The Cuckoo (To A)

He heard the first cukoo at the beginning of April.

Because he'd been feeling on edge, maybe,

from his inclination to order the chaos, maybe,

he wanted to know which notes the cukoo sang.

He sat waiting with his pitch pipe

next afternoon: when

would the cukoo sing?

He finally achieved it;

The pitch pipe told no lies.

Si-sol were the cukoo's notes.

The discovery shook the countryside.

Everyone wanted to prove whether truly those

were the notes that the cukoo sang.

The measurements were not in harmony.

Each had his or her own truth.

One said it was fa-re, another mi-do.

No one managed to agree.

Meanwhile the cukoo went on singing in the forest,

not mi-do, not fa-re, not si-sol, either.

As it had a thousand years before,

the cukoo sang cuccu, cuccu.

So Happy For My Soulmate

Mazinger Z!

6th Feb...

5th Feb...

Happiness - avoid 46 :-)

ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world’s careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

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These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America’s General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people’s assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age.

Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people’s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.

Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people’s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).

The view from winter

Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.

Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”

People are least happy in their 40s and early 50s. They reach a nadir at a global average of 46

Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.

The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.

Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.

Happier, no matter what

There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years’ worth of data.

Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?

The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.

People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can’t please all the people all the time.”

There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”

Death of ambition, birth of acceptance

There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists’ experiment rather than the psychologists’ or psychiatrists’. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).

A Poem, A Present

Dust

It seems we’ve left skin
in each other’s lungs. I should have

looked under your bed skirt
for my wallet, but how

could credit cards compare
to the sneeze after we’ve parted?

Gone and still you make me
reach for a tissue—still my palms

turn circles in the red
breakwater of your heartbeat.

I want to tell you, I have nothing
but respect for your ribcage

now that we both know
it’s not big enough to hold us.

by Michael Meyerhofer

Five Years of Joy

The Good Simple Life

Thinking on the person who gave me the book of Selma The Sheep as a present...

Life Is Bizarre, Sometimes...

It seems that Hitler died 65 years ago today.

But what is really amazing is the fact that the future grand philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and future political monster Adolf Hitler shared classroom in Primary!

Via Crucis

You know the crossroad very well
You cross it every day, by bike, in your way to work.
A big crossroad is not, neither a special one.
It´s small, humble, an ordinary one.
That´s why you were struck when you saw that Police notice:
“Fatal accident, if you have witnessed something please contact us”.

Since then
Week in- week out
You see fresh flowers
Attached to the lamppost
In the middle of the crossroad.
Someone even wrote a poem
Mourning the dead son.

Months passed by and today
You rode by there again.
There is the bunch of fresh flowers
There the hurting poem, wrapped in cello tape
So the rain doesn´t corrupt
An incorruptible feeling.

Every time you see it
It gives you goosebumps
Someone really did lose
Someone important
A certain number in the calendar
Brings sour memories to someone
A cyclic pain
The need of placing flowers
Flowers that will ease the pain
At least a bit
An I Love You to the gone one
A You Are With Me
An I Don´t Forget You.

Freedom & Birth On The Same Day

The Dream Festival

A Happy Day

Quotes & Comments

Some days ago I received at work one of those work diaries for free.
In the beginning I didn´t pay any attention to it but then I realised that it has some quotes on it.
So I will write them here and then I´ll add a short, very personal comment on it.
Let´s see how it goes:


"A verbal contract isn´t worth the paper it´s written on"
Samuel Goldwyn
(nice try - no).

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by"
Douglas Adams
(he knows how the world works)

"The man who has no imagination has no wings"
Muhammad Ali
(please keep boxing but for God´s sake - shut up)

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple"
Oscar Wilde
(oh yeah, the master!)

"Nothing is as frustrating as arguing with someone who knows what he´s talking about"
Sam Ewig
(a top one, indeed)

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind"
Rudyard Kipling
(yep, history is full of examples)

"A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out"
Walter Winchell
(or as my friend says: you see how good the saucepan is when you put it on the fire)

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep".
Scott Adams
(no comment - as I am not sure if it is a great line or just crap!)

"Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it".
Jean Jacques Rousseau
(hats off!)

"If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied"
Alfred Nobel
(clearly he was better inventing dynamite than crafting quotes)

"I´d rather regret the things I have done than the things that I haven´t"
Lucille Ball
(mmmm, not sure if I agree)

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow"
Helen Keller
(how was that song by the Monthy Pytons?)

"The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn"
David Russell
(the hardest thing is to describe life in one sentence... and he did it!)

"No matter how good you get you can always get better and that´s the exciting part"
Tiger Woods
(please keep golfing but for God´s sake - shut up)

In Praise Of... Up

Say it's a tradition. Explain to your children – or your nieces or nephews or grandkids – that half-term must, as a matter of faith or ancient custom, include a trip to the cinema. Say whatever you have to or, if that fails, then go alone. Just make sure you see Up.

It's the latest animated feature from Pixar, the studio with a claim to being one of the more insightful chroniclers of our times. There's plenty there for kids to enjoy – some nice gags and wonderful pictures – but that does it little justice. Yes, it's sentimental, but it's also elegiac, touching and oddly brave. It is a film that reveals the gaps in the rest of popular culture, exposing those areas where others fear to tread.

For Up has the unlikeliest of protagonists, a grumpy, lonely widower, Mr Fredricksen. It deals, matter-of-factly, with questions that rarely arise in any movie, let alone one aimed chiefly at children. So within the opening few scenes, we have not just the solitude of the elderly but the pressure on them to give up their independence and move into old-age homes. This is not ground covered in High School Musical.

