Message-ID: <970106110115_171518944@emout11.mail.aol.com> Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 11:02:30 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM> Subject: Re: pushing development- To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Kerry,Like you say, we need help.
Who can help us?
You clearly know your work, care about people and the planet, spend your time doing something about the human condition.
For now, accept the possibility that despite our differences and my seeming "arrogance and callousness" and embrace of naked capitalism I too care about the hungry and the sick and the land.
What keeps us all from joining forces, finding our common ground, pushing forward?
Some of the matters that divide us are easy to recognize: many here, perhaps you, find the antiWestern, antiscientist, andtiEnlightenment, antiCartesian account of our disease convincing; I find it the problem, not the solution.
That is: I and others like me will not begin the process of reforming ourselves by accepting our guilt for the state of the world. Period.
We did our best, and accomplished what we accomplished, and failed where we failed, and made mistake after mistake, and so be it. We will not bend the knee and confess our guilt to the self-proclaimed righteous of the world.
We begin there.
Can you work with us without our public confession , contrition, humiliation?
For my part, I have trouble with some of your constructions. Your Gaian temptations, as when you talk about emphatizing with the ore extracted from the "mother" lode. Part of me wants to push away at that kind of romanticism, hard. Or your iteration of the notion that we can and must separate "values" from "hardware" that seems to be to be the heart of a very Grand Generalization that is "endemic" and needs correction.
Where do we find common ground?
One hunch is this: we must simply abandon certain issues, as people have abandoned issues in the past: we no longer spend uch time arguing consubstantian and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
And we might have to learn to avoid the minefield issues.The Ugly American story will not secure the cooperation of this very large and wealthy nation, and the world needs its cooperation. The anticapitalist story as it is commonly told does not play well post Gorbachev.
Is it possible for us to create a new story that we can all accept?
Steve