From the air, it’s easier to spot wealth than poverty. Climbing out of Cape Town International Airport the informal settlements soon become a blur but the private developments remain in crisp focus, their pristine loops of asphalt standing out like Nazca lines, the bulk of their road-straddling gatehouses unmissable and their clustered tricolours of lawn, pool and villa conspicuous against the dun landscape.
Later, descending into Johannesburg in darkness, the city lights reveal the same pattern: random, dull and fuzzy in the shack districts but bright and purposeful in the secure enclaves. The British euphemistically call these developments “gated communities” but South African developers use the more straightforward “security estate”.
In one such as these, near Pretoria to the north, Oscar Pistorius felt safe enough behind high walls, razor wire, attack dogs and armed guards to sleep with the patio doors open (albeit with a gun under his bed and a cricket bat behind the bathroom door).
Pistorius lived on the Silver Woods Country Estate (shown in the aerial image above) – a “prestigious security estate” of 290 homes and still-vacant building plots set amid similar districts with names like Willow Acres and Faerie Glen. This still-growing Securicor suburb will eventually house 25,000 people.
The sleeping and bathing quarters at Casa Pistorius are now among the most familiar interior layouts of all time thanks to numerous media reconstructions of the night he shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
Yet the urban design of Silver Woods has hardly been discussed, even though its paranoia-driven features might provide the only mitigating circumstances in Pistorius’ favour: people who live in these places clearly fear for their lives.
Like most security estates, Silver Woods has a single point of entry and departure: a covered, manned and barriered gateway, bristling with CCTV and biometric scanners and resembling a sub-tropical Checkpoint Charlie. It is connected to the public domain but not of it.
The estate is “enclosed with a solid, electrified security wall” and is planned “in such a way that it has the feel of a village.” All building work is subject to “a strict architectural and aesthetics specification”.
Yet this is a village with no facilities on offer beyond raw security: no stores, playgrounds, bars or cafes. Residents have to journey by car for all their daily needs, or get them delivered. Hinting perhaps at the fearful priorities of its residents, the estate’s website boasts of its proximity to hospitals and medical clinics first of all, before listing the distance to local schools and shops. The location of the nearest police station is not regarded as a benefit worth mentioning.
While security estates respond to violent crime they do not solve it. Despite its precautions Silver Woods has suffered “incidents” in the past. Beneath a brief statement on its website from the Silver Woods management commiserating on the Valentine’s Day tragedy a woman called Colleen has commented: “We moved to the UK to avoid the crime. While living in a ‘secure’ suburb in Johannesburg we experienced many an incident with regards safety, burglary etc. Our children were victims of hijacking attempts as well.”
Developments like Silver Woods attract universal disdain from architectural writers and urbanists. They are seen as a betrayal of civilised values and an abandonment of design’s potential to benignly regulate behaviour in the urban environment. Former Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey called gated communities a “social ill” and wrote: “It’s time we opened our gates, and to shoo the fear away as we do.”
But they are becoming the default setting in towns and cities around the world – and not only for the wealthy. In the USA, the number of homes in developments secured by walls or fences grew 53 percent between 2001 and 2009 and now account for ten percent of all occupied homes.
Anna Minton’s 2009 book Ground Control documented the creeping privatisation of urban space in the UK and the USA but the book predates news of entire private cities being built in Guatemala and Honduras.
She updated the book in 2012 to include a new chapter on the London Olympic Park, which she described as “a divided landscape of privately owned, disconnected, high security gated enclaves side by side with enclaves of poverty which remain untouched by the wealth around them”. This, she writes, creates “a climate of fear and growing mistrust between people, which together with the undemocratic nature of these new private places, erodes civil society.” This paragraph makes Stratford sound like Johannesburg, which it most definitely is not.
I once found myself accidentally living in a gated community in London and the experience taught me of its benefits. Between signing the contract and moving into the flat the developer erected a high, spike-topped fence, electronic gates and unmissable CCTV arrays.
I was furious, until I found out that the other residents had demanded the improvements after numerous muggings in the dark cul-de-sac between the converted warehouses of our development. The over-conspicuous security measures caused mild resentment among neighbours on the other side of the fence but opportunistic crime ended immediately. We came to appreciate our ugly guardians. They were needed to overcome a fundamental design flaw – the spatially indefensible arrangement of the converted industrial buildings.
But even where there is no razor wire or guard, much of life takes place in monitored environments that require entry credentials. Concierged apartment blocks are types of security estates, arranged vertically rather than horizontally. Office buildings with swipe-card entrance systems are security estates.
The Tube and rail networks are security estates, as is a ticketed festival or conference (entry to the Design Indaba conference I was attending in Cape Town was via fingerprint scanner). Large private developments like Canary Wharf are gateless, city district-sized security estates.
What we think of as the public realm has in many places shrunk to a leaf skeleton of arteries that connect non-public realms. But does it really matter whether the land beneath your feet is owned by the state or by a corporation? And if the former is unable to guarantee the safety of its citizens, is it not understandable that they turn to the latter? – Marcus Fairs www.dezeen.com
Every time I write about Tony Blair, I tell myself that it will be the last time. But then I find myself coming back, time and again, like a dog to its vomit. It isn’t because Blair is so interesting in himself.
On the contrary, the more he appears in the media and utters his banal and narcissistic pronouncements, the more he reminds me of a cross between the gardener Chance in Being There and Bismarck’s depiction of Napoleon III as a ‘sphinx without a riddle.’
For me Blair’s interest, such as it is, derives from his political role, and particularly his role in the Iraq war and a dangerous and fervid promoter of the new 21st century militarism.
Last week, there was a sharp and disturbing article by Chris Doyle , the director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), which drew attention to an aspect of the Blair phenomenon that I have always found striking and inexplicable; the often breathtaking shallowness that underpins so many of his judgements and positions – particularly when they have anything to do with the Middle East.
Doyle’s piece contains the following anecdote:
‘Shortly after Tony Blair set up shop as the Quartet Representative in the luxurious American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem he met a group of former Parliamentary colleagues. To the jangle of jaws dropping on the floor, he confessed that before he had come out there, he had not realised just how little he really understood about the Israel-Palestine conflict as Prime Minister. The reality on the ground was so much worse then he had ever imagined.’
This is the man who the ‘Quartet’ sent to bring peace to the Middle East, who once told the Labour Party Conference in 2001 of his determination to ‘re-order’ the post-9/11 world ‘from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan’.
This is not the first time Blair has made grandiose pronouncements on subjects he knows nothing about. In his book on the Iraq war, the Guardian journalist Jonathan Steele once described how Blair met three academic experts on Iraq at 10 Downing Street during the build-up to the Iraq war to discuss what might happen after the invasion.
You might think that consulting established experts such as Toby Dodge, Charles Tripp and George Joffe when you are about to go to war was the mark of a wise politician, willing to recognize the gaps in his own knowledge and keen to remedy them through consultation.
According to Steele, the three academics each made short presentations in an attempt to give Blair some insight into the complexities of Iraqi society and politics and the possible consequences of military action, but the would-be liberator was not interested in such trivia.
Charles Tripp told Steele that Blair ‘wasn’t focussed. I felt he wanted us to reinforce his gut instinct that Saddam was a monster. It was a weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervour.’
Tripp later recalled how
‘At one point, Blair said something like: “Isn’t Saddam Hussein uniquely evil?”There was a muttering from this group of 21st-century academics as if to say: “What’s this man on about?” I thought, no, Saddam’s not unique, and as for evil, well, that’s his statecraft!’
George Joffe told Steele that he came away with the impression of ‘someone with a very shallow mind, who’s not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc’.
Once again, the most disturbing aspect of Blair’s ignorance is not just what it says about Blair himself. Since 2008 Blair has been giving a course at Yale University on ‘faith and globalisation’; governments pay millions for his advice; he picks up vast fees for speaking engagements to elite gatherings across the world continues to be regarded by the British and American media as the go-to man on anything to do with the Middle East; banks pay him huge salaries as a consultant.
Despite his disastrous record in Iraq, he continues to be taken seriously when he calls for new ‘interventions’ in Syria and Iran; when Newsnight commemorated the Iraq anniversary, he was given a twenty-minute respectful interview by Kirsty Walk; both Cameron and Miliband treat him like some wise elder statesman; according to Doyle ‘One politician visiting the US State department last year came away stunned at the high regard Blair was held in.’
All this for a man who again and again has demonstrated that he has no idea what he is talking about, whose record in Iraq – leaving aside the question of the criminality of the war – is one of gross negligence and recklessness. Yet the political and media elites continue to consider him an expert and an authority, as though nothing ever happened.
All of which suggests that Blair’s cliches and ill-informed assumptions and delusions about terrorism, Islam, the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are actually useful in some way – at least to some people and institutions, and that the reputation that he has acquired in certain circles was not achieved in spite of his shallowness and ignorance – but because of it. – Matt Carr
For ages, the country today known as South Africa was no more than a loose band of separate communities. The Nguni tribes, which settled on the Southern tip of Africa around the 10th century, neither considered themselves a single nation, nor did they consider the Khoisan people already inhibiting the area part of their collective, writes Brad Cibane in the Mail&Guardian.
