'Occult' themes are central to much popular entertainment - from the back story of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and comic book adaptations such as Hellboy through to the Goth sub-culture and the imagery in pop videos, largely harmless and fun.

But behind the stylistic use of such material to express a dash of the controlled forbidden in the search for entertainment lies a more serious revival of intellectual interest in the non-rational, the 'hidden' and the liminal and in imagination and subjectivity as guides to life.

Much of this is playful. Some of it has been rediscovered through the workings of the new technologies (an old theme of ours). It has developed, as esoteric studies, into respectable academic communities in Exeter and in the Netherlands.

Why The Occult Now?

This rediscovery of what previous generations would find laughable or even dangerous and demonic needs some consideration as a cultural phenomenon. The subject is far too big for a single posting but some commentary may be useful.

The first observation is that it is an attempt to re-instil some semblance of meaning in the wake of the philosophical destruction of nearly all forms of traditional essentialism and as a means of dealing with the challenge of nihilism in relativism and post-modernism.

The second observation is that it appears to be emerging as a form of psychology. An individual can construct an identity, or perhaps makes more coherent their multiple identities, by creating a bespoke essentialism suitable for themselves existentially. It also has the advantage of not requiring the expense of a therapist or the authority of a priest in times of trouble.

In the past, there were formal structures of learning that built up a religious or even esoteric ideology into which one was apprenticed (much as the great religions do today within stable family and community structures).

Today, the psychological or subjective truth (in the eyes of a good proportion of humanity) that there is actually something ineffable out there requires individuals to make choices themselves about how to respond to that alternative 'reality'.

A science of non-science (or non-sense as the determined rearguard of the Enlightenment and probably Professor Dawkins would have it) has had to emerge as an exploration of 'that of which nothing may be said' (to paraphrase Wittgenstein).

It is required because many people cannot find value in taking the nihilistic or materialistic paths pointed out by any cold and calculated assessment of our position in the world [Heidegger's 'dasein'].

If we do not start out with conventional faith or are constitutionally disinterested in the big questions, then we are soon faced with that 'abyss' first drawn to our attention by Kierkegaard, knowing that one is alone in marching through the wood to the final clearing of death [Heidegger. again]. 

Best not to think on this or to make the thinking one does work for one's survival and pleasure in the world. Best, above all, not to take it for granted that there is no meaning and create one's own meaning through the exploration of what is before us ...

The sense of something 'hidden' behind the veil (the real sense of 'occult') is no more than a rejection of a nihilism that states that there is (not may be) nothing behind that veil - or that whatever it is behind that veil can be understood wholly in terms of a leap of faith into some grand narrative dictated solely by the community at large. 

The consequence is a culture of questing and search that pefectly fits our existentialist times and which fills a gap for many left behind by mechanistic, rationalist and materialist world-views and by the inadequacy of faith-based alternatives.

The New Religions

I am making this more intellectual than it is. The new non-rationalism is not interested in understanding the phenomenon so much as existing within it. 

And for every intense searcher after deeper truths, there are hundreds who just emotionally or playfully or religiously grab hold of the 'memes' of the occult side and enter into the new religions that exist half-way between intellectual occultism and older faith-based cultures.

These new faiths are growing quite fast amongst teenagers and socially marginalised groups but also amongst some solid stable ordinary folk who find they say something important about how life might be lived. 

We must not overplay their size or importance but the fear of ridicule and a certain paranoia about public reaction has meant that the extent of formal or informal esoteric and neo-pagan belief in Western society is probably significantly underestimated. People are still reluctant to 'come out' about an often misunderstood set of views about the world.

One starting point for anyone who might share this interest is Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999). It cannot be recommended enough.

A surprising result of the book - which made it clear that claims of an ancient origin to the new religions (with the exception of induction by consent into traditional shamanism) were just so much bunkum - is the degree to which Wiccans in particular have taken Hutton to their heart. 