Admirable though it is to raise issues normally confined to the pages of the Guardian's Society section, Up digs deeper. The film starts by showing Mr Fredricksen as a little boy, walking the 1930s streets of his neighbourhood, then staring wide-eyed at the black-and-white newsreels that brought word of Charles F Muntz, the Lindbergh-style heroic explorer who soared above the globe in an airship. This simple act of recollection sends a powerful message: it says that the elderly of today once had their own pop culture, their own celebrities, their own "new media". They are not just old people, those we might brush aside. They were children once, too.

There are regular, often acerbic, observations of the way we live now. The small, charming wooden house the old man has lived in for most of his life is under threat from developers, men in Matrix-style suits and shades, who are surrounding it with looming steel-and-glass skyscrapers. When Mr Fredricksen decides he's had enough, tying his home to a thousand balloons and heading for the skies, he is joined by a young boy scout whose father has given him all kinds of electronic gizmos – he has given him everything, in fact, except time.

Some will detect hypocrisy in a US entertainment giant such as Disney – which owns Pixar – making a target of both corporate greed and the marketing of consumer electronics to kids. But these are asides in what is a much larger story. Up deals with themes that are timeless and universal. In the most outstanding sequence, a wordless montage follows Mr Fredricksen and his childhood sweetheart from their infancy to adolescence, marriage and eventually her death. Silently, and movingly, we see the disappointment of childlessness and the deferral of dreams – in this case a long yearned for voyage to Venezuela – because reality always intrudes. Up shows us the truth of John Lennon's pithy observation: life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

This is becoming typical of Pixar. Its last feature, Wall-E, asked whether waste and rampant consumption were choking our planet, so that eventually human beings would have to find somewhere else to live, while telling an eternal story about the need for companionship. The protagonists of their most recent films – a rat, a rusty robot, a curmudgeon – are not designed with one eye on the merchandising product line. Pixar is instead doing the work of great storytellers, holding up a mirror to the world even as it reminds us of those fundamental traits, and needs, that make us human. And Pixar manages to do all that while telling a funny, exciting yarn that appeals to the widest possible audience. How many of our literary giants can say the same?

4 Sep: A Chicken Song Is Due Today...

Happy Ice-Land

Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy - in terms of wealth, health and education - they are champions of the world. To which one might respond: Yes, but - what with the dark winters and the far from tropical summers - are Icelanders happy? Actually, in so far as one can reliably measure such things, they are. According to a seemingly serious academic study reported in the Guardian in 2006, Icelanders are the happiest people on earth. (The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy.)

Oddny Sturludottir, a 31-year-old mother of two, told me she had a good friend who was 25 and had three children by a man who had just left her. 'But she has no sense of crisis at all,' Oddny said. 'She's preparing to get on with her life and her career in a perfectly optimistic frame of mind.' The answer to why the friend perceives no crisis in what any woman in a similar predicament anywhere else in the western world might consider a full-blown catastrophe goes a long way towards explaining why Iceland's 313,000 inhabitants are such a sane, cheerful, successful lot.

There are plenty of other, more obvious factors. Statistics abound. It is the country with the sixth highest GDP per capita in the world; where people buy the most books; where life expectancy for men is the highest in the world, and not far behind for women; it's the only country in Nato with no armed forces (they were banned 700 years ago); the highest ratio of mobile telephones to population; the fastest-expanding banking system in the world; rocketing export business; crystal-pure air; hot water delivered to all Icelandic households straight from the earth's volcanic bowels; and so on and so forth.

But none of this happiness would be possible without the hardy self-confidence that defines individual Icelanders, which in turn derives from a society that is culturally geared - as its overwhelming priority - to bring up happy, healthy children, by however many fathers and mothers. A lot of it comes from their Viking ancestors, whose males were rampant looters and rapists, but had the moral consistency at least not to be jealous of the dalliances of their wives - tough women who kept their families fed in the semi-tundra harshness of this north Atlantic island while their husbands forayed, for years at a time, far and wide. As a grandmother I met on my first visit to Iceland, two years ago, explained it: 'The Vikings went abroad and the women ran the show, and they had children with their slaves, and when the Vikings returned they accepted it, in the spirit of the more the merrier.'

Oddny - a slim, attractive pianist who speaks fluent German, translates English books into Icelandic and works as a city councillor in the capital, Reykjavik - offers a contemporary case in point. Five years ago, when she was studying in Stuttgart, she became pregnant by a German man. During her pregnancy she broke up with the German and reconnected with an old love, a prolific Icelandic writer and painter called Hallgrimur Helgason. The two returned to Iceland where they lived together with the new baby and in due course had a child of their own. Hallgrimur is devoted to both children but Oddny considers it important for her first-born to retain a close link to her biological father. This happens on a regular basis. The German flies over and stays at Oddny and Hallgrimur's far-from-spacious home for a week, sometimes two, at a time.

'Patchwork families are a tradition here,' explained Oddny, who was off work, at home, on the Thursday morning we met, looking after her youngest child. 'It is common for women to have kids with more than one man. But all are family together.'

I found this time and again with people I met in Iceland. Oddny's case was not atypical. When a child's birthday comes around, not only do the various sets of parents turn up for the party, the various sets of grandparents - and whole longboats of uncles and aunts - come too. Iceland, lodged in the middle of the North Atlantic with Greenland as its nearest neighbour, was too far from the remit of any but the more zealously obstinate of the medieval Christian missionaries. It is a largely pagan country, as the natives like to see it, unburdened by the taboos that generate so much distress elsewhere. That means they are practical people. Which, in turn, means lots of divorces.

'That is not something to be proud of,' said Oddny, with a brisk smile, 'but the fact is that Icelanders don't stay in lousy relationships. They just leave.' And the reason they can do so is that society, starting with the parents and grandparents, does not stigmatise them for making that choice. Icelanders are the least hung-up people in the world. Thus the incentive, for example, 'to stay together for the sake of the kids' does not exist. The kids will be just fine, because the family will rally round them and, likely as not, the parents will continue to have a civilised relationship, based on the usually automatic understanding that custody for the children will be shared.

