20121105_R4
Source: BBC Radio 4: Start the Week: Political Divide
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01npgn5
Date: 05/11/2012
Event: Climate change politics as an antidote to "the age of gadgets"
Credit: BBC Radio 4
People:
- Michael Ignatieff: Author, academic and former politician
- Andrew Marr: Journalist and political commentator
- Amos Oz: Author, essayist and journalist
- Mary Robinson: First woman President of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Andrew Marr: Amos Oz, in your essays you make a very eloquent plea for politicians to understand that we are now in a world where there are serious scarcities.
Amos Oz: Yes, well, to come back for a moment to the issue of human rights, I read somewhere recently that close to two billion human beings never sit on a toilet seat, because they don't have one, because they cannot afford one. Maybe this is where human rights begin - afford a toilet seat for every human being on this planet.
Andrew Marr: Mm.
Amos Oz: Now, the 20th century was an ideological century - heavily ideological century - and it followed centuries of certainty, where every human being knew three things: where he is going to live, which is close to where he was born, what he or she are [sic] going to do, which is close to what their parents did, and what is going to happen to him or to her in the afterlife. Those certainties collapsed. Then came the ideologies. When the ideologies collapsed, came the age of gadgets, the age of self-centred selfishness. We cannot afford this any more. We cannot afford this any more. Poverty, fanaticism, despair, hopelessness are threatening from all directions. And the fanatic - as I say in my essay - is a walking exclamation mark.
Andrew Marr: Michael Ignatieff - I'm bring this back to the American contest that ends tomorrow. One of the big problems is that we don't know what democracy would look and feel like, in a world where politicians told the truth about - about the end of the gadget-obsessed, selfish half-century, where actually going out to people and saying "Do you know what - you're going to have to make do with less, for the sake of the next generation, and for the sake of the people around you". When politicians like yourself try to talk about climate change and carbon taxes and all the rest of it, you get whacked.
Michael Ignatieff: Yeah, you do get whacked, and I've got the scars to prove it. Um, the voters' capacity for bold, bald truth is strictly limited, because all of our capacities for bold, bald truth is strictly limited. It's tough to face reality, and a lot of politics, modern politics, is about facing realities - that is, we haven't got all the resources we want. We're going to have to cut here or cut there or reduce there. A politics of scarcity is a very tough politics, and you - a lot of voters out there are shooting the messenger, one after the other. "Tell me - tell me a happy story here, because I don't want to hear the bad story". But we've got to - we've got to face up to the bad story.
And also, the other thing I would say is we have to acknowledge just how important politicians - that hated breed - actually are. You're not going to get peace in the Middle East unless - not through having coffee but by elected politicians, or some kind of politicians, doing a deal that nobody likes very much but it's better than no deal at all. And a lot of - a lot in an age of scarcity, a lot of the deals that we're going to have to live with are going to be deals that a lot of the audience isn't going to like very much.
But the only thing I'd say finally is that, you know, everybody talks about how, kind of, locked up or messed up American politics is - never, never count that place out, would be my first cent. And the second thing I'd say - somebody said something very interesting to me, it was Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, just to quote an authority. He said "2008 was an election you'd want to lose, because the economy's going to be terrible for the next four years. 2012 is actually an election you want to win". And that's one of the things at stake, here. So - scarcity yes, but there may be opportunities here that we can't foresee.
Andrew Marr: Well, some of them just come from the mid-Atlantic, because Hurricane Sandy arrives. This is a campaign where nobody has talked about climate change or global warming at all. And then the Mayor of New York, who's a Republican - Bloomberg - actually endorses Obama as a result of it. Mary.
Mary Robinson: What I feel is that we haven't got serious enough about the climate issue, because it's not yet enough about people.
Andrew Marr: Mm.
Mary Robinson: Now, that super-storm Sandy made it about people, in the United States, for the first - not for the first time, because they've had several, recently - but they're beginning to appreciate it. But I think when we recognise that the - that climate is undermining poor livelihoods in Africa, in South Asia, in Latin America, in small islands, that we have to get urgent about it, and I have a hope, actually, that it's going to change the perception of what politics is about, to a common purpose, a common purpose of addressing the fact that if we don't change course, we're going to have far more severe weather shocks everywhere, displacement of people - they say maybe 200 million may be displaced by climate, climate-displaced people, climate refugees, by 2050. That's not so far away now.
Andrew Marr: No.
Mary Robinson: And, so I think - let me put it in Irish terms - and I'm overstating in a way, but I feel this. When I was running for President in 1990, what impressed me greatly was a spirit of community-felt development all over the country. And we had an Irish word for it, the spirit of "meitheal" - "meitheal" is like "ubuntu" in Africa, it's "I am, because you are". The link with the other, because of the agricultural - doing one field one week with the one tractor, and then moving to the next farmer's field - if that farmer was sick, you still did the field. Then we had the "Celtic Tiger" - selfish, gadget time, everybody showing off their latest gadgets. And now we have a coming together in an economic crisis, where the neighbourliness is coming out, where in towns and in parishes in Ireland, you can see people are helping each other again, it's...
So there is that sense of - if we can understand that climate change is actually a common threat to all, and it's already deeply affecting the poorest - because that's one area where this country has been very good on its aid budget and has held to that budget despite cutbacks, and I must say I greatly credit the government, at the moment - I don't credit them for everything, but, because of... [laughs] for actually holding onto that. If we can see that there are places where people are not climate-resilient - they don't have insurance, they don't have a Plan B... New York, for all its happening, is climate-resilient, because they have FEMA, they have the Mayor of New York, they have government to give support and insurance...
Andrew Marr: And, Michael Ignatieff, that is where any optimism must come from - it's back to the old Winston Churchill thing about democracy being a terrible system, just better than all the other ones. In the end, under pressure - maximum pressure from external forces - people will do the right thing.
Michael Ignatieff: Well, I think that, you know... One thing I teach my students is: they come to me all the time, saying that politics doesn't matter and our politics is terrible. I say "Go to a place where politics is really terrible". There are all kinds of places in the world that have literally been destroyed by bad politics, by the inability [of] political leaders to do what they have to do. Iraq at the moment is completely stuck with bad politics. I could go round the board with places where your life chances - literally, your chance as a young person - are ruined because you've got such terrible political leadership.