Scared of Shadows?

Last week the schools were closed for a day in Los Angeles. Almost seven hundred thousand children missed a day’s education because of a threat that was received in an email that apparently originated in Germany. The same email was sent to the authorities in New York and possibly several other cities, who took very little time to determine that it was not a credible threat. Their counterparts in Los Angeles took a different line and ordered the closure of the schools. 1,500 of them were closed and 2,800 law enforcement officers conducted searches of school premises at a cost of “millions of dollars” according to City Councilman Paul Krekorian. And 17 year old Andres Perez who should have been in class was hit by a truck and killed in Highland Park.

This is just one incident of many that prompt the question – “What are Americans so scared of?”.

The United States is by an enormous margin the mightiest power the world has ever seen. Partly that is a function of timing. In their days the Roman and Chinese Empires and even the British Empire were all as dominant as the USA is today but they didn’t have the sheer economic and military muscle that has resulted from two hundred years of the industrial revolution. On the other hand those earlier empires appeared much stronger than the USA of today in the confident manner with which they confronted the world.

The Los Angeles school closure is just the latest example of fear-driven behaviours that have changed life for the worse. Many of them are irrational and actually cause more damage than the problems they are supposed to solve. The most obvious of these is the complete political impossibility of restricting the availability of deadly firearms. Many people in the USA – and I have met and talked to some of them – genuinely believe that they need a gun for “protection”. It doesn’t matter how much evidence is accumulated that owning a gun makes it much more likely that you will be killed by one. The belief persists and is acted upon.

Some of the behaviours are genuinely risible. For many years whenever I entered the USA I had to fill in a form that asked a number of questions about me and my intentions. Did I intend to overthrow the government? Had I been guilty of moral turpitude? I understand that the questions are mandated by Act of Congress and would require another Act to change them. They are still stupid. But in terms of costly stupidity they pale into insignificance compared to the antics of the Transportation Security Agency. This panic response to the 9/11 atrocities now employs 55,000 people at a cost of $7.5 Billion per year and has so far caught not a single terrorist. It is a colossal waste of resources and the source of enormous frustration to millions of travellers forced to endure the indignities it visits upon them. And yet it is politically untouchable. Like the pistol in the bedside cabinet of otherwise sane Americans it is there “just in case”. Just in case the next terrorist attack uses exactly the same methods as previous ones. Just in case the completely impracticable process of producing binary liquid explosives proves to be a real threat despite all the analysis that has demonstrated that it isn’t. Just in case an evil-doer might be such a convincing actor that a flight crew would mistake a child’s water pistol for a real gun.

The fact is that the TSA is untouchable because of fear. The fear of 435 Members of Congress and 100 Senators that they will lose their seats if they vote to get rid of it or even to moderate its stupidity. Given the current state of US politics the fear is probably well-founded.

All of the current candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are running campaigns based on fear. Fear of “terrorism” is the most prominent although there seems to be little agreement on how to actually define terrorism. In the rhetoric of Trump, Carson, Fiorina and all the others only Islamic terrorism seems to count – in 2015 at least. Another fear is economic. The fear that other parts of the world are achieving economic success at the expense of the United States. Fear that living standards are depressed by an influx of cheap manufactured goods from China and cheap labour from south of the border. And then there are the truly irrational fears that improving the lives of historically oppressed groups such as women, ethnic minorities and gay people will necessarily make things worse for the previously dominant sections of society.

All of these fears are demonstrably based on falsehoods but all of them appeal to a certain narrative that is strong in US society. It is a narrative that will drive the USA down the path that is familiar to any student of history, the path of the declining empire. Time and again through the ages a dominant power has faded away because it was unable to adapt to changing times. Persia, Greece, Rome, Spain, and of course Great Britain all enjoyed their time of dominance and all faded away when the times changed. In every case the rulers and the privileged were the last to understand what was happening.

In the 21^st century the rules of engagement have changed compared to the ancient world or medieval times. Obtaining an empire by military conquest is no longer desirable. The development of nuclear weapons has made the dream of world conquest in the style of Alexander or Napoleon infeasible. Extending influence by economic means is the name of the game today. The most influential great power across Africa today is without doubt China – a country that has never put a combat soldier in the field outside its own region. And yet the USA continues to spend more on its military than the combined total of the next seven major powers. Even if the USA reduced its military expenditures by 75% there is still zero possibility that its homeland could be conquered by any conceivable military force. It is said that generals are condemned to be always ready to fight the battles of the last war. The same may be said for whole civilisations.