The comfort of knowing that, come what may, the future for the children is safe also helps explain why Icelandic women, modern as they are (Iceland elected the world's first female president, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, a single mother, 28 years ago), persist in the ancient habit of bearing children very young. 'Not unwanted teen pregnancies, you understand,' said Oddny, 'but women of 21, 22 who willingly have children, very often while they are still at university.' At a British university a pregnant student would be an oddity; in Iceland, even at the business-oriented Reykjavik University, it is not only common to see pregnant girls in the student cafeteria, you see them breast-feeding, too. 'You extend your studies by a year, so what?' said Oddny. 'No way do you think when you have a kid at 22, "Oh my God, my life is over!" Definitely not! We think it's healthy to have lots of kids. All babies are welcome.'

All the more so because if you are in a job the state gives you nine months on fully paid child leave, to be split among the mother and the father as they so please. 'This means that employers know a man they hire is just as likely as a woman to take time off to look after a baby,' explained Svafa Grönfeldt, currently rector of Reykjavik University, previously a very high-powered executive. 'Paternity leave is the thing that made the difference for women's equality in this country.'

Svafa has embraced the opportunity with both arms. For her first child, she took most of the parental leave. For her second, her husband did. 'I had a job in which I was travelling 300 days a year,' she said. She had her misgivings, but these were alleviated partly by the knowledge that her husband was at home, partly because of the top-class state education that Iceland provides, starting with all-day pre-schools, rendering private schools practically nonexistent. ('I think there is one, but 99 per cent of kids, be their parents plumbers or billionaires, use the state system,' Svafa said.)

The 300 days' travelling job was as deputy CEO in charge of mergers and acquisitions for a generic pharmaceutical company called Actavis, where Svafa worked for six years. During this period the company rose from global minnowhood to become the third largest of its kind in the world, buying up 23 foreign companies along the way. A propagandist not just for her former firm, which she left when she could no longer fight the guilt she felt over her maternal absences, she listed some of the more notable feats of entrepreneurial prowess her country had achieved in the past 10 years, boom-time in what had traditionally been a fish-based economy. Icelandic banks now operate in 20 countries, and the Reykjavik-based company deCODE is a world leader in biotechnological genome research. Icelandic firms are gobbling up food and telecommunications firms in Britain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, further evidence of the island's economic growth.

Svafa is a lively, wiry woman with a sassy haircut and a sharp, humorous mind. And she has a corner office to match. Spacious, minimalist (so much so she does not even have a desk) and modern in the clean Nordic style, it has the feel of a lounge and views to kill for. From one window you see over Reykjavik's red and green rooftops to the fishing port and the dark blue sea; from another you look on to a ridge of low, snow-capped mountains. It's a beautiful landscape to look at but a hard one in which to live, especially in the 1,000 years Iceland was inhabited prior to the invention of electricity and the combustion engine. 'You have to be not only tough but inventive to survive here,' said Svafa. 'If you don't use your imagination, you're finished; if you stand still, you die.'

As the Vikings showed, part of that imagination means getting out into the world. That is what Svafa did (she studied for a PhD at the London School of Economics, lived in the US, spending a total of 10 years abroad) and what practically all Icelanders do. Very few do not speak excellent English. But now that Iceland has become prosperous the invitation is out to the world to come to Iceland. Reykjavik University has staff from 23 countries and the idea, after a planned move in two years to what Svafa describes as a new space-age campus, is to expand the foreign presence both in terms of teaching staff and students, and convert the university into a hub of global business education. Reykjavik University is already entirely bilingual. 'Students who only speak English can come and do postgraduate studies here.' Does nobody worry about losing the Icelandic language, when, after all, so few people speak it? 'Not at all,' declares Svafa. 'Our language is safe.' Not prey to the nationalist neuroses of other small countries (though practically none are smaller than Iceland), Iceland's obsession is with embracing the world, not fearing it. 'We are into brain gain, not brain drain. We want to do what the Americans have done to great effect, in our specific case to create an elite campus in Europe that attracts the best in the world.'

Icelanders know how to identify the best and incorporate it into their society. I talked about this to the Icelandic prime minister, Geir Haarde, whom I met at an official event at a steamy public swimming bath, a popular meeting place for Icelanders, like pubs for the British. Easygoing as everybody else I met, and without anything dimly resembling a bodyguard anywhere near him (there is almost no crime in Iceland), he agreed on the spot to sit down and do a quick interview.

'I believe we have blended the best of Europe and the United States here, the Nordic welfare system with the American entrepreneurial spirit,' he said, pointing out that Iceland, unlike the other Nordic countries, had exceptionally low personal and corporate tax rates. 'This has meant not only that Icelandic companies stay and foreign ones come, but that we have increased by 20 per cent our tax revenue owing to increased turnover.' Which is not to say that Iceland has been immune to the financial panic affecting the rest of the world right now. Icelandic banks being, in the US manner, aggressive and optimistic global players, there are worries they may have over-extended themselves. The rise in food and oil prices is generating the same sort of headlines in Iceland's papers as we are seeing elsewhere. Yet there is no suggestion that the economic system itself is under threat. Icelanders will continue to receive not just free, top-class education but free, top-class healthcare, private medicine being limited in Iceland chiefly to luxury procedures, such as cosmetic surgery.

