The Wonderful Wizard of Aus

If it isn't too late already, take my advice: don't go!

…..To see the latest and last of the Harry Potter films, that is.

But I know it is too late. You've already been and, like me, you have endured the two-hour long intense barrage of noise and painfully bright special effects that are the stock in trade of modern cinematography. Huddled in the cold-store frozen darkness of some multiplex cinema's airless den, you have watched the over-acted, tiresome antics, 2D or 3D according to your choice or luck, of Harry the wizard and his chums and foes, watched them, that is, with an increasing sense of bewilderment and perplexity about whatever it was that could have persuaded you that it was going to be any different this time around.

Mind you, in this final, rebarbative offering the usual attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder business of modern cinema, with all its attendant props of giant creepy crawlies, fire-spurting wands and mumbo-jumbo, degrammaticalised, pseudo-latin 'magic' words, is interspersed with some indescribably boring, drawn-out, new-age pseudo-profundity, as the usual parade of self-indulgent thespians ham their way through the cliché-ridden pseudo-eschatology that has replaced religion in the digital age. I have to say, if life after death really is a railway station in North London swathed in the fog of a permanent white-out, then I am in no hurry to get there. Please! Take back my ticket for the Swiss Euthanasia clinic!

Still, the High Noon with wands scene was the stuff of which belly-laughs are made, even if that was not the intention.

From the dark night of the cinema-goer's soul I emerge into a bright, baking world of intense, breathless sunshine. The same angry sun beats down on the Horn of Africa, where once again there is hunger, only this year is a really bad year. I was stationed in Ethiopia at the turn of the century and have memories, backed up by photographs, of endless long journeys, including covering most of the Ogaden by road and helicopter, to visit camps full of hungry, worn-out refugees from a landscape that could not and would not support them. Now, in Somalia,  whatever nature does has been massively compounded by war, anarchy, misrule and all the other human factors that go far beyond simple issues of population, livelihoods and meteorology. Ten million people at least are affected and the UN has declared a famine. It does not seem that much has been achieved since the mass starvation of the early seventies that brought down the old imperial regime in Ethiopia. Except that the will, the ability and the mechanisms for keeping millions of people who would otherwise die do now exist and on the whole work pretty well. And as for the reason for doing this, I can think of no better answer than the words of Simone Weil: 'It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.'

 My father recently gave me Simone Weil's 'Attente de Dieu' in order to improve my French in preparation for moving to work in Brussels. It is typical of him to choose something out of date, intellectual and at the same time religious within an, albeit slightly off-beat, western Christian tradition. And it is typical of me and, by extension I suppose of my whole generation, not to be at all well versed in the writings or thought of Simone Weil or many other writers and thinkers of her generation. The one thing I did know already – at least I think I'm right on this -  is that she more or less starved herself to death in sympathy with those living under German occupation in Second World War France, so it is apposite to read her thoughts at this time.

I am not sure yet where I will get to with Simone Weil. I have a feeling there is a concept of emptiness or kenosis in her theology or philosophy that I can appreciate. The imperfections of the world reflect the need for what is created to be different from - or the total opposite of -  God. It is not so much a doctrine of original sin, the thing that Ivan Karamazov struggled with to the point of losing the plot, as an understanding that this world is characterised precisely by a lack of perfection. So, I tell myself, when I am wondering why yet another attempt to make it all come right and poverty go away for ever, whether through some growth driven macro-economist's latest magic spell, or  the endless concatenation of higgledy-piggledy grass-roots initiatives which all development bureaucrats end up stewarding, no wonder it doesn't all come right in the end. The world simply is not a place where perfection can be achieved.

And yet, in that Simone Weil sort of way, there is every reason to do our best to fight against human misery and suffering, whether you see that as progress towards Nirvana or heaven or God or simply towards a better society for everyone. Whether or not you call this striving the pursuit of grace, I think that it is a road we are meant to travel. At the same time, it is interesting to think a bit about what goes to make a better society and I suppose I am a child of my age in espousing a set of essentially middle class values, concentrated around a balanced yin and yang of personal freedom and social responsibility and well shod with the sensible shoes of democracy, as opposed to the jack boots of tyranny of whatever ideological persuasion. Going back to the film, it is interesting to note the happy middle class heads of families that Harry and his friends have become in the final scene, where they pack their offspring off on the train that will take them to the magical boarding school world that enshrined their own growing up. As I say, all very nice and middle class. Speaking of which, for me the champion of middle class values, lurking behind the concepts of good governance that underpin all the development effort that we development bureaucrats spend our lives engaged upon, is Max Weber.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.'

This sentence, describing the western society of his day, is equally true today with regard to that same western world. Our economy, society, sense of values and identity are neatly encapsulated by the three key words that it contains: rationalisation, intellectualisation and disenchantment. Our world is characterised by the rational pursuit of economic gain, driven by - to use the now hackneyed phrase that Weber coined – the protestant work ethic. The individual is at the heart of it all, shouldering his responsibilities for whatever he will or will not achieve through his individual efforts within a society whose main characteristic is the concept of legitimacy.

Legitimacy is an element in another Weberian trinity, his three-way typology of authority as being legitimate, traditional or charismatic. For me this concept is crucial to our understanding of where we find ourselves when we are trying to do development. We tend to think within the philosophical framework of our own rationality and for us, therefore, the only type of authority that can possibly be right is that which is legitimate, characterised and governed by the rule of law. Often we are confused because so many of our interlocutors speak the same language as we do on this issue, but the reality is often something else. At the local level, or it may be the community level, or the national level, or every single level in a society, it underpins the way things are done and the way power is held is something much closer akin to what Weber described as traditional authority.

