OOPS a daisy – a little indiscretion on the red carpet at Cannes, and the Hollywood superstar Sharon Stone finds herself in deep trouble, not only with the 1.3 billion people of China, but also with Dior, the fashion and cosmetics company which pays vast sums for her services as its global public face.
Ms Stone's "error of judgment" involved wondering aloud whether the recent Szechuan earthquake, in which as many as 80,000 people may have lost their lives, was a consequence of the "bad karma" built up by China through its harsh treatment of Tibet
. And the incident is strangely reminiscent of that great British hoo-ha of almost a decade ago, when the England football coach Glenn Hoddle went public with the view that disabled people were paying the price of bad behaviour in a previous incarnation. "The karma is working from another life," chirped Hoddle, and, before he knew it, his career was toast.
The truth is, though, that in her slightly wacky showbiz way, Sharon Stone is speak-ing for millions in the western world who have begun, over the last three decades, to adopt certain aspects of Indian or east Asian spiritual belief, not least the idea that every event, however apparently horrific, reflects the working out of some deep form of cosmic justice. To say that this is tough on those who actually experience apparently random misfortunes is an understatement, as Ms Stone has just been forced to realise.
And although many of those who adopt "New Age" beliefs would see themselves as opponents of the free-market ideology that has dominated British and American politics for the past 30 years, in fact the two belief systems fit together very comfortably.
Like the market individualists, the karma-fanciers tend to argue that your wealth or poverty depends on you, and on the signals you send out to the universe, therefore if things go badly for you, it's not because of big, impersonal economic forces that require collective action to redress them, but because you yourself have, at some deep level, a "bad attitude".
All of which, I think, goes a little way towards explaining the extraordinary spectacle most western governments are now making of themselves, as they face an "oil shock" to match anything that happened in the 1970s, combined with growing crises in global food and energy supply. For almost 30 years now, political discourse in the West has been dominated by the essentially fatalistic concept of the "hidden hand of the market", and by the matching right-wing doctrine of "unintended consequences" – ie, the thesis that any effort made by human beings to improve the world usually ends up making things worse.
At the same time, spiritual discourse has also become more fatalistic, more bound up in the idea that our fate is written in our genes, that what goes around comes around, and that we cannot change it. Yet despite all this disempowering theory, governments in tight corners still tend instinctively to talk – like the British government this week – as if they hold the key levers of power in their hands, and can somehow protect us from the impact of the fierce economic storm currently shaking the world economy. And meanwhile, out in the real world, we face resource problems which the market alone – and national governments acting alone – manifestly cannot solve, except by condemning millions of our fellow human beings to a rapid death by starvation and disease.
And this, I think, at a deep level, is what people mean when they say that politicians have "lost the plot", and no longer have a convincing "narrative" of what they are about. This week, the Bank of Scotland Imaginate Children's Theatre Festival is in full swing in Edinburgh, and even the most inexperienced children's storyteller would know that no believable story can be constructed out of two such conflicting propositions, both completely disconnected from the supposed subject of the tale.
I suppose the Stone narrative might suggest that the whole human race now has "bad karma", and is doomed to pay the ultimate price for its greed and arrogance. But only a fool could look into the glowing faces of the tiny toddlers at the Imaginate Festival and continue to embrace such a nihilistic and depressive creed.
What we need now, in other words, is to snap out of our recent extraordinary period of reactionary fatalism about our collective fate, and to start doing what human beings at their best have always done – organised ourselves in well-structured communities where people have enough freedom to be creative, and just enough security not to exhaust themselves in a daily struggle for survival. And then we need to start wrestling, with all the wit and ingenuity we can muster, to find the means for our continuation as a species.
The Chinese – as they speed from a feudal past towards a ferociously efficient form of 21st-century nationalism – seem ready for that struggle, and have already batted Stone and her talk of "bad karma" aside, in a wave of savage denunciation.
But are we in the West ready for it? Not if you judge by the blandness, bluster and evident confusion of our political class, torn as they are between the outward forms of a collective national life, and an inner belief in the primacy of the market-driven individual that rots the very sinews of their power. If they were telling their story at the Children's Festival, in other words, they would be lucky to get a one-star review, and without a credible story of what our future might look like, told by leaders with an essential spark of creative courage and integrity, we will be unable even to begin to make that future a reality.
The full article contains 978 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
