Do You Think You're Clever? (19 page)

(Land Economy, Cambridge)

Of course, this partly depends on who you are. If you’re someone whose family is afflicted by AIDS then clearly that’s the biggest crisis. If you’re one of the billions of people around the world living in extreme poverty, then that is the biggest crisis. If you’re someone whose traditional way of life has been ruined by the destruction of rainforest, then that’s the biggest crisis.

But looking at these problems on a global scale, the most massive immediate problem is clearly poverty. The number of people – more than a third of the world’s population – suffering miserable lives or worse as a result of poverty around the world is huge and unacceptable. 4.4 billion people live in developing countries. Three-fifths lack basic sanitation. Almost one third have no access to clean water. A quarter do not have adequate housing. A fifth have no access to modern health services. A fifth of children do not make it to the end of primary school. A fifth are continually ill because they do not have adequate protein and energy from their food supplies. And each year, for every single child alive and well in the UK, a child dies in the developing world through the effects of poverty. There is no crisis that comes even close to this in scale, urgency or tragedy. It’s a calamity for humanity, and demands immediate attention.

The damage to the environment is potentially catastrophic. If, for instance, global warming is even half as bad as some of the worst scenarios predict, it could be devastating. Many of the world’s great cities could be drowned by rising seawater as ice caps melt and the oceans warm and swell. Many productive areas of farmland could be turned to desert by drought. And the extra energy in the atmosphere could generate storms that wreak havoc around the world. In future, environmental damage could do untold, irreparable harm to life on earth that lasts for many generations, if not forever. So in the long term, the threat of destroying our planet must be considered a bigger problem than poverty. However, poor people need help now. For them, the threats to the planet in a few decades’ time make no difference; most of them will not be alive to see it unless their problems are addressed now.

Of course, it’s absurd rating crises like this. They are the most serious issues facing humanity and all demand attention. What’s more, they are not separate problems to be packaged up and dealt with one by one. They are intimately related in both cause and effect, and they need to be dealt with together. AIDS, for instance, often goes hand-in-hand with poor living conditions and a lack of education, both of which are also closely linked to poverty. And poverty, of course, is often a direct result of environmental problems, and the poorest of the poor are likely to be the worst hit by the effects of climate change – such as impoverished inhabitants in low-lying Bangladesh as
sea levels rise, and the peoples of the Sahel as the desert expands. But the interconnectedness goes much deeper, and it’s almost inconceivable that we could ‘solve’ one without addressing the others.

On a very superficial level, the main threats to the environment are a direct result of intensive economic development around the world, but especially in the developed countries. Massive energy consumption and massive demand for resources (mineral, water, food and land) put huge pressure on the environment. Poverty is essentially the counter side of the concentration of energy and resources into the world’s economic hotspots. Economists and development experts have many ideas how it could and should be done, but it seems likely that both world poverty and environmental damage could be alleviated by damping down the furnace of consumption in the economic hotspots and working to spread a more even, sustainable level of development around the world.

(Oriental Studies, Cambridge)

This is presented as if it’s a difficult or controversial question, maybe about the status of religion. After all, some of us were told at school that God is capitalised out of respect for the Almighty. But it’s just a diversion. The answer is quite simple: in English, proper names are always given
an initial capital letter, and God is a proper name, just as Gordon and Barack are. The word ‘God’ should still be capitalised even if you have no respect, providing you are referring to the being known as God – in other words, when the being’s proper name is God.

So even an atheist should capitalise God, although he has no more belief in God than he does in Puff the Magic Dragon. You might split hairs if you were a particularly tricky kind of atheist and try to say that because you don’t believe he exists he can’t have a proper name, but you’d be wrong because possession of a proper name is not a proof or even acceptance of something’s existence, any more than Superman’s is.

But the word ‘god’ should not have a capital, of course, if it’s used descriptively rather than as a proper name – when you’re referring to just any god, or one of the gods, or a real goddess. The word ‘I’ is the only personal pronoun to be capitalised, and it may simply be that the single letter ‘i’ would look insufficient in lower case.

