The Problem of Small Strong States

A strong state, said Max Weber in 1919, is one which has a monopoly over the legitimate use of force. As many others have added since then (like Migdal in 1988), a strong state taxes the population in some way and reassigns these expropriations to the general purposes and for the general advantage of the population. Migdal also pointed out that a strong state, with its centralising authority structure, is opposed to a strong society, in which authority is decentralised. You can find variations of strong and weak states, and strong and weak societies, all over the world.

The USA is a superstate which balances the strong-state/strong-society dichotomy well. It has the advantage of being composed as a kind of federation of plausibly independent states. Hence there is a balance between the Federal centre and the functions of the USA on one hand, and the state epicentres and state functions on the other. This balance can be found to some extent in Germany and Switzerland, among others.

However, there is less latitude for tiny states. A small state like Andorra or Luxembourg, Monaco or Singapore, does not take decentralisation well because the web of relationships between various components is too tightly woven. Even if you artificially privatise everything, the state still needs to look after the integrity and needs of the overall polity. High-density city-states cannot survive as a bunch of separate but federated components — you cannot build a nation of independent farmer-soldiers or baronies when the population density is too high.

Eventually, individuals in a tiny state will bump into the web of relationships and be subsumed into the ruling establishment. There is little choice, because there is only one centre. Citizens can try to create separate centres of power and legitimacy, but these will only be mitochondria to the mighty nucleus of state government.

Strong states, however, need diversity to survive. Small strong states have the problem of obtaining sufficient diversity within their population limits. This means that, as with the smaller organisms, either asexual reproduction by splitting (probably not viable, but it's been tried before) or sexual reproduction by mingling imported genes must occur.

Most small states have been formed and continue to thrive by receiving external input. The problem is that frequently it isn't possible to tell when you're getting a 'junk' gene input that will never do you any good, a 'good' gene input that will help you do better, or a 'reservist' gene input that might be of use someday but not just yet. So a more diverse net must be cast, and yet more exacting filters must be used.

What a problem! How can small strong states survive? Quite often, they end up as members of an agglomerate, as parasites, or in some sort of mutual relationship where members all provide different functions to the whole. Very seldom do modern city-states thrive.

As of this century, only one full-fledged city-state remains.

After Brezhnev, Andropov

There are remarkable similarities (of course, also differences) between the regime changes at the Citadel and the regime changes in the Soviet Union. It almost seems that we have made the transition from Leonid Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov. Those who have eyes to read, let them read.

Fear is the Lock

At the back of certain kinds of success is the fear, not of failure, but of less success. In Atlantis, where the Priests of the White have held sway for fifty years and more, the loss of even one small district out of the Eighty is occasion for breast-beating (or chest-thumping, which is even more distasteful). Accordingly, as with all normal humans, the fear of a negative sensation has led the Priesthood to find better ways of reducing the likelihood of such.

As we learnt in the Halls of Training, in the Priesthood of Learning, there are four ways of supplying motive (I shall not say 'motivate' here):

• reward — supplying what is desired when the subject meets positive criteria
• punishment — supplying what is undesired when the subject meets negative criteria
• withholding reward — not supplying what is desired when the subject meets negative criteria
• withholding punishment — not supplying what is undesired when the subject meets positive criteria

It is always good to teach people such things so that they know how they might be manipulated. It is clear that the situation that I outlined at the beginning of this post is one based on fear of not having enough success, and being punished for it in terms of loss of ego, and perhaps sense of entitlement and/or privilege.

Till this day, amused outsider that I am, I have failed to see how increasing the size of authority blocs helps bring better representation and flexibility to those under authority. It is like saying that putting more generals in one room makes their armies work better, even though all the generals were chosen to think the same way. I've seen this in the Citadel of the Wyverns before, and those who have passed through its portals in the last few years will know what I mean.

I remember sitting at a meeting in which I said the f-word. Immediately, the Boss pounced on it. "What? Who is frightened? We are not frightened! What do you mean?!"

I was amazed at the response. I had meant that the general population might not be as sanguine about new directions as we were. And then it clicked: he was genuinely afraid and angry that I had apparently noticed it. Ho ho. Such is life.

It's all about fear. And you can smell the metallic, acidic tang of it in the air at certain times. Those times are beginning again. I shall need more Earl Grey tea.

