Age has slowed me down but at least no day goes by without reading bringing me the fascinating and penetrating insights of other minds. In this week’s column I record three such insights from the 
literally dozens discoverable every day.
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- If the writings of Karl Marx were now appearing for the first time, unsullied by the perversions of his thinking which tyrants like Stalin inflicted on the world, they would certainly be attracting great interest. Tony Judt, a distinguished European historian, describes why the insights which Marx brilliantly expressed more than a century and a half ago still have relevance.
“If generations of intelligent men and women of good faith were willing to throw in their lot with the communist project, it was not just because they were lulled into an ideological stupor by a seductive tale of revolution and redemption. It was because they were irresistibly drawn to the underlying ethical message: to the power of an idea and a movement uncompromisingly attached to representing and defending the interests of the wretched of the earth. From first to last, Marxism’s strongest suit was what one of Marx’s biographers calls ‘the moral seriousness of Marx’s conviction that the destiny of our world as a whole is tied up with the condition of its poorest and most disadvantaged members…’
“If Marxism fell from favour in the last third of the twentieth century it was in large measure because the worst shortcomings of capitalism appeared at last to have been overcome. The liberal tradition – thanks to its unexpected success in adapting to the challenge of depression and war and bestowing upon Western democracies the stabilizing institutions of the New Deal and the welfare state – had palpably triumphed over its antidemocratic critics of left and right alike. A political doctrine that had been perfectly positioned to explain and exploit the crises and injustices of another age now appeared beside the point…
“Today, however, things are changing once again. What Marx’s nineteenth-century contemporaries called the ‘Social Question’ – how to address and overcome huge disparities of wealth and poverty, and shameful inequalities of health, education, and opportunity – is back on the international agenda with a vengeance. What appears to its prosperous beneficiaries as worldwide economic growth and the opening of national and international markets to investment and trade is increasingly perceived and resented by millions of others as the redistribution of global wealth for the benefit of a handful of corporations and holders of capital… The world appears to be entering upon a new cycle. In the coming years, as visible disparities of wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation … And thus, as we lose sight of communism the moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow.”
- In a good biography of the great physicist Isaac Newton by James Gleick I came across a passage which is appropriate to explanations given by current cricket commentators in match after match about the swing and swerve imparted to a cricket ball. When at Cambridge University Newton occupied a room upstairs between the Great Gate at Trinity College and the Chapel. To the west stood a four-walled court used for the game of royal tennis. Sometimes Newton watched fellows play and he noticed that the ball would curve about and not just downward. He understood instinctively why this should be so: the ball was struck obliquely and acquired spin. In a letter to his mathematician friend Oldenburg of 6th October, 1672, Newton wrote: “Its parts on that side, where the motions conspire, must press and beat the contiguous Air more violently than on the other and there excite a reluctancy and reaction of the Air proportionately greater.” This is a correct account of the Magnus effect named after Gustav Magnus who ‘discovered’ the effect in 1852, 180 years after Newton wrote about it. The best bowlers exploit the Magnus effect best. I wonder how many know this.
- One of the greatest dangers any leader faces is that posed by the flatterers and yes-men who tend to congregate around power. No leader can afford to do the job of leading without having by his bedside a well-thumbed copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. There he will read and take note of the advice how to avert the damage done by flatterers by “choosing the wise men in his state and giving to them only the liberty of speaking the truth to him … With these councillors, separately and collectively, he ought to carry himself in such a way that each of them should know that, the more freely he shall speak, the more he shall be preferred; outside of these, he should listen to no one, pursue the thing resolved on, and be steadfast in his resolutions. He who does otherwise is either overthrown by flatterers, or is so often changed by varying opinions that he falls into contempt.”
