Johann Hari

In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with plyers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civillian population who we regarded as “baboons”, “barbarians” and “terrorists.” They will come bearing the story of how Britain invaded a country, stole its land, and imprisoned an entire civillian population in detention camps – and they ask only for justice, after all this time.

As a small symbol of how we as a country have not come to terms with our history, compare the bemused reaction to the arrival of these Kenyan survivors of Britain’s gulags to the recent campaign supporting the Gurkhas. We have all waxed lyrical over the Nepalese mercenaries who were, for two centuries, hired by the British Empire to fight its least savoury battles. Sometimes they were used in great causes, like the defeat of Nazism. Sometimes they were used to viciously crush democratic movements in India or Malaya or Pakistan. But they obediently did the bidding of the Empire – so they are a rare bunch of foreigners who the right will turn moist over and welcome to our island.

I too strongly supported their rights to reside in Britain, out of simple humanity – if they’re good enough to die for us, they’re good enough to live with us. But isn’t it revealing that even in 2009, we can cheer the servants of Empire but blank the people mutilated and murdered by it? There will be no press campaigns or celebrity endorsements for the surivors of the Kenyan supression when they issue a reperations claim in London next month. They will be met with a bemused shrug. Yet their story tells us far more.

The British arrived in Kenya in the 1880s, at a time when our economic dominance was waning and new colonies were needed. The Colonial Office sent in waves of white settlers to seize the land from the local “apes” and mark it with the Union Jack. Francis Hall was the officer of the East India Company tasked with mounting armed raids against the Kikuyu – the most populous local tribe – to break their resistance. He said: “There is only one way of improving the [Kikuyu] and that is to wipe them out; I would only be too delighted to do so but we have to depend on them for food supplies.”

The British troops stole over sixty thousand acres from the Kikuyu, and renamed the area “the White Highlands.” But the white settlers were artistocratic dillettantes with little experience of farming, and they were soon outraged to discover that the “primitives” were growing food far more efficiently on the reserves they had been driven into. So they forced the local black population to work “their” land, and passed a law banning the local Africans from independently growing the most profitable cash crops – tea, coffee, and sisal.

The people of Kenya objected, and tried to repel the invaders. They called for “ithaka na wiyathi” – land and freedom. After peaceful protests were met with violence, they formed a group, dubbed the Mau Mau, to stop the supression any way they could. They started killing the leaders appointed by the British, and some of the settlers too. As a result, the London press described them as “evil savages” and “terrorists” motivated by hatred of Christianity and civilisation. They had been “brainwashed” by “Mau Mau cult leaders”, the reports shrieked.

The 1.5 million Kikuya overwhelmingly supported the Mau Mau and independence – so the British declared war on them all. A State of Emergency was announced, and it began with forced removals of all Kikuyu. Anybody living outside the reserves – in any of the cities, for example – was rounded up at gunpoint, packed into lorries, and sent to “transit camps”. There, they were “screened” to see if they were Mau Mau supporters. One of the people locked up this way for months was Barack Obama’s grandfather.

Professor Caroline Elkins, who studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book ‘Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya’, explains the tactics adopted by the British to snuffle out Mau Mau. “Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire,” she writes. “Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin and hot eggs were thrust up men’s rectums and women’s vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects.”

The people judged to be guilty of Mau Mau sympathies were transferred to torture camps. There, each detainee was given a number which they had to wear on a band on their wrist. They were then stripped naked and sent through a cattle dip, before the torture would begin again. “Detainees were frog-marched around the compound and beaten until blood ran from their ears,” Elkins writes.

The Kikuyu survivor Pascasio Macharia describes some of the tortures he witnessed: “The askaris [guards[ brought in fire buckets full of water, and the detainees were called on by one, [my friend] Peterson first. The asakaris then put his head in the bucket of water and lifted his legs high in the air so he was upside down. That’s when [one of the camp commandants] started cramming sand in Peterson’s anus and stuffed it in with a stick. The other askari would put water in, and then more sand. They kept doing this back and forth… Eventually they finished with Peterson and carried him off, only to start on the next detainee in the compound.”

Another favoured torment was to roll a man in barbed wire and kick him around until he bled to death. Typhoid, dissentry and lice sycthed through the population. Castration was common. At least 80,000 people were locked away and tortured like this. When I reported from Kenya earlier this year, I met elderly people who still shake with fear as they talk about the gulags. William Baldwin, a British member of the Kenya Police Reserve, wrote a memoir in which he cheerfuly admits to murdering Kikuya “baboons” in cold blood. He bragged about how he gutted them with knives while other suspects watched. Another British officer, Tony Cross, proudly called their tactics “Gestapo stuff.”

For the civilians outside, life was only slightly better. Women and children were trapped in eight hundred “sealed villages” throughout the countryside. They were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, and forced at gunpoint to dig trenches that sealed them off from the world.
There was always another, honourable Britain who fought against these crimes. The Labour left – especially Barbra Castle and Nye Bevan – fought for the camps to be exposed and shut. They didn’t succeed until the British imperialists were finally forced to scuttle away from the country entirely. We will never know how many people they murdered, because the colonial administration built a bonfire of all the paperwork on their way out the door. Elkins calculates it is far more than the 11,000 claimed by the British government, and could be as many as 300,000.

