Posted on 01/02/2004 8:15:20 AM PST by Jakarta ex-pat
World events rush through our lives with such speed that we are challenged to discern the trends that one day will define the history of our time.
How should we remember 2003 as it slips into the mist? It is already marked down as a period of terrorism and tyranny engendered by a Middle East that is battling to come to terms with itself and a wider world that is dominated by secular modernism.
This struggle will continue in its various forms for many years, with its appeals for attention clouding our view and understanding of the deeper shifts in the evolution of humanity.
It encourages us to dwell on doom rather than reflect on the slower forces at work on history that in recent decades have lent the billion people of the developed world a much higher standard of living than our forebears, from quality of life and opportunity to longevity, health, education and experience.
"If the diver always thought of the shark," as the old Arabic saying has it, "he would never lay hands on the pearl." The pearl we need to grasp is that after a few thousand years we have finally developed the means to start conquering the deprivation, disease and despair that once made life for all but a lucky few a short and feverish stab at survival.
How quickly we take progress for granted. One excellent reason not to do so in our complacent consumerism is that another billion people on the planet are still stuck in a Hobbesian hell, making whoopie on less than a dollar a day. A bit better off are the four billion souls between the two extremes, clinging precariously to the ladder of advancement.
While many observers of the global condition would identify terrorism, say, or globalisation as the force about which we should fret most, a more considered thinker might nominate the growing gap between rich and poor.
The pearls on which we in the West have laid our hands need to be shared with greater sincerity, commitment and effectiveness.
Average real incomes of the rich billion are now about 80 times those of the poorest billion, a gulf that is not only wider than at any time in the past but continuing to expand. The distortion that this is imposing on the fabric of human affairs is fundamental and profound. It extends far beyond the conscience of the Western politician weighing a foreign aid budget or one of his or her voters deciding whether to contribute to a humanitarian organisation.
In today's globalising world, with its information and communications revolution plus increasingly easy means of travel and growing numbers of migrants seeking escape from lack of opportunity, no country - however advanced and well defended - can consider itself isolated from waves whose origins may be a continent or two away.
Look at the way in which France is struggling with its once inviolable identity, banning all visible expressions of religious adherence as a way of trying to forbid the Islamic scarf in a society of secular values where in a decade or so two citizens in 10 will be of that faith.
Globalisation is the prism through which this huge disparity between rich and poor is visible. Terrorism is partly a reaction to the surge in progress, prosperity and liberalisation that marks out the West as the part of the world to be despised on one hand, desired on the other.
If the developed world is to maintain its poise and continue its advancement, it must face the challenges of other societies and cultures or fall prey to their failures and resentments. The pearls on which we in the West have laid our hands, in other words, need to be shared with greater sincerity, commitment and effectiveness if for no other reason than that it is in our selfish interest to do so.
In this we have no choice. Drugs, disease, disorder, conflict, transnational crime, terrorism, mass migration and other forces are the products of poor, distressed and moribund societies. Globalisation is delivering them to our door.
"The wall that many people imagined to separate the rich countries from the poor came down on September 11 two years ago," as the president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, has put it.
We must deal with the causes of these failures where they exist or face a future in which the people of those countries increasingly seek escape in growing narcotics - as the Afghans, Burmese, Bolivians and others already do - or in extremism - as we witness on the Islamic fringe - or in the safety and prosperity of the developed world as we see from the annual inflow of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and economic migrants.
Many of those who leave for the West are from the most motivated and better educated parts of their societies, enhancing their new societies even as they deprive their old ones.
Wars are ruining the lives of a billion people, most of them already in the category of the wretched.
Civilians - women and children, primarily - are the main victims. As a World Bank study has indicated, countries are at high risk of civil war if they combine low income with economic stagnation and dependence on primary commodity exports.
When rebellion or anarchy intervene, such societies are easy prey for maladies that are now readily transferable to other countries and continents. This is the reason Australia is stepping into those sensitive waters of neo-colonialism by intervening in the Solomons and Papua New Guinea.
The lesson of our time is that we need to do everything we can to prevent global problems from unfolding rather than trying to fix things after the event. Restoring Iraq, once a prosperous country, is ruinously expensive at an estimated $50 billion or so. Rebuilding Europe after the Nazis cost twice as much. Such sums, saved through prevention, would be big enough to start solving global problems.
Prevention can only be employed collectively. This is the issue that keeps Kofi Annan awake at night as he seeks ways of persuading the big powers to allow the United Nations to adapt to changing threats and give it the resources it needs to deal with them.
