Let me speak to your first point about inventiveness. When industry refuses to take--or finds way to avoid taking--advantage of new inventions, it not only harms the public good, it also harms capitalism. General Motors owned the hybrid technology behind the Prius 15 years ago, made a couple of cars, and decided it wouldn't sell. The company sold it to the Japanese, who are making a fortune. Now we are busy trying to catch up to where we were 15 or 20 years ago. It turns out to have been a really bad capitalist decision, a bad investment decision. Good capitalists who know what they are doing are necessarily prescient. They look to where the market is heading, and they invent something in advance in order to be ready for the new direction. Those who were prescient, as some engineers at GM were 15 or 20 years ago, knew that carbon emissions and oil dependency were growing problems, and they wanted to find an alternative basis. In fact, the first electric car, which was very popular, was introduced in this country in 1903! It was actually a competitor with the internal combustion engine. What we're seeing here is bad capitalism, a failed capitalism that neglected to take advantage of a very good thing.
On the way here this morning I heard mention on the radio of an organization whose name I didn't catch, run by somebody named Cohen and the founder of twitter. They have an alliance of young people who are putting on a big gathering in South America. They've been tapping into countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. If anybody knows of that organization, please let me know the name of it.
Twitter's obviously wonderful new technology requires that you express yourself in 150 or 165 characters, and that's something I'm constitutionally incapable of, so it will not work for me, but I hope it works well for others. Let me say a more serious word on the new technologies because there's a lot of enthusiasm about them, and I think the architecture of the worldwide web and its international character are wonderful, but let's not forget that democracy is about an encounters with strangers we don't agree with, whereas a lot of social networking, a lot of the web, is about finding people just like us and talking only to them. The current uses of social networking are not necessarily as hospitable to the sorts of democratic exchange and argument and encounter with people you don't agree with as I think some young people imagine it is. If you look at MySpace and Facebook and some of the other social networks, you'll find that Bill McKibben is wrong. He said nobody has friends anymore. I have 365 friends on my Facebook site, and my daughter has 1320 friends. Now, psychologists have said you can't have more than around 18 friends or maybe even seven or three who are close friends, so we have created a faux notion of friendship. It's part of marketing friendship to people who have no friends; they think they can go online and suddenly have friends. So I'm saying, be a little bit skeptical and suspicious of the benefits of the web.
Bill McKibben and many others in this room are trying not only to think and write but to do something. If you go to benjaminbarber.org or my website civworld.org, you will see that for the past seven years on the day after September 11 we have held a Global Interdependence Day in a global city. We started in Philadelphia, the home of in dependence, the second year was in Rome, then Paris, Casablanca, Mexico City, Brussels last year, and Istanbul just last month. Next year September 12 it will be held in Berlin. We go to a global city and work with religious leaders, political leaders, students, scholars, and--very importantly--artists around issues of interdependence and cross-border forms of cooperation. It's an attempt to create constructive forms of interdependence to counter all the destructive and brutal forms of interdependence--like AIDS and terrorism and financial markets--that we contend with today. Our belief is that if we can create a context of civic interdependence, of citizens without borders, then what we're trying to make possible here in the United States will be possible on a global level. That's my small contribution to actually doing something and not just talking about it. CivWorld.org, Interdependence Day, September 12 next year in Berlin.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Concluding Remarks
I want to say a little bit more about the issue of inequality that Bill McKibben raised this morning, specifically in terms of how inequality affects our capacity as a nation to respond to the urgency of climate change. Twenty years ago on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall came down, and that was a symbol for walls around the world. What makes me interested in interdependence is the fact that it promotes a mantra which says walls don't work and can't work. Berlin proved it; the Soviet Union proved it. Walls don't work. But as you know, since the end of the Berlin wall the country that helped to bring down the wall has been busy building its own. The United States is constructing a wall across the Mexican border in an effort to stem so-called illegal immigration. Indeed, immigration across that border is illegal with respect to political sovereignty. The problem is that the labor immigrants are following the logic of economics, not the logic of states, and according to the logic of economics they go where the jobs are. The jobs cross borders, so they cross borders, and the wall will not discourage them. I think they'll go over it, they'll go under it, they'll go around it. They'll come up the coast in boats, and if the coast is closed off, they'll come in from Canada, or they'll drop down by parachute, but one way or the other, they'll find jobs here because that's what the logic of the global economy dictates. Yet we still do have this notion of building a wall to be safe.
