There has been pressure applied from certain quarters (ahem) to produce a second post that measures up to the first one in this blog. I was (and am) pleasantly surprised that my previous post attracted the attention and kind comments of other members of the blog world, and for that I am grateful. I do not anticipate being able to offer much of particular interest in my posts from now on; they will often be boring and mundane, but I’ll try my best.
Starting out as I am in the real world (as opposed to the academic one) I cannot help but recognize and realize that I am, through circumstance and effort, afforded the ability to live a pretty comfortable life. I feel no sense of guilt per se over this, as I’m just starting out, and my parents and I have had to make my share of sacrifices ‘to the system’ to arrive at this point. And now more than ever, people the world over are on average able to live more comfortable, less unstable lives (I’m deliberately being fast and loose with a proper definition for this to get to the main point of this post). Generally speaking more people are now able to live comfortably and without worry of hunger and instability than in decades and centuries past. I’m referring here to the notion of Human Security and the remarkable Human Security Report which argues forcefully that in the past decade, there has been a striking and unprecedented decrease in the number of conflicts, wars and genocides and loss of life due to such forms of political instability and violence.
Which is why extreme examples of internal conflicts and horrendous violence become all the more conspicuous in current times. At the same time, our collective inaction in these cases too becomes particularly galling. Consider the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and its aftermath. What have Western or Asian countries, or for that matter wealthier African countries done? IF we believe that every human life is equally worthwhile, on some very basic level, then our altruistic , impulses should first lead us to the DRC. But they have not, and they likely will not. Why? Is it, as the Canadian commander of UN forces during Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, suggested, that these black African lives are not worth the same as lighter skinned lives? The horrific and willful ignorance and inaction displayed by most of the world during the Rwandan Genocide willful, and the remarkable, willful action displayed bt NATO in Kosovo supports this argument.
The remarkable blind eye turned by almost every country in the world to the messy horror that was, and still is, the DRC, too does much to support this argument (see this link for a summary of the scale and scope of the chaos in the DRC – recent elections notwithstanding). Surely, we live in an era where unrestrained cruelty and pervasive death and violence need no longer prevail. Human lives have worth and dignity, regardless of their place of birth. Why does everyone seemingly believe this, yet do nothing to enforce this? Why do I do the same? Is it selfishness? Realpolitik? Or is there some (admittedly facile) biological way to account for our individual and collective ability to ignore uncomfortable and disconcerting facts?
Perhaps you might argue that we have learnt from the mistakes of Rwanda, and may now point to the example of Darfur. Darfur seems to have caught a lot of people’s attention, because it is (or at least was, at first glance) somewhat easy to understand. There are bad guys (the Janjaweed militia, and it no doubt helps that they’re Arab too) and the victims, the ethnically black populations of western Sudan. But the situation here is complex too, and it is unclear what effect, if any, diplomatic efforts have had at stemming deaths in the region.
The DRC situation however was and is a nightmare several orders of magnitude beyond Darfur; a moral quandry par excellence. There are rebel militias of myriad, murky political affiliations, who rape, and kill with abandon, and government soldiers who do the same. There is no good here, just murky shades of evil; despicable, unspeakable acts of brutal inhumanity and heartbreaking hunger and death. These are our fellow humans. We, who finally live in era where the precept of equal worth is at least mouthed by the chattering classes, may act and think differently about Africa, but in effect, it seems we are no better than the Belgians who idiotically and savagely attempted to colonize the region that would become the DRC.
I did not wish to make this a historical or political rant, though the modern history of this region is deeply and directly relevant. Nor is this intended to criticize anyone, as any such criticism I would level first on myself before daring to impose it on others. The argument here is an emotional one that emanates from the soul of rationalism: the worth of each human self, if we believe in it, must be central to our collective decision-making processes.
But contrary to general public perception, and as mentioned earlier, things are on average better now across the world than they were at anytime in the recent past. Which is why, I suppose, I consider myself a pessimistic optimist when it comes to our collective future. Haha, though at times, I think there’s some merit to Stephen Hawking’s suggestion that we colonize the Moon and Mars to hedge our bets. For now, then, I’ll stick to worrying about the boring details of moving into a new place this weekend; and trying not to think too much about the fact that I’m living comfortably 