This is what is at work when it turns out that local government throughout the Philippines where I have most recently been working is completely dominated – 'captured' – by local elites, in many cases the families or clans who have always held power locally. What happens is that the trappings of modern democracy are used to legitimise a traditional system, under which no-one bats an eyelid to find that daddy is the governor, big brother is the mayor and little sister is the congresswoman. What is interesting to note, moreover, is that from this situation there is a natural tendency to move towards the charismatic end of the scale, while evolution towards a legitimate system is painfully difficult. On a global scale, the poor, the downtrodden, exploited and marginalised are expected to support their traditional rulers and can easily be induced to support charismatic figures who promise solutions to their many woes. They will always prefer a Chavez or a Thaksin over whatever the legitimists may have to offer and all too often what the legitimists do have to offer is of interest mainly to an emerging middle class, bent solely and selfishly, and some apologists would say rightly, on its own interests, which seldom look in the short term like the same interests as those of the poor. To put it bluntly, where the middle class may have a work ethic, the poor simply have to work hard in order to survive and what they will usually respond to is a leader who knows how to sing their favourite tunes at the karaoke bar.

In the Philippines the voices lined up in support of the president’s ‘responsible parenthood bill’ are overwhelmingly as middle-class as the phrase itself. ‘Responsible parenthood’ is all about the realisation that having children is a serious business. Children have to be educated – ‘brought up’ as my parents’ generation used to put it, not just brought into the world. And it is no surprise either that the Roman Catholic church, which has throughout its history depended on being able to dominate and ‘shepherd’ a massive, impoverished flock of uneducated, illiterate ‘believers’, should resist with such bitterness, acrimony and willingness to resort to dirty tricks and mendacity the move of a legitimist government to try to fulfil its obligation under the Cairo Declaration to make modern family planning available to all women. Nor is it any surprise that the politicians lining up alongside the Church to oppose the bill are all thoroughly identifiable as traditionalists and would-be charismatics, including the successful pugilist and failed rocket-scientist Congressman Manny Pacquiao.

By contrast with this situation in the Philippines, where Rome, having lost so much ground in Europe and in Latin America, seems to have decided to make its own version of Custer’s Last Stand, the news from Ireland is like a breath of fresh air. Clear evidence of instructions from Rome to bishops to defy the law and defy the government with regard to reporting the abuse of minors has led to a powerful and dignified affirmation of the authority of the elected government in a legitimist modern state, coupled with a stern rebuke for an arrogant, immoral church. Modern secular, western civilisation is still alive and kicking, it would seem.

But how healthy is our modern world? If the secular society does have gods then what are those deities and what do they represent? Does it have to be inevitable that the promotion of individual responsibility also has to involve a descent towards an anti-social cult of self and selfishness? Viewed from further out, the simple materialism of the shopping-mall culture might look like the empty rituals of an ugly cult of limitless accumulation, as economies increasingly seem to function to channel wealth to a small number at the top. Watching Harry Potter, I am drawn to reflect on how many people have mentioned to me just how fabulously wealthy the author of the series has become and how much the young actors get paid, as though these were the things that mattered. Film actors and producers, soccer players and basketball stars, it seems that all these people are expected to become multi-millionaires. It makes it almost impossible to believe that in the nineteen-fifties there was actually an extremely low MAXIMUM wage for soccer players in the English FA league. It is as though the world of art and sport, or entertainment or ‘the media’ or whatever you think you are in when you read or watch something like Harry Potter – has come to reflect a culture that promotes the accumulation of wealth by an elite, rather than its sharing among the many ordinary people, which was what we had come to believe in so ardently just a generation or two ago. And I wonder if this perception does not reflect the brash materialism of a culture that has reached its decadent phase, just as I wonder what hope there can be for the legitimate state in a world that seems determined to divide itself into an elite group of super stars surrounded by the countless, nameless masses.

Maybe the symbol of that descent into decadence is right before our eyes in the last flight of the Space Shuttle and, with it, America's bowing out of the leadership of what used to be called the Space Race. Looking around at the alternative contenders for world domination I think we should permit ourselves the same sort of shudder as must have gone through the inhabitants of the Roman World as it slowly collapsed into chaos and confusion and half-forgotten memories of things that used to matter.

The latest story of obscene wealth accumulation, ruthlessness immorality and hubris is that of media mogul and Citizen Kane understudy, Rupert Murdoch. I won't repeat Murdoch’s story in detail here, since it has been done to death already. There is an interesting angle in the warping of a strong protestant work ethic, inherited from a protestant preacher father, into an immoral and ruthless drive for acquisition and power. This is the very core of the decadence I am trying to identify, a principle taken to extremes and, divorced from any moral frame of reference, ultimately bad and destructive, in the end revealed to be no more than the empty, destructive pursuit of power and accumulation of wealth.

O tempora o mores!

Indeed…

Of course the case was aggravated by the po-faced corruption of the British police. Senior police officers accepting lengthy stays in luxury spas, back-scratching relationships with dirt-digging newshounds viewed as par for the game, junior policemen regularly taking cash in exchange for privileged information - I'd like to sack the whole hypocritical, morally blighted lot of them.

And yet in the end the enduring image of the case will surely be that of a bewildered confused old man huddled before the culture, media and sport select committee of the British  parliament last week, unable to understand, let alone answer, the questions being fired at him, for all the world just like the bewildered confused old man at the end of the movie that first put a wizard on the big screen, one who turned out to be so much frailer and more human than Harry and his fantastic chums with their flame-spurting wands.

Oh well, time to set off back down that old yellow brick road in the fond hope that somewhere along the way we might just find a brain, a heart and a dose of courage to help us make our way safely back home.

Goodbye to Paradise

The case of Michael Gilbert was on the BBC Radio 4 news this morning. For those who do not know, which probably means anyone not residing in or hailing from or for some other reason interested in the UK, Michael Gilbert was a troubled young man with mental problems who, after growing up largely in local authority-run care homes, fell into the hands of a brutal family who treated him not only as a domestic slave, but also as a target for the considerable amount of sadism and savagery that they evidently had inside them. In the end they murdered him and dumped his decapitated corpse in a lake, which has led some of the more tasteless news media to refer to the case as the 'Blue Lagoon Murder'.

