A Queer Post

Invoking all the outrage of the best linguistic campaigns, I announce my intention to reclaim the word "queer." I don't mean to reclaim it for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, pansexuals, transsexuals, transgenders, intersexes, asexuals, hermaphrodites, or perverts. I mean to reclaim "queer" for those of us who like discussing and, especially, who like writing about queer things. As in, "The Northern Lights have seen queer sights/But the queerest they ever did see/Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge/I cremated Sam McGee." Because a dozen queer things happen to me each day.

The campaign begins now.

Yesterday it was raining, so I took shelter under a concrete awning in front of a shoe store and a bank in downtown Kampala. While I stood there, flâneur-esque, somebody walked by wearing a black 10-gallon garbage bag. He was short, so upside-down it covered his body from head to waist. With his arms straight down, only his hands protruded. I only saw him from the back, so I can't say what sort of arrangement he had in front for which to see his way. It was a queer thing to see.

Some Thoughts on Sweatshops and Child Labor

There stands a young woman, gaunt and ill, sallow, filthy, with hair dirty and dry, just rags for clothes, you can count her bones. She is weary, balanced uneasily on one remaining leg, and that leg is repulsive: oozing, infected, odoriferous, and weak. Although her leg offends you, do not attack it. There are other ways to help that woman.

Election Thoughts

Yesterday was a great day for American democracy. Not because I’m naïve enough to think that the Democrats are fundamentally better people than Republicans, but because political competition and conflict form the stick to keep government in line (re-election being the carrot). Both have been notoriously lacking for the past six years.

Listening to Bush’s press conference yesterday morning, I heard some interesting things. For one, Bush wasn’t just making empty promises of bi-partisanship that were understood to be valid only so long as the opposition agreed to do his biding. He was actually offering congratulations to Democrats—the first tentative steps towards rebuilding bridges burnt long ago. Not to say that he won’t renege, but it was good to see.

Second, Bush uttered a phrase which, although I may be wrong, I believe has been completely alien to all of the President’s prior rhetoric: “the lack of progress in Iraq.” Was this not the man who until quite recently was insisting that we were winning Iraq? President Bush’s denial of the reality so apparent to the rest of us, in Iraq as well as elsewhere, is what has disturbed me most about his tenure. So this, too, is a promising development.

To back this up, he has removed the most (or perhaps second-most, after Cheney) obstinate man in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld’s leadership has been marked by a complete inability to acknowledge failures, an apparent unwillingness to learn from mistakes, and an ideological disrespect for dissenters.

What we may now be seeing is the re-birth of a new Bush administration, one more responsive to the public and more willing to compromise (if only because it has no choice). The Republican majority that in 2004 seemed impermeable (I heard conservative friends speak, smiling wistfully, of the “enduring Republican majority”) is now in shambles; the President and his crew botched policy so badly over the last two years that on Tuesday local Republicans across the country paid the ultimate political price. National issues dominated this election, as every pundit in the country has pointed out, and Bush lost this one for his team.

What is left for Bush and Rove in their remaining two years is to try to make amends, to rebuild the party to a place where it can compete for the Presidency in 2008 against a Democratic strategy of demanding change. In this election it did not matter much what form that change took—the Democrats did not put forward a cohesive vision for America prior to this election, they simply had to emphasize that they were not Republicans. President Bush’s job is to make sure that the same strategy does not work two years from now. He’ll do that only by beginning change now, and by forcing Democrats to take some responsibility for the direction this country is taking.

Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats must recognize that the strategy of being not Republican (or, as Jon Stewart put it, of slowly backing out of the room while your brother is yelled at for burning down the garage) probably won’t suffice in 2008, and need to come up with something a bit stronger to run on. Pelosi is just the firebrand that the Democrats need to push them into taking some risks. If the Democrats want to become anything other than the impotent party they have been for six years, they’ll have to start some actual leading, and the changes they make will need to make a good impression. If they can point to positive results in two years, and if they can put forward a solid candidate with charisma and a base broader than Massachusetts, they can take back the White House. If they fail to do either, they won’t.