So if all the fears are unfounded why do they persist? To put it another way, who benefits by keeping the people terrified?

The obvious answer is politicians like Donald Trump. He has garnered huge support by pandering to the fears of the American people. But in many ways Trump is just the visible manifestation of a much deeper issue. The USA, like many Western countries, is about thirty years in to a social revolution which has reversed a long-term trend. In these countries wealth is being concentrated into a smaller and smaller group within society. In his book “Capital in the 21^st Century” published last year, Thomas Piketty demonstrated that this is an inevitable consequence of the essential workings of capitalism unless it is checked by deliberate government action. Until the 1970s that government action was considered to be a basic responsibility. It was the mark of a civilised state that its government should support Jeremy Bentham’s fundamental axiom (See Enlightened Stories) of seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.

Not any more. Since the 1980s the tide of politics has turned. Concentration of wealth into a smaller number of hands is not only acceptable it is the inevitable consequence of policies that have become mainstream. Regressive taxation which bears down heavily on the poor and practically bypasses the rich has become the norm. The movement of capital around the world to exploit low-wage economies at the expense of middle class people in the US and Europe is an established – and highly lauded – business strategy. The fruits of the staggering technological developments of the last hundred years are being apportioned in a manifestly unjust manner.

So why do people put up with it? Why is it impossible for a politician who advocates a return to Benthamite values to get elected? That’s where the fear comes in.

George Orwell was one of the great thinkers and writers of the 20^th century. In 1984 his picture of a world divided into three competing super powers in which populations were controlled by maintaining a constant state of war rings eerily true today. Of course it didn’t predict every facet of modern life and of course it would be folly to take it as a manifesto for today’s world. That said I can’t help thinking of Orwell whenever I hear a politician talk about the “War on Terror”. There is nothing better than an open-ended and fundamentally unwinnable “war” to excite the public and distract it from other political issues that have far more impact on their lives.

As long as people are fearful they are less likely to be angry with their leaders. And as long as they aren’t angry about things that could be fixed then nothing much can change. It suits the immensely wealthy individuals and organisations that finance politicians to keep the fear flowing. The mass media are, in general, controlled by the same interests that finance the politicians. It should come as no surprise that the furtherance of fear and ignorance is such a big part of their business strategy.

So the United States lives in a constant state of fear. And yet it doesn’t. On an individual level and at the level of communities the people of the United States are capable of enormous levels of courage, not to mention care of the weak and kindness towards strangers. Whether it's the 9/11 firefighters who ran towards the collapsing towers or the bravery under fire of Chief Warrant Officer Edwin J. Hill, during the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 (If you don’t know about Hill, it’s worth a few minutes of your time to read his story here) or the every day courage of the families caring for disabled children across the country, Americans are tough, strong and brave. So why as a nation do they allow themselves to be ruled by fear? And more importantly how can they change that?

Those questions are too big for me to answer, especially as a non-American. Whatever the answers are they have to come from within. One thing that might help would be more engagement between ordinary Americans and the rest of the world. It is an often-quoted factoid that only about 5% of Americans travel overseas each year. That’s not many  compared to other developed nations but given the size of the country and the low number of vacation days that Americans enjoy it’s not that outlandish. But you don’t have to travel physically to engage with others. In today’s world it’s easy to see foreign movies and TV, to play online games with people on the other side of the world and to eat exotic food from every continent. It’s easy so why don’t many more people do it? Crack that puzzle and there may be a way to reduce the fear of the unknown.

And then there is religion. For a country with a constitutional separation of church and state there’s a whole lot of bible-bashing in American politics. Things might just improve a bit if the folks who bring you ideas like Original Sin, The Last Judgement and The Rapture were to confine themselves to the realm of the personal and play less of a part in the body politic.

Whatever the solution I do have confidence in the American people that they will eventually find it. There will probably be more bumps in the road. The fear mongers will have some more successes along the way but if the USA is to avoid the fate of those earlier empires reason will have to prevail in the end. And I am a great fan of reason, as I may have mentioned before.

