Ingredient 1: Un-checked Fear
Ingredient 2: Too much power compared to all other countries
Ingredient 3: A weak and/or incompetent media. Specifically...
"The failures of the American media to slow or stop the descent into the Iraq War are the greatest media failures of our current era."Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute Director
As Christians, most of us look inside and know we won't always like what we see. We say this in our hearts daily and say this from our lips as least weekly that we thank Jesus Christ for getting between the person God would have us be and the person we really are with all our mean spiritedness, pettiness, over-reactions, and the desire to choke the ever-living-crap out of so-and-so who so richly deserves it.
I don't know too many Christians who examine their own motives, or know that they should be, or at least giving lip service to it. But somehow that doesn't always translate to looking inside our group-self. That is, we aren't nearly as willing to looking inside our country and deciding that we don't always like what we see there either. Some of us will even go so far as to call that disapproval unpatriotic. And that's just so obviously backward and upside-down. Regardless of what conclusion you come to on the Iraq war or any other foreign policy debacle, taking the periodic look inside is a requirement for any human being with any integrity, Christian or no.
We all know that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, but some of us also know that those who fail to evaluate current events will meet their doom even faster. So,
I hope the following excerpt, from a speech by Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute Director, will help some of us take another look inside.
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We will live or die in the 21st Century according to whether we can co-operate globally. Our problems - ranging from climate change to species extinction to failed states - are global and require global co-operation to solve them.The touchstone of my Reith Lectures this year were the words of President John F Kennedy in 1963 as he sought peace with the Soviet Union in order to pull the world back from the nuclear abyss.
President Kennedy said:"Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts.
"It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process - a way of solving problems." *
The Risk of Fear
The media can play a unique role in that global problem solving. When I gave the Reith Lectures, I knew that the lectures could, at least potentially, reach hundreds of millions of people.
There was simply no better venue for a global discussion than the BBC World Service.And indeed from African villages, to passport counters and airport check-ins, to corridors of power, I met people in all parts of the world that were tuned into the Reith lectures and were debating them within their families and communities.
The core underpinning of global co-operation is that we have a sufficient degree of trust so that representatives of different societies can reason together in peace.
The central risk is that morbid fear overtakes us, with fear degenerating to hate and
conflict.
Will we be an open global society or a group of fearful and closed societies poised for war?
Fear today is pervasive, especially after terrorist incidents. We know that such incidents can lead to a general conflagration.
A terrorist shot in Sarajevo provided the pretext for German aggression which started
World War I. 9/11 was used by the Bush Administration to launch the Iraq War.
In both cases, trigger-happy leaders exploited the incidents for their own political
purposes.
In both cases, the national media played along. The failures of the American media to slow or stop the descent into the Iraq War are the greatest media failures of our current era.
Our major media transmitted with little questioning the lies of officialdom and they
editorialised in favour of the war.
The war coverage itself was overtly propagandistic, with reporters sending home patriotic messages that dehumanized the Iraqi population on the receiving end of the US bombs. Everyone killed by a US bomb automatically became an insurgent or a terrorist.
It is interesting that the lies leading up to the war were more aggressively exposed and discussed by the new media of the internet than by the established media, who were constantly looking over their own shoulder with concerns about listener approval, government regulators, and corporate advertisers.
The problem with the internet, of course, is that it transmitted considerable flakiness alongside pithy truth telling. Blog sites, for good and ill, are unfiltered and unaccountable.
Our survival in the 21st Century will depend first and foremost on one core human skill: empathy. Co-operation depends on trust.
Trust depends on believing in the common humanity of "the Other".
Appreciating our common humanity depends on empathy, the ability and moral bravery to see things through the eyes of the other, even of one's adversaries.
The Bush Administration's belief that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq was the opposite of empathy. It was unbridled and ignorant hubris.
What then can the media do? Three things will be most important.
First, the media can present people of other cultures and political leanings, so that we can hear what they think.
Such cross-cultural exchanges should be respectful and truth seeking, not insulting and point scoring. They need not veer away from tough questions and hard challenges, but they should not be games of "gotcha," to humiliate or expose "the Other" in wars of propaganda.
Second, the media can intensively scrutinise our own governments, which operate on the logic of power-expansion and self-preservation.
Paths to co-operation
In short, almost all governments lie and lie relentlessly. Yet governments can be made to lie less frequently by being exposed and held to account by the professional media.
It is a media function that fails in authoritarian societies where journalists are locked up or murdered.
It is one that can fail in our own societies, in the United States or the United Kingdom, through self-editing, or the allure of power and access, or the fear of government reprisals through regulatory retaliation.
Third, the media can translate science to the general public, and the public's concerns back to the scientists.
We need to give scientists and technologists a key role in the challenges that lie ahead, because today's challenges and our best options - regarding climate, biodiversity, water scarcity, desertification, extreme poverty, emerging diseases, and demography - require a solid understanding of science and technology.
It was a wonderfully wise decision for the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to award half of this year's Nobel Prize to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, since the IPCC, as it's called, represents the most ambitious and successful global process to bring complex scientific understanding to the broad public.
In short, we need professional journalism more than ever, to tell - with detail,
expertise, accuracy, accountability and sensitivity - the stories that can help the world to avoid the abyss.
We need journalism of the highest standards and ethics to help us to understand other
societies, the science and technology that define global risks and opportunities, an the paths to global co-operation rather than wider war.
We need professional journalism to sort out the gold and the dross that are found on the internet today.
John Kennedy put our hopes this way: "For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
That is the most urgent story that needs to be told in the 21st Century.
