Power and Saints: Conflict over the means of production in the charity industry.

Power and Saints: Conflict over the means of production in the charity industry. I am reading Allan W. Eckert’s “Wilderness Empire”. This seminal account of the Iroquois League demonstrates how little things change with the passing of fashion and technology. The same conflict between justice and rent seeking we find in the mission and development field today existed in the vast wilderness of North America as Catholic orders and European kingdoms wrestled for wealth and power. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac's writing, below, explains the conflict between the Jesuits, Recollet friars, and the priests of the Missions Estrangeres concerning his plan to build a fort along the strait – or detroit, as it was termed – which separated Lake Huron from Lake Erie. This plan would bring civil administration into a region largely administered by the church and would “civilize” and “educate” the Indians, including efforts especially focused on teaching them to speak the French language. Cadillac wrote: “It is essential that in this matter of teaching the Indians our language the missionaries should act in good faith, and that His Majesty should have the goodness to impose his strictest orders upon them; for which there are several good reasons. The first and most stringent is that when members of religious orders or other ecclesiastics undertake anything, they never let it go. The second is that by not teaching French to the Indians they make themselves necessary [as interpreters] to the King and Governor. The third is that if all Indians spoke French, all kinds of ecclesiastics would be able to instruct them. This might cause them [the Jesuits] to lose some of the presents they get; for though these Reverend Fathers come here only for the glory of God, yet the one thing does not prevent the other. Nobody can deny that the priests own three-quarters of Canada. From St. Paul’s Bay to Quebec, here is nothing but the seigneury of Beauport that belongs to a private person. All the rest, which is the greater part, belongs to the Jesuits or other ecclesiastics. The Upper Town of Quebec is composed of six or seven superb palaces belonging to Hospital Nuns, Ursulines, Jesuits, Recolletes, Seminary priests, and the bishop. There may be some forty private houses, and even these pay rent to the ecclesiastics, which shows that the one thing does not prevent the other. One may as well knock one’s head against a wall as hope to convert the Indians in any other way [then that of civilizing them]; for thus far all the fruits of the missions consist in the baptism of infants who die before reaching the age of reason”. What I find striking is this notion of rent seeking and the conflict between benefiting targeted communities and meeting rather less sanctified needs that mission and development practitioners frequently experience. Even more alarming is the perpetuation of a state of dependency and subjection in the power relationship. Cadillac is demonstrating this internal contradiction of the mission and development industry; If target communities are empowered, converted or otherwise transformed, than the source of income is diminished. This is especially relevant in the mission and development field because the excesses are not as regulated or reported as in other spheres of society. There is an adage in the developing world that generals and preachers never go hungry. Working in the developing world, it is eye opening to see the modern financial kingdoms created by Central American Protestant families that control the levers of power for North/South Exchanges. Even more alarming is the wave of North American retirees moving to exotic, comfortable locals as modern day missionaries to spread the word and donated shoes, frequently taking up shop in tourist destinations where neither the need nor danger is great. This is not to mask the considerable sacrifices and struggles of the faith-based and development communities seeking justice and empowerment for communities marginalized by the powers of the day. Rather, understanding the historical examples of rent seeking by church hierarchies provides a needed historical context for establishing direct and transformational practices in mission and development.

Pesky Details

I was recently at a convention of free enterprise educators, and I attended a thought-provoking presentation concerning the free cities movement, and the possibility that Honduras will be listed in history as an innovator of this libertarian dream.

The concept of free cities includes the creation if something akin to city states where people can freely choose the type of legal framework under which they wish to exist. Of interest to transnational capital, it can also choose which regulations govern the labor relations, environmental impact, taxation, and ownership requirements.

The idea is to stimulate a competitive environment to enable competing models of social organization to flourish or fail, depending on the perceived value or quality of life offered. So in theory, a person could choose to live in a monarchy, an anarcho-syndicalist collective, a Moaist collective, or a free enterprise, right-to-work city on the hill.

A simple example given by the panelists concerned construction investment in Mexico. A company and worker could choose to enter into an agreement based on Mexican law, law that makes it extremely difficult to fire employees, or under Texan law, which, well, let’s just say anything just short of lynching is seen as acceptable in labor relations.

The idea behind free cities is that it will eliminate the drag of government rent-seekers or parasites from siphoning off productive capital, as well as providing investors with attractive environments which will produce economic growth that raises all ships. In theory, workers will flock to these Meccas of economic development and states will be able to provide social services from the windfall of rational uses of local resources.