Synthetic Rights

In Shakespeare’s time, the opposite of natural was super-natural. It was a distinction between the mortal realm and the spiritual, and humans and everything made by humans fell, therefore, with the natural. Today we are more secular and less superstitious. We also surround ourselves with material things, man-made things, so that things that come from nature outside of man are actually rather rare, at least in much of the West. And so the use of the word changed: now the opposite of natural is man-made, or artificial. Previously, if you actually wanted to find something not natural, you had to go to a witch. Today, if you want to find something that is natural, you probably have to go to a special store.

Around the same time as the semantic shift in the meaning of natural, the rhetoric of humanism also changed. Human rights were previously referred to by philosophers (for human rights were at that time, and perhaps still are, primarily in the domain of philosophers) as natural rights. The name was changed, rightly, because the idea of natural rights (as the word is now understood) is somewhat limiting. It is pretty clear that nature does not consider anything to have the right to live out the day, much less to do so with dignity. Our natural rights would be exhausted by a short list: you have the right to struggle, to feel pain, and to die. Everything else you have to earn, or be lucky.

In this light, you can see that the semantic shift from natural rights to human rights is important: it recognizes that the notion of rights is entirely artificial, foreign to the natural realm. Maybe we should go further, and call them synthetic rights.

Of course, that is not really how the word human is being used in human rights. The word does not denote their source, as the term natural rights attempted to, but denotes the target of the rights. Rightly, it stresses their universality among homo sapiens sapiens. The notion is that all humans should enjoy them.

But not all humans in practice enjoy them. Hardly any humans enjoy them all, in fact. Well, that’s a ludicrous complaint anyway, since it’s not clear what “them all” would be. The most frequently sited enumeration, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a political document that merely included everything Eleanor Roosevelt could shame leaders of the capitalist West, the communist East, and the impoverished and generally totalitarian Rest to grudgingly agree to. That’s not exactly a comprehensive or necessarily accurate methodology for establishing the basic principles of human dignity.

So we struggle on for human rights, waiving an ad hoc manifesto from another era to rally the masses and shame our leaders. Amazingly, this is the most effective means of promoting human dignity that we have ever found.

But, of course, it is an artificial process. And it can only make limited progress until we have fully conquered nature. That is, after all, what escaping hunger, disease, and violence is: escaping the less appealing aspects of the natural world. Even as environmentalists, with good reason, work to alert us that our current artificial way of life is unsustainable, it is clear that we must build up more artifice if we are going to see everyone’s human rights fulfilled. This doesn’t necessarily require more pollution and degradation, and I believe we can find a better way. But until we have more infrastructure, the human rights to potable water and a basic education will never be fulfilled. Moreover, as long as people are too poor to take care of themselves, their rights will be infringed upon. And making people less poor means getting them decent-paying jobs, and that means creating more jobs, and that requires more enterprises.

The concept of human rights is one of the most beautiful ideas we as a species have ever had. It is a great ideal to work towards. But they aren’t natural, and therefore can not be taken for granted. They will not be guaranteed by some higher force. In fact, we shouldn’t speak of human rights as if they already exist. They won’t exist until we bring them about, through further economic development worldwide. Human rights are a human invention, a modern invention as well, and we have a lot of work to do to secure them for everyone.

Looking East

Africa's future lies in China. For better or worse.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much Western aid has been holding Africa back in some ways. There are easy examples, like the free second hand clothes that America ships here by the boatload, effectively preventing any large-scale domestic textile industry from becoming established. Remember the key role that textiles and cotton played in the development of England, the U.S., South Africa, and Australia, to name a few obvious examples. But it's not just this sort of idiotic giving that hurts Africa. It's also the way we do our aid. (See my earlier post, The Last Condom Factory in Africa.)

I can't think of a single instance where development (in any way you want to measure it: per capita GDP, infant or maternal mortality, life expectancy, literacy/education, access to potable water, etc) has been driven by anything other than private sector growth. State-lead development was a categorical failure in Latin America (which Latin American socialists like to forget), and the development model of the East Asian "miracle" countries makes the Washington consensus look populist. In short, the state seems to be incapable of bringing about meaningful gains for its people, short of fostering the growth of independent (not state-owned) employers.

The problem is that Western aid by and large flows to the governments, which is all but useless. It is throwing money down a rat hole, as foreign aid has been disparaged by isolationist American politicians des temps en temps.

