Abstract
The essay uses two recent works of fiction as a takeoff for a critique of Development Studies, suggesting that what is presented in the form of fiction is often closer to reality than what the discipline offers as fact. The review of two novels by former US Peace Corps volunteers offers clear examples of how fiction in the field of “development” can offer truths that are not presented in academic work. This essay suggests how fiction can help invigorate the discipline of Development Studies, offers a list of examples, and also suggests how fiction should not be used. This essay challenges scholars in the field to draw upon insights from fiction and to review fiction works while encouraging publishers to widen their perspectives and present works in new genres in the field of “development.” The essay also notes how related genres like development “diaries” can also be used as a reality check on the discipline and as a way to infuse new ideas into this field.
Introduction
Some 30 years ago, when I was about to begin my career in international development with an internship for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an old Asia hand took me aside at an academic conference and gave me some advice. “Keep a diary,” he told me “and listen to rumors. The rumors will often contain more truth than official reports.” It was my first introduction to how so much of what is “documented” in the field of Development Studies is a fiction and how often one needs to turn to “fiction” to find “truth.”
I followed that advice and kept a diary. My work in Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’ Philippines and then in a follow-up internship with a US Embassy in Central America turned into a manuscript following a popular approach at the time to introducing the reality of professional fields to newcomers or to provide an “insider’s” view of a field. I titled it, “The Making and Unmaking of an American Diplomat” in a vein similar to Dr William Nolen’s popular book The Making of a Surgeon (1970). In it, I described my meeting with a former Philippine President (Diosdado Macapagal) who was nearly in tears detailing to me, in his private study, the fears he had of what the US government could do to him and how colleagues had been bought. I reported on how my co-workers and supervisors at USAID combined their work with visits to prostitutes and even encouraged child prostitution and how they gloated about their “romantic” time in Vietnam when they combined aid with military invasion. I visited US “Peace Corps” volunteers who talked about their use of local drugs to deal with the boredom they felt. (Like other forms of Orwellian development “Newspeak,” “Peace Corps” needs to be in quotes to note that its ideology needs to be held to question. So should the other names and terms here like “aid” (USAID), “development,” and probably many others that are taken for granted without examination.) I met with and wrote about meetings with opposition political leaders including one who was later assassinated with little apparent US concern. I described how US “aid” officials routinely destroyed information to evade Congressional scrutiny or oversight, and how they warned me they would destroy my career if I sought to follow the law and uphold my oaths as a lawyer. Almost none of this was reported or discussed in the literature or scholarship on “development,” and I sought to make it available in a book for those entering the field. I presented first-hand experiences and described how they challenged what I had come to believe from, what I was taught at some of the best universities in the US, and from what I read in published sources.
Then and in the 30 years since, I came to understand why there was such a gap between the reality and the way it was taught and presented. Observations on the reality of “development” are routinely suppressed.
Most publishers told me that I could not publish such a diary unless I was already “famous.” Other publishers simply said they were too afraid to touch the material that was truthful because that made it “hot.” Even today, in my Ph.D. field of anthropology, where primary source material that protects informants is the basic data of the profession, most publishers refuse works on “First World” institutions and allow only repetitions of published and vetted secondary and tertiary information that assures little connection to reality. Meanwhile, those first person accounts that are published, from those who are “famous,” are the ghost-written or carefully prepared works of elites or of commercial journalists, whose commitment to presenting and discussing the deeper reality of “development” uniformly appears to avoid what is raw, fresh, or analytical and/or real models and solutions of what needs to be changed to meet internationally agreed goals, and how to change it. That book and many other articles offering non-standard perspectives and models on how the world really works or could change, remain in limbo. I am not yet “famous” enough to publish them.
Censorship runs rampant in Development Studies and social sciences today and its form is a bit of a paradox. While much of contemporary scholarship has turned to journalism without hypothesis testing or solutions to key human concerns (Duncan, 2012), primary source data that presents the harsh reality is censored as “unsourced” because it is not vetted by academic censors as reinforcing mandated ideologies. Though fiction may not have an easier time of being published (and in many ways may be even harder to publish, particularly, where publishers predetermine that no market category exists), it has the same advantage that falsehoods propagated as common wisdom has; no need for footnotes.
When truth and imagination are suppressed in scholarship, and where models that are supposed to be based on “truth” are more often fiction, paradoxically, the place to look for truth is in the works of “fiction.” In the world we live in, reality simply needs to be presented as “fictional,” while different social science theories and models need to be offered as “fantasy” and “speculation” if they are to make it past the censors.
This essay uses two recent works of fiction by former US Peace Corps volunteers as examples of how fiction on “development” can offer truths that are not presented in an academic work that claims to be based on reality. The essay suggests how a fiction can help invigorate the discipline of Development Studies, offers a list of some examples, and also how fiction should not be used. It challenges scholars in the field to draw on insights from fiction and to review fiction works and encourages publishers to widen perspectives and present the work in new genres in the field of “development.”
