FEAR THE ONLY CURE FOR MADNESS

The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting looks back on 2006 from the flooded world of the future:

The problem was that we were intoxicated with an idea of individual freedom. With hindsight, that understanding of freedom was so impoverished that it amounted to little more than a greedy egotism of doing whatever you wanted whenever. We understood freedom largely in terms of shopping and mobility (we were restless, and liked travel of all kinds). The idea that the most precious freedom of all was freedom from fear gained force much later. I don't blame the politicians as much as all of our collective madness.

Fear in the end was the only mechanism that was able to cut through the complacency and force the cultural change, the political pressure and the global cooperation necessary. We are all haunted by the fact that human beings were unable to use the benefits of our own intelligence - we had the knowledge - to avert disaster; that fact has generated a terrible self-loathing. In the end it was catastrophes, the great floods and eventually the loss of London and the depression, that prompted change.

We have had to sacrifice a lot for survival - freedom, privacy. We grumble about the state's regulation and surveillance of our carbon usage, but we put up with it in a way that would have astonished me in my 40s. The idea that the local carbon usage committee would determine how many times I could boil my kettle or turn on my heating! The irony is that my generation heard stories from their parents of second world war rationing and we have lived to experience an even more draconian version ourselves in old age.

Oddly, Ms Bunting thinks fear of terrorism is a bad thing:

In the seven weeks since the London bombings, we can trace how fear is shaping our political culture - and distorting it. The danger is that the imperative to satisfy the emotional needs posed by fear and its close associate, anger, will end up crippling our capacity to respond effectively to the threat of Islamist terrorism. The "what works" British pragmatism is in danger of being junked for emotionally satisfying but irrelevant symbolism - a few individuals are banned or deported but the websites they run will penetrate just as deeply into the hearts and minds of some British Muslims.

What about the emotionally satisfying (for lefties) but irrelevant symbolism of Kyoto?