I had a long lunch with Marcia today. Marcia is in the 2-year law degree, from a Politics backround in the University of Minnesota.
She is also the big sister in ideological discussions. Over lunch today we reviewed each of our CVs. Somewhere in between it all, we started talking about working for the United Nations. (“Someday, someday…”)
I have to say that from the work done at the Exeter Model UN Society, working politics for the sake of politics has no appeal for me. Delegates speak for the sake of other delegates. Out of fear for hidden oppositional agendas, out of fear of the seething electorate, out of fear for a career discarded by reassignment or poverty or otherwise ideological elimination, by gulag or inconsequence.
The middling, centrist impractical garbage on official stationery and starched collared shirts, off-the-rack Brooks Brothers lounge wear outside the 9 to 5. Without regard for any other country’s interests, without regard for any fundamental common ground between human beings when it is economically inconvenient. Note the word petit-bourgoise floats on the tip of my tongue, but I will not allow that enough weight here to bias or distract.
Without an absolute frame of reference, a systemized, comprehensible scale by which to understand what is right and wrong, I can’t go on my day to day without faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature.
Even a concession, working for the UNDP or UNHCR, for development and justice, I doubt very much. Bureaucracy I can deal with, pushing through a resolution for what is right, I can handle. But when political agendas are used under the pretense of justice, or administrtion of humanitarian, the playing field is no longer even. Bureaucracy is no longer passive, no longer a benevolent check against irresponsibility. Red tape becomes obstacles in the path of rediscovering what is justice, what is fairness and natural law.
Where sociological development is concerned, Marcia pointed me in the direction of Hegel’s A History of Philosophy, conveniently found online here.
I can’t pretend to have read it, though surprisingly my mentor had recommended this same book to me last year.
Marcia’s summary: Hegel asserts that capitalist socioeconomic development is the single standard by which human society is evaluated. Hegel compares modern-day nations as exemplars of this continuum, from Greece to America.
But what of the rest of the world? There is no explanation of the state of industrialisation in Africa, in Asia.
In many ways, the Western world has been built by Colonial superpowers, on the backs of slaves and natives in overseas territories. Clearly, postcolonialism significantly confounds such a simplistic view. The “liberation” of slave populations if not the colonies themselves from imperialism resulted in rampant poverty, both at the demographic and national levels. Without any fixed market for customary exports and the professional oppression that maintained the Colonial status quo, the West Indies (as an example) had no organized way to turn towards self-sufficiency. Diaspora resulted from economic duress. Diaspora from governance under authorities whose legitimacy is questioned by not only neighbouring states, but more importantly its own peoples. Diaspora from petty tribal rivalries granted submachine guns and empowerd with ideological sabotage
Let’s not mistake this for an educated perspective, but isn’t it enough to start questioning? “Responsibility” for the developing world, in the arena of the global superpowers, is only a pitying trophy horse to justify political agendas. Why do politicians speak? Why words, when facts will count? Because the numbers, if they are ever publicized, can only be twisted so much to hide that true international aid for the benefit of the peoples is incidental.
