APART from technology and the level of affluence, perhaps the most marked difference between this century and the last is the ideological content of our vocabularies.
As the Soviet Union crumbled under the weight of its own excesses and inefficiency, the left everywhere was forced to retreat. This was accompanied by the global triumph of consumerism and the elevation of profit and loss to the position of our governing principle. For the young, socialism was no longer fashionable; for their parents it was an embarrassing reminder of the past.
Earnest and humourless young MBAs took the place of intense, argumentative Trotskyites and Maoists on campuses around the world. The NGO movement replaced parties of the left, and personal computers and TV took the place of Marxist literature and existentialist tracts. Humanist philosophies lost out to a hard-edged, no-nonsense pragmatism.
In brief, the triumph of the profit motive over idealism was complete. Although altruism has seldom played a major role in human history, most civilized people have paid lip-service to it, and at least pretended that they aspired to nobler things. It was considered crass to be seen as selfish and money-grabbing. No more. Today, everybody wants to be as rich as he can be, as quickly as possible. As the ubiquitous dish antenna shows us what money can buy from Tokyo to Toronto, the universal cry is "I want it, and I want it now!"
When my son Shakir first started working a couple of years ago, I was a a bit disturbed by his stated goal of making big bucks sooner rather than later. "You're just being hypocritical," he replied when I voiced my concern. "You like collecting paintings and books and eating at good restaurants, but you pretend not to care about money. In fact, your whole generation has a similar attitude." Sad but true. Growing up, I do not recall any conversations about money or business at the dinner table. Young Pakistanis in the sixties and seventies were much more political than today's cynical generation, and ideology played a much greater part in their lives than it does today. Now, the only ideology around stems from religion, but it is a thesis without an antithesis.
But even in the days of greater involvement, there was much ideological and intellectual confusion. Although we had ready-made labels for everyone and everything, looking back, I can only smile wryly at our pretensions.
I was reminded of those distant days when I picked up an old edition of "The Opium of the Intellectuals", a collection of columns by Raymond Aaron, a very influential French columnist in the fifties and sixties. An iconoclast, Aaron was writing at a time when Sartre and Camus were at the height of their powers and fame, and Paris was still the intellectual capital of the world. His insights are still relevant fifty years later. For instance, in the chapter "Myth of the Left", Aaron writes:
"It is always dangerous to apply terms borrowed from the political vocabulary of the West to the internal conflicts of nations belonging to other spheres of civilization, even and perhaps specially when the political parties concerned are at pains to identify themselves with western ideologies. Removed from their original settings, ideologies are liable to develop in a manner diametrically opposed to their original aims and meanings. The same parliamentary institutions can exercise either a progressive or a conservative function according to the social class which introduces and directs them.
"When a group of well-meaning officers with a lower middle-class background dissolves a parliament manipulated by Pashas and speeds up the development of national resources, where is the left and where the right? Officers who suspend constitutional liberties (in other words, the dictatorship of the sword) cannot in any circumstances be described as left-wing. But the plutocrats who made use of democratic institutions to maintain their privileges are no more worthy of that noble epithet."
In an era when ideologies blur and overlap, and when productivity and profits are the be-all and end-all of all human activity, it is easy to forget that one of the primary duties of the state is to protect the weaker segments of society. Marxism in all its manifestations professes to do just that: The credo "To each according to his needs" is at the heart of socialism. Capitalism, on the other hand, rewards the ruthless predator. Most rich European countries have developed welfare states where the taxes of the upper and middle classes provide a safety net for the poor. In countries like Pakistan, there are no such provisions for the dispossessed for ours is a sink-or-swim economy.
There has been much brave talk of the IT revolution providing countries like Pakistan and India the means to break out of the poverty trap. Computers and the Internet are supposed to be the engines of magical growth. Unfortunately, when misty-eyed enthusiasts expound upon this vision, they tend to forget that it is difficult to spread computer literacy among a largely illiterate population. It would seem that the first step is to teach people to read and write before talking about information technology. Unfortunately, as the elite do not send their children to government schools, these continue to languish or exist only on paper. One of the (unsung) successes of socialist governments, wherever they have existed, is the excellence of the educational system they have put in place. Health is another sector to have benefited under socialism.
It is true that in developed capitalist societies, the poor are provided for, leaving aside the thousands who are forced to live on the streets of affluent cities like New York, London and Paris. Schooling is free, as is health care, and the unemployed do not have to choose between begging and starving. But in underdeveloped nations, the poor get no support of any kind from either the state or the rich. They survive as best as they can, and there is a permanent underclass of impoverished people who have no hope and no place in society. Of these marginalized millions, the World Development Report 2000 says:
"The world has deep poverty amid plenty. Of the world's 6 billion people 2.8 billion - almost half - live on less than $2 a day, and 1.2 billion - a fifth - live on less than $1 a day, with 44% living in South Asia..."
It is clear that without idealism and passion, the wretched of the earth will stay just where they are. The IMF and the World Bank have neither the mandate nor the motivation to pull them out of the poverty trap.
Most governments and politicians are not really concerned with the fate of the poor, except at election time. Unless we accept that social conscience goes hand in hand with the profit motive, there can be little hope for a harmonious world.