While ideas that offer the potential to diminish the considerable drag of state corruption and rent-seeking needs to be applauded, the fact that capital is free to move, yet labor’s movement continues to be restricted does not permit the appropriate conditions for such ideas to be considered Libertarian, Democratic, or free enterprise. While capital is free to move, if developing world nationals do not share in that freedom as they search for best employment, investment, or business opportunity, then you do not have the actual freedom of choice on which the system is based. Rather, you have marginalized groups of labor whose only recourse to defend basic economic interest continues to be fragmented, leaving them at the mercy of the bottom line.

Furthermore, a cause of great concern with the advancement of these ideas is the component of international arbitration to settle disputes concerning agreements that are considered to be unalterable by the nation states. The planners of the free city movement intend to enter into contracts which are linked to international agreements, thereby reinforcing agreements with international law. The proponents of the free city movement propose that this is ethical and democratic because they are entering into agreements with the dually elected representatives, while insisting, in the case of Honduras for example, that the last coup d’état, which removed a democratically elected president, was not a coup d’état because he was a really crazy guy who needed to be removed.

This (logic) is demonstrative of what Dr. Joan Bach refers to as Salami Politics. Salami Politics state that everything left of center is chopped off and what’s left is a rather bloody mix that no one really wants to digest. Cuba has the most respected elections in the world- no one doubts the mechanisms of Cuban elections. However, there are very few people who consider the Cuban process to be democratic. As Florida can easily demonstrate, elections a democracy do not make. Therefore, it is rather disingenuous to describe contracts rendered through negotiations with the political elite of nation states which can hardly be considered democratic, as legitimate instruments to lock into perpetuity land and labor resources.

The libertarian vision of competition is great, and I would love to see the current proponents of the free city movement condition agreements with clauses that facilitate people from participating nation states to have the freedom of movement to any other city or nation state, as well as include provisions which take into consideration the enforceability of contracts signed by dually elected representatives produced under undemocratic condition.

The Health of Nations

After a recent visit to the family physician in which I learned that my blood pressure has crept to a dangerously high level, I’ve jumped feet-first into the quarry of healthy living.

One thought that keeps occurring to me as I work to live in the world of vegan diet and increased exercise is just how crazy it is that we pay to make ourselves sick. On a recent trip to Guatemala, I noticed an alarming increase in the number of youth smoking and was very disappointed to witness the explosive growth of McDonald’s and other fast food chains. While there, I was studying possible solutions to the increasing water crisis provoked by mining and the desire to support the economic growth of manufacturing sectors outside of the region. Looking at things like the astronomical profits of mining companies that destroy not only mountains but people’s lives and thousands of years of cultural heritage, and the purveyors of pharmaceutical companies that engage in Machiavellian maneuvers to limit the public’s awareness of natural remedies, it truly challenges one’s belief in humanity that doing wrong is so profitable, while struggling to do good is so monumentally more difficult.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, evil is seen as something that is delicious, beautiful, and desirable. In many Native American cultures, that which can be conceived of as evil is engaging in behavior that is out of balance. It is interesting to note that while money isn’t evil, people will do evil things to obtain it. Something that I have learned from working in the highlands is that words mean much less than actions. Frequently we are criticized by faith-based groups for not being loud enough, while secularly minded folks feel that we are too much compromised by our individual faiths.

In our work, we find that if only we organized projects to support the status quo, realized programming to benefit private interests, or enabled people to feel good while avoiding sticky ethical issues of social justice, we could be financially well remunerated. I believe this really gets at our struggle in the 21st century- How do we recapitalize the social capital that is diminished in the pursuit of the material success that has become the new religion?

For me, it’s listening to my Grandmothers. Of all those I have heard, none are wiser, more centered, and more well-adjusted than they.

Carcinogenic Development

I remember hearing a talk in college given by an indigenous leader whose name escapes me. He spoke about the arrogance of North American academics, missionaries, and scientists believing in the materialist Western world view as being both the apex of human intellectual development and the shining path to human prosperity.  With a missionary zeal, North Americans promote their way of life through medical missions, education, and military intervention.

            It is rather obvious that if someone is going to “sell” a way of life, then it should be healthy, sustainable, viable, and optimal.  Before one asks an indigenous culture that has successfully sustained large populations for centuries to ditch their world view, agricultural technologies, and diet for the American McLifestyle, one had better first ask some introspective questions.  One, does this indigenous population have an army ready to obtain the petroleum necessary for everything from pesticides to tableware to throw pillows?  Is this a sustainable way of life, both ecologically and socially, and does the system require too many “have nots” to incentivize success?  Does the work ethic lead to dysfunctional families, neglected children, and abandoned elders?  Is the medicine more damaging than then the illness?

