COVER -> DAY ONE
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On the evening before the announcement of the mass slaughter of the Nepalese Royal Family I was reading a Frank Kermode essay on Macbeth. Macbeth, goaded by dynastic ambition and his wife's scorn of his virility worked himself into a bloody ascent and death. Admittedly the Crown Prince of Nepal is supposed to have turned the light machine gun on himself, having wrought his havoc, rather than waiting for the Royal Guard to arrive but the similarities are obvious enough. What happened in the Royal Palace in Nepal can properly be termed Shakespearian.
If I were a trekker I would get your trip of a lifetime in pretty quickly. The implosion at the centre of Nepalese dynastic politics presents Maoist rebels with a vacuum they cannot but fill. The establishment has the resources to fight a rearguard action but, paradoxically, they cannot match the brutality of the Maoists, nor can they counter it with redistribution.
In a sense that would make a moralist shudder, the role of Maoism and its variants in East Asia has been to perpetrate massive, transient violence which makes the reinstatement of feudalism impossible but it is a high price for a low return. Had Western trading and then colonial powers been more enlightened, or even more inventive, some of the worst of these evils might have been moderated but we offered no viable new models, even for countries with a large enough middle class to sustain them. Only in India is there some semblance of democratic order arising out of self-discipline and self-restraint and one suspects that such virtues are more a product of the culture the colonialists confronted than created.
It is easy to re-write history and, if done well, difficult to detect. To listen now to the old buffers that still occupy the leather armchairs of London Clubs you would think that the British colonial mission was to spread democracy throughout the world to which the only rejoinder worth making is that -- if they did want to export it -- it was to reduce the amount of it left here. But, of course, this is a piece of historical nonsense. De-colonialisation was not voluntary and post colonial settlements were simply bogus instruments of constitutional propriety. At least in the case of Nepal there was no such pretence. Our own, increasingly quirky, Royal Family maintains odd relationships with dynastic misfits in misshapen polities, A Nepalese Crown Prince here, a Middle Eastern Sheikh there, a Tongan minor royal, a Norwegian monarch/bureaucrat on a bicycle.
On the day after the announcement from Nepal I reached Troilus and Cressida which, above all other plays in the canon, deals with the subject of the nature, almost sacred, of kingship. All very dramatic stuff as a bunch of blokes fought over the abduction of Helen of Troy but give me a bit of dull managerialism any time.
Even in our more democratic times I have a preference for the prosaic Carter over the glamorous Kennedy. I like my democracy to be dull and businesslike. If we ever face another mortal enemy I might want something like a Churchill but, even then, I would want the guns to work rather more than the oratory.
Not unnaturally, the book of essays finished with The Tempest, the most beloved of all plays in English which deals with treachery and a planned assassination but whose main theme is reconciliation. For all its faults democracy is better at dealing with difference than is an aristocracy or a monarchy. In authoritarian regimes crises become internalised and personalised until death or exile are the only means of resolution.
We are too apt to dismiss the mild virtues of patience and the poor but visible return on prudence. The nearest we have got to Nepal in Western politics is the Kennedy clan but the system did not allow its private turmoil to spill over into mainstream politics.
The problem of exporting democracy to places like the former Soviet Union is that democracy arises out of a set of assumptions and publicly admired qualities. It cannot be imposed as a set of rules. Being organic, its germination is long and its growth slow. We would have been much better, as would our Eastern neighbours, if we had started by implanting business ethics and the notion of a social contract between citizens and government rather than looking for a quick democratic fix to salve our consciences while the real purpose was to convert command economies to economic liberalism from which we might immediately benefit.
When the wall came down in Berlin the East got the worst as well as the best we had to offer but, as any historian or moral philosopher might easily have predicted, the worst took root much more rapidly than the best, as weeds always seem to thrive more than flowers. Of course this is true; democracy, like garden flowers, has to be cultivated and protected from all kinds of weeds. It is a delicate product of a long process and it is never far from the danger of suffocation. Left to himself, Prospero might not have forgiven his enemies but Ariel insists and Prospero complies. It is the voluntary nature of good acts that makes them count and it is that autonomous and collective restraint which allows our systems to survive. We shall better protect them with modesty than grand proclamations.
