Vinoth Ramachandra

Last February, the IBM supercomputer Watson won an exhibition game of the American TV show “Jeopardy” against two of its best contestants. This was a significant advance on Deep Blue, another IBM supercomputer, which had defeated the six-time world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. It was hailed in the popular media as heralding the “triumph of machine intelligence over the human”. Of course it was nothing of the sort. It was the triumph of a top team of human researchers at IBM, aided by hundreds of others from many of the leading technological universities in the US, who had programmed Watson over five years and at the cost of $3 million.

In my last post I referred to EP guru Steven Pinker’s claim that the human mind is a “system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our natural ancestors.” In this “computational theory of the mind”, the latter is treated as a set of computer programs or “modules” that are being executed in the electrical wiring (“hardware”) of your brain even as you read this page. Linked to this is the key assumption that what the mind-brain essentially does is “process information”, and this is usually understood as the manipulation of symbols by rules or algorithms. By using a common terminology (e.g. “information”, “intelligence”, “neural networks”) when discussing minds, brains and computers, the human-machine barrier is easily straddled. The mind is both naturalized and computerized. And the brain can now be described as an incredibly powerful microprocessor, the mother of all motherboards.

It requires a certain philosophical sophistication to see through the sleights of hand that ends up reducing human minds and persons to bundles of neural activity in the brains. As Ludwig Wittgenstein famously put it, when looking back on the naive philosophy of science (“logical positivism”) that had once seduced him in the 1920s: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” (Philosophical Investigations, 1953)

There is nothing new in the way scientists take the most advanced machines of their day as models or analogies for human functioning.  Steam engines and telegraph systems have served this purpose before. But there is a short (though calamitous) step from modelling to identification. We then imagine that machines which help us perform certain functions have those functions themselves. We humanize the machines even as we mechanize humans. When we speak of “clocks telling the time”, what we mean is just that they enable us (conscious human persons) to tell the time. Walking sticks don’t actually walk, and running shoes don’t run. The same applies to “radar searching for aircraft”, “telescopes discovering black holes” or “smart phones remembering our appointments”: they do not literally search, discover or remember. If there were no conscious human persons using these prosthetic tools, these activities would not happen.

In one of the most cited philosophical papers of recent decades (“Minds, Brains, and Programs”, 1980) , John Searle invited us to imagine somebody totally ignorant of Chinese seated in a closed room and receiving inputs of Chinese symbols. He is also given a rule-book for processing these symbols, so he can manipulate them and produce an output. Suppose that the input of Chinese is in the form of questions. It would appear, then, from the output symbols that the person in the room was answering the questions. However, he has not understood anything that was passing through his hands. Searle used this analogy to argue that electrical flows in computers do not count as the processing of symbols, since symbols are symbols only to those who understand them as symbols. It is wrong to imagine the mind as analogous to a super-computer, because in the absence of minds computers do not do what minds do.

In our IT-obsessed age, not only is information confused with knowledge, but the special engineering use of the term is confused with meaning. A meaningful message may actually have less information (from a technical point of view) than a sentence made up of pure gibberish. It is all matter of the range of alternatives from which the message is selected and their prior probabilities. As Claude Shannon, a pioneer of the mathematical theory of communication, reminds us, the “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects.”

In a loose sense of “inform”, the books (and this Blog) I write may be said to be  “filled with information” and stored in print (or on the internet) indefinitely. However, it is strictly only potential information that can be inscribed and stored outside a conscious mind. Once the concepts of information, informing and being informed start to be liberated from a conscious someone being informed or intending to inform, language goes on holiday (another Wittgensteinian expression) and reason disappears.

Distinguishing person-talk from neuro-talk, and neuro-talk from computer-talk, are indispensable if we are to explore the distinctively human and rescue the humanities and human sciences.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was notorious among his contemporaries for his cynical view of human nature. Hobbes held that we always act out of self-interest. Once a friend observed him giving money to a beggar and asked Hobbes if what he had just done did not disprove his own theory of human motivation. Hobbes replied that he had given money to the beggar not out of kindness, but because it gave him pleasure to see the pleasure the beggar obtained through his gift!

Reasoning like Hobbes’s (an example of “reductionism”) is rampant in many academic disciplines, and especially in the new glamour sciences of “cognitive neurology”, “genetic technology” and “evolutionary psychology”. A molecular biologist friend of mine in Cambridge once told me that the saddest aspect of the work of people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins was the way they identified evolution with atheist materialism. The result, among those Christians, Muslims and others who had little understanding of science, was inevitable: reject Darwinian evolution altogether. A clash of fundamentalisms, one religious, the other atheist, follows. But one does not have to be a theist to see the fallacies in biological reductionism (or “Biologism”).

