On Faith, Brexit and Designer Babies

Last week was awful in terms of the news: conflict, conflict everywhere and not a drop of light at the end of the tunnel.  As if mass shootings, terror attacks and wars were not enough, politicians are clashing on every single issue and the general public picks up the cue. The Brits are still fighting over whether they should stay in the EU or not, the young now claiming their long life ahead was determined by geezers with one leg in the grave. Amid all the mayhem reports, a refreshing headline grabbed my attention the other day: "Baby-making could jump from the bedroom to the lab." Wow!

I've heard of genetic modification and tampering with embryos to create a baby with desired traits. But this is not about harvesting eggs and working on them, it is about creating a baby from any cell in the body; a skin cell for example. In the near future, according to the report, cells will be turned into eggs and sperm in a lab to produce hundreds of embryos. Those will be tested to see what genetic traits they carry, and parents will be able to choose which one they want hatched into a baby. People who otherwise could not have their own children will be able to have them made from non-reproductive cells. From the multitude of embryos they will also be able to pick the ones that do not carry a hereditary disease. And if they have a lot of money to spend they can have the embryo further engineered to produce a baby with the desired eye and hair color, the size of the nose, the height, etc.

These days, children who get stuck with silly names chosen by their parents, like North West or Apple and Pear, can change them when they grow up. Altering one's physical and character traits may be a little harder. Still, in the future, we may have more Caitlyn Jenners. Gone are the days when the family awaited the arrival of a baby with baited breath to see if it is a girl or a boy. There will be no surprises - pleasant or otherwise - any more.

Whoa!  I got carried away.  For a moment I forgot my own video packages on drought and famine in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 40 million people in the region face hunger and even a larger number in India. A family moving from the parched Somaliland into the scorched parts of Ethiopia in search of food and water will be happy if the child is delivered alive, forget the hair color.

Then there is faith. A person who believes that a reward for killing in the name of God secures a place in heaven, with charming maidens serving refreshments  (as allegedly the Orlando shooter believed), is hardly likely to believe in creative baby making. Such a person is killing and ready to be killed to return things to what he imagines they may have been in some other time and place.

I am reading a book about Dracula - the real one, not the Hollywood creation. A fascinating and repulsive character at the same time: overly fond of impaling even for his own era, he also seems to have engaged in cutting off noses, ears, heads, women's breasts and genitals. It was said that Vlad III, nicknamed the Impaler, sometimes had children boiled in hot oil and made parents eat them, and did other stuff too gruesome to mention. But as we know, similar things happened during the war in the Balkans just a couple of decades ago, and are still happening at the hands of Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

We live in a world in which technology and innovation are literally skyrocketing, but too many people still face  hunger.  There is poverty in the United States, "the richest country in the world." More than 45 million people worldwide live in "modern" slavery. Globalization was supposed to even out some of the differences and bring people closer together, but appears to have created an even wider abyss between fellow human beings - a chasm not different from the one separating the medieval Wallachian prince and his brother Radu the Handsome, a favorite of Sultan Mehmed II.  The brothers fought each other, one with atrocities, the other with Turkish support.

Those caught in the middle of the tensions are confused and angry.  Sometimes they feel helpless, like the young Brits who say that the elderly imposed an unwanted future on them. Other times they arm themselves with assaults weapons, like some Americans.  Readers' comments to media articles on any topic reek of racism, misogyny and hatred. Culture is no exception. Just check YouTube video clips from operas. If you happen to like a singer or performance someone else dislikes, you better keep your opinion to yourself unless you have high tolerance for insults.

So commentators, professional or amateurish, who hasten to praise the Brexit as a "momentous event" akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall, those who predict that other EU countries will follow suit, and those who hope that the U.S. under Donald Trump will close its borders, are missing the point. Britain was split almost in half on the remain-leave referendum and it seems that some members of the "winning" camp got cold feet the very morning after the victory.  More than a million are now demanding a second referendum. Whichever way the vote might have gone, it would not have reduced the tensions in Britain. Neither will the country fall to pieces because it stepped out of the bloc. "Nigdar ni bilo da ni nekak bilo"...as an old Croatian wisdom goes.

In the 1960s, the slogan "Make Love, Not War" began its tour around the world, and the Hippy era saw the Westerners enthralled with oriental culture and spirituality. The commercialization of yoga and meditation in the West is a lasting reminder of that time. The world "love" has disappeared from the intercultural discourse. Today, we are talking of "tolerance" and we are protesting "against hatred" at best. Some of the most religious of us believe that a faith can be "defended" by war and isolation, and that love has nothing to do with it. I am no proponent of a return to any "glorious" era of the past, but I do hope that a future generation of the "Brave New World," the one that will create babies in the lab, comes up with a new make-love movement, one less steeped in drugs and more in sharing.

21st Century Trends: Who Knew?

At the turn of the century pundits offered a plethora of predictions of what the new era would bring. Few have foreseen the Arab Spring and its reverberation throughout the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Russia was considered too impotent to pose a threat to anyone.

At the close of the 20th century, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War sparked hopes that we were entering a new era of peace and prosperity. Instead, we saw the September 11, London and Madrid bombings, violent sectarian and ethnic clashes and a growing rich-poor gap.

