Message-ID: <2.2.32.19981228195858.006d2170@pop.ben2.ucla.edu> Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1998 11:58:58 -0800 From: Maureen Silos <mailto:msilos@UCLA.EDU> Subject: Re: LIFE IN REVERSE To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
Hi,I am relatively new to this list and have been following the discussion between Wilbur and Jay with some amusement. I don't understand Wilbur's insistence that Jay proves that his postings are relevant to "International Development," unless Wilbur's definition of international development is very narrow.
The following two quotes from Jay are especially poignant I think, and go to the heart of the matter. I am interested in these issues as a Caribbean social scientist (I am from Surinam, a former Dutch colony) who studies the internationalization of the ideology of the market through economics education. One of the more important issues that social scientists/economists are not very well equipped to understand is precisely what Jay says: "To change society one must change individual men and women." Moreover, we have to have a vision of what we want to become.
People who believe that, with the advent of industrial democratic society especially in its US form, mankind has reached the end of history, of course have no need to rethink the fundamental assumptions of the current social formation and the ways in which it reproducres itself. But being from a formerly colonized country, I have an inherent suspicion of claims that Europe or the US are the most superior models for social formation on this planet. As a postcolonial I am very aware of the mechanisms of IDEOLOGY, and thus not very impressed with the authority of sciences that support the ideology of market capitalism.
>
>To change society one must also change individual men and women. Man must be
>ontologically reconstructed and redeemed as Homo economicus. What is
>redemption if not the passage from one state to another, from darkness to
>light? The virtues of the New Economic Man, whose dwelling place is the
>market, are the will and the capacity to accumulate, to follow self-interest
>and to maximize profit in all things. His wants are unlimited; to satisfy
>them, he must learn to struggle against his fellows. Scarcity is a fact of
>life. There is not enough to satisfy the unlimited desires of all nor to
>provide a place in the sun for everyone. If unemployment in their country is
>twenty per cent or more, the New Men and Women will pit themselves against
>each other to find work at any price, at all costs.
>
>
>If such endless growth is supposed to lead to an American or European
>middle-class standard of living for over five billion people today and who
>knows how many tomorrow, we already know this to be an ecological and
>biospheric impossibility, even assuming tremendous and rapid changes in
>technology. The Bank refuses to confront this last of all last things -- not
>merely individual or societal death but the possibility of species
>extinction, including that of the human species. Incantations like
>"sustainable development" stave off the moment when the finite must at last
>be faced.
>
I have a question for Wilbur? Are the people who worry about the environment wrong? Is it okay for us to do more of what we are doing in terms of the ideology of unbridled economic growth as the basis for happiness and wellness? Am I crazy to think that if people in the Caribbean do not begin to rethink the definition of development, they will be contributing to their extinction? Am I wrong to think that the narrow materialistic and reductionistic definition of development does violence to the complexities of human beings? After all, we have more needs than only material ones. We also have emotional needs (e.g. the need to be touched, to love and be loved), mental needs (e.g. need for intersubjective communication, status, free thinking), and spiritual needs (e.g. experience of transcendence and nonduality). In my opinion, all of these needs have to be taken into account when we envison what a developed society might look like. Material wealth then becomes just a small part of the whole package.
It is time that this list begins to look at those issues, and I appreciate Jay's attempts at rocking the boat.
Maureen
________________________________________________ Maureen Silos, Ph.D. UCLA, Center for African American Studies phone: 310/825-7403(work); 310/450-4659 (home) fax: 310/825-5019