This is how the reductionist argument goes. The human brain is undoubtedly a physical organ that has evolved over millions of years. So, start with this fact and make the  leap to the materialist creed that conscious awareness, self-consciousness and our sense of personal identity are nothing but neural activities located in our brains. The next step follows: the mind, too, is an evolved organ. Natural selection and environmental adaptation explains all there is to us human beings. As Steven Pinker, a prominent evolutionary psychologist of mind puts it: “The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our natural ancestors.”  Human persons are not embodied subjects, merely living organisms seeking to optimize their reproductive capacity.

If the ultimate motivation for our behaviour is making the world safe for our genes, this has some rather disturbing consequences which don’t seem to have been noticed by those who advocate such views. To begin with, any claim to objective knowledge disappears. The evolved mind serves, not truth, but reproductive success. So, presumably Pinker’s arguments and beliefs are also designed to promote his “selfish” genes. If not, how does he exempt himself from his own assertions?

Moreover, all talk about love and justice, as well as truth, are ultimately self-serving. You may think you are sacrificing your life for others,  but what you are really doing is enabling the group that shares your genetic material to survive. All the ethical norms that govern your behaviour are boiled down to promoting the “inclusive fitness” of  your kinship group (sacrificing your life for other groups, let alone your enemies, is skated over in the literature). More generally, the reasons we give for the things we do (from occupying Wall Street to speculating on Wall Street, from composing music to pirating music videos) are mere rationalizations. Only the evolutionary psychologists can  reveal to us the real reasons, which are not actually reasons at all but biologically determined forces which motivate and determine our behaviour.

Evolutionary psychologists see us as the unwitting playthings of an immensely complex biological organ (the brain) that deceives us into thinking that we are still living in the time of our hominid ancestors or the pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer human groups. Whether we are choosing our life-partners or deliberating about energy policy, we are simply reflecting behaviour learned in Stone Age savannahs. Those forms of behaviour that favour the replication of the genome will preferentially survive, whether we know it or not. And, unless we are evolutionary psychologists, we don’t know it.

Hardly a week passes when we are not offered, in the serious scientific journals no less than in pulp tabloids, biological “explanations” of marital infidelity, economic risk-taking, rape or painting in terms of the influence of our genes or neurons acting on us directly – or indirectly through their cultural proxies (so-called “memes”, analogous to genes).

However, I am still waiting to read a scientific paper that gives a biological explanation of the emergence of biological science among humans. Also, a scientific account of what motivates people to become evolutionary psychologists, and why others are impressed by their “explanations”.

I am mystified that clever academics, some philosophers and literary critics among them, blithely quote those cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists who announce that our sense of being “persons” and of having free-will are nothing but illusions foisted on us by neural activity determined by our evolutionary past. Why on earth should we believe such statements when they, too, must be biologically determined? Moreover, isn’t it remarkable to find, say, in the same university medical department, doctors promoting “autonomy”/ “choice” as the supreme value in bioethics while their colleagues undermine all notions of selfhood and free-will?

Is it not hypocritical of people to accept academic awards and book royalties for work that was all pre-programmed in their neural circuitry and over which they had no choice?  But since all moral arguments, too, including outrage at hypocrisy and double-standards, are presumed to be neural reflexes or hangovers from our Stone Age past, I suppose they can be safely ignored. Until, of course, pseudo-sciences like evolutionary psychology are thrown out of our universities. The cries of moral outrage, then, will be deafening.

I return to Ha-Joon Chang’s debunking 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.  In one of his chapters, Chang argues that people in poor countries are generally more entrepreneurial than those in rich countries. Most citizens of rich countries work for a company, doing highly specialized jobs. As a result, they spend their working lives implementing somebody else’s entrepreneurial vision, and not their own. According to an OECD study, in most developing countries 30-50 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce is self-employed (the ratio tends to be even higher in agriculture). In some of the poorest countries the ratio of people working as one-person entrepreneurs can be way above that: 66.9 per cent in Ghana, 75.4 percent in Bangladesh and a staggering 88.7 per cent in Benin. In contrast, only 12.8 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce in developed countries is self-employed.

For developing-country entrepreneurs, however, things go wrong all the time: power cuts, delivery delays due to bureaucratic red-tape, bribery and transport breakdowns. Coping with all these obstacles, Chang observes, requires agile thinking and improvisation. An average American businessman would not last a week if he had to manage a small company in Maputo or Phnom Penh. Why then do these entrepreneurs remain poor?

Recognizing the entrepreneurial energy of the poor has led many secular and Christian NGOs to leap on the “micro-credit bandwagon” in the past couple of decades. The main idea behind micro-credit is that the poor lack the necessary capital to realize their entrepreneurial potential. Regular banks ignore them and local money sharks charge exorbitant interest on loans. Enter the micro-credit (or, more broadly, the microfinance) industry which gives  poor people, especially poor women, small loans at reasonable interest rates to set up a food stall, buy a mobile phone to rent calls, or buy a cow or chickens and sell their produce.

