Illich on good intentions
I was impressed by your insight that the motivation of U.S. volunteers overseas springs mostly from very alienated feelings and concepts. I was equally impressed, by what I interpret as a step forward among would-be volunteers like you: openness to the idea that the only thing you can legitimately volunteer for in Latin America might be voluntary powerlessness, voluntary presence as receivers, as such, as hopefully beloved or adopted ones without any way of returning the gift.
…the case for suburban-dwellers to stay and work in the suburbs…
James M:
I’m wondering what insights you may have with regard to this essay in light of your time spent in Haiti (and elsewhere,) Stan.
13 April 2008, 3:26 pmStan:
NGOs in Haiti have been called a “cancer” by many radical Haitians. I myself never went except by inviation… from Haitians, and often simply to have conversations about practical security matters and advice on how foreign militaries tend to operate. Kind of the alien to help understand aliens.
The “cancer” reference is especially apt for NGOs who have associations with (1) proselytizing churches who tell Haitians they are “devil worshippers” and the like, and (2) anyone associated with the Agency for International Development, a US Embassy project closely coordinated with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Embassy Econ Section/Haitian Chamber of Commerce. They throw money around in ways that peel the most energetic and much of the young intelligentsia away from organic popular movements and fold them into institutions with all the characteristics we have discussed here… “funding considerations” and such to take the hard political edges off. Haiti has more of these outfits per capita than anyplace else in this hemisphere… and we can see how much good it has actually accomplished.
Haiti is where I saw food riots two times; now they are having them again. The places that are targeted are the NGOs who have huge storehouses full of food that is parcelled out, ie, CARE.
13 April 2008, 4:16 pmJosiah:
Stan’s point about the need to organize from our own communities instead of acting as missionaries is one I am coming to appreciate myself more and more over the years. It’s like Malcolm X said when asked by a white student what whites should do about racism. He said (I’m paraphrasing from memory) that the white community is the source of the problem, so that’s where whites should organize; they should not come into the black community looking to “help.” That would be like trying to stop the U.S. from invading Iran by going to Tehran and trying to “help.” It reflects an internalization of power that misidentifies the source of the problem of domination and oppression in the victims, rather than the victimizers.
The Illich essay speaks to me directly, about what I’ve seen in the last few years. The more I’ve traveled outside of the U.S., the more I’ve become aware of two things: 1) the pervasiveness of U.S. power outside of its territorial boundaries (including both the elite-directed corporate and military kind, and the kind exercised by “average Americans” in their capacities as tourists, privileged NGO workers, etc.); and 2) how this power is racialized and sexualized. Living here in South Korea for the last six months, it is has been remarkable for me to see the diffusion of Las Vegas-style consumer capitalism in the still-growing northeast Asian metropole (the eastern node of the “triad”), which nonetheless remains under the military and economic thumb of Pax Americana. There are over-the-top, gas-guzzling joint South Korean- and Filipino-U.S. military exercises going on in the waters off Korea regularly, many meant to intimidate North Korea, and regular rape and abuse scandals involving U.S. soldiers and young women here and on Okinawa, the Philippines, etc., bubbling up just about every month. I always know I am near a U.S. military base in South Korea, because I always see duty-free shops, strip clubs (with names like ‘eagles’ lounge’ and ‘Go-Go’s') and street-walking prostitutes, many of them Filipina.
Teaching English here, I am starting to realize, is a lot like a Roman teaching Latin in Palestine or Egypt in the first century A.D. Even as a young man with little money fresh out of college, I recieve certain privileges by virtue of my metropolitan background, accentuated no doubt by blue eyes and white skin, in a society which has thoroughly absorbed the racial hierarchies of Europe and its settler-colonial offshoots. South/southeast Asian migrants are ranked socially at the bottom, and wealthy and fashion-conscious Koreans are getting eyelid surgery and dying their hair lighter colors, etc. I don’t want to exagerrate this dynamic, as there is a very healthy and strong counter-current to all of this TV-amplified brain-washing, and a thriving spirit of grassroots resistance to U.S. imperialism and its corrupt lackey, President Lee Myung-Bak, who is deeply unpopular for his macho nuclear brinksmanship vis a vis North Korea. I am seeing how U.S. power is exercised more clearly than I could back home, and it’s ugly but also perceptibly weakening.
Illich couldn’t be more right about the internalization of these imperial priveleges among would-be U.S. do-gooders abroad. This is the external equivalent of white paternalism within the U.S., which I saw a lot of when I was in Philadelphia (which has its own white-dominated NGOs “serving” communities of color in a condescending way). Out of these unequal power relations flow an unspoken but deeply felt dialectic of pity, arrogance, disgust and resentment between priveleged middle-class whites with liberal arts and social work degrees entering communities of color to “help” when the problem emenates from the power structure, not those ghettoized and told to go to hell by it. On the other hand, solidarity is possible within a context of inequality and domination, if actual relationships are built, although the privileges one party recieves will generate friction and justifiable resentment, make friendship and equal exchanges (and intersubjutivity) difficult. The kinds of dominance relations that exist between the U.S. and Mexico, or white and Black America, generate these kinds of perverse contradictions on multiple scales, just like during the colonial era.
