West Tribalism: Regressive Progress
It is difficult to fathom that the esteemed judges of Supreme Court of the most advanced country would ban abortion in these modern times. This is akin to snatching away the most fundamental right of an adult woman in a secular and liberal society of the United States of America. And any violation of this ban is now to be met with fine and punishment.
How can one rationalize the insurrection that took place in Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 in the most matured democracy of the world? US constantly preaches and often invades others to impose its ideology of democracy and freedom whenever it gets an opportunity. The same country elected an erratic and psychopath Donald Trump as its proud President in 2016. And now gearing up to elect Trump or alike again in 2024. After all, 80% of Republicans are still his followers and Trump got close to half of popular electorate votes in the last election.
Medieval rhetoric prevails that is promoting the thinking to fight until death as long as a single Ukrainian stands alive by Zelenskyy. Though Ukraine had an option to walk away from the war, tribal instinct has trumped their civilised thinking and modern living standard. They have preferred Ukrainians to be decimated to Stone Age so that their traditional honour, pride and valour remain intact. This attitude is not too different from Taliban who were living in caves and the fighting was their only way of life.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Europe is blindly supporting Ukraine in a war against Russia, rejecting all rhymes and reasons. A war that NATO instigated by its speedy expansion towards east without heeding to any security concern of Russia. Instead of allocating resources for peoples’ welfare hit by high inflation, they are being channelled to arm Ukrainians and to increase NATO’s budget. Russia proved to be a paper tiger on the war front and is being strongly resisted by Ukraine: a country less than four times in population, less than five times in military arsenal and without any nuke. Russia is also inadvertently providing an excuse to NATO to go on for shopping for arms from Military Industrial Complex which is making huge profits at the expense of societies’ welfare.
Talking about substituting Russian energy imports as if there is a magic switch and the World has excess supply of oil and gas, all waiting to serve Europe. Even if it can be done, but at what price and how long will it take to make necessary alternates. How and at what price Europeans will cope these drastic changes and what would be its impact on their living standard in coming days? This is on top of vagaries caused by Covid and Europeans treasury being in shamble due to series of massive stimulus packages to keep their economies floating. But no one dares to ask and debate the hard truth in the so-called free Western media. All read the same rehearsed scripts dictated by their cherished governments.
All these regressive thinkings and acts in order to change the World in line with Western thinking has repeatedly displayed its fragility and antiquity in today’s diversified world. It is a high time to make some revolutionary reforms and recognize that there could be different form of democracy for each country according to its own ground reality, culture, traditions, history and need.
In India, who would have thought that Hindutva and resurrection of “Bharat Rashtria” would spread like wild fire after 75 years of independence. And this is happening at a time when the world appears to have moved ahead and religious differences are fading, especially in a country like India which is kind of a mini-UN in diversity and a rich history of accommodation and assimilation of foreigners.
Hard truth is that education, development, advancement and continental differences do not matter when it comes to ignorance, crudeness, backwardness and darkness in human behaviour. We are all behaving the way as we used to do thousands of years ago. All advancement and achievements are in material, scientific and technology areas. Social, religious and cultural behaviour are not too different from tribal societies. Slavery and discrimination have seemingly dissipated. But dismantling of slavery was prompted largely due to economic reasons as it was not sustainable. Lack of additional sources of slavery and finding that a free labourer was more productive than a slave convinced their Masters to let the slavery go.
I believe that we should not be deceived by the level of education, economic progress and living standards. They may be smoke screen to hide our backwardness, tribalism and dark devil instincts. Perhaps we have to wait another Ten Millenniums to become Civilized.
About Mahmood Iqbal
An Economist (PhD). Former Principal Economist, The Conference Board of Canada. Adjunct Faculty Member, Carleton University, Canada. The author of “No PhDs Please: This is Canada.” Besides doing research on serious economic and policy issues for the last 25 years, like to write journalistic pieces on subjects of interest. An amateur Photographer. … Blog appears to be appropriate venue to post my wondering thoughts without any peer pressure and academic review process.
Originally published at http://ipotpourri.wordpress.com on May 8, 2022.