This was seen as the magic formula to end poverty. It proved immensely popular among American donor agencies who saw it as a way of making every poor person a capitalist, no longer depending on government handouts. Governments, in turn, could simply forget the poor and leave their welfare in the hands of foreign and local development agencies who would distribute microcredit loans far and wide. The popularity of micro-credit reached fever pitch in 2005, which the UN declared the International Year of Microcredit. The following year Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, widely hailed as the pioneers of microcredit, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Unfortunately, the cracks in the micro-credit industry began to appear before this. And they have widened. Several books have questioned the claims that microfinance has significantly improved the lives of its clients. The problems are too numerous to mention. But just consider the woman who initially makes good money by renting out a mobile phone in her village. As soon as more “telephone ladies” appear on the scene, the incomes fall dramatically. The answer to such overcrowding of the market is to start manufacturing the phones yourself or writing software to develop applications for the phones. But this is a major step up and the “telephone ladies” do not have the education or wherewithal to move into manufacturing or software design. The problem is that there is only a very limited range of simple businesses that the poor in developing countries can take on, given their limited skills, lack of education and access to technologies, and the limited amount of funds that they can  mobilize through microfinance.

What is worse, however, is that without subsidies from governments or international donors, microfinance institutions have had to charge near-usurious rates. It has been revealed that the Grameen Bank could initially charge reasonable rates of interest only because of the (hushed-up) subsidies it was getting from the Bangladesh government and foreign donors. When, in the late 1990s, it came under pressure to give up the government subsidies, the Grameen Bank was forced to re-launch itself (in 2001) and start charging interest rates of 40-50 per cent. In countries such as Mexico the interest rates can be high as 100 per cent. Since few businesses can make the necessary profits to repay the loans, most of the loans now made by microfinance institutions go towards “consumption smoothing”- people taking out loans to pay for their daughter’s wedding or to make up a temporary fall in income due to the illness of a working family member. In other words, the vast bulk of microcredit is not being used to fuel entrepreneurship by the poor, but to finance consumption.

What really made rich countries rich is their ability to channel individual entrepreneurial energy into collective, productive enterprises. Even exceptional individuals like Thomas Edison or Bill Gates could become what they have only because they lived in societies that had good collective institutions: laws that enabled them to build large and complex organizations; a scientific infrastructure that enabled them to acquire their knowledge and experiment with it; an educational system that supplied trained scientists, engineers, managers, and workers to run these companies; a financial system that enabled them to raise large amounts of capital when they wanted to expand; patents and copyright laws that protected their inventions; easily accessible local and overseas markets for their products, and so on.

Poor nations need help in building effective institutions and collective, entrepreneurial organizations, if they are to get out of mass poverty. There are severe limits to developing individual talents alone.

This raises a major question: Are NGOs, both secular and Christian, unwittingly helping governments evade their responsibilities for social justice?

The average human today lives longer, travels further, burns more carbon and eats more food than in any generation before us. The unsustainable consumption habits of Europe, the USA and Japan have been promoted worldwide and are now being emulated by hundreds of millions in China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. The carbon-fuelled, capital-intensive approach to economic development has gathered so much momentum that, however much the world’s leaders may pay lip-service to caring for the planet, very few have the imagination and courage to envision alternative pathways.

Not surprisingly, the face of the earth too is ageing. Its skin (the soil) is drying up and becoming more reliant on chemicals. Its arteries (the rivers) are choking with industrial waste and blocked dams. Its lungs (the forests) are gasping for air, having been steadily shredded for timber, paper, cash-crops, ranches and highways. Its energy reserves (oil, coal) are being consumed faster than ever. While all our countries display the symptoms of this deterioration, in none is it so glaring and amplified as in China.

This is the verdict of Jonathan Watts, the environmental journalist and China correspondent of the Guardian newspaper. I have just been reading Watts’s fascinating account of his journey from the Tibetan plateau to the decimated forests of Heilongjiang, describing the tragic contradictions of China’s accelerated ‘progress’. In When A Billion Chinese Jump (2010), Watts repeatedly points out the gulf between the stated aims of the Chinese leadership when it comes to ‘scientific development’ and the realities on the ground.

Despite its dictatorial leadership, the Chinese government seems less able to prevent an environmental meltdown than leaders in democratic nations because it is more addicted to rapid growth. Moreover, power lies neither at the top nor the bottom, but within a middle layer of bureaucrats, with their own fiefdoms, and local developers whom it is difficult to hold to account. The per capita energy use in Shanghai now exceeds that of Tokyo, New York and London, and is 50 per cent higher than the global norm. And it is the conspicuous consumption of rich Shanghai shoppers that is being pushed as the lifestyle norm in all the other mega-cities in China.

“Hopes for a green future are premature,” writes Watts, while fears of the red past seem outdated. “If any single colour predominates in today’s China, it is the grey of smoke and ash and concrete, of horizon-blurring smog, of law-obscuring vagueness and of colour-stifling monotony. More species are dying out, fish stocks are declining, water shortages are growing more severe, deserts are encroaching on cities, glaciers are shrinking and the climate is becoming more hostile. Countless millions die each year of environment-related disease. Yet the government is choosing farm animals over wildlife, monoculture over biodiversity, concrete over earth and weather modification over truly ambitious moves to tackle global warming.” (pp. 388-9).

