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"Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions - rearranges itself, and the people born then cannot even imagine a world in which their grandparents lived and into which their parents were born, We are currently living through such a transformation"

Peter Drucker, "The Post-Capitalist Society" Chapter 1, 1993

In "The Future of Money" former Belgian central banker Bernard Lietaer suggests two examples of Drucker's "sharp transformation".

First the invention of printing, and the unimaginable change it brought about in the literacy and therefore intellectual and political influence of a large part of the population from whom books were previously too remote. The ramifications of such a change included the Reformation and its huge upheavals as nations moved away from Rome, gave primacy to their own languages, and permitted scientific scholarship previously zealously suppressed by the Vatican.

Second, the invention of the steam engine which accelerated the process of urbanization, global trade in manufactures, created a working class steeped first in poverty, oppression and misery, and then rising up with revolutionary fervour.

Lietaer, following Drucker's suggestion, suggests that the next epochal change is on us. This time he paints a picture of four great movements that he describes as huge pistons pushing towards the same centre point, and that our reaction to these movements could push us to ever greater social inequity and environmental degradation to the disadvantage of future generations or to what he calls "sustainable abundance". His four great pistons are all too evident already: climate change, an ageing population, monetary instability and the advent of the super-connected information age.

So, you'll have spotted that this actually has nothing to do with the recent book from which I've shamelessly pinched the title. I haven't read it, and it appears now to be on reprint or something as Amazon can only offer 4-6 weeks delivery, but I will no doubt find it interesting once it arrives. But the point is that this epochal change will necessitate a reinvention of the state, the nation state, and probably every nation state on the planet.

Many of the institutions, commercial and governmental at least, that we have today were forged precisely because communication and information flow between disconnected markets was difficult. They are vehicles in which we put our trust when dealing with people and businesses we could not know personally. Even money itself is a construct that enables us to trust dealings with one another, a mechanism by which someone who sells us something can give us credit without knowing too much about us.

The information age changes all of this. The synopsis of David Cameron's Google speech yesterday at ConservativeHome does pinpoint the sort of changes we have seen in information flow and how they have been reflected in changes in the mode of government or, to use their word, bureaucracy. But it goes so much further than they seem to conceive (or maybe they're just trying not to scare the Tory horses too much).

The internet and other communication technologies enable us vastly to expand the networks of people whom we know well enough to form an opinion about whether we trust them or not. Look at things like e-Bay, where many participants rely on recommendations from others when making decisions about whom to trade with. An operation like e-Bay could just as well work in fact with a new, corporate, common currency into and out of which people trade other currencies as they need to. In a different vein, bringing new participants into the global economy, look at things like Kiva, the internet based microfinance scheme where people from all over the developing world can pitch for micro-loans from investors the world over to help them set up or develop their businesses.

On a more day-to-day level we have seen the internet make trade "arbitrage" available to the individual consumer - we can now search the web for the best prices in many goods and in different currencies. There is simply less of a need for national currencies. When, as we are frequently promised, we no longer need cash even for small transactions, it will not matter what currency our bank account is denominated in, so long as timely information allows us to convert it at the till into something the seller wants - which may even not have to be "money" in the conventional sense at all.

The internet is also radically changing the way we could choose to work, even if not many of us have so far done so. We could choose to live on a desert island with an internet connection and still work for our tech firm in Britain, or vice versa, we could retreat to our village virtual workplace and carry out open heart surgery on a patient in Tonga. Where do we get paid for these different patterns of working, and in what - Tesco vouchers anyone, after all you can pretty much buy anything you'd need there if you want to? How would a government know, except through every more intrusive surveillance of our affairs, what our incomes are, where they ought to be taxed and so on?

What does a state have left, if it no longer has control of information about its citizens' earnings and trading patterns? And when we can trade with smaller and smaller businesses around the world because of our widened networks of trust, what does the global corporation have left to keep us buying from them? This was the great hope of the nineteenth century anarchists, libertarians and mutualists who hoped for an end to the money monopoly held by states and bankers, and to government protectionism, which would drive down the returns to capital and drive up the returns to labour.

In the light of these huge potential changes in the ways we work, socialise, trade and trust we have the opportunity to look again at the argument, that once seemed so settled in the early part of the twentieth century, the great Liberal reform era, for truly free trade over protectionism. Individual choice over state intervention. If there is a role for the state in all of this, it is in trying to ensure that we all have fair access to the media of such a new economy - communications and delivery networks.

I've got to be nice to Jon Snow - he's my university Chancellor for a start and I always enjoy his annual lectures here. He often speaks about what one might call opinions below the political radar. On Monday night he presented a heavily trailed documentary about "What Muslims Want" - drawing on recent research and opinion polls amongst British Muslims about their attitudes to British society and their world view.

I was left not quite clear about whether it was intended to show how different some Muslims' attitudes are, or how similar, to the "rest of us". But it felt as if it was tending towards highlighting supposed differences, and left me feeling slightly uncomfortable as a result knowing that I felt the same on many issues. As if those differences were somehow sinister.

I am a Christian (most would probably say not a very good one but that's not for them to judge in my creed anyway). I've been on a faith journey that has taken me to what one might call "separatism" - from childhood Scottish style non-conformism to Roman Catholicism and I nearly became a monk about twelve years ago in my mid-late twenties. Just about the time when the young Muslims Jon Snow's research was looking at were at their most radical or separate. But I don't think I am particularly extraordinary - it was a part of me forming my opinions and locating myself in the world.