Dagur Eggertsson, until recently the mayor of Reykjavik and every inch a future prime minister of Iceland, made the point to me that what has happened in Iceland has defied economic logic. 'In the Eighties and Nineties right wingers in the US and UK were saying that the Scandinavian system was unworkable, that high state investment in public services would kill business,' said Dagur, a boyish, super-bright 35-year-old who, like most Icelanders, is a furiously hard-working multi-tasker - as well as a politician, he is a doctor. 'Yet here we are, in 2008,' he continues, 'and you look at the hard economic statistics and you see that these last 12 years we and the Scandinavian countries have been roaring ahead. Someone called it bumblebee economics: scientifically, aerodynamically, you cannot figure out how it flies, but it does, and very nicely, too.'

Iceland's spectacular success comes from that capacity for hard work Dagur exemplifies, plus that imperative for creativity Svafa spoke of, plus an American faith in the feasibility of big ideas. 'Many of us have lived in the US, studied there,' said Geir Haarde, 'and what we have both taken from them and found that naturally we share is that can-do attitude - that if you work hard, anything can be done.' Svafa seemed to be the living expression of what Haarde was describing. She rejoiced in the civilised generosity of the Icelandic state but worked in pursuit of her own private goals with tireless optimism.

A similar spirit lies behind the success of Reykjavik Energy, the company that provides Icelanders with most of their hot water and electricity. Pipes dug deep into the earth's icy crust extract not oil, but water, which one kilometre down reaches temperatures of 200C. In 1940, 85 per cent of Iceland's energy came from coal and oil. Today, 85 per cent comes from underground volcanic water, which supplies half the country's electricity needs at a price just two-thirds of the European average. Iceland has the world's largest geothermal heating system, and the world is coming to have a look. The prime ministers of China and India have visited Iceland in recent years to see what they can learn about clean, cheap renewable energy and Reykjavik Energy is engaged in joint projects to replicate the Icelandic model in places as far flung as Djibouti, El Salvador, Indonesia and China.

The success of Reykjavik Energy is a metaphor for Iceland's broader achievement: harnessing the harshness of nature and transforming it, through invention and hard toil, into rich, fruitful energy. Artists have done much the same. The country is crawling with writers, painters, film makers and - like Oddny - accomplished musicians. Iceland has Björk, its cool answer to Madonna, but also a national symphony orchestra that plays to the highest standards all over the world; it has its own opera company (while I was there, La Traviata was being performed at the Reykjavik Opera House, entirely by Icelanders).

Baltasar Kormakur, a former TV soap opera heart-throb, is a successful local film director whose films have been shown in 80 countries, and is about to make his first Hollywood film this year. He has also directed a play at the Barbican, where he will soon be staging a production of Shakespeare's Othello. As for writers, half the population appears to have written a book, as if inspired by the single greatest cultural legacy Iceland has so far given the world - the 13th-century Viking sagas, which Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest writer never to receive a Nobel prize, described as the first novels, 400 years ahead of Cervantes. As a consequence, the one thing Icelanders could do that many in richer countries could not, even in the 19th century, was read - and the abundance of bookshops in Reykjavik is testament to this. Painting as an art form did not exist in Iceland until 100 years ago, but a large sector of the population dabbles in it now and at least 100 Icelanders live off their art full time.

Haraldur Jonsson, who studied in Paris and whose father was a champion multi-tasker (he was both an architect and a dentist) is an abstract painter, sculptor and video and performance artist who describes his task as 'making the invisible world visible', transforming emotions into things you can see and touch. He has exhibited all over the world, including London, Barcelona, Berlin and Los Angeles. Why is there such an abundance of artists in Iceland? What drives them? 'We do it so as not to become mad,' replied Haraldur, who is tall, nervy and thin with eyes that have the concentrated energy of a laser beam. Not to become mad? 'Yes, to keep the beast at bay.' The beast? 'The beast is Iceland, this island on which we live with its terrifyingly harsh nature, its bitter ever-changing weather. It's Goya's dark nightmare world, beautiful but grotesque. This is the moody beast of Iceland. We cannot escape it. So we find ways to live with it, to tame it. I do it through my art,' said Haraldur, whose attempts to pacify the monster have also included the writing of three books in which 'there are no animals, no trees. We have to have a rich internal life to fill the empty spaces, to fill the silence with our own noise.'

There is another beast to which Iceland owes a debt: the Second World War. The Icelanders must be the only people in the world to whom Adolf Hitler bequeathed a legacy of value. Before the war, Iceland was Europe's poorest country. Suddenly, in 1939, it became a strategic location of immense value. The British and the Germans raced for it, and the British got there first. They established a military base on a finger of land near the Reykjavik coast. 'Suddenly there was an abundance of jobs that were, for the first time ever, unrelated to fishing or farming,' recalled Asvaldur Andresson. 'I remember that before the war we barely had roads, and those we had we had to build with picks and shovels. The British and Americans came and then it was Caterpillar trucks and tar roads and all sorts of wonderful new tools with which to work.'

Asvaldur, who was born in 1928 in a fishing town in Iceland's wild far east called Seydisfjordur, emigrated west to Reykjavik at the end of the war and found a job as a bus driver at the US base. After that, following long hours of hard night-time study, he spent most of his life as a refurbisher of bashed-up cars. His life was always tough, but especially when he was growing up, when Iceland was that worst of possible mixes, a Developing World country with brutally cold weather. He left school at 12 and went to work on a fishing boat amid the icy storms of the Arctic circle's southern edge. His sister died of whooping cough at the age of three, and when his father died, Asvaldur, then 16, was out at sea, so he did not find out about it until after the burial. He worked 16-hour days all his life to keep his family fed. Today, he has a full-time job looking after his invalid wife. The blessing is that he receives money from the state to do so, a big reason (consistent with the culture of family cohesion) why most old people in Iceland live not in residences but at home. 'I look back at my life and I see how this country has changed and I can hardly believe my eyes,' said Haraldur.