Is China the biggest threat to global security? It would seem so, despite the American political and media obsession with Iran and Pakistan. For China’s domestic addictions and environmental problems have spilled over into the rest of the world. As its own forests, fields and mines struggle to satisfy an expanding national appetite, China is depleting Siberia’s forests and Mongolia’s ore deposits. Obese children used to be rare in China; now nearly 15 % of the population is overweight. To feed its growing livestock, China imports huge quantities of soya, much of it from Brazil, which has accelerated deforestation in the Amazon region. The high-protein, high-octane, junk-food lifestyle has consequences for global food security, climate change and South East Asia’s wildlife. Toxic dust from factories and deserts in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia drift across the Pacific to the West Coast of California. Dams and river diversion projects in Tibet and Yunnan are affecting millions of people living downstream in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Burma. Chinese cash and political support is accelerating the filthy extraction of oil from Canada’s tar sands and propping up evil regimes in resource-rich nations like Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burma.

In the lead-up to the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, China promised to cut the carbon intensity of its economy (greenhouse emissions relative to GDP) by 40-45 per cent by 2020. However, if it continues to grow at 8 per cent per annum, and remains unable to kick its coal habit, both its per capita carbon output and its historic emissions (those accrued over the past hundred years or more) will have exceeded that of the UK by 2020. There is still a long way to go before it catches up with the USA in both per capita and historic emissions culpability- but I think I have said enough on this Blog about the latter that I’ll quickly pass over this point!

If China is becoming the biggest threat to global security, India must lie not far behind. Its political elites care more about “national prestige” than human rights and the welfare of future generations. (How strange, then, that Europe and the US are looking to these Asian powers to rescue their economies!). If conservation is to stand any chance of working in China, India and elsewhere, environmental laws and well-articulated policies are not enough. There has to be a widespread cultural conversion: new values and attitudes, new understandings of what constitutes the “good life”. And, in my experience, that conversion has to begin in the middle-class Christian churches of Asia (which includes people like me).

One week before the Great Crash of October 1929- which precipitated the Great Depression- Irving Fisher of Yale University, perhaps the most distinguished US economist of his time, claimed that the American economy had attained a “permanently high plateau”. Three years later the national income had fallen by more than 50 per cent. No one, not a single economist, had seen it coming.

The usefulness of economics, observed that wittiest of economists, John Kenneth Galbraith, is that it provides employment for economists.

I thought of Galbraith when I read that the new Italian cabinet comprises economists, industrialists and masters of finance- the very people responsible for the debt crisis in the first place! And I do not understand why the European Central Bank, which lends any amount of money to every debt-ridden bank in the Eurozone,  does not lend to countries, thus forcing the Italian government to borrow at much higher rates of interest on the open market. And how is it that the United States, whose public debt is more than five times that of Italy, continues to borrow at the low rate of 2 per cent while Italy’s has reached a supposedly “unsustainable” level of 7 per cent? And why do the media go into a frenzy whenever a credit rating agency downgrades the credit rating of a country when all those rating agencies were caught with their pants down during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis?

Can any economist out there help me understand these mysteries?

My puzzlement seems to be shared by the Queen of England.  When attending a presentation in November 2008 at the London School of Economics, the Queen asked all the distinguished economists assembled there (and I paraphrase her words): “How come none of you nerds could tell us beforehand that this would happen?”

The economists went away and puzzled over the Queen’s question. The British Academy convened a meeting of the country’s top economists, and the results of that meeting were conveyed to Her Majesty in a letter, dated 22 July 2009, written by Professor Tim Besley, of the LSE and Professor Peter Hennessy, an eminent historian of British government from Queen Mary College (also of the University of London).

In that letter, the professors stated that individual economists were competent but that “they had lost sight of the wood for the trees”. There was, according to them, “a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.”

I take this story from Ha-Joon Chang’s recent book 23 Things they Don’t tell You About Capitalism. Chang is a well-known economic historian at Cambridge University, and here he continues the valuable work of myth-busting that he began with his more academic books Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaritans (where he showed, for instance, that the Western nations became rich by pursuing the very policies that, through the IMF and World Bank, they dissuade poorer countries from following).

Chang calls our attention to the phrase collective imagination in the professors’ letter. Hadn’t most economists (though not all) assured us, and still assure us, that markets are free and work well because we are rational, self-seeking individuals and so know what we want for ourselves and how to get it most efficiently? Where is there any discussion of the imagination, let alone of the collective kind, in economics textbooks or economic conferences? Conventional, neoclassical economics works with a reductionist understanding of human nature (selfish, rational). The complexity of human motivations and the socially embedded character of rationality are ignored in the pursuit of an abstract, ahistorical “economic science”. There is no room for notions of moral imagination, social solidarity, or the common good.

