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14 August, 2011

One of the rare treats of living in a city like Addis Ababa is listening to the city fall asleep.  It’s 8:02pm now, and it’s Ramadan, the Muslim Holy month.  Soon the neighbourhood Mosques will start singing at full volume again.  The Mosquely chorus will continue until about 10:15, when a long string of “Allah Ahkbars” will forecast the coming of silence.  I don’t mind the singing, especially when you can hear the “congregation” singing-along in the background, but it can get a little tiring after a few hours (and after a few weeks).  Also, every so often the singer breaks into a mad coughing fit.  As the closest Mosque is less than 100m from my window, it really does sound like he is coughing into my ear, which kind of spoils the groovy Muhammadian mood.  After the echoes of the last “Allah Ahkbar” have faded and the loud-speaker crackles into silence, there is sometimes  a reprieve of an hour or so before the dogs have their turn at singing.  I’m grateful that the dogs haven’t yet accumulated enough money to buy a loudspeaker of their own, though who is to say when that day will arrive.

My neighbourhood is populated by a rotating assortment of 25 to 50 dogs of all shapes, sizes  and colours.  By day, they roam about, alone or in packs, sniffing for food, fighting with each other and trying to play leap-frog.  They are not very good at leap-frog, as I have yet to see a single dog successfully climb over top of the dog in front of him.  They practice diligently, though, so I am sure they will master it before too long.

I’m not sure where these dogs go at night, as I am too busy lying in bed with a pillow over my head, trying to block out the incessant barking.  (It’s 8:08 and the Mosque just started.)  Who knew that dogs liked to bark so much?  Near and far, quiet, loud and very loud, dozens of doggy voices ring out in the night the way dozens of birdy voices ring out in the morning.  The barking and growling persist until somewhere between midnight and 2am, at which time I must assume they get tired and agree to disagree until the following night.

I love watching dogs, and watching a pack of wild urban dogs is a unique treat.  I often stop as I pass by on my way to and from work to see how their leap-frog practice is coming along.  This particular pack of dogs seems to be ‘Alpha’d’ by a big-ish blonde dog, who walks with a limp and has a distinct ‘white-trashy’ look about his face.  He growls a lot, and frequently sends other dogs whimpering away with their tails between their legs.  He is the most ardent leap-frog practiser of the bunch, and often attacks other dogs when he sees them practicing leap-frog without him.  He is also the only neighbourhood dog who I have seen actually growl at a person.  Of course, a group of men immediately rewarded his growls by pummelling him with stones.  Ethiopians, it turns out, have very little tolerance for insubordinate animals.  Just last week, I watched a shepherd literally punch his goat in the jaw for wandering too far afield.  The blonde dog quickly retreated amid a hail of falling rocks, cursing our opposable thumbs under his doggy-breath.

One day, not too long ago, he was challenged by a brown dog of about the same make and model.  The brown dog had been happily working on his leap-frog skills with a sexy little bitch when Blondie came along and told Brownie that he had no business practicing leap-frog without him.  Most dogs seem to immediately back down from Blondie, but I guess Brownie really wanted to improve his leap-frogging skills.  After a little casual ass-sniffing, Brownie stood up to Blondie.  I’ve seen lots of dogs play-fighting in my life, but when a dog really decides to put on his “don’t f*ck with me” smile, it’s quite terrifying to behold.  The bared teeth and growls lasted perhaps 30 seconds before Blondie made his move.  It was like the classic ‘ball-of-dust-with-limbs-flailing’ seen so often in cartoons.  I could see immediately why Blondie was the Alpha.  The fight lasted only 10 seconds or so before Brownie was sent scampering and whimpering away, bleeding from at least three places.  Blondie, jaws dripping crimson, wasted no time in claiming his spoils.  He immediately commenced with his leap-frog practice, but still didn’t manage to get all the way over the little dog.  Maybe he was tired from the fight.  I’ve never seen that brown dog again.  Violence and blood-shed, it would seem, are very effective means of projecting doggy-power.

