Davos Man is fighting for his survival

Is it possible for evolution to go backwards? Could Darwin's 150th anniversary be remembered as the year when natural selection went into reverse? It's a question probably only David Attenborough could answer with authority. Which is why we have to hope that he's in Switzerland this week - so that he can watch the most highly evolved mammal on the planet struggling to maintain its supremacy, in the one environment it feels totally secure. Davos.

Davos Man is the inhabitant of the ultra-chic Swiss ski resort which is home every year to the World Economic Forum, a gathering of the globe's most powerful politicians, businessmen and influence-mongers.

For years now, merchant bankers turned finance ministers and former finance ministers who have found time in their lives for a little light banking have mingled in the queues to hear masters of the universe explain how to sweat assets, add value and spread risk. Normally on to other people's balance sheets.

For many it would normally be the only time every year they queued for anything. Because Davos Man, the plutocrat's plutocrat, has got used to living in a world where you rarely fly commercial, and if you do by some mischance find yourself on an airline, you never turn right; a world where supermarkets are not places where you make purchases but things you actually buy and sell; a world where your bank manager doesn't manage your account, he runs your bank.

But now that world has vanished. Just like the climate cataclysm that robbed the dinosaurs of the lush vegetation on which they relied, the credit crunch has deprived Davos Man of the abundant hedge funds, plumply vulnerable family firms and juicy government contracts on which he used to feed. If he is to survive at all, he may have to reacquaint himself with habits that he imagined he had long outgrown. Like saying sorry. This week might be a good time to start.

BlackBerry fools

If I were offering Barack Obama one piece of advice, it would be about the bulge in his pocket.

The President has let it be known that he'll keep his BlackBerry in the White House, and in the process he'll become the first 24/7 digitally connected commander-in-chief. Even as the BlackBerry-wielding classes are facing catastrophe, the little electronic monster survives and flourishes. The BlackBerry may have thus proved itself a sort of digital cockroach - the one creature that can survive any global disaster, see the environment in which it once securely nestled disappear, and crawl into a new berth as lively as ever. But while the little daemon's creators may rejoice at its durability, I can only grieve for Barack.

I spent part of last week at a conference which brought together some of Europe's greatest and goodest - they were more Homo Sir Humphrey than Davos Man - but every one of these high officials had their little flashing bundle of twinkly e-news. Like some exercise in nouvelle cuisine fruit salad design, each individual mandarin came with a matching BlackBerry. And the effect was like teaming them with a three-year-old child. Every few minutes they were distracted by a plea for attention, repeated requests for a reply and the effects of undisciplined leaks.

And BlackBerry proliferation has actually fed a culture where it is considered acceptable for grown-ups to do what no child would ever have got away with in the past - staring at a screen while someone else is talking.

It has fed an appetite for facts spun out of thin air and instantly confected gossip - candyfloss news and popcorn current affairs - to the detriment of context and analysis. Novelty rather than quality has become the measure of information's value. It is one of Obama's many virtues that, like his hero Lincoln, he enjoys reading for its own sake, and values both history and literature. Which is why the BlackBerry is such a poor companion.

Carrying it on duty is like asking Charbonnel et Walker to make up your packed lunch - there will be lots of delicious goodies to nibble at but nothing substantial worth getting your teeth into. So I hope Barack ditches that electronic bulge and gets some Balzac to put in its place.

Paine and suffering

Proof that Barack is a bookworm at heart came, again, in the invocation of the great liberal polemicist Tom Paine in his inaugural address. Ben Macintyre has paid Paine handsome tribute in these pages, but the terrible truth about Paine is that he was out-written in the great political struggle of his time.

The authors who got the French Revolution right were its enemies, like Edmund Burke, and his Reflections have proved a better read, and wiser guide to human nature, than anything produced by the Revolution's apologists such as Paine. To this day there are still attempts by brave historians such as David Andress to paint that convulsion in sympathetic colours. But, thanks to Burke, the story of the French Revolution has become the eternal parable of what happens when clever men imagine that the world can be remade by force of pure reason and human nature can be bent to their will - nothing but suffering follows. If only Burke were lecturing in Davos this year...