Tasteless behaviour by the news media is in vogue these days of course, if the News of the World phone-tapping scandal is anything to go by. It turns out that journalists have been tapping the phones of murder victims and the families of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. It also transpires that sometimes considerable sums of money are routinely paid by journalists to police officers in exchange for inside information. There will be inquiries, of course. Perhaps the police will get the same treatment as parliamentarians have over their abuse of the expenses system. That would be no bad thing, all part of the healthy working of the checks and balances side of good governance. I think it was Max Weber who said that it is not so much the severity of the punishment that matters in such cases but the certainty of it.

But I digress. To my mind an important aspect of the tragic case of Michael Gilbert is that nobody loved him. He really did have nowhere - no-one else - to go to other than the family of thugs who abused him so horrifically and eventually killed him. In the end we all need to belong to some human grouping whose numbers total more than one. It is similar in a way to the twisted psychology that leads a prostitute to develop an emotional dependency on the pimp who abuses and exploits her. It is, after, all part of our mammalian heritage.

Another way of looking at this is in terms of social capital. This is something that has been on my mind quite a lot during the last week. I will be leaving the Philippines at the end of the month. Last week I made my final trip to the field here. I went to see how things were going with a fairly large and multi-faceted project we fund in the province of Occidental Mindoro. The project aims to do many things for the Mangyan people who are the original inhabitants of the island and who have been the victims of a process of dispossession, marginalisation and impoverishment which follows the same miserable pattern that can be found in respect of indigenous peoples all over the world. The project is probably too ambitious. They often are, but its intentions are good and I am pleased that we are doing it.

I first visited Mindoro back in 2008 in connection with our comparatively far larger support to the reform of the health system in the Philippines and was struck then by the poverty I saw in Mangyan communities and the lack of understanding that was apparent in the approach of local government in whatever relations it had with them. I was so discouraged by what I saw that I followed my official visit up with a very different kind of trip accompanying a sprightly septuagenarian Father Ewald Dintner, who has worked for getting on for half a century with the Mangyan communities of Mindoro, for a couple of days hiking into the mountains to stay overnight in small, isolated Mangyan communities. The three lasting memories I have of that hike are of the incredible beauty of the mountains and the views out over the ocean far below, of the real meaning of poverty and hunger when all there is to eat are boiled bananas and of the ridiculous presence of two porcelain toilet bowls that some moronic politician must have had dragged all the way up to a tiny hamlet in the mountains just so he could say he had done something about 'sanitation'. The toilet bowls had been placed on a raised platform in the small communal house of the village where we slept. In the night they seemed to loom over me like the gods of some long forgotten cult. Needless to say no human posterior ever treated them in the way for which they had been intended. So much for 'sanitation' and so much, by analogy, for so much development assistance. The intended beneficiaries don't even want to crap on it.

But back to the trip I just made, which was to the northwest tip of the island of Mindoro, reached from Manila by taking the ferry from Batangas to Abra de Ilog. I have to admit that my inner child with all its enthusiasms and ability to revel in the beauty of nature and the wonder of what is new and bright and fresh around me always comes to life the moment I get going on a trip to the field. For most of my life, as far back as I can remember, I have slept so much better in a sleeping bag in a tent or, in this case, on top of four benches put together in the village school-room. If I wake up in the night I get up and watch the fireflies in the trees or trace the constellations in a sky that is free from city smog and light pollution. And yes, the village where we stayed was beautifully situated next to a fast flowing mountain river in which I had a wonderful bathe when I woke with the rising sun. Inner child or inner Rousseau? It doesn't matter really. At moments like that it simply feels that things are right and well-balanced. There is a sense of harmony that cannot be quantified or subjected to analysis.

But actually what really makes a field trip or breaks it are people - the people you travel with and, far more importantly, the people you come to visit. That should be axiomatic of course. It is why I think it matters to stay the night and to sit around the campfire in the dark listening to poetry and songs recited by members of the community in the now scarcely remembered Iraya language. And it was good to stay on for an extra day beyond the parsimonious time frame of the official trip in order to walk with local community members to another village situated amount hills and mountains still partially clad in virgin or semi-virgin forest, where a group of children scrambled nimbly up into the big bignay tree in the school yard to gather some of its delicious fruit for us.

The other aspect of this, though, is the professional one. There has to be an understanding of what is going on inside a community before you can presume to design some sort of intervention that is meant to 'help' people to do something that will improve their well-being in some way. Looking back on my four years in the Philippines, I think the penny finally dropped in my mind that not only do paradigms of rural development or even the more trendy 'community driven development' fail to base themselves on a thorough analysis of the communities they are directed at, but that the failure to sub-analyse communities down to the household level (in particular, disaggregating by wealth) is compounded by a failure to take the various aspects of the sustainable livelihoods paradigm properly into account, especially elements like social capital.

The latter is of course something we are aware of at an anecdotal level at all times in relation to access to health services. We know that a huge chunk of the cost of healthcare, in particular the cost of medicines, is paid for 'out of pocket', but we do not really understand the mechanisms by which poor people find the resources they need or how they prioritise. And of course this kind of understanding is vital if we are to understand why a project that sets out to persuade very poor farmers in an upland community to switch from the slash and burn practice known in the Philippines as 'kaingin' to a much more sophisticated type of farming such as the 'sloping land agriculture' of the project I was in Mindoro to see.