            An issue that frequently confuses the matter is a rather colonial view of either negating all traditional knowledge as being “unscientific” or imagining there is a perfect past.

            What we endeavor to accomplish as the Highland Support Project is an honest examination of indigenous knowledge and practices to find those which provide a promise for better lives for all of humanity.  It is a tricky balance between over romanticizing an idealized path and becoming a Luddite who instinctively resists good ideas.  This is where reflection, reason, and aesthetic play a significant role in the process of program design and development.  We do believe that there is a role for ingenuity, inquisitiveness, and tinkering in the process of observation, quantification, and validation.

Over the years I’ve had interesting conversations with fellows in academia who bemoan the current state of affairs in which they are only able to obtain funding for research that they do not believe in and have to self-censor their public statements and writing in order to keep from alienating their university’s funding sources.  It can be tempting to compare your progress in relation to other entities that use development strategies that prove to be more lucrative.  Therefore, we return to that cardinal principle of economic development- small is beautiful.  Do not compromise beauty for growth.

Recollections of Things to Come

This morning I was reading team reviews from the Summer 2010 Partners in Service program and I found a couple of comments to be rather illuminating. They demonstrated a significant obstacle faced by indigenous nations in obtaining a meaningful part in contemporary political, philosophical, and academic discussions. One comment bemoaned the mixed messages delivered by HSP between “preserving Mayan culture and trying to bring progress to the Highlands.” So, the subliminal message to this dichotomy is that indigenous culture is primitive, backwards, and antiquated. Actually, one of the greatest struggles faced within indigenous communities is the internalization of this very message—that their culture is the cause of their poverty. That is to say that Westerners have a romanticized and erroneous view of indigenous culture. First, to believe that indigenous culture is to be dirt poor, living on the side of a mountain in a shack, unable to provide for the nutritional needs of a family, and existing in complete ignorance of natural cycles and causes of illness. The problem with this colonial worldview is that it is both factually off base and that it also impedes an introspective process for industrial Western societies to find their way back to a healthy and harmonious lifestyle.

In the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas, written by Charles C. Mann and published in 1995, 1491 is not as much a story of the year itself as it is a story of what the Americas were like before Europeans arrived. As the book’s Amazon review observes, “The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.” In regards to the cultures predating European arrival, the same review writes of Mann’s work, “But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before.” As Mann says, to judge indigenous culture by what was found in the years immediately following initial contact is comparable to judging European Jewish culture through the pathetic living conditions of Auschwitz survivors in Eastern Europe in 1945. What is important to understand is that indigenous cultures have very valuable understandings of science, philosophy, spirituality, metaphysics, and aesthetics. To assume that being ignorant and superstitious is synonymous with an indigenous worldview is to not realize the colonial blinders that are inhibiting an honest assessment of past and potential contributions of indigenous culture.

Another antidote concerns a time when we had a Mayan priest conduct a ceremony and had a participant complain that it would have been more authentic had the shaman not worn a cell phone on his belt. It’s interesting to contemplate that it was this shaman’s ancestral profession that independently came up with the concept of zero—something pretty dawgon important in computer operating systems, and, more notably, cell phone operating systems.

Mayan languages describe different periods of times as frequencies as well as contemplate variances in solar radiation—things that took Western societies hundreds, if not thousands, of years to understand and utilize. Therefore, one could look at Western observers at the Mayan ceremony and smile that their primitive and war-like societies have finally been able to harness powers that cannot be seen, touched, or dissected.

Global Consensus and a Unifying Vision: A 21st Century Solution to Materialism, Individualism, and Selfishness

I read a book a few years ago called The Story of B by Daniel Quinn. It emphasized the fact that vision is far more important that any particular theory, policy prescription, or program. It made me think--we could talk at length using development jargon, but unless we have some unifying vision, then all programming is really just window dressing. For the 21st century, the critical issue is just that—a lack of unifying vision or mythology.

This is especially true in relation to our existence on this planet. Historically, religion has played a social role by promoting values and norms that enable societies to function without tearing apart internally. Whether we are talking about a village shaman or the Pope, one function of religion is to provide moral instruction. Over the last century, however, one dominant vision has taken hold—a cancerous, myopic sense of materialism and selfishness. We even have a school of thought where greed is actually good. Traditionally, the role of religion was to balance out societies by recapitalizing social capital that was depleted by the drives of self-interest. Yet we have shifted away from this, towards a doctrine of individualism and materialism.

