Extract from the Economist:
"But certain religious virtues always seemed lacking in Mr Blair as prime minister. One of the aims of most forms of spiritual development is to cultivate an appropriate sense of humility and self-awareness: a sense of one’s own fallibility, and a sense of how one appears to others, an ability to empathise, at least momentarily, with onlookers in very different places. At the height of his internationalist fervour, Mr Blair had little feeling for how Britain and other European powers were viewed by those members of the United Nations (about two-thirds of them) with recent memories of colonisation. He therefore had little sense of how hard it would be to convince the world that Britain deployed its army in a spirit of disinterested concern for humanity.
And above all, he lacked the sense, which is deep-rooted in the great religions, that human overconfidence can have unintended consequences. In his Chicago speech in April 1999, Mr Blair laid out a set of guidelines for intervention: it must be militarily feasible, peaceful options must have been tried, some national interests must be at stake. To many a politician from the developing world, there was something insufferably arrogant about an arch-colonial power asserting the right to intervene at its own discretion in situations where wrongs need righting, and regimes need changing.
To make a huge generalisation, the practice of religion tends to make people either more proud or more humble. Mr Blair’s spiritual journey is still, of course, a work in progress. But there has never been much sign of religion making him more humble."