Just a few hours of conversation with local people was enough to reveal that for them the advantage of kaingin lies in the fact that it is not labour intensive, does not require community cooperation or sophisticated water management and, in particular, leaves time for other coping strategies which are so important during the hunger months that take up a sizeable chunk of the year. It is a rule, after all, that the poorer you are the more risk averse you are likely to be. And the people in some of the remoter villages really are poor by any standards. It is worrying to find that the monitoring report by an outside consultant that I had with me failed to pick up on this, commenting only on the need for better water management. Over and over again it seems to me we so-called development professionals fail to get it. I ought to shout: 'It's the ...., stupid!' , but I am not quite sure what goes in space. Social capital is definitely part of it, though. The individual needs the household, which needs its own wider network within the various structures of family and community, all too often in the face of an unsympathetic or hostile government and outside world.

Actually, what the communities made clear over and over again during the visit was that for them the most important aspect of the project is its support for their claims to the certificate of ancestral domain tenure, which under the Philippines' Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act provides a degree of protection against the further expropriation of the lands which remain available to indigenous peoples in the absence of individual deeds of property. This last point, of course, has been the most blatant point at which the outside world clashes with and usually destroys indigenous communities and cultures. The modern state works on a basis of legal ownership of property based on individual rights supported by legal documentation. Time and time again throughout the world this has been used as a basis for usurping indigenous peoples' lands, usually turning thriving communities into dislocated groups of homeless beggars scraping a living on the margins of modern society.

With his usual talent for boldly pointing out the obvious which others prefer to conceal, Adam Smith wrote:
'As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.' As an economist he was always human enough to relate his conclusions to human nature and society, however ugly. It is more common for economists engaged in development to do the opposite, turning the poor into numbers and then manipulating data to show how activities and interventions that blatantly destroy their society are, through some perverse logic, actually good for them.

The Philippines  should be praised for having legislation that permits indigenous peoples to legalise their rights in respect of some at least of the lands they inhabit. The absence of such legislation was a major cloud that hung over the programme of support for the peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, where I was working before I came to the Philippines. But the process of obtaining the certificate of tenure is time-consuming, complicated, bureaucratic and  expensive. So it is a good thing there are organisations working to support indigenous communities in processing their claims and I am glad to have played my part in buildoing a programme to support them.

But now I'm leaving. I don't think I'll miss Manila too much, although I'll have the usual fond memories of good people and good times. It is a great big, congested, polluted megalopolis, after all, like most of the places where I get to live and work.

But I will miss this:

Another bonfire of the vanities

Here’s the plot of a story:

There’s a very wealthy man, so powerful and arrogant that he and his colleagues refer to themselves as ‘Masters of the Universe’. He could belong to a variety of professions. He could be a politician or the leader of a religious movement; he could be a high ranking international bureaucrat or a captain of industry; he could be a movie mogul or a very senior lawyer or judge; but for the purposes of this story let’s say that he’s a banker. He lives in a millionaire penthouse on Central Park in New York, drives the latest and fastest sports car and, in addition to the wife and child who occupy the penthouse with him, he also has a mistress, for whom he is about to purchase an apartment where he can visit her without fear of detection, what in Mexico would be called ‘la casa chica.’ He certainly has it all, until suddenly his whole world is overturned because he takes one wrong turning when driving across town with his mistress. They find themselves in a slum neighbourhood, unfamiliar, hostile and threatening. They want to get out quick, panic and hit a man. Out of fear of being lynched they drive away from the injured pedestrian, turning what would have been classified as an accident into a criminal offence.  Even then they might have got away with it, but fate conspires against the hero. He mishandles what should have been a routine meeting with the police, arousing their suspicions, a politician becomes involved because he sees a wonderful chance to make political capital out of the case of a greedy, wealthy man callously knocking down a pauper in a slum street and then driving away from the scene. And so it goes from bad to worse. The police enjoy humiliating him, handcuffing him with his hands behind his back when they take him to court, nearly driving him to suicide. He finds himself denied bail, forced to share a police cell with hardened criminals. His clothes get dirty and sweaty. As the trial drags on, the comfort, luxury and power he used to know become increasingly distant memories. The press demonise him, the prosecution closes in for the kill with a jury fully manipulated by political and social considerations. The politician stirs it up as much as he can. And in the end the ‘Master of the Universe’ ends up serving a lengthy jail term. It all happens at the drop of a hat, a total reversal of fortune, all because of one wrong turn.

The point is that for a normal human being, that is to say for a person who did not consider him or herself to be a master of the universe, above the law and above conscience, the wrong turn in all probability would not have turned into such a catastrophy.They probably would not have driven off from the accident to begin with.

Just recently this tale has come to have a strange familiarity. In fact it is a rough rendering of the plot of Tom Wolffe’s 1987 novel ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’. But as I have, inevitably and I hope without relish, followed the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn – his arrest when already seated comfortably in the first class compartment of a plane about to leave New York, his denial of bail, his hand-cuffing (hands behind the back of course, which Wolffe is at pains to point out is done by the police to maximise the sense of vulnerability and humiliation of the defendant), his demonization by the press – I could not help catching my breath at the way true life mirrors fiction.

It is, of course, more appropriate to reflect on the nature of hybris and the strange and usually sudden inevitability with which the powerful and the mighty fall. In that sense, one might look around the world at this time and take a long hard look at what has happened in Egypt and Tunisia and what may ultimately happen in several other countries in the region. When I was working in Egypt back in the early nineties, managing a number of projects in technical and agricultural education, it was clear that a massive population bulge was coming through that the system – political, social and economic – simply was not geared up to coping with. Thousands of young people were going through technical secondary schools knowing full well that there would be no jobs for them and not even the means or the right to give tongue to their frustration or support a legitimate political party that offered to address their needs. Even back then President Mubarak was referred to with rueful humour as the pharaoh, the head of an autocratic dynasty. And of course we should remember that in the early days of the first dynasty the ancient Egyptian believed that only the Pharaoh had an immortal soul. Only he would live on in the after world after death.He truly was a ‘Master of the Universe.’

