Tag Archives: Third World

Comment on a Comment

Posted on by elizabeth
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Airline pilot Patrick Smith on Malcolm Gladwell, interviewed at CNN:

CNN interviewer: Another fascinating finding is that you are more likely to be in a plane crash if the pilot comes from a particular country. What’s that all about?

Gladwell: Yes. That’s a fascinating thing. The single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane, it’s not the maintenance, it’s not the weather, it’s the culture the pilot comes from.

That is a reckless and untrue statement. There is nothing, statistically or empirically, to justify such a conclusion. Looking over the accidents from the past several years, I see crashes involving airplanes from Nigeria, Cyprus, Kenya, France, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand. Looking further into their various causes, I do see a pattern of pilot error, usually in response to technical failure or some other unusual situation, but the majority of fatal mistakes were strictly technical/operational.

A factor in a limited number of accidents? I can accept that. But “the single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes”? That is totally absurd, and I am extremely disappointed that somebody as influential as Malcolm Gladwell said it. In addition to being incorrect, it encourages the widely held notion that non-Western airlines are by their nature less safe than those of North America and Europe — a mythology I’ve addressed many times in this column.

What all of this underscores is the difficulty of finding wholly reliable information when it comes to commercial air travel. Aviation is a strange and mysterious realm, steeped in secrecy and veiled by an almost impenetrable vernacular. It begs to be sensationalized. Any journalist who comes near it has a hard time coming away with information that is, for the lay reader, at once digestible, useful and accurate. Gladwell gets a lot of it right, but still I expect better from one of our most talented and meticulous reporters.

Read the whole thing here

Tragedy of the 20th C.

Posted on by elizabeth
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Morgan Meis, at The Smart Set, discusses Niall Ferguson’s documentary, War of the World, aired on PBS over three weeks in late June and early July:

Ferguson’s unconventional arguments strike me as a sign of a greater attitudinal shift happening now in the early part of the 21st century. The assumptions of the century past don’t seem so obvious anymore. We’re more inclined to look backward in dispassion and perhaps a little melancholy. The German critic Walter Benjamin once came up with a startling image he called the Angel of History. Here’s the passage:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

We are starting to be able to see the 20th century as that catastrophe, that pile of wreckage linking our most recent past to all the other centuries that have piled up man’s folly. Surely it is the only thing we’ve got and there is a strange beauty to the wreckage. But it becomes impossible to look back at the 20th century without a sense of tragedy.

It is only fitting, then, that WWII should become a centerpiece of contention. WWII has always been the success story of the 20th century, the war that everyone can feel good about even while recognizing its terrible costs. Suddenly, though, it is possible to wonder whether such a horrific orgy of destruction could ever be called “good.” Even the once unchallengeable claim that it was “The Necessary War” has recently come under fire. Patrick Buchanan — hardly a marginal figure — has recently come out with a book called Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Buchanan comes to many of the same conclusions about the Allies’ responsibility for the war as the Left pacifist Nicholson Baker does in his recent book Human Smoke. (I wrote specifically about Nicholson’s book in these pages a short time ago.) Buchanan writes:

“Victory at all costs” proved costly indeed. Yet, horrendous as the cost was, it had to be paid. So we are told. For Hitler, as Henderson wrote, was out to “rule the earth.” But if he was out to rule the earth, and war was the only way to stop him, we must ask: Where did Hitler declare his determination to destroy the British Empire and “rule the earth”? How was a nation of Germany’s modest size and population to conquer the world? Was there no way to contain Hitler but declare a war in which, as Chamberlain told Joe Kennedy, millions must die?

The fact that we have three analysts — Ferguson, Buchanan, and Baker — coming from such different political standpoints and all raising such similar questions about the hitherto almost universal opinions about WWII is telling. Once again, at the beginning of a new century we are looking forward to a new era with as much uncertainty as ever. The concrete truths we stood upon to survey the world just a few years ago suddenly melt beneath our feet. The cost of historical understanding comes at the expense of surety.

In the last episode of The War of the World documentary (covered in the epilogue of the book) Ferguson makes the point that the second half of the 20th century wasn’t much less bloody than the first half. The areas of conflict simply shifted from Europe to the Third World. Ferguson closes with the following thought:

[W]e remain our own worst enemies. We shall avoid another century of conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one—the dark forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still.

It is a strange conclusion for Ferguson to draw when he has spent so much time showing us the overwhelming force of history as against the relatively pathetic human attempts to consciously control it. The more realistic conclusion to be drawn is that historical understanding works only in one direction: backward. Like Benjamin’s angel of history, we only get to view the catastrophe once it has already happened. In that sense, our knowledge is frustratingly impotent. The 20th century found its own special and remarkable ways to be the bloody mess that it was. There is little reason not to assume that the 21st century, too, will add to the carnage of history. A new perspective on the 20th century merely confirms our essential uncertainty. But as an old man once mentioned after visiting the Oracle at Delphi, there is wisdom in knowing how much you don’t know. 

Read the whole thing

One point of major disagreement:  there is nothing inevitable or “beyond us” about historical understanding, and an understanding of the world today is not beyond us either.  There are powerful forces waging war in our world, but they are not absolutely beyond human control.  There are people today, as there were people, “yesterday”, who see and understand the depth and range of the many powers that operate against progress and peace.  I remain hopeful that, one day, there will be enough such people to change the future.  Though it is getting awfully late in the day.

