The Face of Pragmatism

It is interesting to listen to mainstream social democrats these days. On the one hand, there is a substantial amount of ill-hidden schadenfreude (“told you so!”) about the apparent failure of global capitalism. On the other, there is little understanding of what the hope of global prosperity has actually come to mean for the rest of the world, and also of what may truly be at stake in the current crisis.

Carl Tham (once a liberal who converted to social democracy in the mid-eighties) repeated what has become common wisdom these days: that the financial crisis was the inevitable consequence of too much market economy, a bunch of greedy bankers, and a failure to regulate. True as all this may be, I have learned to be very careful when too many people run in the same direction.

My scepticism proved valuable when the current crisis was linked to the global quest for sustainability. Once again, the platitudes prevailed: the rest of the world can never attain our standard of living; we only have one planet (a claim that many distinguished scholars hold to be axiomatically true, regardless of how empirically false it is); and that recurrent failure to think boldly about our possibilities.

Yet the initiative to organise a conference on the “triple crisis” (the ecological, economic, and resource crises) is indeed laudable, and I promise that the next blog post will contain somewhat less frustration :-)

p.s., for more on the financial crisis and sustainability, see the op-ed by Thomas Friedman on “The Great Disruption” in yesterday’s IHT.