Political balance necessary to fix poverty

    Imagine the beginning of a new phase of mankind. Picture just one out of the many possible worlds that could become our future.
    So as not to conjure up a world completely alien to us, let’s consider simply this: a world without hunger.
    In this vision, we encounter the coarsest of human needs met — all the revolutionary talk of freedom and equality tends to ignore the essentially authentic project of feeding the hungry, for we forget the truest revolutions need not be violent.
    Surely we can all agree a world without hunger is an incommensurably better world than ours.
    But did you know that for over 50 years there’s been more than enough global food production to feed the entire population of the earth?
    The reason behind this seeming incongruity — starvation while there’s a food surplus — is distribution, that is to say, capital. Orbiting along its controlled circuit, wealth somehow leaves out of the loop those not so prosperously fated.
    All excuses aside, an honest look reveals the situation is man-made. Starvation in a world with more than enough food to go around uncovers a short-circuit of responsibility, honesty and trust. We cannot blame nature (even human nature) for this ethically unacceptable state of affairs.
    Everyone knows money has for ages privileged the few above the rest, and that the trend has by no means reversed itself: Today 2.5 million millionaires live in North America as 1.1 billion people languish in extreme poverty, living on less than a dollar a day.
    In modern times, the hypocritical contradiction inherent in the affected “democratic” and “humanitarian” sociopolitical posture of the powerful and the wealthy has only become more blatant.
    So the simplest human necessity, hunger, relates us inexorably back to poverty.
    The endless controversy over poverty (marked in this country by a curious, but revealing, mixture of arrogance, wretchedness and pity) suggests a peculiar contradiction: a feigned humanitarian pity, repugnantly self-serving in origin, which serves to disguise a perverse curiosity.  But how consistent is the American attitude towards poverty, in both ethical and political terms, when one considers the lack of significance attached to the (in)justice of starvation? Perhaps there is no mystery in such a prevailing attitude towards poverty on the part of a “free” market society, an over-exposed digital culture of convenience.
    The concept and lived reality of poverty are perhaps keys to navigating that most complex of man-made phenomena: the dynamic balance of power between the state and the individual. Poverty would appear to emerge as a flaw from the flowing conservation of unity, energy and purity as the whole subdivides itself into parts; the reality of starvation reminds us of the arbitrary nature of power, problematizes the moral foundations of political action and economic theory by the powerful and/or wealthy.
    The political import of all this lies in this question: How to bridge the rift between society and man, and of different classes of men within society? What is the proper social distribution of power?
    How do we balance freedom and equality, focus upon the equilibrium of meeting the needs and desires of the individual and the society?
    The art of striking this balance is the whole of the political.

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Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 10 2006. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry