The very happening of these calamities is bad enough but it seems compounded by the trouble we have in responding to them - to the extent that it often seems we do nothing at all. Take Libya. First-off, nobody did anything, except for polite calls for restraint and eventually some slightly harsher words. That was ineffective, but by that point the situation there was already in free-fall. (Perhaps time was needed to warm up for the next step, but that seems a pretty damning indictment on the workings of the world.) Next, the United Nations stepped in, but the politics of the Security Council (a threatened no-vote here, an abstention there) and the precedence of other recent UN-sanctioned actions (Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously) resulted in a diluted resolution, the interpretation of which seems to have been left open to debate ever since. At last, the world took action 'to protect civilians', but it has hardly been decisive and now the coalition appears divided, the slaughter goes on and no-one seems to know what to do. Of course, Libya also brings into sharper focus the other places around the world where we actually do nothing, in spite of our equal horror: Bahrain in recent months, Lebanon in 2006 (when Israel invaded), Georgia in 2008 (when Russia invaded) and Gaza in 2009 spring to mind. Our failure to act makes it seem that we have double standards that are infuriating and embarrassing; I'm not sure if we do, or if sometimes we just don't know what to do.
In terms of communication, our world now is so incredibly small. The bare fact of happenings from all over the world scrolls across the bottom of our television screens and flashes onto our mobile telephones as a 140-character tweet, followed quickly by the first photographs and the growing details on news websites and twenty-four hour television news services. The pace at which the world has shrunk in this regard is startling. The virtually-instantaneous news coverage we have at our finger tips did not exist when I was a child - just fifteen to twenty years ago - neither did twenty-four-hour news programmes. We might catch a brief radio news bulletin during the day and we tuned in dutifully for the six-o'clock or the nine-o'clock news to find out what had happened around the world. It's not so long since the sketchy details of news from far-flung countries arrived a day or two after it had happened nor even really since people in remote parts of Britain would find out an event in another part of their own country days (conceivably even weeks) after it had happened. I wonder if our politicians sometimes wish we weren't as clued-up today as we are about the goings-on around the world!
The challenge for the politicians, I think, is that they must know from the moment we see something awful happening somewhere in the world (basically, as it happens), we want something done about it. In the same scenes we watch on television they must hear our questions: What will we do as people's livelihoods and their very lives crumble away in the aftermath of this earthquake or are washed away in that freak storm? How will we put a stop to genocide on the other side of the world? How will we ease the suffering of the refugees from conflicts in several different countries at the same time as feed the starving in another famine-struck region? How will we help end the rule of a corrupt despot? The problem for us is that for all our world has become a place small enough to see and hear events ten-thousand miles away as they happen, it is still too big for us to do very much about them, certainly not with the speed we wish.
It seems to me that we haven't even started to adapt to our smaller world; the workings of our world are out-of-date, built for different purposes and they can't keep up with the global challenges of the modern world - the way a town's medieval road network is not built to cope with the twenty-first century rush-hour. Religions can no longer answer our questions as easily or with the same confidence they used to. With its watered-down and sometimes unenforced resolutions, the U.N. is left wanting. NATO is constrained by its history and exclusivity. Collectives of countries like the E.U., the Arab League and the African Union are weakened by their weaker, less-committed members. Financial mechanisms buckle. Perhaps even the idea of nationhood is increasingly irrelevant as goods and peoples and monies and ideas and languages flow through old borders with ease - those borders seem restrictive.
The hope I think is in the continued shrinking of the world. I'm very conscious that I am writing this blog from the perspective of a westerner, living comfortably in a highly-developed country; the world must look different for someone else living in a developing country without a television or mobile telephone or internet access. Yet we refer to those countries as developing rather than 'stuck' or 'backwards', which says something about our humanity and our optimism and our determination that the world will go on shrinking. These are countries for which the world is shrinking too. And as it goes on shrinking, we will, of course, carry on caring and wanting to do more to address the problems of the world. As the world shrinks and develops therefore, it is inevitable that we will adapt the workings of it to meet our global challenges. The two go hand in hand. Perhaps even the pace of change in the workings of the world will speed up soon - to better meet the demands of people living in this small world.
Maybe that will be the global revolution of the twenty-first century, or the twenty-second century. Either way, there is hope.
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