And that brings me back to the solipsism of the very wealthy and very powerful. It has not been pleasant to read some of the really vicious comments that have been made about Strauss-Kahn or the way he has been found guilty in the press and on the internet long before due process has taken its course. Of course his reputation stands against him as evidence, but even so, the presumption of innocence is an important principal that seems in danger of being forgotten. Some of the things written are plain stupid, such as the claim that in France his behaviour would have been condoned and his alleged victim would have been silenced. In fact, it is possible to find predatory male behaviour that abuses power and authority in order to take advantage of vulnerable women in every society. It is simply located in different niches. While there is no doubt that a woman in Taliban-run Afghanistan must have faced the worst odds in terms of protection or redress, it is certainly crass to point fingers without plenty of self-criticism, too. The USA, for example, at one point was awash with stories of sexually abusive behaviour by the leaders of ultra-protestant sects affiliated with right-wing politics, cases of misbehaviour with congressional aides surface on a regular basis and, of course, Hollywood has always taken a perverse pride in its seedy tales of ugly sexual behaviour by media moguls taking advantage of would be stars and starlets.Meanwhile the writer of the series of books about ‘The girl who something or othered a something or other’ has shown that even nice, liberal and ethically advanced Sweden may have its dark side.

The dark side we are talking of is this thing that seems to lurk deep down in the male persona. As we read the horrific news about the routine use of rape as a tool of intimidation in the Republic of the Congo, or consider the fate of the thousands of women who are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation, we must surely pause for thought – about what is in ourselves. When the news broke a year or two ago in my own nice little home town of Cambridge in the East of England (home of Stephen Hawkin and the death of God, of course!) of the existence of houses where trafficked young women from Eastern Europe were being held against their will and prostituted, the chief investigating police officer asked publically how any men could want to ‘make use of’ these girls. But apparently there are plenty who do.

My own worst encounters with this dark business were in Bangladesh, where girls are sold at an early age into brothels and told that they have an enormous debt to pay off before they can start to earn on their own account. It isn’t nice to think of young teenage girls having to accommodate as many clients as possible a day in conditions of imprisonment and de facto slavery. Sadly, I’m not sure if the project we were funding was able to do that much to help them.

But leaving that very dark world behind and emerging into the comparative daylight of more common or garden predatory sexual behaviour, I’m pretty sure it’s true to say most of us know one or two men who seem obsessed with sex from the narrow perspective of how many women they can bed or viewing every woman they meet as a potential conquest. Nothing particularly wrong with that, I guess, in a fair and equal world, where everyone has an equal right to say yes or no. And as Montaigne said ‘Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition,’ so we’re all pretty much tarred by the same brush.

However, the real world is not fair or equal. Most relationships are asymmetrical, especially in the work place, where we are all busy bullying or manipulating one another for one reason or another. And I guess it is that asymmetry that has got the fur flying in the Strauss-Kahn case. Once the high and mighty topple from power, the awe and respect in which they have been held disappears at once. That’s what happened to the Romanov Tsars in Russia, of course, when Nicholas the Second abdicated. In the space of a minute he passed from being the most powerful autocrat in the world to becoming a figure of ridicule, for whom death at the hands of a Bolshevik firing squad was probably already inevitable. At least heads of the IMF don’t risk such a fate when they fall.             

Hot and bothered in Manila: Climate Change and human nature

Manila is melting. This is my fourth year here and I've never known it so hot. They call April the Summer here, then the rains are supposed to arrive and cool things down a little. But this year apart from a side-swipe by a passing typhoon some ten days ago, which drenched Manila in a heavy downpour and knocked out a few power lines but dealt all its real mayhem, death and destruction up the east coast of Luzon, the blistering heat has just continued to build. The polluted sky hangs like a sinister curtain outside the 30^th floor window of my office with its panoramic view across the city and out over Manila Bay; in the unventilated gym where I go to box the sweat pours in rivers off me and the other masochists still training; at night I wake with a horrible breathless feeling in my chest from nightmares in which evil aliens arrive in cloaked space-ships to destroy the Earth through global warming projected by lethal rays. I wonder: is this really it? Has climate change really begun to take effect?  The charts all show that, as climate Change takes hold, the western side of the Philippines is supposed to get hotter and drier while the east gets wetter and subject to more and more typhoons of increasing intensity. During these murderously hot days, on which only the air-conditioning in the car keeps road rage in check in the grid-locked traffic of Makati City, it is very easy to convince oneself that things really have started to change and not for the better.

Which makes me wonder just why the stuff about climate Change that comes to me, whether in the newspapers, on the tv or radio, or in the official documents in my in-tray, is all so terribly complicated, convoluted, tongue-twistingly acronymed and jargonised to smithereens and frankly tedious. 'All countries now agree that strong climate action is more urgent than ever!'  screams one of the documents attached to an in-coming email, before vitiating itself in a sea of bureaucratic detail.

Does any normal human being understand what was agreed during the last climate change bun fight in Cancun?  Does any normal human being know that there is going to be yet another love fest quite soon, this time in Durban, and does anybody think it is going to make any difference? Does anybody remember the Kyoto agreement or what that involved? Or the Copenhagen Accord? Does anyone know what a carbon market is? (No, dear, it is not somewhere where you go to buy fuel for your probably soon to be, if not already, illegal coal fire.)

The documents I have on my desk make pretty turgid reading, but underneath all the Beachcomber-ish gobbledegook they tell a story that ought to have everybody, if not alarmed, then at least feeling uneasy. Apparently even if the Kyoto experiment were repeated it would still not meet the target of staying below a 2° C increase in the global climate. And Kyoto is already over. Meanwhile there are a lot of aspirations and a number of  pots of money all wrapped up in complex bureaucratic management procedures, but, in the absence of anything legally binding, it's business as usual.

And it's too hot for me to box.

Yet half of the people I meet or those who read this will tell me the heat out there has nothing to do with climate change. The science is actually very complicated, they say, and no-one really knows how to interpret the data. That's the trouble with scientists. They are complicated people.

