Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Finally, for us — writers and artists bringing original expression to politics and social issues at the end of this century where neither socialism nor capitalism has achieved justice and human fulfilment for all — Czeslaw Milosz has the rubric:

Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic

In the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption. 93

1999

Dear citizens of the twenty-first century,

There is no escaping the past, and so one must take an honest look at your inheritance from the twentieth century. There are many aspects; I choose that of the new, never-before concepts that arose during my life as a child of the time. One that is of great significance to your lives as you take over is the concept of globalisation.

The feasibility of globalisation has been made possible by the huge technological advances of the twentieth century, particularly in means of communication, from the satellite up among the stars to the computer on every office table. Information may be exchanged across the world in real time ; distance means nothing so long as jet aircraft have the fuel to overcome it. Globalisation has all the means of efficiency to regulate itself as it is conceived so far: primarily as a one-world of investment, a super-tool of international finance.

Has it a human face?

The real necessity for globalisation — which you will have to tackle — is nothing less than the question of whether the gap between rich and poor countries can be narrowed by it. What role can globalisation play in eradicating world poverty? For poverty puts an inhuman, outcast mask on more than three billion of our world’s population.

If globalisation is to have a human face in your century its premise is that development is about people in interaction on the planet we have occupied, so far, without sharing.

This will not be achieved, however, through worldwide shopping by internet. In the twentieth century consumption has grown unprecedentedly, reaching around $24 trillion in 1998, but the spending and devouring spree, far from widely benefiting the poor, in some aspects undermined the truly human prospects for globalisation: sustainable development for all.

Runaway consumption by the developed world has eroded renewable resources such as fossil fuels, forests and fishing grounds, polluted local and global environments, and pandered to promotion of needs for conspicuous display in place of the legitimate needs of life.

While those of us who have been the generations of big consumers need to consume less, for more than one billion of the world’s poorest people increased consumption is a matter of life and death and a basic right — the right to freedom from want. And this is not want of food and clean water alone; there are other forms of want — illiteracy, lack of technological skills: the basic qualifications for benefiting from the concept of globalisation. Illiteracy is the basis of global cultural deprivation, and it exists among great numbers of the world’s population. From it comes isolation from many of the forms of culture that are essential to the human right to develop individual potential for a full life. There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries.

Then there is the matter of translation of the world’s munificent store of literary enlightenment. With all the ease of technological reproduction of the written word now attained there remains the fact that the human process of translating creative literature from one language to another — which certainly, so far, cannot be achieved by any electronic brain — is not recognised as a highly important means of bringing about the ideal of global understanding ; which surely must be the underlying philosophy of globalisation?

In the new millennium there will be the need to remedy this by establishing schools of translation in universities (they are rare in the twentieth century); by the action of publishers to cooperate in joint enterprise across language boundaries; for government ministries of arts and culture to provide subsidies for this work; and for the ministries of foreign affairs to wake up and realise that this is an initiative of diplomacy effective beyond the conventional cultural limits of providing cultural exchange mainly in the form of scholarships abroad.

Consumption is necessary for human development when, as cultural consumption does, it enlarges the capabilities of and improves people’s lives without adversely affecting the lives of others. And a brake on material consumption need not, as some fear, bring about closed industries and shops if the power of becoming consumers is extended among the population of the globe.

Whose responsibility will it be to bring these things about?

That of many, international and national.

It is the responsibility of the European Community, which flouts the principles of globalisation through its blatant protectionism. It is the responsibility of national governments to bring about just consumerism. Theirs is a legal one: the framing of laws in each country for justice in the access to and share of its resources. And it is the responsibility of international law, an aspect of globalisation long contested in respect of fishing rights, for example, and towards the end of the twentieth century, at last, in the essential process of establishing an international criminal court. For globalisation, we must admit, posits the most difficult secular morality possible: a moral authority above all those individual ones of the global concept’s component countries.

Non-governmental and civic organisations have the responsibility both in building human capability and in ensuring that a development philosophy prevails that projects are not imposed upon people according to others’ ideas of their needs, but are planned and brought into being only with the beneficiaries themselves, according to their knowledge of their community and environment. Let the remnants of the age of social engineering be deeply buried in the twentieth century, not with a backward glance, but a shudder.

Now if we are realistic we have to see that on the doorstep of the new century there is delivered a new threat to globalisation with a human face. Thirty-five per cent of our world is in recession as the old century ends. Many countries are in strife. This means more millions of refugees, driven homeless and starving to swell the count of the globe’s three billion poor, calculated before the tragedies of Kosovo and Angola, to name only two. In Russia the winter of 1988–9 froze over impoverished people in their disillusion with international openness in trade and investment; these elements of globalisation as it has been evidenced so far have not shown them a human face.

But we know what you absolutely must not do is allow the shadow of a world economic recession that fell upon the last decade of the twentieth century, reaching from Asia over West, North and South, to become an excuse to postpone the inescapable responsibility of the developed world, in the new millennium, to pursue the eradication, rather than the traditional band-aid amelioration, of poverty which exists alongside the globalisation of economic power.

Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls — when it sounds in one stock exchange its note reverberates throughout the world, shaking the Haves as well as casting down even further the Have-nots.

Global free markets mean nothing in the end, if there is no one able to come to buy. The hazard of decline through the very interdependence created by globalisation of world economies: this negative impact upon the progressive and positive in the concept is what surely must cause even the most complacent acceptors of the time-disgraced division of the world’s resources between rich and poor, to realise that the billions of fellow men and women in abject poverty are in coexistence with them , not safely quarantined in isolation. The financier George Soros has come to the reflection: ‘There are collective interests that don’t find expression in market values’. 94