November 4 2002
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Thirteen years ago I attended a conference at the University
of Guelph with the intriguing title of “Ethical choices
in the Age of Pervasive Technology.” One speaker stands
out in my memory. The then president of the Club of Rome -a
think tank concerned with the future of our planet - told us
that in one respect we have come a long way. Not so long ago
the only weapon warriors had was their fist or an hand-held
club or sword or spear or bow. With the invention of the gun,
the fist was expanded by a few hundred meters. Now, with cruise
missiles and guided bombs long distance killing is common place.
And those are the benign kind. Since then smallpox-loaded missiles
and anthrax bombs have become distinct possibilities. He lamented,
however, that our ethical basis has not kept pace with this
expansion: on the contrary. Although we have WMD, ‘Weapons
of Mass Destruction,’ WMS ‘Weapons of Mass Salvation,’
are scorned.
Weapons of Mass Destruction create the impression of being sophisticated
and highly technical. Not true. The simple fire arm qualifies
as Number One. In the same three -week period when a sniper
killed 10 people in the Washington area, 1,600 people died from
gunfire in the United States as a whole, and more than 17,000
around the world or 300,000 annually. Even though the USA comprises
4 percent of the earth’s population, its death rate from
fire arms is 9 percent of the globe’s total, double the
world’s average.
In such a gun-loving culture it comes as no surprise that its
diplomacy too prefers hard power. Europe, in contrast, has a
different approach. It contributes ten times more peacekeepers
than the USA. As share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) it
contributes three times as much as the USA in aid to poor countries:
60% of all foreign assistance comes from Europe. If aid, defence
spending and the cost of peacekeeping is added together, the
European total equals what the USA spends on defence. Europe
prefers ‘soft power’ over ‘hard power.’
It is telling that especially those countries with the lowest
percentage of church-going people - Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands
- have the most Christian attitude of ‘loving your neighbor,’
while the Western country with the highest number of ‘religious’
people, the USA, refuses the see the need of the world’s
poor. It is no secret that the USA is firmly in the last place
among the 22 donor countries in aid as a share of income.
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University
in New York, comments of this in the November 1 issue of the
Economist, the foremost magazine of Capitalism. He wonders:
“Yet while the Bush administration is prepared to spend
$100 billion to rid Iraq of WMD ( Weapons of Mass Destruction)
it has been unwilling to spend more than 0.2 percent of that
sum ($200 million) this year on the Global Fund to fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria.” This fund, set up by the United
Nations, is an the arsenal of life-giving vaccines, medicines
and health interventions, emergency food aid and farming technologies
that could prevent millions of deaths each year. Says Dr Sachs:
“The expected $100 billion cost of war against Iraq would
be enough to avert 30 million deaths from disease.”
Alas. We live in a world where the power of the fist has been
magnified a million times, but where the concern of the heart
has hardened to the point where soon we will be in a position
of triage.
“Triage is the act of sorting according to quality,”
according to my dictionary. Of course, we in the west are richer,
the richer are wiser and the wiser are of higher quality. So,
we are entitled to have first claim on the world’s resources.
We all governed by our ‘Laissez Faire’ mentality,
our belief that it is in the nature of things that all works
out for the best in the end. Nothing that happens in the short
run in in conflict with our longer-run well-being. This philosophy
governs the decisions of the Bush administration, because they
are convinced that, no matter what they do, it will work out
fine in the end.
This may have been true so far, but, says Dr. Sachs: “Our
interconnectedness on the planet is the dominating truth of
the 21st century. One stark result is that the world’s
poor live, and especially die, with the awareness that the United
States is doing little to mobilise the Weapons of Mass Salvation
that could offer them survival, dignity and eventually the escape
from poverty.”
Want to fight terrorism? The biblical notion: "It is better
to give than to receive,” provides as good a clue as any.
The secular notion: "Give (the fist) before you receive”
leads to global warfare and misery for millions.
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