Science: Its political, ideological and ethical implications
The scientist as a promoter of status quo or social change
Economic power, political power and poverty
Where do liberal food and nutrition workers stand?
A critical look at our profession and ourselves
The future challenge
References

Wld Rev. Nutr. Diet., vol. 53. pp. 1-27 (Karger. Basel 1987)

CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN¹
<schuftan@gmail.com>

¹ I would like to acknowledge the help of Tonia Marek, MPH. in the preparation of this paper.

Introduction

The topic of the above title has vividly interested the author for many years. Considerable material is available but the difficulty has been to find a unifying thread through the swamps and jungles of the raw data. The challenge was to provide a framework of understanding in which what appeared a jumble of frightening facts became a pattern. The end result has been the construction of a scenario that looks into most of the burning questions on these issues bringing together insights previously scattered in dozens of journal articles, books and newspaper columns.

The materials are here presented under 6 headings as an informal, non-systematic review of the literature on the ethical, ideological and political implications of nutrition as a science and as a tool and an avenue for intervention. The materials here collected should shed some new light upon the major issues at the core of this universal discussion that -whether we like it or not – is at the very base of our daily work as food and nutrition professionals. (Some of the same materials inspired a previous article by the author entitled Ethics, Ideology and Nutrition that was published in Food Policy in 1982 [1].)

Science: Its political, ideological and ethical implications

Slicing Reality

Every age is dominated by what Foucault calls an ‘episteme’ – a way of conceiving and perceiving the world, which brings certain features of existence into visibility and blurs or conceals others. If we are to understand history, then, we must come to terms with the episteme of each age. In it we should find the interplay between knowledge and power [2]. In this context. all science should ultimately be a search for meaning, but what that consists of varies from one person to another [3].

Unfortunately, western scholarship is too often a fiction, a representation, a closed system, one that has developed according to its own rules. These rules have subdivided the experience of a whole area into neat categories convenient to scholarly classification – though not necessarily conductive to a better understanding of the subject [4].

Human events, like physical events, can be viewed at many levels of abstraction, each providing a window on the world. To restrict our view to a single window is to invite partial truths. Half-truths can be dangerous; they can frighten and subdue the uninitiated while legitimizing the interpreters, deforming the moral discourse [5].

Whether a certain development in a society is interpreted as harmful or beneficial ultimately depends on one’s theoretical position and one’s class interests. To understand and to change any social situation requires a knowledge not only of the internal dynamics of the situation, but also of the nature of the macrosystem which provides the parameters for that situation [6]. We have to learn to look at totalities, rather than fragments of reality [7]. Therefore, what counts as a fact depends on the concepts we use, on the questions we ask. There is no neutral terminology. There are really no wholly neutral facts. All describing is classifying according to some conceptual scheme. Motives are not just private states of mind, but patterns in everybody’s life. We cannot say what somebody is doing until we know why he/she does it. Man can neither understand his nature nor his behavior until he understands his motives [8]. Let’s face it, we are often more interested in answering questions of fact not involving values, than answering factual questions about values [9].

As said, our intellect divides the indivisible – thought from feeling, form from content – but such dichotomies do not exist in nature; ambivalence is part of our nature, else we would not have developed a morality. Asking different kinds of questions produces quite different kinds of answers. Slicing the world in different directions reveals different patterns. How you see it depends on how you slice it. All you have to remember is that there’s more than one way to cut it [8]. It is well and good to question hunger, for example but, in so doing, are we using the right questions? That is, do we not obfuscate the problem by avoiding the real issue behind hunger which is one of wealth and power [10]?

There is the naive perception that food and nutrition interventions are intrinsically good; who can be against feeding children? But many do not realize the importance of the social and political context in which those programs take place [11].

Moral and Ideological Aspects

Unlike academic achievement, intellectual development cannot be separated from moral development. The connection between morality and the sciences may appear indirect, but I do not see how a deeply prejudiced person could be a good research scholar. The importance of the moral factor is more obvious when it comes to the social sciences and philosophy. Who you are and where you stand must make a difference. Intellectual development should never stunt moral growth; they must travel hand in hand. How does one deal with poverty around the world if by our behavior we abet those who favor an elitist and authoritarian view of society and see left wing subversion in every attempt to change the way people have been treated unjustly? Whether we like it or not, what we are morally depends on the choices we make, the things we actually do. And what we teach honestly and convicingly also depends on what we are [12].

When people who hold the fate of nutrition programs in their hands make fine distinctions, semantics become statements of policy. Words have always been ideology and ideology has been policy. It, therefore, becomes important to take a close look at the beneficiaries’ rights and needs, as much as at our moral duties. Are these two interlocked? And what do we really mean by the recipients’ rights? Is subjective conviction all there is to the concept of a moral right? Obviously not, for otherwise any thief who honestly believes that because he has had a deprived childhood or because lie has been wronged by society he has a right to help himself to a piece of someone else’s property thinking that that would be morally right. And a Robin Hood, who robs the rich to give to the poor, would be doubly right. The subjective conviction that one is in the right gives one the inner strength to do what one is doing. That is an important thing in itself. But for such a subjective conviction to become a moral right, it also has to obtain the sanction of others, even if not necessarily most or even all of them. Such a sanction may convert a Robin Hood from a highway robber into a social rebel, a terrorist into a freedom fighter. A subjective claim can become a recognized moral and legal right by external sanction. But there is another limit to any moral right which determines to what extent it will be sanctioned – its possible conflict with another moral right. When such a conflict arises, the sanction for one right against the other depends, in terms of morality and justice, on what claim is considered the stronger, the more urgent, the less injurious to the other. In terms of political reality, it depends on whose claim can muster more support based on the real interests of those who have the power to grant the sanction or to deny it. This. then, determines the extent of the moral and legal right the world is prepared to accept. However much we may regret it, the world never accepts more. Not only do the relative weights of conflicting moral claims change – political power interests also change. The question thus is, what sanction, moral, legal and political one can get for any new position. Morally, might is not right. Politically, it often is. Perhaps if we have the might, our subjective belief that we are doing no wrong would in time receive the sanction of some and of lime itself. But not only do we not have the might to conquer hunger, not only do we not have the power to rally support, and not only does time work against us, but the very attempt to rely on our moral strength may lead to disaster. It may be good rhetoric to say that we need no one’s confirmation of our rights, that we will in nil likelihood win morally, but politically, however, it may bleed us to death. The question is not our right to fight hunger and malnutrition, but how –and that, unfortunately, can not easily be imposed unilaterally. To fight malnutrition we have a supreme moral claim, sanctioned by the entire world. For the alternative, the claim for structural social changes we have no’ universal sanction. Charity, therefore, is obscurantism, because it really means no solution [13].

To be human is to be a moral agent, able to choose freely amongst alternatives and to engage in consequential action. Moral questions arise as we consider how we ought to act in respect of others. The moral values we draw upon in choosing are themselves the product of collective life. Moral values are consensual, and actions based on them are said to be legitimate. It is clear, however, that the moral code of a community also legitimizes established relations of power. An instrument of domination in the hands of the ruling elites, such as a moral code is not only an integrative but an alienating force; it renders exploitation of the people easier. Thus, neither moral nor political, the market’s powers are to be seen as purely instrumental, relating means to given ends. By responding more and more to the logic of markets, communities are reduced to the functional requirements of livelihood, while the roles and moral obligations of citizens are often dismissed as irrelevant. Therefore, a system that has no place for a majority of the people has lost the moral authority to prescribe what should be done. It is by participating in the political life of a community that we acquire a sense of who we are. It is through political discourse that a needs-oriented economy comes into being. The right to equal access to such discourse should be the essence of our demands [14].

Conversely, we often find ourselves accepting or supporting ‘ethically neutral’ although ‘value biased’ premises. It is in the name of scientific analysis that unemployment, malnutrition and poverty are often perpetuated through the impersonal mechanisms of economic policy and of the market [15]. In ‘the way things areness’, society makes disprivilege look right. Things are explained away’.’ It is through ideology that society ultimately explains itself; it is, therefore, clearly partly governed by myths [16].

The scientist as a promoter of status quo or social change

We Intellectuals

Are intellectuals a class apart, responsible only to their own inner urges, and a vision of man’s needs that goes beyond the daily struggle and even defies it? Are they duty-bound to immerse themselves in their society to articulate consciousness? Or are they natural leaders, destined not only to provide the ideas that shape society but also to make sure that they are implemented? Here is Jean-Paul Sartre, arguing the obligation of political engagement and action as the true test of our values [17].

The truth is that intellectuals bend the rules of discourse to suit their own interests; they argue for what they want to believe. The determinist theories they use consistently tend to provide a justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race or sex. The judgement of a work of science depends on whether it conforms to the political convictions of the judges – who are mostly self-appointed [8]. It is precisely because of this that scientists in higher education in America help reproduce the class system with their right hand – and it is hard to keep the left hand free to foster critical intelligence. We are not independent intellectuals floating somewhere above the economic system: we’re part of it [18]. We are simply guilty of bad scholarship, which could be improved and be made truthful if only we would reform our methods and expunge our false preconceptions. Few scholars can resist the pressures on them of the scholarly tradition in which they work [4].

