Justice – Week 5
Where I look to decolonise my brain, and find myself reflecting on sugar, population numbers, consultants, and tax havens.
America was Europe’s dream of plenty. Silver, sugar, cod, whales. I remember the maps of ‘great discoveries’ I used to look at as a child. Europe would cast its bright eyes on the world, and triumph. Later, as a teenager, I would spend hours playing Sid Meier’s Civilization, a strategy game which unfolded along the same expansion narrative. That dream has since turned to nightmare. One where an elusive presence is fast approaching to destroy me, but no matter how much I try to run, my limbs are lead-heavy, and I’m hardly moving.
For Justice week, I initially set myself the goal of decolonising my brain. Stories were planted in me when I was too young to consent, and those ingrained a certain worldview. For years, I have been working on uprooting their shoots, yet I continue to stumble on them occasionally. Reading alternative works of history and critical social science is an important hygienic practice, to replace this colonial imaginary with one I find more just.
I start the week with Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth: a large-scale world history tracing the parallel evolution of imperial domination and environmental destruction, from the Middle Ages onwards. One insight I re-learn here is the cost of sugar. Even before the West Indies, the forests of Madeira were torn up to make room for sugar cane, cultivated by enslaved Africans and Guanches. Sweetness comes at a price. I can hear my benign grand-mother as I read, biting on a piece of chocolate after dinner, and commenting with a smile: ‘isn’t gourmandise an endearing form of sin?’
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Later in the book, in a chapter called Roads to Freedom, Amrith describes efforts by decolonised nations to put fossil fuels to good, and otherwise make use of natural resources for human advancement. Some of those efforts led to terrible destruction – China’s Great Leap Forward to the front. But one clear success is the massive reduction of infant mortality, and mortality overall. Except, with this came an explosion in the global population, and as a result, increasing pressure on natural ecosystems.
In 2022, I wrote a piece called Who should die and what should we do with the bodies? In part, it was an ironic reply to the cold abstract thinkers – my father among them – who frame the current woes of our civilization as ‘there’s just too many people’. Yet the question lingers. We're approaching planetary boundaries not with one or two but eight billion people alive, and the number is rising.
One of the most provoking texts in my mental library is a passage of Pasolini’s Lutheran letters. Reflecting on the mental and moral structures of 1970s European society, he attributes much of what he sees as bourgeois decay to people he calls ‘those who were fated to die’. Medical progress reduced child mortality. As a result, many of the people alive then would have died in earlier times. The consequence, argues Pasolini, is a number of people feeling deep in the bones that their survival is tied to the system around them. Therefore, they live with a mild background of fear, and resist any radical change.
This text has personal resonance. I am one of those people who survived early childhood as a result of modern medicine. I can feel a light cloud of anxiety when I think of our current civilization, and its possible demise in collapse scenario. What will happen to me then? Who knows how radical I would be if I did not have this nagging worry. Who knows how all of us would be? Yet shouldn't I feel at lest some gratitude to the structures that have kept me alive? Or is this part of those narratives I absorbed as a child, and should uproot out of my head?
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After Amrith, I start another book to help me demystify the mechanics of government action. In The Big Con, Mariana Mazzucatto and Rose Collington write about the enmeshment of large consulting companies in all aspects of the government bureaucracy – from technological infrastructure to special projects and strategy. Not only do they raise the cost of work that could be done for cheaper and more accountably by governments in-house, not only do they use knowledge acquired in-house to favour private clients willing to pay for their services, but their privileged position gives them extreme levels of influence on shaping the details of the law. Change, then, may be less about voting for this or that party, than about understanding those dark patterns, and organising against them.
I read in that same book that about US$21 to $32 trillions in financial assets – IP and otherwise – are held in tax havens, and US$ 427 billion in tax is lost every year to their lax taxation. Spread across a global population of about 8 billion, that is US$53 per person per year, or about 15 cents a day. In Melbourne, that’s about one coffee per month. By another calculation, the poorest 700 million people live on less than US$2.15 a day. If all the money lost to tax evasion was distributed among them, it could close to double their income.
Of course, those are figures only, but this calculation makes the magnitude palpable, and accounts for our apathy. Compared to the budget of a middle-class Australian and stretched across the planet, it’s a drop in the ocean – yet it’s enough to terminate extreme poverty. Oh, but if we were to distribute money to ‘those people’, I can hear my father's voice in my head, surely that would encourage them to reproduce, putting more pressure on the planet. And so, in the name of justice, I bend down again to the soil of my own brain, look for the root of that colonial weed seeded in me when I was too young to realise, and try again to pull it off...