What Fiction Can Do to Invigorate Development Studies
Without the constraints of “peer review” to enforce conformity, fiction is (at least theoretically) free to confront orthodoxies by providing insights into real behaviors, to offer models of reality in the form of speculative thought experiments, and to present visions of alternatives. This need in “Development Studies” has long been recognized, but the field remains stagnant and could use such challenges.
Some 25 years ago, “scholars” in “Development Studies” already began to pontificate on why the field was “irrelevant” (Edwards, 1989). Many academics made their careers offering answers. Yet, despite all this work, it appears that there is still no humanistic definition of “development” or a vision of human “progress” in the field that reflects actual human aspirations and capacities, though concurrent with this piece, the author of this article is now presenting one based on the international consensus in post-World War II international agreements (Lempert, 2014a, b). Overall, the field remains stuck either affirming or critiquing the same dead end that has been defined as “development”: “growth” through industrialization, cultural assimilation, and genocide, along with resource exploitation for neo-colonial globalization. There is little evidence of human progress over the past 25 years other than in these “growth” measures, and certainly little achievement in the promotion of sustainability, protection of cultural diversity, or elevation of human security, capacity, and spirit. Most indicators in fact show the opposite: cultural extinction, planetary environmental crisis, and threats to long-term security and quality of life. Development Studies programs now teach students how to administer the same growth and globalization agenda more efficiently, perhaps prolonging the same destruction of resources, with skills in how to fundraise from the neo-colonial powers that be who now fund their agendas through a subservient “NGO sector.” More critiques may be voiced, but they are taught in ways that are disempowering and fatalist without offering alternative humanistic models and the tools to achieve them.
The answer to the question of why “Development Studies” has been irrelevant is likely because it is by design. It appears to be complicit in the unsustainability of the planet for the pursuit of “growth,” the destruction of cultural diversity, and the exploitation of the many by a few. Where the field could stand behind the clear definitions and standards that already exist for promoting the human potential, use laws to hold actors to it, and study and teach the mechanisms of accountability, the field largely seems to run from doing so. The current structure of academia and of this field now allows for “critical development studies” that offers its own slogans and dogma, but it fails when it comes to fully exposing psychological motives and acts, offering solutions or teaching the real skills to actually protect and “develop” humanity. Certainly, there is more discussion of “sustainability,” “peace,” “social justice,” and rights issues, but graduates of programs teaching these new topics routinely end up simply tacking on sub-agendas within the agendas of globalization and growth, offering little real alternative or impact. That is the fault of the field. Critics sit back in their armchairs and blame ideologies like “markets” or “capitalism” and “greed” or “hegemony” or “imperialism” without any discussion of what it takes to change these, whether they can be changed, how, and what realistic systems would work better given realities of human beings. They are paralyzing and co-opted because at best they simply offer new slogans as afterthoughts within the same agenda.
One of the few avenues left to present alternatives is fiction. “Avenue” is not exactly the word because the same controls also exist in the publication of literature. If a story does not reinforce an ideology, authors will be told “there’s no market.” Publishers will not test the market and they will not use the funds to create it, as they do to create markets for that do meet it. But if there is no “avenue” at least there is a thicketed path by which fiction can be used to shake up the field.
Humanities at its best has a complementary role to social science in the furthering of knowledge and human betterment of the world. It fulfills this role in two kinds of ways:
It challenges assumptions and raises new theoretical questions in ways that expand science beyond limited frameworks; The questioning of assumptions can probe certain realities of behavior and show that current models are wrong because of mindsets that lead to false thinking. It can do that through satire or collision of oppositions or through other means. Challenges can be on the fundamental goals of the discipline, such as questioning the idea of “development” or the reality of human processes of development. They can be on assumptions about societies or individuals by examining their psychology. It runs thought experiments that are beyond the abilities of academics to currently run, applying what is known and then exposing certain links that need to be tested. The thought experiments are projections of potential futures.
To do this, fiction can simply present a richer or more varied picture with additional variables not found in the academic work, or it can present truths and taboos directly, without academic jargon or diversion. Where such a presentation is still forbidden or politically and culturally difficult, it can use different techniques to present ideas through hidden meanings. Among the approaches to doing this is to just shift the perspective to the views of different actors or different points in history and away from that of the development bureaucrat or government actor in a powerful country.