The Dutch settlers, who committed to transforming the Cape from a refreshment station to a settlement in the 1670s, also did not envision forming a nation with the Khoisan or the Nguni tribes. The same is apparent for the English colonists who settled in the 1820s.
The settlers and the colonists divided the country among themselves into four separate states: the Colony of Natal, the Cape Colony and the Boer Republic (Orange Free State and Transvaal). The situation persisted until the early 1900s when, after a bloody war, the Volksraad and the British embarked on negotiations, which culminated in the South African Union Act of 1909. On May 31 1910 the Union of South Africa was formed as a British dominion.
The new Union of South Africa excluded non-Europeans from its constitutional structures. The exclusion awoke the natives to the reality of their status, and drew them closer together. The loose band of tribes united to speak in unison when the South African Natives Congress was transformed into the African National Congress in 1912.
The unjust marginalisation of natives (Ngunis and Khoisan) was codified in 1913 when the government enacted a law reserving more than 87% of land for the exclusive use of whites. The government coveted ultimately to dispel all non-Europeans, and to create a “Little Europe” in Africa.
The vision started to take shape in 1948 when the National Party came into power. The National Party’s policy of “separate developments” (or “apartheid”) anaesthetised the distinction between the English and the Afrikaners. Government rhetoric opted instead for the more generic term “Europeans”. It sought to unite all whites under the “European” banner. South Africa was for (white) Europeans.
The biggest hurdle that faced the new united nation was that European South Africa and black South Africa were very different. Thabo Mbeki characterised the differences vividly in his “two nations” speech. Thus, the task of building a single nation was prodigious and it befell not just the new “black government” but all South Africans.
The characteristic terms “black” and “European” were discarded, leaving a single South Africa occupied by Africans of all races. White South Africans who had been beneficiaries of a system that pillaged and oppressed on their behalf relinquished their “European” status and citizenship. Those aggrieved by the demolition of “Little Europe” packed their bags and headed elsewhere.
It appears, however, that there are citizens of “Little Europe” (or European-South Africans) remaining in South Africa today. The problem with these people is that they do not consider themselves South African (other than “Little Europeans”). They harbour the most regressive elements.
The corollary of a South African citizenship is that it entails not just the right to co-exist with other South Africans, but also the concomitant obligations of contributing to the betterment of the nation. Citizenship in the new South Africa entails discarding racial and cultural prejudices. For the citizens of former “Little Europe”, a citizenship in the new South African also entails giving up a privilege built on many years of domination.
The nuisance with citizens of “Little Europe” currently inhibiting South Africa is that they sit elevated on a platform of perceived betterness. They harp and lash harshly at government without rolling up their own sleeves to fight the good fight. They speak with nostalgia about the good old days when their citizenship did not entail obligations towards black folk. They speak of the black inclination towards crime but make no recognition of the root causes (poverty, illiteracy and inequality).
An apt example of a citizen of “Little Europe” is a (white) man who tells foreign media that the (“black”) government is responsible for his (white) son shooting his (white) girlfriend. He makes no mention of the gun culture in which he raised his son.
South Africa faces Herculean challenges and all South Africans must battle together. The first step toward winning the battle is taking ownership of all problems by all South Africans, black or white, rich or poor. Poverty, crime and and iliteracy should concern all residents the country with similar urgency.
South Africa belongs to South Africans, citizens of “Little Europe” must leave. “Little Europe” no longer exists.
Cibane, however, likes Afrikaans. He says it’s is a beautiful language, even though it’s rather heavy. People are often curious about the difference between Afrikaans and Dutch. Except for the semantic difference, Afrikaans is much lighter, although the accent is rather heavy. Unfortunately, Afrikaans is burdened by the Soweto uprising, Skhothens, Captonian thugs and, well, the National Party.
Many young South Africans refuse to speak the language. But, if you’ve seen 7de Laan, you’ll know that it is not impossible to make love to the South African variant of Dutch.
For a non-speaker, Afrikaans gets a plus because it is exotic. Many none speaker, who at least understand the language, will appreciate hearing, “jy is pragtig” instead of “you are beautiful.”
Cibane thinks Afrikaans does not handle vulgarity well, however.
There’s a biological explanation for the reason why women talk more than men. Scientists have discovered a protein that’s found in higher concentrations in the brains of women.
You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there’s a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a “language protein” in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.
Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven’t been able to biologically explain why this is the case.
Now, they can. New findings conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and published in The Journal of Neuroscience show that a certain protein may be the culprit.
In 2001, a gene called FOXP2 appeared to be essential for the production of speech. In order to test this protein, the team, led by J. Michael Bowers and Margaret McCarthy, looked at young rat pups. These animals emit cries in the ultrasonic range when separated from their mothers. The team recorded the cries over five minutes in groups of 4-day-old male and female rats that had been separated from their mothers. They found that male pups had up to twice as much of the protein FOXP2 in regions of the brain known to be involved in vocalization–perhaps an unsurprising finding since researchers noted that males made twice as many cries as females.
Next, the researchers wanted to test their findings in humans. They conducted a small study on human children aged four to five years who had died in accidents less than 24 hours previously. They then analyzed the amount of FOXP2 protein in the brains of these children. In the end, the researchers found 30 percent more FOXP2 protein in the brains of the girls.
The research shows that the protein, FOXP2, is a key molecule for communication in mammals. In fact, it could allow researchers to better understand other species that may or may not possess the protein, such as Neanderthals. With this new biological link, scientists could potentially trace back the evolutionary origin of speech.
That said, the research also gives a reason for why women tend to be better at small talk. – Science World Report
In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former chamber slave of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled “On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.” A dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who praised “the natural genius” of Africa, its “appreciation for learning,” and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs” and of “divine things.” Kraus placed Amo in a lineage that includes many North African Latin authors of antiquity, such as Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine.
Why have we chosen to go with Hume and Kant, rather than with the pre-racial conception of humanity?
In the following decade, the Scottish philosopher David Hume would write: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complection than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.”
Hume had not heard of Amo, that much is clear. But we can also detect a tremendous difference between Hume’s understanding of human capacities and that of Kraus: the author of Amo’s dedicatory letter doesn’t even consider the possibility of anchoring what individual human beings are capable of doing to something as arbitrary as “complection.” For Kraus, Amo represents a continent and its long and distinguished history; he does not represent a “race.”
Another two decades on, Immanuel Kant, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the modern period, would manage to let slip what is surely the greatest non-sequitur in the history of philosophy: describing a report of something seemingly intelligent that had once been said by an African, Kant dismisses it on the grounds that “this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”
Kraus, the rector of Wittenberg, had been expressing an understanding of the nature of human diversity that was, in 1734, already in decline, soon to be thoroughly drowned out by the fundamentally racist view of human populations as dividing into a fixed set of supposedly natural, species-like kinds. This is the view lazily echoed by Hume, Kant, and so many of their contemporaries.
In his lifetime, Amo was principally known as a legal theorist. His first publication, in 1729, which has since been lost (or, one might suspect, intentionally purged), was a jurisprudential treatise, “On the Right of Moors in Europe.” Here he argues, on the basis of a reading of Roman history and law, that in antiquity “the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed by the Roman Emperor” Justinian, and that “every one of them had to obtain a royal patent from him.” This meant, in Amo’s view, that African kingdoms were all recognized under Roman law, and therefore all Africans in Europe have the status of visiting royal subjects with a legal protection that precludes their enslavement.
Historically, this is highly implausible, since much of the continent of Africa was unknown to Europeans at the time of Justinian. Still, Amo’s understanding is remarkably different from, say, Kant’s account of global history, on which black Africans stood, from the very beginning and as if by definition, beyond the pale of history, and therefore led lives of no intrinsic value, lives that could only be given value through absorption into a global system dominated by Europe.
Scholars have been aware for a long time of the curious paradox of Enlightenment thought, that the supposedly universal aspiration to liberty, equality and fraternity in fact only operated within a very circumscribed universe. Equality was only ever conceived as equality among people presumed in advance to be equal, and if some person or group fell by definition outside of the circle of equality, then it was no failure to live up to this political ideal to treat them as unequal.
It would take explicitly counter-Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, to formulate anti-racist views of human diversity. In response to Kant and other contemporaries who were positively obsessed with finding a scientific explanation for the causes of black skin, Herder pointed out that there is nothing inherently more in need of explanation here than in the case of white skin: it is an analytic mistake to presume that whiteness amounts to the default setting, so to speak, of the human species.
The category of race continues to be deployed, not just by racists, but by anti-racists as well.
The question for us today is why we have chosen to stick with categories inherited from the 18th century, the century of the so-called Enlightenment, which witnessed the development of the slave trade into the very foundation of the global economy, and at the same time saw racial classifications congeal into pseudo-biological kinds, piggy-backing on the divisions folk science had always made across the natural world of plants and animals. Why, that is, have we chosen to go with Hume and Kant, rather than with the pre-racial conception of humanity espoused by Kraus, or the anti-racial picture that Herder offered in opposition to his contemporaries?
Many who are fully prepared to acknowledge that there are no significant natural differences between races nonetheless argue that there are certain respects in which it is worth retaining the concept of race: for instance in talking about issues like social inequality or access to health care. There is, they argue, a certain pragmatic utility in retaining it, even if they acknowledge that racial categories result from social and historical legacies, rather than being dictated by nature. In this respect “race” has turned out to be a very different sort of social construction than, say, “witch” or “lunatic.” While generally there is a presumption that to catch out some entity or category as socially constructed is at the same time to condemn it, many thinkers are prepared to simultaneously acknowledge both the non-naturalness of race as well as a certain pragmatic utility in retaining it.
Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that “negroid,” “caucasoid” and so on represent real natural kinds or categories. [1] For several decades it has been well established that there is as much genetic variation between two members of any supposed race, as between two members of supposedly distinct races. This is not to say that there are no real differences, some of which are externally observable, between different human populations. It is only to say, as Lawrence Hirschfeld wrote in his 1996 book, “Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds,” that “races as socially defined do not (even loosely) capture interesting clusters of these differences.”
Yet the category of race continues to be deployed in a vast number of contexts, and certainly not just by racists, but by ardent anti-racists as well, and by everyone in between. The history of race, then, is not like the history of, say, witches: a group that is shown not to exist and that accordingly proceeds to go away. Why is this?
Philosophers disagree. Anthony Appiah identifies himself as a racial skeptic to the extent that the biological categories to which racial terms refer have been shown not to exist. Yet at the same time he acknowledges that the adoption of “racial identities” may often be socially expedient, and even unavoidable, for members of perceived racial minorities. Ron Mallon has in turn distinguished between metaphysical views of race on the one hand, which make it out to describe really existent kinds, and normative views on the other, which take race to be useful in some way or other, but not real. Malon divides the latter into “eliminativist” and “conservationist” camps, supposing, variously, that the concept can only be put to bad uses, and must be got rid of, or that some of its uses are worth holding onto. On his scheme, one may very well coherently remain metaphysically anti-realist about race but still defend the conservation of the concept on normative grounds.
But given that we now know that the identity groups in modern multicultural states are plainly constituted on ethno-linguistic and cultural grounds, rather than on biological-essential grounds, it remains unclear why we should not allow a concept such as “culture” or “ethnie” to do the semantic work for us that until now we have allowed the historically tainted and misleading concept of “race” to do. We have alternative ways of speaking of human diversity available to us, some of which are on vivid display in Amo’s early life and work, and which focus on rather more interesting features of different human groups than their superficial phenotypic traits.
It is American culture that is principally responsible for the perpetuation of the concept of race well after its loss of scientific respectability by the mid-20th century. Even the most well-meaning attempts to grapple with the persistence of inequality between “blacks” and “whites” in American society take it for granted at the outset that racial categories adequately capture the relevant differences under investigation (see, for example: Thomas B. Edsall’s recent column, “The Persistence of Racial Resentment“) . This may have something to do with the fact that the two broad cultural-historical groupings of people in this country, which we call “white” and “black” and which have been constituted through the complicated histories of slavery, immigration, assimilation, and exclusion, tend at their extremes to correlate with noticeably different phenotypic traits.
An African-American is likely to look more different from an American of exclusively European descent than, say, an Orthodox Serb is likely to look from a Bosnian Muslim. This creates the illusion that it is the phenotypic difference that is causing the perception of cultural-historical distinctness, along with the injustice and inequality that has gone along with this distinctness. This also creates the illusion of American uniqueness: that our history of ethnic conflict cannot be understood comparatively or in a global context, because it, unlike conflict between Serbs and Bosnian Muslims or between Tutsi and Hutu, is supposedly based on “race” rather than history, politics, and culture. But where people are living with a different historical legacy, as in much of European history prior to the high modern period hailed in by Hume and Kant, the supposedly manifest phenotypic differences between “blacks” and “whites” can easily recede into the background as irrelevant.
Amo did not meet a happy end in Germany. His original manumission and education appear to have been a strategy on the part of Duke Anton Ulrich to impress Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, who had recently adopted his own chamber slave, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, as his own son. Gannibal would go on to a career as a brilliant engineer, military strategist, and politician; Amo, for his part, would be largely abandoned by his sponsors when the geopolitical winds shifted, and Russia fell off the duke’s list of priorities.
For a while the African philosopher eked out a living as a tutor in Jena and Wittenberg, and in 1747, after being made the butt of a libelous broadside accusing him of falling in love with a woman beyond his station, he returned to West Africa in disgrace. A French seafarer, David-Henri Gallandat, finds him there a few years later, and writes of meeting a man who “was very learned in astrology and astronomy, and was a great philosopher. At that time he was around 50 years old… He had a brother who was a slave in the colony of Suriname.”
The hopefulness of the 1734 dissertation was now long behind him. It is not known when Amo died, or under what circumstances. What we can say for certain is that he would not spend his final years as a successor to Augustine and Terence, but rather in the degraded position where someone like Kant supposed he belonged: outside of history, philosophically disenfranchised and entirely defined by something as trivial as skin color.
As long as we go on speaking as if racial categories captured something real about human diversity, we are allowing the 18th-century legacy of Kant and Hume, which was never really anything more than an ad hoc rationalization of slavery, to define our terms for us. We are turning our back on the legacy of Anton Wilhelm Amo, and of his European contemporaries who were prepared to judge him on his merits.
FOOTNOTES
[1] This is not to deny that there are limited contexts in which self-reporting of “racial” identity may be informative in a local or regional context. It is indeed helpful for a doctor to know, within the context of the American health-care system, the “race” of a patient. What it does mean to say that race is no longer a legitimate scientific category is that this limited, contextual helpfulness tells us nothing about a natural kind or real subdivision of the human species. The category of “race” can be useful in a local, medical context to the extent that it often correlates with other, useful information about tendencies within a given population. But this population need not be conceptualized in terms of race. Race is a dummy variable here, but not of interest as such.
Justin E. H. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.This piece appeared in the New York Times
Science may have confirmed our worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making transnational corporations more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to many. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).
“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world’s economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”
“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system’s behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, “is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups”. Or as Braha puts it: “The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy.”
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning “Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…” was misattributed.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
Over the past half century or so the United States has pursued two main but disconnected objectives in West Asia and North Africa: on the one hand, Americans have sought strategic and economic advantage in the Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, and Egypt; on the other, support for the consolidation of the Jewish settler state in Palestine. These two objectives of U.S. policy in the Middle East have consistently taken precedence over the frequently professed American preference for democracy.
These objectives are politically contradictory. They also draw their rationales from distinct moral universes. U.S. relations with the Arab countries and Iran have been grounded almost entirely in unsentimental calculations of interest. The American relationship with Israel, by contrast, has rested almost entirely on religious and emotional bonds. This disconnect has precluded any grand strategy.
Rather than seek an integrated policy framework, America has balanced the contradictions between the imperatives of its domestic politics and its interests. For many years, Washington succeeded in having its waffle in the Middle East and eating it too – avoiding having to choose between competing objectives. With wiser U.S. policies and more judicious responses to them by Arabs and Israelis, Arab-Israeli reconciliation might by now have obviated the ultimate necessity for America to prioritize its purposes in the region. But the situation has evolved to the point that choice is becoming almost impossible to avoid.The Middle East matters. It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe converge. In addition to harboring the greater part of the world’s conventionally recoverable energy supplies, it is a key passageway between Asia and Europe. No nation can hope to project its power throughout the globe without access to and through the Middle East. Nor can any ignore the role of the Persian Gulf countries in fueling the world’s armed forces, powering its economies, and setting its energy prices. This is why the United States has acted consistently to maintain a position of preeminent influence in the Middle East and to deny to any strategically hostile nation or coalition of nations the opportunity to contest its politico-military dominance of the region.The American pursuit of access, transit, and strategic denial has made the building of strategic partnerships with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt a major focus of U.S. policy. The partnership with Iran broke down over three decades ago. It has been succeeded by antagonism, low-intensity conflict, and the near constant threat of war. The U.S. relationships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now evolving in uncertain directions. Arab governments have learned the hard way that they must defer to public opinion. This opinion is increasingly Islamist. Meanwhile, popular antipathies to the widening American war on Islamism are deepening. These factors alone make it unlikely that relations with the United States can retain their centrality for Cairo and Riyadh much longer.
The definitive failure of the decades-long American-sponsored “peace process” between Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs adds greatly to the uncertainty. Whether it yielded peace or not, the “peace process” made the United States the apparently indispensable partner for both Israel and the Arabs. It served dual political purposes. It enabled Arab governments to persuade their publics that maintaining good relations with the United States did not imply selling out Arab or Islamic interests in Palestine, and it supported the U.S. strategic objective of achieving acceptance for a Jewish state by the other states and peoples of the Middle East. Washington’s abandonment of this diplomacy was a boon to Israeli territorial expansion but a disaster for American influence in the region, including in Israel.
Over the years, America protected Israel from international rebuke and punishment. Its stated purpose was the preservation of prospects for a negotiated “two-state solution” that could bring security and peace to Israelis and Palestinians alike. A decade ago, every member of both the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation endorsed this objective and pledged normalization with Israel if Israeli-Palestinian negotiations succeeded. In response, Israel spun out its talks with the Palestinians while working hard to preclude their self-determination. It has now succeeded in doing so.
There has been no American-led peace process worthy of the name for nearly two decades. There is no prospect of such a process resuming. No one in the international community now accepts the pretense of a “peace process” as an excuse for American protection of Israel. Eleven years on, the Arab and Islamic peace offer has exceeded its shelf life. On the Israel-Palestine issue, American diplomacy has been running on fumes for some time. It is now totally out of gas and universally perceived to be going nowhere.
