Martin Henry WELL IT'S all over and another half-million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been pumped into the atmosphere to hurry the 65,000 delegates and the 6,000-strong world press corps home ahead of September 11. Gwynne Dyer writing out of London, in a gem of a piece, "Johannesburg: the value of hot air", says, "it has been calculated that flying all 65,000 delegates to the 10-day world summit on environment and development that opened in Johannesburg on August 26 will dump an extra half-million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as much as one million Indians produce in a year"!
We won't know for another decade or so, as for the Rio Conference of 1992, what has been achieved, if anything, besides producing hot air, at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. By which time Tuvalu will be further under the Pacific Ocean. Tuvalu, present like everybody else at the WSSD, accused rich nations of selfishness and greed saying their pollution was causing global warming that could raise sea levels and submerge it under the waves.
For diversion from the wranglings over the "sea of brackets", Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the host UN went off to the Sterkfontein caves with South African President Thabo Mbeki to view what have been described as some of the world's earliest pre-human 'ape-man' remains. Why should not humans go the way of the dinosaurs, the African dodo bird and the dozens of other species which are disappearing forever each year? As creatures of Darwinian evolution rather than children of God on what basis should we be exempt from extinction, whether at our own hands or otherwise?
It is logically inconsistent to claim any kind of special status or value simply as the most highly evolved creatures in a meaningless world of natural selection by the survival of the fittest. Who knows what chance plus time could throw up in another 3.5 million years, give or take a couple of million, if humankind were eliminated today. More and more it is appearing that the combination of human technological capacity and human stupidity is creating serious 'fitness' problems for the species. In media hype the Johannesburg Summit was a conference "to save humanity from itself" "with environmentalists warning that time was running out to save mankind from itself." We can only hope that the leader of the far from United Nations found wisdom and inspiration among the bones of his ancestors at Sterkfontein.
On a more modest, practical and useful scale the UNDP arm of the UN has been putting out the Human Development Report for a dozen years now. Surprise! Surprise! Perhaps the most basic conclusions drawn from the years of work are that markets and democracy, essentially as they are understood as ideals in Western societies (despite the cautious, diplomatic disclaimers), are essential to development defined as enlarging human choice, freedom and well-being. The corruption and failure of ideals are, of course, part of the huge problem of human survival. But there are not too many bright alternatives. This year's HDR, "deepening democracy in a fragmented world", concludes that "advancing human development requires governance that is democratic in both form and substance for the people and by the people. Triggering a virtuous cycle for human development requires promoting democratic politics."
'VIRTUOUS CYCLE'
But as more and more people are quietly discovering, there are limits to democracy and what it can achieve, particularly when simplistically viewed as direct, decision by decision participation in state power, a view warmly embraced by large numbers of 'people organisations.' There can be no 'virtuous cycle' without virtuous people and virtue is a moral, spiritual and religious value. The American Founding Fathers and many other thinkers on democracy recognised virtue as a spiritual, moral and religious foundation stone of the democratic republic.
As Johannesburg has so amply demonstrated, there is a problem of considerable size when multitudes of factional interests make their own special sectoral demands on the state or superstate. As our own election campaign plays out with an intensification of promise-making an old pessimistic prognosis on the future of democracy comes up. Just about when the American Republic was being born, an English historian Alexander Tyler, analysing the fall of the Athenian Republic wrote: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship." Free education now or 2005?
I filed this quote when it appeared in The Gleaner Letter of the Day coincidentally on International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2001 by Albert Reynolds from Black River. My heart and mind want to reject Tyler's prognosis; reason and the flow of history dictate otherwise.
A PUBLISHER'S VIEWS
I see where one Oliver Frederick Clarke has been firing some heavy artillery on the Mona campus. The man who has managed The Gleaner since 1976 as one of the principal platforms for public discourse in defence of freedom, democracy and development and has led several other successful businesses in a hostile economic environment, has told the UWI "to put its best minds to the improvement and better management of the future rather than focusing on slavery and colonialism."
Mr. Clarke's supporting evidence drawn from assessing the titles of the University Press, as a publisher himself, is perfectly legitimate; and Professor Sir Roy Augier's defence, himself a fine historian, is weak. Sure the sampling of published output from The Press, the major outlet of UWI scholarship in book form, for content focus may not be a full yard but it is a pretty good yardstick. Everybody knows about reasonable approximation and this is one.
The wagging heads, in the absence of any more potent rebuttal than Sir Roy's, are likely to turn upon Mr. Clarke's colour and class and the colonial history of The Gleaner in classic form when stung by criticism. And to the extent that our finest energies are devoted to nurturing old wounds, real and imagined, Jamaica and the Caribbean cannot become the fastest growing economic area of the world, with the help of the universities, as the man with a solid track record of management for growth and development by private enterprise wants to see.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