A funny thought that occurs to me is that the issue of global warming and human-induced environmental catastrophe has actually been around for a long time, at least as long as I can remember. As a boy I had a David Bowie album that started with a song about the Earth coming to an end in five years' time. (No prizes, but who can name the album and the song?)

Still on the subject of the devastating effects of Climate Change that await us, I watched a David Attenborough video on the plane coming over here from London last month. In it he demonstrated with the help of highly equipped teams of scientists all over the world, that the oceans really could be dead by the middle of the century. Fish stocks have been fished to crisis point and coral reefs are threatened not only by the warming of the sea but by its increasing acidification due to the increased amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air. Now it starts to sound like the plot of the movie Soylent Green, if anyone can remember that terrifying vision of an over-populated future, and I am feeling really depressed.

Talking about David Attenborough, he gave a short talk on Chimpanzes on the radio the other day, in which he described how they hunt Colobus monkeys. To do this they have to work as a team with one group of chimps driving the Colobus monkeys into an ambush. While expressing his regret at the sight of the 'all too human' bodies of a female Colobus and her baby being ripped apart and eaten, Attenborough cannot help admiring not only the chimps' teamwork, but also their willingness to share the spoils of the hunt. It would seem that they are at their most human in terms of what we would see as essentially positive characteristics, when engaged in an act of extreme violence and bloodshed, albeit against another species and in search of food.

The close association of what is destructive and murderous in our nature with what makes us human -  something that would seem to go well beyond the association of aggression with affection or protective love postulated by Konrad Lorenz (at least with regard to Greylag geese!) – is a fundamental problem for psychologists and sociologists and metaphysicians alike. At times it seems enough to justify the doctrine of original sin, which in this post-religious world, where Professor Hawkin has just told us the idea of Heaven and life after death is a fairy-tale, really is rather disturbing.

Pelagius and the Pill

Last Monday was my birthday and alongside the greetings from friends scattered around the world, mostly for the first time in my life on Facebook, and the surprise party that was waiting for me in the office (and if any of those present get to read this, yes it really did ambush me!) when I returned from the gym, there was also the additional treat, if that is quite the right word, of finding my name in most of the press cuttings assiduously collected by the press and information department of our office. I am not an important person, so it is a pretty unusual for me to find my name associated with something newsworthy. I must confess to a twinge of that sense of gratified vanity that a pampered bureaucrat is bound to feel when some tedious pronouncement they have made at some non-event is picked up by desperate, probably underpaid journalists, or the warm glow a quasi-human minor celebrity must dimly sense in his or her proto-mind when his or her latest cavortings are publicised in one of the newspapers that uses big letters and short words. But once that little feeling wore off what followed was an acute awareness of just how easy it is to be misquoted, to have ones words fitted to lines of argument that in no way correspond to the point one was trying to get across, and so on. In short, it was the rude awakening of the neophyte. What they were writing about was and is important enough and the general gist of what the various articles were saying was sufficiently in line with what I would have liked that I decided it did not matter and was happy to drift back into the warm birthday glow. However, since the subject does matter, I want to take it up now. That subject is reproductive health, or, if you prefer, family planning.

To my mind this is an important issue. In fact it is one of the issues that matters most in development. The first thing I want to say on this should not need saying, but unfortunately it does, because in the Philippines, where I work and where this is a crucial issue (which is why my remarks got into the press) those, led by the more conservative elements in the Roman Catholic church hierarchy, who remain resolutely opposed to the introduction of legislation to make the provision of modern family planning easily available to poor women have cynically and openly resorted to blurring the lines between the two. The point in question is this: family planning is NOT abortion and abortion is NOT a form of family planning. Abortions, other than those that are carried out for medical reasons, the ethics of which are complex and subject to different legal provisions from country to country, are overwhelmingly the result of the unavailability of and lack of knowledge about modern family planning or contraception. The thousands of mostly very young women who resort in their desperation to abortions, all too often in far from salubrious circumstances and all too often with fatal consequences, are not practicing family planning, they are reacting desperately and tragically to unbearable circumstances they end up in because family planning was never available for them.

Of course the moralists will jump in here now and say: 'Well they had it coming to them. Shouldn't have let their passions get the better of them!'

Funny how hollow and hypocritical that sort of remark sounds, isn't it?

Anyway, enough of that. The press were good and fully understood my point and having raised the issue of abortion briefly at the beginning of the interview, they let it drop and did not bring it up in their articles. The second point is more difficult, but I do want to make it clear. A lot people are now making the point in the Philippines that the population has got very big, too big in fact, and the current growth rate is not one that will enable poverty reduction. The maths is very simple. One cake growing at a certain speed, hungry mouths wanting a piece of the cake multiplying at a faster rate. Result: ever smaller slices of cake (mine's the one with the glace cherry on it, please!). Of course the 'I'm a macro-economist, or should I say macho-economist, and I know about these things' types all scoff at the naivety of this view. They point to the need for a steady supply of new members of the workforce to support growth. Yes, sir! When can I have a starvation-wage job in your sweatshop, please, and is it ok for my wife to go and work as a slave for some serial rapist in a country which shall be nameless, but which is, of course, a long way overseas?

Funny how the macho-economists seem to positively relish the 'dark satanic mills' of the world they believe in. And they're not very good economists, anyway, because their model is ultimately even more naive than that of the primitive malthusians, since it does not take into account that peculiar phenomenon that certainly exists throughout nature but which has never been properly accounted for, the business cycle. Even mighty civilisations wax and wane according to it. Besides there are an awful lot of us now. The World Bank is seriously worried about food commodity prices and supplies. And climate change is a reality. Suddenly our planet looks kind of small. The last word I'll say on this is that the macho-economists tend to view demographic transition as something that is going to happen anyway. Somehow one day we all wake up and people are having less children. A bit like believing in the tooth fairy. Actually the small print in the text books tends to say that governments facilitate demographic transition through making family planning available...

