In good times, I argued that one had to find grace in advantage. One had to become worth the good fortune that had been heaped on one. In bad times, one has to find grace in adversity.

Indeed, I am old school. I believe that the surest way to grace is through humiliation. Not everyone makes it by any means. Lots of people, faced with adversity, find only bitterness. That’s why we seek to diminish adversity: we’d prefer the problems it brings.

I’m not at all sure that one either is or is not tough enough for grace. I think many people can produce spiritual toughness. It’s like running – or what I’m told running is like. There’s pain and then pleasure, but the pain is manageable for most people, and the pleasure very real. Spirituality is like that.

I didn’t wish this recession on people, and I worry about those who won’t survive it. But then I accept that grace and spirituality – like toughness and courage – are not give to everyone. For the weak, only being loved by the tough is any use.

I am inclined to think that it is old-fashioned to obsess on the physical remains of the dead. The soul – whatever that is – has moved on and the rest is just, well, gristle. So I was a bit suspicious when I heard that the New York authorities were trawling through twenty-some thousand human remains – some of them beyond vestigial – and attempting to identify them. Put it another way: it seemed odd to reunite the bereaved with the remains of their loved-ones, again however vestigial.

The testimony of Shiya Ribowsky (not least in his book, Dead Center), the senior coroner leading the project, put me right. A devout orthodox Jew, he clearly believes there is meaning in his work and he has the kind of manner which puts second-guessing at a discount. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

His work is of course driven by technological capability. Since we can now interrogate the merest smudge of human remains, we are bound to. Mourning a representative “unknown soldier” was a moving thought, but it doesn’t survive our ability to identify the remains of all the fallen.

I think the point of the post-mortem forensic DNA work is that it is an attempt to overcome the randomness of the 9/11 slaughter. We have to accept the Humpty-Dumpty nature of the world: we can’t unstir custard. But what terrorists can blast into anonymity, we can to some small extent put together and are bound to want to.

I am growing in sympathy for adopted people who want to know who their biological parents were. A M Homes found herself recognising her biological father’s backside, as she writes in her A Mistress’s Daughter. Not all of it, just aspects. She felt herself connected to this man even though she had reason to resent him. We will never know the precise role of genes and biology in our make-up, and not least because it almost certainly is not remotely precise. I did think she was a bit self-obsessed about her quest for identity. But then – I realised – it is never quite fair to accuse good writers of being self-absorbed. It is in a very real sense what good writers do. What’s interesting about Homes’s case is that she is aware of the modernity of her quest: we may not what genes and DNA do exactly, but we know that we are somehow code-bearers. Homes writes very well about the degree to which bits of her biological parents stick to her, and even of her irritation that she can’t choose those parts, though her four parents variously chose her and chose to abandon her.

The case of the remains of John Henry Newman, the brilliant 19th century English Roman Catholic, reminds us how peculiar and enduring the thread of human remains can be. The Catholic church wanted to relocate Newman’s remains as a precursor to their being the object of veneration and his possibly becoming a saint. God is assumed to transmit his grace through shards of human remains. Or is it that saintly remains hold a remnant of his grace, rather as material may hold radioactivity? The point is especially well made granted that in the absence of remains of the Cardinal’s body in his grave, the church is having to make do with a few threads of clothing which have survived there.

It’s an abiding mystery that the very rich don’t feel the pinches that the ordinary rich do. Sunseeker, the yachtmaker, said the other day that their multi-million speedboats were keeping the business afloat even as the bottom end of their market was feeling the pinch. There will always be plenty of multi-millionaires to buy Hirst, even in the depth of a recession.

In Hirts’s case, we have all the conundrums that art always presents. After all, we have no idea whether his pieces will grow more valuable as works of art, or be stripped down for whatever their raw materials are worth. In short, his works may be thought risible quite soon. Or not.

Then there’s the intriguing business of what Hirst will do with his loot. He might just become an ordinarily rich person. But it is just as likely that his wealth will be folded back to us all as his audience. Perhaps he’ll start a gallery or a foundation. Whatever.

Roughly speaking, the problem is this. Capitalism is prone to bubbles, but they really do differ in degree and kind.

Here’s a morphology.

(1) Stock Bubbles
At their most pure (The South Sea Bubble, the 1717 Mississippi Company), these are stock schemes in which there is no actual economic activity. But these readily get confused with, say, the 1990s Internet Bubble – in which there probably was a real business. Greed and irrationality underlies bubbles, but at least in the Internet case, people were aware that something big and real was happening. Tulipmania sits somewhere between the two, as does the art market. Will Damien Hirst’s productions get melted down for their gold?

