TraderMike, here's a piece that you and others might find interesting -
We Need a Global Declaration of Interdependence
The Western ideal of comfort and wealth
holds a hollow promise for the rest of the world and
provides fodder for extremists
by Wade Davis
Published on Saturday, July 6, 2002 in the Toronto
Globe & Mail
On Sept. 11, in the most successful act of asymmetrical
warfare since the Trojan horse, the world came home to
America. "Why do they hate us?" asked George W. Bush.
This was not a rhetorical question. Americans really
wanted to know -- and still do, for their innocence had
been shattered. The President suggested that the reason
was the very greatness of America, as if the liberal
institutions of government had somehow provoked
homicidal rage in fanatics incapable of embracing
freedom. Other, dissenting voices claimed that, to the
contrary, the problem lay in the tendency of the United
States to support, notably in the Middle East,
repressive regimes whose values are antithetical to the
ideals of American democracy. Both sides were partly
right, but both overlooked the deeper issue, in part
because they persisted in examining the world through
American eyes.
The United States has always looked inward. A nation
born in isolation cannot be expected to be troubled by
the election of a President who has rarely been abroad,
or a Congress in which 25 per cent of members do not
hold passports. Wealth too can be blinding. Each year,
Americans spend as much on lawn maintenance as the
government of India collects in federal tax revenue.
The 30 million African-Americans collectively control
more wealth than the 30 million Canadians.
A country that effortlessly supports a defense budget
larger than the entire economy of Australia does not
easily grasp the reality of a world in which 1.3
billion people get by on less than $1 a day. A new and
original culture that celebrates the individual at the
expense of family and community -- a stunning
innovation in human affairs, the sociological
equivalent of the splitting of the atom -- has
difficulty understanding that in most of the world the
community still prevails, for the destiny of the
individual remains inextricably linked to the fate of
the collective.
Since 1945, even as the United States came to dominate
the geopolitical scene, the American people resisted
engagement with the world, maintaining an almost
willful ignorance of what lay beyond their borders.
Such cultural myopia, never flattering, was rendered
obsolete in an instant on the morning Sept. 11. In the
immediate wake of the tragedy, I was often asked as an
anthropologist for explanations.
Condemning the attacks in the strongest possible terms,
I nevertheless encouraged people to consider the forces
that gave rise to Osama bin Laden's movement. While it
would be reassuring to view al-Qaeda as an isolated
phenomenon, I feared that the organization was a
manifestation of a deeper and broader conflict, a clash
between those who have and those who have nothing. Mr.
bin Laden himself may be wealthy, but the resentment
upon which al-Qaeda feeds springs most certainly from
the condition of the dispossessed.
I also encouraged my American friends to turn the
anthropological lens upon our own culture, if only to
catch a glimpse of how we might appear to people born
in other lands. I shared a colleague's story from her
time living among the Bedouin in Tunisia in the 1980s,
just as television reached their remote villages.
Entranced and shocked by episodes of the soap opera
Dallas,the astonished farm women asked her, "Is
everyone in your country as mean as J.R.?"
For much of the Middle East, in particular, the West is
synonymous not only with questionable values and a
flood of commercial products, but also with failure.
Gamel Abdul Nasser's notion of a Pan-Arabic state was
based on a thoroughly Western and secular model of
socialist development, an economic and political dream
that collapsed in corruption and despotism. The shah of
Iran provoked the Iranian revolution by thrusting not
the Koran but modernity (as he saw it) down the throats
of his people.
The Western model of development has failed in the
Middle East and elsewhere in good measure because it
has been based on the false promise that people who
follow its prescriptive dictates will in time achieve
the material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of nations
of the West. Even were this possible, it is not at all
clear that it would be desirable. To raise consumption
of energy and materials throughout the world to Western
levels, given current population projections, would
require the resources of four planet Earths by the year
2100. To do so with the one world we have would imply
so severely compromising the biosphere that the Earth
would be unrecognizable.
In reality, development for the vast majority of the
peoples of the world has been a process in which the
individual is torn from his past and propelled into an
uncertain future only to secure a place on the bottom
rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere.
Consider the key indices of development. An increase in
life expectancy suggests a drop in infant mortality,
but reveals nothing of the quality of the lives led by
those who survive childhood. Globalization is
celebrated with iconic intensity. But what does it
really mean? The Washington Post reports that in
Lahore, one Muhammad Saeed earns $88 (U.S.) a month
stitching shirts and jeans for a factory that supplies
Gap and Eddie Bauer. He and five family members share a
single bed in one room off a warren of alleys strewn
with human waste and refuse. Yet, earning three times
as much as at his last job, he is the poster child of
globalization.
Even as fundamental a skill as literacy does not
necessarily realize its promise. In northern Kenya, for
example, tribal youths placed by their families into
parochial schools do acquire a modicum of literacy, but
in the process also learn to have contempt for their
ancestral way of life. They enter school as nomads;
they leave as clerks, only to join an economy with a
50-per-cent unemployment rate for high-school
graduates. Unable to find work, incapable of going
home, they drift to the slums of Nairobi to scratch a
living from the edges of a cash economy.
Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of
technological sophistication, have a magnetic allure.
