Soon it will be over. No more cod theology, no more recycled orphans' faces on front pages and no more of the media's perishable brand of pity. What happens next, in the countries devastated by the tsunami, and in Africa, will depend on whether the mood of the past fortnight really is a conduit to a better world.
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown thinks so. His three-part prescription of debt relief, increased aid and better trade terms for poor countries is, at first sight, nothing new. He rehearsed his action plan, complete with an international financial facility for front-loading funding, several months ago in an essay for New Economy.
ILLUSTRATION YUSHA
Two factors made last week's program different. The first is the Asian earthquake and the second the supposed feud Brown has with British Prime Minister Tony Balir, who rolled out his own salvation package simultaneously.
Brown is, apparently, playing Prometheus to Blair's Zeus. In the legend, the underling filched the leader's fire to bestow on struggling mortals. In the modern variant, the Chancellor has merely stolen the prime minister's thunder.
Blair wants to be a savior, too, but he has been upstaged by Brown's talk of `the extraordinary power of human compassion to build anew.' The two men's wishes may be similar, but Blair's lack the transformation element. Only Brown believes that the events of the past fortnight can turn people into better human beings who will now refocus their newfound altruism on Africa.
Governments are not usually very optimistic about the goodness of their citizens and Blair's is no exception. Any legislative or social program suggests that the human condition is to hang around the fast food shop in a hoodie, planning antisocial acts or to binge fecklessly on alcohol and carbs.
The perfectibility of mankind is a frequently recycled hope, despite its dubious record. Communists held it as a primary goal.
Thomas Malthus thought it might work, if only there were fewer people to perfect. Enlightenment do-gooders were always trying to civilize wild children, as proof of the triumph of rationalism and reason and then growing bored with them once the novelty had faded.
Brown tacitly admits he has some way to go. The statistics quoted in his speech do not bear witness to the kindness of the affluent: 110 million children denied a school place and 60,000 others who suffer or die each day as the rich world falls 150 years behind in its millennial pledge to eliminate avoidable infant deaths.
Then there are the bits he did not mention, such as the competitive giving in which nations vie to outdo one another, while corporations get denounced as tightwads. In all this who-gave-whattery, only the generosity of citizens offers some hope that they can become the army of salvation that Brown's vision requires.
Can people really change so fundamentally and do they need to? On two of his proposals -- writing off debt to developing countries and doubling aid -- the Chancellor is asking nothing radical. As Rodney Barker of the London School of Economics says, Athenian regimes of the 4th century regularly cancelled debt in the hope of building a fairer society. Helping the poor has always been the duty and the luxury of the wealthy.
Fairer trade policy, the third plank of Brown's plan, will be the test of whether the earthquake has unleashed the will for a better world. Some months before the tsunami struck, Oxfam interviewed a woman called Nong, who was stitching underwear for Western retailer Victoria's Secret in Thailand. She explained she was afraid of having children because she feared she could not feed them.
"We have to do overtime until midnight to earn a decent income," she said.
Thailand, the Maldives and Sri Lanka are full of women like Nong. Tonal regulations, which puts China in direct competition with other textile producers. Meanwhile, the West continues to rake in its cut with one hand while dispensing beneficence with the other.
On Oxfam's figures, the US duty levied on Sri Lanka for exports of clothing and textiles alone was US$244 million in 2003.
The EU charged US$77 million in the same year. In Indonesia, the corresponding charges were US$426 million and US$180 million. Tariffs are so harsh that the charity estimates the overall income lost to the developing world at US$40 billion. Western generosity is woefully selective.
From Manchester to Malibu, people know little about such clawbacks, mainly because their politicians do not discuss uncomfortable truths. Few things are simpler to grasp than starving to death and few are made more unnecessarily complex than the remedies. Global financial institutions do not deign to speak the language of ordinary voters, which is useful for governments with a vested interest in ensuring that the poor stay poor.
The idea that a fairer world is virtually impossible to achieve has corroded public generosity, or skewed it. Before the tsunami, the average British adult male donated his ?12.32 a month (or ?13.55 for women) to causes led in popularity by medical research (24 percent), children (21 percent) and animals (11 percent). Overseas projects trailed at 8.5 percent and disaster relief was the priority of only 2.4 percent. In other words, donkey sanctuaries touched more hearts than Darfur.
David Held of the London School of Economics has done some other sums. In a recent essay for openDemocracy, he argued that developed countries had ample means to change the world. EU citizens spend US$11 billion a year on ice cream alone, while the joint pet-food bill for the EU and the US is ?17 billion, against the UN budget of US$1.25 billion, excluding peacekeeping. Held's question was whether we have the will for global social justice.
Brown thinks so. He has annexed citizens' goodwill, not in fiscal speak but in a prophet's rhetoric, or even a poet's. With the tsunami over and Africa ahead, Brown is ushering voters into T.S. Eliot country, to choose "between the profit and the loss in this brief transit where the dreams cross."
Will we go with him? Not if the only lure is the fading faces of the drowned or even the knowledge of what a scandalous profit retailers are making from Sri Lankan-made knickers. But perhaps citizens will follow and drive their politicians, if they can be shown that there is a mutual benefit at stake.
There would be short-term sacrifices for fair trade, such as job losses that Britain should be able to absorb. In the longer run, the "one moral universe" Brown envisages will benefit a world in which global warming, natural disaster and terrorism have already instilled some equality of catastrophe.
Easier options exist. We could help reconstruct pre-earthquake poverty and give Aceh back its one, flyblown hospital to treat a region's sick. We could stall on debt relief and trade while virtuously bewailing, over a cup of fair-trade tea, the lack of decent governance south of the Sahara. Or we could accept what events, self-interest and humanity decree: that Asia and Africa are the key to all our futures.
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