Sadly, barring fundamental changes in Israeli politics, policies, and behavior, the longstanding American strategic objective of achieving acceptance for the state of Israel to stabilize the region where British colonialism and Jewish nationalism implanted it is now infeasible. In practice, the United States has abandoned the effort. U.S. policy currently consists of ad hoc actions to fortify Israel against Palestinian resistance and military threats from its neighbors, while shielding it from increasingly adverse international reaction to its worsening deportment. In essence, the United States now has no objective with respect to Israel beyond sheltering it from the need to deal with the unpalatable realities its own choices have created.
The key to regional acknowledgment of Israel as a legitimate part of the Middle East was the “two-state solution.” The Camp David accords laid out a program for Palestinian self-determination and Israeli withdrawal from the territories it had seized and occupied in 1967. Israel has had more than forty-five years to trade land for peace, implementing its Camp David commitments and complying with international law. It has consistently demonstrated that it craves land more than peace, international reputation, good will, or legitimacy. As a result, Israel remains isolated from its neighbors, with no prospect of reversing this. It is now rapidly forfeiting international acceptability. There is nothing the United States can do to cure either situation despite the adverse consequences of both for American standing in the region and the world.
In the seventeenth century, English settlers in America found inspiration for a theology of ethnic cleansing and racism in the Old Testament. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Jewish settlers in Palestine have invoked the same scripture to craft a parallel theology. The increasingly blatant racism and Islamophobia of Israeli politics, the kafkaesque tyranny of Israel’s checkpoint army in the occupied territories, and Israel’s cruel and unusual collective punishment of Gaza have bred hateful resentment of the Jewish state in its region and throughout the Muslim world. One has to look to north Korea to find another polity so detested and distrusted by its neighbors and with so few supporters among the world’s great powers.
The United States has affirmed that, regardless of how Israel behaves, it will allow no political distance between itself and the Jewish state. In the eyes of the world there is none. Israel’s ill repute corrodes U.S. prestige and credibility not just in the Middle East but in the world at large.
Israel does not seem to care what its neighbors or the world think of it. Despite its geographical location, it prefers to see itself as its neighbors do: as a Hebrew-speaking politico-economic extension of Europe rather than part of the Middle East. Nor does Israel appear concerned about the extent to which its policies have undermined America’s ability to protect it from concerted international punishment for its actions. The United States and Israel’s handful of other international supporters continue to have strong domestic political reasons to stand by it. Yet they are far less likely to be able to hold back the global movement to ostracize Israel than in the case of apartheid South Africa. America may “have Israel’s back,” but – on this – no one now has America’s back.
For a considerable time to come, Israel can rely on its US-provided “qualitative edge” to sustain its military hegemony over others in its region. But, as the “crusader states” established and sustained by previous Western interventions in the region illustrate, such supremacy – especially when dependent on external support – is inevitably ephemeral – and those who live exclusively by the sword are more likely than others to perish by it. Meanwhile, as the struggle for Palestinian Arab rights becomes a struggle for human and civil rights within the single sovereignty that Israel has de facto imposed on Palestine, Israel’s internal evolution is rapidly alienating Jews of conscience both there and abroad. Israelis do not have to live in Palestine; they can and do increasingly withdraw from it to live in diaspora. Jews outside contemporary Israel are coming to see it less as a sanctuary or guarantor of Jewish security and well-being than as a menace to both.
The United States has made an enormous commitment to the success of the Jewish state. Yet it has no strategy to cope with the tragic existential challenges Zionist hubris and overweening territorial ambition have now forged for Israel. The hammerlock the Israeli right has on American discourse about the Middle East assures that, despite the huge U.S. political and economic investment in Israel, Washington will not discuss or develop effective policy options for sustaining the Jewish state over the long term. The outlook is therefore for continuing deterioration in Israel’s international moral standing and the concomitant isolation of the United States in the region and around the globe.
This brings me back to the other main objective of U.S. policy in the Middle East: the nurturing of strategic partnerships with the largest and most influential Muslim states in the region. Iran and Syria have proven to be lost causes in this regard. Iraq is now more aligned with them than with America. Turkey is still an important U.S. ally on many matters but, with the exception of some aspects of relations with Syria, Ankara is following policies toward the Middle East that are almost entirely uncoordinated with those of the United States. The two pillars of the U.S. position in the Middle East beyond Israel are Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Neither can now be taken for granted.
Egypt is in the midst of a transition from American-aligned autocracy to self-determination under Islamist populism. It is not clear what sort of domestic political order this populism will shape but it seems certain that future Egyptian governments will listen less to the United States and demand more of Israel. The diversion to Egypt of a portion of the U.S. government’s generous annual subsidies to Israel long sufficed to secure Cairo’s acquiescence in the Camp David framework. This enabled Israel to pretend that it had achieved a measure of acceptance among its Arab neighbors despite its default on its obligations to the Palestinians and its escalating mistreatment of them. More importantly, it gave Israel the strategic security from Egyptian attack it had been unable to obtain by force of arms.
Populist Egypt’s passivity is very unlikely to be procurable on similar terms. Enough has changed to put the Camp David framework at severe risk. (This is true for Jordan as well. Jordan made peace with Israel in response to the Oslo accords, which the ruling right-wing in Israel systematically undermined and finally undid.)
Since 1979, the U.S. relationship with Israel has been both a raison d’être and essential underpinning for U.S.-Egyptian cooperation. It is now reemerging as a point of division, irritation, and contention between Americans and Egyptians. Egypt is once again an independent Arab actor in the affairs of its region, including Israel and Iran. It is no longer a reliable agent of American influence. It reacts to Israeli actions and policies calculatedly, with much less deference to U.S. views than in the past.
Islamist parties now dominate Egyptian politics as they do politics in Tunisia and among Palestinians. It is very unlikely that post-Assad Syria will be democratic but it is virtually certain that it will be Salafist. The so-called Arab awakening has turned out really to be a Salafist awakening. There is a struggle for the soul of Islam underway between Takfiri Salafists and conservative modernizers. In the traditionally Islamist states of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, this struggle is being won by the forces of tolerance, reform, and opening up. Elsewhere, as in Egypt, the outcome remains in doubt, but nowhere are Muslim conservatives, still less Salafists, at ease with expansionist Zionism or the sort of aggressive anti-Islamism that the United States has institutionalized in its “drone wars.”
In the wake of Washington’s abandonment of the effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the impact of 9//11, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the transformation of a punitive raid in Afghanistan into a long-term attempt to preclude an Islamist regime there, the U.S. – Saudi relationship, once an example of broad-based strategic partnership, has markedly weakened. American Islamophobia has erased much of the previous mutual regard between the two countries. The United States continues to be the ultimate guarantor of the Saudi state against intervention from foreign enemies other than Israel. There is no alternative to America in this role. Nor, even when it regains energy self-sufficiency, will the United States be able to ignore Saudi Arabia’s decisive influence on global energy supplies and prices. But U.S. – Saudi cooperation is no longer instinctual and automatic. It has become cynically transactional, with cooperation taking place on a case-by-case basis as specific interests dictate.
Policy convergence between Washington and Riyadh continues but sometimes conceals major differences. This is clearly the case with Iran, where Washington’s interest in non-proliferation and desire to preserve Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East overlap but do not coincide with Riyadh’s concerns. If Tehran does go nuclear, Saudi-American disharmony will be glaringly apparent in very short order . Similarly, in Syria, the common desire of Americans and Saudis to see Syrians overthrow the Assad government masks very different visions about what sort of regime should succeed it and what the stance of that regime should be toward Israel, Lebanon, or Iraq.
The bottom line is this. U.S. policies of unconditional support for Israel, opposition to Islamism, and the use of drones to slaughter suspected Islamist militants and their families and friends have created an atmosphere that precludes broad strategic partnerships with major Arab and Muslim countries, though it does not yet preclude limited cooperation for limited purposes. The acceptance of Israel as a legitimate presence in the Middle East cannot now be achieved without basic changes in Israeli attitudes and behavior that are not in the offing.
U.S. policies designed, respectively, to pursue strategic partnerships with Arab and Muslim powers and to secure the state of Israel have each separately failed. The Middle East itself is in flux. America’s interests in the region now demand fundamental rethinking, not just of U.S. policies, but of the strategic objectives those policies should be designed to achieve.
Chas Freeman, retired U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, spokeat the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council 16 January 2013.
The British charity Oxfam recently released an updated version of the Book of Lamentations. Something about how “the relentless focus on ongoing problems at the expense of a more nuanced portrait of [Africa], is obscuring the progress that is being made towards a more secure and prosperous future.”
That’s chief executive Barbara Stocking, as quoted by the BBC. Apparently the charity’s been doing some polling recently (in the UK), and coming up with interesting results. In one poll half of the respondents confessed that Africa conjured for them images of hunger, famine and poverty. In another poll, almost half of the 2,000 respondents thought Africa’s biggest challenge was hunger. Three out of four were suffering from ‘Africa-fatigue’ – that debilitating condition that afflicts well-meaning foreign philanthropists exposed to an endless stream of images of suffering and torment originating from the dark continent.
A distressed Oxfam has since gone ahead to launch its latest Africa campaign, in a desperate bid to shift the world’s attention from African Hunger, to African-Hunger-Backdropped-By-Stunning-African-Landscapes.
That’s, in a nutshell, the story. It left me a tad puzzled. A w-t-f puzzlement. As in: is Oxfam for real? Let’s even forget, for a moment, that Oxfam has probably done far more than any other organisation in propagating these images. Let’s focus on something else that struck me about the story: the way blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of the Images.
Oxfam appears to be saying: Put All The Blame On The Images. Not the people hanging on stubbornly to those images in the face of alternative evidence. Am I alone in thinking Oxfam’s lamentations suggest a British public that is at the mercy of what they are fed. Helpless Brits who somehow cannot – despite all their efforts – rise beyond the bombardment of pity-evoking images of Africa,
One might as well rephrase Dame Stocking as follows: “Oh poor helpless people of Britain, all they’re being fed is harrowing, unhelpful images of Africa. We need to stop that. We need to feed them something different. We need to change their diet.”
In whose interest?
The whole set-up suggests that Britain is now guilty of the sort of intellectual laziness once associated (almost solely) with America (er, sorry). Clearly the surveys say far more about the British mind than they do about the African condition. Now we know, courtesy of Oxfam, that all along we’ve been depending on a bunch of wallet-opening puppets to deliver us from ourselves.
Now the puppets are growing weary, the strings fraying, the wallet-opening mechanisms aging. Now we have to refurbish the puppets, oil the creaking joints with a new, more positive type of ‘communication’. Landscapes, not Hunger!
A mindset that elevates what the British public thinks of Africa, over and above contemporary reality, and that suggests it is in Africa’s interest for that thinking to change, is not only faulty but dangerous as well.
To put it less mildly, who – apart from Oxfam, obviously – really cares, in 2013, what the British public thinks about a continent from which they fled in varying stages of undress? What’s that proverb about crying more than the bereaved? In the 21st century are people still allowed to be zombies gobbling up everything they’re fed by a collaboration of powerful media and NGOs?
I seriously doubt that it is in Africa’s interest for Brits to change their perception of Africa. Instead I think it is totally in Britain’s interests to change its perceptions of Africa. That problem, is Britain’s, and no one else’s. If the Brits insists on seeing Africa primarily through the lens of philanthropic intervention, good for them.
Let them stay thinking that way; let Oxfam, with its its Africa-emblazoned super-hero capes, stay convincing itself that it has a duty to alter global perceptions of Africa, while the Russians and Chinese – and diaspora Africans, who must have once assumed they’d left the continent for good – boldly head out to the continent to engage in potentially more useful ways.
Alternative images
Granted that those starving-children-and-dying-mothers images form a sizable part of African exports to the west. There may be little we can do about that, as long as we have a west obsessed with delivering Africa from itself. But what about the the tens of thousands of kwashiorkor-free, English-speaking, pocket-money-receiving African students who flock to the UK annually, to study (with a good number actually returning, to continue with the lives they left behind in Lagos and Nairobi and Accra and Freetown and Johannesburg etc).
How the British public fails to permit these alternative images to displace some of the “old stereotypes” (quoting Dame Stocking) should alarm many right-thinking people, and perhaps inspire an industry of academic theses on national delusions and epidemics of ostrich-in-sand-syndromes. If those flesh-and-blood representations of contemporary Africa somehow don’t succeed in serving as a useful counterbalance to the stereotypes, then nothing will.
“We want to make sure people have a really better balanced picture of what’s happening in Africa. Of course we have to show what the reality is in the situations in those countries. But we also need to show the other places where things are actually changing, where things are different,” Dame Stocking says.
I wish her and Oxfam the very best. Must be awful to have to take on that job of saving people from self-inflicted ignorance. In an age in which Google, Twitter and the news media lie at most fingertips, delivering, alongside stories of African suffering, narratives of determined recovery from tragedy and technology-driven change and emboldened youth and rising political awareness and growing intolerance for tyranny – is there still room for getting way with blaming with fixating on photos of begging bowls and the oxfamished children attached to them?
Stories also abound of the startling stupidities and failures of aid projects whose origins lie in a mentality belonging to a world that appears to have vanished. Misguided messiahs and their T-shirt donation and Shoe donation schemes, money-grabbing consultants, corrupt practices, high-profile-nil-value baby adoptions, etc etc.
It’s important that the Oxfams of this world do not allow themselves to get overly caught up in the myth of their impact. In the larger scheme of things, perhaps they’ve been over-estimating their messianic abilities. Consider this: In his posthumously published collection of essays pan-Africanist Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem says, of Nigeria’s 2006 debt relief deal: “What kind of success is debt relief that sees Nigeria paying back over three billion dollars to Britain alone, a figure more than the total aid budget of Britain in the same year?”
You could of course argue that that is oil-rich Nigeria, and choose instead to focus on the Rwandas and Malawis, where close to half the national budgets are donor-funded. And I could remind you of what the late Malawian president did with chunks of his country’s money. Or the mystery of the vanishing dollars in the Ugandan prime minister’s office.
I’m also somewhat surprised we’re still having this ‘African aid’ argument at the beginning of 2013, after the eloquent arguments of books like Dead Aid and The Fastest Billion. And after the Economist already publicly regretted its silliness.
Tolu Ogunlesi is black, lives in Lagos, Nigeria, where he works as Features Editor for NEXT, a daily newspaper. In 2009 he was awarded the Arts and Culture prize in the annual CNN Multichoice African Journalism Awards, as well as shortlisted for the inaugural PEN/Studzinski literary prize. He’s not part of Oxfam’s target market. Very few black poets press on the “donate now” button on the Oxfam website.
The American political process is being hijacked by a reckless, whining dangerous gang of psychologically damaged white men who are far-right ideologues. I used to be one of them. It’s time to tell the truth about our white male problem.
Not everyone who disagrees with the president is a racist. Not even most people who do are. But the continuous attempt by the white far-right in Congress to shut down the government rather than work with our black president has a lot to do with racism. And lurching from manufactured crisis to crisis isn’t about politics; it’s about pathology. It doesn’t make sense politically to take the blame for risking America’s future — and the Republicans know they will take the blame — so how can we conclude other than something else is going on here?
I’m not talking about the white young male mass murderers we’re afflicted with carrying assault rifles courtesy of the NRA. I’m talking about the white far-right males who hijacked the 112th Congress and are set to destroy the 113th. They have metaphorically done to our country what the killer in Newtown literally did to 20 children, and for the same apparent reason: alienation from the mainstream and retreat to a paranoid delusional fantasy land of — literal — mental impairment.
This has less to do with politics and more to do with the fear and mental illness that grips a willfully ignorant minority of white males. But the mainstream media is talking about everything but the underlying racial, cultural and mental health issues afflicting the white male minority of far-right congressmen holding us all hostage. And the extreme insanity of the right-wing rhetoric over the last four years, from “birther” to Obama-is-a-Muslim etc., conclusively points to something other than politics.
The manufactured crisis we face are not about economics. These self-inflicted wounds are about a few people’s fear of being marginalized.
It’s not considered polite to mention race anymore. But I’m going to mention it anyway. We have a white problem.
I’m a 60-year-old white male father and grandfather. My son served in the Marines. I own a gun. I have handwritten notes from George Bush Sr, Jr, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford both to me and to my late father expressing gratitude for our contributions to the “fight” for traditional values and the Republican “cause.” Been there, done that!
I spent my youth not only as part of the Republican Party but helping to organize the culture wars that have come near to destroying our country. I have worked with the very kind of people who are now the hard-core Republican right. But I have changed my views. I may not be one of them any longer, but I bring an insider’s knowledge to the table.
Overlay a map of the states with the safe gerrymandered congressional districts that sent us the Tea Party Republicans hijacking our country and you’ll find it’s the same map by and large of the former slave states.
The anxiety of losing white long-held power at the expense of minority and marginalized constituencies like women and gays has metastasized into outright hatred of everything and anything President Obama would suggest. Racism has combined with fear.
The fear is of a world in which white (mostly) evangelical Republicans lose power… forever. The country has moved on, but the safe Republican gerrymandered districts have not. These folks are literally living in a fool’s paradise whose time has come and gone.
The white Republican hijackers of our Congress talk about smaller federal government and out-of-control federal spending, states’ rights and the Defense of Marriage Act. These are the defenders of 30-round magazines and personal arsenals, Kevlar-piercing cop-killing bullets, access to unlimited numbers of semiautomatic weapons and lethal handguns carried in public — all in the name of the Second Amendment.
The mainstream media doesn’t have the courage to say it, but the Second Amendment “defense” is nothing to do with today’s loud defense of “gun rights.” The truth of the matter is that there is a subculture of frightened white Republicans who see their own government as a threat. They’ve embraced ignorance and a fact-free life that denies evolution, gay-rights, the demographic changes in America, and above all, the fact that their fellow countrymen have rescinded our entire history of racist bigotry and voted for a black man for president. They just can’t accept this.
The common thread that runs through the Republicans’ “issues” of the day has little to do with those issues per se. What it’s really about is the fear of a future in which traditional white male power structures dissolve.
The true crux of the friction with the White House and the Democrats and indeed with most Americans — including most women living in the South and many Southern men as well — lies in the racial history of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and slavery.