Anyway, the point is that people have started to talk about the population issue in the Philippines. In fact it even features quite strongly in the new Philippines Development Plan  of the Government. And that is what the press picked up on. Which is why I am writing this now, because it is NOT what I said to them. Quite the contrary, in fact. I made it clear that the issue of population growth and association of family planning with trying to slow it was a contentious issue (because of the macho-economists), but that there was a reason to support making modern family planning available that in my mind is not something that can be argued against and that is HUMAN RIGHTS. Everyone seems to have forgotten the clear commitment expressed in the Cairo Declaration of 1998 to make modern family planning available to all women. It is one of the two targets for achieving the 5th Millenium Development Goal, or MDG, moreover, the one which all over the world is least likely to be achieved.

What is the 5th MDG? Reducing Maternal Mortality.

Hey ho, am I surprised that the MDG that is above all for women is the least likely of all to be achieved? Sadly, I am not. In case you are wondering what family planning has got to do with maternal mortality or maternal death, ask yourself which women are the most at risk in childbirth. The answer is those who are too young, those who are too old and those who have already had too many babies. Then go and tell an impoverished woman in a rural community anywhere in the Philippines that even though she has already had seven or eight babies, we're shooting for nine or ten and, with any luck, even more! What's that you say? - She and her husband should simply practice abstinence. Yes, sure, I'll see you back at the institution when it's time to give you your pills and tuck you in for the night. Meanwhile, back in the real world...Eleven women die needlessly every day in the Philippines, according to campaigners, from causes directly associated with their inability to access family planning.

Whether this figure is exactly right or not, I don't really care. I do think it is essential that we think of them as people, not simply as the commodities that women so often seem to be reduced to in debate and in the world. I am not talking about the rich 'Eats, something-or-other, loves' jet-setters, by the way, who are pretty nicely 'empowered' in a solipsistic sort of way. I'm talking about the real world of female genital mutilation, child marriage and trafficking of women and children for commercial sexual exploitation, in which I seem to have lived and worked most of my life. I once worked out that based on the Unicef definition of childhood being up to the age of 18, then well over half the men in the world could be classified as paedophiles, but that is a bit extreme, provocative, etc, so let's not go there.

In the end I would like the press to have focused more on the issue of basic human rights, not population control. But, far more important than that, I do hope that things continue to move in the right direction and the responsible parenthood act gets passed into law in the Philippines. A lot of good people have dedicated a lot of time and effort towards that end.

Today, as I write this, I'm in England, looking out over a beautiful early spring morning scene, a green meadow surrounded by tall trees freshly in leaf and decked with blossom. I listened to Melvin Bragg's discussion programme on the radio, which this time around was on the subject of Pelagius. Early church history is probably as good a subject as any to listen to as Good Friday dawns, the most serious day in the Christian calendar. The discussion took me back (further than I like to consider) to my university days and the study of Dostoievsky, in particular his 'Brothers Karamazov'. In those days, young and ignorant as I was, my main concern was the formal aspects of the polyphonic novel, as propounded by Bakhtin in what was probably just a wizzard wheeze to keep the master clear of the Stalinist censors, but now, listening to the excellent exposition of the arguments between the Celtic ascetic from my own little corner of civilisation and the worldly wise Saint Augustine of Hippo, I realise not only the real fundamentals that Dostoievsky was setting out, but something that may have a wider relevance - in an old-fashioned structuralist sort of way. Ivan Karamazov handed back his ticket to paradise because he rejected the notion that innocent children could be considered to be tainted by original sin (and therefore in someway deserving of the suffering inflicted on them deliberately by sadists or indifferently by nature). In this he was expressing the views of Pelagius and these views, to my mind, continue to be the philosophical standpoint of those who work idealistically for the good of others, whether working as humanitarian or development professionals or in any other walk of life, and whatever religion or non-religion they may believe in. Idealistically, it is good to underpin what we do with a belief that human beings can of themselves be good.

Ivan's antagonist (in the life of the book's hero, Alyosha Karamazov) is of course the saintly Father Zosima, whose name is highly symbolic, for it was Pope Zosimus in real life who exonerated Pelagius after one of those innumerable Church Councils they used to have. Pelagius's great rival, who eventually triumphed over him in the western if not the eastern church, was Augustine, and his views have underpinned the official, establishment view of things ever since, including in the end the doctrinal opposition to family planning. In this world everything is subjugated to dogma,  even common humanity. Augustine himself firmly believed that if you were not baptised you would go to hell when you died. Hey, Ivan, wait for me! I just handed back my ticket too.

Zosima, however, is far more than just an avatar of Pope Zosimus. In a way that aspect is just incidental. More importantly he is linked to the Bogomils, that fascinating popular sect whose origin goes back to the Manichaean religion, which Augustine had in fact followed before the fear of persecution drove him into the Christian church. The Manichaean religion has had a long and shadowy history alongside mainstream Christianity from its heyday in the dark ages when it dominated a wide swathe of central Asia. Its rigid division between light and dark, good and evil forces, infusions of Buddhism and other influence, gave it a wide appeal, including later on to extreme Calvinists and others who see evil all around them especially in the souls of their neighbours, as well as to the all the strange gnostic sects that eventually saw their expression in the weird and whacky rosicrucian-inspired world of William Blake and, more recently, the somewhat less highbrow, but no less ridiculous realm inhabited by the likes of Dan Brown.

I think there is a touch of the dark vision in all of us. I find it in my pessimistic moments when I look at the Dark Satanic Mills - I'm right with you there, William! But at other times, there is the optimistic side and that tends to come out when something good is happening  - if I'm lucky enough to be there when a very poor community is feeling good about itself because it has managed to establish a meaningful, livelihood-enhancing project, or something like that. I'm glad there is a balance in life and on the whole I think it is better to be positive. My Christmas Blogg was the product of one of the dark moments.

