When someone has a coin in his hands, unwittingly he often tends to fall into a sort of amnesia and while looking on one side of the coin, the person forgets the other side.
This also takes place where our health is concerned. We tend to focus on pain (no surprise, because this is the function of pain) while forgetting other needs of our body. But this forgetfulness can be tragic.
Justifiably many of us are very preoccupied by the phenomenon of ‘boat people’ – a term introduced after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, referring to the refugees who fled Vietnam by boat and ship, mostly to Australia.
It cannot be otherwise when we remember the thousands of refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean in the last decade. This year alone, at the time of writing, 584 refugees have been euphemistically declared ‘missing’.
Thank God, compared to previous years, this tragedy is not numerically as large. But the drowning of even one refugee is one too many.
However, we should not allow this tragedy to distract our attention from its causes. These causes and their solution are forgotten.
Among them is the problem that was originally called ‘underdevelopment’ and then was turned into the more politically correct term of ‘development’.
Why have we stopped speaking about democratic governance as a first tool towards achieving these goals?
Let’s have a small test: when did you last read in the press, social media or heard discussions on TV about the ‘United Nations Millennium Development Goals’ signed in September 2000 to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women?
And why have we stopped speaking about democratic governance as a first tool towards achieving these goals?
How often are politicians acting to break the link between corruption, development and underdevelopment? Development is often seen as either ‘Westernisation’ or the Chinese-type economic model, depending on who is exploiting the Middle East, Africa or Latin America.
And this brings us to another forgotten (anti-)social process: exploitation. How often have you heard this term recently? Exploitation is often the root cause of war, poverty and hunger.
Who would not do his very best to escape such a situation? Would one bother about whether governments will call him/her an asylum seeker or an illegal immigrant?
Rich countries (to save face they call themselves ‘industrialised countries’) tend to conveniently forget their past. In the 1960s, when writing on the development of underdevelopment, Andre Gunder Frank had said: “We cannot hope to formulate adequate development theory and policy for the majority of the world’s population who suffer from underdevelopment without first learning how their past economic and social history gave rise to their present underdevelopment.”
And unfortunately, the situation has not changed much.
How often do we Catholics refer to Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio?
Who is fighting the current unbridled capitalism?
Similarly, what about the recommendations of the 1983 Brundtland Commission to unite countries to jointly pursue sustainable development?
The Brundtland Report, published later as a book entitled Our Common Future (1987), remained a dead letter. This Commission linked environment and development… but the tragedy of the environment is a present, clear and imminent danger.
Let us Christians learn from history and act on the holistic view of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’.
Fr Joe Inguanez, a sociologist, is executive director of Discern.