Yet in Britain today, there is a blood-encrusted blank spot about Empire. On the reality show The Apprentice, the contestants recently had to pick a name for their team, and they said they weanted “something that represented the best of British” – so they settled on “Empire.” Nobody objected. Imagine young Germans blithely naming a team “Reich”: it’s unthinkable, because they have had to study what their fathers and grandfathers did, and expunge these barbarous instincts from their national DNA.

This failure to absorb the lessons of Empire is not only unjust to the victims; it leads us to repeat horrifying mistakes. Today, we are – with the Americans – using unmanned drones to bomb the Pakistan-Afghan borderland, as we did a few years ago in Iraq. Nobody here seems to remember that the British invented aerial counter-insurgency in this very spot – with disastrous consequences. In 1924, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris bragged that all rebellion could be stopped with this tactic. We have shown them “what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed,” he said. Yet instead of “pacifying” them, it radically alienated the population and lead to an uprising. If we knew our history, we would not be running the same script and expecting a different ending.

Gordon Brown said last year (in India, of all places) that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over.” The survivors of England’s blanked-out torture camps are entitled to ask: when did we start?

To read my series of articles criticizing the imperialist historians Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, click here, here and here.

The political H-bomb of Expensaggeddon has confirmed the belief that our politicians are a homogenous class of crooks only interested in themselves. The gaps between the parties look increasingly like a fatuous blur, designed to cover the looting of the tax-payer. And it’s true those gaps are way too narrow, clustering the parties well to the right of public opinion, where they are largely accountable to the rich and their media lackeys rather than us. But these differences are, in reality, still wide enough to determine whether millions of us will keep our jobs and our homes. Today, a wildly biased media is refusing to tell you how.

The dry rot is not only running through Margaret Moran’s second home. No. It now runs right through our coverage of politics – and especially of the man most likely to be the next Prime Minister.

A series of disturbing facts have leeched out about David Cameron over the past fortnight – but they have been virtually unreported. The Tory leader has started advocating a form of economics so extreme it was derided even by the first George Bush as “voodoo economics”, and revealed he is so out of touch with ordinary people he doesn’t even know how many houses he owns. We failed for years to expose the MPs’ expenses scam. Isn’t it time for journalists to pull the news agenda out of Douglas Hogg’s moat and start exposing the facts about Cameron that will affect us even more bitterly than the stench from the Fees Office?

Let’s start with a tiny story, that points to a bigger untold tale. A few days ago, the Lader of the Opposition was asked how many homes he owns. “I own a house in North Kensington and… in the constituency in Oxfordshire and that is, as far as I know, all I have,” he said. He then started to get confused, said he might own four homes after all, and pleaded: “Do not make me sound like a prat for not knowing how many houses I’ve got.” Imagine if Neil Kinnock said this in 1991. Do you think you might have heard?

The fact that David and Samantha Cameron are worth an almost-entirely-inherited £30m, according to financial expert Philip Beresford, isn’t in itself damning. Franklin Roosevelt was very rich, but became a great crusader for the poor. But Cameron is advocating policies that will benefit his tiny class of super-rich Trustafarians at the expense of the rest of us. He is committed to spending billions on a massive tax cut for the richest inheritees, paid for by the bottom 94 percent of us – and now he has announced his enthusiasm for a bogus economic theory that will justify shovelling far more of our money their way.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the coverage, David Cameron’s economic philosophy was already surprisingly far outside the political mainstream before his latest revelation. President Barack Obama explained why in a recent speech, where he was arguing the Republican hard right who take the same line. He said: “Economists on both the left and right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending. You see, when this recession began, many families sat around their kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back. That is a completely responsible and understandable reaction. But if every family in America cuts back, then no one is spending any money, which means there are more layoffs, and the economy gets even worse. That's why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand.”

Cameron is almost alone in the democratic world in disagreeing and demanding immediate cuts in public spending as the global economy grinds to a halt. When I asked this year’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman whether this would make the recession worse, he replied: “Yes. For sure,” and then added that Cameron’s policies were “pure Herbert Hoover.”

This is serious enough – although hardly anyone knows it. But then, two weeks ago, Cameron went even further. He was asked about whether the government’s proposals to increase taxes on the richest one percent would raise more money for the Treasury. He replied: “It’s a very difficult calculation about where we are on the Laffer Curve… We have to put this [top rate of tax] in a queue of things we would want to get rid off… and I’m always interested in topping up my study of Laffer.”

To most people, this sounds like gibberish. Who is this “Laffer” who Cameron is turning to as the measure of whether tax policy works?