(2) New instruments
John Law, who was behind the Mississippi Company, also came a cropper when he tried to engineer a new currency for France. But he wasn’t operating as a crook when he did the latter: he was inventing new approaches to currency and was – hardly surprisingly – out of his depth. 

This is a little like the muddle modern banking has got into as it recently sliced and diced sub-prime debt.

Indeed, many of these dramas turn out to be schemes which are crucial to capitalism’s future – it’s just that the pioneers don’t post large enough warnings as to the riskiness of innovation.

(3) Straight frauds
Some bubbles and some new instruments are introduced as straight frauds, or as screens behind which straight frauds can be perpetrated. Thus, Enron’s crime was very like the fraud perpetrated by Jabez Balfour in the late 19th Century. Enron was playing with energy futures and other devices which few people understood, just as Jabez was playing with new schemes for insurance and housing.

Enron and Jabez were developing schemes which in non-criminal hands would turn out to be valuable.

In conclusion…..
Many capitalist pioneers turn out to be crooks. Or, many crooks turn out to be pioneers. It’s spotting the difference which makes for entertainment.

Anyway, there are no signs of crookedness in the present crisis. Regulators encouraged bankers to get careless as they invented new wheezes. The bankers overdid it. The bubble burst.

The books excerpted in the R4 series
The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D Wattles
The Moneymaker by Janet Gleeson
Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
Metamorphoses XI by Ovid 
Tulipmania by Anne Goldgar
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
The Reformation of Manners by Daniel Defoe
The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
The South Sea Bubble by John Carswell
Tulipmania by Anne Goldgar
The South Sea Bubble by John Carswell
Extraordinary Popular Delusions by Charles Mackay
The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan
A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith

I would add:

Millionaire: The philandere, gambler and duelist who invented modern finance, by janet Gleeson
Jabez by David McKie

For some years I made repeated if half-hearted attempts to become an advisor to Tony Blair. I dared to imagine that I could help him wrestle with the problem of reconciling his urges to be a warrior and a Christian. Anyway, he – or his people – didn’t bite. When I read The Ghost, I found myself missing the essential dilemma in describing (or satirising) Blair. Harris does describe how one never knows whether Blair actually had any conviction or was merely an actor. But Harris avoids altogether the greater piquancy, which is whether Blair had a rather barmy religious conviction about his higher purposes. What’s interesting about Blair is not only whether he had convictions but on what he based whatever convictions he had. Anyway Blair is much more interesting than Lang is.  

A lot of people who have come to me for spiritual counselling have wanted to talk about their sex lives. So you may gather I am a bit of an expert in the field. The first thing I’d say is that you can never predict from appearances who likes to use prostitutes. The second thing is that it’s impossible to predict what fantasy will turn on whom. So when we come to the Max Mosley case against The News of the World, I have views:

It wouldn’t be his fault if Nazism looms large in his life
Everyone knows the Nazis were sexy – all that leather and doing the dark thing
One can do Nazi sex fantasy without being a Nazi
Anyone can do Nazi sex fantasy without having a fascist father
Doing a Nazi fantasy is nobody’s business but one’s own
Newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to prey on Nazi fantasists
He wasn’t doing anything even like full-on Nazi fantasy

On the other hand, it may not matter if Max loses because:

He could go on leading Formula One without difficulty
It’ll give us all a chance to show we don’t give a damn
It’ll remind us that all our games may become public and none of it matters

At the heart of the book is the stomach and the rather beaten-up male member of Misha Vainberg, the son of a dead gangster who was the 1,238th richest man in Russia. Our hero’s mind and heart come into the thing, too. The mind is rather messed up by  drugs, and the heart is in a perpetual state of yearning for a black girl met when Misha was studying multi-culturalism in New York.

Comic writing has to have a heart if its own. It needs to be merciless, but it has to have a fragile fingerhold on fellow-feeling. Misha is a mess of appetites and weaknesses. But he is as likeable as he is hapless. He would like to be good. In his (very exciting) adventures, he is very nearly brave. But he is up against a world in which everything is shifting too fast and too chaotically for it to be very clear what goodness might mean.

Very few cominc novels are brilliant at geo-politics, but Absurdistan takes us on a giddy tour of the power struggles of our world. At the same time, it is a hilarious account of second rate post-modern thinking.

All in all then, this is comic writing to put alongside Waugh’s Scoop. That it survives the comparison is saying something.