It is in fiction where the rogues gallery of “development” workers, the powers behind them, and their actual motivations can be presented as they are: based on the reality of human psychology and venality as it is without the pretense of “good intentions but mistaken or uninformed choice” and without the need to make ideological criticisms (for example, of “capitalism”) in order to be heard. Fiction offers the opportunity to fully depict the real world cast of characters in “development.” Among them are:
the corrupt “donors” who extract concessions in return for their supposed largesse and whose projects are designed simply for symbolism, planned failure, and dependence along with cultural destruction and control; the global bankers who never actually seem to set foot on the soil of or breathe the air or see the people in the places they work, turning resources and people into short-term income, feathering the nests of elites and cadres in the “planning” ministries that they fund to override governments, and living in a bubble of colonial splendor; the petty bureaucratic “aid” agents in the “poverty business” who live colonial fantasies, feather their nests, and thrive on power, sexuality, and status; the employees of “aid” projects, chosen for their naïveté or for their willingness to participate as intermediaries in transfers of wealth from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor countries, treating symptoms of problems rather than root causes in ways that subsidize and maintain the harms and causes of the problems if not worsen them, thus forcing peoples to give up their ways of life for agendas of production and consumption chosen for them by others – all the while, they are able to maintain and promote the delusion that they are “helping the poor” and doing it “because they are poor”; the “consultants” who rubber stamp and praise everything they see and who close their eyes to reality in order to toady to the powers that be so as to assure continued employment and income, with only a pretense of professionalism or standards; and the development official “partners” in “host countries” who assure continued flows of what are effectively subsidies (or hidden payoffs) that cement their power and assure no change other than destruction of their minorities, industrialization of their rural communities, and erasure of national and local identity.
Seen on the ground in a presentation of individual actors rather than abstract “policy” as presented in “Development Studies,” the aid world is quickly exposed as theater with “development” no more than a fiction or euphemism for other agendas. “Poverty alleviation” is a euphemism for poverty continuation or postponement. “Development” is a euphemism for destruction and catering to animal needs as a basis for creating dependence and control rather than protection of sustainability, diversity, and promotion of human aspirations for social progress and expansion of the human potential.
Development Studies perpetuates these fictions not only by starting with false definitions of “development” (to “generate income” and “reduce poverty” and “promote the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (‘MDGs’)” and meet “human development indicators”; all short-term measures of treatment of symptoms and homogenization of their cultures). It also perpetuates false assumptions about the goals and motives of those involved in the development enterprise. The basic starting assumption that achieving “development” is simply a technical problem of choosing better measures and more efficient implementation is a false one not borne out in any way by the actual motives or activities of development actors. Development Studies avoids imputing impure motives to major powers (aside perhaps from a paralyzing Marxist critique) or charities. It avoids questioning their legality, their morality or deeper reasons for their competence. It is off limits to discuss their psychological profile, their gratifications for sexuality or power or destruction; their fears about themselves and others and nature. Outside of the debate are the deep structure of culture or people or systems and their incentives. The mention that individuals who work in “development” might actually enjoy suffering or pain or blood and are attracted to it rather than eliminating it; or that they are motivated by risk or game playing; or that they ran to this career and to the “developing world” because of their inadequacies elsewhere that they cannot face is forbidden.
In its historic relation to the “discipline” (or theology) of economics (or production engineering), Development Studies has also maintained the fictional assumption of the “rational human” who somehow understands long-term values rather than just short-term impulse, who applies wisdom to calculations of risk, who prefers peace to violence, who recognizes the value of tolerance and diversity rather than seeks dominance and conformity, who can see other perspectives and opinions rather than be driven by narcissistic, individual needs.
The field of Development Studies pretends that those active in the profession are genuinely concerned about welfare and about the human future, but simply in need of more understanding or conversely that they are driven by some ideology that has no human agency and makes people powerless in front of it (for example, “capitalism”). The real motives of those working in development are rarely held up for examination. Current censorship in the field assures that the study of development becomes a fiction and that human progress and change become impossible.
It is fiction that can expose this myth and present humans as they really are, for real social science study and modeling. In place of the false “rational human,” fiction shows us the true irrational human, driven by superstition, risk, danger, anger, sex, violence, genocidal and destructive impulses, fear, self-destruction, lust rather than beauty or quality, consumption, narcissism, and competitive advantage. Fiction can expose these beliefs that are the status of a religious dogma. It can explore the deep psychology of individuals and societies involved in “development,” looking at their sexual and power fantasies in relation to others, their colonial fantasies, their attractions to pain and suffering, their real feelings about the natural environment, their fears about their positions in their own culture, their escapist goals and so on. All of these are a key to understand what goes on in the name of “development” and why. Fiction shows us the prison of culture that also locks individuals into what can be inefficient and destructive rituals when environments and situations change. In doing so, if it is then coupled back with social science (and only then), can it lead to solutions and change.
Indeed, fiction is not a cure in itself. It is only a way to shake up current myths. It also must face similar pressures. There will still be censorship of fiction as there is today, and de facto promotion of works that “fit” corporate publishers. There will still be battles over what constitutes reality, with academics and powerful practitioners claiming that their versions of truth constitute the best ones. But at least it offers another channel and a chance for some pluralism of voices. As this essay shows, some fiction works have broken through the barrier and some today (reviewed in this piece) continue to do so.