Any job in the city may seem better than backbreaking
labor in sun-scorched fields. Entranced by the promise
of the new, people throughout the world have in many
instances voluntarily turned their backs on the old.
The consequences can be profoundly disappointing. The
fate of the vast majority of those who sever their ties
with their traditions will not be to attain the
prosperity of the West, but to join the legions of
urban poor, trapped in squalor, struggling to survive.
As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often
shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable
to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility
of securing a place in the world whose values they seek
to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire.
Anthropology suggests that when peoples and cultures
are squeezed, extreme ideologies sometimes emerge,
inspired by strange and unexpected beliefs. These
revitalization movements may be benign, but more
typically prove deadly both to their adherents and to
those they engage. China's Boxer Rebellion of 1900
sought not only to end the opium trade and expel
foreign legations. The Boxers arose in response to the
humiliation of an ancient nation, long the center of
the known world, reduced within a generation to
servitude by unknown barbarians. It was not enough to
murder the missionaries. In a raw, atavistic gesture,
the Boxers dismembered them and displayed their heads
on pikes.
However unique its foundation, al-Qaeda is nevertheless
reminiscent of such revitalization movements. Torn
between worlds, Mr. bin Laden and his followers invoke
a feudal past that never was in order to rationalize
their own humiliation and hatred. They are a cancer
within the culture of Islam, neither fully of the faith
nor totally apart from it. Like any malignant growth
they must be severed from the body and destroyed. We
must also strive to understand the movement's roots,
for the chaotic conditions of disintegration and
disenfranchisement that led to al-Qaeda are found among
disaffected populations throughout the world.
In Nepal, rural farmers spout rhetoric not heard since
the death of Stalin. In Peru, the Shining Path turned
to Mao. Had they invoked instead Tupac Amaru, the
18th-century indigenous rebel, scion of the Inca, and
had they been able to curb their reflexive disdain for
the very indigenous people they claimed to represent,
they might well have set the nation aflame, as was
their intent. Lima, a city of 400,000 in 1940 is today
home to 9 million, and for the majority it is a sea of
misery in a sun-scorched desert.
We live in an age of disintegration. At the beginning
of the 20th century there were 60 nation states. Today
there are 190, many poor and unstable. The real story
lies in the cities. Throughout the world, urbanization,
with all its fickle and forlorn promises, has drawn
people by the millions into squalor. The populations of
Mexico City and Sao Paulo are unknown, probably
immeasurable. In Asia there are cities of 10 million
people that most of us in the West cannot name.
The nation state, as Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell
wrote, has become too small for the big problems of the
world and too big for the little problems of the world.
Outside the major industrial nations, globalization has
not brought integration and harmony, but rather a
firestorm of change that has swept away languages and
cultures, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Of the
6,000 languages spoken today, fully half are not being
taught to children. Within a single generation, we are
witnessing the loss of half humanity's social,
spiritual and intellectual legacy. This is the
essential backdrop of our era.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I was asked at a
lecture in Los Angeles to name the seminal event of the
20th century. Without hesitation I suggested the
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. Two
bullets sparked a war that destroyed all faith in
progress and optimism, the hallmarks of the Victorian
age, and left in its wake the nihilism and alienation
of a century that birthed Hitler, Mao, Stalin and
another devastating global conflict that did not fully
end until the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989.
The question then turned to 9/11, and it struck me that
100 years from now that fateful date may well loom as
the defining moment of this new century, the day when
two worlds, long kept apart by geography and
circumstance, came together in violent conflict. If
there is one lesson to be learned from 9/11, it is that
power does not translate into security. With an
investment of $500,000, far less than the price of one
of the baggage scanners now deployed in airports across
the United States, a small band of fanatics killed some
2,800 innocent people. The economic cost may well be
incalculable. Generally, nations declare wars on
nations; Mr. Bush has declared war on a technique and
there is no exit strategy.
Global media have woven the world into a single sphere.
Evidence of the disproportionate affluence of the West
is beamed into villages and urban slums in every
nation, in every province, 24 hours a day. Baywatch is
the most popular television show in New Guinea.
Tribesmen from the mountainous heartland of an island
that embraces 2,000 distinct languages walk for days to
catch the latest episode.
The voices of the poor, who deal each moment with the
consequences of environmental degradation, political
corruption, overpopulation, the gross distortion in the
distribution of wealth and the consumption of
resources, who share few of the material benefits of
modernity, will no longer be silent.
True peace and security for the 21st century will only
come about when we find a way to address the underlying
issues of disparity, dislocation and dispossession that
have provoked the madness of our age. What we
desperately need is a global acknowledgment of the fact
that no people and no nation can truly prosper unless
the bounty of our collective ingenuity and
opportunities are available and accessible to all.
We must aspire to create a new international spirit of
pluralism, a true global democracy in which unique
cultures, large and small, are allowed the right to
exist, even as we learn and live together, enriched by
the deepest reaches of our imaginings. We need a global
declaration of interdependence. In the wake of Sept. 11
this is not idle or naïve rhetoric, but rather a matter
of survival.
Vancouver-born Wade Davis is Explorer-in-Residence with
the National Geographic Society in Washington. His
latest book is The Light at the Edge of the World.
(c) 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc |
