Some of the most important debates in the West today are about gay rights, legalization of marijuana, guns, abortion, animal rights, assisted suicide, atheism and legalized prostitution. If you consider that this is at a time when the structure of the global economy post-global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the accompanying economic recession has been one in which developed economies struggle to find output growth at 1.5 to2.0 percent, then this is a frankly astounding choice of priorities!
If you add the facts that unemployment persists at historical levels in most developed OECD economies; China, the other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa-admittedly with many qualifications!) and a few other emerging/developing economies are powering ahead and threatening Western economic and political hegemony; global peace and stability, including Western assumptions about a secular world order and constitutional democracy is challenged by a rampant global Jihadist movement manifesting in crisis across North Africa (Libya, Egypt, Algeria), West Africa (Nigeria, Mali, Chad/Cameroun/Niger), East and Central Africa (Kenya, Somalia, Central African Republic), Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen), Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran etc. and threatening Europe and the US, then one must marvel at whether the West is not fiddling while Rome, Washington, Paris, London, New York, Amsterdam, Toronto and even Berlin are all threatening to burn!
This last phenomenon is particularly of one would assume,Western interest as immigration and low Anglo-Saxon birth rates threatens to permanently alter the internal demographics of many Western democracies within the next twenty five years and create substantial minorities and/or new majorities which have starkly different values and whose commitment to current notions of how societies are ordered in the West cannot be taken for granted. Whether this state of affairs is a cause or consequence of another emerging trend-the political dysfunction in most Western democracies is unclear. In the United States, policy making is hobbled by not just divided government, which of itself may not necessarily be dysfunctional (it worked not so badly during the Clinton era), but seemingly a divided nation in which voters and politicians cannot agree on a common vision for America! In Britain a very odd coalition between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has governed for the past few years unable to fully confront the challenges to Britain’s future. The last few years have seen Australians, Canadians and Italians change governments and leaders multiple times, like Nigeria used to do under the military! Much of Europe appears permanently in recession, with Greece, Portugal, Spain etc. (instead of India and Ghana!!!) been poster nations for economic sluggishness and political drift.
Or perhaps the current inability of the West to focus on what an outside observer would assume should be its current priorities is a by-product of the current quality of political leadership that “opinion poll” democracies are producing? When Margaret Thatcher took over the leadership of the UK in the 1970s, she knew her country was in trouble and went about taking drastic, often unpopular actions to reclaim her nation; when one of her predecessors Winston Churchill was confronted with aggression and war, he shunned appeasement and galvanized his nation to respond securing an unlikely victory in conjunction with other allies; Ronald Reagan, FDR, Chancellor Helmut Kohl…great leaders with vision, resolve and courage built Western nations, but today’s professional politicians seem to have no enduring purpose in office except to win elections and rule based on trends predicted by opinion polls and pundits! Many can’t be called “leaders” in the true sense of the word!
The policies which have brought out the greatest passion in both Barack Obama and David Cameron have been around homosexual rights, and that is where both and many of their contemporaries across the West may leave a permanent imprint on society! Being a massive social experiment, it will not be clear for another few generations, whether this will be a positive or negative legacy. It has been astounding for instance watching Obama and the gay lobby attempt to turn “gay rights” into a “universal” (strangely even within America, the universality of gay marriage is grossly debatable!) fundamental human right that is superior to every other constitutional right, including democratic self-determination, national sovereignty, religious freedoms and free speech. It is not difficult to project a conjunction of gay rights and animal rights that one day results in people been entitled to marry their pets or siblings! Another unpredictable experimentation is going on with drugs, starting with marijuana which is now legal in some states in the US and parts of Europe.There are new debates being orchestrated over legalized prostitution and assisted suicide, with lobbyists for the latter already learning an important lesson from the abortion (“pro-choice”) campaign-rename the issue to remove any legacy inhibitions and turn the table on the opponents. I can already see from “The Economist” that the term “assisted suicide” may soon be abandoned for a more caring “aid in dying” just as “sodomy” evolved first to “homosexual” and then “gay”!!!
There is a lot we can learn from the West-in education, science and technology, research, agricultural innovation, medical and healthcare systems, transportation and engineering, in building constitutional democracies, protecting historical rights of citizens and organizing free elections, amongst others. However regarding the more recent “progress” the West is making, it is prudent to await the outcomes of current social re-engineering before adoption!
Opeyemi Agbaje