The most remarkable thing is what has become of three of his grand-daughters, all grown up now. One makes documentary films in Paris; one is a bio-technology whizz who assists surgeons in a Reykjavik hospital; the eldest, at 26, has a flying licence from the United States and is undergoing training to become a pilot with Ryanair. Icelandic women being the early reproducers that they are, Asvaldur and his wife have not one or two but five great-grandchildren.

They are all sure to be receiving a fine education, especially should any of them happen to go to a school I visited in Reykjavik called Hateigsskol. The principal, a quietly passionate man called Asgeir Beinteinsson, showed me around. The children range from the ages of six to 16, and every classroom, which we visited unannounced, was a picture of cheerful industry. Apart from the wide variety of subjects obligatory to all, from cookery to carpentry via all the traditional lessons, what was striking was the ingenuity in the teaching and the degree of liaison with the parents. One method of teaching for younger children involved the use of drama to explain history and science. The story of the first settlers who left Norway in 874, for example, is learnt by acting out how they would have navigated to Iceland using the sun and the stars, and how they survived when they first arrived on Iceland's barren rocks. As for the parents, there is one member of staff whose job it is to compile detailed data on internal assessment exercises conducted with a view to keeping the school on its toes, and standards high. After consultation with pupils, teachers and parents, progress is rated on everything from the quality of maths teaching for nine-year-olds to the satisfaction levels of the teachers with their colleagues to the pupils' feelings about the school buildings. The information is then made available to the parents on the internet.

'The philosophy behind everything we do,' said Asgeir, 'is that we must challenge the children with a broad educational foundation, teach them in a warm, creative environment where we respect everyone equally. All are equal.' Asgeir and his staff have, like many other Icelanders, looked abroad for ideas and inspiration. Two teachers I met had just returned from England, where they had spent time at a school in Birmingham with a reputation for doing an especially good job. Asgeir himself has been to Denmark, Scotland, the United States and Singapore, and he was off to New Orleans the week after I met him. For good measure, all teachers have the opportunity to take a year off to study a subject of their choice on full pay.

If the bumblebee flies, if Iceland is the world's best place in which to live, and one of the richest, it is because of the way governments have added enlightened policies to the island's pragmatic, inventive human raw material. 'I as a medical doctor and as a politician believe that there is an intimate link between the country's health and the quality of political decisions that are made,' said Dagur Eggertsson, Reykjavik's former mayor. 'We were the poorest of nations 100 years ago, but we all could read and we had strong women. On that we have now built strong policies. My point is that more important for the health of a country than not smoking and eating well are the social phenomena we stress here: equality, peace, democracy, clean water, education, renewable energy, women's rights.'

Dagur, like the many people I spoke to in Iceland who were proud of their country, was confident but not complacent; content but ambitious - and open to the world in all its diversity. That was manifest even at Asgeir's school, where I came across children from China, Vietnam, Colombia, even Equatorial Guinea.

When I was talking to Svafa about the better influences from the rest of the world that Iceland seemed to have wisely plucked, or just happened to have, we mentioned, as the prime minister had done, the humaneness of Scandinavia and the drive of the United States. We also discussed how the Icelanders - who have excellent restaurants these days and whose stamina for late night partying must come from the Viking DNA - seemed to have much of southern Europe's savoir vivre. Then I put it to her that there was an African quality to Iceland that the rest of Europe lacked. This was to be found in the 'patchwork' family structures Oddny had spoken of. The sense that, no matter whether the father lived in the same home or the mother was away working, the children belonged to, and were seen to belong by, the extended family, the village. Svafa liked that. 'Yes!' the pale-skinned power executive exclaimed, in delighted recognition. 'We are Africans, too!'

Partly by dint of travel, partly by accident, Iceland, we agreed, was a melting pot that had contrived to combine humanity's better qualities, offering a lesson for the rest of the world on how to live sensibly and cheerfully, free from cant and prejudice and taboo. Iceland could not be less like Africa on the surface; could not be further removed from the lowest country in the UNDP's Human Development Index, Sierra Leone. Yet the Icelanders have had the wisdom to take, or accidentally to replicate, the best of what's there, too. Without any hang-ups at all.

by John Carlin

To Our Beloved Dog

Bro brought you 16 years ago already... you were just a ball of black fur with two amazing blue eyes. I know that some people offered money for you when bro was just killing time for the bus home. I also remember how mum told bro off saying she didn´t want any dog at home but then she was the one who was always there looking after you and tonight she is the one who is crying because tomorrow your elderly suffering will stop. I remember my best times with you on the local beach, throwing the stick, walking looking the waves or just sitting on the sand. I remember thinking how silly people were for crying for pets. Tonight I am crying, and bro is crying and mum is crying. And my thoughts are just with you my beloved friend who just happened to be from another specie. I missed you every single day all those years. You are up there, in the same picture with dad.

YOU WERE HERE

As I sit in those moments of quiet,
When sadness invades me,
I know that yesterday,
You were here.

Now you are away from us,
Not knowing your future,
Or when you'll come home, but yesterday,
You were here.

It has now been a week,
A week since you last were in the house,
An entire week since we carried you away,
To the place where we did not know your future,
But just last week,
You were here.

Another day passes;
a week ago, you were still with us,
In daily reports from the clinic,
They did not know your future,
But we could still hope, and,
You were here.

More days pass,;
A week ago you left us,
Your head cradled in our hands,
Your spirit gracefully moving upward,
But for a few hours of that day,
You were here.

Sadness invades again,
As I know that once those hours pass,
I can no longer look back,
Over the span of a familiar week's time,
To find that comforting point when,
You were here.