The 'newness' of these faiths, including the consciously reconstructed Heathenism of Asatruar, is fully accepted as a fact in terms of form and origin in order to preserve a 'timeless' content in terms of belief.  

Compare the perceptual shift from a scientific world view which had resulted in part from rational debate on the origins of God's Word in the Bible. The debate on 'truth' undermined traditional Christian faith and created the cuddly toothless Anglicanism of today. 

Neo-pagans simply say that the origins of their belief system are no less true for having been created (in one case) out of the fertile imagination of a pensioned civil servant. It would be like a Christian saying that he accepts a claim that Jesus' death was faked but that it does not matter because the message is true. This is faith existentially chosen because it represents a deeper inner truth. Tom Cruise might defend his beliefs in similar terms.

For example, Wiccan and pagan forum members on the internet will often be highly critical of attempts to over-estimate the deaths in the 'burning times' (the European witch hunts), of the unwarranted feminist claims of historians like Gimbutas and, above all, of the ridiculous claims of continuity between modern reconstructions and the ancient religions from which they have been reconstructed. 

This maturity about facts - far from the caricature of outsiders - positions these religions as intimately linked to modernity. They look less and less like reversions to the traditional as time and study progresses. 

Even their interest in folk tradition centres on their being grounded in the contemporary community as local healers or as 'earth magicians', although these claims may eventually be legislated out of existence by severely materialist legislators worried about fraudulent claims on an unsuspecting public.

This flexibility of practice is in marked contrast to what happens when authority gets its grubby little paws on paganism to bend it to its own purpose. The fate of Shinto under the Meiji restoration is an object lesson in cynical inauthenticity for the purpose of nation-building with tragic consequences.

The Cultural Avant-Garde

Another contribution in the Hutton tradition of critical analysis of belief - Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Esotericism by Hugh Urban of Ohio State University (University of California Press, 2006) is also worth referencing here. 

Urban takes the key points in the history of 'sex magick' (not nearly as scandalous today as the nomenclature implies) as separate and successive components of alternative cultural practice. He demonstrates how what was highly transgressive at each stage, fully in defiance of conventional mores, eventually became pulled into the prurient and commercialised mainstream. 

A culture of individual resistance to community culture came to shadow each stage of the development of consumer capitalism. With no intention to do so on either side, radical individual liberation and the market converged, becoming the Western society that we live in today. This is, of course, my over simplification - read Urban's book. 

But the seven case-types he introduces: the sexual magic of the mixed race American Paschley  Randolph in the Post-Bellum era; the discovery of Tantra; the influence of Crowley; the Nietzchean impulse of Julius Evola; the arrival of Wiccan ideas and its links to feminism; the Satanic 'christian heresy' of La Vey; Chaos Magic with its shattering of all points of reference: all these lead (in Urban's analysis) to the 'magical logic of late capitalism'.

From this perspective, we must be entering the 'next stage' and the next stage may be the re-sacralisation and distancing of sexuality in sheer exhaustion at its omnipresence visually as a commercial tool.

But what next politically, if anything - with all barriers down and apparently nowhere further to go. Any belief, any practice seems to be permitted. 

The Politics of Non-Rationalism

An odd book, from 'Jonathan Black', the nom de plume of the head of a Random House imprint, gives a sense of some of the change taking place at the macro-cultural level. 

The Secret History of the World [Quercus, 2007] could be read as a cynical attempt to capture interest in the occult, as an occult attempt to re-introduce the 'Hidden Masters' to the wider public, as a 'sinister' ideological project to undermine the Enlightenment, as playfulness, as an attempt to rehabilitate imagination and subjectivity as equal to rational thought, as an experiment in creating a 'grand narrative' for the esoteric or as genuine attempt to create an esoteric morality based on 'art' (pp 380-1) - or all or part or something else.

