AFRO-NETS> Food for thought about a state of mind (2)

[Claudio Schuftan <aviva@netnam.vn>]

Food for thought about a state of mind (2)
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ON MORALITY, FREEDOM, CHOICES, JUSTICE AND THE NEED FOR PEOPLE'S 
POWER

Variations on a theme by South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine 
Gordimer
Inspired, plagiarized and paraphrased from her novel "A Sport of Na-
ture"
Penguin Books, N.Y. 1988

I am not lonely. But in my darkest hours, I feel I am alone.

In development work, living without a cause is living without a rea-
son to be. As opposed to those who do not, those of us who have 
choices ought to have morals. How often are we caught in the thought 
that we know what is right, even if we do not manage to do it? Many 
of us spend our professional lives living in the midst of inequities 
and behave as decently as we can -under the circumstances. We can 
spend our lives on our front porches and never be of real use to any-
one, especially if we uncritically listen to all the dis-information 
floating around about development, justice, rights and equity. We can 
indeed choose to continue to live on "innocence and ice-cream". But 
is that ethical?

We cannot just be grounded on remembering how good it used to be; in-
stead, we need to embark in providing a new style of leadership (more 
and more based on the inalienable principles of Human Rights). We 
need to be taken out of the ranks of 'useful onlookers' and become 
grassroots protagonists. We say we have been preparing for change. 
That is all right. But have we really worked for change that is mean-
ingful to those we purport to serve?

The much taunted freedoms of assembly, speech and the press are not 
the only ones that count. Freedom is divisible. Most of us want life 
for the poor people to be better. That is a freedom too! I still pre-
fer the way freedom is divided here (in Viet Nam, for example) over 
the way it is divided in the great riches of the West.

Some choose to fight through charity (or God). This comes about, in 
part because we do not know why we are in this world and religions 
tell us why. Others decide to go fight with the people - not through 
God. (For me, in the real world, God changes sides too often). To one 
of Gordimer's characters it was not the Church, but Marx who told him 
what the world was really about.

Donors send soup powder to change the world. In the meantime, some 
get power. The important thing is to be on the side that gets the 
power. You will never come to power on soup powder. And you have to 
be in power to be able to feed your own people. You get there with 
power (people's power) and you stay there with money. (In the process 
of negotiating to get there, it is not questions of justice and rea-
son that count; it boils down to the question of sheer power). Jus-
tice is high-minded and relative. We can give people justice or with-
hold it. But power, they find out how to take it for themselves; 
through circumstances that arise pragmatically from the specific cir-
cumstances of their lives. That is why textbook revolutions fail. 
Therefore, is it our role to help create those circumstances?

But even under these prerogatives, if we do not attempt to do jus-
tice, we cut morality out of power. And that is dangerous.

We can go away from what is happening now. But we can never go away 
from our moral responsibility. We need to be fully engaged with the 
world and the present, based on a concrete historical past. Then 
there is no need for too much reflection. The past becomes a prepara-
tion to put action in motion.


Claudio Schuftan
Hanoi, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn

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