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: