In the last month, I've spoken with Tanzanians about their frustration with the rate of economic growth in Tanzania relative to Kenya (typically traced back to Julius Nyerere's collectivization experiments), and I've also talked with Indians about India's pace of development relative to China (typically attributed to China's embrace of foreign direct investment, which India has strictly limited). In both instances, I have felt that focusing on the economic indicators was too short-sighted.
More important than quarterly earnings reports and stock market performance, in my view, are indicators like the ability to change leaders without killing people and the degree of social tolerance for different groups. These indicators necessarily signal a positive and deep-seated assimilation of modern governance and social norms; and these norms, in turn, lay the institutional foundation for modern economies. Economic prosperity, on the other hand, can readily be achieved (but not sustained) without any such foundation and, as we have seen even in the U.S., can be the result, not of productivity, but of chicanery.
From this perspective, the good news is that "late bloomers" like Tanzania and India may actually be better off in the long run; the bad news, of course, is that they're poor(er) now, with all the ramifications (lack of international respect, shorter life spans, etc.) that poverty entails.
Personally, I believe that these costs are worth the benefits. Modernization is a slow process, and developing countries that allow it time are (in my opinion) better off than those that rush the process. That said, I'm not from a developing country, and obviously perspectives can differ. Therefore, I was interested to read, in Santosh Desai's recently published - and excellent book - Mother Pious Lady, an affirmation of my perspective.
Mother Pious Lady is a collection of essays about India's middle class. In a selection called "The Power of the Imperfect Solution," Desai argues that:
India understands time. It understands the transience of all things, including solutions. It understands that there are no final solutions to problems [hear that "End of History" wallas?]; at best there is a temporary equilibrium that must eventually get destabilized and give way to a new equilibrium. . . . The desire for lasting solutions is nothing but a desire to freeze time.
(p. 135.) This understanding leads Desai to advocate as follows:
[While] Western analysis operates by reducing a problem to its components and freezing it in time . . . [t]hings are classified, labelled, put in boxes . . . . Perhaps a good place to start would be to stop labelling situations and conditions indiscriminately as problems. Moving beyond the simplistic problem/solution mode into the process/time mode will allow for a much more realistic understanding of how things change and how little they do. That we [Indians] understand this is a huge advantage; let us not take to the flashy shallowness of other modes of thinking in our quest to be seen as successful in the short run.
(p. 139.)
At the risk of being accused of "flashy shallowness" for praising a commentator with whom I agree, I think Desai's perspective is immensely valuable. All countries - the so-called "developed," as much as the "developing" - are currently trying to strike the right balance between communal and individual, traditional and modern, indigenous and foreign. Desai's explication of value in India's communal, traditional, indigenous views has done a great service to Indians . . . and to anyone interested in achieving balance in their own lives and countries.
At a recent humanitarian training on hygiene promotion in emergencies, I had the opportunity to reflect on the extent to which modern thinking can impair learning.
The training involved one Power Point presentation after another, most of which entailed some stultifying combination of semantics, theory and complicated visual depictions of behavior models. The training materials looked like they'd been held hostage in some business management consulting firm that demanded ransom in the form of adherence to its enthusiasm for inane diagrams supposedly representing conceptual analysis of real world phenomenon.
Earnestly attempting to stave off sleep by focusing on the slides, I recalled Walter Ong's explanation in his masterful book, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, that abstraction is a characteristic of thinking in literate (that is, modern) societies. Pre-modern, oral societies think more situationally:
Illiterate subjects [in one experiment] consistently though of the group [of drawings of a hammer, saw, log and hatchet] not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations - "situational thinking" - without adverting at all to the classification "tool" as applying to all but the log. . . . A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: "They're all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as good a job as a saw." . . . Asked why another person had rejected one item in another series of four that he felt all belonged together, he replied, "probably that kind of thinking runs in his blood."
(p. 51 (citations omitted).)
Of course, situational thinking isn't bad or less intelligent than abstract, categorical thinking. It's a different way of organizing information that, in certain contexts, is appropriate or even superior to abstract, categorical thinking.
One such situation, I have discovered, is during a training for hygiene promotion in emergencies.
Hygiene promotion involves persuading and cajoling people into washing their hands after using the toilet. Safe water and food handling, safe disposal of excreta and solid waste, and safe management of "vectors" (rats, flies, mosquitoes, etc.) is also part of the job.
The job can be difficult and anxiety-provoking because the subject matter can be embarrassing, and people are often unwilling to discuss or change intimate habits, especially with or at the behest of strangers or foreigners. In learning how to do the job, case studies, simulations and opportunities to work directly with relevant populations are helpful. But as any parent who has toilet trained a child can affirm, diagrams of models of behavior change don't offer much assistance in getting a kid to use a toilet.
This retreat into business-consulting-speak may be a simple result of hiring too many engineers to do water and sanitation-related work in emergencies. Engineers are notoriously poor communicators.
But this silly and ineffective abstraction about hygiene promotion may also have another cause: anxiety about discussing embarrassing and, potentially, demeaning issues. Making a behavior model about hand washing may seem, to some, more important work than actually communicating with others about hand washing; certainly, there's less risk of personal exposure and humiliation.
Sadly, such a perspective simply leads to wasted efforts. No matter how advanced the society in which we live, we are all practitioners of primitive functions, like defecating. Modern thinking is powerless to change ancient facts.
In the last month, I've spoken with Tanzanians about their frustration with the rate of economic growth in Tanzania relative to Kenya (typically traced back to Julius Nyerere's collectivization experiments), and I've also talked with Indians about India's pace of development relative to China (typically attributed to China's embrace of foreign direct investment, which India has strictly limited). In both instances, I have felt that focusing on the economic indicators was too short-sighted.
