Position of Disparity

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/04/index20article5.html

We may all be riding on “spaceship Earth,” but as German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger pointed out decades ago, some of us ride first class and some in steerage. Traditional realists see this as a fact of life, and even extol the virtues of poverty. In the business section of the daily newspaper, if not on the editorial page, unemployment is necessary, for it keeps inflation down and bond prices up, just as low environmental and labor standards in the Third World keep prices down. As American policy analyst George Kennan explained back in 1948, in days less sensitive to the demands of liberal rhetoric, “Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”

Such postures have lost any claim to the name of realism. Not all future Third World regimes, Robert Heilbroner has noted, will “view the vast difference between first class and cattle class with the forgiving eyes of their predecessors”… Moreover, since weapons proliferation is at all levels unimpeded by any serious efforts at control, we must assume that the poor of the future will be armed to the teeth. They will be bound to the rich by the global economy and by planetary TV, but it will be a loose and unstable coupling. Barring new departures, competition and violence will only increase, as the ecological plunder will continue.

… Worldwatch’s Lester Brown says that we must either “turn things around quickly or the self-reinforcing internal dynamic of the deterioration-and-decline scenario will take over,” and then argues for an “Environmental Revolution” as the best hope. His strategy is to say much that is chilling and yet remain upbeat and, when it comes to politics, abstract. We have “underestimated what it will take” to reverse the trends now threatening to overcome us, and “can no longer separate the future habitability of the planet from the current international distribution of wealth.” Large statements, both of these, but they are left to float in warm generality. “Stabilizing the climate” will require “restructuring the world’s economy to phase out fossil fuels,” but when it comes to how this can be done, there is only anticlimax: vague talk of gradually shifting investments, reforming technologies, and changing values.

Here, too, there is implicit a political theory — large change will come exclusively by small degrees. No need to solve problems like regulating the planetary corporations, halting the spread of nuclear arms, or substantially redistributing land and wealth. We will wake one day to find that incremental reforms have made all the difference. Brown first tells us the environmental revolution is not political, but rather a cousin to the industrial and agricultural revolutions. He then explains that we do not have the kind of time that they required, but even this does not inspire him to discomforting conclusions. If there must be changes that will not come politely, they are best left unremarked.

There is a method here. Worldwatch regales us with fact-laden overviews of ecological deterioration, then leavens its message with a large measure of bright possibilities, from green taxes to windmills. It makes good reading, for it balances pessimism with optimism, and there is nothing to offend. Change makes good rational sense, and change is necessary, so change will come. Even land reform, which once rang throughout the world in calls for “land and liberty” and heroic, bloody peasant uprisings will come perhaps easily.

… Meaningful land reform will not come easily. Elites have long used anticommunist ideology as an excuse to oppose the redistribution of land, and now they must do without it. But they will find new excuses easily enough. In both the United States and Mexico, “efficiency” is the favorite justification for the destruction of both peasant and family farming.

… There are good reasons to believe that change is possible, reasons that range from the green movement itself, to the technological and economic reforms we hear so much about from policy activists, to the obvious fact that greens are hardly alone in seeing the state of the world as intolerable. To see hope in concrete form, one need only pick a subject, from water pollution to family planning to democracy. A few hours of research will generally reveal excellent ideas in profusion, and demonstrate that it is politics, and not any lack of technological or policy alternatives, that holds us in this stasis.

The strongest grounds for hope is this—that time and resources both remain. If fifty years, hence, our children find themselves so in thrall to necessity that they cannot even imagine a better world, it will not be because they met their inexorable fate, but because we failed now, when the broad shape of the future is still open to dispute.

— Tom Athanasiou,
Divided Planet:
The Ecology of Rich and Poor,
Chapter 6 – Realism