The lies about our federal government — that somehow they are in league with the United Nations, to the point where we can’t even sign an international declaration on the rights of the handicapped! – have nothing to do with the stated objectives. This is like a family argument where an uncle shows up at the dinner table and argues with everyone not because he actually disagrees but because he’s feeling alienated from the family.
Simple palpable hatred drives these people to willful ignorance. The white males insisting on carrying guns (in a country where violent crime is way down!) are scared, not of muggers, but of the fact that their imaginary reality is coming unstuck.
They’re too smart to believe that Fox News spin on reality is reality. Most of these folks are too smart to believe in their evangelical theology either. I’ll bet at heart many are atheists or at least doubters, well aware of the hypocrisies and inanities of evangelical Christianity. But they put on an act of upholding what they believe are the traditional standards we need to live by, which really boils down to little more than white resentment.
These Republicans are from safely gerrymandered districts so they have little to lose and something to gain by “holding the line” against public opinion and the president, even if it continually pushes the country to the brink.
The fact is that many flag-waving American Republican males these days are horribly unpatriotic. Not since the 1960s and the far-left of the Weather Underground have we seen people who hate America so deeply. Some of the Republican “patriots” hate this country so much they joinsecessionist movements and interpret their “right to bear arms” as a right to build personal arsenals against that day when the federal government comes to “take away our freedoms.”
House Republicans like to say that Americans voted for a divided government. They say that “gridlock” is what becomes it. But that’s not true. The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the Republicans.
A state of panic exists because Republican members of Congress demand a state of paralysis. They want to freeze the world as it is because the new world doesn’t have room for white male bigots who base their lives on Bronze Age mythology and white, privileged, Jeffersonian-style institutional racism. Their real ideology has nothing to do with gun rights, fighting against abortion or reducing the size of the federal deficit, but has everything to do with their own personal psychological turmoil.
These people are literally ill with fear. And their world is turning lopsided. There is a black man in the White House and he’s winning, and worst of all he’s self-evidently smarter than they are. He’s not even angry!
It is time for the mainstream media to stop playing the Republican extremists’ game. Let’s talk about racism and white Southern males who can’t get with the program. Let’s talk about what’s really going on with gun rights, which has nothing to do with hunting or home protection or even the Second Amendment, but has everything to do with the delusional paranoia of people who really believe the world is out to get them because it’s changing.
Let’s talk about the fact that there never was a fiscal cliff, just a dysfunctional Congress hijacked by the white males who turned the Tea Party into their cry of anguish.
The real problem we face is racism, bigotry and willful ignorance in the face of our changing demographics, spiritual beliefs and the challenge that postmodern thought poses to people stuck in Bronze Age thinking. These haters are a minority in the South, but they have — through gerrymandering — given the whole South a black eye. The millions of tolerant Southern white men, women and all the rest of us wherever we’re from need to rise up and condemn this charade.
The real problem we face is not economics or gun ownership or what happens to Planned Parenthood, but how we can reintegrate a few hurting marginalized white males in Congress and their most ardent delusional supporters into a better future while stopping them from using self-created political stalemate to burn down the house we all share.
Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back
Everywhere I look outside my home I see people busy on their high tech devices, while driving, while walking, while shopping, while in groups of friends, while in restaurants, while waiting in doctor offices and hospitals, while sitting in toilets – everywhere. While connected electronically, they are inattentive to and disconnected in physical reality.
People have been steadily manipulated to become technology addicted. Technology is the opiate of the masses.
This results in technology servitude. I am referring to a loss of personal freedom and independence because of uncontrolled consumption of many kinds of devices that eat up time and money. Most people do not use independent, critical thinking to question whether their quality of life is actually improved by the incessant use of technology products that are marketed more aggressively than just about anything else.
I for one have worked successfully to greatly limit my use of technological innovations, to keep myself as unconnected as possible and to maximize my privacy and independence. I do not have a smart phone; I do not participate in social networking; I do not have any Apple product, nothing like an IPod, IPad and similar devices. I have never used Twitter or anything similar, or sent a text message. I do use the Internet judiciously on an old laptop. Email is good and more than enough for me. I very rarely use an old cell phone.
So what have I gained? Time, privacy and no obsession to constantly be in touch, connected, available, informed about others. Call me old fashioned, but I feel a lot more in control of my life than most people that I see conspicuously using their many modern devices. They have lost freedom and do not seem to care about that. When I take my daily long walks I have no device turned on, no desire to communicate, nor to listen to music; I want to be in the moment, only sensing the world around me, unfiltered and uninterrupted by any technology.
I am not hooked by advancing technology, not tethered to constantly improved devices, not curious about the next generation of highly priced but really unnecessary products, not logged on and online all the time. I have no apps or games.
Those who think interactions with people through technology devices are the real thing have lost their sanity. Technology limits and distorts human, social interactions. Worse yet, people have lost ability and talent for actually conversing to people face to face, responding to nonverbal nuances, or through intimate writing with more than just a few words.
Consider these findings: “Researchers from the University of Glasgow found that half of the study participants reported checking their email once an hour, while some individuals check up to 30 to 40 times an hour. An AOL study revealed that 59 percent of PDA users check every single time an email arrives and 83 percent check email every day on vacation.”
A 2010 survey found that 61 percent of Americans (even higher among young people) say they are addicted to the Internet. Another survey reported that “addicted” was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to technology. One study found that people had a harder time resisting the allure of social media than they did for sex, sleep, cigarettes, and alcohol.
A recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed. Worse, 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. A little good news: the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” increased to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.
The main goal of technology companies is to get you to spend more money and time on their products, not to actually improve your quality of life. They have successfully created a cultural disease that has gone viral. Consumers willingly surrender their freedom, money and time in pursuit of what exactly? To keep pace with their peers? To appear modern and sophisticated? To not miss out on the latest information? To stay plugged in? I do not get it.
I see people as trapped in a pathological relationship with time-sucking technology, where they serve technology more than technology serves them. I call this technology servitude. Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google acknowledged that “we can be swept away by our technologies.” Welcome to virtual living. To break the grand digital delusion people must consider how lives long ago could be terrific without all the technology regalia pushed today.
What is a healthy use of technology devices? That is the crucial question. Who is really in charge of my life? That is what people need to ask themselves if they are to have any chance of breaking up delusions about their use of technology. When they can live happily without using so much technology for a day or a week, then they can regain control and personal freedom and become the master of technology. Discover what there is to enjoy in life that is free of technology. Mae West is famous for proclaiming the wisdom that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” Time to discover that it does not work for technology.
As to globalization of technology servitude: Is this worldwide progress what is best for humanity? Is downloaded global dehumanization being sucked up? Time for global digital dieting.
Joel S. Hirschhorn blogs at www.delusionaldemocracy.com
Every culture has a Story of the People to give meaning to the world. Part conscious and part unconscious, it consists of a matrix of agreements, narratives, and symbols that tell us why we are here, where we are headed, what is important, and even what is real. I think we are entering a new phase in the dissolution of our Story of the People, and therefore, with some lag time, of the edifice of civilization built on top of it.
Sometimes I feel intense nostalgia for the cultural mythology of my youth, a world in which there was nothing wrong with soda pop, in which the Superbowl was important, in which the world’s greatest democracy was bringing democracy to the world, in which science was going to make life better and better. Life made sense. If you worked hard you could get good grades, get into a good college, go to grad school or follow some other professional path, and you would be happy. With a few unfortunate exceptions, you would be successful if you obeyed the rules of our society: if you followed the latest medical advice, kept informed by reading the New York Times, and stayed away from Bad Things like drugs. Sure there were problems, but the scientists and experts were working hard to fix them. Soon a new medical advance, a new law, a new educational technique, would propel the onward improvement of life. My childhood perceptions were part of this Story of the People, in which humanity was destined to create a perfect world through science, reason, and technology, to conquer nature, transcend our animal origins, and engineer a rational society.
From my vantage point, the basic premises of this story seemed unquestionable. After all, it seemed to be working in my world. Looking back, I realize that this was a bubble world built atop massive human suffering and environmental degradation, but at the time one could live within that bubble without need of much self-deception. The story that surrounded us was robust. It easily kept anomalous data points on the margins.
Since my childhood in the 1970s, that story has eroded at an accelerating rate. More and more people in the West no longer believe that civilization is fundamentally on the right track. Even those who don’t yet question its basic premises in any explicit way seem to have grown weary of it. A layer of cynicism, a hipster self-awareness has muted our earnestness. What was once so real, say a plank in a party platform, today is seen through several levels of “meta” filters to parse it in terms of image and message. We are like children who have grown out of a story that once enthralled us, aware now that it is only a story.
At the same time, a series of new data points has disrupted the story from the outside. The harnessing of fossil fuels, the miracle of chemicals to transform agriculture, the methods of social engineering and political science to create a more rational and just society – each has fallen far short of its promise, and brought unanticipated consequences that threaten civilization. We just cannot believe anymore that the scientists have everything well in hand. Nor can we believe that the onward march of reason will bring on social utopia.
Today we cannot ignore the intensifying degradation of the biosphere, the malaise of the economic system, the decline in health, or the persistence and indeed growth of global poverty and inequality. We once thought economists would fix poverty, political scientists would fix social injustice, chemists and biologists would fix environmental problems, the power of reason would prevail and we would adopt sane policies. I remember looking at maps of rain forest decline in National Geographic in the early 1980s and feeling both alarm and relief – relief because at least the scientists and everyone who reads National Geographic is aware of the problem now, so something surely will be done.
