Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

LABOUR WELL THE TEEMING EARTH

The poor are always with us.

The eradication of poverty.

These are the poles of perception, the oppositions of the phenomenon of want.

The poor are always with us.

The first is ancient, an implied acceptance of a destined lot, everyone conditioned by class (each in his place), by religion (the meek shall inherit the earth), to be content to have no place and inherit nothing.

The eradication of poverty.

The second proposition refuses to accept poverty as part of human destiny. The United Nations General Assembly’s designation of the International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty is a mission statement in the true sense. It is surely the boldest expression of faith in human endeavour ever made? It comes from the most representative body in the world. It posits perhaps the greatest human advancement ever embarked upon, an adventure greater than any attempted in the progress of humankind since we could define ourselves as such. And most important, it asserts convincing proof that the goal could be attainable.

Beginning last year, the United Nations Development Programme has launched an exhaustive, world-wide initiative to debunk poverty as destiny; with its partners, the United Nations system, organizations of civil society, academic institutions, the private sectors and international donor community, research has been produced which identifies the extent and nature of poverty in its many forms — and destiny is not one of them.

I do not propose to cite the statistics of the world of want. They are all there, devastating, in the invaluable publications of the United Nations Development Programme — the staggering material facts of race, racial prejudice, political and social administration, geography, gender, ethnicity, agricultural practice, technological practice, industrial production, health services — everything — from the drying up of a stream to the closing down of an arms factory — that produces the phenomena of poverty as lived by the world’s 1.3 billion poor.

When you read this evidence of physical, mental, and spiritual deprivation, you can reach only one conclusion: poverty is a trap. Brought about by many factors other than the obvious ones you may always have had in mind, poverty is the nadir of disempowerment.

It is a disempowerment that has existed and does exist in democracies as well as dictatorships, links them, in a way we are reluctant to have to admit. The ballot box of free and fair elections has failed to empower the poor in most of the democratic countries. The dictatorship of the people failed to do so in most countries of the Soviet empire. And since the fall of Communism the West’s claim of freeing those countries to the establishment of a market economy and prosperity means nothing to the old people who now beg in the streets of Moscow, as the homeless do in the streets of cities of the only great power left in the world, the United States of America. In Brazil, in Argentina, in Africa, in India, in Bangladesh — where in this world except for the small welfare states of the north, are there not people in the nadir of poverty? No need to enter into ideological differences, no need to make any value judgments, here: each country has produced — or failed to end — the shameful human end-product, poverty.

What is a decade — in terms of centuries of acceptance, the poor are always with us?

Our answer surely is that the world now has the knowledge, the scientific and technological ability to do away with most of the causes of poverty, and to turn around the consequences of causes it cannot prevent. There are identified practical means: what is needed is the money and commitment of governments, regional, national, and bodies of world governance, to cooperate and carry out these means. And what is needed to bring this about is a roused awareness and admittance among the peoples of the world that whether there is proved to be life on Mars, and whether you may conduct your affairs electronically without leaving your armchair, the new century is not going to be a new century at all in terms of the progress of humanity if we take along with us acceptance of the shameful shackles of the past — over a billion men, women, and children in poverty, eighty-two countries unable to produce or buy sufficient food for their population — and we offer only charity, that palliative to satisfy the conscience and keep the same old system of haves and have-nots quietly contained.

In view of this need for roused awareness, I think it is useful for us to consider: How do different people conceive poverty? How do they think about it? Historically, where did it begin?

In prehistory early humans lived by what we would call now a subsistence economy: you hunted, you gathered, and when these resources of your group ran out in one place, you moved on; only nature discriminated, making one area more salubrious than another, but there was space enough to make of this an advantage rather than a deprivation. It was with the arrival of surplus value that the phenomenon of rich and poor began; with the cultivation of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, when food was grown and could be stored instead of foraged and hunted, able to satisfy only short-term needs. As soon as there was more than sufficient unto the day, those who grew more than they could eat became the haves, while those whose harvest provided no surplus became the have-nots.

Basically, nothing has changed since then. Except that it is no longer possible for societies to move on from one disadvantaged environment to a more salubrious one — the colonial era of the European powers was perhaps the last such movement to take place successfully, the final enactment of an obsolete solution to social problems. On an individual scale, immigrants in contemporary days generally find themselves received by locals with resentment as competitors in the labour market of the country of their aspirations, and quickly sink to a place among the poor of that country. Nothing much has changed, over the centuries, except that we have evolved what might be called a philosophy of acceptance of poverty.