Thoughts on Climate Change from an Inveterate Traveller

Someone posted this on Facebook a couple of days ago. Like most of the quotes attributed to Michael O’Leary it may or may not have actually come from his mouth. If it did there is no doubt in my mind that it was said purely as part of his never-ending campaign to get free publicity for his airline. Some years ago I met Mr O’Leary a number of times in a business context and I am absolutely certain that he is way too smart to succumb to this sort of category error. Weather and climate are not the same thing. There is absolutely no contradiction between our inability to predict next week’s weather and the very strong probability that average global temperatures will continue to increase for many years to come based on the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere.

So why would the CEO of one of the fastest-growing airlines in history want to encourage doubt about the existence of human-made climate change? Obviously because he wants to put off as long as possible the inevitable day when the airline industry will be required to make its contribution to slowing the damage and maybe even starting to reverse it.

The other extreme of this argument is represented by the protesters who disrupted access to Heathrow the week before last. Their position is that aviation is causing such enormous damage to the global climate that it should be stopped in its tracks or at the very least have severe constraints placed on its growth. Humans should revert to the lifestyles of a hundred years ago when most people never moved more than a few miles from their birthplace unless some calamity like a World War temporarily made them more mobile.

So where do I, as a scientifically-literate, left-leaning, inveterate air traveller with several million air miles under my belt stand in this argument? As always when we confront the big issues in life I think it’s quite complicated. Answers need to be nuanced and sophisticated rather than shouted from soap-boxes with the loudest voice winning.

Firstly, climate change is real. There is no serious doubt about that and if you are having trouble accepting it you should be reading a different blog to mine. Perhaps this one. On current rates of growth in greenhouse gas emission the earth is on track to increase its average temperature by four or five degrees Celsius. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it will be enough to melt most of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica, raise sea levels several metres and make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable. World leaders are meeting right now in Paris to try to agree ways to restrict the temperature rise to 1.5 or 2 degrees. This is still a big rise and will cause substantial problems, especially for low-lying island nations, but on the whole most of humanity will be able to adapt and get on with life.

The main cause of climate change is the emission of gasses into the atmosphere by human activity. Carbon dioxide is the one that gets most of the attention but there are others including methane, nitrous oxide and water vapour. This is not speculation. The physics has been well understood for over a century. The impact has been known in scientific circles for over thirty years. In 1977, during the second year of my physics degree, I wrote a paper describing the impact of this “greenhouse effect” and the steps that would be needed to counteract it. I said we should curtail the use of fossil fuels, develop renewable energy technologies and bridge the gap by judicious use of nuclear fission. In 2015 that’s still probably the best plan although thirty years of inaction mean that it’s rather more urgent now than it might have been.

Where does aviation fit in to this picture? Clearly the biggest issue is that aircraft burn fossil fuels. Lots of them. In particular jet engines burn a petroleum product called paraffin in the UK and kerosene in the USA. When they do this they emit carbon dioxide which accumulates in the atmosphere along with all the other greenhouse gasses. It’s real. There is no doubt whatsoever that airline flights are contributing to climate change.

So should we severely curtail the amount of flying that we do as a species as part of our efforts to maintain a habitable world? For many the answer is an obvious yes but that would be to ignore the great benefits that aviation can bring.

Aviation brings us together. It facilitates trade which increases prosperity. It improves understanding between people from different cultures and backgrounds. The huge growth in civil aviation of the last few years has meant that a broader cross-section of people has been able to travel and to get exposure to other places and experiences or just to get a well-deserved holiday in the sun. It is not fanciful to say that aviation is one of the most important factors that brings us together as a human family rather than pushing us apart into a series of distrustful tribes. We still have a long way to go in this respect but I firmly believe that the world is a better place when its peoples are able to meet and understand each other.

So, we have a problem. Aviation is a good thing for the reasons I have outlined but it is a bad thing because it contributes to climate change. How do we square that circle?