Nothing was done. Rainforest decline accelerated, along with nearly every other environmental threat that we knew about in 1980. Our Story of the People trundled forward under the momentum of centuries, but with each passing decade the hollowing-out of its core, that started perhaps with the industrial-scale slaughter of World War One, extended further. When I was a child, our system of ideology and mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality have punctured its protective shell and have ruptured its essential infrastructure. We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites. We don’t believe the politicians, we don’t believe the doctors, we don’t believe the professors, we don’t believe the bankers, we don’t believe the technologists. All of them imply that everything is under control, and we know that it is not. We have lost the vision of the future we once had; most people have no vision of the future at all. This is new for our society. Fifty or a hundred years ago, most people agreed on the general outlines of the future. We thought we knew where society was going. Even the Marxists and the capitalists agreed on its basic outlines: a paradise of mechanized leisure and scientifically engineered social harmony, with spirituality either abolished entirely or relegated to a materially inconsequential corner of life that happened mostly on Sundays. Of course there were dissenters from this vision, but this was the general consensus.
When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life. So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. The year 2012 ended with just such a potent story-disrupting event: the Sandy Hook massacre. Even realizing that far more, equally innocent, children have been killed in the last few years by, say, U.S. drone strikes, it really got under my skin. No one was immune. I think that is because its utter senselessness penetrated every defense mechanism we have to maintain the fiction that the world is basically OK. Unlike 9/11 or Oklahoma City, and certainly unlike the horrors that go on around the world, there was no convenient narrative to divert the raw pain of what happened. We cannot help but map those murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto ourselves. At the base of our Story of the People is separation, of humanity from nature, of me from you, of each from all, and this event united everyone, of whatever culture, nationality, or political persuasion. For a moment, we all felt the exact same thing. For at least a moment, I am sure, most people were in touch with the simplicity of what is important; I am sure many people had that fleeting feeling, “It doesn’t have to be that difficult, if only we could remember what is so obvious now, that love is all there is.” We humans have made such a mess of things, forgetting love. It is the same realization we have when a loved one is going through the dying process, and we think, “Ah, how precious this person is – why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I appreciate all those moments we had together? All the arguments and grudges seem so tiny now.”
Following that moment, of course, people hurried to make sense of the event, subsuming it within a narrative about gun control, mental health, or the security of school buildings. Maybe I am imagining things, but I don’t think anyone really believes deep down that these responses touch the heart of the matter. Gun culture, we know, is a symptom of something deeper, and the violence that finds expression through guns would, even in their absence, come out in some other way. Mental illness too is a problem so vast that it is essentially unsolvable in our current system; it too comes from a deeper source. As for school security, a Chinese saying describes all the measures proposed: they stop the gentleman but not the villain.
No one would say that Sandy Hook was more horrible than the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, or the imperialistic wars of the 20th century and 21st, but it was less comprehensible. Try as we might, we cannot fit it into our Story of the World. It is the anomalous data point that unravels the entire narrative – the world no longer makes sense. We struggle to explain what it means, but no explanation suffices. We may go on pretending that normal is still normal, but this is one of a series of “end time” events that is dismantling our culture’s mythology.
The evident futility of the responses that we are capable of imagining also points to this deep ideological breakdown. The responses are all about more control. Yet control, as we may or may not realize, is a key thread of the old story of humanity rising above nature, imposing technology and reason on the wild world and the uncivilized human. All around us, we see our efforts at control backfiring: wars to fight terrorism breed terrorism, herbicides breed superweeds, antibiotics breed superbugs, psychiatric medications lead to explosive outbursts of violence.
Looking back on the community schools a couple generations past, where children and parents could walk in and out of any door, can we say that the inexorable trend toward fortress schools in a fortress state is something anyone would have chosen? The world was supposed to be getting better. We were supposed to be becoming wealthier, more enlightened. Society was supposed to be advancing. Here I am in America, the most “advanced” nation on Earth, yet even as our financial wealth has doubled and doubled again in fifty years, we have lost wealth of a more basic form; for example, the social capital of feeling safe, feeling at home where we live. Is more security the best we can aspire to? What about a society where safety does not equal security? What about a world where no human being wields an assault rifle? What about a world where we mostly know the faces and stories of the people around us? What about a world where we know that our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? We need a Story of the People that includes all of those things – and that doesn’t feel like a fantasy.
Various visionary thinkers have offered versions of such a story, but none of them has yet become a true Story of the People, a widely accepted set of agreements and narratives that gives meaning to the world and coordinates human activity towards its fulfillment. We are not quite ready for such a story yet, because the old one, though in tatters, still has large swaths of its fabric intact. And even when these unravel, we still must traverse the space between stories, a kind of nakedness. In the turbulent times ahead our familiar ways of acting, thinking, and being will no longer make sense. We won’t know what is happening, what it all means, and, sometimes, even what is real. Some people have entered that time already.
I wish I could tell you that I am ready for a new Story of the People, but even though I am among its many weavers, I cannot yet fully inhabit the new vestments. In other words, describing the world that could be, something inside me doubts, rejects, and underneath the doubt is a hurting thing. The breakdown of the old story is kind of a healing process, that uncovers the old wounds hidden under its fabric and exposes them to the healing light of awareness. I am sure many people reading this have gone through such a time, when the cloaking illusions fell away: all the old justifications, rationalizations, all the old stories. Events like Sandy Hook help to initiate the very same process on a collective level. So also the superstorms, the economic crisis, political meltdowns… in one way or another, the obsolescence of our old mythos is laid bare.
We do not have a new story yet. Each of us is aware of some of its threads, for example in most of the things we call alternative, holistic, or ecological today. Here and there we see patterns, designs, emerging parts of the fabric. But the new mythos has not yet emerged. We will abide for a time in the space between stories. Those of you who have been through it on a personal level know that it is a very precious – some might say sacred – time. Then we are in touch with the real. Each disaster lays bare the real underneath our stories. The terror of a child, the grief of a mother, the honesty of not knowing why. In such moments we discover our humanity. We come to each other’s aid, human to human. We take care of each other. That’s what keeps happening every time there is a calamity, before the beliefs, the ideologies, the politics take over again. Events like Sandy Hook, for at least a moment, cut through all that down to the basic human being. In such times, we learn who we really are.
How can we prepare? We cannot prepare. But we are being prepared.
Charles Eisenstein is an essayist and author of the books Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity. He is a contributor to Shareable, where this article first appeared.
Idle No More is forcing many Canadians to be Willfully Blind No More.
Ostensibly, the movement spearheaded by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence is about the protection of First Nations’ treaty rights. At its core, though, might be something more profound, perhaps best described as a demand for all of us in this country to re-think the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. The relationship is, of course, an uneven one, though it might be far more uneven than most of us in this country care to acknowledge.
Against this backdrop, policy makers and average Canadians alike would be well advised to ring in the New Year by considering the lessons Michelle Alexander highlights in her important book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindedness. The context is American, but the lessons may hit closer to home. In the book, Alexander writes the following in regards to African-Americans and the United States’ criminal justice system:
“It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration). While marginalization may sound far preferable to exploitation, it may prove to be even more dangerous. Extreme marginalization, as we have seen throughout world history, poses the risk of extermination.”
It’s a narrative equally provocative and compelling. Alexander argues that Americans’ obsession with ‘law and order’ began as a conservative attempt to breed white opposition to the burgeoning civil rights movement. Politicians on the right labeled civil disobedience a precursor to criminality, and branded supporters of civil rights legislation as promoters of lawlessness. Exploiting the fears of poor and rural whites, Republican politicians invented and propagated the ‘War on Crime’ and, more specifically, the ‘War on Drugs’ as a means to incarcerate, and thus control, the black population.
The scheme was so successful that any politician that questioned the effectiveness or morality behind the supposedly colour-blind ‘War on Drugs’ was accused of being ‘soft on crime’ — the death knell for one seeking public office. In 1992, Bill Clinton recognized that Democrats could peel off right leaning white voters by outflanking the Republicans on issues like crime and welfare reform, and promptly advocated for a number of policies that resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in the history of the United States, the overwhelming majority of which were people of colour. The normalization of racial marginalization, according to Alexander, was finally, quietly complete.
The book is more than a lament; it’s a warning. Alexander paints a bleak portrait of a future in which the majority of African Americans — increasingly economically vulnerable in a nation of skyrocketing inequality — being under the control of the criminal justice system is not entirely inconceivable. It’s an ugly commentary on contemporary American society. Canadians should pay attention.
One in five Canadian prisoners are Aboriginal
Troublingly, there are significant parallels between the plight of African Americans in the United States, and the Aboriginal population in Canada.
As American history is steeped in institutional savagery toward African Americans, Canada’s history, too, is pockmarked by the white majority’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. Most notable among a litany of gross violations of justice are the permanent occupation of ancestral lands beginning in the 18th century, the noxious attempt to ‘civilize’ Aboriginal people in residential schools in the early 1900s, and the refusal to recognize Aboriginal Canadians as legal ‘persons’ until the middle of the 20th century. And the similarities, unfortunately, are not only historical.
