Reviews of Debaters and Consent

The Great Debaters and Age of Consent

By John Taylor; 2008 May 20, 04 `Azamat, 165 BE

 

Last night I watched the new DVD "The Great Debaters," with Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker. I was inspired along with the average viewer by the underdog-wins-out theme of a tiny Black college's debating team beating a famous White school, but beyond that I found the way the film was researched intriguing as well. This is depicted in the "DVD extras" section where they show how in a formal setting the filmmakers and actors filmed interviews with the aged original participants in the debates, their teachers and, when they had died, their descendants. This historical research suggested how not only films but also the debate itself might be improved and updated to meet the needs of a world threatened by climate destabilization. I will come back to this in a later essay.

 

I just finished what I think is one of the most important, thought provoking and possibly revolutionary books to come out this century, George Monbiot's "The Age of Consent, A Manifesto for a New World Order." On the back cover is the motto: "Everything has been globalized except for consent." Age of Consent is a lesser known, earlier work than Monbiot's bestseller on global warming, "Heat," but I think the former has to be his masterpiece. It deserves to become a classic of political science.

 

Age of Consent is modeled on Marx's Communist Manifesto, which Monbiot dismisses by saying that in spite of its appeal for justice for the oppressed working man, it is too simplistic. He points out that even today one cannot read Marx's Manifesto without wanting to go out and shoot a bourgeois capitalist exploiter or two. Monbiot does an excellent job throughout the book of improving on Marx by dealing with complex issues with clear logic and commonsense. He is a popularizer of political science, but most of all he treats it as it should be treated, as a revolutionary steppingstone for the imagination.

 

Still, in spite of starting off by abjuring Marx's violently oppositional orientation, Monbiot does not entirely escape it. He holds to the assumption that the rich are determined permanently to exploit the poor while stifling all hope of our collective survival. Unlike Abdu'-Baha, he does not see the super-rich coming to their senses and voluntarily agreeing to legal limits to extremes of wealth. He does acknowledge at the end of the book that at least two of their most important agents have "turned," George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz, and that the steep increase in executive salaries may be a sign that this "age of coercion" is entering a final stage of moral bankruptcy.

 

Unlike lesser minds, Monbiot recognizes that the only way out of this mess is to establish a democratic world government. The heart of the book is a specific and I must say startlingly bold proposal for bringing this about. Leading up to this, the book opens with a truly brilliant dismissal of the rivals to democracy, which are anarchy (his own former leaning) and communism. Unlike academic theorizers, he usually speaks from his own travels and direct experience in the countries he uses as models.

 

For example, he rejects anarchy as a prospective way of ordering the world by pointing to an experience he had in the anarchic Darfur region of Africa. An entire clan was wiped out by another bearing guns in the middle of the night. As long as a violent few have access to weapons (and not necessarily modern ones; Rwanda showed that sticks and machetes can effectively exterminate imagined opponents in their millions), anarchy is not a viable option. Several other telling examples from Africa cited by Monbiot seem to indicated that just as that continent has the richest human gene pool, it also is a unique laboratory and showpiece of what works and what does not in political structures.

 

Monbiot's startling proposal comes in Chapter Four, "We the Peoples, Electing a World Parliament." His proposal is not to wait around for national governments to agree among themselves to sponsor a world government, why not just start a global election process going without them? Elect a democratic body of 600 members based on representation by population. Since there are about six billion people in the world, that works out to be a constituency of ten million people for each of the 600 representatives. I have to admit, I never thought of that.

 

The Baha'i proposal is for a representative to come out of the nation state; he or she would initially at least be appointed based on qualities that satisfy all levels of state government. These appointees would travel to a universal gathering of man where they would form a world constituent assembly. But now that I think of it, there is no reason that a world democratic election might not be held either before or after that "universal gathering of man." Monbiot sees the world parliament working independently and concurrently with present international bodies.

 

At least in the beginning the democratic world parliament could exercise no official force of law. Their resolutions would not be law, as in a normal parliament, but instead would work by prestige. They could right wrongs, he holds, by the pure moral force of being the chosen representatives of the peoples of the world. It might work too, as long as national governments and corporations do not oppose it, either openly or through their usual dirty tricks. Monbiot seems to think they could operate in the face of active opposition by plutocrats, capitalists and nationalists, but I have my doubts.

 

In any case, he makes an elaborate argument for this democratic institution that I should not try to summarize. Suffice to say that everyone who aspires to be a world citizen should read and digest this proposal. As Monbiot himself says, it may be deemed flawed and might need an overhaul, but something like this has to be done, and done soon, if we are going to have any future generations of human beings to inherit this languishing planet.