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RAIN - If I were a full time journalist of the 'old school' --- around 1973 when Woodward and Bernstein were unearthing the Watergate story --- I would have time to investigate some of the oddities behind the recent crisis in Mozambique. There are three that immediately come to mind: first, why did not a single official, in criticising the Western democracies for not sending enough helicopters well in time to save thousands of people from drowning, never mention all the helicopters not sent from Zimbabwe; secondly, if civilian satellites are now allowed to collect data up to a resolution of .85 metres, what were they all doing when the helicopters were buzzing around looking for stranded villages; and, most puzzling of all, what happened to all the paraphernalia of meteorological hardware girdling the planet?
Not for the first time, quite obvious solutions to crises seem not to have been considered. Surely we have enough weather system tracking to have told not just the Mozambique government but every government that a flooding crisis was looming in Southern Africa. Equally, surely there could have been some effort to decrease tension in the region, temporarily freeing military helicopters for disaster relief. The one aspect of the story that particularly puzzles me, a phenomenon which has struck me on many occasions of international crisis, is how good are satellites and how much truth are we ever told about their surveillance capabilities. So many things seem to happen by surprise even though the Pentagon is supposed to be able to see objects as small as a packet of cigarettes; either we need to be told more or we need to be told to expect less.
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An emergent source of pain, however, is the apparent failure of modern technology to diagnose and begin to deal with the crisis. It is an insult to humanity that we have such powerful tools but that, either through maldistribution or indifference, they were not used to save the lives of thousands. I know it's vital to have the weather on the hour every hour so that you don't spoil your new hairdo between the parking lot and the mall door but a daily weather bulletin might make the difference between life and death in a delta with a fragile ecology.
Equally, reliable information on when to plant and harvest would save millions of lives. It is a sad commentary on our mores that the first major Satellite discovery of a meteorological fluke --- the 1976 frost in the uplands of Brazil --- led to killings on the world coffee market. That was iconic in many ways but the indifference is much more disturbing. If information technology can be used so effectively to cut the cost of financial transactions it can surely be used to cut the massive swathes of human misery.
There is, sadly, too much evidence that it is not the cost of aid that inhibits us but rather collective indifference. There is --- to recall with shame the nationwide concern for the dog killed in a bout of road rage --- nothing in our supposedly sophisticated society so puzzling as the disproportion of our concerns. This, as inheritors of high culture, too often leads us to be more emotionally concerned for fictional characters and animals than for our fellow human beings. I have been mortified by fictional tragedies and left indifferent by real ones. Too often I turn off the television with a sense of weariness and just send some money. The danger in this, of course, is that if unchecked this tendency will lead to such a degree of indifference that I won't even bother to send the money. We live in the context of ambient global disaster which, it is fashionably supposed, leads to 'compassion fatigue'. In justice to myself I have to say that my indifference is spasmodic. Most of the time I want to put things right and can't imagine why the collectively most creative civilisations in history haven't begun to want to fix what is going wrong rather than shrugging and tolerating it.
If it were simply a matter of money or technology most of the planet's problems could be solved but what we have not found is a sense of fraternity. We have been so obsessed with the first two revolutionary virtues that the third has gone by default. After two centuries I think we have gone as far in debating liberty and equality as is possible without repeating ourselves into redundancy. As the economy and technology are making us into global beings the political priority for the 21st Century must surely be the development, where our individual and collective means are incapable of instituting and sustaining it, of institutional infrastructure to nurture fraternity. That is why the often derided 'political correctness' of academia is so vital; it is a first step to the recognition of the centrality of decency in human relations regardless of particularities. To accept that we ought to be decent and to frame our discourse so as to be inoffensive is a necessary precondition for behaving decently. those who ridicule this mode of conduct either want to rule by oppression or feel threatened by the good fortune of their neighbours.
Although I find some of the terminology of decency somewhat bland and precious, I would find it difficult to identify any circumstances in which I would prefer greed and covetousness.
We shall soon learn that in a global economy we will have to accord equal respect to all those with whom we have dealings and that the return on bullying, though great in the short term, will diminish over time. Such broadening of our consciousness should include those still beyond the reach of our help. We do not need evangelism nor a grand crusade; we do not want moral tracts nor inscriptions on the walls of our public buildings; we need, at least, to start with a quiet appreciation of the gap between what we do and what we could do for our neighbour.
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