{"id":5513,"date":"2012-05-20T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2012-05-20T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=5513"},"modified":"2012-06-13T09:46:32","modified_gmt":"2012-06-13T09:46:32","slug":"paradise-lost-and-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=5513","title":{"rendered":"Can global development deliver us a new paradise?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paradise Lost and Found<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Greenbelt<\/em><\/p>\n

83 London Wall, London EC2M 5ND<\/em><\/p>\n

Sunday 20th May 2012<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Can global development deliver us a new paradise?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Paul Vallely<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is not a parable, but a true story (though, of course, it is could be both). It was told to me by Charles Elliott from his time as director of Christian Aid.<\/p>\n

An aid worker went to an African village and asked what the community needed.\u00a0 The elders were asked whether they would like a well, or a school, or a clinic, or latrines.<\/p>\n

After conferring they said: \u201cWe would like a new graveyard\u201d.<\/p>\n

The aid worker was perplexed. \u201cWe don\u2019t do cemeteries,\u201d he replied, \u201cit\u2019s not part of our development brief. Would you like something else?\u201d<\/p>\n

The elders deliberated again and then replied: \u201cNo, if we can\u2019t have a graveyard, we don\u2019t need anything else thanks\u201d.<\/p>\n

Can global development deliver us a new paradise? That depends on what your idea of development \u2013 and paradise \u2013 is.<\/p>\n

The received wisdom about development is that it is the same thing as raising economic productivity. Development is about maximising our personal wealth, freedom and choice. That\u2019s the modern idea of what it means to live a good life<\/em>. It has its roots in the Enlightenment notion that progress is linear \u2013 and that moral and material progress go hand in hand. It assumes that all traditional societies are alike and that progress is only possible if they can be purged of their \u201cprimitive\u201d attitudes.<\/p>\n

Now, we don\u2019t want to be puritan about this. The decade leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis saw extraordinary economic growth which has lifted millions of people out of poverty in countries like China and India.\u00a0 But this growth, which was generally arrested by that international financial crisis, has been accompanied by: greater environmental damage, greater inequality and increased fuel and food instability.<\/p>\n

Worse still, \u00a0the vision it embodies is fundamentally individualist rather than a communal vision. It is thoroughly materialistic and acquisitive. Yet in acquiring more and more stuff we in the West have also acquired overwork, stress, addictive activity, depression, anti-social behaviour and family dislocation. The incessant quest for more \u2013 higher incomes, faster growth \u2013 is robbing us of the good life rather than helping us attain it. Poverty can be spiritual as well as material.<\/p>\n

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So it is worth asking \u2013 before we blithely recommend pulling the world\u2019s poor aboard the escalator of Western material progress \u2013 whether we are offering poor countries what the present Pope calls a \u201creductive vision of the person and his destiny\u201d[i]<\/sup><\/a>. What place do we have \u2013 in practice \u2013 for the spiritual, the cultural and the communal in our vision of paradise.\u00a0 Or as one African bishop put it: \u201cIs that what you think of the Kingdom of God \u2013 that it is a kind of universal Marks and Spencers?\u201d[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Development, like paradise, then, is more than a process of enlarging human choices.<\/p>\n

Notions of what development means have altered according to the times.<\/p>\n

During the Cold War Pope Paul VI declared \u201cDevelopment is the new name for peace[iii]<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0 What had started as aid<\/em> agencies focused on relief<\/em> turned into development<\/em> bodies which famously wanted to teach people to fish rather than doling out handouts of fish to the poor. This was the era when we moved from charity to justice as we realised that poor people are kept in poverty by the very structures of international trade and finance, the structures of sin, as the Liberation theologians called them. Poverty grew from powerlessness.\u00a0 As the next Pope, John Paul II, put it: \u201cObstacles to development have a moral character\u201d[iv]<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Some went further \u2013 and declared that people are poor because the rich are rich. And insisted that would have to change, quoting Mary\u2019s prophetic song:<\/p>\n

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,<\/em><\/p>\n

and has lifted up the lowly;<\/em><\/p>\n

he has filled the hungry with good things,<\/em><\/p>\n

and sent the rich away empty[v]<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

But there was a step beyond justice \u2013 and that was to empowerment and participation. True development allows people the dignity which comes from controlling their own lives. Ultimately that is a question of power. It cannot be a relationship between un<\/em>equals. And we must go beyond co-opting a local elite to into the lifestyles of the West; we must find ways of fostering true development that reaches the poorest.<\/p>\n

Religious people involved in development ought to have an added insight into this. It is not about democracy or rights so much as recognising in others the image of God \u2013 that\u2019s how we truly recognise intrinsic human dignity. Charity and justice both have about them, philosophically and theologically, a touch of a one-way process \u2013 in which we<\/em> give to them<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That is why Dom Helder Camara asked: \u201cCan there be a new international economic<\/em> order without a new international social<\/em> order?\u201d\u00a0 His answer was clear.<\/p>\n

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For development to move us closer to paradise requires us to understand that. The Evangelical Fellowship of India\u2019s Commission on Relief spells out what that means in practice. As one of its staff put it:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we go to a village to drill for water, we do two surveys. We do a socio-economic survey to find out where the poorest and most marginalised people live \u2013 the outcasts or dalits. Then we do the physical survey, to find out where the water is located. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIf the result shows a water source where the dalits live, we drill the well there. That means that the higher-caste women will have to come to this community to get their water. If we drilled it in the high-caste area, they would fence it off and not allow poor people to touch it. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a powerful tool. At first these women are quite upset, but they often begin to see that they have to forget their old prejudices.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Zulu word Ubuntu offers an insight here. It means, as Desmond Tutu puts it, \u201ca person is a person through other persons[vi]<\/a>\u201d. \u201cI am myself because of you\u201d. What is good for me is somehow woven into what is good for others.<\/p>\n

Everyone has something to give into the common life. And, more than that, if one person is prevented from giving, then everyone is poorer. We are impoverished by injustice. It makes us all less human. As John Donne put it: \u201cEach man\u2019s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is what both Aristotle and St Paul meant by koinonia <\/em>\u2013 a real sharing of goods, material and spiritual. For Christians it is there at the heart of the theology of the Trinity. It is about relationship. In development, to quote Rowan Williams, \u201cwe are not trying to solve someone else\u2019s problem but to liberate ourselves<\/em> from a toxic and unjust situation in which we, the prosperous, are less than human[vii]<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

True solidarity flows from that.\u00a0 Sometimes the poor understand this better than the rich. In November 2000 the worst floods for 400 years hit the city of York. TV news flashed footage round the world. Soon after Christian Aid received an envelope stuffed with Mozambique currency and with a request that the money be forwarded to those affected in York. Earlier that year Mozambique had suffered a devastating cyclone that led to widespread loss of life and livelihoods, and the country was the subject of a massive international relief effort.<\/p>\n

The donation was despite that. Or perhaps because of it.<\/p>\n

Wealth by no means equates with well-being. We know that. But to see how big the gap is, consider this:<\/p>\n

A few years ago there was an interesting experiment in which a group of psychologists descended on Slough \u2013 \u201ccome friendly bombs\u201d \u2013 to try to make people there happier. The good folk of Slough were told to do several of these things every day:<\/p>\n