“We are failing those who will grow up into a world where the gap between the richest and poorest parts of the country is significant and destabilizing.” Justin Welby, September 2017
“They’ve got it so wrong … the gap between rich and poor is smaller than a decade ago.” Daily Mail, September 2017
As Hurricane Irma batters the Caribbean, some of those living there have made the point that Western consumption is contributing to the destruction of their home. Nearly all climate scientists would agree with that.
It is customary in the Western media to value the lives of people living in North America and Europe much more highly than lives in Africa and Asia. So, for instance, the estimated 1,200 people in south Asia who have been killed by monsoon floods in recent weeks attract much less publicity in our papers than the 13 people killed by terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils during August.
The death toll in Texas from Hurricane Harvey, also in August, has risen to 45. Those victims of environmental disaster, and the ones in Florida who will follow them shortly, at least get a decent mention in the media; which in turn helps slightly to correct our perspective on the relative magnitudes of threat posed by jihadist terrorism on the one hand and the manifestations of climate change on the other.
It shouldn’t really be necessary, though, for human tragedies to unfold before we wake up – or at least open a drowsy eyelid – to the consequences of our lifestyle. The risk is that even if we reluctantly admit to some sort of connection between our country’s energy use and diet and global warming, we look around bleary-eyed and spot someone to blame. The rich.
As we all know, unless we live in some sort of self-induced coma, the average British citizen lives in a way that is unsustainable when copied by a large part of the world’s population. The rich may be the worst culprits, but most of us share in the blame.
Inequality is a social evil, implicitly accepted as such even by those who seek to deny it is getting worse. It is hard to have much sympathy with university vice-chancellors or top executives who seek to justify their enormous salaries on the grounds that they are necessary to attract ‘top talent’. Here is a useful social experiment: cap the top salaries and see if we really do suffer from the absence of top talent. Or whether in fact the lesser talents surprise us with how well they do. Genius is an over-worked term, which over-estimates nearly all those who claim to have it and simultaneously under-estimates their unnoticed subordinates.
And yet a focus on inequality can be both an excuse and a delusion. An excuse because it implies that most of us are too insignificant to count. And a delusion because it implies that what the rich have is worth having.
In certain respects it is of course: it is hard to deny the importance of good healthcare and education. But our education system itself needs to teach us that there is much more to life than world travel, a large house, a meat-heavy diet and lots of stuff. Life begins when we start noticing and valuing and stop comparing, all of which are made difficult by the condition of being rich.
Norway is a good example of a relatively equal society. And if we all achieve the global footprint of the average Norwegian, then humanity will not last much longer on planet Earth. Which is not to say that inequality should not be tackled, but rather that tackling it does not solve the problem of our survival. For that we need a new mindset: one that does not envy the rich, but pities them their needs. It will take time to develop this mindset, so ingrained is the attitude that we can buy our way to happiness, but human beings are above all adaptable. It can be done.