The book claims to tell the history of the world from a non-rational perspective based on the esoteric tradition. To any academic historian or scientist, it is absurd from beginning to end but Black cleverly ensures that we understand that he is not making the same 'truth-claims' as these rational experts. His 'truth-claims' are imaginative but no less 'truth-claims'.

'Jonathan Black' appears traditional and conservative to the point of the dark side - his assessment of the French Revolution is negative, straight out of conspiracy theorist Abbe Barruel, he accepts the story of the American Empire as being Masonic in inspiration and he sees the Illuminati as a real plot, leading to the Terror and much else besides.

Yet Hugh Urban, on the other hand, points in the opposite direction - that each stage of the rediscovery of the 'occult' has resulted in increasing radical individualism and liberalism.  How can conservative imaginative traditionalism and radical libertarianism and tolerance be squared? 

Both interpretations could have in common an implicit critique of the collectivist and of the intrusion of the esoteric into political manipulation. While not identical, both interpretations seem to share an 'attitude' that is critical of systems and elites in both the material and 'spiritual' worlds that fail to deliver results specific to their sphere and are supportive of systems and elites that do.

The logic of this is that Governments that govern well, regardless of ideology, and who leave the spiritual world alone are 'good'. 

So, we have an essential pragmatism that dislikes grand narratives and ideology and, ironically, reflects Christ's dictum about rendering unto Caesar. It is a position that separates faith and state and is essentially conservative. A good King is better than a corrupt Republic.

However, the denial of the grand narrative (despite Black's attempt to create one) in matters of the spirit and the primacy of personal choice and free association, tolerance for all paths (including entrepreneurial and sexual) and determination on none suggests a radical libertarian perspective in favour of the individual.

Good governance without ideology and respect for the individual sounds remarkably like the social conservatism espoused by David Cameron and, though there is no suggestion of the British Tory Party as an occult organisation alongside the Illuminati and the Templars, there is a convergence between philosophical scepticism as final fruit of the post-modern revolution and the less-ambitious pragmatic 'Burkean' conservatism of the contemporary Conservative Party.

Why Are The Old Guard So Scared?

It is no secret that Cameron has had to ride rough-shod over his authoritarian Right to get to his current position. If Brown's Government had not gone into melt-down in the early Autumn, it is arguable that he might have been facing some much more serious challenges from the Right.

As it is, Cameron's social conservatism and the rise of non-rationalist thinking are also consonant with other cultural changes encouraged by the new technologies and the instinctively sceptical and pragmatic attitudes of the educated elements in the under-35 generations.

This seems to be a zeitgeist thing and we are moving far beyond our original curiosity about esoteric thinking to seeing it as a symptom of a whole series of converging developments that favour social conservatism at the expense of the psychological rigidities of centre-left communitarianism and the Tory Right.

Authoritarian personalities are anxious. This is not good, they say. The British military is worried, no kidding!  But their analysis is the opposite of ours and comes from within a state system that is worried because it is simply no longer fit for purpose.  They say ...

"An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

The relativism and pragmatism that unnerves them will lead, they think, to a demand for externally imposed certainties. In their dreams! 

This relativism and pragmatism is likely to result in quite the opposite - a demand for a framework of good governance by all means but also a complete abandonment of any attempt to tell the people what to do and what to believe so long as they obey a law that is minded to liberal values.

Collectivist, faith-based and fascist or authoritarian reactions to liberalism and attempts to reverse the trend are likely (especially on the back of the breakdown in the community that has resulted from state failure) but they will have few resources to reverse the 'hegemony' of a culture of libertarianism.

It is almost as if the military are willing order to return and, fearing a British Mussolini [Nick Griffin] or Stalin [Comrade Brown, perhaps], want us all to accept their order instead. Well, British intelligence has not had the best of records and we see no reason to accept this analysis either. The high point of an attempt at statist authoritarian rule ended when John Reid gave up the Home Office.

Good Times Ahead?