The grey area would seem to arise, perhaps, when you use personal pronouns for God, but you would use capitals when referring to His Majesty, or His Holiness, so it may be right to insist on capitalising Him when referring to God, regardless of respect, because Him could be used as a title, not a personal pronoun. I think, though, that most people accept a lower case ‘him’ is the norm nowadays.

The distinction between capitals and non-capitals or, in printing terminology, upper and lower case, emerged only in the Middle Ages in European languages. (The letters are called upper case and lower case because in the days of movable type, the capital (majuscule) letters literally came from the upper case or tray of letters and the small (minuscule) letters from the lower case.) In classical texts, all letters were capitals. The rules for usage vary with each language, and have varied through history. All European languages begin sentences and lines in verse with capitals (although a few modern poets have deliberately subverted the rule), but within sentences and lines usage varies. In German, every proper noun is given a capital, and that was once true of English. Now only specific names and things such as adjectives derived from nouns (e.g. Newtonian physics) have capitals.

(Land Economy, Cambridge)

Very few people would deny that poverty is an issue that demands attention. No politician could credibly stand up in parliament, for instance, and assert that it isn’t important – however vacillating he or she might be in actually doing anything about it. It’s one of the major issues facing the world today.

The scale of devastation wreaked by poverty around the world is truly appalling. There are over a billion people – a
fifth of the world’s population – living in what the World Bank calls ‘extreme poverty’ and a further 1.6 billion living in what they call ‘moderate poverty’, the vast majority of these in sub-Saharan Africa and in India. The definition of ‘extreme poverty’ is living on less than a dollar day – and that means perpetual malnourishment, no proper home and an exposure to disease and deprivation that at best causes misery, and at worst death. And there is little moderation in ‘moderate poverty’, which means struggling to exist on less than $2 a day. Today’s newspapers could print the headline ‘Yesterday, 25,000 children died from extreme poverty around the world’, and they could print the same every day of the year, year in year out, and it would still be true. But of course most die invisibly, far away from the attention of the world’s media, with only a few of the worst crises making the news.

The effects of poverty ‘at home’ are less extreme than they may be in the developing countries. Oxfam’s definition of poverty in the UK means living on less than 60 per cent of the median income after housing costs are deducted (£108 per week for a single adult in 2006). That may not sound so terrible compared to poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, but it still brings misery – never having enough to eat well, rarely being warm in winter, never affording the small pleasures that make life bearable.

Most people would agree that the suffering all this poverty causes is unacceptable. For us to live affluently while others suffer and starve is not only morally dubious, but
ultimately corrosive of our own well-being. And yet, global poverty has, if anything, got worse in the last few decades. If it weren’t for the enormous strides forward in China, many more people would have slipped into the poverty trap around the world than have climbed out of it. Even in the UK, the government’s earnest and genuine pledges to reduce child poverty at home seem to have run backwards. This is all the more distressing in view of the fact that there have been several high-profile international resolutions to tackle global poverty – most notably at the G8 conference in Gleneagles in 2005, when Tony Blair, backed by a chorus of rock concerts around the world, cajoled the world’s richest nations into pledging £25 billion of aid to Africa by 2010.

The outcome of that Gleneagles pledge is perhaps symptomatic of why there is such scant progress. Of the eight nations who pledged money in 2005, only Britain has kept its promises, while Italy, France and Japan have fallen way short, despite pressure from Gordon Brown and Barack Obama at the L’Aquila G8 summit in Italy in July 2009. It looks almost certain that Africa will get much less than a third of the promised aid by next year’s deadline. When you realise that this meagre target was just 5 per cent of what the USA spends on defence, and just 2 per cent of what the UK government alone put into bailing out failing banks in the 2009 crisis, it becomes clear why there is no movement on world poverty. If governments such as France’s have so little financial freedom of movement that
they cannot even come up with what was, in any case, a token sum, then it’s clear that high-profile international efforts will achieve little.

