Haiti - part 2

Disaster aid has three phases: rescue, relief, and recovery. Rescue provides immediate assistance, for example pulling people from the rubble of collapsed buildings and distributing food/water for survival. Relief entails meeting needs beyond immediate survival, e.g., camps to house and feed refugees. Recovery represents the long-term assistance that will help people restore their lives to some semblance of normalcy.

Rescue efforts feed the adrenalin pumps in our bodies. Rescue produces immediate results, often ones of sorrow, sometimes ones that elate, but always ones that help the living to move forward. Soliciting funds and volunteers to support rescue efforts is relatively easy.

Relief efforts generate less exhilarating sentiments, last longer, and require greater diligence and fervor to solicit sufficient funds and volunteers. Relief efforts may continue, as in the case of Katrina (probably because of mismanagement) and drought (because of prolonged adverse conditions), for years. Fatigue grows steadily and irreversibly among donors and volunteers once relief efforts commence.

Recovery efforts are the most problematic to implement. In addition to having the greatest difficulty obtaining required resources, recovery efforts may either pose problems to which people do not have good answers or for which people and nations lack the collective will to resolve. For example, the world could, if nations so chose, grow and distribute the food to feed every human now alive.

Widespread recognition that mutual interdependence (i.e., reciprocal altruism) rather than competition offers the best odds for human survival has yet to form part of global consciousness. Ensuring that all people have life’s basic needs met (water, food, clothing, shelter, healthcare) represents the world’s best hope for security. Instead, national competition triggers races for resources, arms, and economic flourishing at the cost of other nations.

The current issue of Foreign Affairs has several articles that argue nuclear proliferation represents the largest threat to global security and safety. Those arguments deal with symptoms. The root cause of the problem is that human capacity for waging war has outpaced the expansion of the circle in which we believe reciprocal altruism operates. That circle probably began with the nuclear family, grew to include the extended family, then clan, tribe, and now nation state (although the social fabric of many nation states seems badly frayed).

Healthy religion as found in all of the world’s major religions emphasizes the common humanity of all people and promotes reciprocal altruism toward all, i.e., all major religions teach the precept, “love your neighbor (everyone else) as yourself.”

Three hundred years ago, a natural disaster in another country prompted little outpouring of aid for rescue, relief, or recovery. Since then, the level of those efforts has gradually increased, perhaps in no small measure because of religious influences, especially Christianity. In other words, perhaps the world is on a trajectory toward a global community characterized by reciprocal altruism. Certainly, one can point to many contrary signs. However, the prospects for a peaceful world apart from reciprocal altruism seem very dim. Reliance on arms, necessary to some extent in the short run, offers a greater prospect for mutual destruction than peace.