Thinking Globally ... Mark Steyn

My little grade school in New Hampshire recently introduced an exciting new fun project for its pupils: It will be tracking its carbon footprint!

Sorry, let me make that even more exclamatory: It will be tracking its carbon footprint!!!!!!!

Do even impressionable seven year-olds still get excited about this racket? The easiest way to reduce the school district’s carbon footprint would be to return to the one-room schoolhouses my older neighbors attended and which are still standing around town, with their blackboards and even the desks mostly intact. Aside from cleaning out the woodstove, you’d need nothing more than a fresh box of chalk and some new slates – and, although those 19th century Grade Four history exercises are a bit daunting for those weaned on the graphics-enhanced pabulum of “Social Sciences”, if it shrivels our carbon footprint, I say let’s do it!

But I don’t expect that’s what the school has in mind. Instead, there’ll be some marginal going-through-the-motions-type stuff that’ll make everyone feel virtuous and Gore-compliant, and that’ll be that.

We are enjoined, constantly, to think globally, act locally. But in practice we do very little in the way of global thinking. Now why would that be?

Well, I’m not unsympathetic to those who favor a constitutional amendment prohibiting all baby boomers from public office. It’s amazing to me how many institutions remain entirely in thrall to the received wisdom of 40 years ago – scarcity of “resources”, world “overpopulation”, the growing “inequality” between the rich countries and the “Third World”.

None of these things exist. The UN now says the planet’s population will peak in mid-century, and in many parts of the developed world it’s already in decline: the problem Germany faces, for example, is not “sustainable growth” but sustainable lack of growth. Meanwhile, the last three decades have seen the emergence of what Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin calls “a new world middle class” made up of over 2.5 billion people in developing lands who now have a standard of living near enough that of the west. So about half the folks in the so-called “poor countries” are, in fact, doing pretty nicely. As Virginia Postrel put it, if you take the planet as a whole, in 1998 “the largest number of people earned about $8,000 - a standard of living equivalent to Portugal’s.”

There is no “Third World”. There is no “Africa”. There is Mauritius, which is now an upscale vacation destination. And there is Liberia, where drug-fueled gangs of machete-wielding adolescents terrorize shanty towns and changes of government are marked by the ceremonial feeding of the outgoing President’s ears to himself and of his genitalia to the incoming President (on the grounds that the former leader’s powers are contained therein. Which would certainly add a bit of culinary variety to the New Hampshire primary’s rubber-chicken circuit).

And then there’s Somalia, where, as Professor Peter Leeson of George Mason University points out, functioning government collapsed in 1991. And yet in the 16 years since, by almost every measurable indicator, life has improved: extreme poverty down 20%, infant mortality down 24%, access to health facilities up 25%, measles fatalities down 30%, maternal mortality down over 30%. I hate to sound like a fainthearted moderate squish, but even we small-government conservatives don’t usually have anything quite so drastic as the Somali model in mind. Still, strictly on the empirical evidence, the no-government solution is working out a lot better than the previous three decades of Afro-socialism.

And why wouldn’t it? After all, go back to, say, mid-19th century America: Did the central government impinge that much on the average mid-westerner? Or did they just get on with things? The other week, four extremely rare identical quads were born to a Canadian mother, but they had to be delivered in a hospital in Great Falls, Montana because there was no bed available for the young mom either in her local hospital in Calgary or in any other health facility in Canada. After making the usual cheap jokes about socialized health care, I received a ton of indignant e-mails from affronted Canucks: “There are literally tens of thousands of things that government tries to do and shouldn’t,” wrote one reader, “but health care is a fundamental of any civilized society.” Really? A “fundamental”? Are you saying then that the Canada of the Fifties and Forties was not a “civilized society”? If “civilized society” is not possible without government medicine, then civilization in Canada, Britain and the rest of the west has the shallowest of roots.

If you’re thinking globally, it helps to think locally: What’s happening in Mogadishu is not what’s happing in Monrovia. But most of our views of “global problems” are highly parochial. The assumption behind “global warming” and “global poverty” is that western civilization – or, at any rate, western capitalism - is to blame. At the same time, the very same people assume that an advanced western society is the natural endpoint of human development, at least in terms of the social issues: secularism, abortion, gay rights, and whatnot. In other words, everywhere is on a varispeed one-way railroad track to Sweden.

Or it was. New York Times readers must have choked on their brunch the other day when confronted with a Sunday magazine devoted to the return of “The Politics of God”: “Our problems again resemble those of the 16th century,” says Mark Lilla, arguing in effect that the two centuries between the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall were a mere Interlude of Reason, and that a traditional politics of “competing revelations” is reasserting itself. The careless presumption that our moment – the social democratic “civilized society” – is permanent and inevitable is a delusion. The obsolescent boomer pieties that are now the core curriculum of our grade schools will be a laughingstock by the time those children graduate high school.

Speak for yourself, Steyn. Speak for yourself.

< /just kidding >

"Mark Lilla, arguing in effect that the two centuries between the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall were a mere Interlude of Reason..."

MS is great and usually hammers every opening the Leftist Times give him. But... this time, while he hit them on another point, I'm surprised he let a glaring one pass:

The "Interlude of Reason" began with the Revolution that lived by the guillotine and ended with the Empire that lived by the Gulag? Very Reasonable... for an Atheist true-believer.

What were the enduring results of the French Revolution? A pile of headless corpses and a tyrant ruling France!

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