Arthur Laffer is an economist who was fired from the Nixon administration in disgrace and went on to invent a false economic theory. He was picked out by the Watergate-wet Richard Nixon when he made a prediction about economic growth that was way ahead of every other economist. Nixon put it into every speech – until it was revealed that while other economists had used thousands of variables to arrived at their predictions, Laffer had used just four – and got it totally wrong. He was fired, and that should have been the end of him.

But Laffer was befriended by Dick Cheney, and in 1974 they invented an economic theory on the back of a cocktail napkin – literally. Laffer claimed that cutting taxes on the rich was always right, because when you cut their taxes the rich had extra incentives, so they worked harder, and paid the money back (and more) in extra revenue.

To illustrate this, he drew a diagram. As the writer Jonathan Chait explains in his must-read book ‘The Big Con: The True Story of How Washignton Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economists’: “He pulled out a cocktail napkin and drew a parabola-shaped curve on it. The premise of the curve was simple. If the government sets a tax rate of zero, it will receive no revenue. And if the government sets a tax rate of 100 percent, the government will also receive zero tax revenue, because nobody will have an incentives. Between these two points – zero taxes and zero revenue – Laffer’s curve drew an arc. The arc suggested that at higher levels of taxation, reducing the tax rate would actually produce more revenue for the government.”

It was a magic formula – you can cut taxes for the rich and you won’t lose a penny in tax revenues! There’s no business cycle – only marginal tax rates make the economic weather. Cut! Cut!

There’s just one problem. It’s a fantasy. Look at the facts in Laffer’s own country. From 1947 to 1964, the top rate of tax in the US was 91 percent. Using the Laffer Curve, the economy should have been in the tank – but in fact it was enjoying the longest sustained boom of the twentieth century. In the 1980s, Reagan slashed the top rate – but there was a severe recession in 1982, and the growth that followed was merely an average recovery. Then in 1993, Clinton increased the top rate of tax from 31 to 39.6 percent, and Laffer predicted an economic collapse. In fact, there was the next long boom.

And so it goes on. Chait puts it well: “It is impossible to see how events could have turned out worse for them, short of God appearing on Earth to denounced the Laffer Curve as an abomination.”

Why would Cameron want to surf the Laffer Curve now, when it is discredited except among the fringes of the Republican Party and the Spectator right? Because it sets up a logic where there should be more tax cuts for his own tiny bloated over-class – the only people he has ever known. (Remember: this is a man who said his wife is “highly unconventional” because “she went to a day school.”)

If you bother to read Cameron’s statements, it’s clear how he will pay for these cuts for himself and his friends – by slashing the few redistributive programmes for the poor built up over the past decade, like the Educational Maintenance Allowance for poor kids to stay on to sixth form which his team derides as a “bribe”, or the tax credits which his frontbench openly compares to the disastrous nationalized industries of the 1970s, or the SureStart centres which he has described as “a microcosm of government failure.” They belong to a world he has never seen, or shown any interest in.

But none of this is explained to the British people. Instead, the media colludes in the slick presentation of Cameron as an ordinary bloke who will govern in the interests of us all. Yesterday, his call for minor constitutional tinkering was reported as it was a big-picture solution to our busted political system – even though Cameron scorned the reform that matters most: proportional representation.

This mis-coverage is as shameful and un-democratic as the great expenses con – and more consequential in the long term. The fact that Labour is lying by the roadside barely twitching is no excuse for failing to inform us about what the alternative will mean. The political journalist Kevin Maguire recently said sardonically that if Cameron announced the slaying of the first born, the press would applaud it as a great policy for second children. When will we start doing our job?

What will endure from the plays of the late twentieth century? Already, the theatre that caused the greatest fuss at the time– the In Yer Face shockers by Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh and friends – look flashy and shallow and strangely dated; only Sarah Kane’s psychological slashing seems to have survived from this flashing pack of playwrights. Yet one genre seems to have solidified as the decades pass into bona fide masterpieces, and will perhaps define that period: the play of ideas.

It looks now like the theatre from the 1980s and 1990s that tried to dramatise the great intellectual mudslides and forest-fires of its time has thrived better than any other – from Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen to Caryl Churchill’s ‘Top Girls’ to Terry Johnson’s ‘Insignificance’. Using the old theatrical forms of the comedy or the thriller, they ask the most profound questions – what is human life for, and how it should it be lived? Standing above them all, making the case for the entire genre, is perhaps the greatest play of its time: ‘Arcadia’ by Tom Stoppard.

As it is about to have its first major revival in the West End since its premiere in 1993 – starring Stoppard’s own son, Ed – the vindication of ‘Arcadia’ seems close at hand. Yet Stoppard compresses so many ideas and guffaws and griefs into less than three hours that any attempt at a summary of the play will sound paradoxical. It is an English country-house farce about the death of the Universe. It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously. It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are romanticism, classicism, and the meaning of life.

It sounds convoluted, yet it unfolds to the audience with the clarity of a cool breeze on a hot day. The play is set in Sidley Park, an English stately home, in two different centuries. It opens in 1809, in the style of an Oscar Wilde drawing room farce. A handsome young science graduate, Septimus Hodge, is living there, tutoring the precocious thirteen year old girl of the house, Thomasina Coverley. Reading through her Latin homework, she wants him to explain what “carnal embrace” means. When he tells her, she is appalled. “Now whenever I do it, I shall think of you!” she rasps. “Is it like love?” He replies: “Oh no my lady, it is much nicer than that.”