Classic Works in Development Fiction
In an Internet search for discussions of fiction works in the development field, two recent articles pop up, but little else, suggesting that there has been little if any attempt so far to couple fiction with the social science of development. These two pieces offer completely different perspectives and choices that suggest at least three categories for looking at “development fiction” (Harriss, 2011; Lewis, Rogers and Woolcock, 2008). Indeed, there is little agreement on which are the important works in “development” because there is still little agreement even on the definitions or perspectives of “development,” and the field itself is politicized. In many ways, the censorship of our times that reinforces mythology is not due to specific prohibitions but due to driving out the rare good work with several times as many works that simply drown it out. Nevertheless, just recognizing the “genre” and potential sub-genres opens up the discussion and maybe helps to inspire the field.
There appear to be three different categories of works that can enrich thinking about “development.” The three categories are as follows:
Fictional works that place characters in situations of those of contemporary “development” actors and that may be disguised journalistic or auto-biographical accounts (though this seems to be a very small category). Works that address relations between powerful and “developing” countries, or between majority groups and indigenous groups, in general (this seems to be the largest category and it is the one on which Lewis, Rogers and Woolcock focus). Works that address the ends of “development” and that may deal with “developed” countries or offer utopian or dystopian visions of “development” (the category on which Harriss focuses).
Certainly, there are overlaps of the categories. For example, works on missionaries can be both examples of fiction portraying development actors as well as general fiction on hegemonic relations. All three of these categories address themes and questions in “Development Studies” but from different levels. Their usefulness depends on the level of analysis one takes and on the kind of information they offer about different actors and behaviors.
For the purpose of establishing that these categories exist and for opening a discussion on the value of sharing ideas about such works, it is worth starting with some short lists, beginning with the first category.
Fiction on Development Actors
Though the two books reviewed in this essay, by Reeves and Theroux, fit into the category of fiction about “development” actors in defined roles, this seems to be a very small sub-genre, for reasons that are not clear to this author. Among some of this author’s favorite works of development fiction (raising provocative questions and offering insight into actual behaviors) are the following two books on “development” actors: Karel Capek’s satirical War with the Newts (originally in Czech) (1936); and Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s The Ugly American (1958).
Perhaps this category is too situation specific, but there are certainly plenty of fictional works on lawyers or politicians and other professions. Perhaps this is a difficult category in which to write and publish (as this author finds with his own satirical novel on development) that publishers unduly fear and that just needs to be further opened in the way that works on other professions were. (One might have assumed 40 years ago that there was little market for works about corporate law and the civil side of the legal profession, but John Jay Osborn Jr.’s fictional The Paper Chase (1970, film 1973) helped open up the category (followed by authors like Scott Turow) and it became a staple of television programs like L.A. Law, Divorce Court, and Ally MacBeal.) A course on development at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focuses on Paule Marshall’s novel on West Indies development, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), which is unfamiliar to this author.
Fiction on Relations between the “Developed” and “Underdeveloped”
While there are few books on “development,” there seems to be no shortage of books on cultural interactions, both fiction and science fiction that portray processes of colonialism, homogenization/assimilation and resistance from different perspectives. Since “development” sits within the context of interactions between stronger and weaker cultures, but it is only one subset of these interactions, there is a question of how useful or new it is to consider this category in the “development” field.
Three British academics at the University of Manchester offer a list of 65 book titles in a paper entitled, “The Fiction of Development” that is easy to find on the web (
Certainly, few in the field of “development” today recognize themselves as “colonial”: neither the “post-independence” government bureaucrats, other local leaders, nor the foreign and local (but usually foreign funded and foreign patterned) NGOs, international bankers, international business, international agencies nor others. On one hand, linking these books to Development Studies may have the important benefit of offering historical parallels to reveal the “deep structure” of what “development” actors are really doing today but under different names. On the other hand, because few people immediately recognize themselves or other current actors in books like these, there is a danger that those who read these works without recognizing the links may simply be diverted from the contemporary problems of “development.” It is easy to focus on these works in ways that distract attention from their parallels today and to claim moral superiority in a way that reinforces the harms in the name of avoiding them. This may very well be what happens today in courses and departments on “colonial studies” or “nationality studies” and “ethnic studies” that exist alongside the field of Development Studies without having much impact.
