Message-ID: <970106131322_613409060@emout05.mail.aol.com> Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 13:40:07 -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>
In a message dated 97-01-06 12:41:23 EST, mailto:bdiamond@mind.net (B. Diamond) writes:<< We don't force capitalism down their throats: that is your construal of > reality.
<<We make loans that must be repaid, we thus force cultures beyond subsistance and into generating a surplus.>>
I see. The indigenous choose capitalism freely, and need loans, and we make them, and that cycle is forcing capitalism down their throats. Yes indeed.
>The truth is much worse, Brett: as soon as they learn about
> capitalism they choose it. The only ones who prefer that they remain
> untouched by the market are Western intellectuals like you and their
> indigenous allies, usually indigenous intellectuals.
<<Now here's an intersting argument, "indigenous intellectuals." I would assume by "intellectual" that you mean educated, and perhaps once educated, these "indigenous intellectuals" are able to see through the smoke and mirrors of capitalism and realize that the long-term consequences of such capitalism will ultimately destroy their culutre, not enhance it as promised by the "preachers." Don't you just hate it when people become smart enough to realize that the emperor really isn't wearing any clothes? >>
It isn't working out quite that way, Brett.
The indigenous intellectuals who make your arguments are typically Western-educated or influenced Marxists, devoted and dedicated, who are able to gain influence and power for a while. In the case of the former Soviet Union, for a long while. Then, eventually, the people realize what has happened as a result of their influence: they will not allow them to rule any longer, the Gorbachevs appear, and the people are allowed to choose again.
And they choose the market and the consumer society. Sorry about that--I truly am--but that's freedom, I guess.
The emperor of the marketplace is indeed in deep trouble, at home and abroad, as you correctly point out.
He is not , however, in complete disarray, as is your emperor of socialism, who is in flight everywhere in the world, and completely discredited. The Marxist story of The Ugly American is often good politics, and gets applause and laughter and sometimes votes--but as soon as they can the people want to come here, not to a socialist Utopia, or they want their own opportunities to get jeans, and Hollywood movies, and burgers. Again, sorry about that, but that's democracy. And you're not going to be able, any more than the communists were able, to extinguish the hunger for the consumer society that you criticize. Still sorry about that, but apparently one real universal is the desire for levis and rock music. A hunger deeper than the hunger for swidden agriculture.
I think I came to epiphany on that hunger in Kenya, waiting to go television with my message of appropriate technology, and watching Desi and Lucy talking Swahili.
The world needs, I believe, to soften and humanize the market economy and ethos without destroying its dynamism, and this means finding ways to build into our society and the world many of the ideals that motivated socialism, as well as finding ways from our own ethical and religious traditions to infuse our lives and ways with compassion and caring.
Believing that we can learn to do this by studying societies whose institutions and technologies are radically and irrecoverably different from ur own will only delay the process of rehabilitating our own institutions.
I do not believe that we can learn from a cashless society how to become a cashless society. I do not believe we can learn from an indigenous culture how to deal with the sickeness of our own urban ghettos.
I believe that pretending that we can is a dangerous illusion that serves to distract us from the work of reconstructing our own troubled society. And it is even worse when we use a mythic version of such a culture as a mask for the fiction of The Ugly American and The Noble Indigenous.
Your story is not playing well around the world. And it does not play well at home.
Steve Eskow