Though Canada doesn’t yet lock up the same percentage of its citizenry as its southern neighbor — the most heavily incarcerated society in the world — measures passed by Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative government have resulted in a steady increase in the number of Canadians behind bars. Canadians of Aboriginal ancestries have borne the brunt of the surge of prisoners.
The proportion of African Americans and Aboriginal Canadians in prison far exceed their representation in the U.S. and Canada, respectively. In the U.S., black Americans account for 12 per cent of the total population, but represent nearly 40 per cent of the prison population. In Canada, Aboriginal peoples make up four per cent of the total population, but 20 per cent of the prison population.
These significant discrepancies are not shrinking. In the U.S., over 40 per cent of new offenders to state and federal prisons are African American. In Canada, more than one in five new admissions to men’s prisons are of Aboriginal descent. Among women offenders, over one in three are Aboriginal. In the U.S., one in three black men can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives. In Canada, young Aboriginal men are more likely to go to prison than complete a high school diploma. And once in custody, a significantly larger proportion of African American and Aboriginal Canadian prisoners are recommended for maximum levels of security than white prisoners charged with similar crimes.
Structural discrimination
While it might be unfair to claim that Canadian politicians and the Canadian criminal justice system have joined forces to consciously ensure that our Aboriginal communities remain repressed and disenfranchised, it cannot be denied that Aboriginals across the country suffer from poverty, injustice and lack of opportunity more than other type of Canadian. One in four Aboriginal children live in poverty.
The life expectancy for Indigenous people in Canada is eight to 20 years less than non-Aboriginal Canadians. On First Nations reserves, 60 per cent of children do not graduate high school, and the lack of suitable housing and access to clean water is endemic. To be Aboriginal in Canada today is to be a second-class citizen.
As a new year begins, we should take this opportunity to look closely at the society that we have created, and address the appalling inequalities of our criminal justice system. There is still time to prevent the prison state of our southern neighbors, but only if we hurry.
The year 2030 will see an increasingly chaotic world where China is the top economy and demand soars for resources, a US intelligence report said Monday.
The National Intelligence Council, in its first assessment in four years aimed at shaping US strategic thinking, said that China will surpass the United States as the largest economy in the 2020s, in line with independent forecasts.
But the study said that the United States, while weaker, will probably stay the top player in two decades thanks to its role in resolving global crises, its technological prowess and its “soft power” that attracts outsiders.
“The US most likely will remain ‘first among equals’ among the other great powers in 2030 because of its preeminence across a range of power dimensions and legacies of its leadership role,” the 137-page report said.
“Nevertheless, with the rapid rise of other countries, the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana — the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 — is fast winding down,” it said.
The study predicted that Asia’s economy, military spending and technological investment would surpass those of North America and Europe combined by 2030, but warned of major uncertainty over an emerging China.
“If Beijing fails to transition to a more sustainable, innovation-based economic model, it will remain a top-tier player in Asia, but the influence surrounding what has been a remarkable ascendance will dissipate,” it said.
China’s global power is likely to keep rising but at a slower rate — a phenomenon of easing growth that, according to historical precedent, makes countries “likely to become fearful and more assertive,” the study said.
Europe, Japan and Russia are expected to maintain slow economic declines through 2030, while a number of middle-tier countries could rise such as Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey, it said.
The study expected major benefits from technology by 2030, but warned that climate change threatened to pose serious challenges.
With a growing population and rising incomes, the planet’s demand for water, food and energy will grow by 35, 40 and 50 percent respectively by 2030, it said.
A wealthier China and India will likely need to rely more on food imports, driving up international prices. Families in low-income nations would feel the pinch hardest on food, likely fueling social discontent.
The National Intelligence Council estimated that the world would have nearly 8.3 billion people in 2030, up from 7.1 billion now, but that the average age would be older — with potentially giant consequences.
The study said that 80 percent of armed and ethnic conflicts occurred in nations with youthful populations. The number of youthful states will fall significantly by 2030, with the remaining ones clustered around central Africa.
Other areas that will still have youthful populations — and the fuel for potential conflict — include Afghanistan, western and tribal areas of Pakistan and India’s poorer northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, it said.
By contrast, the study found that the Middle East “will be a very different place” in 2030 with the gradual aging of the youth bulge that took to the streets in the Arab Spring protests that brought down autocratic leaders.
But the report predicted instability in nations with rooted sectarian or other tensions such as Bahrain, Iraq, Libya and Syria along with Yemen, which the study predicted could break up for the second time.
Iran was a question mark. The study expected “far-reaching instability” if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, but also said that a more pro-Western Iran could emerge due to public pressure and infighting within the clerical regime.
The study said a potential resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would have “dramatic consequences,” but suggested that a more likely scenario consisted of unofficial actions that lead toward a Palestinian state with key issues such as the status of Jerusalem remaining unresolved in 2030.
While the study looked at trends, it warned of the potential for game-changing events by 2030 such as a global economic meltdown. – AFP
Codrin Arsene writes from a black man’s perspective. About one hundred Algerian and Chinese residents clashed in Algeria’s capital a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated phenomenon. Violent clashes between Chinese immigrants and Ten reasons why Chinese are despised in Africa discontented Africans have occurred all over the continent from South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, my research site in Tanzania, to Ethiopia and Egypt. The situation is getting worse by the day since various factors are provoking these unforeseen acts of xenophobia. In the light of the latest attacks against Chinese in Algeria, I’m piling up a list of the top ten reasons why Chinese are despised in Africa. I am basing my list on the most common answers I received from Africans I interacted with in South Africa, Zambia and Tanzania. I believe these causes might be similar in other countries as well. The top is not made from the most significant to the less significant factor as this is irrelevant since all these causes act together and can only be seen as a whole!
Disclaimer: This article is more about perceptions than facts. These perceptions are the ones that cause xenophobia even if there is a loose connection to facts. This article is not meant to suggest that Chinese people are hated all over the continent. In fact, many Africans I talk to every day praise the Chinese for being hardworking, honest and direct people. The only reason why this article was written was to contextualize the attacks against the Chinese people in Africa, not to draw conclusions about the Chinese Diaspora itself.
High unemployment in urban centers (where most Chinese immigrants work) fuels tensions over migrant workers. In Dar es Salaam, I met Chinese citizens working on less than 60,000 Shillings a month (45 dollars) which is unacceptable even for the average person working in the city.
Chinese workers in Africa, most of which happen to be uneducated, have no respect for local customs. I witnessed one Chinese getting brutally beaten in Zanzibar last August because he refused to stop drinking beer in front of his shops and listen to loud music. It goes without saying that this type of behavior is offensive during a religious holiday, especially one as important as the Ramadan.
Chinese traders sell extremely cheap products which break easily. This causes tensions between buyers and sellers.
More than half of the uneducated Chinese that I interacted with are very aggressive in their behavior and use curse words loosely. This is another cause of frustration among the local people.
Various Chinese living in Africa are not only aggressive but racist in their attitudes and behavior. Instead of trying to see other Africans as their equals, they claim to be superior in front of the ones they interact with. This brings back old memories from the colonial period. Moreover, the actions of a few (not every Chinese I met in Africa is racist) affect the perception of the whole community.
Many Chinese do not speak the local language at all which makes communication even harder.
Various Chinese run enterprises throughout Africa have failed to pay their employers, something that is seen by many Africans as another form of direct exploitation. While the Chinese government has taken concrete measures against some of these companies, these instances are still prevalent in much of Africa.
At least in East Africa, Chinese citizens have been incarcerated for illegal fishing, illegal activities or even prostitution (I myself and currently into the businesses of two Chinese run brothels in Tanzania.) Illegal fishing in Tanzania made a lot of Tanzanians who depend of the fish trawled out of Lake Victoria and the Indian Ocean think that “the Chinese” are stealing their food. Such generalizations are harmful but the local authorities have not put any effort into addressing them. Not all Chinese are illegal fishermen or crooks but if people take some isolated incidents out of context they are more likely to form negative opinions about them.
There are more and more biased media accounts in East Africa that portrait the Chinese community in less than favorable terms. It took me a lot of time to find out why this is the case. My findings point to the fact that the businesses of some of the most important businessmen in Tanzania and Kenya are affected by the Chinese firms operating in this part of Africa. These owners have many political connections and are now pressing of the local mass media to write about the Chinese community in negative terms. Two businessmen told me they actually ordered inflammatory articles against the Chinese community.
There is almost no effort to control Chinese immigration in East Africa. More and more Chinese people come here every year which creates anxieties among the local people. And why shouldn’t that be the case? In one month since I came to Dar es Salaam I interacted with Chinese who, to come to the first reason why Chinese I despised in Africa, are plumbers, electricians, instructors, engineers, agriculturalists, babysitters, carpenters, miners, machine operators, street sellers or even baggers. Again, I don’t think this is a problem on its own but uncontrolled migration causes much of the anxieties to begin with. – african-politics.com
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From the air, it’s easier to spot wealth than poverty. Climbing out of Cape Town International Airport the informal settlements soon become a blur but the private developments remain in crisp focus, their pristine loops of asphalt standing out like Nazca lines, the bulk of their road-straddling gatehouses unmissable and their clustered tricolours of lawn, pool and villa conspicuous against the dun landscape.