The crisis of confidence in the UN and other multilateral institutions is in reality a crisis of confidence in humanity itself. Only the application of that rare and delicate flower - political will - can overcome this problem. Here, globalisation is demonstrating the importance of co-operation.
The West, China, Russia, India and other powers are all vulnerable to these transnational forces and are slowly realising that they can be overcome only by reasoning together. Reason, as Euripides said, can wrestle with terrors, and overthrow them.
However, the blinkered liberal chooses the easy target of the west as the culprit.
Until the "global" mass media is defeated, the chances of the survival of the "west" are miniscule.
Movies and music generally preach the hatred of the west and put on a pedestal homosexuality, "multiculturalim", and the UN.
Until we face the fact that the UN and liberalism is an enemy as great as Nazism, if not more so, we are gradually being sucked into oblivion.
Unfortunately, most of my fellow workers (teachers) have a left leaning shoulder that would make Quasimodo proud.
The message is loud and clear, but the listeners seem few.
And it shall be. Just a good, old-fashioned social contract. You do work for me, I give you money. You sell me raw materials, I convert them into higher-value end products, and sell them back to you in exchange for either more raw materials, or for the money you earned while doing useful work for me.
Keep smiling,
Philip.
I want other people's lives kept separate from my life. I want the problems other people bring upon themselves kept separate from my life.
We in the West have not "laid our hands" on wealth!
We have toiled, sweated and died for our prosperity.
We have unleashed the genius of free thought!
Nations in the Middle East squat upon vast reserves of "black gold" but don't share that wealth within the region.
Now we see a great visionary leader called Bush offering those repressed peoples of that dusty foresaken region of the planet the tools with with to develop their own native skills and dreams.
He has offered them a gift that none of their own leaders have ever dared.
He offers them the prospect of FREEDOM.
The most generous and palpable sharing of our wealth that we can possibly offer is free and open trade with foreign countries. Many are too stupid and/or selfish to accept it, and their standards of living suffer as a consequence. If we attempt to reciprocate by closing our hearts to them, our standard of living will suffer as well.
Freedom and opportunity for all without government interference IS the charitable road. Unfortunately, we have become too institutionalized to recognize it.
I recently had t do a group project for a class I was taking. It was on a conroversial topic relating to science. The topic was GE foods.
One girl in the group kept spouting off wbout how unfair it would be that only poor people would have to eat the GE foods and pointed out Mugabe and the fact that he turned down the GE food.
I pointed out that they where starving to death and should be happy to have any food. I also pointed out that they once grew food in abundance and that they should fix their political system if they wanted to eat again.
She then went on some diatribe about how we are responsible for all these evil dictators and we do business with them and prop them up to make money for our elite, rich, Haliburton types. Seriously, this is the mind set out there.
And this wasn't some 19 year old idealist this was a 33 year old mother of 3.
This can be either good or bad, depending upon what is used for "money".
In this we have no choice. Drugs, disease, disorder, conflict, transnational crime, terrorism, mass migration and other forces are the products of poor, distressed and moribund societies. Globalisation is delivering them to our door.
I have read some pretty mealy mouthed poppy cock in my time but this takes the cake. If "globalisation" is delivering them to our door, we need to shut the door on globalism.
Let's take the little tale of the diver, the shark, and the pearls to it's logical, reasoned, conclusion. Why would the courageous diver want to turn over his hard earned pearls to those too cowardly to dive for them theirselves? Why would he want to cast his pearls before swine that have no understanding of the value of pearls in the first place? Just because they want them? Just because the shark agrees not to bite only if the diver shares? I don't think so.
I think it's time for the diver to kill that shark making insane demands on his, sweat of his brow, wealth, earned by his courage.
We have already shared them and continue to do so.
There is no censorship of books on economics, our legal system is documented and the knowledge is freely available to all.
As Rush continually points out, the third world is impoverished not because of a lack of resources but because of a lack of capitalism.
Sharing our wealth with countries and people who do not have the courage to institute a political and legal system which will allow them to generate wealth on their own is counterproductive. It will paper over their dissatisfaction for a short time, but the gap will continue to expand.
The developed world can not give everyone enough to make them wealthy. We can and have given them the blueprint for how to do it on their own.
Whether I could agree or disagree with you on this would depend almost entirely on how you would define "free and open trade". There is a difference between simply giving our wealth away for short term (lifestyle) gains and aiding others in building their wealth while maintaining and increasing ours through mutual trade development. Most 'free traders' seem to favor the former, I favor the latter. One is sustainable, one is not.
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