- Jonathan Swift, from A Modest Proposal
This is an examination of a peculiar sort of power, one that allows millions to suffer and waste away for no apparent reason, for what is preventable to become the inevitable, and for the highest form of lunacy to be touted as the most refined form of logic. It is the power to not care.
To begin this post I would like to take a look at the argumentative stance adopted by the putative opponents to this most crazed but stylish of opinions. Perhaps by doing so you will start to understand the cool, calculated insanity of it all.
Niall Ferguson, a prominent history professor at Harvard, wrote an article a few years ago about Harvard students' views of Henry Kissinger, one of Harvard's most renown graduates.
These students, he explains, obviously possess greater political acumen and finesse than those of past years, judging by their effusive reception of Kissinger during a recent visitation to the university. Such warm greetings could not have differed more starkly from past receptions of the former secretary of state since, as Ferguson grudgingly recalls, previous students often protested Kissinger's visits due to the destructive policies he pursued during his tenure in Washington.
Seething with venom -- as well as self-satisfaction -- Ferguson writes that other members of academia should follow the "younger and wiser generation" of students in choosing to welcome Kissinger with open arms. They need to realize that mud-slinging at Kissinger, though once "fashionable," is ultimately childish; in other words, they need to "grow up."
Ferguson -- a Harvard historian, believe it or not -- evidently wants us to forget about Kissinger's illegal bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia which killed countless civilians and destabilized Cambodia, paving the way for the ascent of the genocidal Khmer Rouge (which the U.S. then backed diplomatically). Apparently he also wants us to forget the former secretary of state's move to support, and then cover up, the Indonesian military's genocidal campaigns against the indigenous people of East Timor -- a country it crushed with ample military aid from the West.
And of course, I would be remiss if I failed to mention Kissinger's steely maneuvers in Chile. By freezing Chilean assets and backing militarist forces he directly aided the toppling of the democratic Allende government of Chile on September 11, 1973. (Yes, Kissinger is one of the orchestrators of the original September 11.) After a paroxysm of violence, which left some 30,000 dead, came the infamous Pinochet dictatorship, a chapter of repression which has become synonymous with despotism in Latin America.
Yet, according to Ferguson, it is childish to raise these points. One should not only stomach Kissinger, war crimes and all, but grant him a privileged place at the country's top institutions, lavishing him with unqualified praise despite the bespattered blood of millions coagulating on his filthy hands. It is no longer "fashionable" to do otherwise, he assures us; we all just need to "grow up."
________
Many conservative intellectuals like Ferguson are adept at discrediting the unfathomable suffering of millions by insinuating that if it is not "fashionable" to remember these crimes then it is simply not worth doing so. Incalculable human tragedy is reduced to the despicably trite language of a modish trend. And not only is sticking up for those who suffer derided as conforming to "fashionable" trends, but this particular style is denounced as uncool.
Anyone with a simulacrum of decency would realize that ridiculing those who champion the rights of the victim when attempting to be a historian -- a recorder of truth -- is not only naïve beyond words but crass beyond comprehension. Most of all, the existence of the victims is obfuscated, their graves and scars pissed on if not simply denied.
Ferguson, a famous white historian descended from European colonizers of South Africa who now spends his time writing books at an ivy league university, has the privilege, indeed the power to not care. For him the daily hell of war, famine and political repression can be understood as a fashion, one he is free to not concern himself with, or to in fact distort if it does not conform with his tastes.
His decision to disparage the advocates of justice instead of even assessing the veracity of their message speaks volumes about his understanding of history, morality and politics. To Ferguson, these are nothing more than titillating games. And while maligning the protestors' positions he does not even mention the victims. In his eyes the victims are expendable, not even worth mentioning. (During his diatribe he does not even mention them once, as if they never existed!)
________
While the brute callousness of conservative intellectuals like Ferguson may seen exceptional, this could not be further from the truth. Unfortunately, the fantastic logic employed by Ferguson is virtually the same logic and approach which underpins the thinking of intellectuals across the First-World's political spectrum.
When hypothesizing from the comfort of an air-conditioned room, coffee in-hand, it becomes all too easy to gloss over the reality of suffering elsewhere in the world. That is to say, everywhere else.
Perhaps there is no more callous example of this amongst first-world thinkers than the current hype about world population growth. If whitewashing the crimes of the world's war criminal par excellence is "fashionable," then it is most certainly "fashionable" to bewail each increase in global population.
The typical "problem" is framed like so: the world population is increasing at an unsustainable rate and this will accelerate environmental degradation, plus engender humanitarian crises of epic scale. Those who have large families are engaging in backward practices, especially those living in the Third-World who are most vulnerable to the effects of high birth rates. Family planning must be put in place in order to preclude near-certain crisis -- the specter of Malthusian collapse.