Authoritativeness is not Authoritarianism

Wolff has been in Atlantis for nigh-on forty years. It always puzzles him why people think of Atlantis as if it were mainland Eurasia, that hotbed of scurvy Staleninomarxism, uptight Natsocifascitis, and other natural ills of political man. He looks at Atlantis as the natural heir of Rome (without the legions), Byzantium (without the richness), and Venice (without the charm). It is no Londinium, nor is it Novo Eboracum, but what it is is a drastically small island, about one and a half times the size of Andorra but a lot less beautiful.

Atlantis is an authoritative state. It speaks firmly. It believes in firm principles. It just hasn't had a couple of centuries (or more) to work out how its conflicting principles should interact, unlike some much larger confederacies and conspiracies. It is therefore disparaged for not being libertarian (a philosophy, which Wolff claims, requires less than 200 people per square kilometre in order to really work).

Wolff is quite amazed, actually, that Atlantis works at all. It has the dark brothers of Sind and the brown brothers of Cathay and the pale brothers of Hyborea and perfidious Albion all in one place. It has gallant knights of the Wyvern, studious monks of the Torch, and pasty scholars of the Gryphon. It has great food, although people will tell you that there are other places with far better (which is always true, no matter where you live), and awful rats. It floods about once or twice a year on average (legends say once in fifty years, but obviously they are wrong).

But he is happy that he doesn't have to execute purveyors of the poppy or occultists of the opiates himself — the state will do it for him. He is happy he doesn't have to draw arms against rapists and gangsters, villains (not villeins, that's different) and vigilantes. He can live in relative peace because the state acts with authority.

Yes, it sometimes exceeds its authority. He notes that the people are ill-represented, but he also realises that the better the representation, the more taxes you pay for that honour. He notes that the high priests receive a large tithe. He is happy that they do not take more and pretend that they aren't. He feels that he is comfortable, and that most people here are not because their ancestors were driven by the urge to be better off than their fellow men.

He is somewhere in the middle. He chats with his friends; some serve the State and are not villains, a rare combination in some other places. He drinks kava with them; the kava comes in many varieties. He eats of the fried oyster omelette, and of the rice-sheets in dark sauce, and of the porridge of the sea. He is happy.

He suspects that moving the population to somewhere like Novosibirsk or Pyongyang might be a healthily educational experience. But he knows better than to bother. Atlanteans will learn in time that there have been other islands in other times, not all of them physically so. It is better, he feels to understand the basis of authority and try to steer it gently along the rightful path, than to think that it is all evil.

It is odd, he feels, that the rationalists and scientists want to make the world ordered and tidy, but not their own society. He suspects hypocrisy. But he is willing to live and let live.

The Human Overlord

Caught up in Tolkiensian imaginings, you might think of the overlord who is beyond redemption, a fallen angel turned into a lidless eye, a thing you knew was never human and always to be feared. It is easy to hate what you have demonized.

But the truth in human reality is always messier. Over the years, I've had difficulties with human hierarchs and they have had problems with me. I am not one for giving respect where it is not due.

Neither am I one to withhold respect where it is due. I've put on record, and meant it each time, what I have said of former overlords. Of one, I said she was hardworking, determined, willing to get her hands dirty; of another, I said he was the most focused educational administrator I'd ever met and the best student when attempting to learn something new. I have served many earthly masters, and I have never met a single one who didn't have something good in them.

You see, everyone has at least one gift. The only problem in using that gift is when it is not used the right way; either it is overshadowed by evil weeds, or its light is dimmer than the shadows. When a leader decides to do evil, whether out of ignorance or spite, we call it 'turning to the Dark Side' ever since George Lucas made that iconic. When a leader decides not to do good, whether out of meanness or out of caution, it is a move away from the light and down into the shadows.

The steps of a man's faith are simple. Find your gift. Use it to serve. Remember all that is asked of you is to use that gift in ministry to others. The bargain is: for each gift, the use of that gift. The other things are always forgiven, as long as the gift was used aright and the mission served.

Traditional Jestice

It was the Hierophant who reminded me of the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. The two men are (were, Milgram died in 1984) both New Yorkers, born in 1933 and schoolmates from an interesting era.

More relevantly, the two are (were) psychologists who examined the psychology behind the way the exercise of power corrupts authority. Authority by itself is a neutral given. It is conferred by position and status in human societies; the Greeks called it kratos, and that word is still in common English usage, as the suffixes -crat and -cracy. 'Aristocracy', for example, means 'the ruling authority of the highborn', while 'democracy' of course means 'the ruling authority of the population at large'.

