Trip Wires and Silicon Answers
Estimates
suggest the number of suicide bombers in the Middle East and Africa is nearing
one thousand per year, killing and maiming other tens of thousands. The flash points behind this are mostly illegible to our Western
eyes. As the new World Trade Center Tower
and Memorial nears completion in New York City—remembering the inestimable worth
of 3,000 human lives lost on 9/11—no memorial rises for the tens of thousands
of inestimable human lives lost during the past decade’s Middle East and
African wars; wars in which the U. S. has been either directly or indirectly
involved.
The suicide bombers
can be seen as a response to the missing memorials. The bombers are making a statement
about their own life’s meaning, drained of opportunity, ennobled by their self-willed
death that ends all future meaning and concludes all future social relations.
Note that the
young Boston bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, drifted for days in anomie
after their awful act. They appear to have had no future plans. The meaning of
their act—like the acts of suicide bombers—lay in its potentially conclusive devotion. The Tsarnaevs are reported to have resented
that their own culture’s traditions
were usually identified as despised and inferior, invidiously compared with U.
S. traditions—where they found no place for themselves—composed of noble moral superiority;
a superiority they could have heard reiterated in countless political speeches,
usually dressed with religious sanctimony.
Our Western minds never want for self-regard but this easily
becomes a trip wire exposing a moral arrogance blind to the sight of a vastly
unjust world, one plausibly filled with many more Tsarnaevs.
This was documented days after the
Boston bombers’ apprehension when the national news focus changed ineluctably
revealing a second trip wire as Bloomberg News reported that half of New Yorkers are now poor or
near-poor. Two days later the Pew
Research Center reported the net worth of 93 percent of U. S. households had declined 4% during the
Recession years 2009 to 2011 while the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose
28%. In dollar
terms the mean wealth of the richest 8 million households rose $697,651 while
the mean wealth of 111 million less affluent households fell $133,817.
Across the Atlantic, prolonged Euro Zone unemployment ticked
up May 1st to 12.1 percent. Eurostat, the statistical
office of the European Union situated in Luxembourg, reports this
is the highest unemployment in Europe since it began keeping records in 1995:
26.5 million are now unemployed in Europe including 5.7 million young people. [NY
Times, May 1, 2013]
Current global conditions
can be understood to guarantee a continuing supply of suicidal acts born among
millions of people with no clear path to the future. Apparently invisible to many
leaders in government and business today, the rising tide of violence is growing as the inequality gap grows. Suicide bombing is now a significant portion of the deaths in the ongoing global violence: approximately
3,043 deaths in the Middle East per month since January 2013 [CNN]. During this April alone in Iraq 322 people
died, Afghanistan 323, Pakistan 89.
With 11.7 million in the U. S.
remaining unemployed, many for more than a year (BLS May 3, 2013) 4.4 million workers have been unemployed for at least six
months not including people who have given up looking for work. Then there
is the other dark side: the burgeoning U. S. prison population. The Population
Reference Bureau (August 2012) reports:
Since 2002, the United States has had
the highest incarceration rate in the world….the natural rate of incarceration
for countries comparable to the United States tends to stay around 100
prisoners per 100,000 population. The U.S. rate is 500 prisoners per 100,000
residents, or about 1.6 million prisoners in 2010, according to the latest
available data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
A growing domestic and global alienation from
Western idealism is clearly visible in the growing tide of violence: in the U. S. we see school massacres, murdered
police and public officials, counter-pointed by a daily family death toll by
gunfire. In Pakistan twenty more died in
a bombing in Pakistan as this was being written. (5/6/13)
We can be forgiven
for believing that worse lies ahead.
On the other hand powerful
minds in Silicon Valley believe this does not have to be so. The Valley’s Kool
Aid diet (the one that shipped millions of jobs out of the U.S) creates a steady
drum beat of harmony between wealth and moral principle. Valley entrepreneurs Eric
Schmidt and Jared Cohen have written a new book. The New Digital Age, that advances a parallel universe cut from biblical
metaphors. Technology will change all things,
make all things new. Schmidt,
the executive chairman (and former chief executive) of Google, and Cohen, a
foreign-relations expert and director of Google
Ideas claim their book is
meant to explore the ways technology and diplomacy can intersect.
There is a canyon dividing people
who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world’s
toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge.…[but] a new
accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed public… will be able to
tell the difference….The consequence of having more citizens informed and
connected is that they’ll be as critical and discerning about rebels as they
are about the government.”
The Tech icons claim that to confront
terrorism “a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed [global] public
will be able to tell the difference. [the citations and this account are
in The N Y Times 4/25/13].
The writers’ theory may enlarge their already ample fortunes
but will its saving power reach the jobless, the disenchanted and the potential bombers
whose wires have already been tripped?
