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- THE TROUBLE WITH DEVELOPMENT
HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENTWorld War II left the United States in an unprecedented position of influence over the whole world. The war had left much of Europe in ruins, but the United States enjoyed economic, military and technological supremacy while also claiming a lifestyle that surpassed any nation in the history of the planet. Escobar’s book opens with Harry Truman’s inaugural address as President of the United States on January 20, 1949. “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people… I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life… Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge” (Encountering Development 3). Truman suggested that the United States use its overwhelming influence to improve the standards of living of people world-wide. The intention was to replicate the world in the image of the United States. The discourse began with the assumption that the lifestyle enjoyed by the people of the United States was the model from which all other people should work in creating their own lives. Truman’s Doctrine was immediately and universally accepted by the world’s great powers. Industrialization, agriculture, capitalism, technology, and Westernization were the keys to future prosperity, and no one seemed to doubt them. Why would anyone doubt them? The nations that were most powerful and influential in the world were the ones with these qualities. Nuclear weapons were a status symbol, as was most technology. Economics and capital were making rich nations into richer ones. World War II was a triumph for Western culture backed by a great Western military. It would have been absurd not to believe in the power of the “developed” Western nations. Even communists like in the Soviet Union invented socialist development schemes meant to industrialize other countries so they could join the bloc against the United States and its allies. There were two immediate implications of this. First, nations began to see themselves as “developed” or “undeveloped,” or even “in transition.” The United States’ military and economic superiority was being translated into cultural superiority, and everyone juxtaposed themselves comparatively to the United States as a standard. Second, the triumph of those nations who were developed or developing was seen as inevitable. It was the meaning of progress. Old cultural fixtures were contrary to the ability of developing nations to care for their own peoples. When they were in the way of progress, they were removed or forcibly forgotten. THE TROUBLE WITH DEVELOPMENTDevelopment discourse is a new language of imperialism, a colonialism used to subject other peoples to the West. Escobar quotes Homi Bhabha on this colonialism, saying that colonial discourse “is an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences. Its predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for a “subject peoples” through the production of knowledge in terms of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form of pleasure/unpleasure is incited… The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” (Encountering Development 9). Using discourse of development begins with the assumption that the other is an inferior being because the other is without cellular phones and soda pop. The discourse is racist because it presumes that white-folk must help their less fortunate, less able darker folk. The discourse is imperialist because the “help” that will be imposed on the other is a method of forcing Western culture upon that other. The discourse is Eurocentric because it demands recognition of Western culture as the best and brightest at the cost of other cultures. Development discourse functions to destroy the other in two steps, representation and management. First, the discourse represents the other in a way that makes it inferior. Gustavo Esteva, in The Development Dictionary (1995), writes that development “always implies a favourable change, a step from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from the worse to the better. The word indicates that one is doing well because one is advancing in the sense of a necessary, ineluctable, universal law and toward a desirable goal. The word retains to this day the meaning given to it a century ago by the creator of ecology, Haeckel: `Development is, from this moment on, the magic word with which we will solve all the mysteries that surround us or, at least, that which will guide us toward their solution.' But for two‑thirds of the people on earth, this positive meaning of the word `development' ‑ profoundly rooted after two centuries of its social construction ‑ is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.” The word development alone implies a bettering of something from a condition lower than it was before the developing took place. The developing are represented as inferior, and therefore, in need of our help. Management, the second function of the discourse, is where the physical harm is done. After being represented as inferior and in need of help, people of the Third World are “aided” by world institutions looking to build them to look like their models in the West. Technologies are brought in to simplify and expand production of agriculture, even if older agricultural practices are central to a society’s cultural existence. Nutrition is a concept of the West. Escobar writes that “Discourses of hunger and rural development mediate and organize the constitution of the peasantry as producers or as elements to be displaced in the order of things” (Encountering Development 106). World Bank and IMF planners are brought in to help order peoples and plan their economic and infrastructural developing projects. These managers begin their projects by counting and categorizing things. Categorization is where labeling of problems comes from, and the creation of terms like “malnutrition.” Escobar sees these problems as created by Western managers who saw differences between the Third World and the West and assumed that they must be problems. Solutions to these problems are created by the managers and designed mostly to recreate the Third World in the image of the West. The harm to the environment is one of the first major catastrophes. James Petras, in the March 1999 Journal of Contemporary Asia, writes that “To speak of sustainable growth, while the imperial state, the World Bank and their counterpart globalist investors and politicians promote privatization and pillage is an obscenity: nowhere has privatization been accompanied by conservation, it always has been and is associated with heightened pillage, exhaustion and abandonment of people and lands” (98). Petras raising an interesting point, that development is harmful when it is honestly trying to do good, but it can be even worse when the developers are out to make profits without regard for the people. Robert McCorquodale and Richard Fairbrother, in the March 1999 Human Rights Quarterly, write that “a great deal of the investment arising from globalized economic sources for the purposes of "development" is allocated only to certain types of projects, such as the building of dams, roads, and runways, and the creation of large-scale commercial farms. There is little or no investment in primary health care, safe drinking water, and basic education” (735). The management accompanying the discourse pillages its hosts. The implications of the discourse are devastating. Zygmunt Bauman writes about the terrible consequences. “[H]umanity is divided into two parts. One confronts the challenge of complexity, the other confronts the ancient, terrible challenge of survival. This is perhaps the principal aspect of the failure of the modern project . . .It is not the absence of progress, but on the contrary the development ‑techno‑scientific, artistic, economic, political ‑ which made possible the total wars, totalitarianisms, the widening gap between the riches of the North and poverty of the South, unemployment and the `new poor' . . .Lyotard's conclusion is blunt and damning: `it has become impossible to legitimize development by the promise of the emancipation of humanity in its totality.''' Yet it was exactly that `emancipation' ‑ from want, `low standards of life', paucity of needs, doing what the community has done rather than `being able' to do whatever one may still wish in the future (`able' in excess of present wishes) ‑ that loomed vaguely behind Harry Truman's 1947 declaration of war on `underdevelopment'. Since then, unspeakable sufferings have been visited upon the extant `earth economies' of the world in the name of happiness, identified now with the `developed', that is modern, way of life. Their delicately balanced livelihood which could not survive the condemnation of simplicity, frugality, acceptance of human limits and respect for non‑human forms of life, now lies in ruin, yet no viable, locally realistic alternative is in sight. The victims of `development' ‑ the true Giddensian juggernaut which crushes everything and everybody that happens to stand in its way ‑ `shunned by the advanced sector and cut off from the old ways . . . are expatriates in their own countries.'" Wherever the juggernaut has passed, know‑how vanishes, to be replaced by a dearth of skills; commodified labour appears where men and women once lived; tradition becomes an awkward ballast and a costly burden; common utilities turn into underused resources, wisdom into prejudice, wise men into bearers of superstitions.” (Life In Fragments: Essays In Postmodern Morality 22-33) Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! 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