More time will pass;
Sadness will not so much invade as menace,
And I will mark the days,
Saying things like,
"last month, last summer, last Halloween, last year,"
You were here.

I dread that day,
One year from now,
That first marking of the time,
That your body was no longer with us;
Though we will never forget you,
Your tangible memory fades,
The feel of your fur, your head, your back, your weight against us,
The smell and sounds of you when,
You were here.

The emptiness is beginning to fade,
To change into another reality,
One with you still playing a part,
But a role of ethereal presence rather than physical comfort we crave;
Your memory, your spirit, your essence and counsel,
Dwell with us, but this feeling is not the same as when,
You were here.

Author: Jenine Stanley

With friends like these . . .

"There is something quite particular
about spending the second half of your life
taking revenge on the first."

When David Mamet declared last month that he was no longer a 'brain-dead liberal', he joined the ranks of leftwing writers, from Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens, who have moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar challenges the new generation of renegades.

by David Edgar


One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been overlooked in the current nostalgia fest.

Despite Robert Frost's stern warning against the dangers of youthful idealism ("I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old"), remarkably few of those formed by 1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That is, until now.

In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan's key thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political defectors of the past, their critique of the left is validated by personal experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our own time. And, intentionally or not, they are undermining the historic bond between progressive liberalism and the poor.

I became interested in the politics of defection in the late 1970s. I'd written a play about the far right (Destiny), but as the National Front crashed to ignominious defeat in 1979, it was clear that its thunder had been stolen by a resurgent conservatism that owed much of its passion and its principles to deserters from the left. As the death-agony of the 1974-79 Labour government unfolded, former socialists and communists contributed to proto-Thatcherite tirades with titles like "The Future that Doesn't Work" and "An Escape from George Orwell's 1984". In 1978, former leftwingers such as Kingsley Amis, Max Beloff, Reg Prentice, Paul Johnson and Alun Chalfont anthologised their apostasy in a book proudly titled Right Turn.

In my play about defection (Maydays, produced by the RSC in 1983), I speculated about how the British class of '68 might move to the conservative right. Essentially transposing the experience of earlier generations into the 70s, I don't think my central character's trajectory was implausible. In France, Bernard-Henri Lévy and other nouveaux philosophes had provided a vocabulary of retreat for the veterans of the Paris events of May 1968. Some American popular radicals had fled to business (Jerry Rubin) or to the religious right (Eldridge Cleaver), and former Ramparts editor and Black Panther supporter David Horovitz was to mount a 1987 conference, Second Thoughts, at which former 60s radicals such as Michael Medved and PJ O'Rourke confessed and renounced their errors. Nonetheless, most of the leading figures of the period - from Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin and Bernardine Dohrn in America via Danny Cohn-Bendit in Germany to Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn and Sheila Rowbotham here - have remained faithful to their previous ideals. And while Alan Milburn, Alan Johnson, Alistair Darling and Stephen Byers have clearly moved a considerable distance since their days in or about the Trotskyite far left, they would doubtless claim to be pursuing a drastically revised version of the same, socially progressive agenda. Until very recently, almost everybody disillusioned with the far left felt there was still a viable near left they could call home.

Now, that appears to be changing. Bookshop shelves are not quite yet groaning with defection literature, but Nick Cohen (What's Left?), Andrew Anthony (The Fallout), Ed Husain (The Islamist) and Melanie Phillips (Londonistan) are all self-confessed deserters (Phillips wears the "apostate" label with pride). Although Martin Amis was never part of the revolutionary or communist left (and attacked both his father and his friend Christopher Hitchens for so being), The Second Plane is an assault on the kind of liberal, literary intellectuals among whom Amis has moved throughout his life. And although Cohen, Anthony, Phillips et al have poured particular vituperation on leftwing playwrights (David Hare and Harold Pinter in particular), they have now been joined by one - David Mamet, who last month wrote a piece for the Village Voice entitled "Why I am no longer a 'brain-dead liberal'" (he no longer believes that "people are basically good at heart"). Like previous generations, these defectors have been there, done that, and can now bear witness to their former misbeliefs. In so doing, they are joining a club with an extensive membership. Most of the radical and progressive achievements of the 20th century - including the Russian revolution - were brought about by an alliance between the oppressed and the intelligentsia, and a good proportion of them - particularly the Russian revolution - were followed by disappointment and desertion. For some, disillusion set in as early as 1921, when the Bolsheviks suppressed a sailors' uprising at Kronstadt, the port of St Petersburg and cradle of the October revolution. Subsequent "Kronstadt moments" included the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, the neo-Stalinist show trials in eastern Europe in the early 50s, Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes in February 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November of that year.

As a result of these crises, ex-communist writers such as Arthur Koestler and Stephen Spender moved to the liberal centre. Others, like WH Auden, withdrew from political involvement altogether. For many, like the American poet and bohemian Max Eastman and the fellow-travelling novelist John Dos Passos, the cold war provided a changing room from which they emerged - with new stars in their eyes - as full-blown, traditionalist conservatives.

The events of 1956 changed the rules of membership of the ex-communist club in two ways. The creation of a self-consciously non-Stalinist New Left gave people disillusioned with communism somewhere else to go. On the other hand, the subsequent activities of the New Left became a recruiting agency for the right among older radicals, socialists and even liberals. For ex-communist Kingsley Amis, opposition to the expansion of higher education ("more will mean worse") was the first of many Conservative causes which transformed the author of Lucky Jim into a Thatcherite cheerleader. Similarly, what became the Reagan coalition was given considerable intellectual ballast by a group of New York intellectuals surrounding ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol, for whom the hippy counter-culture, Black Power and later the women's and environmental movement demonstrated the infantilism and nihilism of the New Left. Self-defined as "liberals mugged by reality", Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell were genuinely neoconservatives, having previously been revolutionaries (Kristol), radicals (Podhoretz, Glazer) or at the very least democratic progressives.

