Sharing

Vietnamese woman tests
for virginity by looking for
red spot behind the ears.

I have been thinking of the concept of “sharing.” Most children in most (if not all) societies are taught from a very early age to share things with others, and for the most part they do. In most small scale societies where community, tribal, or clan organizations prevail, sharing is the most important value. If one person eats, all eat, if one person goes hungry, all go hungry. Typically there are well-known provisions for sharing, the successful hunter or farmer gets a certain share and others receive shares as well. Those who do not share with others are ostracized and can even be driven out of their communities. In some societies, when times are so difficult there is simply not enough food to share, someone, usually an elderly person, will be sacrificed, or even volunteer to die so the remainder can live. This is itself a form of sharing.

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, as societies grow larger and more complex, the concept of sharing virtually disappears entirely from human behavior. Larger polities for the most part do not share with one another. There are a few exceptions as when two or more states agree to share water, or large cities agree to share expensive equipment, and so on, but sharing is not characteristic of cultures once they reach a certain level. This is often expressed by saying that morality tends to be limited to the “in-group” and does not extend beyond certain boundaries. In some small-scale societies, clan-based ones, for example, it is said that morality does not extend to anyone outside the clan, and this seems to be pretty much true. Even within large polities, where relationships tend to be contractual rather than personal, as in the U.S., the concept of sharing can even be denigrated and referred to in an extremely derogatory manner as “socialism.” But socialism does not have to imply that everyone shares exactly in the same amount of whatever there is to share. Social democracies have rules for sharing, mostly of wealth, that permit some to have more than others, but also insist that no one should go entirely without. The U.S. does not have very clear-cut rules for sharing and whatever rules there are can be circumvented or ignored, the result being no limits on how much some can have and no limits on how little someone can have. This is not the subject of this discussion, however. I have in mind an even more pie-in-the sky theme.

Let us agree that with the demise of the Soviet Union the United States was/is the only remaining superpower. As such, the U.S. has more power and influence than any other nation on earth. What could have, or might have happened had the U.S. decided to use this power and influence to improve the lives of all people on earth? If instead of wasting trillions of dollars on fighting “wars” to control the Middle East and the rest of the world, we had used our power and influence to share the earth’s limited resources and help others to develop their full potential. How much oil could we have purchased for the money we have wasted killing people for it? How much better would our international relations be had we helped these nations develop instead of ravishing them for their resources? How much more peaceful would life on earth be had we not taken this road of death and destruction? How much better off would our own country be had we spent our money on education, superstructure, medical care, and looking after each other? With 5% of the earth’s population, but using 25% of its resources, would we have been seriously harmed to rein in our consumption and helped others to increase their consumption a bit?

I believe these things could have been done had we not assumed our moral, racial, and religious superiority, had we treated the rest of the world with dignity and respect and genuinely tried to help them, rather than pretending to bring them democracy at the point of a gun and insisting they had to live precisely as we do. Of course it is true that other cultures have customs we do not like or approve of, but such changes cannot be forced on people overnight (if at all). And it is not as if we are morally and ethically pure and they are not. There are societies in which there are no orphans, no child abuse, no beggars, little or no crime, and no homeless. Of course these societies are generally not always regarded as “civilized.” You don’t like the way women are treated in some Muslim countries, read back in American and European history a few years. Laws for women were much more restrictive than for men, women were widely regarded as less intelligent, less competent, and even to this day are paid less than men for the same amount of work. Similarly, they are not fairly represented in either business or government. Even female suffrage is a relatively recent phenomenon. You don’t like the way boys are treated in Afghanistan, think of the epidemic of pedophilia in the U.S. and countries in Europe. And among Western-European societies the U.S. is virtually alone in maintaining the death penalty. And we probably should not even consider such things as torture and other war crimes. Besides, our hypocrisy on such matters is shameless, we don’t express any outrage over the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. We treat Cuba as a rogue country but cozy up to China. We deal with dictators all over the world but regard some dictators as worse than others (those who don’t cooperate with us).

In short, we could have, with all our power and influence, taken a quite different path. How different it would have been had we selected the High Road. Bush/Cheney deliberately chose the low road, the “dark side.” They did not elect to share, but, as all greedy capitalists, to exploit the rest of the world, in this case to maintain the fiction of “American exceptionalism,.” and "our way of life." Anything else would have meant sharing the earth and its resources with ("undeserving and inferior") others. How unthinkable! BothBush and Obama could have seized the moment, but failed.

LKBIQ:
Friendship make prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
Cicero

TILT:
There are more than 250 known species of bumble bees.