| A series of lectures given by Howard Richards at the University of Baroda, Gujarat State, India, in August and September of 1995 | This third lecture is about planning, but I want to begin it by introducing one more new idea about evaluation. Planning and evaluation are closely related. The main difference is that we usually plan actions before we do them, and evaluate actions after we do them. The usual model is:
First one plans an activity, project, or program; then one carries out the process of action according to the intentions formulated in the plan; then one evaluates what has happened, using the results of the evaluation to improve future planning and action. A slightly more elaborate model is:
In this slightly more elaborate model, basic research leads to an understanding of a cultural and ecological system, and of the cause and effect relationships that are at work in it. In the light of basic research, some deliberate intervention in the system is planned. The intervention takes the form of action. The evaluation is in principle continuous during the action, and it is itself a form of research. Thus evaluation contributes to the ongoing action, to the planning process, and to humanity's store of basic knowledge. Constructive development is transformative action. It consists of thousands of grassroots projects in many places, together with networking and large scale actions, which will bring about the transformation of the basic structure of the global economy. I have been saying that to evaluate transformative action it is necessary to measure the post-economic component of a project. One would, perhaps, see no need to measure the post-economic component, and no need to encourage the growth of post-economic norms as part of the project, if one did not see a need to transform the basic structure. We do see a need to transform the basic structure, and this vision informs our everyday actions. The transformation aims not to eliminate the usual economic incentives but to embed them in a context of social values. Economics needs to be, as the Notre Dame economists Charles Wilber and Ken Jameson have written "embedded" in social relations. (Wilber and Jameson follow the historian Karl Polanyi, who expressed the findings of his research into the origins of modernity by writing that at the beginning of the modern age the economy became "dis-embedded" from its context in social relations, so that the economy became an independent power with a tendency to take over and govern everything else; Wilber and Jameson propose to "re-embed" the economy.) The basic structure we are trying to re-embed, in other words to transform, is quintessentially economic: exchange for money. It follows that in evaluating our actions we should measure their posteconomic component. As I said in the last lecture, in evaluating a project it is often convenient to identify the post-economic with desirable cooperative activity that is not work for wages or business for profit. The one new idea I want to introduce now is to suggest that a more profound way of thinking about the transition to a post-economic perspective is to say that it is a shift in how we think about mobilizing resources to meet needs. Instead of thinking first about the need, and then about how to meet it; we think first about the resource, and then about how to use it to meet needs. Economics, Michel Foucault says somewhere, begins with desire, and therefore it inevitably leads to conflict. Without trying here to discuss why Foucault said this, or to what extent it is true, we can note that to have a desire is similar to having a need - indeed Spinoza defined desire as consciousness of need - and we can suggest a parallel proposition, which is: a post-economic perspective begins with offering a resource for use, and it leads to cooperation. The shift from a focus on the need to a focus on the resource can be compared to the reversal of perspective that Jean Piaget has demonstrated in the cognitive development of children. If children are given the task of putting blocks in a box, they are unable to fit all the blocks into the box as long as they focus on the blocks. If instead they focus on using all the available space, making sure it is filled before putting in another block, they are able to complete the task and fill the box in such a way that all the blocks fit into it. Another way to conceive the shift from a focus on the need to a focus on the resource, is to look at it in Gandhi's terms, as a shift to a focus on means, as distinct from ends. As Gandhi emphasized, means become ends. Alternatively, it can be looked at as waste-minimizing, as distinct from profit-maximizing. We can say that our current economic system has had enormous success in finding ways to produce goods and services that are "efficient" when judged by the standard of the economic bottom line, but which must be evaluated as enormously inefficient when judged by an ecological standard of minimizing waste. For example, in assessing homelessness, we might do well to shift our attention at least some of the time away from counting the homeless people on the street, and to measure instead how many square feet in abandoned and underutilized buildings are wasted. For another example, a recent study by Baljit Kaur and her colleagues concerning Halbi-speaking youth in Topakal, Bastar district, India, reported, "Preadolescents and adolescents generally spent their time talking and idling." And, "Boys, on the whole, spent a lot of time wandering around the village with no apparent aim in mind." Concerning these young people, one might ask how to find resources to meet their needs, but one might also regard their vital energy as a resource, and ask how they could find good uses for it. Now that I have made my suggestion about evaluation, I am ready to talk about planning. I have already said that planning and evaluation are closely related, and my one new point about evaluation provides an example. In evaluating a project we should ask how well it used resources; in particular we should ask how well it took advantage of unexpected opportunities. For example, consider a project designed to help young male convicts adjust to life outside prison. The project might unexpectedly find that a few months after it begins, there is suddenly a new popular television series, which provides good and attractive role models for young males. If the project participants are watching the television series anyway, the