On the occasion of Milton Friedman's 90th birthday in 2002, his friend Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve said of The Great Depression: “You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.”
Given the economic meltdown taking place Stateside as we speak, maybe it's time to change the quote to “You did it, Milton. Say sorry.”
It's not stretching the imagination too far to suggest that America finds itself in trouble thanks in no small part to a bloody-minded adherence to a Friedmanite, laissez-faire interpretation of what a free market really means. Such an ideology has, in many cases, done little more than grant permission to a cohort of greedy individualists and corporations to pursue profit at any cost and reduce the role of government to little more than a war chest for their ventures. The same governments they expect to bail them out financially when the logical conclusion of their reckless pursuit of profit is reached. Enron, anyone? Halliburton? Bear Sterns?
According to a report in the New York Times today, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year. Maybe its time we returned to the middle ground and adopted an approach that recognises that, “free as in beer” seldom works and markets are no different. They're not sentient, living entities any more than the earth is some kind of society-free vaccum. The “Quants” might have been all the rage in recent years, but the sub-prime crisis has demonstrated something that you don't need a Nobel Prize to understand – the market is essentually a gamble; you can make educated guesses, but pure maths will never measure human behaviour precisely – or the consequences of it.
Maybe when we learn to do business in that reality, we'll find a more sustainable profit base. Not to mention a nicer world to live in.
Monday, March 31, 2008
You did it, Milton. Say sorry.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Is sorry all that we can say?
According to Elton John, it's the hardest word to say but the past couple of years have certainly seen something of an outpouring as the human race engages in some kind of stampede to apologise for everything from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. These days, if you're not taking responsibility for something someone else did 300 years ago or last week, you're simply not worthy of your political salt. What's going on?
Let me get one thing straight: I actually do believe that white South Africans, as Desmond Tutu has said, missed out on a golden opportunity to engage in a meaningful process of apologising for the apartheid past during the TRC. It matters not if you and your family didn't actively engage in racist behaviour or vote Nat; if you were white, like it or no, you benefited from apartheid in some way. That's just how it is, it doesn't make you a racist in 2008, but that's not really the point. The point is that we have to address the problems arising from a past that we either take ownership of in order to move on, or we leave the lid on a seething pot of shame, anger and inequality and wait to see when it will blow up in our faces. Be that as it may, I'm not so sure that an apology today will do anything to help the situation we find ourselves in. Events of the past couple of weeks – the Forum for Black Journalists, the appalling video from Bloemfontein and Irvin Khoza's unapologetic use of the k-word because he didn't like the questions he was being asked – leaves me pondering the value of “sorry” and whether we're not bandying it all around a little bit too much. And in the process, devaluing it.
It's not just in South Africa: Tony Blair apologised to the Irish people for the Famine in which an estimated one million people died – more than 150 years ago. He was lauded for his attempt to heal the wounds of centuries of British oppression in Ireland but many of Northern Ireland's Catholics would have preferred an acknowledgment of guilt for something like Bloody Sunday; if you really want to heal the hurt, try tackling something that resonates in the here and now, they say.
London's Mayor Ken Livingstone apologised for Britain's role in the slave trade; again, the sentiment was in the right place but many felt it inappropriate for Britain to shoulder all of the blame when you could just as readily point the finger at Arab slave traders and the African chiefs who willingly supplied “product”. More than a millennium ago, marauding vikings and others like them did a brisk trade in kidnapping forays to Ireland and Wales; in the 17th century, almost everyone living in the west Cork town of Baltimore in Ireland was abducted by North African pirates in search of fuel for the Mediterranean slave trade.
Then you've got Australia's attempt at grappling with its own racist past with National Sorry Day and new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generation. An apology that, far from earning white Australians absolution or bringing closure to the Aboriginal peoples who continue to suffer the consequences of a racist past, came across as a pathetic attempt to sidestep any real compensatory activity and return to the sort of head in the sand approach that allows everyone to forget about it all and “move on”. The flip side of this, of course, is the sense of political correctness that it has delivered a system that returns young Aboriginal girls to their abusive families rather than face the suggestion that placing them with white foster parents is a return to the old, evil days.
The question we need to ask ourselves is whether any of this is actually achieving anything more than salving the consciences of people with an inherited sense of guilt for the sins of their fathers. Does any of this actually make the recipient of the apology feel better? The TRC was supposed to achieve that in South Africa, but when people descend to the sort of stereotypical generalisations of “coconut”, “kaffir”, “boer” and “racist” faster than you can jerk your knee each time we try and visit our past, you have to wonder whether it's the right approach.
Only a complete moron would attempt to deny that apartheid raped this country and that the scars run deep and profoundly affect us all. Only a fool would deny that the social and psychological fall out from all of this will dog our country for generations to come. What we do need to start considering, though, in light of everything from our worryingly poor performance in delivering services, education and personal safety to our people, is that there is irresponsibility inherent in putting the righting of past wrongs over and above our need to address the problems that we face today. Our apartheid and colonial past does not – and should not – alleviate the current, democratically-elected administration of its responsibility to educate our children and give people brutalised by history the dignity of housing, jobs and medical care. Too often, history feels like a convenient distraction – would a white apology really allow us to move on and, acknowledging the whys of our challenges, finally start addressing them for what they are?
James Joyce wrote that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Others point to the importance of acknowledging your past if you are to create a positive future. All of these things are true. But it's also true to say that its very hard to go forward with certainty if you are looking over your shoulder all the time. We need to find a way to embrace our past, warts and all, without becoming bogged down in it to the detriment of our future. What we need to figure out is whether or not “sorry” is going to get us there. If it's just going to be another word, pap for the dispossessed, I'm not so sure that it can.