In fact, Authority may be very worried about its loss of authority but there is no reason why we should be. So long as authority does not intefere, a degree of self-correction within society is already taking place. 

We have been hitting a cultural, economic and social low point across the West and the existing structures are about to be politically punished. But this is a correction and not a collapse.

Now that the dangerous neo-conservative revolution (with its implicit offer of republican order and vertu) has collapsed, there is probably no turning back from this prevailing ideology of personal liberation within a framework of good governance. 

We have been careful not to call these new trends irrational. They should more properly seen as offering alternative rationalities. Even non-rational as a term is unfair. Non-rational thinking is perfectly reasonable [i.e. rational] once you accept the subjective assumptions underpinning it. But non-rational seems to me to be a reasonable concession to the wider world.

In this context, the threat to liberty now comes not from the Right but from radical liberation activists with their own grand narratives (notably the black-consciousness, gay and feminist elements). They feel that the tide is turning from single identity politics towards a society based on fluid and multiple identities. And this offers a profound threat to their political position.

Old Enlightenment liberals can only accept one set of assumptions based on universal rights and fixed identities and resent the idea that there are many alternaive ways of constructing a world view. And so, paradoxically, it is elements within the Enlightenment Left that are buttressing the New Right in a context of an alleged clash of cultures. 

One final thought. Urban in his Preface refers to the academic prejudice and fear surounding his taking up (even in an academic and objective way) the subject of 'sex magick' as a topic for serious study. He points out the odd combination in our culture of prurience and sniggering and yet the massive availability of sexual imagery in almost every context. 

We might call Western culture adolescent if it was not an insult to teenagers. If the new religions unravel attitudes more suitable to a peasant society before birth control and bring maturity to our civilisation, then this may be no bad thing. It would not be the first time (we think of Jesus) that the margins of an empire have proved its salvation.

www.tppr.co.uk

[Some of this material appeared in an April 2007 posting on Gaia.com: New Religions And Our Civilisation]

It can be interesting to revisit old postings in other places on the web and see what has changed in one's views over months or even years. This posting takes us away from international relations completely to ask some basic questions about how we respond to Art. 

It is a 'wild card' on As It Happens and we hope you appreciate the occasional break from politics - though we can rarely resist some commentary hidden in our texts. The original posting related to the major Gilbert & George retrospective in London earlier this year.  Only the internet permits this process of editing one's own views over time quickly and simply.

Can any art rooted in place be fully appreciated by someone who has not shared that sense of place to some degree with the artist? 

You may see a work that owes its apparent meaning to a particular place yet know that a combination of art market pressures and perhaps the sheer scale of a work may mean that it is displaced quite quickly to the large and spacious houses of the rich or to the public gallery of a foreign land. 

How can a wealthy collector understand references to the East End street in Gilbert & George's work? How much of a work by Anselm Kiefer or Georg Baselitz requires the owner not merely to understand German history and culture but to be 'German'?

Is Art appropriately universalised by the art market and popularity or is this universalism nothing more than inauthenticity and commodification? Do owners as investors even need to care if detachment from original context causes no loss of value?

Similar questions apply to portraiture when the subject of the portrait becomes detached from the person or the family and their purpose in commissioning it. If you commission a work of art, you are laying some claim to its meaning but if an artist entrepreneurially takes your image for his purposes, then he is taking meaning from you. 

If an artist takes a commission and does not produce the meaning you intend, is he engaged in a fraud? This might mean, by extension, that an artist who takes your image and uses it for his purposes is engaged in a 'theft of meaning'. 

We have 'economic crimes' in both Soviet and American regulatory culture - perhaps, one day, some future culture will create a category of 'creative crimes' in which 'theft of meaning' becomes a criminal act and schools of artists categorised as organised crime.

Only this weekend, we have seen one pop realist artist, Sebastian Kruger, produce retrospective portraits imagining the Rolling Stones as children of 10 - it is poignant that Brian Jones has not been included. 

