Beyond Regional Thinking

Being very selfish and fiercely competitive has served us very well. Indeed,
competitiveness has been the motivating
factor behind most human achievements. Evolutionary demands have
changed over time and much of human progress can be (and I think
convincingly) explained as a response to these changes. As the late
Carl Sagan in his book, "Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors",
argues, human divisions into tribes, nations and religious communities
have served an evolutionary purpose in the sense that they introduce
the competition and diversity necessary for our species's survival.

Two hundered and
fifty million years long history of life on earth has seen great many
species rise to the challenges of the environment, flourish by
successfully evolving and die because of not being able to change fast
enough. Great dinosaurs lived for 65 million years and surely must
have faced great many challenges. Yet even dinosaurs were not
prepared for the gigantic environmental changes that led to their
demise.

One can argue that those principles of evolution do not apply to us
humans, the intelligent species. We couldn't be more wrong. We
have managed to survive in the last few thousand years only because we
have been able to evolve in response to the challenges of the
environment. The reason for our species's survival has been our
ability to successfully evolve biologically as well as socially in
response to challenges of the environment. Our survival depends on
the early detection of the impending disasters and on our readiness to
respond to them. That is precisely where our intelligence has helped
us in the past and can help us in the future.

The challenges we face today demand that we rise
above our ingrained nationalistic, tribal and religious prejudices
(that have served us well in the past) and learn to think as a
species. Indeed if we do not abandon these narrow
frames of mind we are not only condemned to live in the misery that has
been the hallmark of the twentieth century but face certain extinction.

Today, more than two thirds of human beings live in absolute misery
and conditions of utter poverty. The reason for that is not that the
poor people happen to be inherently. The
reason for this poverty is the lack of access to resources. For
instance, Canadians are rich only because we occupy a big proportion
of the world's resources and not because we happen to be intellectually
superior to others. Now, global resources
are limited. Therefore, the only way for us to continue to be rich is
to protect this incredibly unjust division of wealth by putting up
walls around our borders and not letting others in. Any equitable
division of world's resources would mean a lower standard of living
for the richest. I find it incredible that our politicians
whether they be on the left or on the right of the political spectrum
simply refuse to acknowledge this fact. Every political party in the
rich nations is promising to improve people's standard of living. What
they don't tell us is that it will be done by taking away bread from
more people in Africa or South Asia. What they don't tell us is that
year after year, consistently, world's poorest countries keep
getting poorer and the richest countries keep getting richer. The
incredible imbalance in wealth makes people risk security fences and
certain death in trying to cross the walls put up by the rich nations.
The US-Mexico border is one graphic example where thousand of people
risk being shot yet keep rushing to the border.

There is another interesting phenomenon occuring since the early 90s.
Big corporations, dissatisfied with the current levels of their profit
margins, have convinced the governments across the globe that capital
should be freely transportable across the international borders
whereas humans should not be (so that CEOs of these multi-nationals
can live insulated from the poverty of the deprived). While this has
given the richest in the richest nations the opportunity to accumulate
even more wealth it has resulted in unprecedented levels of
unemployment in the richest nations such as Canada and Germany. It
has meant lower welfare spendings and fewer social programs for the
poor of the richest countries. Yet, our democratically elected
governments are forced to bow to these multinationals' whim
to move to another country where they can make more money. Under
pressure our governments are forced to take money away from the
poorest and give it to the richest. Multinationals are pitting
nations and regions against one another in the race to get 'lean and
mean'. Our "national" politicians have no solution. The sad truth is
that they cannot and will not have a solution for the simple reason
that no national solution exists to this global problems. Perhaps, we
are asking too much of our politicians: we elect them on a regional
basis so why are we be surprised if they cannot solve problems that
are global? We need to organize ourselves on a global scale
if we are to have any hope of breaking the cycle of decreasing social
spendings and increasing poverty around the world.

An ever increasing population is putting pressures on
the world resources. We are about to pass the
carrying capacity of the planet. The dwindling global resources will
pit nations against nations on an unprecedented scale. The patience
of the poorest nations ran out a long time ago. They are no longer
willing to listen to our lectures about saving the environment while
we, a small minority of world's population, continue to occupy huge
resources. Malayasia's PM Muhatir receives applause every time he says that West cannot tell us to conserve the environment while they
continue to exploit huge natural resources that they have unjustly
occupied. This rising consciousness of injustice is wonderful but it may mean just another race to pollute the world. The poor see emulating the past extravagant exploitation of the earth by the rich as their survuval.

We are changing our environment unalterably without knowing where this will lead. Unlike dinosaurs we don't need a
meteorite to kill us: we just have to continue our current practices.