Newt World Order
by Clay Risen

In 1937, Czech author Karel Capek published his masterpiece dystopian novel, War with the Newts. The story concerns humanity's discovery of a race of hyper-intelligent, oversized newts, which man subsequently exploits as low-wage labor.

Though the use of newts dramatically improves the world economy, the animals soon develop their own civilization, and in the end rise up against their human oppressors. The revolt does not come as a surprise, either — the world knows it's in trouble, but in typical Capekian irony it is so bound up in its own economic glory that it refuses to save itself. Acting against the newts would throw the world into economic disarray, a price too high for Capek's narrow-minded world leaders.

Capek's book was long held as an anti-fascist manifesto by the Communist Czech government; in the West many interpreted it as a warning against colonialist oppression. But, as Czech author Victor Klima points out, neither interpretation is sufficient. Rather, Capek was concerned that:

The world was witnessing increasing confrontation between classes, nations, and systems ... its chief effect was to obscure the human side of every problem; conflicts and issues were elevated to an impersonal level governed by power, strength, and abstract interests, where man was not responsible for his behavior or actions, and even less for the fate of society.

For Capek, the real tragedy of mankind was not war, famine, ideologies or even really big amphibians, but rather its blind acceptance of the course of history, its failure to realize that ideas, economies and governments in the end depend on the people that support them.

Fast forward to last week's WTO protests in Seattle.

Thousands march demanding the WTO focus on labor and environmental issues. They are met with tear gas and rubber bullets, but also calm assurances that the WTO and its brand of global trade are protecting the world from war, famine and economic depression, arguments which in their pat black-and-whiteness are eerily reminescent of the newt-using governments in Capek's novel.

Indeed, the real danger behind the WTO is not its lack of environmental or labor protection, but rather the logic that WTO supporters employ in its defense — that there is no other way, that world trade is an inevitable, uncontrollable process. They paint free trade as an either-or issue; for example, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in the New York Times: "Unless we convince developing countries that globalization really does benefit them, the backlash against it will become irresistable that would be a tragedy for the developing world."

Annan, of course, missed the entire point of the Seattle protests. They were not against free trade, but rather a particular type of free trade, one without controls, one without worker protection or environmental standards. But for Annan and others (for instance, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman), free trade is a juggernaut that we can only hope to affect, but never control, and as a result the two sides in Seattle might as well have been ships passing in the night.

If he were alive today, Capek would tell us that it is all to easy, and all too wrong, to assume that WTO supporters are merely stooges of multinational corporations, willing to lie through their teeth to defend big business.

Rather, the problem is more complex, and possibly more dire: It lies not in the policies but in the logic behind them. It is the logic that buys into economic structures as something extra-human, something we must serve instead of harnessing it to serve us. In this light, Annan's statement sounds almost like a warning to the mortals, telling us not to disturb the gods of free trade lest they destroy us.

Hundreds of years ago, Adam Smith saw the emerging world capitalism as a boon for mankind, a system that we could control and use to better the lives of all of us, much like Capek's newts. However, he and others since him also saw capitalism's ugly side, its all-consuming structure that forces everything into black-and-white, consume-or-die questions, until even life itself becomes a matter of economic efficiency.

The protests in Seattle were a warning not against all free trade but against this kind of free trade, and if we don't listen we could end up like Capek's humans at the end of his novel — cowering under the glare of our own creation, no longer able to do anything about it.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.