Profile
|
||||||||
| User: | jenkasjournal (5135861) Jenka's journal
travel and thoughts on world affairs |
|||||||
| Name: | world traveller | |||||||
| Location: | Dist. of Columbia, United States | |||||||
| LJ Talk: |
|
|||||||
| Bio: | A Brief Autobiographical Sketch In readings of social, political and economic theory, I have found it very useful to research an author’s biography to get some idea of the context and experience from which they are presenting. Although I try not to judge the author, I like to know where they are coming from. This is especially helpful when I encounter an author whose ideas are particularly appalling to me — Hegel’s ideas on Africans not being human, for example — for I am able to look through the author’s historical and social eyes, limited though those eyes might be, and understand a little bit better why they are saying the things they are saying. And while I hesitate to advocate this as an effective exercise for others, I have a captive audience for the moment and would like to indulge in a small bit of autobiographical storytelling. After attending a Quaker high school, in which I learned about, criticized, and eventually agreed with the pacifist activism of the Quakers, I found myself in a Jesuit university, the alma mater of President Clinton and the home of many would-be future politicians. My first "wake-up call" concerning the myopic, narrow vision of many of the students and professors was during my first month there, when I attended a party and spoke with a student who told me about visiting Mexico and seeing shanty towns there. In sharp contrast to the Quakers of my high school, many of whom were engaging in social action (activities such as setting up schools in the garbage dumps of Guatemala) after graduating, this young man responded to the suffering and poverty of the shanty towns with the all-too Christian idea that "the poor we shall always have with us", and that there was "nothing we could do" about the situation of the poor. This was an idea I was to confront repeatedly during my time at Georgetown. When I left in 1996, many of the students in my class were being groomed for jobs in the "investment banking" industry, but none of the students I spoke to could give me a definition of what "investment banking" actually involved. This ignorance of the purpose and aim of the work one is doing is a theme I will examine in this paper, as it is a common occurrence among financial, economic and corporate functionaries in the machinery of "globalization". During the year I spent in South Africa (1997), I encountered again the idea that "the poor we shall always have with us" from the Christian nuns that ran the school where I worked. One day I was riding with several of these nuns and we came upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever encountered — a minivan had turned over, and there were people strewn all over the road, bleeding, dying. I didn’t know what to do, but thought quickly of how my parents had reacted when there were accidents on our road, and said, "Ok, do we have any blankets? Let’s go." But the sisters were already pulling away from the scene, and as I reached my hand to open the door to get out of the car, the sister who was driving said, "There’s nothing we can do", and quickly sped away. I was screaming inside, but said nothing. For a long time, I felt regret for not shouting "Stop!" and going immediately to the people who were suffering, like I knew in my heart I should have done. But I learned an important lesson about the nuns that day — that they would "help" the poor as long as such "help" did not entail any discomfort for themselves. And I realized that the same was true about the Georgetown students who said that there was "nothing they could do" about the situation of the poor. For as long as they were unwilling to give up their security, comfort and privilege, there was certainly "nothing they could do". This is similar to the idea put forth by Gilbert Rist when he says: Most Christians come to accept the gap between their belief in a world ruled by love of one’s neighbour and the harshness of everyday social relations, so that they are scarcely bothered by the fact that their own practices regularly contradict the values to which they say they adhere. Similarly, most political and economic leaders use ‘development’ as a pretext to convert natural and social relations into commodities, and to widen the gulf between rich and poor, without seeing anything contradictory in what they do. The example I’ve given takes such a presumption even one step further, with an attempt to justify inaction using Christian doctrine with the statement "the poor we shall always have with us." The political, economic and social systems that exist in "developed countries" depend upon violence and the threat of violence to force the subjugation of the poor to the rich. I realized this most clearly when, in 1998, I was invited to an all-day interview to become a foreign service officer. This was the event for which I had been preparing for most of my life. Even as my focus had changed from international politics to the study of non-violent response to conflict, even as I wrote my final thesis on the disparity and racism of the prison system in the U.S., even despite my realization of the profound injustice committed by the Europeans against the Native Americans and Africans, my life had been leading to this point, where I was to become a diplomatic representative of the United States. But as I stepped into the interview room, and was handed the briefs from which I was to prepare, I realized that I was engaging in something far different from a consensus-building discussion between equals (the "Quaker" model). I realized quite clearly, as I read the details of the mock diplomatic session in which I was about to engage, that I was being asked to threaten, cajole and coerce the representatives of another country into submitting to the requirements set forth by the State Department of the U.S.A. I was given a set of instructions, and told that I was to be meeting with diplomats from a country that had a history of human rights abuses. I was to offer them pressure in the form of sanctions, loss of aid and, if they did not acquiesce, I was to threaten them with the use of force. I knew at that moment that I could not represent this country in the way I was being asked to do, and I told the interviewers that I could not, in good conscience, carry out such an exercise. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. I offer this brief autobiographical sketch to illustrate some parts of my journey through the realms of thought that comprise international relations and development theory. The nuns in South Africa represent for me the archetypal "development" practitioners, intent on bringing "western education" to the "underdeveloped" Africans while at the same time unwilling or unable to exercise compassion in a dire emergency. The misunderstanding of the situation of the poor given in my example above with the student’s reaction to the poverty in Mexico complements this attitude with the theoretical (and religious) justification that "there is nothing we can do". What I hope this example has made clear is the connection between the student’s assertion of helplessness with regard to the poor and that same student’s subsequent contribution to the economic system of inequality (through investment banking) that creates wealth for a few at the expense of the poor. | |||||||
| Schools: | None listed | |||||||
| Friends: |
| |||||||
| Friend of: | 14: aadi11, amnormand, incendiaryfs, ioerror, jimmy_dunson, juststeps, lapartera, lookaghost, orange4aks, prince_mab, rev_bri, sogn, thebabbyboon, yakmilk | |||||||
| Account type: | Basic Account | |||||||
