The shape of things

One of the most important things that has happened over the course of the past fifty years is that the world has increasingly become divided into three parts. There is the small, underpopulated commonwealth of peace and plenty that is North America, most of Europe, and Japan; there is the part made up of Latin America, the former Soviet Union, China and India, in which wealth and poverty coexist and where the future is unclear; and, finally, above all in sub-Saharan Africa and an area stretching from Algeria to Pakistan, there is a vast, teeming dystopia of war and want whose future no decent and properly informed person should be able to contemplate without sadness, outrage, and fear.

David Rieff
A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2002)

Here in the US, there seems to be another dynamic at work: class warfare is fracturing the broad American middle class, skimming off those at the top to join the elite upper class, which benefits mightily from the policies of the new radical conservative establishment, while more and more of those at the bottom of the middle class, stripped of many of the underpinnings which enabled them to survive, fall into the ranks of the working poor. What's left is a middle class that's less secure, less able to pass on the benefits of bourgeois life to its children, less certain about its position in the scheme of things.

The net effect of all this is, generally, a widening of the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots", and the disempowerment and enervation of those left in-between. Trust is destroyed, security is swept away, the body politic is fractured, comity and civility are undermined by the constant exploitation of cultural wedge issues, and inevitably, social unrest grows.

As a social policy, this is extremely short-sighted, because while the elite will garner numerous short- or medium-term benefits, eventually the weight of mass discontent will lead somewhere where none of us really wants to go. Bread and circuses may have worked once, but it's unlikely to be sufficient to keep things reigned in if the current dynamic continues.

When we reach that point (if we do), it may be harder to automatically include the US in the "first world" that Rieff describes. Whether we'll go so far as to fall into the "second world" of China and India, where poverty and plenty coexist and the future is uncertain, remains to be seen, but I'm far from optimistic about our chances if we don't manage, sometime within the next decade or so, to start to reverse the damage that's already been done, and to rebuild the caring and empathetic society that's even now being destroyed.