Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Almost equally indicative of an unhealthy society is the age distribution within that society and the failure to provide education and health protection. About half of Latin America’s population is unproductive and a social burden on the other half because it falls into the two groups of the young (below 15 years) or the old (over 65 years). This compares with only 26 percent of the population in these dependent groups in the United States. Such a distribution, in a healthy society, would require very considerable direction of resources into such social services as education, health protection, and retirement security. All such services in Latin America are painfully inadequate. About two-thirds of Latin Americans are illiterate, and those who may be classified as literate have very inadequate schooling. The average Latin American has had less than two years of schooling, but, like all averages, this one is misleading, since it covers both Paraguay (where very few children ever get near a school) and Castro’s Cuba (where, we are told, illiteracy has been wiped out and all children of school age up to 15 are supposed to be in school). Leaving out these two countries, we find that in 1961 in 18 other Latin American countries only 38 percent of the population had finished two years of school, while only 7 percent had finished primary school, and one out of a hundred had attended a university.

The inadequacy of health protection in Latin America is as startling as the inadequacy of education, but may not, in a wider frame, be so objectionable. For if health were better protected, more people would survive, and the problems of scarce food and scarce jobs would have reached the explosive point long ago. Unfortunately, this problem of health and death rates has a very great impact on humanitarian North American observers, with the consequence that a considerable portion of the funds for development provided by the Alliance for Progress since 1961 are aimed at reducing these evils of disease and death. Since this effort is bound to be more successful than the much smaller funds aimed at increasing the food supply, the net consequence of these efforts will be to give Latin America more and hungrier people.

As things stood in 1960, infant mortality varied between 20 and 35 percent in different countries. Even in the Latin American country with the lowest death rate for the first year of life (Uruguay with 25 deaths per thousand births), the rate is ten times as high as in the United States (2.6 per thousand), while in Latin America as a whole it was 56 per thousand, rising to about 90 per thousand in Guatemala. The expectation of life for a new baby in all Latin America is only two-thirds that in the United States (44 years compared to 66 years), but in some areas, such as northeast Brazil, men are worn out from malnutrition and disease at age 30.

While such conditions may rouse North Americans to outrage or humanitarian sympathy, no solution of Latin America’s problems can be found by emotion or sentimentality. The problems of Latin America are not based on lack of anything, but on structural weaknesses. Solutions will not rest on anything that can be done to or for individual people but on the arrangements of peoples. Even the greatest evil of the area, the selfish and mistaken outlook of the dominant social groups, cannot be changed by persuading individuals but must be changed by modifying the patterns of social relationships that are creating such outlooks. The key to the salvation of Latin America, and much of the rest of the world, rests on that word: “patterns.” Latin America has the resources, the manpower, the capital accumulation, even perhaps the know-how to provide a viable and progressive society. What it lacks are constructive patterns—patterns of power, of social life, and, above all, of outlook—that will mobilize its resources in constructive rather than destructive directions.

Failure to recognize that Latin America’s weaknesses are not based on lack of substance but on lack of constructive patterns is one of the two chief reasons why the future of Latin America looks so discouraging. The other reason is failure to recognize that the chief problem in planning Latin America’s future is that of establishing a constructive sequence of priorities. In fact, these two problems: obtaining constructive patterns and obtaining a constructive sequence of priorities, are the keys to salvation of all the underdeveloped and backward areas of the globe. We might sum up this general situation by saying that the salvation of our poor, harassed globe depends on structure and sequence (or on patterns and priorities).

In applying these two paradigms to Latin American development, we shall find that the problem of priorities is much easier to solve than the problem of patterns. Obviously, the birthrate must decrease before any vigorous efforts are made to reduce the death rate. Or the food supply must be increased faster than the population. And some provision must be made to provide peasants with capital and know-how before the great landed estates are divided up among them. Equally urgent is the caution that some provision for capital accumulation and its investment in better methods of production must be made before the present accumulation of excess incomes in the hands of the existing oligarchies is destroyed by redistribution of the incomes of the rich (who could invest it) to the poor (who could only consume it). It should be obvious (but unfortunately is not) that a more productive organization of resources should have priority over any effort to raise standards of living. And it should be equally obvious that Latin America’s own resources (including its own capital accumulation and its own know-how) should be devoted to this effort before the responsibility for Latin American economic development is placed on the resources of North Americans or other outsiders.

This last point might be amplified. We hear a great deal about Latin America’s need for American capital and American know-how, when in fact the need for these is much less than the need for utilization of Latin America’s own capital and know-how. The wealth and income of Latin America, in absolute quantities, is so great and it is so inequitably controlled and distributed that there is an enormous accumulation of incomes, far beyond their consumption needs, in the hands of a small percentage of Latin Americans. Much of these excess incomes are wasted, hoarded, or merely used for wasteful competition in ostentatious social display. This, as we shall see, is largely due to the deficiencies of Latin American personalities and character. The contrast, from this point of view, between England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is very instructive. In both cases there was such a drastic inequity in the distribution of national incomes that the masses of the people were in abject poverty and probably getting poorer. But in England there were groups benefiting from this inequality who eschewed all self-indulgence, luxury, or ostentatious display of wealth, and systematically invested their growing incomes in creating new and more efficient patterns of utilization of resources. This is in sharp contrast to the situation in Latin America where such excess wealth, in the aggregate, is much greater than that being accumulated, a century or more ago, in England, but is very largely wasted and surely is not being used to create more productive patterns for utilization of resources, except in rare cases.

The solution to this problem is not, as we have said, to redistribute incomes in Latin America, but to change the patterns of character and of personality formation so that excess incomes will be used constructively and not wasted (nor simply redistributed and consumed).