Modernization

Modernization is a word that people throw around a lot but what exactly are they trying to convey? A lot of the time modern and western are words that are used interchangeably, however, that juxtaposition says a lot about the idea of 'modern' today, not what modern really is. Modern generally means having the characteristics of the present or the immediate past involving techniques, methods, or ideas. So technically the word modern simply means what ideas and methods are common presently, and modernization means moving towards that. However, there are a lot of words that modernization alludes to, like westernization, urbanization, industrialization, and civilized. The connections between modernization and westernization are tied tightly together by many ideas in our society. The 'west' views itself as the most advanced and therefore the most 'modern' of today's societies. So what does modern society mean? Does it mean that every societies’ modern is the same? In the natural world every organism is different but they are all advanced and well suited to survive in their environment, can we think of societies the same way? As the world becomes more interconnected must societies become more similar in order to live together in a smaller environment. I think that there could be a move towards a more ‘modern society’ in order to become more powerful in the world without loosing the unique culture of each society.

There are other interesting blogs about this subject, like this one and this one. Both of them are from a different parts of the world, but both give interesting points of view.

Death in The Poisionwood Bible

I just finished reading The Poisionwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and a quote stuck out to me near the end. On page 528 she writes:

They worshiped everything living and every dead, for voodoo embraces death as its company, not its enemy. It honors the balance between loss and salvation. This is what nelson tried to explain to me once, while we scarped manure from the chicken coop. I could not understand how muntu could refer to a living person or a dead one with equal precision, but Nelson just shrugged. ‘All that is being here.’

This idea of death being a necessary part of life is critical throughout Kingsolver’s novel. The equality of life and death is not something we really talk about in America and in the west. I was raised by a thoughtful family and I cannot recall having ever talked about death. There are so many ideas about death, but many in western culture are still fearful of it, and view ‘death’ as a bad thing, and perhaps it is (interesting blog). It takes people away. It literally kills people.

Death in The Poisionwood Bible is more fluid, more mathematical. A person who is living or dead is muntu. They are still alive when they are dead, and in some ways dead when they are alive. Death is still sad, the Congolese women scream and screech when their children die, but they understand that without death there is no life. Throughout the book, one thing dies so that another may live, and that is the price you have to pay to stay You must hunt and kill animals to keep your children alive. You must choose a child to save when the driver ants come. Adah considers herself to be alive because her younger sister Ruth May is dead. Adah did not kill her, she tried to save her, but she survives later because Ruth May is not there. Death is a necessary part of life, at least the Congolese life as portrayed in The Poisionwood Bible. There is a cycle of life and death that is forever upheld in the Congo.

Cyclical v. Linear Time

The other day I was reading about India and my English teacher recommended a talk by Devdutt Pattanaik about the myths of India compared to traditional western myths and how those myths affect how we think today. The natural world shows each human the same thing, but the myths each person holds allows them to make sense of the world that they see. So, the concept of time in India and in the United States is what I will examine in this blog.

The American concept of time is traditionally linear. That everything has a set order, a time line, and once something happens it does not happen again. Similar things may occur but each has its own notch on the linear time record and is separate from one another. Augustine was the first to praise a linear time line because he said time was going somewhere and nothing was ever repeated. On the other hand, Indian time is traditionally cyclical. Cyclical time is first recorded in the Upanishads, when the Rishis believe that time is circular because of the seasons and nature and they saw a center around which everything revolved around (more detail here). Nothing lasts forever, and everything is repeated. Devutt Pattanaik says in his talk, “Not only do [the people of Indian myth] live infinite lives, but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all.”

How do these two competing ideas affect the way people think and live? If your view of the world is cyclical, I think you would care more about what happened in the past, so that you could know what would happen in the future. Also, I think your sense of justice and fairness would be more firmly set without any other influences (religious commandments ect.) because ‘what goes around comes around’. On the other hand, linear time is more focused on goals and steps, and the westernized world of business is set up very linearly. So perhaps to succeed in western business you have to give a little to the linear perspective. In Indian myths there is a lot more left unknown, as Pattanaik mentions. He says, “You're not really sure how you stand in front of God. So, when you go to the temple, all you seek is an audience with God.” It leaves justice as a more fluid space (at least in the moral sense of the word, not in actual policing), and I think more questioning would go into morality if someone thought it would affect them in the future. Perhaps thinking more about our actions would be a good thing.

When does aid become harmful?

According to S. K. B. Asante in International Assistance and International Capitalism: Supportive or Counterproductive?, “Summing up the experience of African countries both at the national and at the regional levels it is no exaggeration to suggest that, on balance, foreign assistance, especially foreign capitalism, has been somewhat deleterious to African development.” Is this true? At what point does aid become harmful to the people receiving it?

In American society we are brought up with the idea that as Americans we are ‘the best’ and must spread our ‘best-ness’ around to everyone else. Although these ideas are vague and near immeasurable, we hold them up as if they are indisputable. From John Winthrop’s ‘City upon a Hill’ to Fareed Zakaria noting in The Post-American World that America is the only nation that issues report cards to every other country in the world every year, this idea is ingrained in our society. However, I am not here to write about American exceptionalism, I am here to talk about one of the things that it causes… humanitarian and developmental aid, specifically in Africa, and whether it helps or hurts the people receiving aid.

First, the good side of foreign development and aid. Aid can be given for many different reasons including natural disaster, to strengthen allies, to provide infrastructure needed to evacuate natural recourses, and commercial access. Of course, humanitarian ideals are also held and aid is given for that reason as well. Direct humanitarian aid, like sending doctors, food, and shelter to areas which are affected by war or natural disasters saves lives. There are many organizations that help with medical assistance, food, shelter, education, and a whole host of other problems in other countries. I probably don’t need to preach to you too much about how good humanitarian aid is. It saves lives! Over 44 billion dollars in 2008 was donated to Africa from other countries to help in developmental and humanitarian aid. That’s a lot of medical supplies, food, and tents, all of which are essential to people who have been affected by natural disaster or war.

Direct humanitarian aid does save lives, but developmental aid is harder to pin down. Developmental aid can become a political tool for developed countries to influence other countries. In the Cold War, for example, both sides used aid to garner allies and support them with no view of where the aid was going. James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist, says that developmental aid in Africa is harmful because many times it is distributed by politicians and can help prop-up corrupt governments that use the aid to manipulate the people they govern. Shikwati uses the example of food aid in Kenya, portions of which are sold on the black market at prices that undercut local farmers. Furthermore, Mark Brown, former head of the United Nations Development Program, said that food aid cost developing countries about $50 billion dollars a year in agricultural exports not exported. In places that corruption is high, aid money goes a long way to finance things it is not meant to finance. Monetary aid in Iraq for example is considered to be about 15 cents on each dollar donated. Also, foreign aid can make an impact in ways that they are not meant to. For instance, sending educational aid may help a government reallocate funds from their educational spending to their military spending, so the actual increase in spending goes to the military rather than education. So, developmental aid can be harmful to the people it attempts to aid.

Now we come back to our American exceptionalism and wonder, are we doing the right thing? At what point does our want to help people actually end up harming them. It should be noted that although the United States does come up as the highest donor on many lists, it does not come in even the top fifteen (out of the 22 measured) in the Commitment to Development Index, which measures factors other than money. So I would like to ask, what do you think?