I've posted several times about power, and I continue to believe that it comes in three forms: kratos, dünamis and bia. An English equivalent would be to call them 'authority', 'inspiring motivation' and 'coercive force'. It's not possible, as far as I can tell, for humans to use just one or two; all three tend to come in together eventually. This tripartite division of power is thus a somewhat common motif (and a problematic one) in human societies.

The problem really is that they undermine while magnifying each other. If you have authority, real authority, people would do things because they accept that authority. But one is often tempted to add the suasion of personal motivation and/or the application of force in order to get things done faster. One is often tempted to add titles and honours to one's resumé in order to justify one's use of superior physical or numerical force. And so on. The three thus tend to form an unholy constellation even when they start off pure and unsullied. This is what I mean by 'undermine' (in the sense of 'erode the moral and ethical basis of') and 'magnify' (in these sense of 'increase the perceived importance or necessity of').

Conventionally, the idea is that powers should be separated (e.g. 'Church and State', or 'Legislative, Executive and Judicial'). This separation of powers thus reduces the quantities of power (kratos, dünamis and bia) to manageable little pieces, thus preventing abuse. Or so the theory goes. The problem is that in many states, it's really not possible to separate the powers; power tends to agglomerate, to agglutinate, to clump together in big and dangerous masses which then go critical to everyone's confused dismay.

The solution really is therefore not so much that they should balance each other, but be balanced by something else. In old and historically messy countries like the United Kingdom, you have so many competing traditions that even the law draws upon at least three main strands (Anglo-Saxon, Roman and Hebrew) and many others. In some places, hierarchy is so dispersed that it's hard to know who is really boss, so everyone is (like some small states or autonomous entities). In some places, like Vatican City, everyone is an employee of a higher authority and that is supposed to diffuse power while concentrating it.

Different balancing solutions thus exist. But I think two of them tend to be more successful than most, based on their longevity and their ubiquity.

The first is tradition (although some might say it comes later than the other). The force of tradition tends to keep new powers from consolidating, and it tends to check uncultured power with a cultural authority of its own. Tradition alone cannot stop a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao from abusing their authority and consolidating their power, but it can keep some things alive, and it can create a viable alternative, counterculture, or resistance. It hasn't always worked that way, but it keeps cropping up. Of course, 'bad' tradition can resist 'good' power; but power tends to corrupt anyway, so it doesn't remain good for long.

The second is humour (although some might say it comes first). The force of humour seems to sustain people even when power is being used on them. It is a common thread of humanity which by its nature ameliorates and alleviates the heaviness and awe of myth and tradition. It is the reason why rulers need jesters; rulers can't (don't, or won't) do self-criticism because to do so would be to undermine the effect of power (to which they must be beholden). A self-critical ruler, if such a creature exists, must subvert himself by laughing at himself; but in these times, such a ruler runs the risk of looking ridiculous — if he can laugh at himself, surely someone else can laugh at him.

I live in a state where to make jokes about judges (or to mock the Magistratum, haha) is to commit the offence of trivialising, scandalising, or undermining the judiciary. If you make a politician or judge look like a figure of fun, it is a problem for the Internal Security Act. After all, if you undermine the sources of power, doesn't it weaken the security of the realm? This key argument is what runs many states the way they're run. It is just that some states and institutions are better at hiding it than others.

The sad corollary to all of this is that almost all rulers can't actually have a real sense of humour. If they do, it is 'humour lite' or 'humour without slapstick' or some other dignified (and here I use the word in a similar way to 'gentrified' or 'bowdlerised') form of it. It is as if a ruler's humour is something from ancient philosophy, and not something which alleviates the gloom and ameliorates bitterness.

The good corollary to all of this is that power can be balanced by mechanical (or at least, procedural) means. If you enforce a rotation of authority, which itself cannot be undermined by authority (good luck there!) then rulers have a chance to recover their sense of humour and become human once more. Some other poor sap can have the job. You can also insert a professional subversion agency: a jester, or as Frank Herbert suggested, a 'Bureau of Sabotage'.

In the end, it boils down to this. An institution or a state cannot thrive morally, aesthetically or creatively unless power is subvertible. Humour, for this purpose, is more flexible and useful than tradition. If the king will not have a jester, he should be adjested. That way, jestice will be served.

Accountability

Sometimes theology, sociology and economics make strange bedfellows. We've seen this in the ideas and ideals of 'liberation theology' and of the 'prosperity gospel' – the former more about liberation than theology, the latter more about prosperity than the gospel.

