How Isis makes me feel

Drop a frog in hot water and it will immediately leap out. Put the same frog in cool water and slowly heat it and it is likely to remain until cooked (and dead!).  We humans have a similar characteristic; we have no difficulty spotting emergencies and responding; storms, earthquakes and heart attacks spring to mind, but a slow steady yet inexorable build up we may well fail to notice until too late – history is littered with examples, the consequences of underestimating the Nazi threat springs to mind.

For part of my working life I was responsible for developing strategies for business. I discovered this was not about sitting in a darkened room with a wet towel round my head trying to think clever thoughts, but was about identifying important trends as early as possible, that is, finding those things whose rate of increase was interesting while the absolute volume of activity was still small. The explosive growth of personal devices and the internet were apparent over thirty years ago, you just had to know where to look to find the ancestors of Google, Skype and mobile phones already up and running. I missed texting though.

This type of analysis is applicable at any level, and there are three international trends that are really worrying to me. Global warming: we aren't going to spend any time on it other than to point out that we haven’t really got past the awareness stage, in other words, there is still no concerted effort at world level to cope with a world problem. The second is the steady erosion of the effectiveness of antibiotics, those miracles of modern medicine that we abused in such cavalier fashion that there are an increasing number of resistant bugs: again there is little evidence of any kind of concerted world action to ensure they are used correctly. Finally there is the increasing growth of tribalism and its sinister brother sectarianism. Far from there being any worldwide action against this trend, there seems to be a concerted effort to reinforce it.

Let me try to justify such a sweeping statement. The Basques have been making noises about separation for years, the Catalans have managed to get there language revived, the Scots have campaigned for “independence” for years and are actually being given the opportunity to secede from the three centuries old Act of Union and the Irish are, well, the Irish.

This is not personal, most of my genes are from the Celtic fringe (Scots, Welsh and Irish) and my grand-children are half Catalan. More, I’ve been on a lifetime journey of personally "celebrating difference". This was partly by chance and partly because I passionately believe that the search for truth and knowledge are facilitated by variations in culture and experience. I also believe that two of the mainstays of human success as a species are our power of co-operation and our capacity to challenge established ideas; for evidence, just look at the number of multi-cultural, joint Nobel Prize winners. And, of course, for that to work to the optimum, tolerance is essential.

It is against that back-drop that I find the growth of ISIS and its atrocities against people and cultural and historical icons, the events in Nigeria, particularly the school kidnap and more recently the mass killings of civilians in Gaza to be abhorrent and personally, psychologically disturbing. They all have a common element, complete intolerance for any point of view other the narrow, entrenched and didactic one of the perpetrators. It’s as if the worst of the Spanish Inquisition had been re-incarnated and deposited in the Middle East with 21^st century weapons put at their disposal.

From here we can only go in one of two directions. Like a pond freezing over, which starts in a corner and finishes with the whole surface becoming ice, we can all retreat to our tribes and expel those different from ourselves, as was done in Nazi Germany and is happening now in Northern Iraq and Syria and Nigeria and Sudan and will inevitably spread. Or, we can take world action to counter the threat.

While the wonderful advertising campaign for unity being waged by the Lebanese army on local television is a positive example, I can’t say that that the responses to global warming and antibiotic misuse give me much hope. So, let's speak up and speak out.