And he has been demonstrating this conviction: Septimus has just been spotting having “a perpendicular poke” in the gazebo with Mrs Chater, the wife of a visiting poet. The lesson is interrupted by a note from Mr Chater, demanding he receive “satisfaction” for his wounded honour in the form of a duel. Septimus sighs: “Oh, Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you demand satisfaction. I cannot spend my day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.” When Mr Chater arrives in a fury, Septmius insists he won’t engage in a pistol-fight to defend the honour of “a woman whose reputation could not be adequately defended with a platoon of musketry deployed by rota.”

The play then shifts suddenly to the 1990s, and a more realist style. In the same house on the same set, a historian called Hannah Jarvis – a role written for Felicity Kendall – is delving into the history of Sidley Park with the permission of the Croom family. She is a cool woman who has stripped herself of emotion and stocked her heart with icy frigid air, as she buries herself in piecing together stories from the past.

Her work suddenly is interrupted by a braying, patronising English don called Bernard Nightingale who – we soon realise – has discovered the note that Chater wrote to Septimus in an old book, after all this time. Only he is convinced it means something more – something much more. He believes the note was written by Lord Byron, the great Romantic poet, who happened to be visiting that weekend – and that he fought the duel and killed Chater. This would explain his until-now mysterious fleeing to France in 1810. It will be “the literary discovery of the century”, he neighs, turning him into a “Media Don – book early to avoid disappointment.”

And so the structure of the play is set. We watch the action unfold from 1809 to 1812, while the characters in the late twentieth century try to figure out what happened using the surviving scraps of their lives. The stories alternate – until, in the final scene, they appear on stage together, stumbling past each other, unseen, unseeable, yet locked in a waltz.

Hannah – and Stoppard – are obsessed with the way the garden at Sidley Park was redesigned while Thomasina was swotting and Septimus was shagging, because it represents the intellectual shift that was sweeping Europe at the time. Until 1809 the garden was in the classical style, modelled on Virgil and ancient Greece – ordered and clean and geometrical. As Thomasina’s mother, Lady Croom, describes it: “The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage… The right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged – in short, it is nature as God intended.”

But then the garden was demolished and remade to conform to the vision of the new romantic craze sweeping Europe – wild and irregular and disordered. Lady Croom exclaims: “Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden, [there will soon be] an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was never a spring. My hyacinth dell is to become a haunt for hobgoblins.” Hannah calls it “the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires.”

The idea of what Arcadia – paradise – looks like flipped in one generation, from order to disorder, from classical calm to romantic chaos. Hannah believes she has uncovered – in the crags of the garden’s history – a perfect symbol of this degeneration. When they were carefully constructing their fake wilderness, the gardeners built a fake hermitage – and Lady Croom demanded that the gardeners provide a hermit to live in it. “If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water,” she says. The bemused gardeners suggest advertising for a hermit in the newspaper, causing her to retort: “But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.” But a hermit was found – and he is the subject of Hannah’s new book.

He spent decades scribbling away in his fake hermit’s hut, unremarked on by the Croom family. When he died at the age of 47, he was discovered to have been writing tens of thousands of pages of incomprehensible equations and Cabbalistic proofs that the world was coming to an end. “He’s my peg for the breakdown of the Romantic Imagination… the whole Romantic sham!” Hannah explains. “It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and fake beauty… The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.”

And so the tension that runs through the play is set up, in the very set itself. It’s the old division that obsessed the eighteenth century. The classical order – which mutated into the Enlightenment – believed the world was ordered and comprehensible and was governed by rules that could be slowly uncovered. The Romantics believed this was a suffocating cage in which humanity was being imprisoned, and sought to overthrow all rules in the name of individual creativity. You make up your own rules as you go along: every man is an artist. There is no order other than the one you invent.

Against the backdrop of this transformed garden and the transformed ideas it embodies, a strange story begins to unfold. The young Thomasina is, it soon becomes clear, a genius. Even as she girlishly prances around failing to spot the series of the sexual farces unfolding in her family, she can grasp the implications of the newest scientific discoveries way ahead of any of the adults around her. Septimus teaches her about Newton’s laws of physics. They are clean, clear laws, promising an underlying, predictable order to the universe. Thomasina frets about what becomes of free will in a world where we are all merely atoms moving in line with his laws of motion – and then, suddenly, she spots a series of dark flaws in Newton.

She explains to Septimus that in Newton’s universe, equations can run in either direction – forward or back. But there is one equation that runs only one way: heat turns to cold. A cup of tea left to stand will always go cold; it will never spontaneously become hot. The same thing is happening everywhere, all the time: it’s called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The implications – only just being grasped by the generations after Newton – were plain, and bleak. “It’ll take a while, but we’re all going to end up at room temperature,” says one character. Septimus – sobered by Thomasina’s explanation – adds softly: “So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold.”