Lack of freedom, terror, civil strife, poverty, environmental disasters and deadly disease outbreaks are among the common problems in the world today. Almost all of Africa is affected and also large parts of Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Central America and now Ukraine.

Ten years ago, military geostrategist Thomas Barnett and author of The Pentagon's New Map said these problems beset mostly countries where globalization has not taken hold.

“If you are looking at violence in the global system, it is overwhelmingly concentrated in those parts of the world, regions and countries that are not integrating their national economies with the global economy, either because they live in an authoritarian state, or because they are isolationist, or because they suffer endemic poverty, or they are dependent on export of a single raw material, and that leads to poverty or mal-distribution of wealth - commonly.”

Barnett said that leaving these "non-integrating" parts of the world “alone,” as some people suggest, would only make their problems worse and the world less secure because of the terrorism they breed.

“We need to stop terrorist activities, illegal movement of arms, or money, or people, the smuggling of people, copyright infringement -–those kinds of things. And the reason why you need to keep a lid on those sort of bad flows is that there are positive flows that do have to occur.”

Some of these positive flows according to Barnett were legal migrations of people from overpopulated areas to under-populated ones, the flow of oil out of the Middle East and direct foreign investment from Europe and the United States in developing Asia. He said many of these flows were hindered by terrorism. Therefore, he predicted, this century could see more U-S military interventions like the one in Iraq.

Ten years later, Washington-based analysts Peter Eltsov says Barnett's observations were mostly right, but that he failed to acknowledge that socioeconomic and cultural configurations of these troubled societies make it very difficult for their people to embrace free markets, democracy, multiculturalism and other developments that can help make a country rich and prosperous. Military interventions like the one in Iraq cannot change that.

Peter Eltsov

At the start of the Iraq War, many analysts pondered the effects of the U.S. display of military power on the rest of the world. California-based business consultant and author Larraine Segil, saw the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a major milestone, which would shape the coming decade in the Middle East.

“I think that what has happened in Iraq is an enormous and substantial change in the balance of power in the Middle East because it has suddenly become clear that there is somebody in the White House who is prepared to take action to follow words. ”

Eltsov says Segil was right in that the war in Iraq upset the balance of powers in the region. But, he notes, neither she nor anyone else foresaw the advent of the Arab Spring, the emergence of ISIS as the most powerful terrorist organization, and the unprecedented growth of extremist violence so soon after that war.

Segil acknowledged that military force is not an answer to every problem. She said that in addition to U.S. military force, another powerful new trend was shaping the world in this century: a rise of various formal and informal alliances across national borders.

Such alliances, according to her, have a great potential to improve life in the third world. For example, she said, African leaders could reduce famine and disease in their countries if they allowed private groups in their countries to connect with similar organizations in other parts of the world. China's economy has boomed, according to Segil, in large part thanks to business alliances with Taiwan, the United States, Germany, Africa and Latin America.

Ann Florini, professor of public policy in the School of Social Sciences at the Singapore Management University and a Brookings Institution fellow, agreed. She added that a wide range of transnational issues, from terrorism to environmental disasters to the global economy can be managed more effectively by non-governmental institutions, citizens movements and private corporations than by large international organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

“The inter-governmental institutions that have the most influence right now in the world are the IMF, the World Bank, the World trade Organization, the UN Security Council, " said Florini.  "In all of those except the World Trade Organization, the rules are explicitly set up so that a handful of rich-country governments dominate.”

“The biggest problem is that most of the world’s population has been completely left out of global economic integration.  The overwhelming share of global trade and financial flows were among North America, Western Europe, Japan and some other parts of Asia. "

Florini said interests of poor southern countries have long been neglected. "There has been almost no foreign direct investment in Africa, while Latin America and parts of Asia have received much less than their fair share in proportion to their populations."

But she said, “NGO-s, particularly in northern countries, have had in some cases a very significant influence on global rules. They have had campaigns on poor-country debt. They have had campaigns on land mines. In those kinds of campaigns they’ve shown that they can have a significant influence in getting governments to consider a broader public interest."

Florini said that U.S. military prowess in Iraq alarmed many people around the world, and it also showed that most economic, environmental, social, health and other global problems cannot be solved by force.

Eltsov says her assessment of the global trends seems to have been the most accurate. "The interests of poor southern countries are still being neglected, and globalization has not been helpful to many impoverished economies throughout the world." Furthermore, he says, "the invasion of Iraq created a dangerous precedent:  Russian President Vladimir Putin used it as a justification of his own actions in Georgia and Ukraine. One cannot help but agree that force does not solve most global problems."

Eltsov says it was naïve for anyone to assume that the fall of the Berlin Wall would have signified the spread of free markets, democracy, peace and prosperity in the whole world. And as for the end of the Cold War, " it was significant mostly for the USSR, USA, and Europe - not as much for the rest of the world."

"As we witness today, nationalism and fundamentalism are on the rise in Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, the Middle East and East Asia, raising questions about the viability of democratic values in significant parts of the world. Likewise, the economic crisis of 2008 raised questions about the viability and universality of market economy," says Eltsov.