project should seize the opportunity to use themes borrowed from it. The tendency to take this sort of serendipity into account in evaluations coincides with the post-economic question, "How can we use this resource to meet a need?" Planning, as the preceding point shows, needs to take into account the fact that not everything can or should be planned. In working for cultural transformation we are working to a large extent with factors we do not control, and our aim is not to achieve more control; it is to make people more responsible and more autonomous. In extending the idea of planning - which is prototypically applied to architectural and engineering projects - to cultural transformation, I do not want to criticize or try to improve on the many good planning techniques that already exist, such as the critical path method, backward chaining, Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), input-output models, and many more. I want rather to improve the planning process by suggesting an approach to what often turns out to be the weak spot in any attempt to plan anything: namely, changing people's behavior. Planners are already pretty good at planning the construction of a new airport, or designing a high tension line that will transport huge quantities of electricity; or writing budgets and schedules for a program that will launch a new space satellite. Planning for cultural transformation requires different techniques, which complement technical planning; and which achieve the changes in human norms that technical planning notoriously fails to achieve, and often does not even attempt. Systematic planning to change cultural structures should focus on changing group norms - without overlooking the need to change individuals, beginning with ourselves. I would like to take a few minutes to explain why this proposition - that group norms should be the focus of planning cultural action to change cultural structures - is true. When we think of changing behavior we often think of education; indeed education is sometimes defined as learning new and desirable forms of behavior. Most people are familiar with education as it takes place in schools, where it is often an attempt to instill knowledge and skill in an individual. First the student takes a test to find out how much she or he knows. Then the teacher provides instruction, and the student studies. Then there is another test to see how much the student learned. We can conceive of a parallel process for changing group values. First there is an anthropological study to find out what the values of the group are. Next there is a planning process, which can be thought of as a search for growth points. The growth point is a point where cultural action can be a catalyst that will help the culture to change for the better in a way that it is already inclined to change. Then cultural action projects nurture the growth points to transform the values of the group. Then there is a participatory process of evaluation which assesses whether constructive transformation has in fact happened. The reason why such a process should be the focus of our planning is that most human behavior is conventional. That is to say, most people most of the time behave normally, according to what is considered normal behavior in their culture, and more specifically among the people they come into contact with every day in their family, work place, and leisure time activities. As John Dewey pointed out in Human Nature and Conduct most people most of the time follow habit and routine, doing the usual things in the usual ways, and usually most people are only motivated to make changes when they face a problem. The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire is the great pioneer of cultural action, and he sometimes calls his method "problem-posing pedagogy." His focus on "problems" connects with Dewey and with the concept of culture as a set of conventional instructions which guide conduct. Conduct is normally guided by conventions; for this reason we speak of cultural "norms." To change conduct what we need to change is norms, and to change norms what we need to do is pose problems. I hope these words of explanation have helped you to see why I believe that group norms should be the focus of planning for constructive development. Now I would like to outline for you the rudiments of a four-part planning model that I have derived mostly from cultural action work in South America. I believe that it can be generalized as a general model of how to go about planning cultural change. It can be looked upon as a method for identifying "growth points," that is to say, points in the culture where constructive change is already happening, which we can raise to consciousness with a problem-posing method, encourage, extend, and nurture. I must admit that I am mixing my metaphors. I was talking about "construction" and now I am talking about "growth." I have been putting a lot of stress on "construction." I agree with Kant that neither peace nor justice is a natural state for humanity, and that if we want to bring peace and justice about we have to construct them. Now I am changing my metaphor and talking about "growth," which suggests relying on natural processes; growth happens, while construction is something humans do; growth happens at night while we are asleep in gardens that we cultivate by day; construction happens in workshops where we do the building. The advantage of the construction metaphor is that it emphasizes that nature is just the material we have to work with; culture is something we have to make, to build. The advantage of the growth metaphor is that it emphasizes how little control we have over the process; we need to create favorable conditions, as a mother creates favorable conditions for the growth of her child. Both metaphors are true. The four steps of the cultural action planning model can be identified with: (1) Themes, (2) Energies, (3) Transformations, and (4) Structures. I will divide my following remarks into four parts, one on each of the four steps (Themes, Energies, Transformations, Structures). I think it will be best to start each part with examples, and then to build up from the examples to articulate the general concept. About themes.For my first example of working with themes, I would like to draw on the work of the previously mentioned Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire. Freire first developed his cultural action methods in