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?
4 thoughts on “Dodging Trees”
Comments are closed.
I’ll make a comment on the politics of aid and reconstruction over on my LiveJournal within a few days, so I’ll leave that issue for now.
But Morgue asks:
“Who is this Brooke Fraser woman that opens things up?”
Believe it or not, she’s the daughter of All Black Bernie Fraser. She’s also a beautifully talent (very) young singer songwriter. Who, I think, will only improve as she works the Joni Mitchell out of her piano…
“Have Sparklehorse […] broken mainstream?”
I presume you’re meaning Goldenhorse, rather than Mark Linkous’s alternative/country Virginian band Sparklehorse.
Yeah, Goldenhorse have broken through to the mainstream (as much as any NZ band can do). I guess a sure sign is that their songs are appearing on t.v. commercials…
“And how on earth is the Carly Binding single quite good actually?”
She played Indigo last year, don’tchaknow. Which was quite a bizzare billing… But, yeah, she makes good music in a nice “adult-pop” sorta way.
Jo Cotton has gone on to become a very giften comedian too…
goldenhorse, yes. d’oh!
thankee for the answering.
Driving? You ain’t done owt till yer dodging the falling branches, in gale-force sidewinds, on a towpath by a medium-sized river, on a bicycle. Grr!
Morgue writes a partial answer to pverty in the following:
“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.”
It’s just not that simple. And agani you are looking at it only from a western ponit of view. Poverty is much more complicated. There are several ponits to make here:
1. Poverty existed long before free market economies and hyper capitalism did. There have been poor people as long as wealth has been measured in *any* way The Masai tribesman with only two cows is poor compared to the Masai tribesman who has 10, and is treated as such in his society. Perhaps yuo could say that capitalism shifts the focus of povery (i.e. your uotsourcing comment, but even this uis dubiuos). There are still plenty of poor in wealthy nations. Sure, absolutely speaking they are rich compared to the poor in thrid world nations, but they are still, relatively speaking, poor.
2. In the east, particularly here in India, poverty is embedded in culture and religion. If you are poor here in India then the way you improve things for you next life is not by trying to escape your poverty, it’s by accepting it and ivnig stoically under the cuircumstances, then maybe ni the next life you’ll be better off. Furthermore if you are born poor(especially nito a poor caste) and somehow make a fortune (extremely unlikely) all the rich people will still treat you like a pauper. Poverty is socially determined, not materially determined. You can do all you want in the west to make rich people responsible but that will do little to allieviate the intense poverty here. Why?
Because the rich people are the adminsitrators to adminster funds for poverty allieviation and they have no reason not to divert the funds to themselves to make themselves richer. Relgiously and culturally the poor are there *to be* exploited. That is their contribution to society.
And westerners are almost universally despised when they give handouts. People even refuse to take them because they the westerners as faunting their imperialism over them. Here in India there is no such thing as real charity. If you give soemthign to smoeone you expect something in return. So when westerners offer to give things to people here everyone is looknig for the way that they will be asked to payback by the westerners. As suc, they refuse the handouts as it’s better to be poor and Indian than well off and owe yourself to a westerner.
The only charities that really work are the indeigenuos christian ones, and even then it’s really only the indigenous indian christians and muslims who have significant moral imperitives not to steal the carity money. And even they do at times because they are human and get tempted. But much less so that Hindu or secular charities.
3. To a greater or lesser extent this attitudeof your position in society being determined occurs troughout India and Asia. There are obvious exceptions (Japan,Korea), but most of the people in Asia simply live with poverty because they must. I am told that Africa is somewhat like this as well, but less so. It is an utterly alien to westerners as we have this crazy idea that people are self determining (despite intest post modern and secular humanist philosophy would argue against this).
It is this attitude that you have to transform, otherwise the wealth will simply be reistributed in the west making the gap between wast and west wider.
Unfortunately I can’t see anyway to deal with this in Idian apart from the wholesale rejection of the relgion, and the culture built upon it, as it is written into the most fundamental relgious documents of the society, and the society and culture are totally based on that religion.