Ian McDonald THE IMAGES are straight from hell: the starved and agonised bodies, the children with death in their eyes. The raw statistics are no better: millions of people in poor countries are close to starving; over 30,000 children die every day because malnutrition reduces their resistance to disease; probably as many as half a million children go blind each year for want of vitamin A.
The statistics of poverty and deprivation are well-known and feature in many glossy UN publications. Worldwide, 1.2 billion people are "income poor", living on less than US$1 per day. Over 1 billion people in developed countries lack safe water and nearly 2.5 billion lack adequate sanitation. As to illiteracy, God knows how many millions suffer a fate which is all too likely to condemn a person to a nasty, unproductive, short and hopeless life. I say God knows because certainly the UNDP doesn't. Its Human Development Report for 2000 gives Guyana's literacy figures as 98.3 per cent for adults (over 15) and 99.8 per cent for youths (15-24). These statistics are so absurdly, so laughably, overstated that one has to question the credibility of any literacy figures produced by that August international institution. Who on earth compiled, and validated, these ridiculous literacy figures for Guyana?
Poor
But let us not be side-tracked by an argument about statistics. The plain fact is that the situation of the poor around the world is catastrophically bad and getting worse. And an extraordinary international scandal is that the countries harbouring most of the desperately poor of the earth, most of the children starving and going blind, most of the hopeless illiterate remain disproportionately burdened by debt, or to adjust their economies to earn hard currency, poor countries are compelled to cut to the bone, and beyond the bone to the very heart and marrow of spending programmes essential for just minimum standards of existence. Remember, such payments are going to the already very wealthy. Can you conceive that such craziness can exist?
There is an explanation. Throughout history, intelligent and even honourable people have most cruelly tortured and ruthlessly destroyed their fellow human beings. Consider, for instance, the Inquis-ition: some of the best and brightest of that age serenely sent ordinary and innocent people to the torture chamber and to awful death because within the system then in place and unquestioned it was reasonable to do so since that way immortal souls were saved and what could be more valuable than that?
Centuries later, as another example, the best and the brightest in the world's greatest and most advanced democracy visited death and destruction on millions, and besmirched their own treasured communal values, fighting a war in Vietnam in which they applied perfect reason and logic within an unquestioned frame of reference which assumed that to deter Comm-unism was the supreme good.
It is a terrible mistake to think that reason, logic, and efficiency lead inevitably to good results and unflawed human development. They can just as easily lead to catastrophe on a vast scale and devastating human loss. Intelligent, well trained, honourable people, taking reasonable, logical decisions within a completely flawed system of belief can and do inflict unbelievable horror and untold damage on their fellow human beings. They act reasonably within an unquestioned system and do not have the perspective to notice that the system itself is absolutely crazy. In the absence of this larger perspective the system becomes the only good and maintaining it, therefore, the only basis of rational behaviour.
Nothing now better illustrates this perverted sort of thinking than the system which allows the burden of Third World debt to continue to destroy the lives and prospects of hundreds of millions of men, women, and children around this world we all inhabit. Again we have in high places "the best and the brightest" armed with their perfect arguments and rational programmes, acting with impeccable good sense and irrefutable logic, objectively and efficiently applying their expertise and text-book analyses and they cannot see that they are crucifying half the world and destroying the basis of their own humanity.
Objectivity
Their objectivity, their logic, their reason, have nothing to do with a truly enlightened exercise of the human intellect and imagination. This is not, for instance, the logic and the reason of Thomas Jefferson - he who called for the pursuit of happiness to be one of the inalienable rights of man. For Jefferson, reason was explicitly soaked in larger human values and entirely founded upon a faith in the will of ordinary people. The "reason" which leads to the prolonged oppression represented by Third World debt excludes value judgements completely, it rationalises real human needs out of existence, it creates hermetic systems of expertise only and, furthermore, it is profoundly undemocratic: the voice of the ordinary people will only get in the way of the perfect functioning of the system and, from the point of view of the technocrat operating within the system, will certainly be wrong.
We look into the past and stand horrified at absurd systems which once oppressed mankind and we cannot understand how men were so shallow in their thinking, so destitute of imagination, so lacking in perception of basic human values to have operated so uncaringly within those systems. Be assured other men in future times will think the same of us.
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