Intersectionality — Navigating The Mother Of All Crossroads

Where-Do-We-Go-From-Here?

[On July 2nd 2020, Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, submitted his final report ‘The Parlous State of Poverty Eradication’ to the Human Rights Council]

Trouble used to come in threes — a bit like buses, according to my statistician friends. They would endlessly quote some revered French mathematician whose probability distribution theory always sounded to me to be a bit fishy. But it now seems that Monsieur Siméon Poisson was way off the mark. To arrive at the mother of all cross-roads you can take at least six troubled routes.

Few navigators have a satellite view of this intersection but are traveling their chosen path to eventually join hosts of weary pilgrims with no obvious way through, or indeed back, for any of them.

This intersection cannot be avoided.

It is an unholy tangle — a virtually unpickable knot that must be tackled if we and our planet are to survive premature collapse. This is the ultimate point of education; the mission that we bequeath to our grandchildren. They’ll surely need much more than pivot tables and matrix algebra. They’ll need first to understand how we all got here.

To quote Philip Alston:

“The world is at an existential crossroads involving:

a pandemic,

a deep economic recession,

devastating climate change,

extreme inequality,

and an uprising against racist policies.

Running through all of these challenges is the longstanding neglect of extreme poverty by many governments, economists, and human rights advocates.”

Oh, Bugger — or, more politely, Where-Do-We-Go-From-Here?

Your primer is an easy read — just 19 pages. To get the full flavour of the task ahead you’ll also need to explore each of the 144 references. Only then will you realise the scale and diversity of the multi-stream, multi-State, multi-institutional efforts that’ll need to be assembled, prioritised and coordinated.

You may find some very useful clues in the report’s footnotes. Students will, for example, find it helpful to research references to Kate Raworth and her doughnut labs. Search also for Jason Hickel; part of what may one-day be called The Great Untangling will be a fresh approach to the metrics, particularly for Sustainable Development.

Did I mention the budget? TGU will be way beyond philanthropic resources — and anyway, Philip Alston would caution against such funding for fear of distorted motivations. Even the UN’s much-lauded Sustainable Development Goals must be in this melting pot. And only then can the head-knocking, the cat-herding, the truth-and-reconciliation-commissioning, processes begin.

Extreme Poverty is a political choice and few can hope for any resolutions in our lifetime.

This is a job for Cathedral Builders — our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

Forget flying to Mars. Untangling this intersection is existential — so we had better crack on with it.

Good luck to the grandchildren — and sorry we left you with this mess.