As former victims of political delusion, these defectors claim a unique authority. But there is something quite particular about spending the second half of your life taking revenge on the first. Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and do now is coloured by what they thought and did before. Most people who leave the far left do so because of their experience of far-left organisations: their authoritarianism and manipulation, their contempt for allies as "useful idiots", their insistence that the end justifies the means and that deceit is a class duty, their refusal to take anything anyone else says at face value (dismissing disagreement as cowardice or class treachery) and, most of all, their dismissal as "bourgeois" of the very ideals that draw people to the left in the first place. As Spender wrote in The God that Failed (1949), "the communist, having joined the party, has to castrate himself of the reasons which made him one".

But, often, something else is going on. Frequently, there is a sense among defecting intellectuals that it's not just the party that has let them down. Most people move left either because they are outraged by the victimhood of the oppressed (Spender's distress at men and women "sealed into leaden slums") or because they are inspired by the left's revolutionary ardour (as many of my generation were by the Black Panthers and the Vietcong). The discovery that the poor do not necessarily respond to their victimhood with uncomplaining resignation is as traumatic as the complementary perception that they don't always behave in a spirit of selfless heroism.

Hard enough to be fooled by the party; even harder to accept that you deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this realisation turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns outwards into blame.

One obvious result of this is the tendency of ex-radicals to become very conservative indeed, a tendency satirised by Edmund Wilson in his quip about John Dos Passos:

On account of Soviet knavery
He favours restoring slavery.

Dos Passos was not the only American Marxist to pole-vault the cold-war liberal centre and land in the arms of William F Buckley's high conservative National Review. Initially claiming that he still believed in the end of working-class emancipation, former Trotskyite Max Eastman quickly turned on "mush-headed liberals" who "bellyache" about civil rights; for former beat critic and latter neoconservative Podhoretz, homosexuality was a death wish and feminism a plague.

Above all, the reality that neocons felt mugged by was the moral inadequacy of the poor. Kristol's manifesto On the Democratic Idea in America blamed the free market for encouraging unreasonable appetites in the working class; as Robert Nesbit put it, "to allay every fresh discontent, to assuage every social pain, and to gratify every fresh expectation".

Like Eldridge Cleaver, the neocons argued that the welfare state had turned the poor into parasites; James Q Wilson asserts that, in the black community, welfare became for black women what heroin was for black men. For Podhoretz, far from being "persecuted and oppressed", the blacks he knew were doing the persecuting and oppressing.

The directness and lack of apology in neoconservative polemic is a result of the fact that its authors had discharged the same ordnance in the opposite direction, and knew the likely weight and calibre of the returning fire. Most political defectors leave the left because its authoritarian practices stand in such stark contrast to its emancipatory ideals. For many, however, there is a double paradox: on opening their suitcase at the end of the journey, they find not just that the libertarian ideals they left the left to preserve have gone missing, but that the only thing remaining is the very cynicism and ruthlessness which they left the left to escape.

So, as on the far left, there is a tendency to see the world in stark, binary terms. Kingsley Amis once admitted that "it's all pretty black and white to me now. If you decide, as I have, that there are only two sides to the argument, then it's all quite simple." Kristol insists that environmentalists aren't really interested in clean air or clean water; what they're really after is authoritarian political power. And a condemnation of the practice of radicals and revolutionaries justifies the abandonment of the groups they seek to defend. For neocon Nathan Glazer, 60s radicalism was "so beset with error and confusion" that even its mildest manifestations - such as affirmative action for African Americans - had to be swept away.

Is this pattern reflected among those defectors for whom the "Kronstadt moment" was 9/11? Certainly, Husain's The Islamist describes a progression towards and then away from the non-jihadist but pro-Caliphate Hizb ut-Tahrir, which will be familiar to any reader of defection literature; he is now working with the Conservative thinktank Civitas. Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious University Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" to every question). Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance - justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism - with the far right.

The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. And, as no one is suggesting that the Socialist Workers Party, or its fellow travellers in what Aaronovitch calls "the bruschetta crowd", is using the anti-war alliance to pursue a hidden, anti-feminist, homophobic and theocratic agenda, it initially appears that the dupers are conspiratorial Islamists and the dupees the naively innocent socialists who marched beside them. Just like the "useful idiots" of the 30s, they are giving aid and comfort to Muslim extremists, in the deluded hope (to quote Cohen) that the Islamists will "shake themselves and say, 'fair enough, we realise that now you've addressed our root cause, we don't want a theocratic empire after all'".

No one on the progressive liberal left can be comfortable with any of the religions of the book, particularly when literally applied. And those of us who dismissed the oppression of women and gay people as "secondary contradictions" in the early 70s are correctly wary of putting those issues on the back-burner now. Certainly, the progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which is partly about the temptation - on these understandable grounds - to reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished, beleaguered and demonised community.

For, let's be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object - the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give visibility and confidence to entire communities - is not just between a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. Martin Amis denies he's declaring war on the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but his "thought experiment" about meting out collective punishment on Muslims (travel restriction, deportation, strip searching) "until it hurts the whole community" makes no distinction between followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque.

Cohen is careful to point out that "Islamism has Islamic roots", and, clearly, the group that he dubs the "far right" goes beyond the adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami. It's also a group that - defined in the old-fashioned way as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis - remains at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. As Trevor Phillips pointed out in his "sleepwalking into segregation" speech, made after 7/7, a Pakistani man with identical qualifications to a white man is still going to earn £300,000 less in his lifetime.

