Do You Think You're Clever? Page 17
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.* The economic disparities in the world are created by the unseen movement of literally quadrillions of
* I am not saying, by any means, that such efforts are meaningless. Far from it. People need help, now, and aid can make an immense difference to the lives of individuals. Indeed, it’s important because it’s one of the ways each one of us can make a difference now. I may be talking about the problems of finding a long-term global solution, but people who are living on the edge need something more immediate.
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?*
* After I made my guess, my editor directed me to a press release issued by Oxfam in April 2009, when the bank bailouts stood at about $8.42 trillion, which stated that, ‘The $8.42 trillion – made up of capital injections, toxic asset purchases, subsidised loans and debt guarantees – is equivalent to more than $1,250 for every man, woman and child on the planet. The annual cost of lifting the 1.4 billion people living on less than $1.25-a-day above this threshold is $173bn.’ In fact, the bailout has been hugely bigger than Oxfam estimated. By July, the WTF were estimating that the bailout in the USA alone was up to $23.7 trillion. Worldwide the figure is likely to be over $40 trillion. So using those Oxfam figures of $173 billion, switching just a fifth of the bank bailout money could indeed lift all these people out of poverty for five years as I guessed. The total bank bailout would be worth about $7,000 for every single person on the planet. A sobering thought?
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 …
What makes you think I’m having thoughts?
(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.* 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.†
* This is not to say that my mind actually belongs to me (or is even located in my brain, though I personally believe it is) – I am simply using it as a label to describe the entity that is giving me the experience of thinking.
† Interestingly, though, the philosopher A.J. Ayer would challenge even this degree of certainty. According to Ayer, I cannot be certain that it is me having these thoughts. So I am not able to say with certainty that I have a mind. I cannot say ‘cogito’ – ‘I think’ – like Descartes, asserts Ayer; all I can say is that ‘thoughts are being had’. Perhaps, he suggests, it’s merely the way thoughts are arranged that makes us think there is a thinker.
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 fant
asy 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 …
So Who’s Clever Now?
Think again …
Well, it’s been quite a ride, hasn’t it? We’ve been probing inside the mind of a snail, falling through the centre of the earth, voyaging on Noah’s ark, delving into the nuances of girl scouting, and strutting the stage with Shakespeare, and so many other places! I hope you’ve found it stimulating. I know I have. These questions really make you think, don’t they? I’m sure that no one will agree with my answers. If I look back at them I know I would myself answer things differently second time round. But I hope they will at least have got you thinking.
There is a genuine excitement in really thinking, in exercising one’s intellect, that too often gets forgotten after student days. We enjoy challenging ideas, playing games with them, and, if we are honest, showing off just how clever we are – briefly illuminating the dreariness of the world with our flashes of intellectual mastery …
Cleverness can be captivating, both for those who dole it out and those who witness it. Sometimes a dazzling display of erudition and wit can be as entertaining and uplifting as a great piece of music. And maybe some of you who read these questions will be spurred to such heights. Maybe you even imagine yourself confronting those probing Oxbridge admissions tutors and slaying them with the sheer brilliance of your answer.
But of course, if you’re not careful, you might just get up people’s noses. As Samuel Johnson said, ‘There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in conversation. They seem pleased at the time, but their envy makes them curse the conversationalist in their heart.’
And with his normal scintillating accuracy, Oscar Wilde homed in on an even greater danger. In A Woman of No Importance, Lady Hunstanton neatly puts the brilliant Mrs Allonby in her place: ‘How clever you are, my dear. You never mean a single word you say!’
Maybe you came up with wonderful clever answers to some of these questions. Maybe you were provoked to come up with some important new ways of thinking on serious issues. Or maybe you were just provoked. Or simply befuddled. If so, there’s no better recipe than that of W.C. Fields, who asserted: ‘If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.’