21 Lessons for the 21st Century(72)
On the face of things, not much has changed since we left the African savannah for the urban jungle. One might think that the questions we face today – the Syrian civil war, global inequality, global warming – are just the same old questions writ large. But that is an illusion. Size matters, and from the standpoint of justice, like many other standpoints, we are hardly adapted to the world in which we live.
The problem is not one of values. Whether secular or religious, citizens of the twenty-first century have plenty of values. The problem is with implementing these values in a complex global world. It’s all the fault of numbers. The foragers’ sense of justice was structured to cope with dilemmas relating to the lives of a few dozen people in an area of a few dozen square kilometres. When we try to comprehend relations between millions of people across entire continents, our moral sense is overwhelmed.
Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations. If you collected mushrooms to feed your children and I now take that basket of mushrooms forcefully, meaning that all your work has been for naught and your children will go to sleep hungry, that is unfair. It’s easy to grasp this, because it’s easy to see the cause-and-effect relations. Unfortunately, an inherent feature of our modern global world is that its causal relations are highly ramified and complex. I can live peacefully at home, never raising a finger to harm anyone, and yet according to left-wing activists, I am a full partner to the wrongs inflicted by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank. According to the socialists, my comfortable life is based on child labour in dismal Third World sweatshops. Animal-welfare advocates remind me that my life is interwoven with one of the most appalling crimes in history – the subjugation of billions of farm animals to a brutal regime of exploitation.
Am I really to blame for all that? It’s not easy to say. Since I depend for my existence on a mind-boggling network of economic and political ties, and since global causal connections are so tangled, I find it difficult to answer even the simplest questions, such as where my lunch comes from, who made the shoes I’m wearing, and what my pension fund is doing with my money.2
Stealing rivers
A primeval hunter-gatherer knew very well where her lunch came from (she gathered it herself), who made her moccasins (he slept twenty metres from her), and what her pension fund was doing (it was playing in the mud. Back then, people had only one pension fund, called ‘children’). I am far more ignorant than that hunter-gatherer. Years of research might expose the fact that the government I voted for is secretly selling weapons to a shady dictator halfway across the world. But during the time it takes me to find that out, I might be missing far more important discoveries, such as the fate of the chickens whose eggs I ate for dinner.
The system is structured in such a way that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance, and those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth. How is it possible to avoid stealing when the global economic system is ceaselessly stealing on my behalf and without my knowledge? It doesn’t matter if you judge actions by their consequences (it is wrong to steal because it makes the victims miserable) or whether you believe in categorical duties that should be followed irrespective of consequences (it is wrong to steal because God said so). The problem is that it has become extremely complicated to grasp what we are actually doing.
The commandment not to steal was formulated in the days when stealing meant physically taking with your own hand something that did not belong to you. Yet today, the really important arguments about theft concern completely different scenarios. Suppose I invest $10,000 in shares of a big petrochemical corporation, which provides me with an annual 5 per cent return on my investment. The corporation is highly profitable because it does not pay for externalities. It dumps toxic waste into a nearby river without caring about the damage to the regional water supply, to the public’s health, or to the local wildlife. It uses its wealth to enlist a legion of lawyers who protect it against any demand for compensation. It also retains lobbyists who block any attempt to legislate stronger environmental regulations.
Can we accuse the corporation of ‘stealing a river’? And what about me personally? I never break into anyone’s house or snatch dollar bills from anyone’s purse. I am not aware how this particular corporation is generating its profits. I barely remember that part of my portfolio is invested in it. So am I guilty of theft? How can we act morally when we have no way of knowing all the relevant facts?
One can try to evade the problem by adopting a ‘morality of intentions’. What’s important is what I intend, not what I actually do or the outcome of what I do. However, in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference. Charming English ladies financed the Atlantic slave trade by buying shares and bonds in the London stock exchange, without ever setting foot in either Africa or the Caribbean. They then sweetened their four o’clock tea with snow-white sugar cubes produced in hellish plantations – about which they knew nothing.
In Germany in the late 1930s, the local post-office manager might be an upright citizen looking after the welfare of his employees, and personally helping people in distress to find missing parcels. He was always the first one to arrive at work and the last one to leave, and even in snowstorms made sure that the post came on time. Alas, his efficient and hospitable post office was a vital cell in the nerve system of the Nazi state. It was speeding along racist propaganda, recruitment orders to the Wehrmacht, and stern orders to the local SS branch. There is something amiss with the intentions of those who do not make a sincere effort to know.