Invisible Consequences

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

- John Kenneth Galbraith
 

When I was a high school student I lived in South America for a year.  It came as a shock to me to discover how much people hated Americans.  Living with a Peruvian family, and hanging out with Peruvian teenagers, I came to see things from their point of view, and to understand how arrogant and self aggrandizing Americans can be to people who live at a great distance, when the consequences are not visible, and few Americans at home know what is really happening.

Imagine what it would have been like to see the American supported coup in Chile in 1972 if we had CNN giving us the blow-by-blow on video.  Suppose we had all seen the people gunned down in the stadium, being tortured with cattle prods, getting punished for their crime of supporting their democratically elected government?  I bring this up not to diminish the awfulness of what happened in New York, or to argue for moral relativism, but just to make it clear that there are some very real reasons why some foreigners don't like us very much.  Most Americans are fundamentally good people, and if we were more aware of why people dislike us so much, our behaviour would change.  If we could only see it reflected back at us on CNN.  In this case the reason for the hatred is not just our support of Israel, which I think is driven by some idealistic motives, but also the CIA-designed coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Iran, and the roughly half a million people who have died in Iraq of malnutrition, and many other similar events that we should reflect on.

J Doyne Farmer, one of the pioneers of what has come to be called chaos theory, is McKinsey Professor, Sante Fe Institute, and co-founder and former co-president of Prediction Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Farmer was an Oppenheimer Fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and later started the complex systems group.  In addition to his work on chaos, he has made important theoretical contributions to other problems in complex systems, including machine learning, a model for the immune system, and the origin of life.

Source: www.edge.org 1 October 2001

Since 1973, one million Afghans have died violently, some while fighting invaders from the Soviet Union, some while fighting other Afghans, the remainder during brutal massacres of civilians.  Approximately six million landmines are still hiding in Afghan soil.  About 7,000 people per year step on them while herding goats or fleeing to neighbouring countries.

Afghanistan used to produce more than 1/3 of the world's opium and heroin.  The Taliban banned the production and cultivation of opium last year, though the UN estimates that the Taliban earn $10 million to $30 million a year from taxes levied on opium growers.  The US estimates it earns $40 million to $50 million.  This year the UN stated that most opium grown in Afghanistan was in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance.  The northeastern border of Afghanistan (still controlled by the Northern Alliance) is a major corridor for trafficking drugs through Tajikistan.  No one is totally blameless in this situation.  The Northern Alliance is a loose coalition of warlords from minority ethnic groups and they have a long history of violence and human rights violations.  They destroyed most of Kabbul when they ruled it from 1992 to 1996 and killed tens of thousands of people during this time.

Afghanistan was badly governed by the Soviets in the 1980s and early '90s.  In 1996, the Taliban completed their seizure of power.  Since then, life for most Afghans has grown steadily worse.  Many had welcomed the Taliban (a name which means, literally, "religious student") when they marched on Kabul with their promises of restoring order to a land wracked by bandits.  But the Taliban idea of "order" involved severe punishment for anything "un-Islamic": men who shave were whipped; women who didn't cover every millimetre of flesh were beaten.  (The sight of fingernail polish has caused more than one woman to lose the tips of her fingers to a hatchet.)  Women, moreover, could not receive medical care since men were forbidden to see female patients and women doctors were prohibited from practicing medicine.  Their only hope was to marry a doctor.

Thieves had their hands or feet cut off.  Adulterers and those having sex outside marriage were stoned to death.  Homosexuals were buried alive.  Non-Muslims had to wear yellow patches so that "the faithful" could avoid unnecessary contact.  And Muslims who failed to attend mosque regularly risked arrest (and worse).  Afghanistan has suffered many devastating droughts.  Bombs were dropped on their country.  They are victims - of time and of circumstance.  Yet today, as I waited in line at the grocery store, the cashier (who wore an enormous pin that spelled out "I Love the USA" in red, white and blue rhinestones) and the two customers in front of me carried on a lengthy conversation about Afghan women - how they didn't take care of their children, refused them necessary medical care, yet continued to have more when they couldn't properly care for the ones they had.  The two "ladies" - bejeweled, bedecked in their Sunday finery, drenched in scent and makeup - concluded there was just no way to understand those backward Afghan primitives.

The Arabs, on the other hand, seem unable to understand Americans...

Source: www.attrition.org (Unfortunately, this site did not say from which newspaper this article was taken (nor is the link still active).  Of course the site mentioned in the article does not exist.  Perhaps it never did, although the fact that it is an Egyptian site suggests its purpose may have been the same as many American sites - to create an "us/them" atmosphere.)

A successful mission culminates in its own destruction.

- Richard Dawkins, discussing the use of people and planes as cheap "bombs"
and why religion is to blame - as it makes self-destruction palatable
 

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

A successful life culminates in its own death.  So does any life.  Some people need help facing that fact.  Others, sadly, seem to embrace death prematurely.

This page last updated Wednesday, 30 January 2008

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