The October 2011 edition of 'The New Yorker' echoes this line of thought, its blurb on population growth centering around the infamous theories of Thomas Malthus which state that population growth will inevitably outstrip the world's ability to produce food at some point. Though the section does not address the Third-World with overt condescension, the piece is predictably approached from the vantage-point of First-World concerns.
In other words, whenever the question of population increase is addressed the concerns of the affluent, First-World beholder come to the fore. The fact that the shirt on the beholder's back was produced in a Bangladesh factory for pittance wages, that the cellphone they use was likewise created through a system of waged slavery, or that their daily consumption of any resource dwarves that of any Third-World individual is left unstated.
Spoken plainly, pundits can heave and haw all they want about the alleged irresponsibility of those in the Third-World who have more than two kids. No matter how much hell they raise, they will never be able to alter the fact that the very real problems of environmental degradation and limited resources are not exacerbated so much by birthrates in the Third-World as by the hedonistic patterns of consumption in the Global North -- in other words, the rich countries doing all the whining.
No matter how much you try to mess with the statistics, this much is clear: the rich countries' consumption patterns are so much higher than those of the poor countries that even the comparison is ridiculous
Yes, the Philippines may be suffering from profound environmental problems, but this is to no small extent because Japanese construction companies have stripped the hills of timber. Yes, the Congo is experiencing resource shortages and engulfed in hellish civil war, but the American corporations which loot the country's wealth do not seem to mind. Yes, China is facing environmental catastrophe but where was your shirt made, your pants, your shoes?
Yes, Bangladesh may appear to be a backward country to the Western eye but how can we seriously entertain such judgments as locals struggle to free workers from the rubble of a substandard factory building. For the children who lost their lives in the rubble, Disney was likely associated with the toil they daily expended to produce its merchandise, not a series of memorable platitudes strewn across a silver-screen.
Furthermore, First-World pundits conspicuously neglect to mention that even the high birth-rates in the Third-World are encouraged by a specific set of economic dynamics which unambiguously favor the rich peoples of the world. The poor often choose to have large families because they do not have a social safety-net and, consequently, must guarantee that they have children who will take care of them as they age. Children also play an integral part in sustaining the family economy, contributing their labor so that the family can eat (and so that you have a pair of shoes to wear).
It is also telling that almost without fail a publication that decides to touch the issue of population growth, such as 'The New Yorker,' inevitably includes some reference to Malthus and his theories. It is first worthwhile to note that Malthus' theory became an archaism long ago. Even while he was writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the agricultural revolution in Western Europe already allowed places like Great Britain and France to jump the Malthusian trap. Populations grew significantly and food was plentiful.
Even so, industrialization and its attendant effects led to mass pauperization and hunger. Yet the deprivations faced by common Europeans were not because of a natural lack of food but a decidedly unnatural occurrence: starvation amidst abundance. Food was produced just fine, rather, the industrial-age crisis was engendered by conscious decisions made on the part of rich persons to wrest land away from smallholders, thus reducing previously stable households to poverty.
In other words, such crises were not natural or Malthusian, but conscious and manmade.
________
Today when the question turns to that of resources and scarcity, the facts are eerily similar. It is simply disingenuous to claim that there is not enough food and water to meet the needs of everyone. The logic that claims otherwise is nothing more than a self-serving illusion which releases the privileged subject from their responsibility to others as a fellow human-being. The problem is not a technological one or even a matter of the earth's (real) limits, but purely one of human will.
At the end of the day, the issue is a matter of those who have the power to make a difference choosing to do so. Put differently, what happens ultimately depends on those who have the power to either care or not care, to act or not act.
During the 18th century the great English writer Jonathan Swift penned a brief satire now known as A Modest Proposal. In it Swift -- with tongue in cheek, and teeth firmly clenched -- proposes that Irish suffering could be remedied by selling Irish children as food. The Irish back then, as until very recently, were economically exploited by the British with the greatest degree of cruelty. When famines or other disasters struck the Irish, obtuse British rulers refused to acknowledge their role in instigating the suffering, writing it off as a result of Irish backwardness.
Galled by British cynicism, Swift wrote his essay for the purpose of verbalizing the insanity which underscored British condemnation against the Irish, as well as British blindness to their own culpability in causing Ireland's crises. The logic he uses, namely that Irish should sell their children as meat for economic reasons, is stylized on the economic rationalism current amongst the British intelligentsia of his day -- an economic rationalism that is still very much alive.
Then, as now, the problem was not the backwardness of the poor, Third-World or those who are different from us, but the cynical logic -- or insanity -- that passes for logic today amongst both liberals and conservatives.
And then, as now, the problem could readily have been solved if the people who had the liberty to not care instead chose to care: to do something.
No comments:
Post a Comment