The failure of the economists, Chang points out, was understated in the letter to the Queen. It wasn’t simply that economists were wrong-footed in a once-in-a-century disaster that could not have been predicted. They played a crucial role in creating the conditions that paved the way for the 2008 crisis (and dozens of smaller ones that came before it in the 1980s and 1990s). They advanced theories that justified unregulated financial flows, high income inequalities, job insecurity, and the neglect of manufacturing in favour of financial “services”. The brightest and best of them told the rest of us that all was well with the global economy, and that the US had found the magic formula that combined high growth with low inflation.

The architects of the so-called East Asian “miracle economies” were not slaves to economic ideologies of the right or the left. They too were very clever people, but most came from backgrounds in engineering or law, not economics. Chang’s target is clearly not all economists (he is an admirer of Pigou, Minsky, Keynes, Sen, et al.) but the free-market economists whom the Anglo-American world (and some in South Asia and Latin America) has followed for the past three decades. This kind of economics, he says, has been worse than irrelevant; it has “been positively harmful for most people”.

More on Chang’s economic myth-busting in later posts.

I was visiting Portugal earlier this month, and my visit coincided with that of Marina Silva, the Brazilian environmental campaigner who served as Minister of the Environment in President Lula de Silva’s government.  This remarkable woman has been justly honoured all over the world for her tireless and courageous work. She is far more than an environmental activist on behalf of the world’s forests. She is a promoter of a different style of politics, one that puts the long-term future of the planet and its inhabitants before short-term financial gain. This is a politics of sustainability. It is the translation into all our political and economic activities of the Biblical mandate to “cultivate the earth and to serve/care for it” (Gen.2:15).

Marina Silva is a committed Christian. Her Assemblies of God church has commissioned her as “a missionary for the care of creation.” (Just imagine the transformation in the global Church if politicians, economists, business leaders, environmental activists, artists and others were also likewise commissioned and prayed for!). When she was Minister of the Environment, she brought together heads of fifteen other ministries, including transport, agriculture, education and energy, to formulate policies that would bring the notion of sustainability into the heart of government. This led her into collision, as it has done all her life, with powerful corporate interests and criminal networks that seek to control the Amazon the way that drug cartels in other Latin American countries control the narcotics trade.

Marina herself was born in poverty and grew up in the Amazon rainforest. She spent her childhood tapping latex from rubber trees and hunting with her father to support their large family. She was 16 years old when she finally learned how to read and write. That happened after she moved to the nearest city to work as a house servant. Until then, she had learned from the forest and her own people who inhabited the forest  – these stimulated in her the love for creation, as well as the senses to interpret it. Ten years later she earned a university degree in history and went on to found an independent trade union movement with rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes in the state of Acre. (Just imagine how many children there must be like Marina around the world, their human potential undeveloped simply because of the misfortune to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time).

In the early 1980s Marina and Mendes organized peaceful demonstrations by forest-dwelling rubber tappers against wanton deforestation and the expulsion of forest communities from their traditional holdings. Acre became famous as an example of grassroots resistance to wholesale environmental destruction by logging companies hand-in-glove with local politicians. When Mendes was assassinated, their work became known on a global level. It catapulted Marina into federal politics and, in 1994, she became the first rubber-tapper to be elected to the Brazilian federal senate.

As a senator, and later as environmental Minister, she fought to reduce deforestation by a combination of actions: increasing forest patrols by making the official environmental agency Ibama work alongside the Federal Police and the Defence Ministry; breaking up over 1,500 illegal businesses in the Amazon region;  re-ordering land use by creating 24 million hectares of protected areas and introducing the Public Forest Management Law which provided for the sustainable production of timber, and financially enabling the local forest-dwellers to have a greater role in the management of the forests.

Marina is back in the Brazilian senate, and she embodies a politics that puts people and the planet before profits and power. But this is a lonely position to occupy anywhere in the world.

The rich elites of Brazil, India and China who are the focus of the global media (as in the recently held Indian Grand Prix) are the ones who define “development” for the rest of us. Their moral imaginations are, tragically, severely crippled. They can only imitate the wasteful, unsustainable  lifestyles of Western elites, and although we now know more of what those lifestyles cost the planet and the majority of its human and nonhuman inhabitants, there seems to be little creative thinking in these “newly emerging powers” as to what an alternative model of “development” would look like.

Finally, compare Marina Silva with some of the current presidential candidates in the USA who claim to be “Bible-believing” Christians. Michele Bachmann, for instance, has only one recipe for the present economic woes of her country: scrap the Environmental Protection Agency and all environmental restraints on Big Business! Such stupidity gets a bigger voice in the secular media than Marina’s evangelical economics. (One wonders which Bible Bachmann and others are reading). Can the Church worldwide look to women like Marina as role-models, instead of vociferous North American mega-church pastors and politicians, when it comes to Christian leadership in the public sphere?

