It is sobering to consider that half of humanity exists at a level of the economic inferno which we blithely label as “less than a dollar a day.” Just stop and think about what that means. Is there any part of your own life that you can recognise in that? I live in India, and meet people living like this every day, and still I cannot really understand what day to day life is like with such limited resources.
Now I hate all the guilt and the wringing of hands as much as the next person, partly because I think it’s displacement activity, if we are not going to do something about it, then we may as well stop pretending and get on with enjoying ourselves. But there is an issue of political imagination in all of this. Every time we make statements about the planet, or about “life” or being human, we are also making statements on behalf of these people. People who probably don’t speak English and so don’t have any access to our elite discussions.
We depend upon these people, they make our cheap Chinese goods possible, and fuel the service boom in India. In many ways they manage inflation on our behalf, since they are, well, so cheap. Since we depend on these people, if we want to chart a political future for ourselves that is stable, then we need to take into account the realities of their lives. Take the food price crisis: How much have we spoken about the price of milk in Tesco? And yet how little have we discussed the possibilities of food riots? The last trade round fell on this point: The developed world just could not get their heads around the developing world’s insistence that their population had to eat, come what may.
In order to have an accurate political imagination, to help us chart our way through the turbulence of climate change, and avoid crunching on the rocks of natural resource shortage, we need to think beyond our discussions where we mostly talk about Us. We also need to get beyond the current war-time mentality where we think about Them as terrorists or usurpers. We really do face tests that are way beyond what our current mentality is geared up to. Thus we need a new political imagination that is beyond Them and Us.
One Comment
I agree in particular with your last paragraph, Daniel. We are addressing unprecedented dilemmas which we are largely addressing with political, economic and moral constructs from a different era. It’s the equivalent of fighting a guerilla war using trench warfare tactics. In this frame, Marxist-Leninist materialism has proved itself irredeemably flawed, evil and useless, but consumerist capitalist materialism just needs a spot of oil – quite literally – to keep the wheels of progress spinning. We condemn heinous atrocities committed by third world dictators against civilians but we do next to nothing to stop them. At the same time, we condone ‘collateral damage’ under the banner of ‘liberal intervention’ in the name of ‘imposing democracy.’ We don’t hear too much about ‘food riots’ because we’re busy fretting about losing jobs in the ‘global’ financial sector.
Our ‘news’ shapes our world view but it is selective, contrived and usually arbitrary. We react like Pavlov’s dogs, wringing our hands and donating to natural disasters or famine appeals but we buy green beans and potatoes flown into our supermarkets from Kenya. We wear clothes and buy fancy goods manufactured at uneconomic prices by kids and slave labourers but protest about Tibet. We complain about mistreatment of Kurds but holiday in Turkey. We know that the Middle East madness is exacerbated by Israel but most of us can’t bring ourselves to openly condemn a victim nation while the rest of us posture in Palestinian keffiyehs. We’re limbering up for a new cold war against the Russians, on the pretext that they have a de facto dictatorship and invaded Georgia, but it’s really because they hold the energy cards and the commies weren’t supposed to win. We said very little about Chechnya, for example, when we were pounding Iraq.
Despite the above, THUS isn’t about RealPolitik. It’s about empathy. We should not sleep until people like us, with kids and dreams and feelings like ours, are given a fair chance to get enough to eat, shelter and protection from greedy idiots, with or without weapons. It might mean rethinking how we measure progress and success. It will mean asking questions such as ‘is all this stuff making me any happier?’ If not, does it have to be this way?