In good times, I argued that one had to find grace in advantage. One had to become worth the good fortune that had been heaped on one. In bad times, one has to find grace in adversity.

Indeed, I am old school. I believe that the surest way to grace is through humiliation. Not everyone makes it by any means. Lots of people, faced with adversity, find only bitterness. That’s why we seek to diminish adversity: we’d prefer the problems it brings.

I’m not at all sure that one either is or is not tough enough for grace. I think many people can produce spiritual toughness. It’s like running – or what I’m told running is like. There’s pain and then pleasure, but the pain is manageable for most people, and the pleasure very real. Spirituality is like that.

I didn’t wish this recession on people, and I worry about those who won’t survive it. But then I accept that grace and spirituality – like toughness and courage – are not give to everyone. For the weak, only being loved by the tough is any use.

Roughly speaking, the problem is this. Capitalism is prone to bubbles, but they really do differ in degree and kind.

Here’s a morphology.

(1) Stock Bubbles
At their most pure (The South Sea Bubble, the 1717 Mississippi Company), these are stock schemes in which there is no actual economic activity. But these readily get confused with, say, the 1990s Internet Bubble – in which there probably was a real business. Greed and irrationality underlies bubbles, but at least in the Internet case, people were aware that something big and real was happening. Tulipmania sits somewhere between the two, as does the art market. Will Damien Hirst’s productions get melted down for their gold?

(2) New instruments
John Law, who was behind the Mississippi Company, also came a cropper when he tried to engineer a new currency for France. But he wasn’t operating as a crook when he did the latter: he was inventing new approaches to currency and was – hardly surprisingly – out of his depth. 

This is a little like the muddle modern banking has got into as it recently sliced and diced sub-prime debt.

Indeed, many of these dramas turn out to be schemes which are crucial to capitalism’s future – it’s just that the pioneers don’t post large enough warnings as to the riskiness of innovation.

(3) Straight frauds
Some bubbles and some new instruments are introduced as straight frauds, or as screens behind which straight frauds can be perpetrated. Thus, Enron’s crime was very like the fraud perpetrated by Jabez Balfour in the late 19th Century. Enron was playing with energy futures and other devices which few people understood, just as Jabez was playing with new schemes for insurance and housing.

Enron and Jabez were developing schemes which in non-criminal hands would turn out to be valuable.

In conclusion…..
Many capitalist pioneers turn out to be crooks. Or, many crooks turn out to be pioneers. It’s spotting the difference which makes for entertainment.

Anyway, there are no signs of crookedness in the present crisis. Regulators encouraged bankers to get careless as they invented new wheezes. The bankers overdid it. The bubble burst.

The books excerpted in the R4 series
The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D Wattles
The Moneymaker by Janet Gleeson
Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
Metamorphoses XI by Ovid 
Tulipmania by Anne Goldgar
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
The Reformation of Manners by Daniel Defoe
The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
The South Sea Bubble by John Carswell
Tulipmania by Anne Goldgar
The South Sea Bubble by John Carswell
Extraordinary Popular Delusions by Charles Mackay
The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan
A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith

I would add:

Millionaire: The philandere, gambler and duelist who invented modern finance, by janet Gleeson
Jabez by David McKie

The lastest examples I have of the great and the good succumbing to the ridiculous affectation of enjoying this barbaric festival of testosterone come from last Saturday’s Financial Times. In it we learn that is the game of choice of (Jacques) Herzog and (Pierre) de Meuron, the designers of the Bejing Bird’s Nest. They designed the ground used by FC Basel, their home team. Now they are designing a ground for Portsmouth FC (a club which has the merit at least of being proud of its family following).

Lest I be taken to mean that there is no merit in football, I supposes I ought to concede its usefulness to the international investigators trying to understand the wrong-doings in Darfur, as retailed in the FT (26/27 July 2008). They resorted to talking football because they found it difficult to discuss the matter in hand. Who can blame them?

Typically, I had thought of the great man even as I looked down from 35,000 feet at a trans-Mediterranean ferry cleaving the sparkling briney. I would have been on it if my conscience had been in better nick.

The funny thing is, reading JP makes me feel less guilty than just dreaming him up. This latest piece berated politicians for not promoting a post-growth economic and social creed. Mr Porritt seems to believe that this absence of leadership is blameworthy. He may think (but doesn’t really say) that the public can’t be blamed for not getting the message, because their political masters haven’t pushed it.

I’d have thought that there is very limited scope for democratic politicians to get ahead of their voters. Voters have been on the receiving end of twenty years of green campaigning, and it has become the leading orthodoxy, so if the masses choose to ignore the green message I’m inclined to think that it may because they’re living life the way they prefer.

I got almost cross with the Porritt message at the end of his column. He seems to feel that if voters won’t lead or be led toward “sustainability” then it’s just as well a recession will show them the way.  

This argument suggests that recession will give people a taste of green living – and pehaps a taste for it. We’ll see. I can imagine that people may learn that a camping holiday in Britain is even nicer than a Tuscan villa. But it won’t stop people hoping that the recession passes and they can be more confident that their mortgage is safe. 

I think that Jonathon Porritt believes that there is a large spiritual as well as an ecological deficit in modern life. He thinks people ought to embrace a radical alternative. Maybe they should. But I haven’t, and I know very few people who have. I mean that I know monks, greens, environmentalists - exactly the people who understand Jonathon Porritt’s message and even share it. But in every serious respect almost all of them go on living lives which are well short of radical transformation in a green direction.  

For the life of me, I can’t imagine what would radicalise people. An apocalypse might force such a change, or fear of one. But I don’t think an abstract concern for humanity or the planet will. And I find I can’t despise my fellow-humans for not being as altruistic as Mr Porritt thinks they should be.

Nor is it quite an absence of altruism. It’s more a sense that they don’t want to give up their definite delights for hypothetical improvements accruing to others.