William Shepherd

You will be left in suspense no longer. John Papworth’s mystery dinner guests were Naoko and Luke Cooper. Theirs is an unusual story. Naoko’s English husband is the son of Douglas Barker’s university pal and business partner who died a few years ago. Luke is Naoko’s 11-year old son. His English grandmother lives at Purton House…a paradise for children. So Luke in his wisdom declared that he was not going back to Japan but was staying in Purton.

It is not for me to know just what transpired between mother and father. But Naoko now lives in Purton while Luke’s father lives in Japan with their daughter. Naoko was brought up in Kobe but commutes to London each day and works above Charing Cross Station with Price Waterhouse Cooper…one of the giants of global accountancy. Kobe is the capital of Hyogo Prefecture and is one of Japan's major ports along with those of Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Hakata and Tokyo. It is in the Kansai region to the west of Osaka and was one of the first cities to open for trade with the West in 1868.

From time to time PWC has been on my job-seeker list but jobs are not my thing. However I am responsible for getting Luigi Genazzini to hand them his resignation. I gave him the European Investment Bank job advert from the Sunday Times and told him to go for it. He did…and has been eternally grateful to be ever since.

After dinner Naoko, John, Luke and I stayed up late playing three-card brag. It poured with rain the following morning which was just as well as Naoko had announced her intention of getting up early to mow the lawn. It is a remarkable thing but this is the first time I have sat down to dinner with anyone from Japan. Naoko returns to Japan in July when Luke goes off to an English private school. We expect interesting things of Luke.

Eric Forth…a Conservative Member of the Westminster Parliament…died last week of cancer at the age of 61. The Americans would have recognised him as a libertarian. He believed that human happiness depended on the absence of state restraint and he entered Public Office to secure for his fellow countrymen the fourth freedom…as Leopold Kohr called it in The New Radicalism…freedom from government. Forth believed that it is not what governments do that is the problem but what they are. The obituaries in the press failed to come close to explaining his principles.

The obituaries in the press wrote that Eric Forth was flamboyant and witty and quite a character damning him with faint praise. The English have a poor knowledge of the subtleties and shifting nuances concealed behind the commonest of words. It is often the case that those of some other mother tongue have a better understanding of the language of Churchill and Shakespeare than do its native speakers. Everyone dwelling in these offshore islands should be disciplined to learn Real English as a second language…not just new arrivals and asylum seekers.

If someone calls me flamboyant they are probably referring to my manner of dress…but they may be talking code about my sexuality. If they write that I am witty it means I am not amusing or funny and there is something a little precious and mannered about my sense of humour. However being a character is the worst put-down. It implies that I am fundamentally unserious, a flippant poseur and an attention-seeker. Eric Forth was all of these but more besides.

The new Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell has been under attack recently for his poor performance since his election to the post. He has sought to defend himself by suggesting that there is more to leading a political party than performing in the bear pit of the House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Question Time. In passing he observed that nothing in his training had prepared him for the ordeal of Dennis Skinner heckling in his left ear while Eric Forth heckled in his right ear. This begins to capture something of the man.

On one occasion Menzies Campbell rose to give his party’s view on New Labour’s latest Pension Reform Proposals. He had the Chamber in fits of laughter before he had started. But the tragedy for Menzies Campbell was that he had no idea why. With impeccable timing Eric Forth had muttered so all the house could hear, ‘Declare Your Interest’. The remark went to the heart of much unspoken criticism within his own party for having chosen a veteran to lead them when the Conservatives had turned to a younger generation with David Cameron.

On my way back from Purton I found myself sitting next to Neritan Kallfa…a lawyer and former Central Banker from Tirana in Albania…on the National Express Coach. You get to meet interesting people on these coaches. Neritan got off at Heathrow to catch a flight to Vienna. He was in the UK as a proud uncle visiting his nephew for the first time. His sister…a doctor…and her Jamaican husband…had recently had a baby. We talked all the way.

I have never met an Albanian before but I am now an expert on all things Albanian. We exchanged business cards and promised to get in touch with each other if ever either of us needed help. Albania is a small country with a population of just three million and no mineral deposits or oil fields to help them make their living in the world. So the Albanians have learnt to live off their wits. We decided that where small countries are concerned the trick is to back the winner. Last time around the Albanian backed the wrong horse. We have not heard much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire since it disappeared in 1918. But who knows what the 21st century might bring?

Media Studies is a standing joke to many...conjuring up images of PhDs in Elvis Presley and studies of the Sociology of Big Brother…not the one from 1984. But occasionally something interesting emerges. What begins as shifting verbal fashions…slang to you…in TV soap operas can lead to investigations of cycles, periodicities, correlation and randomness. From here it is one small step to mental abstractions, ideas, thought…and memes.

Within modern-day cultures ideas rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something and then they stop believing until no one can remember the old idea. In fashion as in natural ecology there are disruptions and sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in the charred acreage. This happens to science too…the scientific process encourages it. Thomas Kuhn identified the internal mechanisms and structures at work creating these scientific revolutions.

In environmental thought in the 1960s the idea of the balance of nature was widely accepted. Leave nature alone and it will come into a self-maintaining state of balance. The young James Lovelock born in 1926 called it his Gaian Hypothesis but the idea has a longer pedigree…the Ancient Greeks believed it three thousand years ago.

But by the 1990s no scientist believed in the balance of nature anymore. Ecologists spoke of dynamic disequilibrium and multiple equilibrium states. Nature is never in balance, never has been and never will be. Nature is always out of balance. Man…the great disrupter…is nothing of the sort. The environment is being disrupted constantly.

Then one day at the leading edge of Media Studies some American media scientists set their search engines to work analysing the rise and fall of The Idea of Environmental Crisis. Others looked at transcripts of news programmes from the major networks…NBC, ABC, CBS. Others studied stories in the New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles and Seattle newspapers. They got their computers to count the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking. There was a major shift towards the end of 1989.

Before that time the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague or disaster. For example during the 1980s the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition prior to 1989 adjectives such as dire, unprecedented and dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper bulletins. But then it all changed. These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000.

In 1989 the stories changed too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty and panic. The critical question is why it should have changed in 1989 which seemed like a perfectly normal year. A Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other.

But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision to the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should have coincided so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall on the Ninth of November. At first the media scientists dismissed this association as spurious. But it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet Empire…and the end of a Cold War that had lasted for half a century.

For fifty years Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the Other Side; fear of Nuclear War...the Communist Menace, the Iron Curtain, the Evil Empire. Within the Communist blocs it was the same in reverse…fear of us…but with the heightened fear of personal betrayal and incarceration.

Then suddenly in the fall of 1989 it was all finished…gone, vanished, over. The Fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum and the evidence suggests that instead of inventing the moral equivalent of the Cold War as William James would have wished…in the absence of any initiative from the Left…the Right homed in on Environmental Crisis to serve up for global consumption. But there is an irony here.

As far as the Right is concerned the Environmental Crisis has served its purpose. It is beyond its sell-by date. They have moved on and have generated new fears like Islamic Fundamentalism and Al Quaeda Terrorism. But in reality they have created a monster…and they cannot stop their Fear Machine. It is like the Sorceror’s Apprentice. Communist Menaces, Toxic Environments, Wars against Terrorism…it is unstoppable.

But the environmentalists are trapped in their time warp. The momentum of their careers and their funding means that like military generals they are fighting the last war. The thinking right are doubtless much amused. Be our guests, they cry. Fight your old stale environmental wars. We have moved on. We have created new fears and new wars for your distraction. But it’s no fun having the field to ourselves. When will you start to catch up?