It is also a group that suffered, particularly during Cohen, Aaronovitch and Anthony's formative years. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Paki-bashing created an image of Britain's south Asian communities as a traditionally submissive group, victimised by unwarranted aggression. For some, this image was complemented by admiration for groups such as the Bradford 12, who sought to defend their communities against fascist attack, and won the right to do so in court. When, in 1989, Bradford's Pakistanis found a sense of self-confidence and identity through burning books rather than banks, it's no surprise that liberal progressives who had supported, maybe even pitied, that community felt a sense of betrayal. In their books, Cohen and Anthony frequently point out how people on the left grow bitter when the poor fail to live up to the romance of unbridled heroism or untainted victimhood. They don't fully take into account the effect of that delusion on themselves.

Many of the usual pathologies of defection can be detected in the current crop. The attack on multiculturalism - so often sold as a reassertion of Enlightenment principles - often masks a distinctly unenlightened reassertion of hierarchic and traditionalist thinking. Despite his defence of women's and gay rights against Qur'anic scholars, a distinct strain of hostility to the sexual gains of the 60s runs through Cohen's What's Left?: he blames the anti-racists and sexual reformers of the 60s for dissolving "the bonds of mutual support", dips more than a toe into the Daily Mail's critique of the welfare state (breaking up families, privileging immigrants), and blames the Respect party for Pakistani and Bangladeshi unemployment.

Martin Amis's elegant prose shouldn't blind us to his seeming obsession with the Muslim birth rate as a "gangplank to theocracy" ("Has feminism cost us Europe?" he asked in an Independent interview). David Goodhart, editor of left-leaning Prospect magazine (who describes the 60s as "the decade that sharply eroded authority and constraint"), argued in his pamphlet Progressive Nationalism for a two-tier welfare system, the teaching of imperial history in schools, the creation of a migration and integration ministry, the raising of citizenship test hurdles, the reassertion of the monarchy and the army as nationally binding institutions, the banning of certain forms of dress from public buildings and the reintroduction of conscription. That several of these proposals are now government policy is an indication of how Gordon Brown's golden thread of British liberties has thickened into what looks more like a whip.

Most importantly, the culture of betrayal has blinded contemporary defectors to the significant achievements of the alliance between British Muslims and the left. Along with Phillips, Cohen and the New Statesman's Martin Bright, Anthony is preoccupied with the Muslim Council of Britain and its spokesman Inayat Bunglawala, quoting his remark that the campaign against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses brought Muslims together and "helped develop a British Muslim identity".

In fact, Bunglawala's attitude to Rushdie goes to the heart of whether the progressive-Muslim alliance is a genuine conversation or the contemporary equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet pact. In a Guardian article last June, he reiterated the importance of the anti-Rushdie campaign in building self-confidence among a small, isolated, beleaguered and frequently victimised community, but went on to "readily acknowledge we were wrong to have called for the book to be banned". Now, he confesses, "I can better appreciate the concerns and fear generated by the images of book-burning in Bradford and calls for the author to be killed". Not least because, as he wrote in response to a critical blog, the same laws that allowed Rushdie to write The Satanic Verses protects the rights of Muslims to say what they think, too.

Support for human rights legislation that protects the rights of religious as well as sexual minorities is controversial within the Muslim community, as are other examples of supposedly diehard Islamists responding to liberal criticism. For example, the MCB came under fire when it decided - not before time - to participate in Holocaust Day ceremonies. Azzam Tamimi is a leading member of the main Muslim organisation in the Stop the War Coalition, the British Muslim Initiative, a group much reviled for its close ties with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian equivalent, Hamas. Tamimi's book on Hamas (published in America as Hamas: A History from Within) contains a sustained critique of Hamas's constitution, its treatment of the Jews, and its quotation of the tsarist antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another leading member of the BMI, Anas Altikriti, points out that the Qur'an says nothing about homosexuality beyond relaying the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah (and, for that matter, does not call for the execution of apostates). Altikriti negotiated for hostage Norman Kember's release in Iraq, campaigned against escalating protests over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in Denmark (while sympathising with Muslim anger against them) and argues that, unlike the British government, he has been fighting separatist Muslim extremism since long before 1997.

Despite the drumbeat of demonisation by media and politicians, these and other Muslim leaders are increasingly open to the argument that their shared interest in universal human rights trumps what we rightly regard as illiberal beliefs. They are, in other words, going in precisely the opposite direction from that which their detractors describe and predict. Are they really (to use Hitchens's formulation) to be anathematised as "fascists with an Islamic face"?

All of the great progressive movements of the 20th century in the west - solidarity with republican Spain, the building of welfare states, the civil rights movement in the southern United States, the war against apartheid in South Africa - were led by an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression. The civil rights movement in particular allied secular Jews (often with communist backgrounds) from the north with black Christians in the south. The difficulties of that relationship were demonstrated when - after victory was largely won - blacks asserted the need for an all-black leadership of one of the main civil rights groups. Later, feminists properly criticised the leaders of the Black Panthers for the sexism of both their political practice and personal behaviour. Despite all that, does anyone think the creation of the alliance which successfully desegregated the American south was a mistake?

Whether they like it or not, the current defectors are seeking to provide a vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon the poor. So, for civil libertarians, the divide is no longer between left and right, but between authority and personal liberty. For atheists, it is between secularism and religious belief. For some American and European feminists, it is between women's rights and a multiculturalism that validates Muslim patriarchy. For a number of former leftwingers, it is between the social solidarity of a conservative working class and the demands of multicultural newcomers.

What all these fault-lines have in common is that they pit progressives against the group that is under the most sustained political attack, here and abroad, and that those who draw them include people who have the authority of the convert, having seen the error of their ways. It behoves those of us who have also been there and done that, not to defend the indefensible, but to protect the vocabulary of alliance that has done so much good in the past and is so necessary now.