These are characters who take the implications of their ideas seriously. Septimus and Thomasina are stricken by the realisation that instead of setting up a perfectly ticking and well-oiled machine, Newtonian physics exposed us as living in an irrevocably doomed world. Hannah too says the inevitable end-game of this universe is summarised in one of Byron’s poems: “I had a dream that was not all a dream./ The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.”

In the present day, Bernard the aspirant Media Don scorns all the implications of science. In his struggle to prove Byron was a killer, he thinks gut instinct and aesthetics trump boring old scientific facts. He announces to the scientist who lives at Sidley Park, Valentine: “A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars, big bangs, black holes – who gives a shit?... I’d push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I’d lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through… If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out, I can expand my universe without you.”

Bernard’s romantic passion – laced with a little charlatanry – is in opposition to Hannah’s classical reserve. She is afraid of emotion and passion; Bernard is afraid of sobriety and the nagging sensation that the facts might not justify his flights of fancy. He “just knows” Byron murdered Chater.

Meanwhile, nearly two centuries before, Septimus is clearly falling in love with Thomasina, as she ages into a young woman. He is thrilled by her discoveries, not only of the “heat death” implicit in Newton, but of another, deeper flaw in Newtonian physics. Why, Thomasina asks, can Newton’s laws and equations only predictably describe the physics of linear, manufactured objects like squares and cones and pyramids? “Armed thus, God could only create a cabinet… [But] if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” There surely must be a mathematical pattern underlying the things of real life too. She determines to draw these equations.

But the audience slowly realise this is impossible – not because she is wrong, but because she is so far ahead of her time. When Hannah finds her old notebooks, she gets Valentine to explain them to her. He is a mathematician living in the house, pining for Hannah, and trying as part of his PhD to unlock the numerical patterns underlying the changing population of grouse at Sidley Park, as recorded in the old game books. He explains: “When Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And then for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the real world.”

It turns out that so much of the world around us – rainfall averages or measles epidemics, say – follow bizarre equations. Valentine explains: “People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole pattern between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery… because the problem turns out to be different.”

How do we understand them? With a new kind of maths, known as chaos theory. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamic systems to settle into stable, predictable behaviour. But actually, tiny variations in inputs can cause huge changes. Simple equations can produce complex patterns. The way to decode them is a process known as an iterated algorithm. This is a piece of algebra where you take the solution to an equation, and plug it back into the start of the same equation, and keep repeating the process, again and again. Out of a simple equation, you get complex patterns. This is precisely what Thomasina was trying to grasp. But the maths is so complex and so time-consuming, it can only be done with computers. It was inaccessible to Thomasina with her pencils and notebooks, except as a glint in the distance.

So Thomasina, the audience realizes, glimpsed a truth, centuries earlier than anyone else. “She didn’t have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture,” Valentine says. And she knew that if she was right, she could help us escape from the trap laid by Newton – of a predictable, determined universe shorn of free will, and doomed to freeze. With the day-to-day unpredictability of chaos theory, “determinism leaves the road at every turn,” she says. “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm.”

And maybe it, too, offered a form of hope beyond the universal freeze. When it is explained to her, Hannah asks Valentine: “Do you mean the world is saved after all?” He replies: “No, it’s still doomed. But if this is how it started, perhaps it’s how the next one will come.”

But what became of Thomasina’s insight? Hannah reveals its fate casually, in the sixth scene. (Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid a plot spoiler.) Thomasina died in a fire on the eve of her seventeenth birthday – a “heat death” of her own, caused by a candle Septimus lit for her. Her insights came to nothing. Then we see her alive again, skipping onto the stage, trying to persuade Septimus to kiss her. It is, we realize, the night of her death. And suddenly, it hits the audience. The hermit in the garden is Septimus, trying to prove Thomasina’s equations, alone and half-mad in the romantics’ garden after her death. His mind and pencil didn’t have the capacity to do what a computer can manage in a few minutes – but he tried, scribbling endlessly, for decades, trying to prove there is hope after all, and it can only be discovered “through good English algebra.”

The stale cliché about Stoppard – and about this genre – is that he is a brilliant manipulator of ideas, but with no heart. Yet here – at the core of his best play – is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades. Yes, the characters bond over ideas – but some of the most interesting people in life do just that.

That would be enough to make Arcadia a masterpiece – but it is even more than that. The play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask. What is our relationship to the past, and the future? How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain – not just of ourselves, but of our species? Ideas and emotions fuse into one in ‘Arcadia’, and the audience weeps for both.

How are we, as human beings, determined by the past – of our ancestors, and all the thinkers who preceded us? The play suggests that we are forever re-enacting the patterns of the past with mild variations – or, in other words, that the human heart beats to an iterated algorithm. Thomasina’s distant relatives echo her lines through time, with a word misplaced. When Thomasina weeps for the destruction of the library of Alexandria and all the lost plays of the Athenians, Septimus says: “You should no more grieve for [them] than for a buckle from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which shall be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in our arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.”