Is this stealing childhood? It would seem that the 'meaning' of this programme of work did not have room for one founding 10-year old because history has been retrospectively fitted to meet current reality - this Rolling Stones is preferred to that Rolling Stones in an act of artistic arbitrariness. 

On the one hand, Kruger has sold the work on to a German collector so the enterprise is commercial as well as artistic. On the other hand, the artist claims friendship with Ronnie Wood and says that he has the band's blessing and that Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards are collectors. 

The transfer of 'meaning' seems to be one that the owners are happy to see pass on, probably because they long since detached their real selves from the hoopla and show business involved in being a major cultural icon. 

This brings to mind Hockney's Ossie Clark painting and all the pop portraits shown currently at the National Portrait Gallery. The 'iconic' Marilyn and Elvis portraits detach the images wholly from any sense of the real person that inspired them, the sources as unknowable to themselves no doubt as to their friends and the wider public.

The 'real' Marilyn, the 'real' Diana, the 'real' Jesus - how much human energy has been spent on attempting to 'know' (or rather appropriate) so many unknowable different godheads. 

This is the cult of celebrity brought down to its basics - the appropriation of meaning regardless of underlying truths. Art has always been a vector for belief. Once it was belief in God and now it is belief that other people and places can be known without being them, without knowing them, without meeting them and without being there.

In all these cases of place and personality, meaning changes the further that an art object travels from its moment of creation. Some artists are engaged with the facticity of their inspiration - they want to connect with the real object. Others use the object as mere medium to create a new object which has more meaning than the original - that is often truly great Art.

The cynical, however, will grab place and personality to meet the meaning needs of others, even if those needs are crass. Supplying meaning to lives is a trade like any other and artists have as much right to make a buck out of it as politicians, churchmen and businessmen.

We can probably agree that a Duccio madonna and child cannot be fully understood without thinking about how it fitted into its church environment. The 'presence' in the icon was once Mary Mother of God, certainly the divine, but on the wall of an art gallery its meaning will have changed so drastically that the same object will, in effect, have become transubstantiated - in a sinister reversal of what is believed by many Catholics to happen in the Mass. 

If the host can become the Body of Christ through transubstantiation, the Madonna or Pieta ceases to contain the divine as it moves from church to gallery - or to a rich man's home (having presumably failed to reach them through the eye of a needle) unless the rich man is, in fact, a man of belief.

Even then, the 'belief' of the owner may involve a re-sacralisation of the object but the actual belief will be new and not a true reproduction of the old. In most cases, the object is transsubstantiated away from the divine to the material - or at least to the social.

If the divine and personality are lost as a work moves through the exchange system into socially constructed reality, fixing place is going to be equally difficult. Students of Art spend lifetimes trying to recreate the symbolism or the cultural, social, economic and even political context of a work of art.

What cannot be reproduced is the felt sense of being in a place and time shared by the artist any more than we can know God or another person long since dead once the work of Art has come between us and the original. That the art acts as a path back to God or a person is not plausible unless we knew that particular iteration of God or that person originally.

You might now come to see why many Byzantines and all Muslims disliked and dislike the artistic representation of Mohammed and Allah. What appears to be an honour to God in Western tradition degenerates, in practice, into something else disconnected from the original inspiration, a displacement.

All the perceptions, the gestalt, of place in particular may be partly reproducible in living memory but still not be conveyed through the work of art itself to a 'stranger'. Art might fix some aspect of place but only so that other aspects are crowded out. 

The whole draft that we call reality will then be rewritten by the observers of the Art, much as they have done with the Art of the numinous and the personal, to fit their own needs. Art is, self-evidently, never precisely what it represents and there are plenty of French philosophers to tell us more if we really need to have all this confirmed for us.

Two artists bring out this reaction in me because I know the places which contributed to their art (though I would not be so presumptuous as to believe that I understood their art any better than anyone else and certainly no better than the artists themselves).