First, there is the question of different class perceptions of what poverty is, and how these are arrived at. There is the upper-class perception. There is the middle-class perception. And there is that of the poor themselves.

For the rich, any contingency that they themselves might sink into poverty is so remote that it need not enter their minds. They are also in the position of being bountiful; so that, curiously, while they may be genuinely concerned about the existence of the poor, poverty is also a source of self-esteem. Do not be shocked by this remark; without the philanthropy of wealth, the manner in which the world has dealt with, alleviated, poverty up till now could not have been maintained at all. But this over-spill of wealth is too sporadic, too personally dependent on what aspects of poverty, piece-meal, donors happen to favour, to be a solution.

I read recently that if an amount equal to the combined wealth of the ten richest individuals in the world could be made available annually, the problem of the world’s 1.3 billion living in extreme poverty could be solved by the end of the century. And it seems one of the listed twenty richest (Ted Turner of CNN) has heard the message or taken the hint; and his remark that his one-billion dollar donation made available over ten years represents a mere nine months of his income gives credence to the incredible claim that the wealth of ten individuals is so great that it could solve the problem of poverty. Well, one cannot expect these individuals to give up their worldly goods in toto for the world, any more than any of us, I suspect, are prepared to sacrifice our — we consider — reasonable privileges entirely for those who have none. What is asked is for those who possess and control great wealth to look at the political and economic structures in their countries which have made that wealth possible and yet have created conditions that make philanthropy necessary — political and economic regimes that have failed to establish the means, in adequate pay for work, in education and training, in environment, by which people may provide for themselves in self-respect and dignity. That is the thinking that will face the facts of redistribution of the world’s wealth.

The wealthy and powerful who control the consortiums and international companies, and the government agencies who plan with them, need to take responsible heed of the emphasis placed by the United Nations Development Programme on ‘putting people at the centre of development’; on the concept of development enterprises as not only or even primarily advancing the credit balance of a country and providing X number of jobs, but as the instigation of a series of social consequences that will affect the implicated community in many ways. What may put pay in the pockets of the income poor this year may be off-set, over their lifetime, by destroying their environment. Development becomes a dangerous form of social engineering if it discounts the long-term effects on social cohesion. Profit and loss, in the book-keeping of the eradication of poverty, will be a calculation of how many people’s daily lives can be entered, in the long term, on the credit column.

For the broad middle-class, which includes the skilled working-class in many countries, the possibility of descending to poverty is subliminally present. Their concept of poverty is tinged by fear, as well as by concern for those who suffer it: there but for the grace of God go I. Civil conflict, a change of government, inflation, a form of affirmative action whether on principle of colour, race, or simply replacement of older employees with the young — these contingencies threaten middle-class safety with its home ownership, its insurance policies and pension funds. All the things that poverty strips one of; all the safety-nets the poor do not have. . Poverty is regarded as a blow of fate that just might come. Alternatively, in defensive rationalisation, whose fault is poverty, aside from national aleatory conditions? Perhaps, since the middle-class by and large is industrious and ambitious — and has the possibility of advancement in terms of money and status, having a base to start from which the poor have not — the middle-class often feels that it is lack of will, initiative, and commitment to work as they themselves do, that keeps the poor in that state.

The basic image of poverty is the man begging in the street; the conclusion: surely there’s something else he could do? Unemployment is suspect as lack of ability; and well it may be in many developing countries where lack of skills makes people literally unemployable, unable to be active in sectors where employment would be available. But what has to be realized is how that lack comes about in the general disempowerment of poverty itself. To abolish the spectre of the man begging in the street, the woman huddled on her park-bench home, the children staring from a refugee camp, is first to make the effort to understand what factors create this disempowerment.

How do victims themselves perceive their poverty?

They live it; they know it best, beyond all outside concepts.

What, apart from the survival needs of food and shelter, do they feel they are most deprived of? Researchers moving among them have learned much that is often ignored, such as the perception of women that, as those who with their children suffer most, attention to their advancement should take more than a marginal ‘special interest’ place in transformation of the lives of the disadvantaged in general. Recent advice to the Hong Kong meeting of the World Bank and the IMF was that some fifteen thousand bankers, finance ministers, and representatives of development business attending ‘might do well to re-dedicate themselves to slowing population growth through more attention to reproductive health, education for girls and employment for women’.

