An island story of the world

If you go about midway between Peru and New Zealand, you will find an island, which was discovered by the British in 1767. In 1790 the mutineers of the British ship HMS Bounty led by Fletcher Christian settled in that island, which came to be known as Pitcairn Island. In 1838, Pitcairn was the first Pacific Island to become a British colony and today remains the last vestige of that empire in the South Pacific. Outmigration, primarily to New Zealand, has thinned the population from a peak of 233 in 1937 to less than 47 at last count.

There are only 12 adult men in the population of Pitcairn Island out of which seven face lengthy prison terms if convicted. But that is not a good news for the island, which has no port, airstrip or paved roads. Longboats are rowed out to passing freight and cruise ships to collect essential supplies for the island. Convictions of seven men threaten to drastically diminish the adult male population of the island, making it virtually impossible to operate those boats, the islanders' lifeline to the outside world. It would be difficult to ensure the flow of supplies to the island if these men were put behind the bars.

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So the Pitcairn Island right now is in catch-22, which is a lose-lose situation in the US Army term. The island is damned with these seven alleged rapists; it is also damned without them. It is a dilemma, which is almost universal. Keepers turn usurpers.

Behind every financial success, there is a crime. French philosopher Proudhon was certain of it almost two hundred years ago. "Wealth is theft", he concluded.

It is unfortunate that people who succeed also exceed. They make money, run business, own factories, join politics and build dynasties, because, more often than not, these are people with lots of energy. These are also people who take most interest in the world, who are ambitious and aggressive, who hold the world in their hand like a soccer ball and turn it on their fingertips.

These are people who have lot of steam, people who conspire, fight, worry, push, pull, work hard to get involved in life. These are people, who covet no matter what it costs. They get what they want, they are every bit selfish and worldly, people who take the cash and let the credit go. These are people who kill, rob, rape, cheat and snatch. These are people, who are desperate and, at times, dangerous, because they spare nothing and dare everything. They believe that the game is only as good as the prize.

These are people who will not return the money they take from the banks, yet they will not be touched because they create jobs, because they, like those seven men on Pitcairn Island, row the longboat of economy and keep it running. They provide the grease to the wheels of a nation, but are not necessarily honourable men.

Which opens the dispute between economics and ethics, between the end and the means, between the harnessers of resources and the hermits of rectitude. This has been an intriguing story right from the beginning of history. This is the reason why 200 years of Crusade was followed by Reformation Movement in Europe, because power, territory, and riches obtained during feudalism had created an atmosphere of corruption within the Catholic Church. Economics had encroached upon ethics.

This is how Columbus discovered the American continent by ruthlessly slaughtering the American Indians, and this is how the United States of America was created by brutally oppressing them. Australia was born when the Australian Aborigines were pushed off their land by settlers, who started to arrive right after Joseph Banks (a naturalist on Cook's voyage) suggested in 1779 that Britain could solve overcrowding problems in its prisons by transporting convicts to New South Wales.

As a matter of fact, the rise of military power and overlords did not happen until 2500 BCE when parts of Western Europe saw the first use of metals, wheeled vehicles, managed woodlands, simple irrigation systems, and a wider use of the plough. These technological advancements led to increased regional trade and, therefore, to the need for protection by regional chiefs. The first recognition for ethics in life came in 1755 BCE when the Code of Hammurabi was framed.

Organised religion came much later. Buddha, Confucius and Lao Tse lived around 500 BCE. The Hebrew liberator, leader, lawgiver, prophet, and historian named Moses did not live until the 13th and early part of the 12th century BCE. Jesus Christ traveled from Galilee to the Jordan River to be baptised by his cousin John the Baptist in the year 27. Prophet Muhammad would be born centuries after that in 569.

In these times, human destiny showed the irony of manure, animal excrements used for treatment to fertilize the soil. The human condition must deteriorate, degenerate before the turnaround comes for improvement. It must be first rotten before it is rectified and restored to newer heights. As Lance Morrow wrote in his Time essay many years ago, decadence is to be not just corrupt, but terminally corrupt. It captures the capricious fate of every civilization and repeats itself like a vicious circle.

Perhaps that circle is the secret of mystery that shrouds the universe, which expanded from the size of an atom, seething like hot soup of particles and then cooling off to form the stars and the planets. Somewhere in that expansion and contraction, the human nature acquired its contradictions, folded in good and evil and layered in the deep recess of human minds. From the manlike mammals in semi-erect postures to those having the skulls of modern man, the process of evolution spanned many centuries. Nearly 1.3 million years elapsed before the brain of man fully developed to give him the power of speech.

Two of the seven men from Pitcairn have confessed to their crimes, claiming that underage sex has been common on the island since the time of its early settlers. But the truth is that their crimes came in the larger tradition of historical reality. Power and affluence have always fallen in the hands of those who crossed the line and the hands, which rule, are also the same hands, which shape that reality in their own inordinate style. From village vanguards to city coelacanths to national nabobs, from people who put the lashes on adulterers in the village to people who raise tolls in your neighbourhood to people who make the policies to run the country, that inordinate style is peculiarly common amongst all of them.

Although it happened in an island last month, it was not an isolated incident. The hands, which row the longboats of economics, also call the shots for ethical standards. It happens in the larger world all the time. Economics is the alter ego of ethics. Those who ride high on one, go low on another. The wheel turns, the boat rows, the plot intensifies. Vice, not virtue, is the name of the game, because those who push the wheels also pull the strings. Those who row the boat also rock the water.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.