I’ve been thinking a lot about power lately.

Over the past couple weeks, the international news has been dominated by a handful of stories: the riots in London, the uprising in Syria, the civil-war in Libya, the trial of Mubarak in Egypt, the famine in Somalia and the debt-crisis in the United States.  In response to the London riots, the media and government in the UK immediately began denigrating the rioters as “mindless thugs” and “nihilistic and feral teenagers.”  Parliament was called back for an emergency session, the focus of which was to determine appropriate punishment for the so-called wrong-doers.

A well-spoken minority of pundits and bloggers asked if maybe the discussion shouldn’t be focused instead on the underlying causes of the violence.  Of course, such pragmatism has no place in modern Western culture, so these voices were largely ignored in favour of the establishment’s line of discipline and moral decay.  Still, many important questions have been posed about the incendiary role of rising unemployment among the ‘lower-class,’ the increasing lack of opportunities for lower-class youth, austerity cuts to social services and racially prejudicial police behaviour.  It’s been suggested that at the roots of the riots lay an increasing feeling of economic alienation and a perception of powerlessness in those disenfranchised youth who gleefully looted and burned.

Feeling powerless isn’t a very positive feeling: facing your family with guilt because you can’t find a decent job; looking with envy at the wealth-objects that are perpetually out of your reach; being shaken down by aggressive police officers because of the colour of your skin.  I’m sure most of us have felt victimized at one time or another, with little recourse but to grit our teeth and carry on.  I remember having a spear thrust towards my chest in South Sudan, and feeling completely vulnerable.  I remember it as one of the worst days of my life.  I walked home with my head down, curled up in a ball in on my bed and didn’t leave our compound for a week.  Feeling weak sucks.  There can be little doubt, however, as to the strength one feels when sending armoured police officers fleeing as a member of an anonymous mob or that feeling of power that accompanies basking in the flames of a burning police station.  There are many kinds of power, but few, if any, are as potent as violence.  I wonder how many cases of violence – from genocide to school-yard bullying – are the product of a desire to mitigate a feeling of powerlessness.

In this sense, the London riots aren’t much different than the civil war in Libya, where generational abuses of power have caused the historically marginalized to take up arms against their oppressors.  NATO joined the fight not to protect human rights, but to gain control of oil: the fuel that powers commerce and industry.  Syria too, and indeed the entire “Arab-Spring,” is a story of the wielding of violence (or the threat of violence through peaceful masses) to transfer entrenched power from the powerful few to the powerless many.  Education protests in Chile and the Gaza flotillas share the common theme, as do the ongoing drug-battles spilling out from Colombia and Mexico through much of Latin-America.  To die of hunger is perhaps the quintessence of powerlessness, and Somalia’s famine itself has been greatly exacerbated by the fundamentalist tyranny of al-Shabaab as they fight for regional and religious domination.  Even the debt-crisis in the United States – a standoff between powerful factions of government – has a struggle for power at its roots.

Once upon a time, some psychologists put a dog in a cage and then electrocuted it.  Don’t worry.  The dog could jump out of the electrified cage and into another, inert cage.  When you inflict pain on a living thing, it tends to learn pretty fast how to get away from that pain.  The dogs learned fast, and jumped immediately to safety.  Then the psychologists, those sadists, electrified both sides of the cage.  After trying unsuccessfully to get away from the pain, the dogs eventually just laid down, suffered and presumably waited to die.  Even if the electricity was subsequently turned off in the other cage, the dogs still just laid there whimpering, with sad looks on their little puppy-dog faces.  Having attempted to escape and failed, they resigned themselves to their fate, and didn’t bother to try again.  The researchers defined this as “learned helplessness.”  Many connections have since been made to human behaviour.

