[afro-nets] Food for a troubled set of thoughts (3)

["Matt Anderson" <bronxdoc@gmail.com>]

Food for a troubled set of thoughts (3)
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The questions you are asking reflect debates that go back to the Enlightenment.  Do ideas change the world?  Or does the world need to change in order to influence ideas?

I think that your questions pose a problem faced (and debated) by social reformers for some time.  How and when do moral arguments become political forces?

It was the naive belief, particularly pre French revolution that it was simply enough to "enlighten" people regarding how things should be done and social reform would follow from this enlightenment.  For example, Jefrey Sachs thinks that extreme poverty can be eliminated and that it is the moral mission of our generation to do it.  Now that the MDG are clearly not working, he is creating 10 model villages in Africa to show how his ideas are practical so that others will follow him. This strain of thinking is generally considered utopian, has a long history, and is not particularly productive.  But a careful critique of this type of thinking is useful to point out precisely its weaknesses and that critique can profitably draw on the previous critique of prior Utopians.  In fact someone has written a book comparing side-by-side the ideas of Sachs with those of Robert Lawrence, an American utopian from the mid 19th century.

To what extent does a Human Rights approach suffer from similar defects? This is the question that I think you were formulating in your many questions and I was just suggesting that a historical perspective might be useful.

Matt Anderson
mailto:bronxdoc@gmail.com