Similarly, Americans have pioneered the idea of gated communities, communities in which people secede from what seems to them to be a bankrupt public sector into their own private sector, where they pay for their children's education, pay for their own police and their own sanitation. I have to say that there's something slightly gated about Stockbridge and Lenox and Great Barrington. I see it if I look around at this particular audience. Usually when I speak, I see an audience that looks like America, but here we look like the America that was, not the America that is coming and within a few years will be a majority. California's already there, Texas and Florida and New York are headed there, and in all those cases America is already highly multicultural. Even though gated communities don't work, people still try to withdraw, to secede from the republic and then create their own solutions with their own resources.
I mention this because I think one of the reasons why a feeling of urgency is lacking politically is that so many privileged Americans think, "Yes, there's global warming, but I'm not going to suffer from it." It's not just that the people who have been least responsible for it will suffer the most, it's also that those who have the most resources and the most power have the wherewithal to build their own gated communities against the consequences of global warming. The Maldive Islands will, as Bill said, literally disappear if the oceans continue to rise, but we don't live there. Indeed, we don't live on Long Island, a lot of which may disappear as well, and even if we did live there, we know we could get out.
Think of Hurricane Katrina and what happened in New Orleans in 2005. Those with cars, with money, with relatives elsewhere found safety. The people who really suffered the consequences were those without resources or power, especially in Ward 9. There's an aspect to the climate crisis that I call "Ward 9 World." We live in a Ward 9 world, where the people who live near the ocean and who can't get away, whether in Bangladesh or Indonesia or Lower Ward 9, are not going to avoid the consequences, but a lot of those who have the power and resources will find a way to escape. "If there's a flood, we'll build an ark," or "If the water rises too much, we'll build our own private dikes to close in our own private Holland," or "We'll go to our mountain chalet." That mentality allows a lot of people who ought to be concerned to think the problem is less urgent than it seems because they are not going to have to pay, at least initially, the consequences.
How faulty that reasoning is, and why we have to make clear how faulty it is, occurred to me when I was writing an essay, "Ward 9 World." I went to the statistics on New Orleans to find out for myself how many of the casualties had actually been in Ward 9. It turns out that Gentilly, a middle-class ward, had an equal number of casualties and Lakeview, an all-white neighborhood with million-dollar homes, had a lot too. The fact is that having wealth and resources did not save lives in those communities. The walls of the gated communities didn't really work, although the media led us all, including me, to think they did. They won't work in other places either, and that's why one of the lessons I think we need to teach is that the interdependence of our world is here to stay. Even with all the resources and power and money in the world, you can't escape from the disease and crime and drugs and war that will result from global warming. You can't build a gated community against them or wall them out.
There is a certain implicit complacency that says we are good citizens and we care about what's happening, but when push comes to shove we'll get into our cars and drive somewhere that's safe. Well, that won't work this time. We live in a world so interdependent that the rampant consequences of global warming are going to affect us all, just as the folks in Lakeview and Gentilly, as well as those in Ward 9, were affected by Katrina. It could be that by emphasizing this and making people think about it, we can create a more compelling politics for people in the middle class, who as good citizens do care about what's happening but think deep down that it doesn't ultimately apply to them privately, and therefore it may not be quite as urgent as deciding what car to buy next time around. Starting to think about the equality issue, realizing that walls don't work any better today than they did in 1989 for the Soviet Union, recognizing that we are in this together and there's no such thing as a private dike or private ark that's going to save us from the rising seas may be the way to arouse a sense of urgency in political terms and create a broader movement than we can hope for just from the kinds of vital and important civic enterprises we are all currently engaged in.
Benjamin R. Barber, a political theorist with a focus on civic participation and civic education who advances the role of robust democratic citizenship, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, where he is president and director of the international NGO CivWorld. He is Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Rutgers University, where he taught from 1970 to 2001 and founded as well as directed the Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy. He has held the chair of American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the University of Maryland as a principal of The Democracy Collaborative.
Prior to completing his undergraduate degree from Grinnell College, Barber studied at the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Barber's 17 books include Strong Democracy (1984, reissued in a new edition in 2004), Jihad vs. McWorld (1995, with a post-9/11 edition in 2001), and Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole(2007). Writing frequently for many scholarly and popular publications in America and Europe, he was founding editor and for ten years editor-in-chief of the international quarterly Political Theory. All of his writings, from academic studies to more popular articles in newspapers and magazines of opinion, have stressed the need to think practically about ways to foster a more democratic political life in America and abroad.
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