Readers can look at the list of titles on their own. This author would add some other classics that do raise classic “development” issues. Among these are the film The Mission (1986) on the activities of missionaries with indigenous peoples in Brazil in the name of development and the “white man’s burden.” The recent film Avatar (2009), which is also a direct critique of development projects, including English-teaching programs, as an entrée for access to resources and genocide, though told in the form of allegory on a futuristic planet, is based on a Russian science fiction novel, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Noon Universe (1961). Ursula LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972) is said to be similar, possibly for its focus on environmental consciousness and sustainability. The film Blood Diamond (2010) and the 1960s Star Trek television episode “Mirror, Mirror” (1967), essentially comparing the approaches of the US and Soviet Union to colonization, and the novel converted to film The Constant Gardener (2005), are other good examples of such works on the relation between corporations and “public–private partnerships” in which “development” is a disguise for both economic exploitation (labor) and physical exploitation (use of Third World peoples as guinea pigs for new products). Among other films on the American genocide of the Native peoples and their “development” motives is the classic The Searchers (1956), which looks deeply at the psychology of hegemony and “development.”
It may also be worthwhile to consider the idea of “development” in societies that are supposed to be “developed” and how they also change (and may regress) in their international relations. Starting in the late 1950s, David Campbell took on the pseudonym John Le Carre and published a series of “Cold War” “spy” novels on how international relations essentially allowed the “developed” “democracies” to either transform into or justify the same amorality and ruthlessness they claimed to be challenging. These works fictionalized many of his actual experiences. A good example is the work turned to film The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965).
Fiction and Science Fiction on the Meaning and Projections of “Development”
The third category covers the idea of “development” itself, apart from the context of colonialism. Here, books on “progress,” on “charity,” and on projections into the future, all add to the discussion of “development” as well as intervention.
John Harriss, an anthropologist in western Canada, teaches a course on “Development” using fiction (and non-fiction) and one can also easily find his article describing his course and his list of key texts (Harriss, 2011). For example, he uses Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) as a window into poverty and class in industrial society and at the early approaches to “charity.” Classes that touch on concepts of charity could start with Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick) for cannibalism to achieve sustainable populations (1729) and his Gulliver’s Travels (1726) on relations between peoples “big” and “small.” Robert Penn Warren’s classic All the King’s Men (1946) on the politics of corporate-funded demagoguery and “development” helps confront the apologist approach that most development organizations currently take in supporting dictatorships that corporatize and urbanize in the name of “development” while crushing human aspirations.
In a related subcategory are satires on development philosophers (and economists) in the early colonial era, starting with Voltaire’s Candide and portrayal of Dr Pangloss spouting the axioms that have entered modern economic theory on how this is the “best of all possible worlds” (1759). Mark Twain offers a similar satire on “Political Economy” (1870) as does Lewis Carroll on “The New Method of Evaluation as Applied to Pi” (1865) and the nonsense measures that characterize social science and replace real measures of fulfillment of human potential and aspirations.
There are several books on failed planned utopias. Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast (1981) is a take on the ideological blinders to building a “new world” with science and technology and trying to win over the natives. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) is on the dynamics of failed revolutions and his predictions on globalization may be the most prescient vision of our time and on how we are not “developing” and why.
Plenty of books are projections or warnings of the dystopian future in which human societies are now heading and there is no reason to note the long list beyond a classic like Orwell’s 1984 (1948), telling us what globalization today really would and does look like. Leo Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illych told us where we were heading through modernization in confirmations of predictions of social theorists like Max Weber in his description of “Bureaucracy.” Franz Kafka’s works also seem to document industrial society as we know it. H.G. Wells’ Time Machine (1895) that looks at social and biological evolution in the future probably opened up the literature to consideration of complex issues of development and progress. It is still relevant, though it is now followed by many more technical science fiction works on specific technologies and what they could mean for the future, as well as whether they can be controlled or seem to be inevitable. Peter Boulle’s Planet of the Apes (1963) has been distorted in recent films, but it also took a bold look at what “human” “development” means and whether we are really progressing or regressing.
It is important to mention that alongside much of this science fiction, the kinds of issues raised in these works also used to be raised in social science essays as well as in social science subfields like “futurology.” That filled a role alongside social science that seems to be missing today. Authors like Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd, 1956 and People or Personnel, 1965), Lewis Yablonsky (Robopaths, 1972), and Theodore Roszak (Person, Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society, 1979), who were psychologists and sociologists, offered critiques of modernization and alternative development visions. Meanwhile, sociologists and political economists offered their futurology predictions (for example, Daniel Bell, Arthur Toffler, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others). As “Development Studies” has gained prominence, it appears that the space allowed in the past for this kind of essay, with presentation of visions and warnings, has disappeared, leading to a vacuum in thinking to challenge and replenish social sciences and concepts of “development.” Indeed, the space that this journal has offered, small as it is, to promote this type of thinking in the form of book review essays, is a rare re-opening of this kind of discussion.