Gilbert & George (counted as one artist) produce their work within a few streets of East London in territory I know well and Tracy Emin was born (as I was) and raised (as I was not) in Margate. Those streets of Gilbert & George's are very familiar to me. London's cultural shifts and changes are expressed almost precisely in work after work. 

An entire cultural experience over five decades is reproduced, in admittedly simplified terms, to someone who has lived through them without always comprehending what was going on at the time. I rewrite my own perception of my own historical context as I look at them in sequence.

This sense of place lived in and then fixed as a 'memory of sentiment' must be impossible for many owners of these works to understand, so something else is driving them to buy and appreciate. Yet the evocation of a specific time and place is still core to the art and will be lost when people like me and others in my generation die.

The same with Emin. Neither her work nor G&G's can be reduced to this evocation of place but anyone who grew up in the depressed culture of an English seaside town (mine was the neighbouring town of Ramsgate) can see in her graphic work direct reference, perhaps unconscious, to the primitive graffiti and seedy culture of an economy that lived hand-to-mouth on seasonal visitors who sometimes never turned up and, if they did, had little to spend. 

Her autobiographical reactions to a culture of desperation and abuse and her reconstruction of herself through art could have taken place in any zone of deprivation - even in an abusive wealthy context - but the visuals and textures of her work evoke a particular time and place to someone who also participated in it. That aspect of her work will also die as her generation of observers die.

Does this link matter, between the artist's possibly unconscious drawing down from place and the minority of people who may not appreciate what should be appreciated in the art but who still see these unconscious references to a shared world? 

Probably not to the artist or the collector or the art market or the critic or the historian, but this evocation of experience provides a surprising link between watcher and watched. The two sides do not have to like each other but they share an admittedly attenuated sense of being 'distant family'. 

And like a 'family' that shares childhood memories but, otherwise, has nothing in common in adult life, this bond can still draw some people back in a crisis to the art - as a family gets called to a funeral, a wedding or to survival in a war. 

This brings us to Gilbert & George once again. The very first room of the retrospective showed early work very different from the rest of the Exhibition except in scale - a rural idyll of sorts with Gilbert & George apparently celebrating the same sort of English sense of place that dominates Tate Britain. 

There is an essay to be written on how English art moves from celebrating ownership of land [Gainsborough] to becoming integrated with the land as a national ideal, especially in the context of wartime experience and subsequent reactions to postwar changes in society. 

Gilbert & George's sharp shift to specific place from generalised national place in the 1970s and Tracey Emin's reversion to the personal in a revolt against place (yet never entirely leaving it behind) and so many other examples of trying to fix or avoid memory or fix and move on from place seem to indicate that 'English' artists are engaged in a continuous troubled process of coming to terms with the fragmentation of national identity. 

This was especially clear in the very last rooms of the Gilbert & George retrospective where the arrival of Islamic culture in the East London streets is recorded with the same aggression as the arrival of AIDS. There is something nasty in this work and more expressive than any words of the mutual antagonism between the gay culture that emerged in the Thatcher-Reagan years and the new Islamism. They actually hate each other.

One of the 'enfants terribles' was born in Italy and Emin is of Turkish descent with continuing Turkish links. It may be that this enables them to see or feel or express what the indigenous English have long felt - that there is a profound disconnect between what our inherited national culture claims for us and what is experienced in the streets. 

Not that most of us care any more. The English now believe with LP Hartley that the 'past is another country'. But the shift from the culture of the 1940s and 1950s to the urban multicultural highly sexualised culture of the 1990s and 2000s has shattered the old sense of place and nationhood.  

It has replaced it (in many cases) with a stronger sense of specific place, such as that of being a Londoner, and of personal rather than collective memory. 

Our artists, with that genius for the semi-conscious articulation of hidden truths, may be chronicling a cultural revolution in which a world of rootless transient communities has emerged, where there is no longer any shared institutional authority and where memory is unstable because it is not easily reinforced by community norms as a national 'myth'. 

