Another bonfire of the vanities

Here’s the plot of a story:

There’s a very wealthy man, so powerful and arrogant that he and his colleagues refer to themselves as ‘Masters of the Universe’. He could belong to a variety of professions. He could be a politician or the leader of a religious movement; he could be a high ranking international bureaucrat or a captain of industry; he could be a movie mogul or a very senior lawyer or judge; but for the purposes of this story let’s say that he’s a banker. He lives in a millionaire penthouse on Central Park in New York, drives the latest and fastest sports car and, in addition to the wife and child who occupy the penthouse with him, he also has a mistress, for whom he is about to purchase an apartment where he can visit her without fear of detection, what in Mexico would be called ‘la casa chica.’ He certainly has it all, until suddenly his whole world is overturned because he takes one wrong turning when driving across town with his mistress. They find themselves in a slum neighbourhood, unfamiliar, hostile and threatening. They want to get out quick, panic and hit a man. Out of fear of being lynched they drive away from the injured pedestrian, turning what would have been classified as an accident into a criminal offence.  Even then they might have got away with it, but fate conspires against the hero. He mishandles what should have been a routine meeting with the police, arousing their suspicions, a politician becomes involved because he sees a wonderful chance to make political capital out of the case of a greedy, wealthy man callously knocking down a pauper in a slum street and then driving away from the scene. And so it goes from bad to worse. The police enjoy humiliating him, handcuffing him with his hands behind his back when they take him to court, nearly driving him to suicide. He finds himself denied bail, forced to share a police cell with hardened criminals. His clothes get dirty and sweaty. As the trial drags on, the comfort, luxury and power he used to know become increasingly distant memories. The press demonise him, the prosecution closes in for the kill with a jury fully manipulated by political and social considerations. The politician stirs it up as much as he can. And in the end the ‘Master of the Universe’ ends up serving a lengthy jail term. It all happens at the drop of a hat, a total reversal of fortune, all because of one wrong turn.

The point is that for a normal human being, that is to say for a person who did not consider him or herself to be a master of the universe, above the law and above conscience, the wrong turn in all probability would not have turned into such a catastrophy.They probably would not have driven off from the accident to begin with.

Just recently this tale has come to have a strange familiarity. In fact it is a rough rendering of the plot of Tom Wolffe’s 1987 novel ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’. But as I have, inevitably and I hope without relish, followed the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn – his arrest when already seated comfortably in the first class compartment of a plane about to leave New York, his denial of bail, his hand-cuffing (hands behind the back of course, which Wolffe is at pains to point out is done by the police to maximise the sense of vulnerability and humiliation of the defendant), his demonization by the press – I could not help catching my breath at the way true life mirrors fiction.

It is, of course, more appropriate to reflect on the nature of hybris and the strange and usually sudden inevitability with which the powerful and the mighty fall. In that sense, one might look around the world at this time and take a long hard look at what has happened in Egypt and Tunisia and what may ultimately happen in several other countries in the region. When I was working in Egypt back in the early nineties, managing a number of projects in technical and agricultural education, it was clear that a massive population bulge was coming through that the system – political, social and economic – simply was not geared up to coping with. Thousands of young people were going through technical secondary schools knowing full well that there would be no jobs for them and not even the means or the right to give tongue to their frustration or support a legitimate political party that offered to address their needs. Even back then President Mubarak was referred to with rueful humour as the pharaoh, the head of an autocratic dynasty. And of course we should remember that in the early days of the first dynasty the ancient Egyptian believed that only the Pharaoh had an immortal soul. Only he would live on in the after world after death.He truly was a ‘Master of the Universe.’

And that brings me back to the solipsism of the very wealthy and very powerful. It has not been pleasant to read some of the really vicious comments that have been made about Strauss-Kahn or the way he has been found guilty in the press and on the internet long before due process has taken its course. Of course his reputation stands against him as evidence, but even so, the presumption of innocence is an important principal that seems in danger of being forgotten. Some of the things written are plain stupid, such as the claim that in France his behaviour would have been condoned and his alleged victim would have been silenced. In fact, it is possible to find predatory male behaviour that abuses power and authority in order to take advantage of vulnerable women in every society. It is simply located in different niches. While there is no doubt that a woman in Taliban-run Afghanistan must have faced the worst odds in terms of protection or redress, it is certainly crass to point fingers without plenty of self-criticism, too. The USA, for example, at one point was awash with stories of sexually abusive behaviour by the leaders of ultra-protestant sects affiliated with right-wing politics, cases of misbehaviour with congressional aides surface on a regular basis and, of course, Hollywood has always taken a perverse pride in its seedy tales of ugly sexual behaviour by media moguls taking advantage of would be stars and starlets.Meanwhile the writer of the series of books about ‘The girl who something or othered a something or other’ has shown that even nice, liberal and ethically advanced Sweden may have its dark side.

The dark side we are talking of is this thing that seems to lurk deep down in the male persona. As we read the horrific news about the routine use of rape as a tool of intimidation in the Republic of the Congo, or consider the fate of the thousands of women who are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation, we must surely pause for thought – about what is in ourselves. When the news broke a year or two ago in my own nice little home town of Cambridge in the East of England (home of Stephen Hawkin and the death of God, of course!) of the existence of houses where trafficked young women from Eastern Europe were being held against their will and prostituted, the chief investigating police officer asked publically how any men could want to ‘make use of’ these girls. But apparently there are plenty who do.

My own worst encounters with this dark business were in Bangladesh, where girls are sold at an early age into brothels and told that they have an enormous debt to pay off before they can start to earn on their own account. It isn’t nice to think of young teenage girls having to accommodate as many clients as possible a day in conditions of imprisonment and de facto slavery. Sadly, I’m not sure if the project we were funding was able to do that much to help them.