Considering these three categories is not meant to affirm that fiction in our field necessarily has any greater content of truth than what is described as “fact” or “scholarship” or that there is more of it to draw from. Similar pressures for censorship are at work in fiction publishing as in non-fiction, as this author has also found from experience with the novels he has written on development. But some works have made it past the censors and the recognition of these works in categories in a systematic way helps establish benchmarks for trying to hold social sciences accountable and to push them to progress beyond current, self-imposed, restrictions.
How to Properly Use Fiction
As much as the author of this article loves to read and write fiction and cherishes it alongside social science, true social science has become endangered today and it is partly from escapism into literature. Both are important but need to be in their proper place. Literature is not a substitute for field social science, hypothesis testing, and applications for the betterment (development) of the human potential in societies and for individuals, in the research and practical work of scholars and also in teaching and teaching methods.
Lewis, Rogers, and Woolcock do not see much of a difference between social science and fiction representations, believing that they are all just forms of stories for presenting reality. That seems like a grossly ignorant or dangerous view but it may be representative of where we are today. In a world where much of social science today is myth and fiction, divorced from hypothesis testing and measures of reality, perhaps it is little wonder that universities have also taken to teaching of literature and film. If one is already avoiding the modeling of reality and seeking to apply social science to improve the world (as hard as that may be and as risky), doing it through literature is not very different.
Most literature and “theory” courses appear to be simply ideological training in texts, making “arguments” with no intention of improving social science or offering skills training to improve the human condition. They are “humanities” but their humanitarian content can be called into question. Such courses are part of the problem not the solution. In diverting attention, training few skills other than symbol manipulation by the uninformed, destroying social sciences, and turning students into obedient ideologues who are able to slither like chameleons as required, they offer little chance for improvement now or long into the future. Indeed, book learning courses, whether in the social “sciences” or “humanities” are at fault for diverting the mission of the university away from social science modeling, finding natural laws, and testing solutions. Even where such works may raise key issues that could invigorate social science and applications, the methodology in which they are taught subverts the message, with talk substituting for measuring and action. They substitute entertainment and top–down selections with pressures on students for conformity, for democratic and experiential approaches. Courses in fiction carry the same risk as those in social “science” of being transformed into indoctrination sessions for social “theology” and ideology, taking ideology and projecting it on case studies (contemporary social “science”) or taking subjective case studies and using them to extract the ideology (contemporary “humanities”). The last thing this author would want to do is to sit in one of these courses or subject someone to them. It would be like sitting in Plato’s Cave looking at shadows on the wall rather than actually interacting with, modeling and learning how to change the reality in field social science, experimentation and applications. It is another form of diversion and escapism. All of this is antithetical to the mission of human “development,” both for society and for students, themselves.
The purpose of this article is to encourage the marriage of social science with imagination and vision, to improve social science and application, rather than to replace or transform science with fantasy. Though universities today shun courses that help students measure and test hypotheses about reality or work on solutions, it is not because such curricula do not exist or have not been tested. The author of this article has led a team of university students into the field to research and written a sustainable development plan for a country, in a foreign language, to lobby the president of that country to adapt it, and to present it to the media of that country. The plan the team produced is now available as a text in English: David Lempert, Kim McCarty and Craig Mitchell (1995), A Model Development Plan: New Strategies and Perspectives, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. The author has also described and presented this course practicum and an entire curriculum of field social science in David Lempert (1995), Escape from the Ivory Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education, Jossey Bass, San Francisco.
Where literature exists for pleasure and provoking thought, it should remain there, outside of formal disciplines and university training, but merely drawn upon for discussion and mentions of its insights when pushing the formal disciplines forward. There are places like this essay to discuss these ideas and to bring them into the field, but they and their study must not replace the field.
Reviews of Current Works
The two books that are selected here for review demonstrate two of the key contributions that the fiction literature can make to reinvigorating Development Studies. Though neither qualify as the great literature, both are certainly readable and offer ways of thinking about development that one rarely finds today in the academic work. Paul Theroux, an established writer, offers reflections on development in Africa with a 40-year perspective in his work, The Lower River, following the return of a US Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) to his village and offering psychological insight into the realities of development. By contrast, Brian Reeves, a young author, seeks to predict the future for Hawaii as a colony following a path of separatism in his work, A Chant of Love and Lamentation, offering a thought experiment that models a scenario for post-collapse autonomy and rebuilding.
Theroux’s, The Lower River: As a novel,
What is important about this book is the picture that rings true of dependence on aid and of many contemporary places that are now in post-development shock. There are many different settings today in the “developing” world. Most of them are now industrialized, homogenized places where resources have been pillaged, populations are way too high to be sustained on their resource base, and previous practices that may have been sustainable are mostly lost after years of purposeful destruction in the name of “development.” Much contemporary “aid” merely props up these failures waiting to happen or watches the collapse and chaos and then partly mops up the desperation, exploiting what is left and creating another temporary “fix” (and dependence). This book offers the case of one of those cultures that was already unsustainable and hopeless, and where aid simply offered opportunities for a new kind of thuggery associated with globalization– extortion. It is easy to see the situation of this book in places like Haiti, Nigeria, Papua, or Nauru, where resources are mostly gone, or in milder forms elsewhere, where no industrialization is occurring and where resources managed under a kleptocracy will soon be gone while a culture of dependence and extortion are being reinforced.
