Compassion and humanity please; not mindless consumerism

Image by gnosis / john r\'s

Paradoxically, I owe my very life to mass slaughter – my parents first met in Berlin in the aftermath of World War Two. My grandfathers, it turns out, fought on opposite sides in World War One. It is not surprising, therefore, that I, more than many, question the conflicting values of European culture that has come to dominate the world.

In twentieth century Christian Europe, rival empires systemised mass slaughter and destruction to the point of their own exhaustion and collapse. Their people, many of whom had courageously advanced humanity, were reduced to compliant canon-fodder by the opiates of patriotism, glory and honour ringing in their ears. As if systemised slaughter were not enough, state-induced starvation was to kill millions in Russia and China.

Today, the poor are threatened with starvation by the systemised nihilism of our exploitative global systems that treat food as just another commodity and by agribusiness monopolies. 

Nefandous atrocities are being perpetrated in Darfur and the length and breadth of the African Rift Valley. Millions have died, been mercilessly raped or mutilated. Unlike in Christian Europe during the last century, the slaughter is often random, indiscriminate and savagely anarchic. Abject poverty and social collapse caused by population explosion, land degradation and shortages, climate change, aquifer depletion and rampant HIV are very often the trigger.

Asia fares little better. While soil erosion and shrinking agricultural land continue apace in central Asia, Indonesians riot as food prices hike. Millions of Bangladeshis face destitution and homelessness as their houses are swamped by rising waters caused by glacial meltdown in the Himalayas, increased water run-off due to deforestation and rising sea levels. From the Mediterranean to the Indus Valley, armed conflict rages across what were the cradles of our civilisation with an intensity that moves steadily east. As if awakened from a torpor, the nuclear-armed, juxtaposed and over-populated Indian and Chinese empires have, with gusto, embraced the West's obsession with mercantile rivalry and economic expansion. In a world where might is right, Syria and Iran are following in the footsteps of Pakistan and North Korea, by developing nuclear weapons that will enable them to punch above their weight.

In the West, while grudgingly acknowledging our interdependence with the rest of the world and climate change, as if in a trance, our obsession with maintaining our unsustainable lifestyles and economic growth continues unabated. Almost in denial, we are reduced to making token gestures. We will continue, for example, to drive a daily round trip to work of one hundred kilometres that contributes to pollution, human road-kill and mutilation, military conflict to secure oil supplies and the paving over of our countryside for car parks and roads. Yet, somehow, the media render us satisfied with changing to low-energy light bulbs and placing foil behind radiators to reduce our negative impact on the planet. The inelasticity of our car-journey demand means that every jump in the price of oil increases the profitability of biofuels, which, in turn, fuels the cutting of rainforest timber and the shrinking of food-producing land, to be replaced with the monoculture of vast vegetable oil crops and plantations.

Our politicians strut around the globe spinning statesman-like concern for the poor and destitute, while, contradictorily, back at home they assure their electorate everything possible will be done to patch and continue to inflate a consumption bubble that is close to bursting. Our self-interested parasitism seems to know no bounds as we use our power to suck greedily of our host, without being too troubled by those for whom the remaining sustenance of the Earth has been reduced to a mere trickle. When our materialistic inhumanity is mimicked and magnified by the gratuitous violence and killings of our youth and the marginalised disaffected, we are shocked, but only enough to call our government agencies to account.

The pattern is dire and, while we are now better able to hold our destructive militarism in check, we still try desperately, through our purchases, to combat the gnawing emptiness inside. As if to confirm the shallowness of this response, supermarkets, call centres and sales pitches have reduced formerly enjoyable transactional relationships to insincere, and often exploitative, perfunctoriness. Caught up in impersonal systems that overwhelm and digitise us, we are rendered impotent to the extent that, if we salve our consciences and our humanity at all, we do so by means of our cheque books rather than by showing compassion and offering practical help to those in need. We have been reduced to self-absolving, blame-apportioning bystanders who need a good dose of alcohol, drugs or sex at the end of each week to get us through the soullessness of the next.

There is, though, an answer. Violence, slaughters, materialism and the destruction of our earthly habitat are symptoms of our malaise, not the cause. Blaming them is an abnegation of not only our responsibilities to ourselves, but to the world – and therein lies the answer. We must commit to, connect with and respectfully take responsibility for others and their suffering, rather than distancing ourselves through blame, indifference or denial. In this way we give expression to our common humanity, which, in turn, gives our lives real fulfilment and meaning, filling the void we would otherwise try to satisfy through consumption and vying with others. Showing compassion in this way brings us better health, peace of mind, happiness and a sense of empowerment and freedom that even our civil liberties cannot confer. To others it provides the security we have come to expect from our fallible state systems, rather than from each other.

Being realistic and objective about what is the real value of human life and what makes us happy, is the only way we can turn around our present headlong rush to disaster. Societies based squarely on humanity have succeeded extremely well in the past and, oddly enough, while today's China demonstrates questionable humanity towards its people, it is the civilisation of the ancient Chinese sage emperors Yao and Shun that provides one excellent example.

In developing countries greater humanity could provide the security that would lessen the need for large families, give women more choice in the number of children they bear, reduce the need to copy the consumption of the West, enhance cooperation rather than conflict and be conducive to a sustainable, symbiotic relationship with the Earth.

This is not some utopian pipe-dream. Nurturing and strengthening the seeds of humanity, that have long been part of European culture and many others, is a far more realistic approach than our present one, which could see the whole world descend into the savage nihilism of the Rift Valley.