But leaving that very dark world behind and emerging into the comparative daylight of more common or garden predatory sexual behaviour, I’m pretty sure it’s true to say most of us know one or two men who seem obsessed with sex from the narrow perspective of how many women they can bed or viewing every woman they meet as a potential conquest. Nothing particularly wrong with that, I guess, in a fair and equal world, where everyone has an equal right to say yes or no. And as Montaigne said ‘Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition,’ so we’re all pretty much tarred by the same brush.

However, the real world is not fair or equal. Most relationships are asymmetrical, especially in the work place, where we are all busy bullying or manipulating one another for one reason or another. And I guess it is that asymmetry that has got the fur flying in the Strauss-Kahn case. Once the high and mighty topple from power, the awe and respect in which they have been held disappears at once. That’s what happened to the Romanov Tsars in Russia, of course, when Nicholas the Second abdicated. In the space of a minute he passed from being the most powerful autocrat in the world to becoming a figure of ridicule, for whom death at the hands of a Bolshevik firing squad was probably already inevitable. At least heads of the IMF don’t risk such a fate when they fall.             

Hot and bothered in Manila: Climate Change and human nature

Manila is melting. This is my fourth year here and I've never known it so hot. They call April the Summer here, then the rains are supposed to arrive and cool things down a little. But this year apart from a side-swipe by a passing typhoon some ten days ago, which drenched Manila in a heavy downpour and knocked out a few power lines but dealt all its real mayhem, death and destruction up the east coast of Luzon, the blistering heat has just continued to build. The polluted sky hangs like a sinister curtain outside the 30^th floor window of my office with its panoramic view across the city and out over Manila Bay; in the unventilated gym where I go to box the sweat pours in rivers off me and the other masochists still training; at night I wake with a horrible breathless feeling in my chest from nightmares in which evil aliens arrive in cloaked space-ships to destroy the Earth through global warming projected by lethal rays. I wonder: is this really it? Has climate change really begun to take effect?  The charts all show that, as climate Change takes hold, the western side of the Philippines is supposed to get hotter and drier while the east gets wetter and subject to more and more typhoons of increasing intensity. During these murderously hot days, on which only the air-conditioning in the car keeps road rage in check in the grid-locked traffic of Makati City, it is very easy to convince oneself that things really have started to change and not for the better.

Which makes me wonder just why the stuff about climate Change that comes to me, whether in the newspapers, on the tv or radio, or in the official documents in my in-tray, is all so terribly complicated, convoluted, tongue-twistingly acronymed and jargonised to smithereens and frankly tedious. 'All countries now agree that strong climate action is more urgent than ever!'  screams one of the documents attached to an in-coming email, before vitiating itself in a sea of bureaucratic detail.

Does any normal human being understand what was agreed during the last climate change bun fight in Cancun?  Does any normal human being know that there is going to be yet another love fest quite soon, this time in Durban, and does anybody think it is going to make any difference? Does anybody remember the Kyoto agreement or what that involved? Or the Copenhagen Accord? Does anyone know what a carbon market is? (No, dear, it is not somewhere where you go to buy fuel for your probably soon to be, if not already, illegal coal fire.)

The documents I have on my desk make pretty turgid reading, but underneath all the Beachcomber-ish gobbledegook they tell a story that ought to have everybody, if not alarmed, then at least feeling uneasy. Apparently even if the Kyoto experiment were repeated it would still not meet the target of staying below a 2° C increase in the global climate. And Kyoto is already over. Meanwhile there are a lot of aspirations and a number of  pots of money all wrapped up in complex bureaucratic management procedures, but, in the absence of anything legally binding, it's business as usual.

And it's too hot for me to box.

Yet half of the people I meet or those who read this will tell me the heat out there has nothing to do with climate change. The science is actually very complicated, they say, and no-one really knows how to interpret the data. That's the trouble with scientists. They are complicated people.

A funny thought that occurs to me is that the issue of global warming and human-induced environmental catastrophe has actually been around for a long time, at least as long as I can remember. As a boy I had a David Bowie album that started with a song about the Earth coming to an end in five years' time. (No prizes, but who can name the album and the song?)

Still on the subject of the devastating effects of Climate Change that await us, I watched a David Attenborough video on the plane coming over here from London last month. In it he demonstrated with the help of highly equipped teams of scientists all over the world, that the oceans really could be dead by the middle of the century. Fish stocks have been fished to crisis point and coral reefs are threatened not only by the warming of the sea but by its increasing acidification due to the increased amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air. Now it starts to sound like the plot of the movie Soylent Green, if anyone can remember that terrifying vision of an over-populated future, and I am feeling really depressed.

Talking about David Attenborough, he gave a short talk on Chimpanzes on the radio the other day, in which he described how they hunt Colobus monkeys. To do this they have to work as a team with one group of chimps driving the Colobus monkeys into an ambush. While expressing his regret at the sight of the 'all too human' bodies of a female Colobus and her baby being ripped apart and eaten, Attenborough cannot help admiring not only the chimps' teamwork, but also their willingness to share the spoils of the hunt. It would seem that they are at their most human in terms of what we would see as essentially positive characteristics, when engaged in an act of extreme violence and bloodshed, albeit against another species and in search of food.

The close association of what is destructive and murderous in our nature with what makes us human -  something that would seem to go well beyond the association of aggression with affection or protective love postulated by Konrad Lorenz (at least with regard to Greylag geese!) – is a fundamental problem for psychologists and sociologists and metaphysicians alike. At times it seems enough to justify the doctrine of original sin, which in this post-religious world, where Professor Hawkin has just told us the idea of Heaven and life after death is a fairy-tale, really is rather disturbing.