Lush Cemeteries, Parched Villages

AS A FLEDGING adolescent a few years back I attempted to allay my middle-class guilt by adopting a philosophy of romantic asceticism. By keeping a frugal eye on my role as an American consumer, I was able to escape the mental anguish of coming from a financially comfortable family. At the same time I could strike a self-satisfying pose of identification with the underprivileged of the world. Only three things, I reasoned, justified any type of expenditure--books, records, and travel. These principles allowed me to obtain material happiness (books, records, and travel being all I really desired) while simultaneously enabling myself to ignore the fact that most people in the world go to bed hungry.

In the intervening years, with the shrinkage of the dollars in my pockets, I've been forced to retrench on even these essential commodities. I've learned to be content with the monthly or so addition to my stereo collection, and the last airplane I took was a year ago Thanksgiving. I've cut back on books. My once voluntary, compulsive identification with the world's needy has become compulsory. My asceticism is now nothing more romantic than a mundane tightening of the belt.

But a record foregone here and there hardly constitutes personal deprivation. As a student at Harvard I feel the effects of the present economic crisis about as poignantly as I feel my belt when I tighten it around my waist in the morning. I, together with most undergraduates, diligently keep up on the facts and figures of the deepening recession in this country. We read in the New York Times about the decrease in the average American's purchasing power; we hear on the radio about families in inner cities who eat dog food to survive.

But it's difficult for these abstract facts to seep in. Harvard is a secure enclave in a shaky society, a verdant oasis in a parched economy. Come 5:30 or 6:00 we close our magazines to head downstairs to the dining hall, where we are ladled out as much as we can eat. We put aside our newspapers to run to the library to check out a book for an upcoming exam. We turn off the radio as we hurry to Harvard Square to do some errands.

True, in some ways the University feels the effects of the deteriorating economy. Rooms in dorms get less heat than they once did, and Widener cannot buy as many periodicals as in past years. Stringent budget cuts may result in a thinner course catalogue than students have been accustomed to, and less money is available for financial aid.

But being out of work, like 6.5 per cent of the American work force, is something that remains remote--something out of a sociology text--until we experience it more directly. Perhaps on leaving the academic world some of us will know the meaning of unemployment. But while still in school, only in brief flashes do we get a glimpse of the social reality behind all the statistics. The searing experience of being robbed or assaulted, for instance, and the pervasive fear such a likelihood engenders in the community, is perhaps the only direct contact students at Harvard have with the damage recession does to men and women's lives. The University's rising crime rate is not just an undesirable condition that can be summarily condemned. It is not something that can be contained by raising fences and securing locks. Massachusetts's 7.4 per cent unemployment rate is the highest in the Continental U.S., and the many unskilled workers represented by that figure still have families to feed and bills to pay. As has occurred countless times throughout history, be it during grain failures in medieval Europe or in English cities during the period of the Industrial Revolution, or throughout the U.S. in the time of the Great Depression, people have once again turned to crime when times are hard. And Harvard has proved to be fertile ground.

YET EVEN MORE excruciating crises are plaguing the world, crises to which we can be but impervious. Looking at newspaper photographs of emaciated women combing the ground for blades of wheat to give their dying children is little different from reading unemployment statistics in Newsweek. We look, shudder, and lament, and then run to make the last feature at the Brattle. Perhaps we could grasp 'the magnitude of the situation if some international group flew in a group of Bengali or Nigerian villagers to Harvard Square, where they would compete with chanting Hare Krishna people for the attention of the people hurrying by.

Otherwise the numbers are so staggering as to defy our capacity for sympathetic imagination. The facts--900 million people in the world earning less than $100 a year, a billion and a half people suffering from malnutrition, Americans using more fertilizer on their lawns and cemeteries than India has available for its farms--are about as conceivable as the six million Jews massacred in the Second World War or the countless millions who died in Stalin's work camps.

People like me and just about everyone else in this country perpetuate this world situation every time we partake of such seemingly innocent acts as buying a toothbrush or a pair of pants or a television set. Each time we participate in the American market we help perpetuate a time-hallowed structure of domination by the rich nations over the poor. In most of the products we buy we help prop up national companies and global corporations whose accumulated economic advantages enable them to drain off much of the wealth of developing nations, preventing those same nations from developing their own industrial capacity. Through a monopoly of necessary technology and an almost exclusive hold on available funds for investment, businessmen in the industrialized nations are able to corner markets in the Third World and thus prevent local competition. To obtain funds for purchasing finished products, developing nations are forced to export natural resources which have no local enterprises to use them.

So while today transactions are on a more complex level, the classic mercantile relationship--finished goods traded by developed nations for natural resources supplied by developing nations--remains intact, and the worldwide gap between rich and poor widens. By 1970, says MIT economics professor Paul Rosenstein-Roden, the per capita income of the poorest countries was one-fortieth that of the rich countries. And Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, predicts that by the year 2000 "masses of the poor (who by that time will total two and one quarter billion) will on average receive less than $200 per capita" as measured in 1972 prices.

But there are indications that the situation is changing. The Third World nations are awaking to the value of their resources, and they are learning that through common action they can break the strangle-hold the industrial nations have on them. The first manifestation of this power--the oil price rise mandated last year by a coalition of Arab nations--has set a hopeful precedent for other Third World nations which mine metals crucial to industrial concerns in the developed nations. Just last month the four nations which produce most of the world's copper--Chile, Peru, Zambia and Zaire--agreed to a 10 per cent reduction in their exports in an effort to force a price rise on the world market. Pooling of interests is also possible among Third World producers of tin, bauxite, and timber.

Sadly, burgeoning treasuries in developing nations resulting from better terms of trade often result in luxury automobiles for high-living rulers rather than an improvement of the living standard of those who live on the edge of starvation. But the reversal of the flow of funds is start, and hopefully countries will take up Iran's lead and decide to intensify their investment in projects of widespread public benefit.

Meanwhile, back in this country, Americans will bear an increasing brunt of this international redistribution of income. Right now, with the marked concentration of wealth that characterizes American society, some sectors of the population bear a much heavier burden than others. But it is likely that all groups will be continually exposed to the effects of the shrinking dollar. The recession that government and business leaders term temporary could very likely lengthen into a permanent decline in the American standard of living.

IT'S NOT SO easy to convince yourself that the niceties you depend on should fade away so irrevocably. I enjoy listening to Beethoven on my stereo. I like to eat hot corned beef sandwiches. And there is nothing nicer than the feel of a shiny, newly-purchased copy of Keats. And yet the new austerity could produce some benefits, not so obvious at first, but no less long-ranging in their impact. Romantic asceticism would no longer be a viable philosophical alternative, and middle-class youths like myself would no longer feel compelled to renounce their roots. Americans would be a thinner, trimmer breed and hikes in the woods would supersede spectator activities such as horse races and the cinema.

And, perhaps more importantly, millions of poor people throughout the world would not go to bed each night hungry.