The play is both a vindication of this speech, and a repudiation of it. Thomasina’s notebooks are picked up again by Hannah – but what about when the march ends? In our time, science suggests a threat to our ability to survive far more imminent that the frozen universe implied in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: our “heat death” could come under a blanket of our own warming gases. ‘Arcadia’ asks, in part, how do you live with the certain knowledge of extinction – not just your own, but your species’?

In the most important speech in the play, Hannah suggests the answer lies in the process of trying to understand, while you can. You find meaning by questing on, even in the face of failure and extinction. She tells Valentine: “It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.”

And so in the end, Stoppard suggests the division that obsessed the eighteenth century – between romantics and classicists – exists in all of us. Hannah prides herself on her classical reserve, but by the final scene, it is faltering. She finally agrees to dance with Gus, the mysterious, mute young son of the house who seems to have an inexplicable knowledge of the distant past. He is a symbol of all the things that lie beyond her rational explanations – and she embraces him. Septimus is a stern scientist who venerates geometry, but he ends as the most romantic figure of all – a lone hermit in a Gothic garden trying vainly to vindicate the theories of his lost love.

Stoppard seems to believe that without both halves of the eighteenth century self – an impulse to understand the rules that govern the world, and an impulse to overthrow them and create ourselves anew – we are not fully human.

Indeed, he even seems to present chaos theory – in a sweet irony – as a kind of romantic maths, vindicating the romantics’ belief that nature is wild and disordered, using the classicists’ method of good rigorous algebra. The divisions collapse into one.

In the last scene, the characters from the eighteenth century and the twentieth century are on stage together, occupying the same space. They cannot see each other, yet they seem to be speaking to each other all the same, as the implications of Thomasina’s discoveries tumble out. As the music rises, Thomasina and Septimus waltz together for the last time – a dance that is another iterated algorithm, always the same, always slightly different – and Hannah takes Gus’ hand for a dance of their own. The sound of the coming fire slowly rises. The waltzing couples dance in circles past each other, oblivious to each other, and intensely aware of each other, all at once.

It’s a moment that shows the power of the play of ideas to fuse together concepts and characters into a theatrical grenade. This final scene is the waltz that takes place inside all of us – of our ancestors dancing with our present, of reason dancing with irrationality, and of hope dancing with despair, as the roaring, crackling sound of the heat-death draws ever closer.

I've had thousands of emails from Dubai since my expose of the city first appeared here and in the Independent. They have been overwhelmingly positive, although my favourite from an angry Dubai expat said: "Of course I hold my maid's passport. I paid good money to get her here and I'm not going to have her running away."

Anyway, now the Dubai authorities have decreed that the article must not be read. Here's one of many bloggers discussing the ban. I've also been told that if I go back, I'll be arrested or turned away at the airport.

Proves my point, no?

POSTSCRIPT: Developments...

Gordon Brown has released yet another book about Britishness to clutter the nation's bookshelves. He proposes an abstract statement of "British values", or maybe an expanded oath of loyalty, to cement us all together under the Union Jack – but all this well-meaning ho-humming misses the point. Most of us love our country simply because it's ours. I love my flat not because it represents "Johannish" values, or because it's objectively the best flat in the world, but because it's where the things I know and love are cluttered together, and I feel a wave of calm when the door shuts behind me. I feel the same when I step off the Eurostar at Waterloo or stagger out into Terminal Five: Ah, I'm home.

One small but revealing symbol of how we get patriotism wrong in Britain can be spotted if you read the stultifying vow we make immigrants take when they become citizens. It says: "I swear by Almighty God to solemnly, sincerely and truly affirm and declare that, on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs, and successors." There is a suggestion to make kids chant it at schools. So in the name of a non-existent deity, I promise to follow an unelected leader, wherever that ends up. Woo-hoo – I'm British now!

I think we need an oath of office that reflects the real reasons why British people love our country. No, I beg you, not some airless guff about "fair play" and "a sense of decency". Show me a country on earth that prides itself on unfair play and indecency. Here is my proposal for how our new pledge – and our new patriotism – should go:

"I pledge allegiance to the Queen Vic, not Queen Elizabeth. I pledge allegiance to Coronation Street, not Downing Street. I pledge allegiance to The Office, not the office of Prime Minister. I pledge allegiance to the Life of Brian, not the Life of Christ. I pledge allegiance to Marmite – and to people who can talk for hours about precisely why they hate Marmite.

"I pledge allegiance to deep-fried Mars bars, cold doner kebabs, and girls who wear mini-skirts in sub-zero temperatures. I pledge allegiance to the NHS, the BBC, and M&S. I pledge allegiance to Shakespeare and to the belief that "there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio".

"I pledge allegiance to Radio 4 documentaries about the history of drinking water, told in six parts. I pledge allegiance to George Orwell, George Formby, George Eliot, and George Michael. I pledge allegiance to the Notting Hill Carnival, the Edinburgh Festival, and the people who – for no reason at all – wander around Glastonbury dressed as giant pigeons.