Some readers have written to say that Camila Vallejo is a member of the Communist Party of Chile, as if this should make my admiration for her evaporate.

If we are to shun any involvement with communists, then we should also be boycotting all goods made in China and Vietnam, and persuading our governments and business leaders to stop all trade with these countries, let alone investing heavily in them. Joining communists to make money is okay. Joining them to protest against injustice is not. What hypocrisy! And how paradoxical that the United States, which projects itself as the defender of liberty and human rights around the world, is so dependent economically on the communists that the relationship can even be described as one of ownership.

It can, of course, be argued –as the Slovenian communist philosopher Slavoj Zizek does- that today’s China is the ideal capitalist country in which the main task of the ruling Communist Party is to control the workers and prevent their self-organization and mobilization. The Party’s power is legitimized by its undercover deal with the new capitalists, which takes the form: “You stay out of politics, and we will keep the workers under control.” Zizek claims that the ruling regime is so sensitive to any notion of workers’ self-organization that “even the official books dealing with the history of the Chinese Communist Party and workers’ movement in China silently pass over the subject of trade unions and other forms of workers’ resistance, even if they were supported or directly organized by the Communists, lest the evocation of this past give rise to dangerous association with the present” (Living in the End Times, 2011).

One of the myths about capitalism that was popular during the Cold War was that it was the handmaid of democracy. Economic freedom would usher in political freedom. But, even in the history of Western nations, the truth was the very opposite. It was the spread of adult suffrage and the maturing of democracy that curbed the excesses of capitalism and protected men, women, and children from the worst forms of exploitation.

God’s “upside-down kingdom”, which has dawned in Jesus Christ, will one day spell the “scattering of the proud…the bringing down of rulers from their thrones…the lifting up of the humble, the filling of the hungry with good things and the sending away of the rich empty-handed” (Lk.1:51-2).  The day of final transformation is when God’s redemptive presence will fill the earth (Is 11:1-9; 65:17-25; Rev.21:1-5). The victory that Christ secures through his death and resurrection is given to those who are willing to become like little children (Matt.18:2), that is, nobodies; these are also the “poor in spirit” (Matt.5:3), those who have relinquished the obsession with control and competitiveness.

The redemption that the Gospel announces is thus contradicted by a global economy that persuades persons and nations to live beyond their means. Responsible lending can help people escape from poverty, as in foreign direct investment and micro-credit schemes, provided the terms of the loan are fair and the interests of both debtor and creditor are safeguarded legally. But in a debt-based global economy, lending by rich nations and financial institutions is often irresponsible. Poor nations are pressurized by the rich into selling their rights to their “commons” as partial repayment of national debts. (Would this be a contemporary equivalent of the taking of a poor man’s millstone as security for a debt-cf. Deut. 24:6?). Moreover, many Two-Third World governments are run by incompetent and corrupt politicians who are willing to sell off their nation’s natural inheritance in exchange for massive armies and wasteful, grandiose “development projects”. Thereby whole generations live under the shadow of crippling debts which require extraordinary and sustained levels of economic growth to offset.

The IMF and the World Bank are the favourite targets of left-wing critics of globalization. But dependence on such institutions is more often the result of poor strategic planning and fiscal management, rather than a global conspiracy by the latter. States that run up large foreign debts lose control over their macro-economic policy. We are now so accustomed to governments running up billions of dollars in deficits every year that we take it as normal that governments owe hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to people outside the country. But if you put yourself in massive debt to other people, you lose some control over your life

On a personal level, we can stop using credit cards to buy things we cannot afford. Living beyond our means leads to enslavement and ecological disaster. In this regard, the “99%” whom the “Occupying” movements claim to represent are not blameless- they have encouraged a system whose short-term benefits they have reaped, while ignoring the real victims of globalization. But, on a political level, church leaders, economists, businessmen, journalists, artists, lawyers and social activists need to come together with the poor to claim the rights of the marginalized and the vulnerable.

The recovery of democratic politics is central to any Christian attempt to “redeem” the global economy and the processes of globalization. The lack of political will on the part of wealthy nations to reform global financial institutions and to reshape the global economy so that the benefits of globalization are more equitably distributed can only be countered by a transnational mobilisation of grassroots movements from below.

Let Christians in rich nations learn from Occupying Wall Street and other social movements what following Christ entails…

Until two weeks ago, I had never heard of Camila Vallejo. Now I am fascinated by this charismatic student leader in Chile who has been shaking the political establishment in her country. She is spearheading a populist movement that has the right to “quality education” at its core. Boldly outspoken, Vallejo is only the second female leader in the 105- year old history of the student union in the University of Chile. Hundreds of thousands of university and high school students have been boycotting classes since early June, clamouring for better and more affordable education and an end to the two-tier system that creates a few affluent, elite institutions amid many underfunded public ones.