Nowadays, if anything, I have at least as much sympathy with what I understand of Islam as I do of Christianity. Indeed I do feel a lot of the time that Christianity has "lost it", particularly in the area of social and economic justice. The very fact that it has over centuries become a faith of empire builders and rulers is a problem for me - that it has conspired to entrench some hierarchies and inequalities rather than level them as it promised.

But you know, I didn't see much that was "extreme". Taxi drivers, just like me as a hall warden of a Friday or Saturday night, have every right to feel that British society is losing its way, that women are treated appallingly by some young men, young men who should know better, educated young men, often with plenty of money. We see it week in, week out. But I've also heard girls lolling around drunk demanding to be screwed over the bonnet of some stranger's car in a university car park by the multiple drunk lads they staggered out with.

Nor am I alone. It was Tony Blair that blamed everything on the sixties not so long ago (in which I think he was wrong), and there are many, many more in sympathy with the view that there is a malaise of some kind afflicting in particular the generation of an age with the Muslims who scored most highly on the "extremist scale". Tony's answer is ASBOs and the "Respect Agenda", they see theirs as an international agenda of divine laws that will not only put decency back into society but also equity for the Umma around the world.

Tony Blair in his speech last week on a "war of values" said, for example, that Islamic extremism is not about poverty. Let's look at that. There can be no doubt that Islam is a religion of the overwhelmingly poor and dispossessed. In the second half of the twentieth century in particular while individual families and oligarchies have become fantastically wealthy supplying the western world with the fuel for the engines of its vast economic advances - oil - well over a billion more Muslims around the world have not benefitted from that in any significant way.

Out of so many excluded and oppressed, given a faith that tells them, rightly, that they have as much right as any to share in the wealth God has bestowed on us through nature, is it a surprise that a few, a tiny few, are taken in by the most extreme interpretations. Just as some people in the UK find solace for their anger over apparent injustice and exclusion in extremist nationalist groups. And globalisation, particularly of travel and information has made those inequities more visible to more people (remember for many in relatively well developed South Africa and India, 1985's Live Aid beamed into football stadia was the first time they had seen people the other side of the world partying live for their plight). And they have, sometimes, a right to be angry about it.

Islam is a faith of economic and social justice if nothing else. One of the main roles of the Caliphate as I understand it is to ensure the equitable division of God's gifts in nature throughout mankind (even if it would be romantic nonsense to say there's some golden age in the past when any Caliphate ever achieved that). The faith retains, albeit on occasion only through lip service, the ancient Abrahamic controls on usury for example which both Judaism and Christianity have long since all but abandoned. Did you know that "Hallelujah!" was the cry of the slaves, freed from their debts at the fifty year Jubilee when all debts were cancelled and all lands returned to the common wealth for redistribution? But in that it also shares elements of the radical liberalism of centuries, of Locke, Cobden, Hobhouse and many others. Christianity too remember looks to a day when the nations of the world will be one, that power will not be wielded by men over men, but the birthright of us all adminstered for all our benefit.

So where do I differ from the "separatists" or "extremists"? Well, I've moved on slightly from my own "radical extremist" days. I've found in the fusion of my faith with liberalism the ability to strive to be a better person, to carry out the little Jihad if you like, and encourage others to do likewise in their own ways, but not to impose on them unless they are materially or objectively harming someone else. I did disagree, for example, with the condemnation of the Danish cartoons and the circumscribing of free speech. Those of us with a faith have to be more robust in our own defense but not allow ourselves the luxury of special protection from people who may not agree with us.

My faith teaches too that people have the free will to decide for ourselves - the essential element that makes us human. To make mistakes and learn from them. But that's my faith and people are free to share it or not, to make their own way so long as they don't hurt others in the process. But the way we live does hurt others, from destroying the planet to raping whole continents of their resources to make our lives comfortable. And it does have roots in our apparently growing devil may care decadent lifestyles. The simple fact is that most people mature and learn from their more wild escapades and do become better functioning members of society as a result. So I don't see that we need someone imposing their idea of the divine will on us all. Encouraging and challenging us to think about our behaviour, yes, but imposing and punishing - not as a rule.

If we can relight that radical liberal flame, I do believe there is the makings of a fusion that can bring the essential elements of social and economic justice from all the world's major faiths, including the ones, like some forms of Christianity which have slightly lost that focus, and others, like Islam which are growing as a reaction to the inequity in the world, and still allow us to live our lives largely as we choose, have more respect for others, and take more responsibility for ourselves. But like many Muslims and not a few Christians, I am not entirely sure that that radical liberalism is evident in today's more cynical "politics of power". Reclaim it and there's a chance we can enjoin many of these to our cause, the greater cause of humanity as a whole. Go on as we are, and we can expect more polarisation, more resentment, and yes, more desperately hopeless individuals for whom it may be tempting to think that they can make their point through violence.

Technorati Tags: religious wars, islam, humanity

As if getting your business park's planning permission wasn't a nice enough present, now the Labour party is going to give all the Abrahams money back! What a bargain.

Labour to return donations - Telegraph:

Gordon Brown has announced that more than £600,000 that the Labour Party accepted without disclosing its true origin will be returned.

It's not that I am usually a luddite. Nor do I necessarily mourn the fact that workers have priced themselves out of a job. But there is something very sad about the Telegraph's story that the Symington port family is to phase out crushing grapes by gangs of human feet:

Centuries of port heritage ended by family firm

The world's oldest and largest port producer is finally trampling on 2,000 years of agricultural history.

The Symington family, which has been making port since 1652, has announced that it will no longer crush its grapes under foot.

The saddest part is surely that:

While the robots are an expensive investment, they can do the job at any time of the day or night - and don't need the encouragement of an accompanying musician.

Will port wine ever be the same without the local folk tunes of Portugal being instilled into it at birth I wonder?