I don't go to many north London dinner parties these days. So I forgot the things that I thought they were: the collective agonising about the state of the family, town, country, the world, the universe; the booze that turned the occasional sow's ear into a silk purse, from which a thank-you letter could be truly made; the aspiration to real conversation that was collective, honest, brisk, sometimes witty, wearing its authority lightly and never patronising.
It was good for me to go to one again. A tidy drawing room was a holiday, and not having to be a cook was as good as a rest. But it was only when we sat down to eat, and converse, that I realised how the party had changed while my back was turned. It was climate change, become social. True, there was a bit of softening up of the old sort, some wine, some chat about Angers castle's battlements and the huge tapestries within. Someone speculated on the similarity between Taoism and Judaism.
But then it happened—I am still trying to remember what exactly triggered it. I think it was when one of our number said, "One person can change the world. All you need is love." Then I did something I can't think I ever did in the old dinner party days. I realised what I really felt not just about climate change, not just diminishing resources, or al Qaeda, but about the whole menacing mass—and blurted it out. I still find it hard to confess. I have too many 20th-century resistances to the word. But what I said was, "I want a leader."
"I want to be freed from the weakness of mainstream political leadership," I continued. My wife had gone to sleep, but I was hanging on, arguing for deliverance, from the rational impotence of the times, to be empowered by common experience, to be able to tell my kids, it's the law, we live in a democracy and we can all manage our survival together.
"Change only comes from within," came the voice across the table. I did not rise to this. I stayed with political leadership, and how our ragbag of a democracy could not cope without a real, meaning a tough, leader. Then someone said something about tough leaders appearing in times of war. I did not want a war. Who would be the enemy? Under what banner would I fight? Yet now, in the light of day, I still feel I want a leader.
My wife, who is a journalist, later remarked that she would not have minded my unusual display of certainty, if everyone in turn had had a chance to say what they would do if overtaken by catastrophe caused by way-of-life fatigue (economic, environmental and so on). Would we want to move to be with our friends? Would we—could we, flee to the hills? How could we do without friends? Flying? The car? Could we arrange life so that we did everything without travelling far? The bleakness of this speculation would be socialised round the table. We would share our worries and our imaginings.
I keep wondering whether the hour has come. Hour-spotting is becoming a new political interest for me. I have the feeling of a socioeconomic and political system gearing itself up. What is the Bank of England going to do with all that bad debt? Supposing it doesn't get redeemed? It's only greed, or power, or bad faith come home to roost, of course, and we have been there before. But the gearing seems on a new scale.
I know that normally events, dear boy, are the real leaders; leaders and their electorate must follow. But what is it to anticipate events? What sort of a leader feels he or she has a mandate do that? What electorate gives that mandate?
In retrospect it was that one person who provoked my flash of certainty. The dinner guest who thinks one person can change the world, that one moral butterfly flapping its wings in Crouch End really can cause a storm of transformation throughout all G8 lands. That actually made me see the opposite, the collective cast there is to the human mind, and how that communal aspect of our identity wakes up in a crisis.
And yet maybe the impatience for the appearance of a leader is part of the problem, going for legislative fixes while leaving the transformation of personhood unaddressed. Conflict is a swift answer, evolutionary biology the slow one. But evolution of our hard wiring, the seven deadly hard wires in particular—can this ever take place, on a scale that is democratically significant?
In the end, I think the conversation takes its cue from my large family. In this matter of change, since change is in the air, I know as a father that I cannot easily affect the redirection of my own children's lives. I have to pass the buck to someone—the right buck to the right person. A leader doing the tough legislation. Normalising, even enabling, me. And with me, the rest of us, adding up to something that just might work. I don't want the enterprise of doing what one can in a crisis to seem perverse. So though my default position really is with the inventiveness of the human spirit and with the best renewable of all, the will to try again—from within, I still do not want to be morally inventive, I still want a leader too.
