 Whatta Hero! |
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Here is an excerpt from FAITH AND CREDIT: The World Bank's
Secular Empire, by Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli; Westview Press, 1994;
[pp. 6-8] There are no societies without religion, even, or especially, those which believe themselves to be entirely secular. In our century, in our society, the concept of development has acquired religious and doctrinal status. The [World] Bank is commonly accepted as the Vatican, the Mecca or the Kremlin of this twentieth-century religion. A doctrine need not be true to move mountains or to provoke manifold material and human disasters. Religious doctrines (in which we would include secular ones like Leninism) have, through the ages, done and continue to do precisely that, whereas, logically speaking, not all of them can be true insofar as they all define Truth as singular and uniquely their own. Religion cannot, by definition, be validated or invalidated, declared true or false -- only believed or rejected. Facts are irrelevant to belief: they belong to another sphere of reality. True believers, the genuinely pure of heart, exist in every faith, but the majority generally just goes along lukewarmly out of cultural habit or material advantage. When, however, the faith achieves political hegemony as well, like the medieval Church (or the Bolsheviks, or the Ayatollahs), it is in a position to make people offers they can't refuse, or to make their lives extremely uncomfortable if they do. The religion of development cannot be validated or invalidated either. It doesn't matter whether it works or not, nor how many ordinary people's lives are damaged or destroyed, nor how much nature may be abused because of it. Development theory and practice cannot be validated because they are not scientific. They have not established reliable and recognized criteria for determining whether development has in fact occurred, except for internal economic indicators like the rate of return of an individual project or the growth of Gross National Product -- themselves artificial constructions and articles of faith. This being so, there is no established way to identify, correct or avoid error either. When Susan George wrote the Afterword to A Fate Worse than Debt, she put it this way: "Scientists are trained to avoid error by testing their hypotheses systematically. Normally, development theorists and practitioners should also be trained to test their hypotheses by observing what they do to people, since human welfare is presumably the goal of development. 'People' here does not mean well-off, well-fed elites but poor and hungry majorities whose fundamental needs are presently not being met. If decades of application of the reigning development paradigm have failed to alleviate their suffering and oppression or, worse still, have intensified them.., the paradigm ought to be ripe for revolution." She then asked, naively, "In short, how many people have to die before the ruling paradigm is beaten back and we are rid of it once and for all?" thereby largely missing the point. The point is that priesthoods are not elected and they need not answer to the faithful; they are specially invested with the truth and with sacramental functions from which, by definition, the common herd is excluded. The faith they serve is itself a greater good in whose name present suffering is mysteriously transformed into future salvation. Or to borrow an old favourite from secular religion, eggs must and will be broken. One's children, or theirs, or theirs, will eventually sit down to enjoy the omelette. This, for us, is the final and most compelling reason not to concentrate on pointing out yet again how multifarious are the World Bank's ill-conceived projects, how unresponsive its leaders, how impervious to criticism its doctrine. Such things may be entirely or partially true, but are at bottom expressions of a world-view. It is the foundations of that world-view we shall try to dig for. The Bank resembles the Church and this will be a guiding analogy in these pages. Both believe themselves invested with a mission, both (the Church historically, the Bank at present) have set themselves against the state. Both celebrate the poor rhetorically while refraining from actually improving their capacity to change their earthly lot. The Church, more than the Bank, is like God himself "a mighty fortress, a bulwark never failing" in the words of the splendid hymn. The Bank has lost many of its fortress aspects -- particularly compared to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - and is more open to exchanges with outsiders. The overall vision that guides its practice cannot, however, seem to transcend the narrowest of economic orthodoxies serving a smaller and smaller fraction of transnational elite interests worldwide. The Bank's declared new, or at least renewed, "poverty focus" shows that it is groping for a mission but in practice it has no grand design beyond the casting of all economies in the neo-classical mould and the refashioning of all men and women as Homo economicus. "The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of
economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system." "The problem is, of course, that not only is economics
bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ...
economics is a form of brain damage." |
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Jay Hanson
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