It might be useful to look at some numbers. There are around 28,000 commercial airliners in service today and together they contribute somewhere between 2.5% and 3.0% of all greenhouse gas emissions. That number is growing and it may be that emissions high in the stratosphere are more harmful than those nearer the ground. However aviation is a very long way indeed from being the most significant contributor to the problem. There are around 1.2 Billion vehicles on the world’s roads and they contribute around 10% of the greenhouse gasses. Livestock is responsible for about 18%, electrical power generation 25% and housing (heating, lighting, cooking etc) 10%. Industrial and commercial buildings generate about 15% of the global carbon footprint. (By the way I do have reputable sources for all these numbers but I am not trying to write a referenced scientific paper here so you must choose whether or not to trust me). If we want to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas generation the major impacts must come from sectors other than aviation. Not only that but all of these other sectors have viable alternatives that will enable reductions to be made in the short term providing the will is there. The basic physics of aviation require the use of energy-dense hydrocarbons as fuel – at least for the time being.

It looks as if the aviation fan sitting on my left shoulder is winning out in this argument over the ecologist on the right. The benefits of aviation are such that we should just overlook its admittedly small contribution to climate change? Well no. Not really.

It is true that the big benefits of carbon reduction are not to be found in clobbering commercial flight in the short term at least. But in the longer run the world will need to reduce its emissions far more than most of us currently realise. And in that longer run getting the contribution from aviation down by a significant amount will be necessary. Even if aircraft emissions remain steady in real terms they will grow as a percentage when other sectors bring theirs down. Airlines and aircraft makers should be working on this now.

For the time being the best thing that we can do is to fly more people in bigger aircraft, improving the carbon economy per passenger. We need to develop air traffic control technology such that aircraft can always fly the least-fuel route and we need to deploy smart technology like electric tugs so that aircraft can move around on the ground without burning kerosene. And airlines need to continue replacing older aircraft with more modern fuel efficient models.

In the slightly longer term we need to shift to hydrocarbons that we manufacture using biology rather than extracting them from the ground. First generation biofuels based on sugars have a mixed reputation not least because they use agricultural land that is needed for food production. Future biofuels will be made using algae or bacteria, probably genetically engineered, in industrial processes that use solar radiation to produce the energy-dense fuel that we need.

In the really long term we will be using more exotic technologies like beamed energy to power us around the globe and maybe off it. But that is a subject for another day.

For today we may look to Paris. The climate change conference there is due to end this week. It will produce some kind of agreement on how the nations of the world plan to reduce the impact of climate change. It is unlikely that any treaty will have explicit provisions to affect the airline industry but there is no doubt that there will be measures agreed that will require it to look to its future practices. Perhaps there will be a carbon tax that will increase the cost of flying. In the short term that will be a setback for Michael O’Leary and his airline’s profitability but handled effectively it will combine stick and carrots. Airlines that establish a path to reducing their climate impact will benefit financially as well as enjoying the warm glow that comes from simply doing the right thing. Some of Mr O’Leary’s other ideas like cramming in twice as many passengers by making them stand up might just bring him plaudits for reducing the carbon emissions per passenger faster than anyone else.  

Protests and Consequences

I was caught in a traffic jam on my way to the office yesterday morning. My route to work skirts Heathrow Airport and it seems that protesters against the putative new runway had blocked the tunnel that leads to the central area. I was inconvenienced a bit. It probably added twenty minutes to my journey time, meaning that I had to park in the far reaches of the car park along with the other late arrivals. People with flights to catch were inconvenienced quite a bit more. Still, twenty minutes extra in the car gave me time to ponder and I came around to thinking about actions and consequences.

The protesters at Heathrow have two distinct issues. They believe that aviation is a uniquely harmful kind of greenhouse gas generator that is contributing a large part of the climate change we are undergoing. They also believe that it is immoral to demolish houses to make way for a new runway. Both viewpoints are worthy of consideration.

Thinking about the airport expansion first. I have lived in the general area of Heathrow for over 25 years. This is not a coincidence. With the amount of travelling I do it is really quite convenient to live just 15 minutes from terminal five – that’s on a good day of course. When my wife and I bought our house we were completely aware that the world’s biggest international airport was just up the road. In fact it was part of the attraction.

Just as an aside, when we had been in the house just a few months a friend came round. This friend was a keen aircraft spotter and had a radio scanner to listen to the chat between the pilots and air traffic control After a couple of hours of this his face was lit up with exhilaration and he asked us how much extra we had had to pay to get a house so close to the glide path. But I digress.

