Cross Talk
Whose shame is more?
Two radical assumptions, one in which the banks charge unauthorised amounts to customer accounts, and another in which pickpockets clean unsuspecting passengers who are dozing off in a bus station. Now one radical conclusion: both are stealthy actions amounting to theft.
Of course there is some difference. The pickpocket is needy. He steals so that he can keep together his body and soul. The banker is greedy. He steals because he wants to keep his body above his soul. One is art, the sleight of hand whereby weightless fingers are trained to do the lifting. The other is science, when conscience is made so hollow that it can hide a mischief without a twitch.
Although these two types of people are guilty of identical offense, one is respected and another is reprimanded. The Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman ascribes that differential treatment to what he calls the "liquid modernity." It's a condition when a society lacks a clear sense of orientation, when the normlessness becomes the norm.
A computer programmer named Ellen Ullman has written her memoir Close to the Machine where she describes the mind, which is product of this new reality. This is the mind of nonpersons, people who say and do all the right things but who are completely empty. This is not hypocrisy. This is not feigned innocence. This is a kind of mental debility, which refuses to recognise that it does all the wrong things for the right reasons.
So, all the crimes are committed in the name of putting food on the table, sending children to school, creating employment, strengthening the economy and building the nation. The problem is that the pickpocket can't make most of these high-sounding claims due to the low impact of his offense. His counterparts in other professions are more sophisticated. They are the swindlers who use perfectly legitimate fronts to defraud their victims.
Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci pointed out that once the minds of people were captured, their hands followed. What captures the mind of a pickpocket is the rumble in his stomach. He steals because he is hungry, because he is desperate to live by adopting a socially unacceptable source of earning. But if a banker does what has been hypothetically stipulated, then what captures his mind is a different kind of desperation. He wants to make money at any cost.
In 1972 anthropologist Colin Turnbull found a similar desperation in a tribe in Uganda known as the Ik. When someone in that tribe died, neighbors as well as children and siblings fought over the person's belongings and in that frenzy they often abandoned the corpse.
Turnbull concluded that the behavior of those primitive people wasn't very different from what he had seen in advanced societies. Almost any kind of exploitation and degradation of others, impoverishment and ruin was justified in terms of an expanding economy and consequent concentration of the world's riches in a few pockets.
Although the tendency for concentration always existed, it is said to have intensified since Richard Nixon in 1971 abandoned the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. The agreement had made capitalism more human by establishing a system that favored full employment and social safety net for the less fortunate. Since it was discarded, huge amounts of capital started moving by 1973, going upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and the superrich.
Morris Berman reports in Dark Ages America that by 1995 1 percent of the American population owned 47 percent of the nation's wealth. By 1998, the 400 richest individuals in the world had as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population (more than 3 billion people). The achievement of the consequent civilisation is that it has elevated theft to a necessary skill for success.
In this civilisation, says Berman, an average American works 350 hours more in a year than his European counterpart. An average American household owns 2.9 TVs, 1.8 VCRs, 3.1 radios, 2.6 tape players, 2.1 CD players and 1 computer. Forty-two percent of American homes never turn off the television. The average American spends 40 per cent of his free time watching television.
Since the Americans are the yardstick for rest of the world, it is worth noting how these changes have affected their lifestyle. Time has been squeezed for everyone and everything. Sound bites from presidential candidates went down from an average of 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 7.8 seconds in 2000. A survey of the top ten best-selling novels between 1936 and 2001 shows a drop of 43 per cent in sentence length and of 32 per cent in number of punctuation marks per sentence.
While saving time in the present they are losing out on the future. In the USA, there has been a 100 percent increase in teen depression in the last 15 years of the 20th century. By the year 2000, 25 percent of the US teens were involved with weapons; 70 per cent admitted cheating on tests in school; and more than 15 per cent had shown up for class drunk.
The use of antidepressants amongst the American children grew three- to tenfold between 1987 and 1996, and there was a further 50 percent increase in such prescriptions from 1998 to 2002. The children in the United States receive four times as many psychiatric drugs as children in all other countries of the world combined.
It might sound discordant that starting with theft, I am ending with a description of the American scene. Is there a connection? No, I am not going to say that when people steal from others, there is a divine punishment.
But stealing does something to us. It's like an eye for an eye that makes the whole world blind. When everybody steals from everybody, it leads to the ultimate depredation. In that depredation the children are sacrificed for the greed of their fathers.
For once, the bankers and the pickpockets should sit together and calculate whose shame is more!
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.
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