Actions & Beliefs vs Chickens & Eggs

Our reactions and thoughts coming out of Small is Beautiful will continue but unfortunately my copy ended up somewhere in central Wisconsin over the Christmas holidays. Nothing that the postal service cannot remedy but I will take this current opportunity to tie together a few threads that have emerged in my mind over the course of the blog. This post is more related to sustainability rather than development but I think with some thought the same thoughts could be extended to development attitudes and work.

Recently Jordan emailed about some other thoughts he was having about another book he is reading, "The Forgotten Way", by Alan Hirsch (2006). He quoted one passage,

"If discipleship has to do primarily with becoming like Jesus, then it cannot be achieved by the mere transfer of information outside of the context of ordinary lived life. As I will attempt to show below, I simply do not believe that we can continue to try and think our way into a new way of acting, but rather we need to act our way into new way [sic] of thinking. How have we moved so far from the ethos of discipleship passed on to us by our Lord? And how do we recover it again?"(2006:122)

The book and Jordan's email were more interested in spiritual matters but I would like to build on the second sentence of the quote concerning acting and thinking. I recently read an article about concerning behavior change and belief and a follow up article on Grist. The article ends with,

"Belief doesn't come first; action comes first. Changing people's behavior -- in small, incremental, but additive ways -- is the best way to open their minds to the science. It all comes down to change on the ground. Climate hawks need to get smart about driving behavior change wherever they can. Those behavior changes will pull changes in consciousness in their wake."

So now on to some of my own thoughts. For a long time I have wanted to post something about why I fear renewable energy so here it goes. It may be somewhat extreme, but try to imagine if tomorrow a researcher announced a super efficient renewable energy source. Anything from a new type of photovoltaic (solar) cell to a new hydrogen fuel cell or even some progress on fusion. This seems to be the underlying target for most investments and research in renewable energy and, as far as I can see, no one is asking the bigger question about the ramifications of such a discovery. When fossil fuels were first identified they were revolutionary. There's no question that the discovery of oil and its effect on the world (think automobile revolution as well as plastics) was incredible. The energy content in oil is incredible and the possibilities that it unleashed confirmed the opinions at the time that technology can and will solve all our problems and bring society towards utopia.

I think we tend to have the same attitudes towards renewable energy and the consequences might be just as dire. For example, can you imagine the rate of deforestation or resource extraction if we had portable cold fusion? How easy would it be to wage a war with super efficient solar panels powering the front lines? (A major consideration in modern warfare is the fuel supply line to the front line.)

Another interesting ramification might be more cultural. "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler is an interesting examination of how cheap oil has changed the face of North America. Cheap renewable energy would probably exacerbate the changes Kunstler observes. How much more separated with the haves be from the have-nots? How much more infrastructure will we demand to support an even cheaper energy source?

So now to tie these thoughts together. First, we have the idea that changing actions can change attitudes rather than trying to change attitudes in order to change actions. (Note that this is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem since the logical conclusion is that at least one person's attitude must be different in order to affect the behavior of others.) Secondly, I mentioned the idea that our current attitude towards renewable energy focuses our actions on reaffirming our attitudes or making them sustainable rather than changing them. For example, we are pursuing electric cars to allow us to keep our perspective on free and easy personal transportation.

I would like to conclude by saying that the economy could answer both of these questions. If we were somehow able to know and had to pay the true cost of every action we did (especially with regards to the environment) our actions would change immediately because we would not be able to afford our lifestyle. In the short term this would drive research towards technology that could solve these problems so that we could return to our current lifestyle. But before the breakthroughs came (if they ever did) our attitudes would have shifted to better understand a sustainable lifestyle.

Note that I said, "I would like to conclude,". Unfortunately, it is our current capitalistic paradigm that has given us these attitudes and the sort of logic that drives the previous paragraph. I suspect that simply having to pay (with currency) the full cost of our actions would really work to create a sustainable world. I look forward to continuing "Small is Beautiful" in order to further understand more of the underlying shortcomings in our economic system.