Instead, we can do huge amounts of good if we support African industries. This just means buying African-produced goods, and encouraging direct investment in African industries. Foreign direct investment was, after all, the engine that drove the East African economic boom. (Of course, we do need to learn a bit more caution from the fiscal crises of the late 1990s which wiped out some of the gains those countries had experienced.)

So, back to China. China is getting involved in Africa in no small way. Their model is to trade with Africa on its own terms. As Moeletsi Mbeki, a South African businessman and political analyst, is quoted as saying in the NY Times today: “They are not the first big foreign power to come to Africa, but they may be the first not to act as though they are some kind of patron or teacher or conqueror. In that sense, there is a meeting of the minds.”

That sounds wonderful. That sounds like it might be exactly what Africa needs in order to develop its industries, in order to generate more jobs, to mop up the excess labor in which African cities are awash, to raise real wages, and to raise the quality of life and increase the opportunities that Africans will have in the 21st century.

At the same, though, China is not trying to go directly to African businessmen, but is instead working closely with their governments. An upcoming conference on China-Africa trade relations will host 38 African heads of state. No doubt Sudan, Angola, and Zimbabwe will all be there; China works closely with all those governments, eschewing concerns that they commit gross human rights violations. China will use aid, mostly in the form of debt forgiveness and huge loans, as leverage to encourage cooperation from dubious African leaders. Let me not say dubious. Let me say atrocious. These are the sorts of deals that inspire national leaders to do whatever necessary to extend their rule indefinitely: in exchange for trade concessions, they will get access to huge amounts of cash ripe for embezzling. Cash flows like this directly to governments are exactly what Western countries have been doing wrong, but are on the verge of rectifying (see the Millennium Challenge Accounts).

The result may well be more of the same (or worse) for Africa: leaders selling raw materials to China at deflated prices in exchange for unrestricted loans that need never be repaid. African countries will be forced to import the finished items back from China. Africa has long exported raw materials and imported finished products, so deals with China may not result in anything but undermining all Western efforts to withdraw support for inept and corrupt governments. And whatever you think about promoting Western values abroad, there is no reason to provide support to kleptocrats. Or, as my girlfriend loves to say, feeding people is a Western value. (Disclaimer: this is not to say that feeding people is not an African value, or an Eastern value, or any other country's value. Don't read that into this.)

We'll find out soon what increased ties with China will mean, because we have neither the power nor the right to stop them. African development will probably be more affected by its interactions with China's economy than with the West's over the next fifty years. It's anyone's guess exactly what that will mean (in no small part because it's anyone's guess what China will look like in 50 years). But for better or for worse, Africa's future lies in China.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind...

At school, some of my friends were vegan or vegetarian for a solid moral reason: they could not condone the conditions under which the agro-industry functions and thrives. It seems to them to be unsustainable and/or unconscionable to treat animals and the land in such a way. If you object morally to a system, at the very least you are obligated to abstain from it. Even if the system will not be appreciably hindered or reformed by your refusal to participate, you would be a hypocrite if you benefited from a system you find to be morally objectionable.

Unfortunately, agro-industry is but the tip of the iceberg. I'll not go on a tirade on the evils of the global economic status quo, because I think those are generally poorly informed, myopic, and utopian. What I mean to talk about is not human activity, but life itself. The cruelty of the agro-industrial complex is a reflection of the cruelty of the world, of its meanness, arbitrariness, and remorselessness. When we are told that life is unfair, we should not merely be thinking about the capricious nature of man, we should be thinking about how this world fundamentally treats plants, animals, and humans with heartless indifference. There are no such things as human rights. That is not a philosophical statement, it is empirical. A right is a guarantee, and it is clear that if we intend to guarantee human rights, it will require us first to fully conquer this planet, to overcome its staggeringly violent will. No, the world does not cry when we commit genocide. It is envious that it did not get around to killing those people off first.

Pity not the baby seal, clubbed to death by Russians. That baby seal has one of the best deaths afforded by nature, quick and relatively painless.

The only moral option is to resign from this system in protest.

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PS - No, I'm not actually considering suicide, please don't call/email me in a panic.