Consultation with how communities in poverty see themselves in relation to the ordinary fullness of life other communities take for granted is now recognized by research as integral to harnessing the negatives of social resentment and passivity into vital partnership for change. It is the fortunate world outside dollar-a-day subsistence that needs to begin to see the impoverished as our necessary partners in world survival, partners to be listened to in respect of the components of what a decent life is. It is the privileged world that needs to come to the realization that a ‘decent life’ cannot be truly lived by any of us while one-quarter of the developing world’s population exists in poverty.

If economic poverty began when some had surplus production and some did not, and nothing much has changed in principle, the second cause of poverty as a phenomenon of human history is war, and nothing much has changed there, either. Wars, social conflict, whether at international, national, or inter-ethnic level, still produce hunger and homelessness, the prime characteristics of poverty, and now, it seems, on a rolling action scale, spreading as a deadly pandemic from one territory to another. The eradication of poverty implies a hand-in-hand relation with agencies of the non-violent resolution of conflict. The peace-keeping, peace-promoting work of the United Nations and other formations, fraught with difficulty, danger, and frustration, and controversial as it is, must be seen as a vital component of the decade’s aim. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has put the truth succinctly: ‘Without peace development is not possible; without development peace is not possible.’

The violence of nature — flood, drought, and earthquake — is another factor that has caused poverty since ancient times, and that is something which is not within human capability to prevent, as wars are. But the violence perpetrated by humankind on nature is increasingly one of the causes of poverty. The destruction of indigenous forests, the pollution of oceans, the leaching out of the land by indiscriminate use of chemicals; these take away from communities their livelihood. The leakage of nuclear waste makes water unpotable and, as the people of South-East Asia have so recently experienced, the hellish miasma from burned-out trees makes the very air unbreathable. The problem of poverty cannot be solved while the earth and its oceans that feed us are abused by ruthless government planning and blinkered human greed.

What are the moral perceptions of poverty?

These are governed by those looking on, looking in, so to speak, from the outside. ‘Poor but honest’: consider the dictum. Why do the rich never make the qualification, ‘Rich but honest’? No-one has commented on moral attitudes in this context better than Bertolt Brecht. Here is his poem:

Food is the first thing. Morals follow on.

So first make sure that those who now are starving

Get proper helpings when we do the carving.

Is for people to be honest when they are starving our measure of virtue, or is it a measure of our hypocrisy? Common crime, up to a certain level — economic white-collar crime is the prerogative of the wealthy — is a product of poverty and cannot be countered by punitive methods alone. Some of the funds that citizens, living in urban fear of muggings and robberies, want to see used, as the saying goes, to ‘stamp out crime’ with more police and bigger prisons, would have better effect diverted to the aim of stamping out poverty. No-one will be safe while punishment and pious moral dicta are handed out in place of food. The campaign against poverty is the best campaign against crime.

Finally, the definition of poverty does not end with material needs; the aim of its eradication will not be complete or perhaps even attainable without the world’s attention to the deprivation of the mind: intellectual poverty. As food is the basic need of the starved body, literacy is the basic need of the starved mind. According to the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 1997, in the past fifty years adult illiteracy in the world has been reduced to almost half. If it can be virtually ended by early next century, it will be a great force in the six-point global action plan provided by the Report, and not only because the ability to read and write is crucial to participation in development, the open sesame to the world of work, mental skills, and self-administration that is economic freedom. For to be illiterate or semi-literate is to be deprived of the illumination and pleasure of reading, of each individual’s rightful share in an exploration of the world of ideas; it is to spend one’s life imprisoned between the walls of one-dimensional experience.

Illiteracy cruelly stunts the human spirit both as a cause and as a result of the disempowerment we now dedicate a decade to bring to an end. We are here to discuss and pledge the means we know we have at our disposal; and I want to close with what I believe can be our text, for the day and the decade. It comes from William Blake.

Many conversed on these things as they labour’d at the furrow

Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery:

It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal.

Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones,

And those who are in misery cannot remain so long

If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.’

— Speech to the United Nations Development Programme, UN,

Launch of ‘Decade for Elimination of Poverty’

New York, October 17, 1997