"I pledge allegiance to our national dish, chicken tikka masala. I pledge allegiance to the people who sell candy floss on muddy beaches on muggy days. I pledge allegiance to fog and hail and rain, and to people who wear three layers of clothing and shed them and put them back on several times a day, each time declaring with an optimistic smile, "The weather's lovely today".

"I pledge allegiance to the Beatles and the conviction that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I pledge allegiance to queuing, and to the people who tut and cluck and scrunch their faces when anybody tries to push in. I pledge allegiance to William Wallace played by an Australian and Gandhi played by an Englishman.

"I pledge allegiance to Fawlty Towers and faulty trains and that small, almost silent sigh that shudders across a carriage when the train stops for no reason in empty fields. I pledge allegiance to the wrong kind of snow.

"I pledge allegiance to the fact that the London Olympics in 2012 will be messier and shabbier and far more prone to disruption by protesters than the Beijing Olympics.

"I pledge allegiance to the boys who died in the mud at Normandy so I could be free. I pledge allegiance to the women who slept in the mud at Greenham Common so I would not burn. I pledge allegiance to Ateeque Sharifi, who came here as a refugee from Taliban Afghanistan, only to be blown up by Talibanists on the Circle Line. I pledge allegiance to everyone who drives an ambulance or teaches a child on this rainy island for paltry wages because they know it's the right thing to do.

"I pledge allegiance to the people of Britain, not because they're the best in the world, but because they're mine."

This is the age of the conspiracy theory. In the interstices of the internet, no global event happens by accident – or as it seems at first glance – any more. While the truth is slowly getting its boots on, a paranoid counter-narrative is broadbanded across the world in a flash. We can all offer a list of conspiracies we have been told in a confidential whisper, backed up by a blizzard of small incongruent questions that are scraped together to make a fantastical answer. The 9/11 massacres were the Bush Administration’s Reichstag fire, carried out by the CIA to provide a pretext for invading the Middle East. The 2004 tsunami was caused by secret Israeli nuclear tests. Diana was killed for carrying a Muslim foetus. And on, and on, into the shadows.

The journalist David Aaronovitch has been “obsessed” by conspiracy theories, he writes, since an intelligent, likeable young man he was working with told him a few years ago that the 1969 moon landings were faked by NASA in a TV studio. All of Aaronovitch’s common sense responses – why wouldn’t any of the thousands of people needed for such a hoax have gone public by now? – were met by that weary conspiracists’ nod. The lack of evidence, he was told, is simply more proof of how devious the conspiracists are. They can hide anything. They can kill anyone.

In his weighty, gloriously readable new book, he traces how these “voodoo histories” began – and where they could be leading us.

He begins with an admission that will disarm the moderate conspiracists. Quoting the writer Robin Ramsay, he says: “By far the most significant factor in the recent rise of conspiracy theories is the existence of real conspiracies.” We know that the Vatican really did cover up the rape of children – so many more people suspect they are covering up the “true lineage” of Christ. We know that President Lyndon Johnson really did fake the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin “attack” to give himself a pretext to start bombing North Vietnam – so many more people suspect the Roosevelt or Bush II administrations did the same.

Yet real conspiracies are, he notes, “dogged by failure and discovery.” Richard Nixon couldn’t even “wipe a few incriminating tapes” without being caught out. In open societies, you can’t keep the thousands of people you need for a big conspiracy quiet for long. He defines a conspiracy theory – as opposed to a real conspiracy – neatly: it is “the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended.”

He takes as the archetype of conspiracy theories the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the shattered Europe that staggered out of the First World War, a document began to circulate offering an overarching explanation for how this evil happened – and how it could be expunged from the face of the earth. It was an eighty page booklet that claimed to be the leaked memo of a meeting of “the Elders of Zion” – a group of senior Jews that met once a decade in a graveyard in Prague to plot the destruction of existing societies and their replacement with a Jewish-run empire.

Aaraonovitch begins each chapter about conspiracies by describing the theory vividly, as if it were true. He then shows how it was invented. The Protocols were in fact cobbled together by the Russian secret police, who plagiarised it from a novel published back in 1868. But a rubble-strewn Europe was eager for a scapegoat – and they latched onto the Jews. Even now, a thousand facts later, the anti-Semitic smears refuse to die: Aaronovitch follows them from the trenches of Europe to the cable channels of Iran.

He traces over a dozen other conspiracy theories in the same way, from the Moscow Show Trials to the World Trade Centre. Each time, conspiracy theories emerge at a time of confusion and trauma, to allow people to fit terrible new events into their existing world-view. The Bolsheviks couldn’t accept that their way of running a society produced famine and catastrophe – so they preferred to believe in a vast conspiracy of Trotskyist “wreckers” plotting to bring it down from within, and they tortured their comrades into “confessing” to it. It offered, Aaronovitch says, “a painless explanation for massive failure… If it were true, then the great problems of state socialism could be solved by rooting out the plotters.” So many people across the world were invested in believing that the Soviet Union offered a better world that they preferred to something – anything – but the truth.

