There you go

There you go
The strong have always taken from the weak. Vikings and Mongols did it, and the uncounted generations before them. In America, India and Iran, Cortez and the East India and Anglo-Persian Oil companies did no more than maintain an inglorious human tradition. “To them that have…”

There have always been good people doing good, and evil people doing evil; but to get good people to do evil, that takes religion.
Philip Pullman

John Gray argues in Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern that the defining belief of modernity — that advances in science and technology entail corresponding advances in politics and ethics — is a secular remnant of Judaeo-Christian millenarianism; and with different interpretations, the common inheritance of French revolutionaries, Nazis, neo-cons, Maoists, Marxists and monetarists alike. We take our superior science and technology as assurances we occupy moral high ground, despite ample evidence no such link exists. (No one ever accused the Third Reich of having ‘backward’ science and technology.)

The calm confidence of a Christian with four aces
Mark Twain

Institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF express the West’s claim to moral high ground, and dispense advice on how to join the club of rich societies. In practice, the advice is unhelpful. Poor countries that follow it become poorer. The twentieth century’s honour roll, countries that hauled themselves out of wretched poverty — China, India, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam — have treated this advice with the kind of respect given to bubonic plague.

The ‘secular religion’ of modernity has provided a wrapper of self-justification that lets us continue to enslave or imprison the weak, and nick their nickel or oil, without damage to our illusion of virtue. In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we covered exploitation with a thin rubric of evangelism, bringing civilisation and saving souls. Now the civilisation we bring is the gospel of Democracy and Development, which licenses our re-invasion of Iraq or America’s 1980s terrorist war against Nicaraguan democracy. Who first bombed Iraqi tribes with chemical weapons — and to encourage prompt payment of taxes? We continue to offer atrocity to our poisonous gods. Weep for the weak of the world, sacrificed on the altars of modernity.

Or enjoy a grim laugh. Oren Ginzburg’s new cartoon book There You Go explains the process with pictures. You can read it online in a few minutes.

Posted by SJT at July 30, 2006 10:49 AM