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Davos Dispatch

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By Robert Wright
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

Robert Wright, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

Close Encounters

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Yesterday was "sports day" at the World Economic Forum. On sports day people rise early and congregate at various specified places to participate in their favorite wintertime sports. My favorite wintertime sport is sleeping late, and sitting in a sauna runs it a close second. I pursued them both with zest and went for a swim in between.

At midafternoon, sports day ends and normal forum activities resume. I arrived at the conference center in time to watch Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres take the stage amid warm applause. The ensuing spectacle proved what every real estate agent knows: It's not always productive for two negotiating parties to meet face to face. First Peres got up and delivered a message of hope for a peaceful future. Then Arafat got up and delivered a blistering tirade about unprovoked Israeli aggression. Then Peres asserted that Israel's use of force had not been unprovoked, reiterated his message of hope, and implored Arafat not to use inflammatory language. Then Arafat delivered a tirade that was less blistering than the first one by about 5 percent. And so on.

By the end of the session, Arafat had gotten civil enough to reach over and shake Peres' hand, but everyone I talked to was struck—if not shocked—by Arafat's militancy. And that is the way the story played in the media: Arafat delivers blistering tirade. Arafat couldn't have thought he was making a good impression on the Davos crowd, so I have to assume his rhetoric was designed for Palestinian ears. It's notable that he delivered the initial tirade in Arabic and then, as his tone began to soften a bit, switched to English. This is the opposite of what would seem natural, since the early remarks were prepared and the later ones impromptu.

Arafat's bitterness sometimes bordered on the ingenious. At one point the moderator—Klaus Schwab, who invented the World Economic Forum—asked each speaker to envision a future he'd like to see for a child born today on the other side of the border. After Peres had outlined a hopeful future for Palestinian children, Schwab turned to Arafat and said, "What would be your message of hope to an Israeli child born today?" I thought maybe Arafat had been backed into a corner of upbeatness, but he replied, "I wouldn't want an Israeli child to have to live a single hour of the lives Palestinian children are forced to live."

After Peres and Arafat left the stage, Kofi Annan spoke, touting a "global compact" of social responsibility that he wants businesses to subscribe to. Then four African presidents took the stage and agreed on the need for more aid to Africa. (They outlined a program under which African nations that committed to various kinds of reforms would receive infrastructure and education subsidies from the developed world.)

Somebody at Davos figured out how to get a bunch of CEOs to vie for the opportunity to attend a panel discussion on the international AIDS epidemic: Put Bill Gates on the panel. The event, held this morning, was oversubscribed, so I didn't get in. But trusted sources report on one point that emerged clearly: that the AIDS epidemic in Africa is even more devastating than most press accounts suggest. They always note the astonishing rates of infection, but they almost never note the contagion's surprising demographic bias. Whereas in the United States, heterosexual AIDS is a problem of the poor, in Africa it is a problem of the bourgeois, spread by promiscuous upper-class urban males. So, a continent already crippled by a shortage of well-educated people with modern economic skills is seeing this very category of people decimated. Actually, "decimate"—which literally means to kill one out of 10—isn't nearly strong enough a word. (As for what Gates is doing on an AIDS panel: Two days earlier, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had announced in the press room here the award of a $100 million challenge grant to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.)

This afternoon I was on my final panel, which was about the psychological and social effects of communications technology. It was fairly well attended, given the number of alternative sessions with sexier topics and bigger names, including one in which Esther Dyson and Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle discussed "Tomorrow's Internet," and one in which Freeman Dyson and Sun's Bill Joy discussed Joy's fears of the planet getting overrun by designer microbes or bossy robots.

After the session, in another demonstration of the networking skills that I've put to such good use here in Davos, I sidled up to our moderator, the chairman and CEO of garage.com. Breaking the ice with some small talk, I noted that his company advertises on Slate. He begged to differ. I persisted. After all, I'm an authority on Slate! It turned out I was getting garage.com (a venture capital firm) mixed up with driveway.com (which provides online storage space, or something like that).

I decided I had done enough networking for the day. I headed to the Executive Lounge and cranked up my notebook computer.

Within a few minutes, in walked Lori Wallach, whom I criticized harshly in an earlier Davos dispatch, and Jeremy Rifkin, whom I haughtily dismissed in another one. As noted above, I had already decided that I'd done enough networking for the day, so I didn't go out of my way to make eye contact. After awhile, I headed back to my hotel. Tomorrow I get on my Swissair flight (business class!—courtesy of the World Economic Forum) and compose the long-awaited finale in this series, tentatively titled "Reflections on the Meaning of Davos."

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By Robert Wright
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

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Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv and the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and, most recently, The Evolution of God.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

CEOs to the cameras for phony Q&As, everyone knows the Swiss thing is cheesy old PR. Not one Davos attendee last year told us that the technology stock market was a fraud: not one told us that bankruptcy was a vital contemporary financial tool. Tell us about the hookers, the champagne parties, the guys who get stoned, the pr phonies from the American media who hype the thing. The Swiss tourist crowd sells a few thousand hotel rooms in the worst month of the year--what else is there?

--Nannygoat

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