Of course, one of the interesting things about the Manichaeans is that their prime text was the weird and wonderful Book of Enoch, the only full version of which to have survived is the Ethiopian version in the liturgical language Ge'ez. Ethiopia, is the country where I have lived and worked more than anywhere else, though I have not been back since I left in 2002. I really got seriously into linguistics there. But now I seem to be heading going down a completely different road from where I started, so I'd better stop. Thank you for reading this.

Balete tree

There is some sort of Balete tree in my garden. The Balete is a big old ficus. Philippine folk custom associates it with the Kapre, an unpleasant, definitely malevolent tree spirit in the form of a rather unhygienic old man who smokes a lot and molests young women when he thinks he can get away with it. Come to think of it you find quite a lot them around the watering holes of this part of the world. One of my boxing coaches in nicknamed Kapre, but that is just because he is tall and thin. The real kapres are a good deal older and wealthier than he is.

In any case, the point I wanted to make is that the tree in my garden has developed a single extraordinary seed pod. It only has one and I say it is extraordinary because it has a square shape like a box or something man-made. It hangs from one of the branches, green and hard, as large as a small coconut but rigidly geometrical and angular. I'm due to leave this country some time in the Summer and I am hoping against hope that before I go the seed pod will have done something interesting, like bursting open to reveal in its hidden interior a treasure of dark, shiny seeds. Something like the economic plans of a well intentioned government adrift on an ocean of graft and ingrained habits of patronage and elite capture. It's a tough old world, after all.

Last week I was down in Mindanao in one of the areas affected by the conflicts between the Government and Moro separatist organisations over the years, in particular during the 2008 flare up between government and the MILF when the peace talks broke down. A couple of places really stuck in my mind, one in Lanao del Sur within the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and the other in Lanao del Norte on the other side of the line.

Lanao del Sur is interesting. It is a land of banners. Everywhere you go they ripple and wave in the breeze at the road side and across it, proclaiming the academic success of sons and daughters who have passed exams, graduated and become doctors, nurses, engineers, accountants, whatever it is. It is good to see people take such pride in the academic achievements of their children and by the way most of the faces of these successful young people are those of girls. The capital, Marawi City, proudly proclaims itself to be an Islamic city. The atmosphere is very different form that in Illigan, just forty minutes drive away on the coast. The domes and minarets of a multitude of mosques stand out against the green meadows along the shores of the lake that is the centrepiece of the province. It feels lush, yet looking up at the surrounding hills tells a story of rapid and dangerous deforestation and fields planted with maize on slopes that common sense alone would advise against this kind of agriculture.

The community we went to see was typical of this area. The ordinary people have very little, not even a small parcel of land to call their own. They share crop or work as labourers. The fighting from 2008 onwards caused them to flee and inevitably they lost their draught animals and farm implements and tools. They returned afterwards to be poorer than before. The project was about forming groups to grow fruit tree seedlings. Some of these can be sold after a number of months for a higher price than the purchase price, others later for a still higher price and some kept for planting, after which they will yield fruit after six years. The project put people together; it got men working voluntarily together with women in a way they all found empowering and above all it made them feel strong and hopeful. In an imperfect world that almost feels like more than should be expected.

We went to have lunch at the barangay hall, a modest building in keeping with the modest economic status of the place. But next door their were two incredible concrete monstrosities. The first of these was the house of the barangay captain. It is hard to imagine its incongruous vastness, the great pillars complete with doric capitals, the huge slabs of mould stained concrete, all unfinished so that the family live in Gormenghastian feudal grandeur in the ramshackle lower floor while village children scramble and play amongst the pillars and empty half-built chambers of the upper floor that will never be finished, a monument to human self-aggrandizement that will endure for as long as the concrete stays good.

Next door the mosque is even bigger but just as incomplete. The dome, while smaller than that of Hagia Sofia, is immense.

The impoverished people of this barangay live out their lives in the shadow of these delusions de grandeur.

My experience in Lanao del Norte the next day was of a gruelling and at times alarming ride in a jeepney with chains on its wheels churning through the mud to get up the hill, not to the remotest barangay but to the capital of the municipality we were going to. Of course by using chains the jeepneys make the situation worse with each journey they make. But without the chains they would not make it. There is no way out of this bind. How can such a municipality exist with not even a doctor and no budget to pay the one nurse to travel around its twenty-one barangays to vaccinate their children?

The mayor told me she normally lived in Manila, making her living from the sale of DVDs of doubtful origin. Central government funding is spent on paying the wage bills of an enormous army of useless local government officials, for they are all unsackable. A new mayor creates new post holders in key positions but cannot without risk to life and limb dismiss the non-performing appointees of the previous local chief executive. So the payroll just grows and grows. Service delivery is a matter for charity. So enter the donors...

It's like a localised version of the Office of Circumlocution in Dickens' Little Dorrit. I'm forcing myself to read that particularly undigestable bit of Dickens at the moment simply because I read some review by Simon Scharma where he said it was Dickens' greatest work. I still respect Scharma as a historian and I love his history of art series, but he was way off the mark on Dickens, unless he was just trying to drive home the point about one aspect of good governance: payroll control!

Mind you another key character in Little Dorrit is the banker Merdle. We all hate bankers nowadays. We watch the way they grind us into the dust, taking more and more money while our governments wring their hands, make threatening noises, but ultimately are powerless to do anything. The bankers have the power and the rules of the game say if there are no controls to keep you in check then you take as much as you can. In the end the law of the jungle - the human jungle, that is, since nothing in nature is so remorselessly bent on accumulation - is that those who can do capture resources and exploit the others as hard as they can. Development has offered the solution, not of making a fairer world through redistribution of wealth, but of endless, accelerating growth that eventually gets so big that some of it rubs off on everyone. The trouble is that now we have the green stuff to contend with. We're exploiting the planet beyond what is sustainable and our vocabulary is changing. And then the trouble is that our nature and our habits are not changing so fast.