Message-ID: <970105094317_1756629590@emout01.mail.aol.com> Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 09:43:18 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM> Subject: Re: pushing development--or pushing the status quo? To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Kerry,I find your message refreshingly free of the cant of the anticapitalists and full of useful hints and insights.
<< Whether we are _inevitably_ in the business of destruction is beside the point - which is that we _may_ be, and yet fail to appear *to the beneficiaries* to be aware of the possibility. >>
Are any "change agents"--teachers, therapists, communicators, facilitators--unaware that often ignorance is bliss, and that change is often (always?) pain?
Often the language we use, our metaphors, mask the pain from the "change agents" as well those who are changing: we call it "development", not "destruction," for example.
<<If change agents had just a modicum of orientation to this, they could work to communicate some of the ambiguity of development. >>
How should that work? Do we tell the leaders of the community that if we teach them to read they will inevitably read things which will begin to undermine the solidarity of the community? That they will develop new wants that will led to new ways that will further undo the old ways?
Can you really communicate to the illiterate how the individual and group consciousness will be changed by literacy before the change occurs, so that they are properly warned as to the consequences of literacy, ad can choose whether to go forward or remain unlettered?
<<Then at the very least, when disillusionment sets in, we have more defense than, "But it wasn't supposed to happen that way">>
For me these words have a powerful insight.
Perhaps we must tell ourselves first, and all of the development community:
It is supposed to happen that way.
There is no other way.
No matter how hard you try to respect and preserve the local culture, your very presence alters the culture you work in irrevocably, and the skills and technology you bring, no matter how modest, how intermediate, how appropriate will set off a chain reaction that you can not control.
(Perhaps the training of anthropoligists, for example, should include knowledge of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, so that they learn that their very presence with cameras and recorders changes the local culture in ways that that they can not control.)
The only way to avoid personal responsibility for participating in cultural destruction is to stay out of the development business.
<<-- and we may discover that the remaining fragments of cultural integrity will serve to help host and client (that is, 'donor') work *together* to rebuild the rest (which of course, would be an integrated synthesis of old ways and new). >>
Of course: capitalism with an Asian face; modernism with an African face; Westernism with a Latin American face.
But of course Asian factories and work forces consume resources and pollute just as much as ours do.
<<Wouldn't it be just the most amazing outcome if we all discovered that 'destruction' -- any more than 'progress' -- was not the end of the world? >>
Yes indeed. Not only is it not the end of the world, but if it is the inevitable price of development we will stopping wasting our energies preaching against it and try to figure out how to minimize it, how to accomodate it, how to live with it, how to make it part of our work.
Thanks so much for the insights.
Steve Eskow
Dr. Steve Eskow, President The Electronic University Network 288 Stone Island Road Enterprise, FL 32725 407.321.8770;Fax:407.321.4861 January 5, 1997