I was struck by the image of ultimate accountability presented to us in the Bible. "As the eyes of servants look to the hands of their masters... so too do we look to the Lord our God," the psalmist says. It is the accountability of the master to the hireling, the slave and the servant that we find in stark words throughout the entire Mosaic code. It extends to lines like, "Do not muzzle the ox when he treads out the corn" – an injunction to allow labourers a cut of the proceeds and a reward for their toil.

In the Book of Job, we further learn that a man whom God considers upright has this to say about what comes from God: "Shall we not receive good at hands of God, and shall we not (also) receive evil?" It is clear that the argument, as it develops through the book, lays the responsibility for ultimate events in the hands of ultimate authority. What seems to be good or ill to us, the ultimate authority has chosen to be accountable for, and faith is a matter of accepting that.

What gets to me sometimes is the cavalier fashion in which the instinctively authoritarian react to good and bad news. I've seen in government officials and educational administrators the attitude that good comes from their actions and responses to the world, while bad comes from the people they are supposedly serving or responsible for. It is only too common to see a school laud the top scorers and claim their excellence as a sign of school prowess, while blaming the tail end on parents, society and computer games. It is also common to see government officials ask for huge personal salaries because the economy is booming while blaming investor panic and events beyond their control when the economy tanks.

I think that what's right is that those who claim authority must also claim responsibility, for both good and bad. In my tenure, I took my departments results out of a level below national average and fixed it firmly ahead of the national average. At the same time, I was also pretty much an irritant and rather tactless in dealing with colleagues. It was perhaps divisive, and rightly seen to be in some quarters. I was young then, but to this day, I will take responsibility for both things. But I do not think that I have met many authorities who would publicly admit their flaws and failings. I have shirked that responsibility myself in some areas, to my shame; I am not so sure that those authorities would feel any shame at all.

The city-state in which I work has one of the highest government salary scales in the world. The rationale for that is that the local system, in many ways, has displayed great success even when measured against far larger powers.

But in education, for example, there is a problem: we give the same kind of homework as educational superpowers like Thailand, Rumania, Hungary and Iran, as well as like Hong Kong, Cyprus and the Russian Federation. Officially, only 9% of the homework given was ever used to grade students. These are the findings of the Third International Maths and Science Survey. Yet, we rank far higher than any of the other nations using similar systems of classroom pedagogy. One interesting difference is that we pay our private tutors a lot more than we pay our teachers; the average tutor at high school level possibly earns about US$1.20 per minute while the average teacher at high school earns about US$0.35 per minute of work.

There is nothing wrong with having a large tuition industry; Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong all have that too. But surely there must be some contribution to results from the shadow sector, and we would be terribly dishonest not to admit it.

Similarly, when the economy booms, ministers get huge salaries; when it tanks, the cost of electricity goes up 20% and employer contributions to employees' retirement funds are reduced. I've seen ministers' pay frozen but not reduced in line with the economic performance of the nation as a whole. But haven't they accepted blame for both good and bad by claiming such high salaries in the first place? Is there no two-way moral hazard thing? I don't see it.

All this leads me to one main conclusion: if good things happen, I'm not responsible; the authorities are — and if bad things happen, the authorities aren't responsible; I am. That happens whether it is in school or in the financial sector. I don't believe it's true, but the people in power do, and that's what counts.

I could be wrong; I would really love to be wrong about all this. But I don't see much evidence against my hypothesis. I have so much evidence for my hypothesis that I might as well write a book, except that I'm not so minded.

So how do I feel? Actually I feel very happy. It brings home one main point to me about the conclusion I have come to in the previous paragraph. Whoever the authorities are, they are nothing like the God I believe in. And that is why I rejoice all the time in whatever I have received.

Four Kinds of Findings

I don't normally address political issues in this blog. Sometimes, however, something catches my eyes which may have greater applications beyond their mundane frame. In this case, it's the Branchflower Report (colloquially referred to as the 'Troopergate' Report).

Friday, 10 October 2008, will probably be remembered (if at all) as the day on which the Palindromic Crusade bit itself in the tail. Mrs Sarah Palin, Alaska's Governor and Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate in 2008, was under an ethics investigation. Branchflower and his Republican-heavy (8 to 4!) committee voted 12-0 to release the findings as planned. Overall, the consensus was that Palin had violated state ethics law by trying to have her brother-in-law fired as state trooper.

The interesting thing, to me, was the release of the report with four main findings, which I am summarising below:

1. Governor Palin abused her power as a public officer by exerting efforts to benefit her personal interest in firing the trooper.
2. However, the firing itself was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional authority. This is because it is the right of the Governor to hire and fire state employees.
3. The trooper received all his entitlements, so no wrongdoing was done after the fact.
4. The state Attorney-General's office failed to comply with Branchflower's request for information pertinent to the case.

