US farmers and Burma's junta have something in common: a deep fear of change, writes Tony Kinsella
CHANGE OFTEN achieves the confusing trick of being simultaneously amorphous and complex, difficult to define yet having clear, often unimagined, impacts on our realities.
When the Stephensons bolted a steam engine to a chassis back in 1829 they were far too focused on winning a business contract to harbour dreams of launching a global railway age.
A mere 17 years ago Tim Berners-Lee launched the worldwide web on August 6th, 1991, from the European CERN research facility. Even today he struggles to quantify just how much vaster the impact of that invention has been than anything the then 36-year-old publicly-employed British computer scientist was capable of imagining.
Humans, individually and collectively, tend to embrace those aspects of change they find most useful. Change, however, is not an a la carte menu where you are free to exclusively choose the bits you like. It is something you have to address and process comprehensively.
Anniversaries, with the powerful amplification 20/20 hindsight affords them, serve to illustrate this common human dilemma. October 4th, 1957, is one of many crucial dates in our histories.
Just before 7.30pm, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 from Baikonur.
It was only a primitive football-sized radio transmitter propelled into a low-earth orbit by what was essentially an intercontinental ballistic missile. Yet there was a clear before-and-after Sputnik.
Our species had taken its first hesitant step beyond the confines of its planet, something our ancestors had never done. We would soon be presented with the now familiar images of our blue-white planet floating magically against the black background of space.
Our ancestors' horizons had been their villages and valleys, ours had become our often newly-minted nations. Now we had to face the challenge of thinking in planetary terms.
It is a challenge we have yet to master, but the Soviet Union no longer exists, Baikonur is now in Kazakhstan and Russian engineers are busily building their new launching pad in French Guyana - in close co-operation with the European Space Agency.
On the same day, half a planet away, the unremarkable Gateway City, a modified second World War Liberty ship, had slipped her moorings from Port Newark, New Jersey, outward bound for Miami and thence Houston. No smashing champagne bottles or exploding fireworks marked her sailing, yet she was a harbinger of change as profound as the Soviet satellite streaking through the Atlantic skies overhead.
In her holds and on her decks she carried 226 rectangular steel boxes fitted with doors and lifting points. Malcom McLean, a 44-year-old ex-trucker from Maxton, North Carolina had just transformed our planet's economy with his invention of the shipping container. The thousands of years of men trudging ant-like on and off vessels carrying amphorae, baskets, sacks and boxes which had marked human commerce since the Phoenicians and before had now ended.
Producers could now fill containers which would then be transported by road and rail to the nearest deep-sea port. Those ports no longer needed swarms of heavily-burdened and often casually employed dockers, nor even warehouses as the containers protected their contents from the elements. Container vessels can be loaded in hours rather than days.
Modern vessels, carrying up to 10,000 containers each, now ply the world's oceans. Those vessels and the steel boxes they carry have slashed transport times and costs to a degree that was simply unimaginable before October 1957.
The emergence of global markets, the booming Asian economies from Japan to China and Vietnam via Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, would all have been impossible without shipping containers filled with clothes, computers, toys, and goods of literally all sorts.
On the morning of Malcom McLean's funeral in May 2001, container vessels the world over sounded their sirens in tribute to, in the words of Forbes magazine, "one of the few men who changed the world".
The workings of the planet we inhabit have radically changed in the half-century since the converted Gateway City put to sea and Sputnik blazed across the heavens.
They continue to change before our very eyes, but many prefer not to look.
The civic activism the Burmese junta so feared in the wake of Cyclone Nargis is slowly emerging under the auspices of ASEAN, Chinese and Indian co-ordination, and nibbling away at the regime's base, long after the British, French and US naval vessels sailed for home. The transition towards a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe is being quietly negotiated under the auspices of South Africa and the Southern African Development Community, despite, rather than because of, the impotent bluster from London and elsewhere.
An historically-blind US administration has compounded the failure of what will hopefully be the planet's last colonial adventure in Iraq by derailing global trade talks in order to preserve the $1 billion subsidised privileges of 12,000 Republican-leaning US rice-producing corporations.
Those around Senator McCain with their blinkered visions of a planet essentially operated by, and for, white industrialised nations are locked into a vanished past.
The importance they accord to traditional military power, including useless nuclear weapons, is complemented only by those who, in subscribing to a similar analysis reject any mutualisation of our security.
We live in a different and more complex world. One where the centres of economic power have dispersed across the globe, one where crises management must now be collectively undertaken in their local neighbourhood.
Those on the bottom of the dockers' pecking order got the nastiest jobs such as unloading grain ships. They tied strips of cloth around their feet to protect them from the cutting edges of the sharp husks, thus earning themselves the title of "toe rags".
The "toe rags" of history must not be allowed to hobble our uncertain steps into the future - as Malcom McLean has shown us.