A Feminist Reflects on 1968

Posted on by elizabeth
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Feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham reflects on the liberation movements of 1968:

Already in the 1960s marginalised groups such as single mothers, the homeless, people with disabilities had been asserting their right to define their own problems and devise solutions. In America the civil rights movement and black power had been symbolically challenging segregated space and racial stereotyping. In 1968, these new political insights converged into a vision of human liberation that resisted cultural containment. In this utopian moment, it appeared possible to conceive new ways of relating, qualitatively different forms of living, even the transformed perceptions pursued by artists and mystics. 

With hindsight, it is evident that these revelatory glimpses did not simply derive from the movements of rebellion. The structure of capitalist society was beginning to shift in a manner barely evident at the time. How could we have known that empowerment would be the adman’s dream ticket or that the market would zoom in so thoroughly on personal identity. Impossible to know how liberation’s potential would be muffled in contorted debates about competing claims of oppression and esoteric discussions about cultural representation that eclipsed basic recognitions of inequality and injustice. 

Upping the Anti

And Vinay Bahl reflects on her own reading of Rowbotham’s work, especially this bit –

Movements develop in the process of communicating themselves…. We have not even words for ourselves. Thinking is difficult when the words are not your own. Borrowed concepts are like passed down clothes, they fit badly and do not confidence…. We walk and talk and think in living contradiction.

 and how these words are useful for explaining her dilemma as a “Third World” woman using Western feminist concepts and categories:

It is in this historical context (and while reading Sheila Rowbotham) that I found myself thinking of building bridges among women, rather than promoting the idea of “differences” according to the prevailing fashion of academic and political discourse. But I am also aware that I shall be misunderstood if I claim to agree with Sheila without examining the relevance of the fact that she is a white British feminist and I am an Indian (problematic concept) “colored” woman. This threshold dilemma arises because postmodernism in the academy does not allow me any other voice except standing against the West as “different.” Indeed, I have generally found it very difficult to communicate with Western feminists (with a few exceptions of course) because when not feeling guilty for not “understanding” me, their predominant mode has been that of condescension. These experiences made me aware that I am supposed to remain comfortably “different” and alien in U.S. society or find support from the Indian community (which has its own oppressive mechanism to control their women, that I reject) for the rest of my life.

I cannot accept this imposed reality because if I have to constantly define myself in opposition to the constructs of “otherness” thrust on me, then that would be the surest way to “othering” myself I am well aware that the moment one allows oneself to be subsumed within categories of “otherness” one automatically empowers what one is set against. What I seek instead is the creation of voices of dissent, of multiple points of attack and defense, sharply individuated yet linked.

Any theory, if it is to be of some practical use in the material world, must be capable not only of explaining material reality but also of providing a tool to act upon that reality. All of us know that today no country is formally a colony, but this does not mean that we are living in a postcolonial era. It only means that relations between First and Third World now take a more concealed form. We are well aware of the debt-dependency of Third World economies, of the no longer subtle means of control exercised by the World Bank and the IMF. It is in this wider context that the link between the micro-politics of the academy and the macro-politics of imperialism exists. Therefore, it becomes imperative that scholars both from First and Third Worlds should be aware of the ways in which their investigative and interpretive studies promote or serve the designs of imperialism. As scholars our concern should be to find the lived truth of specific human relationships in specific historical circumstances and not the theories of inevitable incomprehension, of convenient relativism, that now flourish in the Anglo-Saxon academy.

Therefore, in order to understand the issue of “differences” as promoted in the United States, and searching for ways to live with respect, independence, and human dignity, I started asking the following question of myself: Why should I always see myself as “different” in U.S. society when I have become a typical part of the historical process of this country? Moreover, my arrival in the United States is not simply a personal decision on my part but also a product of a complex historical process of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism in which the histories of Britain, the United States, and India are intertwined. With this understanding of the historical process of the world capitalist system, I do not see myself as “different” from Western women. Even when I dress differently, when I have a different cadence or accent in speech, or different aesthetic tastes and food habits, it does not make me more “different” in the United States than in India because both countries have a vast variety of people with a vast variety of tastes and languages. I know that I am not different as a human being from other human beings because we all need the same human rights, the same human care and same basic things in life, and the same clean environment. That is why I refuse to he treated as “different.”

II

Today, all of us (Third and First Worlds alike) experience the pressure of unrestrained global capitalism. In this perspective and context it seems illogical and unrealistic to interpret and analyze the experiences of people and societies as only a process of internal (therefore, different) conditions. Instead, we should try to understand the contemporary hegemonic powers and forces, their ideological and other mechanisms of control, and explore how they interact with different societies and how they shape peoples’ views and consciousness. International feminist scholarship has begun the task of understanding the connections between First and Third World economies and their effect on the lives of women in all countries. This work is essential if links are to be forged between women’s political struggles all over the world. The idea of creating bridges has caught up many women in the world in recent years, and Sheila’s writings have been a contribution to that healthy trend.

The article is at Monthly Review