what he called "Culture Circles" whose members were poor peasants, and in some cases urban slum dwellers, in North East Brazil. He was expelled from Brazil when a military dictatorship was established there in 1964, and he continued his work in Chile, where he and his team worked mostly with peasants, who had never owned land, who were being prepared and trained to become landowners under the Chilean agrarian reform law. I will focus on his work in Chile because I have little knowledge of his work in Brazil. Freire emphasized that technical training would not be enough to make successful farmers of people who had been, and whose ancestors had been, oppressed landless laborers for many generations. A change of mentality was also necessary. There had to be an educational process that would provide practice in being free persons. An adult education program with an emphasis on practicing freedom required, on Freire's analysis, "taking one's word," because, in a sense, the poor and landless had never had words. All the "real" words had belonged to the overseers, the professionals, the owners, the bankers. To become responsible citizens practicing mutual solidarity, the peasants had first to recover their culture, and their capacity to create culture; they had to affirm themselves as real people with something to say and communicate. Part of Freire's method for accomplishing his transformative aims is called "codification of the thematic universe." This is where the concept of "themes" comes in. An interdisciplinary team would help the peasants to write down systematically (codify) the meaningful elements of their lived world (the themes). For example, in one of the land reform areas where Freire worked in Chile, a farm called "El Recurso," a major theme was "theft." The peasants were talking about theft, thieves, and robberies; it was on everyone's mind; it was an issue. People who employed Freire's method would sometimes keep a file of small cards in the sort of small box often used for keeping recipes, in which the main themes of a farm or a neighborhood were noted, sometimes grouped by areas, such as: work, family, health, politics, religion.... If you know the themes of a culture (or of that smaller unit sometimes called a "cultural scene"), then you know how to communicate in ways that are meaningful to the people. You could go there, and talk to the people (or perhaps gesture, or sing, or play music, or dress or wear your hair in a certain way) and you would be understood. For another example of finding themes that can be used in constructive development I would like to refer to the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka. The name "Sarvodaya Shramadana" comes from two Sinhalese words, sarvodaya which means "the awakening of all," and shramadana which refers to a collective work project, or, more abstractly, to sharing human energy. Sarvodaya is a grassroots development movement which inspires cooperation among villagers and small farmers by picking up and extending themes from the Buddhist religion. Somewhat similarly, Mahatma Gandhi used themes from the Hindu religion, and Martin Luther King, Jr. used themes from the Christian religion. (If we accept Emile Durkheim's characterization of religion as the original matrix of human thought, then we would have to say that all cultural reform movements work with themes that are in an important sense religious, even those that are not always overtly identified with a religious creed, such as feminist and ecological movements.) Among the words which express themes from the Sinhalese-speaking Buddhist culture of Sri Lanka used in the Sarvodaya movement are:
The general idea of working with themes is that the themes are the meaningful elements that guide conduct through culture, somewhat as the information stored in DNA is the meaningful element that gives instructions for the growth of living tissues. The first step that must be taken to change cultural structures is to learn how to participate in them; one has to be able to connect with people not just on a physical level, or on a quasi-physical level such as carrots and sticks, rewards and threats, but on a meaningful level. One must relate to people in ways they understand, and to do that one must, in Freire's terms, codify their thematic universe. About energies.Examples of energies are sex and violence, the famous duo so manifest, so decried, and so persistently pervasive in popular entertainment. In this respect Sigmund Freud commented that the mass of humanity has never reconciled itself to the sacrifice of primitive desires required by civilization, and has always viewed the sublimated forms of emotion acquired through culture with cynicism and derision. It should not be surprising that sex is a potent source of energy in human conduct. For hundreds of thousands of years - for millions if one considers our species' more remote ancestors - the gene pool has been selected by reproductive success. Those who reproduce pass on their genes to the next generation, while the genetic information in the DNA of those who do not reproduce is lost to the universe, never to reappear. Consequently sexual desire, viewed as a mechanism tending to lead to reproduction, must be one of the most deep-seated of the instincts of the human, or of any species which has survived up until now. Recognizing that sex is important is not, however, to say that we really understand what it is or how it works. It may well be that Freud was mistaken in viewing sex as essentially what he called the vita sexualis normalis, i.e. heterosexual copulation leading to childbirth, and in viewing anything different from it (such as homosexuality, birth control, abstinence, or masturbation) as deviant and likely to produce neuroses. It may well be that Nancy Tanner is right in viewing the erotic as the quintessentially human social emotion, whose main function is not to induce copulation but to induce bonding. She points out that the human, unlike most other animals, does not have a mating season characterized by estrus (heat) but rather a constant attraction at all seasons, which tends to bind the males to the company of the females and the children, and which has genetic survival value because it fuels with vital energy the cooperation needed to keep the children alive until they are old enough to reproduce. In general it is a characteristic of what I call "energies" that human knowledge at the present time only dimly perceives their