09 March 2007
While I'm on the subject of contradictions, my
friend Chris
sent me a link to this
article on zdnet, which describes how the Conservative opposition in
the British House of Commons has been hauling the Labour government over
the coals about their failure to support open source software.
What kind of a world is it where the Tories attack Labour for not being liberal enough? And as Chris points out, "It is a scary and rather weird feeling to realise that I have slowly become a Tory without actually having to change my views on anything."
08 March 2007
This week's furore over the Broadcast Commission of Ireland
(BCI)'s decision to pull Trocaire's
Lenten advert on gender equality has inadvertently pointed out
many of the contradictions inherent in our strange modern world. The BCI's
reasoning - that the ad contravenes section 10(3) of the Radio Television Act 1988 which expressly forbids the broadcasting of any ad
that is "directed towards any religious or political end" - has been
shown up for the spurious nonsense that it is. Let's just stop and think
for a minute about exactly what we are dealing with here:
- A world in which child-employers and cash-crop barons like Nike and Nestle can freely advertise their 'non-political' wares freely and ad nauseam, while Trocaire - a Catholic organisation, of all things - is banned from the airwaves for telling uncomfortable political truths.
- Brows are furrowed and breasts beaten over the terrible dangers of our children being 'politicised' in the classroom. But what are we afraid of? That our kids won't be properly initiated into the cult of consumer-driven capitalism if they learn the truth about the inequality to which it's so closely linked? In the same classrooms, the same children are routinely indoctrinated with the abhorrently misogynistic beliefs of the Catholic church to which Trocaire subscribes, yet barely a voice is raised in protest.
- An aid industry that barely scratches the surface of the issues it exists to confront, but instead functions primarily as a pressure-release valve for our collective guilt at the inequality poverty we instinctively know on some level to be the result of our indefensibly over-indulgent lifestyles. We buy obscenely overpriced houses, drive 4x4s, go on foreign holidays, consume vast amounts of luxury goods, and angst over the colour of new designer accessories, while much of the world battles against levels of hunger, thirst and curable disease that could be eradicated at the cost of just a fraction of a percent of our annual incomes, if only we had the political will to make it happen. We eat chocolate every day while the people who grow it for us don't even have rice.
There's no comfortable way of dressing this up: it's a political issue.
People who try to address these inequalities are routinely ignored because we cannot bear to face up to the terrible truth that our hands are stained with the blood of everyone who dies from these causes. Over 24,000 people a day. That's 1,000 people an hour. Or 16 a minute. Or one person dying avoidably every four seconds. By giving to charity, we tell ourselves we have done what we can. Meanwhile, we refuse to listen to those same charities telling us that it isn't enough, even to the extent of censoring their broadcasts.
Confused? Me too. It's hardly surprising.
We want our world neatly packaged, not full of these contradictions. We want to be able to point the finger at an easy target, and when we can't do that we become easy targets ourselves for anyone who appears to give us convenient and straightforward answers, no matter how far-fetched. Like those who tell us that unfettered capitalism isn't to blame but is part of the solution, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Above all, we refuse to countenance any solution that requires us to modify our own lifestyles. Most of us give no thought to where our luxury goods come from, who produces them, under what political systems and working conditions, or for what reward. We unthinkingly buy Kenyan string beans and Peruvian asparagus without pausing to consider the fact that whole populations are starving or barely surviving in desperate poverty in these countries, while we consume their produce. It's just too uncomfortable to think about, and there is a whole industry - the media - pretty much dedicated to stopping us by drowning out our thoughts in puerile nonsense like Big Brother and the utterly contemptible Swan.
Dissenting voices are like lone cries in the wilderness, and as we've seen this week, even they will be ruthlessly silenced when they cut too close to the bone. It might be OK to have some intellectual debate after dark on Channel 4 when nobody's watching, but not in the harsh light of day. I detest most of what Trocaire has to say, but this week, bizarrely, I find myself on their side. In their own hypocritical way, at least they're trying to raise awareness of the issues.