The amounts of money in circulation around the world, the imbalance of which is really behind poverty both at home and abroad, is astronomical compared to the amounts international bodies are tinkering with when they discuss aid. The 2009 bank bailout cost the US government $23 trillion dollars – that’s well over 10,000 times the entire GDP of a country like Gambia, and many hundreds of times the GDP of the whole of Africa. This is not to say the US government should have sent the money to Africa instead (though maybe they should have); they would say, and perhaps they’re right, that while they can move that mountain of cash into the banking system to support the US economy, even a tiny increase in donations to Africa causes major problems.

The gob-smacking scale of these differences makes absolutely clear the utter powerlessness of governments, or individual aid organisations, to have much impact in the face of the real international movements of money on the global scale.
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The economic disparities in the world are created by the unseen movement of literally quadrillions of

dollars by the world financial system and global corporations. This is why there are so many poor people both at home and abroad.

So when it comes to focusing on poverty at home or abroad in the long term, it’s clear that this is something of a red herring. They have both the same root cause and the same ultimate solution, which is nothing less than a revolution in the global financial system. Actually, I say ‘revolution’ but I suspect even a change of course might make a difference. Imagine, for instance, that the G20 governments had diverted just a fifth of the money they used to bail out banks to supporting the lowest incomes around the world. I don’t have the figures to hand, but I have a suspicion there would be enough to give every single one of the world’s poorest a very decent income for the next five years – and with all these extra people with money to spend, who knows what a boost to the world economy it would provide?
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There are, of course, plenty of sophisticated economic and fiscal arguments that convincingly demonstrate the non-workability of such ‘simple’ remedies and why they would have been a disaster. And sadly governments and banks alike appear to believe them; they seem convinced that they do not have the freedom to make such significant shifts. And maybe they’re right. But perhaps, then, it’s time for a rethink …

(Mathematics and Philosophy, Oxford)

The simplest answer is: my mind. And that’s not quite as facetious as it sounds. The one thing that I can perhaps be certain of is that I am thinking, and it’s reasonable to describe the location of my thoughts as my mind.
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So in a very precise way it’s my mind that is making me think that you, too, are having thoughts. Whether my mind is actually right is a different matter, but it’s surely my mind that is making this thought.
^†

Now, as many philosophers have recognised through the ages, there is no way of logically proving that my own experiences are actually real. My thoughts – the perception that I have a separate mind in a separate body – could all be entirely false. It’s equally impossible to logically prove that you too have a separate mind with its own independent thoughts. However, all my life experience, all the messages that I have received from my senses during my life, confirm that things are as I believe them. I am aware of my body feeding back sensory information and responding to my commands. I am aware that things happen in a largely predictable way. Even when they are unpredictable, they seem to confirm my view that there is a real world beyond me, filled with real people who are having their own thoughts, just like me.

Philosophers have long challenged the assumptions of this commonsense realism, and tried to come up with more robust pictures of reality. They argue, for instance, that the senses are easily fooled. A fast-spinning wheel, for example, can look stationary. Moreover, how can we be certain that the waking world is any more real than the fantasy world created in our dreams? Representative realists suggest, for instance, that the mind does not experience the reality of the outside world but merely a representation of it. Idealists
say that our experience of reality is all in our head, and that objects exist only as long as they are perceived. It’s a conundrum which philosophers have yet to resolve.

However, even though as a philosopher it’s fascinating – indeed fundamental – to explore questions like these, for everyday practical life it makes sense to go with the commonsense view, which accepts our experience as real. In fact, I find it almost impossible to think and live any other way, because that’s the way my mind works. So I live as if the evidence of my experience and my senses is true, and that you are another human being, with a mind just like mine, and that you are having thoughts just like me. So that’s what ‘makes’ me think you are having thoughts.

Of course, I could be wrong in another way. Your body may be a physical reality, but what you do and what you say may not necessarily come from your thoughts. You may be simply a very realistic android, programmed to give very convincing responses … But if you are such an android, you’re a pretty believable one, so I think that it might make sense to hedge my bets and assume that you are a thinking human being and not a duplicitous dummy …