mechanisms, and that in principle research will never discover immutable laws for their functioning - because they are constantly being re-interpreted and reformed by culture. For an example of the latter point - that energies do not function according to immutable laws because they never appear untouched by culture, but always change their direction as culture reinterprets them - one can consider the institution of marriage. Marriage can be the framework in which couples find a safe haven from the storms of dangerous passions and sublimate sexuality as romantic love; marriage can also be perceived as a prison enslaving women and men. Or it can be perceived, in general or in the case of one particular marriage, in myriad other ways. In any case, the cultural interpretation provides a lens through which physiological arousal states are perceived, and the consequence is that energy is redirected. As Rom Harre puts it, the causal powers of the socially constructed entity called "marriage" change when its interpretation changes. It should not be surprising either that violence continually fascinates humans, especially but not entirely males. It is common among animals for combat among males to determine which males impregnate females, and therefore which genetic line is continued. Most mammals are "tournament species" where fighting precedes mating by the winners, and humans are mammals. In addition to determining access to women, success in fighting has often determined among our near and distant ancestors two other prerequisites for carrying forward into the next generation the genetic information stored in one's body: access to food, and survival when attacked. It would be very surprising if humans (especially males) were not genetically programmed with strong inclinations to fight, and if it were not so it would be very difficult to explain how we came into existence. In addition, we have direct chemical evidence that humans (especially males starting at puberty) have in their bloodstreams testosterone and other hormones that foster aggressive behavior. And further: it is not difficult to interpret many of the things that most humans do every day - such as business and sports - as participation in socially constructed realities which draw their heat and passion from the aggressive instincts. (The biological capacity for violence, like that for sex, is protean, ductile, and capable of endless and astonishing cultural elaboration; it can become, for example, the drive to enforce law and order, in oneself as well as in others; it can fuel a will to master the emotions that is vigilant to root out the devil wherever that tempter may appear, and which leads, among other things, to extremely peaceful and disciplined conduct.) There are other major "energies" besides sex and violence. I find that a good way to get insights into the energy that might be channeled to fuel cultural transformation is to watch television commercials. They sometimes cost the advertiser as much as a million dollars a minute. Market mechanisms can be relied on to make sure that the commercials appeal to powerful and reliable human emotions. If they did not, the people spending money on them would be out of business. My observations and those of others find that in addition to sex and violence television commercials often appeal to fear, nostalgia, and patriotism. That advertisers can bank on fear is no surprise. That they can also bank on nostalgia and patriotism calls for comment. The brain physiologist Paul MacLean in The Triune Brain provides reasons why it is logical to expect nostalgia to be a major human emotion. The word "triune" refers to three functional systems of the brain, which correspond to three epochs of evolution. The oldest system, which tends to be associated with the brain stem at the top of the spine and the brain areas buried deepest inside the skull, is one we largely share with our distant relatives the reptiles, the birds, and the fish. The other two brain systems are newer, and they correspond, respectively, to brain functions we share with mammals, and to the characteristically human enlarged neo-cortex, located just under the skull. The deepest, most ancient, and most reptilian layer appears to govern automatic and highly stereotyped behavior, which repeats itself with little variation or versatility, doing the same thing, following the same paths. MacLean finds in this evolutionarily and physically very basic tendency to follow routine a source of the human love of the familiar. MacLean also finds the sense of smell, on which most of our animal relatives rely for guidance more than we do, to be especially associated with seeking the familiar - which accords with the observation of Marcel Proust, the greatest of the chroniclers of nostalgia, that odors, more than anything else, evoked for him the days of his childhood. Patriotism, on the other hand, cannot possibly be a great emotion deeply rooted in the genetic coding of the human species because the nation-state, its object, has only existed for a few centuries. Most historians date the beginning of the nation-state from the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which established Holland as an independent republic, occupying a certain territory identified as the territory inhabited by certain people, its citizens. Since the geographic division of the world into territories occupied by nations is so new, patriotism as a passion must be regarded as a recent form of some strong set of emotions which must, considered generically, be as ancient as it is powerful, but which must have expressed itself differently in different ages. It may be that individual members of the human species have an innate desire to feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. It may be that we have been selected by evolution to have a great capacity for loyalty; and the sources of the love of loyalty may also be the sources of hatred of disloyalty. The questions about what exactly is fueling the feelings we name as patriotic serve to make a general point about what I am calling "energies." We do not know how to name them. In principle, they do not have correct names. Unlike themes, which are what they are and mean what they mean because they are conventional, "energies" are brute nature. Aided by chemistry, by behavioral biology, by brain physiology, by the theory of evolution, by our own experience, by psychology, by literature - aided by whatever will aid us - we seek to gain "insight" into the energy that moves us. We walk down the streets of a modern city, with words running through our minds taken from English or some other human language, all the while conscious that in our blood and in our hormones there are relics of our distant ancestors, which exist still in our bodies, which touch off feelings and reactions, but which are more ancient than English, more ancient than algebra, more ancient than any human language, and which represent a reality which - as Jacques Lacan says - resists symbolization absolutely. Consequently it is not possible to name all the energies - although I cannot resist the temptation to name one more: the play energy of children, which I will discuss in the fourth lecture - nor is it possible to say that one has found the correct and valid name for any single energy, nor is it possible to prove that one has correctly marked the boundary where one energy leaves off and another energy begins. We must be resolutely empirical. Energy encounters us. It is where we find it. At a certain point when you are dancing, at the moment when the party "gets going," when the artist is carried away by her creation, at a certain point when the craftsman warms to his task, when the spirit seizes at once the preacher and the congregation, when the home team ties the score and the fans go wild, at a certain point in scrubbing the floor when the scrubber becomes determined to rub out every last spot, at the political rally where everyone holds hands and sings "We Shall Overcome" together - at such moments people get "into it." This indispensable colloquial phrase "into it" signals that action has ceased to be just deliberate and conventional; the parts of the body below the brain, down the spinal column and all the way down to the soles of the feet, have become engaged, and energy flows. I experience personal energy responses every day, for example as I walk along a sidewalk down the street of a high-tech contemporary city, with my body loaded - as is everyone else's body - with ancient and mysterious low-tech response tendencies. I react in ways I do not fully understand to every sight and sound. My personal experience is mirrored on a larger scale in the entertainment industry's constant search for new but ancient exciting feelings that will fascinate the public. MTV, for example, the global television channel for youth, can be viewed as an advance into the past. Its performers invent images and sounds that touch off ancient feelings and reactions; we do not know what distant precursor of homo sapiens first acquired any given tendency to respond, nor how that tendency became encoded in our bodies; we do experience a feeling in our body in the present - without knowing its precise cause. The symbolic process of MTV is similar to the more traditional symbolic processes of the great mythic dramas and religions that have for many centuries moved humanity to delight and to tears. Both provide exciting conscious experiences, fueled by unconscious impulses. As Carl Jung wrote, "...every vital form of religion organizes one or the other primitive tendency in its ceremonials or its ethics, thereby securing for itself those secret instinctive forces that conduce to the perfecting of human nature in the religious process." The contemporary popular culture manufactured by the entertainment industry is, however, different in two crucial respects: first, because it operates with the aid of today's science and technology; and second because its ultimate goal, the ultimate measure of its success or failure, is profit. Thus, as Frederic Jameson puts it, the global economy conquers and exploits the last frontier: the unconscious mind. We should be all the more concerned, then, as cultural activists seeking peace, justice, and constructive development, to improve our insights into the flow of psychic energy in our civilization. We need to be conscientious and diligent in our attempts to help culture to make better use of the raw material biology gives it to work with. About transformation.To speak of cultural transformation is to speak of a cultural form, which can be changed to become another form. I will begin with a large-scale example; the idea of "chains of equivalence" as applied by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe point out that political equality, in the sense of equal treatment by the law and each person getting one and only one vote in elections, is for the most part an accepted ideal today. This ideal can be extended to equality of educational and economic opportunity. It can also be extended to gender equality, and to equal rights within the family and the household. In this way "chains of equivalence" can be established, so that a cultural form already in existence, the ideal of equality, can be extended and radicalized until society is transformed by it. Laclau and Mouffe work with "equality," which is an important theme in contemporary culture. Moreover, it is a theme that lends itself to transformation. It is a theme cultural activists can work with. Its very logic - like the logic of a DNA chain that lends itself to variation by substituting one molecule for another - allows for extension (from political equality to economic and gender equality). Its very logic exposes contradictions in the culture, since people ask, "If we are equal in theory, why are we not equal in practice?" In Paulo Freire's terminology, "equality" is transformative because it represents:
Equality is thus what the Chilean cultural activist Jorge Zuleta calls a "tema aprovechable," a usable theme. Other usable themes can be taken from bookkeeping and accounting, "the language of business." For example, "audit" can be transformed to be "energy audit." In doing energy audits, ecologists measure, for example, the energy that goes into a particular farm using a particular mix of agricultural technologies; they compare the energy inputs with the energy-content of the food the farm produces; they track how energy is spent along the way. Another theme, "the bottom line" is transformed in an energy audit by being defined in terms of physical reality - instead of being defined in terms of the conventional bookkeeping unit, the national currency. Similarly, the theme of "balance sheet" can be transformed into a "social balance sheet." With a social balance sheet a firm can assess how well it is achieving such aspects of its mission as creating jobs, contributing to basic