I have become involved with activism with some Korean friends, and I have seen some of the possibility for cross-border links of the significant kind, i.e. not the post-modern globalization bullshit. But I completely agree with Stan about the need to start within our own communities instead of going forth with our own version of the “good book” (whether Christian or Marxist or whatever) and embodying rather than challenging power.
14 April 2008, 5:44 amxenia:
Josiah, your contributions really give me hope. Obviously, you are just one person, but to know that people in their mid-twenties can be that politically mature and resolute…wow.
But I wanted to make a funny contribution this time. One of the captions to a story about Haiti in the major German publication der Spiegel said that “there was much hatred toward the West in Haiti”. That’s obviously quite confusing, as I always thought Haiti was in the “western hemisphere” (they don’t really use that term in Europe to be honest).
Just goes to prove how strong the resistance of the ideology of something called the “West” is — for some people, it looks as if by attacking French corporations, Haiti suddenly moved into the vicinity of Iraq or Myanmar.
14 April 2008, 6:54 amWinston Warfield:
A perhaps stark example of Illich’s theme I recall from my Vietnam experience. I volunteered, as part of my brigade’s S-5 (civic affairs) efforts, to “adopt” a Vietnamese child whose father had been killed, which meant allocating a portion of my pay to go to a surviving son on a monthly basis. I’ll not forget the pitiful little Catholic orphanage somewhere along Highway 1 in Quang Tri Province (Bernard Fall’s immortalized “Street Without Joy”). His father had been an ARVN soldier, his mom so thin and exhausted and always-smiling in that forced and obsequious way that serves as a reminder as to the power relationships involved. I was, after all, the face of the beast in her eyes, who somehow wanted to offer some desperately-needed financial assistance. He was tiny and malnourished and it made you sad to think of the world he’d entered. It was one of those feel-good programs the Army has in its perernnial winning-hearts-and-minds efforts, and was of course more about assuaging my (and the Army’s) feelings of guilt than anything else. The reality was the Green Machine, in which I was a cog, had obliterated their land and temples and families. Unless one has actually seen it, it’s hard to fathom how like Godzilla our “help” is in these poor places we’ve taken it upon ourselves to “free”.
14 April 2008, 1:59 pmJosiah:
Thanks, Xenia. Your quote from der Spiegel about “hatred toward the West in Haiti” is the best example of this internalization of power I have seen in a while. Aside from the fact that the people of Haiti have been tortured by France, Britain and the United States since the mid-17th century, with surprising little let-up since then, the cultivated pseudo-innocence the quote expresses is truly mind-boggling. Someone on here (Deanander) said a while back that “the West” is code for “white people,” and I have always felt this when hearing it used. It is a geographically meaningless but politically powerful racial signifier, which simultaneously equates western Europeans with the same Greco-Roman civilization that regarded their ancestors as barbarians (cf. Tacitus’ Agricola or Germania) and blocks out Africa, which juts out well to the west of the British Isles, last time I checked. Martin Bernal’s “Black Athena” is very good on this topic, as he shows he recent (really only a few centuries old) these pretentious histrionics about a mythically de-Orientalized, de-Africanized, “West” really are.
14 April 2008, 7:13 pmDeAnander:
@Xenia — “the West” is almost always code for “White” and “Christian.”
it has relatively little to do with geography
14 April 2008, 8:17 pmxenia:
deanander, my dissertation actually dealt with the formation of the early modern world, among other things, so i’ve wondered about these matters a lot… i guess what fascinates me and still surprises me is the utter irrationality of that code of the “west” and “western civilization” when it comes to other peoples of the americas. even the conquistadores identified the aztecs initially with muslims.
as a european, i had the nice idea that once i lived in the us, i would be speaking spanish all the time,and i would have super-easy access to latin american movies and music. i even thought i would spend every summer in peru or nicaragua. my rationale: the us is so multicultural and it’s all the americas anyway, right?
illich’s piece was great. it also pointed out another reality of the suburban life: the time and the space within which a person is supposed to travel outside the us is always very firmly delineated. if you want to spend time abroad during or after college as a middle-class kid, you are supposed to do it through a fixed institutional network which always presupposes your americanness as set in stone, and always makes the stay abroad very defined and guided. so, even if you go to school in mexico, you can’t pick your classes without the nod of your adviser in the us, and it must be a school recognized by the home institution in the us. you’re not supposed to roam through the mexican countryside for five years and subside by helping people with the harvest, or something along those lines, outside formal us institutions. for lower-class kids, service in the military or an occasional debauchery in tijuana are sufficient means to learn about the world. but regardless of class position, the older you get, the less time you are supposed to spend abroad — except at an expensive resort during a vacation.
i actually have hope that some young people right now (and when the slighly more repressive republican rule continues) are traveling abroad, including latin america, with more interest in politics and more internal agony about who they are and what a dictatorship means. this erosion of the deeply ingrained middle-class entitlement sentiments is vital for the post-oil peak world, whether such kids end up living abroad or returning to the suburbs.
15 April 2008, 4:54 amJosiah:
Thanks, Xenia. That der Spiegel quote about Haiti really says it all about the deeply internalized mindset of power and entitlement which Illich is writing about, doesn’t it?
15 April 2008, 8:49 pm