So what does the formation of this unifying vision require us to do? First of all, it asks us to be tolerant. It requires us to possess a sense of shared belonging to the same tribe as well as an understanding that religions are cultural processes. They are much like languages—different tribes and regions developed different languages, but the information being communicated was universal.

Therefore, to create global consensus and tackle the environmental, ecological, and political crises facing humanity, we need to move beyond literal understandings of ancient text and begin to forge a unifying vision based on the meaning rather than the narrative.

The Road Most Taken: LeBron James and the Individualist Construct

Listening to the fiasco of the televised “Decision” of LeBron James to play in Miami and the ensuing debate concerning the virtues of his choice provides a fascinating opportunity to dissect the philosophical strands that comprise the tapestry of contemporary American thought. There are two schools of thought in judging his choice to leave his hometown club in the backwaters of Ohio for the brighter lights and sultry nights of South Beach.

On the one hand, there are a number of people who question the virtue of LeBron’s decision to abandon both his hometown and his team for his own pursuit of wealth, fame, and status. The opposing view, dominant outside of Ohio, is that LeBron made a rational and moral choice because he was looking after his own best interest, which, in the end, represents the true American way.

Now, what I find interesting is how this discussion reflects the evolution of the philosophical and spiritual constructs of modern America. A significant difference between the religious practices of indigenous nations and modern Christianity is that, for tribal peoples, one’s relationship with the divinity is as a community, not as an individual. Contemporary North American theology, in contrast, talks a great deal about personal salvation and one’s relationship with God. Because many view LeBron’s decision as a “sinful” act, it is fruitful to look at different views of sin.

We can understand sin in a Christian sense—something a person does which goes against their culture’s understanding of God’s will or community law. Native spirituality, however, is practically void of any concept of sin. Instead, what is viewed as important is the maintenance of the tribe; the survival of the group. Therefore, there is no abstract, intellectual process to assess the value of an act. If it hurts the tribe or disrupts the harmony, it is bad. Furthermore, in a tribal society, one does not achieve for personal glory, but rather to further the interest of the group. Skills, abilities, and talents are deemed worthy only to the extent that they propel forward the lives of the entire collective nation.

What I find most fascinating with my interactions with communities that still maintain the tribal worldview is that one’s own life only has meaning within the context of their relationships with others in the community. In the indigenous cultures of the Southwestern United States, there are a number of rite of passage ceremonies for females that provide insight into the acculturation and socialization process of a tribal worldview. In one ritual, a young woman, just after her first menstruation, will have a weeklong initiation ceremony in which she is sequestered from the community for four days. She will walk for an entire day in one direction of the compass points, then return back to prepare an immense loaf of bread made from corn. She engages in a very laborious act to prepare sufficient bread to feed everyone in the community that entails many days of baking over a hardwood fire. During this time, different community members bring gifts of ceremonial attire and accouterments. When it’s time for the feast, she will emerge clothed entirely in these gifts—a symbolic showing of how her identity is drawn from membership in the community. She feeds the community while not consuming a single crumb for herself, again underlining the teaching that she exists not to further herself, but to benefit the community.

It is difficult to assess that LeBron’s actions were immoral when the dominant theology of the United States preaches individualism and personal salvation. Philosophically, it’s interesting to question whether commentators who applauded LeBron’s narcissistic choice would then encourage him to play for the Chinese national team if they were able to entice him before the next Olympics.

What I’m getting at here is the sense of group—because the U.S. is one constructed largely of immigrants, because very few people have ties to a community, and because many nuclear families split to live in different regions—there are no strong kinship, tribal, or clan affiliations with a place. This is relevant for development studies because we frequently witness the same dynamic. On the one hand, you have North American faith groups who believe they are furthering God’s will by preaching a gospel of narcissism and self-absorption. Then, you have development agencies promoting a survivalist economic agenda that fosters competition versus collaboration. We frequently see nurses, doctors, and community organizers who abandon their communities after receiving a subsidized education that was intended to enable them to serve their people. There are also community leaders who increasingly manipulate the system for their own benefit rather than the transformation of their group. This underscores the significance of civic virtue, cultural context, and moral instruction in the transformational development approach.

To criticize LeBron James’s decisions is to criticize the American way, the Protestant Church, and the capitalist economy. When we travel to foreign lands to engage in a transformational process, we must be prepared to leave behind arrogant notions of cultural superiority. We must be prepared to reflect on our own value systems and not impose dysfunction in the guise of progress.