A real war might change that, of course - but not the phoney war on terror. Yet Art is never entirely definable or explicable in words. If it was, we would not need it. We would simply write. Words may be the currency of society and politics but they leave gaps. 

All I have said here is that these gaps, being wordless and numberless, are never fixed. Any original intention or inspiration is unlikely to last long before it becomes acquired by those whose determination is to account, in words or numbers, for the objects in some way.

The person painted at that time, the place that inspired, the divine and the numinous - we can get slivers of original meaning outside the point of creation, but the only way to recreate fully the original inspiration is to be the creator or to have been in at the moment of creation. In a paradox, the price of art is high in direct proportion to its failure to be what it was intended to be (unless the artist started out as a cynic).

Whether a wealthy collector in Luxembourg or Liechtenstein really comprehends any of this - any more than a nineteenth century British imperial collector of Italian altarpieces could understand a late-medieval small town Catholic sensibility - is another matter. But I am sure that the collectors are making some very sound investments and need not care too much about philosophical authenticities.

www.tppr.co.uk

Treadwell's is an esoteric bookshop in Tavistock Street (Covent Garden) that has a tradition of holding lectures and events covering the by-ways of belief, philosophy, folk culture and literature. 

In the last year or so, at its evening lectures, I have heard a Cambridge academic (and intelligence analyst) give a remarkably persuasive account of the hidden codes in Francis Bacon's writings (the seventeenth century fixer not the twentieth century artist), first hand accounts of Transylvanian Romany folklore and the latest research on parapsychology (of which more perhaps on another occasion).

My business partner 'worries about me' (with a smile) because I give time to these things. After all, lectures on H.P. Lovecraft or on 'demonhunters of Japan' do not seem very conducive to business development.

On the other hand, some of the best solutions to difficult problems seem to arise from a preparedness, wholly rationally, to get outside prevailing 'group-think', sweep away the chatter (gerede) of the world and just see what happens when insights from other worlds are brought to bear on the day-to-day issues of running a life, a business and the servicing of clients.

There is hybrid vigour in taking disparate ideas and seeing what happens when you put them together, a creative alchemy that alters perception without relying on shrooms and funny compounds. Applied with common sense to real world problems, when conventional means are not working, such creativity can often move us on to our destination far more safely than following the old rut until we fall off a cliff in the fog.

Treadwells' cultural interludes spark creative ideas, fresh connections between familiar thoughts and new uses of language. The 'use-value' of Treadwell's events or of art or religion is not the point, of course, but there is still a 'use value' in such thinking nevertheless. 

There is a deep mainstream prejudice against radical intellectual experimentation. It is as if the system as a whole depends on us all conforming to certain shared ideas - to such an extent that we seem to believe subconsciously that a breach in that belief system might bring the whole thing tumbling down. Is it possible that our 'way of thinking' is as coherent as (say) Soviet Marxism but equally as vulnerable to changed conditions?

When the system starts to crack (as we have suggested elsewhere might be the case), then it is logical to ask how much of this is down to how we think and how much our thinking will change as the system changes.

I am not suggesting that we are in the middle of an intellectual revolution but, rather, that our thinking patterns may be going through the early stages of patterns of correction and Schumpeterian 'creative destruction' analogous to similar processes in the economy.

This may result in some very personal re-evaluation alongside the process of re-allocating investment portfolios and calculating the effects on pensions of a house price collapse.

Do you, without thinking, normally adapt your own thinking to a group that you are part of? In Russia in the 1950s, would you have unquestionably seen your factory manager role in terms of Marxist dialectic or, in France in the 1650s, would you have understood that your sickness was due to malign witchcraft?

Do you suppress doubts that you may have in case you are excluded from decision-making in the future - or in case you are made to look a fool? Have you ever wanted to say 'I told you so' only to remember that you may have thought that there was trouble coming but that you never actually pointed it out to anyone at the time? Are you going down with a sinking ship because you did not follow your own animal instinct to head for the lifeboat?