Kurtis (from Waterloo)

Development as if People Mattered

Since finishing my papers (last week) I’ve gotten back into reading E. F. Schumacher’s (1973) “Small is Beautiful:  A Study of Economics as if People Mattered”. I highly recommend this book to any of you. This is the first in a multi-part series of posts that Kurt and I plan to write in response to this book, because we are both committed to thinking about development as if people mattered.

 

For me, Schumacher’s most compelling thoughts are on the subject of education (1973:64-83). Granted, I’m only half way through the book. Education, has he saw it in industrialized countries in the 70s, whether in the natural sciences or the humanities fails not because of over-specialization, but because it fails to enable students to form clear convictions about the metaphysical implications of what they are studying. At this point, a longer quotation is justified to explain this idea:

“All subjects, no matter how specialized, are connected with a centre...constituted by our most basic convictions, by those ideas which really have the power to move us.  In other words, the centre consists of metaphysics and ethics, of ideas that – whether we like it or not- transcend the world of fact[s] [and] cannot be proved or disproved by ordinary scientific method. But that does not mean that they are purely ‘subjective’ or ‘relative’[.] They must be true to reality...an apparent paradox to our positivistic thinkers[.] Education can help us only if it produces ‘whole men’ [...one] who will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of life”(1973:77).

Why, in Schumacher’s view is it critical that education allow us to develop a value framework around our convictions about the purpose and meaning of life? Isn’t this viewed by some as a potentially dangerous thing, to hold convictions about the meaning of life or particular values? Shouldn’t these be kept to one’s self?  Indeed, it can be very problematic and harmful if one tries to manipulate facts and the world around him to fit a formulaic value system. But that is not what Schumacher is saying.  Value systems cannot be translated into rules and formulae to be passed on without reference to how life is lived.

Schumacher stresses the need, in education, to differentiate between ‘convergent’ and ‘divergent’ problems. Convergent problems can be solved by logical reasoning, such as many problems dealt with in the natural sciences.  Divergent problems defy logical reasoning.  These include problems faced in the context of “politics, economics, education, marriage, etc.”(81). While convergent problems lend themselves to fully transferrable, formulaic solutions, solutions to divergent problems involve reconciling seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

So let’s briefly examine a divergent problem.  I propose that one such problem is summed up in the question: why do some people stay poor?. There is a related question: “how can chronically poor people contest their poverty”? Development without a human face, like the economics without a human face that Schumacher opposes, treats these questions as convergent. Development without a human face develops formulae for poverty reduction.  For example, more aggregate economic growth will help [everyone] escape poverty. Schumacher argues that when convergent solutions are offered for divergent problems, the solution is always limited if not disastrous, because these types of solutions necessarily ignore one of the irreconcilable opposites inherent in divergent problems.

Living out solutions to divergent problems, such as the problem of chronic poverty, involves the very basic learning cycle of conjecture and refutation (Appadurai 2004). Conjecture is like stating an hypothesis. Acting on that hypothesis may result in refutation, the realization that what you’re trying doesn’t work the way you thought it would. What happens next, if you are fortunate enough to have the resources to do it, is you adjust your hypothesis and try again. And by repetition of this cycle, in the context of an enabling environment, you learn.  This should be intuitive if we think of how a child learns to do all kinds of things in life – indeed, how we as adults continue to learn about how to relate to other people, how to influence them, how to create consensus, how to make peace, how to nurture others. 

Going back to the example of Slum Dwellers International, I have read how their methods for contesting conditions of chronic poverty involve an outside NGO supporting the poor in this kind of trial and error learning (Patel 2004). This living process of living and learning promotes the development of a value system by the poor and enables a slow, organic praxis (the process of testing out ideas) through which the divergent problems of relationship, unequal politics and prejudice are gradually solved. This is development as if people mattered.

Jordan (Manchester)

References:

Appadurai, A. (2004) 'The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition' in Culture and Public Action, Vijayendra  R. & Walton, M. (eds), Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 61–84.

Patel, S. (2004) 'Tools and methods for empowerment developed by slum dwellers federations in India', Participatory Learning and Action 50, IIED, London.

Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, Penguin, London.