Windy today in Edinburgh. (Well, not by Wellington standards, but y’know.) Christmas trees lying on roadsides waiting for collection are sliding into the middle of streets, as if the invisible hand of market forces was pushing them.
Must make driving interesting. It’s hair-raising enough to watch from the roadside.
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In comments to my previous entry, Karen questions whether there will be any “sea-change in how we in the developed and wealthy west regard our wealth” (my words).
She makes two good points:
* she doubts people will make a connection between a one-off ‘act of god’ and the ongoing structural situation of poverty
* showing generosity in this case is easy as it requires no ongoing effort, unlike the challenge of poverty
Hard to argue with both of them. My point was really somewhat tangential to these – I basically want the developed to world to associate its wealth with global responsibility. It’s playing with symbols and framing, again, working on the hidden level of culture-as-intuited. Such transitions are hard, but by no means impossible, to engineer. It is extremely unlikely that this disaster will lead to this kind of meaning-transition as a single revolution, but such changes rarely happen as a single moment of revolution anyway. If this seeds the relationship
between wealth and responsibility still deeper, all the better.
Additionally, it is precisely because of the act-of-god nature of the event that we can hope for such an idea to take deeper root. There are no political actors to blame, and thus no spin that absolves us of responsibility. All there is, is deprivation and need, and our wealth. It is a simple equation, and all the more powerful for it. The re-emergence of the Bam earthquake into general discourse is another helpful sign.
(Of course, talking about culture change is only one level of what’s at issue, and we aren’t going to get very far just sitting back waiting for deep cultural change to solve all our problems. )
Karen finishes on a question – “what DOES one do to address poverty?”
I suspect that was a rhetorical question 🙂 I’ll throw out part of an answer anyway. I consider poverty to be the outcome of a number of factors, but principally the exploitation of the free-market system by economic hyperpowers, with all the structural consequences that follow. As long as corporate power is largely untamed in a global economy, there will be poverty.
Hmm. Can it be said that the first world is outsourcing its poverty and exploitation to the third?