It's the same in any political arena. Given the right to hire and fire, since the dawn of time, some people have taken this right to be an absolute and untrammelled power. With such an attitude, no justification or reason needs to be advanced. To the Palins of the world, findings 2 & 3 are full excuses for the abuses stated in findings 1 and 4.

But the point of the report is a simple one: it was an abuse of power, and hence a violation of ethics; it was not an abuse of authority. Some people must learn the difference between power or force (Greek dünamis or bia) and authority (Greek kratos). Whereas the latter can be taken mostly as granted by legal structure and terms of appointment, the former always requires moral checks and balances.

This is especially true in the education circles that are more familiar to me. But I've blogged about that before.

Famous Dictators I Have Known

Years ago, when I first looked at the local history syllabus after a long while, I was somewhat surprised.

Modern history, apparently, began in 1939. Any prologue to that had to do with the rise of Hitler, the rise of Stalin, or the rise of Mao; Churchill and Roosevelt were parodied and/or left out as key figures of the period. If you fast-forwarded 20 years, you were exposed to the far more benignly-represented rise of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's strongman and unabashedly hard-hitting political leader. It does make you realise that Singapore is as much a dictatorship as Richard Dawkins is an atheist; to classify them as members of their respective (prospective) classes would be to take away the inherent power of their class definitions.

To call Singapore a dictatorship is to forget that the government has brought a fair amount of peace and prosperity; unhappiness has come in the wake of the latter, as the large middle-class finds itself much poorer than the top 1%. With ancestors who mostly came to Singapore to make money, everyone has a fine-tuned monetary instinct. This causes economic unhappiness to be the main unpleasantness here.

To call Singapore a dictatorship is to forget that the governing party has been returned to power voluntarily by the people. Of course, the fact that the opposition is fractious (and fairly often staffed by odd clowns at critical times in the national narrative) tends to help. It is certainly nowhere near the kind of police state that the former USSR was so good at maintaining.

No, Singapore is as much a dictatorship as Dawkins is an atheist. But wait a minute, you say, isn't Dawkins an atheist?

Well, yes, sort of. An atheist doesn't believe in god or God, singular, distributed, parallel or multiple. But Dawkins is a prostituted atheist; he loves to talk, make money, sell his own brand and ram it down other people's throats. Instead of merely not believing in god (God, sing., dist., para., or mult.) he believes he should make other people not believe, and it has become a religion to him. It is a game, an entertainment, and he isn't doing it as a charitable service or philosophical discourse.

It's a fad these days to do all that. You can see it by walking around some place like Borders and looking at the book displays. Meanwhile, God continues to work in mysterious ways, as the Hierophant points out.

You might wonder why I launched into this post. Well, it's yet another one of those mysterious things. I was musing on how a lot of very reactionary students in one particular educational institution were aggrandizing their current regime with labels like 'Stalinist' or 'Hitlerian' (contradictory in most ways except authoritarianism, I suppose). I don't think they're right. I would choose a lesser dictator, a man of many dimensions and talents who always thought he was an aesthete, an almost-religious and accomplished man... one like Nicolae Ceauşescu, perhaps.

Prayer For Authorities

We pray for those in positions of authority, those who are thrones and principalities and powers of this age of humanity. We ask that they will do all things in truth, believing; that they will do all things necessary to the common good in the will of God; that they will aim for the betterment of all people.

We pray for those who are called ministers, that they will minister indeed; that they will be servant to all they profess to serve in fact; that they will be able to call upon higher powers and enlightened thinking as they serve the greater good.

We pray for those who command, that they will direct their subordinates aright, without fear or favour, with wisdom and care. We ask that they will continue to be accountable to all, in the light of the glory of God in whom they live and move and have their being; in whom their authority arises and from whom their authority is empowered.

Amen.

Authority & Independence

Today is US Independence Day. So it is rather odd to be talking about authority. That's a word with a ring of finality to it, and its often associated with the death of independence. But there really ought to be no difference between 'authority' and 'authorship'. They both convey the sense of bearing the stamp of the author, the evidence of auctorial rights. In a strange way, establishing authorship establishes auctorial independence to some extent.

There are two main authority-related issues in an auctorial context.

Firstly, there are people who look at others' intellectual property and misappropriate it. This effectively changes the author of a work, an idea, a process – anything that has already been committed to a physical medium by somebody else. It happens whenever people fail to acknowledge significant contribution, regardless of what legal authority says. This is why creative people occasionally are driven to assert a moral authority, realising that legal authority and casuistry will not necessarily protect them. Moral authority does not protect one's auctorial rights very well either, but moral victories have different standards and produce different elements of retribution.

Secondly, there are people who reserve the right to rewrite the rules of the milieu to suit themselves. Sometimes, this is fair; sometimes, this is merely dictatorship. Most times, it is somewhere in between. One ought to be careful when attempting to rewrite the rules of the game to one's advantage. Some players are better at gameplaying than others, regardless of rules changes. It is the 'metagaming' ability which sets these apart. A more reprehensible version exists in many major organisations – it normally takes the form of a written or unwritten clause which allows for rules changes without consultation or prior notification or warning.

These two issues are quite separate from the traditional issues of authority. Earlier issues of authority were mostly about physical and social control of the traditional elements: money, power, sex, influence and such. These are hoarded, traded, and encashed much like any other kind of token. But the modern world revolves around information, another kind of bargaining chip.

I find it reprehensible, but unfortunately all too justifiable, for a morally-oriented organisation of any kind to slam the gates down on information and engage in the cyber-equivalent of skullduggery and espionage in order to control the flow. If you want to be a pure power-broking institution of the mundane and secular kind, say so. If you're an eagle, don't call yourself a dove. Don't call yourself a charity, a mission school, a bible society, a church, whatever. Especially if you are a Christian institution.

For Christians, Romans 12 warns very firmly about not conforming to the patterns of the world. This is not to say that we shouldn't be law-abiding, peaceable, societally-appropriate in some contexts. Rather, it tells us to disdain the lure of the human-oriented chips: the hoarding of counters based on information, sex, power, money, control, physical force.

Isn't that rather idealistic? No, not at all. Earlier, I mentioned meta-gaming. If you are right about God and happen to be a Christian, then logically you have access to the Author and Finisher of your faith, the Architect of the Foundations, the Lord of Hosts, the Ruler of the Game. You are already a meta-gamer, and no matter how the world's patterns shift and flow, you will remain ahead of the game as long as you remember the true Author. And give Him the intellectual property kudos that belong to Him. Then you will be free indeed.

Happy Independence Day.

Intimidating

Just before midnight, someone I appreciate very much told me that I was once a 'rather intimidating individual'. That person no longer feels that way in such a negative sense. This occasioned a moment of reflection. Why, and how?

The word 'intimidating' means 'inspiring of fear', from the Latin timeo - to fear. It literally means 'to put fear into'. It isn't quite flattering, although further inquiry absolves me from being a source of true phobia. The Good Book says that perfect love drives out fear; this would seem to imply that fear is an unhealthy emotion between people who are supposed to have an agapean relationship - whether in one direction or both. The same verse links fear to punishment; this implies that if I were intimidating, it would be because of my capacity as someone in authority.

In this last capacity, I confess I believe that the ability to inspire fear is an important gift. From our enlightened and rational post-modern vantage, we view fear as an unnecessary impediment to civilisation, a shadowplay of ancient superstitions and primordial fantasies into which we regress under stress. But I believe that fear is no impediment; our overweaning sense of self is a far greater burden. The same people who tell us that the universe dwarfs us into obscurity will also tell us that we should have a large sense of the grandeur of humanity. The two are compatible only as a last-ditch defence against atheistic insignificance. For the odd thing is that it is a sense of the fear of God which actually tells us how valuable we are.

Fearing the impersonal universe is nothing. Fearing a person is to understand something about the nature of self and of intelligence and of society. Fearing a personal God is to understand how mighty the things of the spirit are, and how great we are in our smallness, that we can apprehend the Almighty at all. In a purely physical universe, scale is scale, size is truth. In a metaphysical universe, scale is irrelevant and being is all.

Which leads me back to the person who once felt intimidated, and no longer does. It is a mature relationship of minds and hearts which takes away the element of fear. Moses spoke to God as a man speaks with his friend - and he risked much in that relationship, but feared nothing in it. It is my dearest wish that I might be able to intimidate when necessary, but that it will never become gratuitous to me, and never an obstacle to genuine friendship.

To you who inspired these thoughts, my thanks. I know that you have mentioned my 'force of personality', and others have complained about other elements of my nature. It was never my desire to inspire overmuch fear, but to guide with a firm hand; this time of reflection will help me do that.