Soon, Xi and Trump will meet. World Leaders will descend on the UN General Assembly. Yet another forum of leaders, P4M, with Canada, Europe, Brazil, and Kenya, was just announced. The SCO met at Bishkek. The BRICS summit just got over in Delhi. The liturgy of international politics continues. Talking is usually good. This has helped put a floor under the multiple crises. In some cases, like trade, these summits have opened up new options for the world and created new alliances. It has, to use the current buzzword, helped build resilience. Who knows what might have happened without all this activity? In all likelihood, we would be worse off.

At the same time, it is not difficult to shake off the deep vertigo this activity is inducing. One of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, had captured this well. It is psychologically a richly, layered novel. I first read it right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when its pessimism about modernity seemed out of place. But its disorienting force lingers in two respects. The first is the sense of a civilisation that is sophisticated, intelligent, inventive, smart, capable, refined, even if a little amoral and confused. Yet, it has no sense of how to mobilise judgement or political action to avoid impending catastrophe. But the second thing is the weird juxtaposition between a sense of impending danger, even catastrophe, and the normal routines of ordinary life and diplomacy. Leaders and people were not exactly ignorant of what........

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