The air transport industry is growing fast. In my professional life it is my business to track that growth and when I started to do this in 1999 there were about one and a half billion passengers carried on commercial flights per year. The equivalent number for 2014 was very nearly 3.5 billion and all projections say it will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. London has long been one of the main international hubs for air transport. If it is to retain that position it needs more airport capacity. That much is clear. The position of the protesters is that London should take a principled stance and decide not to participate in the expansion of air transport.

The obvious challenge is that there is a pretty strong correlation between the availability of effective air transport and economic success. There is at least a plausible risk that if London’s position as an air transport hub declines then so too will the economic prosperity of the city and indeed the country. Among those most concerned with the problems of climate change this may be thought a price worth paying. It’s true that in the short term all that will happen is that traffic will shift to Frankfurt, Amsterdam or Paris but eventually the citizens of those countries will also demand a reduction in air traffic and perhaps this will lead to a global reduction.

Well, it might. But in the meantime Boeing and Airbus have order books for over 12,000 new commercial jet airliners. Barring the sort of political change that is vanishingly unlikely the vast majority of these aircraft will be delivered and put into service. If they don’t operate into Heathrow they will operate into Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta, Almaty, Mumbai and other points East. I've been to some of these places and I'm pretty sure that they will welcome growth in aviation for quite a time to come.This will add to the momentum that already exists for the eastwards shift of the economic centre of gravity of the world. Asia will become more prosperous and Europe relatively less so.

And if that were to happen, perhaps those houses that don’t get demolished to make way for a new runway will be worth a lot less than they are today. The area around Heathrow is rather prosperous, mainly because of the presence of the world’s leading international airport. If Heathrow became a backwater on the aviation map maybe some of that prosperity would go away. We have all seen pictures of the villages where the pit closed and houses lost all their value. Heathrow is the coal pit of west London. It drives the prosperity of the region. Most of the people who live nearby depend on it for their livelihood directly or indirectly.

So the protest yesterday morning inconvenienced a lot of people whose livelihood would be threatened if the protesters got their way. This doesn’t seem to me like a strategy for winning friends and influencing people. The argument that people will lose their homes to support airport expansion and this is a very bad thing seems to me to be a weak one. Unless we are prepared to live in an environment that is frozen at some arbitrary stage of development then there will always be such dilemmas. Charles Dickens wrote about the suffering of Euston and Camden Town where homes and communities were cleared to make way for the coming of the railway in the 19^th century. Those people really were sacrificed to the developments that made the modern world and they were very badly treated. In the modern world we do a bit better. Those displaced by the new runway will be compensated for financial losses and assisted with relocation. And if that doesn’t work as it should we have political processes to address the problem. In any case I am not sure that yesterday’s protesters were all that invested in this side of the argument. When they gave their names and addresses to the beak this morning it turned out that none of them lives within a hundred miles of Heathrow.

But what about the other problem, that aviation is such a big part of the climate change problem and if we don’t fix that the disruption of a few outer London villages will seem like a vicarage tea party? It’s a serious question and it deserves serious consideration. I’ll come back to it in another post. All I’ll say for the moment is that last time I looked the whole of world aviation was emitting about 15% of the greenhouse gasses currently produced by cow farts.

Enlightened Stories

I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment. I would happily wear a t-shirt with the image of Denis Diderot or David Hume. For a while I actually did have a t-shirt with the likeness of Jeremy Bentham on it but that was more to do with him being the “spiritual founder” of University College London, my alma mater. Having said that, Bentham’s "fundamental axiom" - the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong" seems to me so self-evident that I struggle to understand anyone who argues against it.

Apart from academic ancestor-worship, what is it about the Enlightenment that captivates me so much almost three hundred years after the event?

The Enlightenment was many things to many people but for me it was a period of time in which rationality came to be prized as a guiding principle in human endeavor. This enabled an explosion in scientific thought as well as huge developments in political and moral philosophy. Rationality didn’t come easily. It took enormous intellectual effort on the part of some of the greatest thinkers of all time to set aside existing preconceptions and build it from first principles.

At the risk of offending any neuroscientists who may be passing I’ll try to explain what I think was going on. The primitive brain that still exists at the base of your skull is hard-wired (this is a metaphor of course, there aren’t really wires inside your head) to deal with the environment at the time humans were living precariously on the African savannah. It perceives the world in terms of agency.

“Is there a sound behind that bush? It might be a lion waiting to eat me. I’d better run away”.