research, sponsoring the arts, and meeting the spiritual and emotional needs of its employees. In searching for transformative themes during the planning and implementation of a project among Spanish-speaking peasants in the south of Chile, the theme carino stood out. Carino is a term which can be roughly translated into English as "affection" or "warmth." It lent itself to transformation in contexts suggested by such phrases as, "Children ought to be treated with carino." This was an attractive idea, and also one that posed a problem and a challenge for parents, because it was not always the case that children were treated with carino. Carino served, too, by the extension of uses of the term already familiar to the peasants, as a name for the animating spirit that gave energy and mystique to the project; people would say, "Our community center is a good one because there is a lot of carino there." Father Patricio Cariola, a Jesuit priest who heads the organization that sponsored the project, commented, "Carino is the wealth of the poor; it is what the poor have to give." About structure.I hope that you are understanding that what I want to say is that by following the four steps of the planning model I am outlining we can find growth points. And I want to say that by nurturing growth points we can overcome the immense structural obstacles which - in the world as it is presently organized - frustrate mobilizing resources to meet needs. Knowing their themes enables us to relate to people in a meaningful way. Energy motivates. Ideas and practices that lend themselves to transformation pose challenges that are problems, but at the same time they are opportunities to acquire a capacity to function at a higher ethical level. But the most important thing I want to convey is the importance of acting with structure in mind. I am assuming that the question you are asking is, "Seeing that the world is as it is, with all its poverty and environmental degradation, How can I help?" I assume that as I give examples of constructive development activities all of them strike you as good ideas. It is a good idea to do energy audits. It is a good idea to write social balance sheets. It is a good idea to facilitate discussions of parenting among Latin American peasants. It is a good idea to organize political rallies where people hold hands and sing "We Shall Overcome" together. It is a good idea to work for gender equality, and for economic equality. It is a good idea to help young ex-prisoners cope successfully with life outside prison. It is a good idea to form farming cooperatives among Buddhist peasants in Sri Lanka. All of these and many more are excellent ideas; they are things somebody should do; perhaps things you or I should do. What I mainly want to say is that in selecting which good ideas to support with our time, money, energy, and influence we should think globally and think structurally. There are many good things to do; only some of them are growth points. I believe that most of the good ideas I have just mentioned are growth points that connect with the larger aims of constructive development; but we cannot judge that they are growth points without first assessing whether they change the basic structure. A growth point is a transformative theme that attracts energy and makes a structural difference. I will not repeat what I have already said about how to identify a project that makes a structural difference. To distinguish between those activities that contribute to overcoming the basic structural constraints that cement poverty in place, and those that only treat the symptoms without reaching the deep causes, is to evaluate for constructive development. I have suggested criteria in my previous lecture, and in the first few minutes of this lecture. In summary: it is to evaluate whether the project builds grassroots empowerment and post-economic norms. In planning activities for constructive development we should ask ourselves whether, when the time comes to evaluate what we have done, we will be able to say that we have contributed to changing the basic structure of the global economy.
Notes and ReferencesCharles Wilber and Kenneth Jameson say that economies have always been embedded in a total social system, and only faulty analysis has obscured this fact. An Inquiry into the Poverty of Economics. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983, p. 238. They propose a moral context for economics based on principles of stewardship, jubilee (self-esteem, fellowship, redressing of inequalities), and subsidiarity (freedom and equality of opportunity). They transform the concept of Karl Polanyi, who had characterized the emergence of the modern capitalist economy as a "disembedding" of the economy from social relations. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Although Karl Marx analyzed exchange value, the commodity fetish, and commodity circulation, he did not regard exchange for money as the basic structure of the capitalist economy. For Marx, exchange took place on the surface of the economy, while its deeper structure was that of exploitation of the working class by the owners of the means of production. Compare Chapter IV of Volume One of his Capital (various editions) with Chapter VII. Nancy Hartsock adopts Marx's model and both analyzes exchange as a model for understanding society, and the level of production which according to her and to Marx is deeper and more significant in her Money Sex and Power. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983. Marx followed Ricardo in this respect. "... after Ricardo, the possibility of exchange is based upon labour; and henceforth the theory of production must always precede that of circulation." Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970. p. 254. Marx presupposes that in the exchange relationship the worker is at a disadvantage, having nothing to sell but his labor-power. Adam Smith, on the other hand, predicted that workers would in the future be at an advantage in exchange, because due to the equipment and savings accumulated over many generations capital would be plentiful, while labor would be scarce. See his Wealth of Nations New York: E. P. Dutton, 1954 (first published 1776). I consider that both Marx and Smith were mistaken because in our society the advance of capital (its exchange as investment in wages, raw materials, or whatever is needed to get productive activity going) is the condition precedent without which productive activity does not usually happen. The worker is usually at a disadvantage, not so much because he is in a social class which inherits the role of earlier subordinate classes, but because his supply of daily goods depends on the productive activity that employs him going forward - but in that respect the rest of society is held hostage to the exchange process too, since even those who do not work for a living depend on the productive capacity of society being set in motion. In the scenario envisioned by Smith the worker would be at an advantage, but that scenario never happens for the same reason - because the condition precedent for productive activity happening is the exchange of money for goods whose peculiar characteristic is that they are goods that will produce more money; investors have to be motivated by the belief that more accumulation or profit is on its way; hence long before labor is scarce and capital is plentiful there is stagnation, a capital strike, a recession or a depression. "Planning" for development in the 20th century has generally taken place against the backdrop of the cultural structures in place, without any pretense of being able to do anything to change them. See. e.g. Chakravarty, Sukhamoy, Development Planning: The Indian Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. The leading question has been how much to leave to the characteristic quasi-natural social reality of the modern age, i.e. the market economy, and how much and what kind of intervention there should be by another quasi-natural social reality of the modern age, i.e. the nation-state. But both economy and state are embedded in an older and more comprehensive social reality: culture. "Planning" for development has been the alternative to laissez faire, the cure prescribed for market failure. "The basic idea of economic planning is that the state should take an active, indeed the decisive, role in the economy." Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama. New York: Pantheon, 1971. p. 131. Following Freire and Gramsci I am saying that humanity needs to plan cures for a deeper kind of failure: cultural failure. "Culture, therefore, not economics, technology, or politics, is the primordial dimension in development." Denis Goulet, The Cruel Choice. New York: Atheneum, 1971. p. 272. Marx might have modified his view that "circulation" is a relatively superficial level of social analysis (treated in the Second Volume of Capital, after the deeper analysis at the level of class relationships in production, taken to be necessary to understand and explain it, has been set forth in the First Volume) if he had been able to read the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and the Annales historians, which show how the growth of trade destroyed the old empires and created the new world-system. See works by Fernand Braudel cited in the notes to the first lecture, and those by Immanuel Wallerstein also cited there. I would say that if one were to select one factor as the independent variable which tends to explain the rest of modern history, it should be the spread of exchange relationships around the globe. For example, Ariel Dorfman hit the nail on the head when he commented on the puzzlement of a native South American who could see no reason why in 1879 soldiers from the central Argentine government suddenly came and drove his ancestors off the lands his tribe had occupied for centuries: "The reason is, in fact, quite simple. They came because by then Argentina was producing goods for export to foreign markets - and a lot of Indian land was there for the taking." Ariel Dorfman, "Into Another Jungle: The Final Journey of the Matacos?" Grassroots Development, vol. 12 (1988), pp. 2-15. The disintegration of traditional values in a world built by exchange value has been lamented by Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978; and by Hilaire Belloc, in The Servile State. London: T. N. Foulis, 1913; and in The Crisis of Civilization. New York: Fordham University Press, 1937. In the third chapter of Discipline and Punish, New York: Pantheon, 1977, Michel Foucault shows his conflict-oriented view of economics. What he calls "the disciplinary society" masks economic and political power (just as Marx said) with the ideology of the free market; conflict and the exercise of power are nonetheless fundamental and pervasive, and for that reason factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals have all come to resemble prisons. I have not been able to locate the place where Foucault says economics leads to conflict because it is rooted in need. For Spinoza's definition of desire as consciousness of need see his Ethics (various editions). Here as elsewhere Spinoza's psychology, like David Hume's, is a dynamics of the soul which tries to apply the methods of Galileo and Newton to the study of the passions; I am suggesting that social transformation should rely on a different view, i.e. that emotions are cultural interpretations of physiological arousal states, and therefore can be socially reconstructed. For the experiments where children are shown to be able to put all the blocks in a box only after changing their mental structures, see Jean Piaget, The Child's Conception of Space. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956. There is a section on Gandhi's view of the relationship of means to ends in the UNESCO selection from his writings, Gandhi, M. K., All Men are Brothers. Paris: UNESCO, 1958. The quotations from Baljit Kaur et al's study of Halbi youth are from pages 19 and 55 of Baljit Kaur, Kalindi Limdi, Mamta Rozario, and Payal Maheshwari, A Follow Up Study of Children of Bastar. Baroda, India: Faculty of Home Science, M.S. University of Baroda, 1992. For discussions of how to put underemployed labor power to work from traditional planning perspectives, see S. A. Marglin, Value and Price in the Labour Surplus Economy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; W. A. Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth. Homewood, Illinois: Irwin, 1955; Nurkse, R. Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1922. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (Myra Bergman Ramos, translator). New York: Seabury Press, 1970. "Codification of the thematic universe" is mentioned at pp. 76-77, but it is an idea so woven into Freire's thinking that one should probably read the whole book to get a sense of how he employs the concept. Its significance here is that it is a starting point for planning for cultural change, somewhat as measuring the terrain would be a starting point for planning an engineering project, such as building a dam. Although Peter Berger is highly critical of Paulo Freire, Freire's "codification of the thematic universe," which begins by understanding people's lives in their own terms, and which then encourages people to become active participants in cultural transformation, is a way to carry out development projects with the "cognitive respect" for different cultures and different personalities which Berger advocates. See Peter Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change. New York: Basic Books, 1975; and the discussion of "cognitive respect" by Denis Goulet and Charles K. Wilber, in "The Human Dilemma of Development," in Kenneth Jameson and Charles K. Wilber (eds.), The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996. "Peace among men who live in proximity to each other is by no means a status naturalis, which is much more a state of war ... for this reason peace must be instituted." Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (various editions, first edition 1795). Sigmund Freud's view that most people have not reconciled themselves to the renunciation of primitive desires demanded by civilization is expressed in his essay on "Jokes and the Unconscious," for example: "Among the institutions which cynical jokes are in the habit of attacking none is more important or more strictly guarded by moral regulations but at the same time more inviting to attack than the institution of marriage, at which, accordingly, the majority of cynical jokes are aimed." And, "What these jokes whisper may be said aloud: that the wishes and desires of men have a right to make themselves acceptable alongside of exacting and ruthless morality." Sigmund Freud, Collected Works (edited by James Strachey). London: The Hogarth Press, 1951. Volume 8, p. 110. The idea of "cultural scene" is found in Spradley, James, The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979. On Sarvodaya Shramadana, Joanna Macy, Dharma and Development; Religion as Resource in the Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement. West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 1983. For another valuable example of constructive development planning see, Vanessa Baird, "Paradox in Paradise: Kerala, India's Radical Success," New Internationalist, March 1993, pp. 4-28. The experience of Curitiba, Brazil, also seems relevant to me, although my interest is more in how grassroots support for innovation developed than in the innovations themselves. See "Urban Planning in Curitiba," Scientific American, March 1996, pp. 46-53. On the origins of human thought in religion see Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1965. (copyright 1915) Echoing Durkheim, Carl Jung wrote, "A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating representation collective." Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (volume XX of collected works). New York: Pantheon, 1959. p. 70 Nancy Tanner, On Becoming Human. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Tanner's views contrast with and correct those of Sigmund Freud. Freud wrote, for example, "...the main motive force towards the cultural development of man has been real external exigency, which has withheld from him the easy satisfaction of his natural needs and exposed him to immense dangers. This external frustration drove him into a struggle with reality, which ended partly in adaptation to it and partly in control over it; but it also drove him into working and living in common with those of his kind, and this already involved a renunciation of a number of instinctual impulses which could not be satisfied socially. With the further advances of civilization the demands of repression also grew." Sigmund Freud, "A Short Account of Psychoanalysis," in Collected Works (edited by James Strachey). London: The Hogarth Press, 1951. Volume 19, p. 207. For Freud human instinctual tendencies are essentially anti-social, and society must repress them. For Tanner human instinctual tendencies are essentially social; they evolved as part and parcel of the physical evolution of a social species. See also on this point Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Charles Kleymeyer has proposed the concept of "cultural energy" to name a remarkable motivational force he finds at work in many grassroots development projects. Charles David Kleymeyer, Cultural Expression and Grassroots Development: cases from Latin America and the Caribbean. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994. In a review of Kleymeyer's book I suggested that it would be more accurate to speak simply of "energy" instead of speaking of "cultural energy." Howard Richards, book review of Kleymeyer's work just cited, Grassroots Development, vol. 19 no. 1 (1995), p. 50. Rom Harre, Social Being: a theory for social psychology. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979; reprinted Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Paul MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution. New York: Plenum Press, 1990. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. New York: Random House, 1924. I mention Jacques Lacan because I draw from him reassurance that when philosophical discussions of reference are over, the real is still what it is; it does not exist because we speak of it. See Jacques-Alain Miller, "Language: Much Ado About What?" in Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (eds.) Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York and London: Routledge, 1991, p. 30. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. The quotation from Carl Jung on the vital energy of the religious process is from his Psychological Types (volume VI of collected works). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. p. 80. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso Press, 1985. For examples of transforming conventional measures of business success see Ariane Berthoin Antal, Corporate Social Performance: rediscovering actors in their organizational contexts. Frankfort: Campus Verlag, Boulder: Westview Press, 1991. The method of the Chilean activist Jorge Zuleta is described in chapter 15 of my The Evaluation of Cultural Action. London: Macmillan, 1985.
Education for Constructive Development
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