We have scarcely touched the surface of what new technologies might do to our culture and personal development - another theme of this Blog. There is no precedent for some of the changes in human relationships that the new technologies will eventually instigate - unless it be some of the risky experimentation of distinctly off-the-message-board radical practitioners of the esoteric arts. 

This is not to accept an esoteric version of the world (TPPR is cooly rationalist about ends and means in business and politics) but only to see that other ways of seeing may have things to teach the wider culture about coping with technological changes that may partly detach mind from body and then do so without restraint of geography and with a changed sense of time (which is one of the most remarkable subjective effects of entry into, say, a virtual world).

Several acquaintances have noted that working at a screen intensely on a project in which one immerses oneself is a mild version of an altered state, that the mind melds with the technology so that the creative flow ceases to be 'thought' in the way that most traditional writing, calculation and thinking is experienced. 

The hypothesis here is that the mind creates content that flows through the body on to a screen so that, at times, the quality of experience is 'transcendental' - some handwriters and creative thinkers have always been able to reach this state.

Regardless of technology, a compulsion to tell a story can operate beyond rational thought. Some minds think in numbers or music or colours. What happens when technologies widen the circle for which this creativity is 'normal'. Will the market price of creativity plummet or will creativity be applied more effectively and more widely? Or both?

All that is being suggested here is that new technologies may take something attributable to very few (the intellectual altered state) and make it an experience for the many - and that, across the culture as a whole, this will come to change perception and so thought.

At this point, we cannot resist a relevant political comment as we watch the implosion of the British official centre-left in a welter of incompetencies and alleged dodgy dealing (exemplified by Andrew Gilligan's investigation of a key member of the Mayor of London's circle in the Evening Standard tonight).

Everything that is going wrong with the New Labour Project is also going wrong with modern democracy - neither the Left not the Conservatives would do much better in this crisis of poor delivery and petty corruption. 

In part, we can put this crisis down to the practical problems of managing a modern late-capitalist liberal democracy with its multiple variables, including free consumer choice (like instant withdrawal of your cash from a building society) and a free media (with its intense scrutiny of political conduct) .

Future historians may be able to give a clean and cogent account of this crisis for their students much as our historians can give such an account of the crisis in the Roman Imperium between Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian. We cannot.

In hindsight, current problems will look far clearer than they to do to us and will include causes economic, technological, institutional, cultural and social. I won't add causes spiritual because that is beyond the whit of any analyst, but we can certainly add causes ethical and imaginative. 

The current crises in the Labour Party and in the wider political system are not only crises of management but are crises of basic moral sense and of imagination. Donations policy (say) has not only been administratively incompetent but has lacked any intrinsic sense of what is right and proper, while the problem of funding politics has not been addressed imaginatively.

People working to Machiavellian norms without core values and the creative flexibility to match management technique to social reality are, inevitably, going to end up on the rocks in a free society.  And this is what has happened - problems have been swept under the carpet because people like Blair and Brown either cannot imagine the consequences of failing to deal with problems head-on or, cynically, believe that they can 'busk' it.

The age of priests and moral exhortation is over, but people are going to start requiring more consistent ethical values as well as greater levels of administrative competence from their political class. This does not mean not having a mistress hidden away somewhere or being holier-than-thou about nicking the company's pencil sharpener but it does mean having values and behaviour that are more aligned in the public arena.

Given the nature of the current technological revolution, this almost certainly means a re-acquisition of the imaginative and predictive function in politics (synthesis as well as analysis) as the only way to make an effective use of political power that is both reasonably competent and trusted.

We could quite safely close down all the think-tanks that have emerged since the early 1990s in favour of having many more Treadwells around - salons devoted not to having young inexperienced policy wonks tell us what to think but encouraging us to think, as equals, for ourselves.

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