The sound is perceived, it was caused by an agent that may well be dangerous, the response is pretty automatic. The problem comes with perceptions that are not so easily attributed.

“The top of that mountain just exploded and I am about to be engulfed by molten rock and poisonous gas. That wasn’t a lion. There must be something even bigger and nastier at work”.

Or a bit more prosaically,

“There are great flashes of light in the sky followed by frightening loud bangs. Still not likely to be a lion. I bet it was the bastard that blew up the mountain the other day”.

And in today’s terms,

“The biggest typhoon in human history just decimated the Philippines. It must be that mountain-exploding, light flasher getting mad about gay people marrying”

The primitive brain has a theory of agency and seeks an agent for those phenomena. It comes up with the idea of a god or a spirit and runs with it. From there it is a direct line to organized religion and the divine right of kings. Stories and myths grow and circulate. They meet and cross-fertilise creating a web of belief that spans the human experience.

Thousands of years later the brain has evolved higher functions. It is much more sophisticated. To use another metaphor, the brain is now capable of running complex software processes that allow reason and logic to be applied. The great achievement of the Enlightenment thinkers was to harness this capability and to look at the world afresh with evidence and reason as their guides. And that’s where the story of modern human development begins to accelerate. The intellectual tool kit developed by the Enlightenment philosophers has shaped the succeeding centuries. It has allowed science to uncover many (though by no means all) of the workings of the universe. Science has led to technology and that has enabled economic development. It has allowed civil societies to develop so that the benefits of economic development are shared across all sections of the population. You will almost certainly live longer and more healthily than your ancestors because of the advances in science, technology and even politics that stem from the Enlightenment.

But nothing in life is ever completely unambiguous. There are certainly people who see the rationality of Enlightenment thinking as undesirable. Some of them are obvious. In 2010 Charles Windsor, heir to the British throne, said

''I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud.”

It’s not hard to see why a privileged member of a family granted a “divine right” to stay top of the heap might take that view but it can be very difficult to understand why some who have benefited hugely from the Enlightenment would take the same approach. Why, despite all the enormous advantages brought about by a rational view of the world are so many people ready to reject rationality?

I think that the answer lies in that primitive brain that seeks agency in every situation and is driven more by stories than by analysis. There is a very old joke that goes:

“Why did you take an instant dislike to Donald Trump?”

“It saved time”.

As with many old jokes it is funny because it reflects a deep truth. Gathering evidence, evaluating it, putting it in context and drawing reasoned conclusions is time-consuming and difficult. How much easier to make a snap assessment of the way a new phenomenon fits with the existing narrative that is already deeply engrained. If you grow up in America with a  world view that incudes tales of rugged western pioneers with six-guns on their belts you might resist all attempts to control the use of firearms in that country. Never mind the overwhelming objective evidence that thirty two thousand of your fellow countrymen die each year due to lack of such control. If your world view includes a deep fear of the outsider you might respond to recent terrorist atrocities by excluding refugees despite the evidence that most terrorists in recent years have attacked their own native countries.

This is bad enough when it is just unintended consequences. When it is used quite deliberately and cynically for political gain it becomes more frightening. The lies told by Donald Trump, Ben Carson and George Osborne are not random errors. They are not even sophisticated or hard to refute. They are deliberate ploys to reinforce a narrative that already exists within a section of the population at the expense of rational consideration of evidence. These three politicians, and there are others, would almost certainly reject Jeremy Bentham’s fundamental axiom. They are not interested in the greatest good for the greatest number. In their world it is quite acceptable to condemn sections of the population to sub-human status  just so long as their own tribe stays on top and grants them positions of power.

So in this bleak picture where is the hope for the children of the Enlightenment? Are we condemned to see the gains of the last three centuries unpicked before our eyes? I don’t think so but the way forward is difficult. We need to tap into the same primitive brain functions as Trump and the rest. We need our own stories. We need our own narrative web that makes rationality the hero. We need legends that reflect what it means to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. There are people around the world already doing this but we need more. For every Donald Trump we need a Carl Sagan. For every Charles Windsor we need a Malala Yousafzai. For every George Osborne we need a Nelson Mandela. Yes I do realize the irony that two of my three heroes are already deceased. Speaking of which, maybe I should get that Denis Diderot t-shirt made up.