Whenever a big event happens, we all have an intuitive expectation that it will have a big cause. So when, say, a President is shot, it seems impossibly empty for the cause to be one lone and lonely lunatic – but it is almost always the case. Ronald Reagan really was shot by a man who wanted to impress Jodie Foster; and John Kennedy really was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.

We know Oswald’s motive. He was a lonely and troubled kid who, as Aaronovitch puts it, “defected to Russia in 1961 hoping to discover a better form of society – and discovered instead the Soviet Union.” When he returned to America, he was bitter and angry, and determined that the only solution left was to tear down all forms of authority. He wanted to build an anarchistic society “without any centralized state whatsoever.” All the endless theories that he couldn’t have done it melt on examination. Take the nonsense of the “magic bullet”: Aaronovitch talks the reader through how it has been shown by scientists studying the Zapruder footage to be not just possible but highly probable that Oswald’s shots were responsible.

Conspiracy theories are theology disguised as investigation: no facts can permeate their certain stories about the world. Aaronovitch gives the example of the Irish film-maker Shane O’Sullivan, who claimed to have spotted in the footage of the Bobby Kennedy assassination senior three CIA agents mulling menacingly. He investigated the backgrounds of these CIA operatives and built an elaborate theory about why he was killed by them. The documentary was shown by the BBC and released in cinemas.

Then a small flaw emerged – the men in the footage turned out to be watch salesmen who were having a conference in the hotel that night. Oh, and one of the CIA agents he accused of committing the murder had in fact died of a heart-attack six years earlier. O’Sullivan didn’t miss a beat. He said the watch salesmen must be other CIA stooges, because their company was chaired by a former advisor to Lyndon Johnson. And they must have stolen the dead agent’s identity. Obviously. The theory – the CIA killed Kennedy – was an a priori belief; the facts will always slot into it somewhere.

When Korey Rowe, the producer of the huge 9/11 conspiracy “documentary” Loose Change, was challenged about the huge number of blatant factual errors in the film, he replied: “We know there are errors in the documentary, and we’ve actually left them in there so that people can discredit us and do the research for themselves.”

When a conspiracy theory is finally, fatally debunked, its adherents often simply fall silent and find another target. Aaraonovitch offers the case of Hilda Murrell, a 78 year old British woman who murdered in 1984 when she was in the middle of invest8igating the threat a nuclear power station posed to public safety. The case became a cause celebre – there were three plays, a novel, and several documentaries detailing the “cover up.” And then in 2003 – when the case was largely forgotten – the police used new DNA technologies on the old evidence. It led them to a 37 year old labourer with a long criminal record, who claimed that – although he was at the scene – it was his brother who killed her. He is now serving a life sentence for murder.

Aaronovitch fillets conspiracy theories brilliantly – but ultimately for the wrong reason. He complains they “eventually add up to an idea of the world in which the authorities, including those who we elect, are systematically corrupt and untruthful.” In the place of excessive incredulity, he offers an unnecessary credulity. Some of the fiercest critics of conspiracy theories have been the very writers who are boldest and best at exposing real conspiracies – I.F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, and George Monbiot, for example. They know that by swallowing any old anti-government nonsense, activists waste their energy – and fail to expose real crimes by governments. You can be equally sceptical of authority and scornful of empty conspiracy theories: there is no contradiction.

Indeed, it is this flaw that leads Aaronovitch to leave a hole in his otherwise-compelling book. ‘Voodoo Histories’ purports to be an account of how conspiracy theories shape history – but it leaves out the most history-scarring conspiracy theory of our age. The Bush administration concocted a story that Saddam Hussein’s agents had met with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. In order to get “proof”, we now know they tortured captured Islamists into “confessing.” On the basis of this conspiracy theory, a war was launched.

Yet Aaronovitch doesn’t peer into this theory – or even mention it. He supported the war, and it would have added an extra layer of depth if he had admitted that he too fell for a conspiracy theory, as we all do sometimes, and teased out the reasons why. Instead, he charges off to condemn the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker for claiming Dr David Kelley was murdered for his views on Iraq – a theory that is ridiculous, but has harmed nobody.

Aaronovitch returns to form in his conclusion. He argues that we keep returning so obsessively to conspiracy theories because they are, paradoxically, reassuring. “Paranoia”, he writes, “is actually the sticking plaster we fix to an altogether more painful wound”: the knowledge that life is chaotic and random and nobody is in charge. Drive into a wall, and you will die, even if you are a Princess. Get shot by a maniac, and your story will end, even if you are a President. Sit in a tower in Manhattan when a plane hits, and you will burn, no matter how rich you are. We can all be killed in a second, for nothing, by next-to-nothing. Faced with this fact, it is actually more soothing to fantasize that there is a force ordering the universe and controlling it all – even if that force is demonic. As Susan Sontag said: “I envy paranoids. They actually feel someone is paying attention to them.”