Development
is like hope, a sentiment based on false doctrines, in particular those which
promise a better future, which in turn somehow justify the suffering we
experience today. The purveyors of this
hope offer all the evidence necessary to prove that we as a species have been
on some kind of linear path that leads from bad to good. This kind of thinking not only justifies the
eradication of cultures, languages, and peoples for the past century in the
name of development, but also allows us to deny the import of climate
change. Effectively, development, like
hope, allows us to live in denial and equals nihilism.
False
doctrines pack irrational meaning into words and concepts while successfully
having us continue to believe in them. Development,
in this case, is a word used by people to compress too many ideas into too
little space. This results in not very
much at all having been said. There was
a guy called Michel Foucault who talked about all this talking around an idea
and called all this talking discourse.
In reading Foucault, you might get the idea that understanding discourse
was pretty important. For example, if
you understood the development discourse, then you could have your own
discourse about that discourse, all to make sense of both discourses in the
first place.
You can see that
so much talking goes on about an idea, like development, that not really
anything at all is being talked about.
Some of us call these people talking heads. You see them on television a lot. If you work for a development organization
like CARE or NOVIB or the United Nations Development Program, you also get to
see them in important meetings held between very important people who are
trying to save humans from themselves.
Development implies
progress, control, and order. In
society, to say the obvious, control and order are about hierarchy. No surprise about this. There is always at least a little bit of
hierarchy in our social lives. Usually a
lot. Hierarchy, often enough, justifies
itself by providing a canon (a set of truths that we accept without
critique). The development canon is that
development does and will alleviate poverty.
Development will have us all living better lives in the future.
The hierarchy
and the canon are precisely why a bell should be going off anytime you hear
this word, development. Control, order,
and hierarchy are those little creatures with which democratic folk
continuously struggle. The struggle is
not to eradicate their presence in society, just to keep them at a healthy
minimum. An uncriticized truth is
antithetical to what most of us consider an ideal of the human condition:
rational thought.
Development is a
kind of plastic word, meaning that it can be twisted to mean anything, which in
turn can make it mostly meaningless.
Here are some examples. Humans
develop, buildings are developed, film can be developing, breasts develop, and
there are developers, developments, and situations developing. It all sounds good, progressive. Except that developments are often negative,
destroying land or implying political tension, cancer develops. From a carbon emissions point of view, human
development is a rather nasty turn of events.
But just use the word development, or its root, in any sentence, and you
can sound knowledgeable and important.
Without having really said what you mean.
Which means that
anyone using the word development may be a bit of an obfuscator. A wizard, if you like. A sorcerer, perhaps. A priest (ess). Nay say politician or bureaucrat? invariably someone on the higher end of some
hierarchical pyramid. These people say things that are quite impressive, but we
rarely know what they really mean. A
development obfuscator will be attached to an institution. Could be a municipality or a public domain
organization like the United Nations.
Could be a non-profit organization, government funded or private, that
provides some service to poor people. For
example, a new model for non-profit organizations is to cooperate with a mining
business while the mining company does what mining companies do. All of them are purveyors of a service or
good, in the name of development. You,
or some other unwitting soul, consume it.
It is like
talking about prayer and any religion.
There are many types of religions around. And even more subsidiaries. But only one word, prayer. Now, what am I supposed to do? Kneel?
Prostrate myself? Contemplate? Hope for the best? Really, I am supposed to suspend any
questions about prayer, accept the discourse (official method of having a
discussion), and get on with the show of believing the canon (gospel truth). But actually trying to understand what prayer
really is? Forget it.
A little
exercise that I play for myself when I do not understand the meaning of a word,
that I use or see used a lot, is to drop the word from my vocabulary.
The end result
is that development, like Nietzsche’s god, is dead.
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