Nobody wants to feel powerless and weak.  Perhaps even more than this, nobody wants to identify themselves as powerless and weak.  The implications for the human ego of such a self-appraisal run in the direction of depression and suicide.  But if an individual who feels powerless is provided with an opportunity to exert control over some aspect of their situation, they can use that opportunity to redefine their self-image.  They can bolster their ego, and see themselves more as they would like to be – as powerful, capable and strong.  All the better if, in so doing, they can redefine their former oppressor, whether a person, an institution or a system, as somehow weaker than they are.  Faced with a oppressive situation, and no constructive opportunities to influence a change, who can really blame a person for joining a gang, or carpe-diem-ing when ‘no-consequence violence’ becomes easily-available.  The alternative is that they spend the rest of their lives thinking of themselves and meaningless and pathetic.  It seems unlikely that anybody taking part in those rioting mobs felt vulnerable, weak, meaningless or pathetic.  What would you choose?

Once upon a time, some psychologists went into a nursing home and set up a couple of electrified cages.  They put the old people into one side of the cage and I’m kidding.  They randomly picked half the residents and gave them plants.  Have you ever been in a nursing home?  They can be pretty depressing places.  Formerly strong and capable human beings sit in chairs and stare at the walls all day as saliva drips from the corners of their mouths.  They have generally lost the ability to care for themselves, and so rely on others to do most everything for them.  Even their schedule is largely fixed.  They eat when they are told.  They sleep when they are told.  They rely on adult-diapers, and are bathed at a scheduled time.  It is difficult to imagine a situation more rife with powerlessness.  So psychologists came in and gave half the patients plants.  It doesn’t take much to care for a plant.  Even people who can’t bathe or dress themselves can probably muster the energy to pour a cup of water into a pot every once in awhile.  Do you know what happened?  Those residents who received the plants lived significantly longer, on average, than those residents who didn’t.  Cool, eh?

Which isn’t to say that we should go find all the unemployed and unengaged youth in our cities and give them plants to care for (though that doesn’t sound like an altogether terrible idea).  But there seems to be value in providing people with a concrete reason for feeling important, and like they are capable of exerting influence on their situation.  This value extends beyond dogs, geriatrics and would-be rioters.  How many school-yard bullies are victims of violence at home, who then victimize others in response?  How many wife-abusers were themselves subjugated by violence in their homes?  The so-called ‘cycle-of-violence’ is well known.  The Rwandan Hutus were the powerless majority, and a recent study in South Africa found that as many as one in four South African men in the townships anonymously confessed to raping a woman.  Importantly, these were not upper or middle class men.  They were also not the poorest of the poor.  As in Rwanda, the majority of the perpetrators were those living on the threshold of poverty – they could see and understand the life they desired, but had no means to attain it.  An important question thus might be: how can we provide productive power to those who perceive themselves as frustrated and powerless?

Our modern world is defined by an increasing disparity between rich and poor.  Especially over the past 30 years, the richest 1% have become phenomenally wealthy, while the poorest 60% live on less than $10/day, and the poorest 20% cling to life on the brink of starvation.  This trend has only accelerated since the global recession of 2008, with banks and money lenders consistently getting paid in full (with interest, of course), while the lower and middle classes are forced to endure successive rounds of austerity cuts that carve away at their social services and safety nets.  In countries around the world, violent riots and peaceful protests have brought citizens to the streets in response.  Generally, these protests are to no avail, as the bankers get paid while the people get shit on.  Rather than providing a feeling a power to the powerless, this trend is accomplishing the opposite and worse.  Not only are the powerless rapidly losing what little power they had, the number of those counted among the marginalized is increasing every day.  Movements to large-scale violence can be potent and deadly, however, and have proven to be an effective means by which the powerless masses can re-assert their positive self-images as individuals and in-groups.  With the leaders in the UK, Greece and other countries continuing to ignore the negative blow-back from spiralling inequality, there is little cause for optimism about a peaceful future.  Truly, there may be great cause for fear.

As a privileged white male from a G-8 nation, I really hope that I am wrong.  For the time-being, Blondie continues to have his way with the ladies.  Inevitably, however, the day will arise when a younger and stronger dog will feel that he deserves to be Alpha.  All things go, as they say, and all’s fair in love, war and leap-frog.

Peace and love.