Seemingly, spot-on in this book are the ravages of HIV/AIDS and the creation of subcultures of violent youth gangs with no parents and no real government authority; the dependence on aid that turns into photo opportunities for co-dependent donors and movie stars just shoveling food; and the short-term mentality in which humans are treated and reduced to something little different from animals. Theroux sees how the destruction of cultures in the name of “modernization” and “growth” creates a focus on crass materialism in environments that are denuded and destroyed, finding himself “trapped in a rotting province that he had once known as promising and self-sufficient and proud” that he wants to “forget, … to leave” (p. 225). He is dead-on in noting the mix of envy and hatred that the colonized feel at the colonizers while seeing how the donors view the recipients as little more than pets or animals, with both sides viewing this pathology as a “partnership.” He is also right to focus on the sexual curiosity (jungle fever), on the inability to really “know” the other or whom to trust and how to assess motives and illusions on all sides.
Theroux’s critique is not that of “development” as a cover for colonialism but more of pouring water on sand without any understanding of context and no desire for it. He seems to really not understand why life in the modern world has gone wrong and turned to greed, where people have lost the ability to love and connect. He does not understand how globalization has turned Native cultures into fake representations of “spirituality.” Rather than being able to see things from the outside, maybe he really is caught in his own delusions about development from his work as a PCV and he is just trying to find a way to come to grips with it. He starts to understand that he had a delusion of power and change mixed with a contradictory need for simplicity in perpetuity and that he was the very instrument of destroying what he valued. Maybe this is the real critique of the book. Rather than just confronting people with the reality of how modern colonial exploitation works and how it is now destroying us all, he is gently showing that we need to start slowly unraveling our delusions and misconceptions.
It is too bad that he cannot go deeper and further and also point to some real solutions and take responsibility. He writes of seeing Haile Selassie and his enthusiasm for African independence in the 1960s but never follows up on why it failed. His portrayal of development actors today and, particularly, the role of the US Embassy, is also a 1960s fantasy that shows he is out of touch with the foibles and chicaneries of current actors and with even the contemporary reality of visas and embassy services (or lack thereof). Maybe he really cannot see deeper. Or, maybe American publishing does not allow him (or any other authors) to do so.
Reeves, A Chant of Love and Lamentation: Reeves’ book
The topic of this book really calls for an epic with a rich cultural context that one might find in a Russian classic by Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, with many more interweaving characters and subplots in the tapestry of culture and history. Instead, it offers stick figure stereotypes and situations that might come out of a television episode and even includes allusions to American television in ways that limit its audience. Rather than standing outside the bubble of American culture in order to really see it, Reeves appears to be still inside it and unable to remove the ideological blinders in which the proposed solutions are the same choices that have caused and will reinforce the problems.
What is important about this book, even though it may not qualify as great literature, is that it does what few books do: it works through one of the key issues of our time and our near future, forcing us to think through what might happen, what individual choices and responsibilities might be, and what might be the consequences.
“Development” projects work continually in places that have “collapsed” and where identities are redefined in attempts to create new alliances or to extract power and resources.The international communities condone some of these identities and alliances and intervene for and against others, designating economic plans for the areas and determining how they will “develop” or disintegrate. Previously colonized territories become “independent” (that is, with local leaders but responding to different axes of political and economic power demands). All too rarely is the question ever asked about whether they can be “sustainable” and how their identities (historically and contemporary) fit with that idea.
In looking at the collapse and secession of Hawaii, Reeves echoes much of what is seen recently in “new” countries like Timor and of the former Soviet Union, secession movements in Chechnya, Kurdish territories, Kosovo, and parts of Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia, as well as in most post-World War II “post-colonialism.” Too bad he does not really compare Hawaii with Nauru after the exploitation of its phosphate, or the dire situation of many other Pacific Islands trying to survive on tourism while dealing with climate change and colonial pressures, or even with the many small countries being colonized now by China. (What would China really want in return for supporting Hawaiian independence? Sex tourism for its excess male population? Hawaiian brides?) What would Hawaii’s economy really produce after the collapse of tourism?
Reeves does not go very deeply into questions about identity, economic survival and actual governance, which is a shame, but perhaps that asks too much. What he does is bring some important issues to the attention of Americans; that their empire is collapsing, that there are tribal identities still within it though they may or may not be able to return to sustainability with their environments, that the future will be violent in dealing with these identities, and that the impacts on individuals will be random and scary. The choices will also be politicized in ways that are uncomfortable (here China is a player in the Pacific). The choices of going backward and forward are muddled. People will be psychologically scarred and motives will be unclear, even within families.
