Taki: why would anyone want 72 virgins? They're useless in bed

The long lazy summer is upon us, and as I walk the Swiss hills below the mountain ranges my thoughts are always of the past, the long hot summers of long ago, girls in their pretty dresses, my father in his whites sailing around the Saronic Bay with a ball-and-chain standard flying from his main mast. It meant ‘Wife on board’, which really meant: when I drop anchor in some nearby port, local talent should stay away. Dad was famous, infamous rather, for flying that ensign, because he loved partying with loose women on his boat, and, during the rare occasions my mother would come on board, he didn’t want to embarrass her with the inevitable visitors. After his death, I would drop anchor at different islands and people would ask what happened to the flag. ‘Unlike my father, I am monogamous,’ I’d lie, and they’d invariably answer, ‘If only you could be half the man he was…’

Yep, that’s how it was long ago. How did Browning put it? ‘God’s in His Heaven; all’s right with the world.’ The trouble is nothing’s right with the world. Every time I open a newspaper all I see is Muslim faces, their mouths wide open with rage, screaming and shaking their fists. I recently read a profile of a man called Hirschman, a planner, as the technocrats would call him, but a man of extraordinary talents and foresight. A German Jew, he fought with the French in the second world war, and afterwards wrote about economic development in a literary style, not with mathematical formulae and other types of jargon. His motto was, ‘I want to prove Hamlet wrong.’ That is, Hamlet should not have been frozen by his doubts, but freed by them. Doubt is a motivating freedom that liberates agents from their dependence on needing to know everything before acting.