Martin LeFevre: Shaking Up the Global Society

The huge earthquake in Chile—8.8 on the Richter scale, one of the largest ever recorded—drives home the point that it isn’t nature that’s at war with humankind, but humankind that’s at war with itself.

Chile’s quakes make California’s look like speed bumps. Having been on top of temblors from 6.5 to 7.1, which do damage and kill people respectively, I can’t imagine anything over an 8.0. To give some idea of the force multiplier, the quake that just hit Chile was over 500 times as powerful as the one that hit Haiti six weeks ago.

The Haitian quake was considerably closer to Porte-au-Prince than the Chilean shaker was to Concepcion (10 vs. 70 miles). The Chilean quake was twice as deep; and Porte-au-Prince has more than twice the population. But these factors account for only a fraction of the difference in deaths, injuries, and devastation. The parlous infrastructure and absence of building codes in impoverished Haiti are the leading factors.

The mind cannot encompass the ongoing tragedy in Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. Hundreds of thousands more have lost limbs, and millions are still at risk from cholera and other diseases.

And yet the scale makes the challenges, and the false thinking that prevents meeting them, clear.

Asking the right questions at this point is not just necessary philosophically; lives depend on it. One question some journalists and experts are asking is this: How should Haiti be rebuilt?

There are assumptions and unexamined premises behind that question, and they stand in the way of an adequate response. First, talking about how Haiti should be rebuilt as people are dying from preventable causes is to indulge in the abstraction of the experts.

The response to the Haitian earthquake has been woefully inadequate, and yet the experts are saying that “there is too much externality with Haiti,” and there must be “Haitian born solutions.” The slick validity of such notions is so obvious that it’s hard to see their underlying invalidity.

First, we no longer live in a world of nations; we live in global society, in which borders are completely secondary.

Second, Haiti was the poster child of a failed State before the earthquake. If it had been exporting terrorists, it would have been receiving a lot more attention. Instead it gets Bill Clinton. (How Clinton became an icon of effective governance when his own administration began in failure and ended in ignominy is beyond me.)

People who call for “Haitian-born solutions” are contributing to the deaths of thousands. Waiting for leadership in a flattened country that had virtually no leadership before the quake amounts to sitting on the sidelines while people in Haiti die of preventable causes.

Where nations are concerned, the entire dichotomy between internal vs. external, domestic vs. foreign, no longer applies. It had some validity in the age of nations, between 1800 and 1990, but once the superpowers collapsed, we entered a new era, and reality.

Therefore the same underlying assumption that makes China a poor world citizen also keeps Haiti suffering. China represents one end of the national power scale and Haiti the other.

“Planning for sustainable development” has become one of the most meaningless phrases in English or any other language. Even so, the idea points in the right direction. The question isn’t, “Does Haiti need a Marshall Plan?” but rather, “Why do countries like Haiti remain mired in unsustainable development, and what is required to help them lift themselves out of poverty?”

Even discussing the underlying issues seems unsuitable while the crisis continues. But it has become clear that the crisis is systemic and ongoing, not only in Haiti, but in most of the world’s so-called developing countries. The idea of progress, which has so long sustained shapers and students of human history, is no longer valid.

There has been a stepwise evolution in human civilization until now. Clans became cities; cities became city-states; and city-states became nations. And with limited success, nations have even united into regional communities.

This process of gradual change seems so old that it seems innate; so commonsensical that seems a given; so rational that it seems the only practical way ahead.

But now, historical forces and facts are such that any further integration of human society requires a leap, a non-incremental breakthrough. Indeed a revolution, psychologically speaking. There is no other way for an integration of nations, and for an effective global polity to emerge.

Regions and nations will continue to disintegrate unless the identification with particular groups gives way in enough people to seeing ourselves as global citizens in our de facto global society. The world has become too interconnected not to see it as a whole.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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