The Noble Community

The West discovered the Rest sometime in the 15th century, so the story goes. At first, They were cast as unGodly, barbaric, an abomination against the progress and culture of man. The savage was raw, wild, separated from animals by little more than an ability to grunt and to wiggle their fingers and toes. And then at some point that changed. The savages' affinity with nature meant that they were unblemished by the pollution and rot of modernity. The were pure. They were innocent. They were pristine. They were noble. This noble savage trope allowed for the West to engage with the Rest with sympathy and paternalism; it allowed the West an easy way out of meaningful engagement that would have treated these Others as equal. And then, again, at some point that changed. Somewhere between New Barbarism and the Yanomami, the West decided that actually those that they encountered on their adventures south and east were ferocious in their rawness, were evil in their nakedness. So the story goes...

I sat with a student of mine yesterday afternoon, as we schemed and plotted about the presentation on her service-learning experience she will give later this week. As is our practice, we invite our partners to these presentations to hear the students' stories, to uhmm and aaah, and for the students to acknowledge their partner's role in their learning. However, on Friday we will have a problem. My student worked with a woman not motivated, capacitated, willing or particularly interested in doing her job very well. There is little of my student's experience that does not reflect badly on this woman. She cannot talk about what she did, without talking about what this woman did not do. We mused, we toyed with a number of ethical questions and in response to my student's despondency I pointed out that our partners are not perfect. She stopped for a moment, took a deep breath and said, "well we never talk about that in class."

She's right. We don't.

Allow me to illustrate: a few years back I was complicit in an initiative run by one of our partners that was so ethically dubious I am still embarrassed to think about it today. I was roped into handing out reading glasses to old people who had difficulty seeing; a well-intentioned but badly thought-out project evidenced most clearly by the absence of an explanation accompanying the hand-out of the glasses. (As you might know, reading glasses are to be worn when reading, or sewing or doing something close-up. When you put reading glasses on to walk around, distance and depth-perception are distorted and old people bump into each other and things, and can stumble and fall and general chaos and catastrophe ensues...) Anyway, the part of my involvement that shames me to this day was that I was there as the bouncy young poppet who was photographed handing out the glasses to the oldies: the donors had to have something to look at and feel good about.

It was then that my suspicion of community-based organizations was born, that my quiet skepticism of the whole community-based agenda started to bubble and simmer. I began to wonder: maybe these organizations are not as noble as I thought they were... And why stop at organizations? What about their employees? And what about the constituencies they serve?

"Careful now, Jen," you may start to mutter, "don't project your own ethics and opinions onto the actions of others."

Indeed, fair point, and as a devotee of cultural relativism (despite its many flaws) I can see where you're coming from. But just give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment...

Does being a beneficiary of development mean that you are incompetent, lazy, unmotivated and selfish? No. Conversely, does being a beneficiary mean that you are competent, hard-working, motivated and selfless? If you are tempted to answer yes, then you have to to tie yourself to an argument that believes there is an Essence of Beneficiary: one who is honorable in their intentions, pure in their actions, noble in their engagement with the world. If you answer no, you have to accept that some beneficiaries fall into the former category, and some fall into the latter. And some, like the somes of the rest of the world, are a little of both.

It is condescending, patronizing, and just inappropriate to suggest that community-based organizations, their staff, and the people the serve are "perfect" or "noble" or anything else that melds them into a homogenous whole. So why don't we talk about it? Why do we blame ourselves when projects don't work and plans don't get done and goals don't get met. Well yes, ofcourse, very often it is the fault of the outsider, but not always. It's unPC I suppose, to whisper about failures of The Community, because of a political and historical discourse that has defined The Community as such, but is it not equally unPC not to treat The Community as Our equals and to hold them to a high standard of competency, rigor and success?

Meera Nanda writes abut a concept called "epistemic charity", which describes an academic trend of engaging with indigenous/local/community knowledge. It refers to the tendency to apply a relativist gloss to alternative knowledge systems and say "oh, it's different to ours but it has its value", without actually interrogating the system against its own markers of value. Implicit here, is an argument that "it's good enough for them but it's not good enough for me to waste my time trying to work out its value to me." Something similar happens I think, when we nobilize the community. We are charitable in the way we would be to someone who we believe needs our help, as opposed to being critical of someone who we believe is our equal.

So really, not critiquing the community is arguably as politically problematic as critiquing it. Perhaps what's most problematic, is not giving The Community a chance to defend itself against a critique.

Too big a conundrum for a cold cup of tea...

* this is a thought experiment, as such, some conceptual tools need to be employed. I'm not using the term "beneficiary" unproblematically, but for the sake of not writing a hellishly-long explanation, let's just understand "beneficiary" as a person who receives services and support from a CBO.