Last month, transport workers and other public sector employees joined the student movement in public strikes that led to a two-day nationwide shutdown. The government has promised to spend a further US $4 billion on education and to cut the interest rates on student loans by more than half. Chile’s Supreme Court has ordered police protection for Vallejo as she has been receiving death threats. A government official lost his job after suggesting that the protests would end if she were assassinated. Chile’s President is the billionaire business tycoon, Sebastian Pińera, whom opinion polls reveal only enjoys 26% of electoral support. Meanwhile, Vallejo has become a cult figure with songs about her appearing all over Youtube. She is tipped to be a future President.

She tells reporters: “Why do we need education? To make profits? To run a business? Or to develop the country and have social integration and development? Those are the issues in dispute.”

Here is a 23 year-old woman taking on the whole educational and political system!

The typical response of Christian students, especially in the privileged universities of the world, whenever I talk to them about engaging in acts of social transformation is either “That sounds idealistic…” or “But, we are only students…” And in the case of many graduates (even those in the mass media and politics), they shrug their shoulders and say, “We are so powerless…”

What needs to change in Christian university groups and churches for them to be attracting students like Camila Vallejo, let alone producing people like her?

At the same time as these momentous events are unfolding in Chile, students in New York and other cities in the USA have also been out on the streets every day since 17 September in peaceful protests against the takeover of American politics by corporate power. They call themselves “Occupying Wall Street” and describe themselves as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colours, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.”

Last Saturday, more than 80 of them were arrested by police in NYC.  But this has not deterred them. They write on their website: “As members of the 99 percent, we occupy Wall Street as a symbolic gesture of our discontent with the current economic and political climate and as an example of a better world to come.”

All these are signs of hope. It is poles apart from the irrational violence that gripped parts of London in August. It expresses the “Direct Democracy” I called for in my Blog post of 2 July. To Christian students and churches, all I can say is, “Get involved!” (You can listen, too, to my plenary Bible exposition on Loving God & Neighbour at the IFES World Assembly in Krakow, 31 July, available at  http://www.ifesworld.org/media/audio/wa2011-aen-mark-vinoth).

Ten years on, media commentary on 9/11 is legion, while other events, equally horrific, are quickly forgotten. Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Howard Zinn, the distinguished American historian and author of A People’s History of the United States, wrote: “The images on television horrified and sickened me. Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment. I thought: they have learned nothing, absolutely nothing,  from the history of the twentieth century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.”

Zinn continued: “We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion dollar military budget has not given us security. Military bases all over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines, a ‘missile defence shield’, will not give us security… We should take our example not from our military and political leaders shouting ‘retaliate’ and ‘war’ but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengeance but compassion.”

Since Zinn penned those words, the U.S military budget tripled to nearly a trillion dollars, and American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which have claimed far more lives than were lost on 9/11) have squandered the deep sympathy for Americans that was widespread immediately after the attacks on American soil. Despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, the US and Western Europe are no less vulnerable to terror attacks than they were ten years ago.

The New York Times of 31 December 2007 carried an editorial insisting that the United States could no longer be called a “democratic” society. The editorial listed a succession of state-sanctioned abuses of American citizens, including eavesdropping, illicit body searches, arbitrary arrests, torture by the CIA and repeated violations of the Geneva Conventions, all done by government officials without apology and under the aegis of waging a “war on terror”. Other governments took a leaf out of the Bush administration’s book and re-described all their civil conflicts as “wars on terror” which justified introducing or extending draconian “emergency laws” and brutal policies of repression against any dissidents.

It is incumbent on governments to provide security for their citizens. But when “national security” overrides all moral considerations, one is forced to ask whether such a society is actually worth defending. If my “security” is obtained at the cost of harming, degrading or endangering the lives of innocent others, then I should be willing to forego that security. Security obsessions are inexhaustible and insatiable; and once we go down that path, whether as individuals wanting to live in “secure environments” (e.g. gated condominiums) or governments pursing every potential “security threat’, it is difficult to change direction. Groups and persons targeted as “threats” are turned into objects and excluded from the moral universe. They can be the targets of “pre-emptive” eliminations, unilaterally undertaken.

The only people who are ever arraigned before war crimes tribunals are those on the defeated side. Victors have never had to answer for war crimes and other abuses of human rights. (If the Sri Lankan regime is ever arraigned by the UN for war crimes, as is currently being threatened, it will be a historical “first”!). The inquiry into the Abu Ghraib outrage never reached the top echelons of the American military command; let alone the top men in the political administration who sanctioned the use of torture.

In an interview with an online American journal in late 2008, I was asked what difference Obama’s election as the new American President would make worldwide. I said that, while Obama’s election was a good thing for US domestic politics, it would not make an iota of difference to foreign policy. Look back over the past sixty years and you will not observe much difference between Republicans and Democrats where U.S military and corporate interests are concerned.

Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any members of the Bush regime who were responsible for war crimes, including some who admitted to torture. Obama has claimed the right to assassinate anybody, including American citizens, suspected of belonging to terrorist networks, merely on grounds given by the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly. Also, the US has greatly expanded the use of unmanned drone attacks in Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan, violating humanitarian rules of engagement by shifting the risks to non-combatants away from American military personnel.

US “exceptionalism” is deeply paradoxical. On the one hand, you have a nation, the first liberal democracy in the world, with a great Constitutional tradition recognizing natural human rights.  On the other hand, however, it is the single biggest cause of cynicism about human rights and the single biggest obstacle to the implementation of those rights by governments around the world. The cynicism is prompted not only by the vast gulf between rhetoric and reality within the US; but also by the way the US, while denouncing other governments’ human rights records (excepting, of course, Israel), refuses to abide by key international human rights conventions, shields its own officials from prosecution, and consistently invokes national sovereignty and American “national interest” over the global common good.

Both the British and German treasuries have struck deals this month with the Swiss government to tax their citizens’ hidden accounts in Switzerland’s globally harmful banking system. However, the identities of these account holders will not be disclosed, allowing Swiss bankers to maintain their bizarre boasts of “privacy” and “confidentiality”. The agreement with Germany sees the latter accepting a paltry $2.8 billion from the Swiss banks said to be holding an estimated $276 billion of Germans’ undeclared wealth. The Swiss authorities will in future tax Germans at the rate of 26 per cent on their interest from their accounts and hand that money over to the German government. Similarly with UK citizens.

The vast majority of nations whose public wealth is siphoned off to tax havens by their political masters, drug barons and business elites have no such bargaining powers. The Tax Justice Network and Christian Aid have been advocating for years an end to banking secrecy in offshore tax havens such as Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Cayman Islands and Bahamas. The unilateral German and British actions have undermined that painstaking work. The Tax Justice Network estimates assets held offshore total $11.5 trillion- which if taxed could yield revenues in excess of $225 billion. But leave aside taxation; these havens are vast pools of illicit funds and make the fight against corruption, money-laundering and international crime so much harder.

We are treated to the spectacle of European and American governments thrown into a panic over their budget deficits and taking out their fears on their citizens who are least responsible for the problem: the urban poor and the lower middle-classes who are being subjected to crippling cuts in health care,  education and the provision of public services. The super-rich are allowed to get away with tax evasion on a gigantic scale; and immediately cry “foul” if the rulers whose palms they grease even suggest a rise in taxes. (Warren Buffet is a rare exception to this rule!).

I am often reminded of the late John Kenneth Galbraith’s memorable words, written back in 1977: “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich. So it was in the Ancien Regime when reform from the top became impossible, revolution from the bottom became inevitable.”

How refreshing to turn to Professor Zgymunt Bauman’s recent book, suggestively titled Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age.  Bauman is one of the most original and insightful social thinkers of our time. Even at the age of eighty five his output is prolific and his prose still clear, trenchant and thought-provoking. He lives in his retirement near Bradford, a city in the north of England that has repeatedly witnessed bouts of rioting and inter-ethnic violence. Writing well before the most recent spate of riots in London and other English cities, Bauman notes that in Bradford 40 per cent of youngsters live in families without a single person who has a regular job, and one in ten young people already have police records. Such a statistical correlation, he points out, “does not in itself justify the reclassification of poverty as a criminal problem; if anything, it underlines the need to treat juvenile delinquency as a social problem.” (NB: David Cameron and others of the ruling class in Britain were quick to label the recent acts of arson and looting as a “law and order problem”, as if this settled the matter). For Bauman, there are social roots which lie “in a combination of the consumerist life philosophy propagated and instilled under the pressure of a consumer-oriented economy and politics, the fast shrinking of life-chances available to the poor, and the absence for a steadily widening segment of the population of realistic prospects of escaping poverty in a way that is socially approved and assured.”

The term “collateral damage” has recently been added to the vocabulary of military forces to refer to the unplanned, unintended (but not necessarily, unanticipated) effects of armed interventions, effects that are damaging, harmful, and costly in human terms. Many military commanders retrospectively exonerate themselves by saying that while such risks were noted they were worth taking, because one “cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs”. What is glossed over in such accounts is someone’s usurped power to decide which are the eggs to be broken and who gets to savour the omelette (certainly not the broken eggs). Thinking in terms of collateral damage tacitly assumes an already existing inequality in people’s rights and life chances. The situation of youth in Bradford, Bauman suggests, “is a collateral casualty of profit-driven, uncoordinated and uncontrolled globalization.”

The richest 10 per cent of adults worldwide own 85 per cent of global household wealth, with the richest 2 per cent among them capturing more than half that wealth. London is the most unequal city in the world. The financial brokers, hedge fund managers and corporate Fat Cats routinely pilfer and pillage on a scale that dwarfs whatever happened recently in English cities. But they are never hauled before magistrates’ courts for summary sentencing. Nor are they even publicly rebuked. Until, of course, like a certain media tycoon, they fall out of favour with their political cronies.