Just getting most people to start thinking about these issues is worthy and the fact that Reeves was a runner up in competition with some 5,000 other book ideas in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Writer’s Contest, 2012, from some very mainstream American publishers and readers, is heartening, even if he is still waiting to be published.
This book does what good thought experiments do. Yes, it is missing variables. Some of its assumptions about how the world actually works are questionable. But, in a world where social scientists should be building and teaching exactly how to do this kind of modeling using real examples and then generating experiments using different scenarios and variables, but not doing it, it is the perfect opportunity for an author of fiction to step in. It is good to see Reeves taking the start and a panel of judges and readers, from somewhat of a closed circle, open to the approach. Perhaps Development Studies can similarly open up to the modeling and skills needed to deal with such issues.
How Other Genres Like Diaries Can be Used to Invigorate Development Studies
In addition to fiction, there are a number of development “diaries” that offer insight into the realities of “development.” It is not hard to distinguish those that make new contributions to Development Studies, but they are also in the minority. Like fiction, the publication of diaries also must overcome ideological screening hurdles and must appeal to what publishers determine is the “market.” In addition, diaries are likely to be self-serving and to be published when their authors are in established positions, rather than because they are offering exposés.
Exposés immediately stand out. Joseph Stiglitz’s criticisms of the World Bank based on his role as an insider there (detailing the pressure to hook countries on loans that they could not pay back, thus making them politically vulnerable, dependent, and underdeveloped) is a rare candid insight into the hidden agendas of the development banks (see Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, 2002). Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary is a classic exposé of the Central Intelligence Agency (1976). A recent whistleblower diary on US “rebuilding” in Iraq fits into this category. It is Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well: How I Lost the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (2011). These works that are in the vein of exposés are worthy of note and stand the test of time.
Occasionally, refugee memoirs can be enriching even if not in the way they are intended. U Sam Oeur’s Three Wildernesses (2005) was probably published mostly for his account of surviving the Khmer Rouge and his praise for his new US home without the intention of serving as an exposé, but since he was the recipient of assistance from USAID in Southeast Asia before 1975, a member of the US financed military dictatorship in the early 1970s, and then a high government official under the Vietnamese sponsored Hun Sen government, he offers an unusual picture of how neo-colonial development policies work in mostly the same way under the US, Vietnamese, and essentially puppet regimes to serve business interests.
Sometimes, works from peripheral fields can also offer unusual insight in a way that insulates it from some biases. Dian Fossey’s autobiographical account of her work with mountain gorillas, for example, opens up a window into the failures of “conservation” agencies, “tourism” development schemes, and zoos. Her demonstration of “active conservation” versus “theoretical” conservation (with government in capacity building and consciousness raising) and her description of pre-genocidal Rwanda as genocide waiting to happen are stark (1983).
There are some rather mild PCV diaries such as Rhoda and Earl Brooks’ The Barrios of Manta (1967) and Moritz Thompson’s Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle (1990), and standard diplomatic pieces of fluff seeking to praise the organizations they worked for or to seek favor with the governments of countries where they were employed, such as Howard Lewin’s memoir on USAID in Laos, Sunsets, Bulldozers and Elephants: Twelve Years in Laos: The Stories I Never Told (2012), CARE Administrator Pam Scott’s Hanoi Stories (2004), and American Friends Service Committee (Quaker) representative Lady Borton’s After Sorrow: An American Among the Vietnamese (1995). (The Peace Corps’ website offers its own list of writings by its volunteers if one wishes to comb through what is likely already a screened list.)
Most recent work tends to involve either self-promotion or organizational promotion or provide a form of swashbuckling travelogue in which involvement in development “aid” is a form of exotic tourism. Brett Dakin’s Another Quiet American (2003) is a good example. There also seems to be a booming market for memoirs of CIA and military veterans who glorify or exoticize their work but offer little critical insight into “development.” In fact, there is a long tradition of these kinds of memoirs going back to the colonial governor generals who reported in their memoirs on the nature of their official work (for example, Arthur Grimble’s memoir A Pattern of Islands, 1952).
Summary
If the “developing” society that we live in today is more like the dystopias Orwell’s 1984 and Kafka’s Castle, than like the fantasy utopian pinnacles of progress that our leaders claim every culture in the world aspires to be like, and that require the homogenization and enslavement of the “undeveloped” world in order to offer them that wonderful opportunity of a militarized planet being turned into a garbage can, it certainly could not hurt to have a bit more fiction telling us the truth and a bit less false truth promoting social fiction. If “development studies” is to be any more than social engineering for social suicide and propaganda for the apocalypse, any form of truth, imagination, and alternatives would be welcome, in whatever form it takes to get past the censors and into consciousness.