Although scholars sometimes carry an ideological debate with the culture that breeds them, they almost never confront that culture with another ideology, with political possibilities that are new or challenging. For without challenging the ideology many of them find abhorrent, they only perpetuate the passivity that has become their central image [19]. Intellectual liberation is difficult to achieve, since many of us are prisoners of our own past training and somebody else’s thought [20].

We also often use statistical illusions devised by our own academic elites which do not fit any real-world cases anywhere in the world [21]. Measuring poverty in detail can often be a substitute for, or an excuse for not acting in response to perfectly visible needs [22]. In that sense, factor analysis, for example has often led us to the cardinal error in reasoning of contusing correlation with cause [23].

Moreover, too many of our economists and too many international “organizations are seeking to take the politics out of the political economy of hunger and of the daily decision making process to avoid discord or conflict. Many, if not most, aspects of life should never be decided by the economists’ yardstick only. The abolition of slavery or child labor laws certainly never would have passed a cost-benefit test [24].

Among others, excessive institutional compartimentalization has separated political from economic analyses resulting in a passive reluctance to call a cat a cat [25]. There is a tendency to slop the analysis where ‘politics’ begins, with formulations like: ‘this, however, is a political question’. Of course, that is where the analysis very often should start. Our task is not merely to reflect the world, but to do something about it. A goal which is not at the same time a process becomes a dogma. It is the ‘principle of recognizing trends and acting promptly at the right time’ that mainly differentiates the politician from the theoretician [26].

On the other hand, why do our attempts to be comprehensive not achieve the expected results? The complex nature of the problems of hunger complicates our policy making. The essence of the problem transcends its interdisciplinary nature. Comprehensiveness cannot be obtained by achieving all-inclusiveness of the parts, but by creating a new philosophy into which all parts mesh. The development of such a philosophy has been avoided, because it automatically raises larger issues about the direction of society and challenges the current system. The essence of the matter is the need for new philosophies, methodologies and processes which help us work towards a society inspired by a different world view. We need tactics, yes, but first we need innovative strategies. It is more necessary than ever to pass from a stale of critique to actual concrete actions. Tactics must be shifted from a defensive position to one that offers positive choices. A positive strategy will be most effective if efforts are made to go beyond the political goal of obtaining the type of lowest common denominator that only serves to alleviate guilt feelings [27].

Our Inherent Obligations

We ought not retreat into helpless passivity, watching the biological and social system around us deteriorate. We can alter trends and avert catastrophes if we recognize and exercise our own power to make a difference. We all carry around with us a bag of unexamined credos, and this unexamined life is what comes under pressure when we are faced with decisions [28]. One of the greatest challenges facing humanity today is the challenge to meet the fundamental needs of the poor. In that sense, research, even applied, has acquired an elitist character, with little or no relevance to our concern for the real needs of the people [29].

From the effectiveness in combating hunger point of view, international and national nutrition meetings have too often become exercises in futility, organized and chaired by the same conservative groups year after year [30]. Food and nutrition professionals should, more than others, leave behind academicism and begin to look at real people and their needs [31].

Meeting the basic needs of the masses will in most countries hardly require any new knowledge or any new hard technology. However, it will require political solutions which are likely to have a number of technological inputs. But the political solutions are not dependent on first making the technological inputs available [32].

Basic human needs focus on five clusters of needs (not limited to material needs): (1) Basic personal consumer goods: food, clothing, housing and furnishing. (2) Universal access to basic services: education (adult and child), clean water, preventive and curative health, environmental sanitation, communications, and legal services. (3) The right to productive employment, (4) An infrastructure (physical, human, technical, institutional) to produce goods and services. (5) Mass participation in decision-making and review.

Not everyone who says ‘basic needs’ supports the above strategic conceptualization. The Roman emperors provided ‘bread and circuses’ for the masses; authoritarian regimes present modern variants, e.g. ‘football stadia and black beans’, ‘basketball courts and rice’. Basic needs defined in material terms, delivered by a bureaucracy and planned by an elite can create client groups, demobilize mass groups and create new patterns of dependence. Devoid of a clear ideological orientation, basic human needs do not clarify but mystify, they do not mobilize but manipulate. Technocratic basic needs models assume that the problems are largely management gaps within the decision-making groups together with a lack of ability to grasp opportunities by the poor [22].

Clearly, there is no easy or short-term solution to the syndrome of underdevelopment, of which nutritional status is an important indicator. The perniciousness of the statistical approach to hunger and malnutrition is that it has so many non-solutions built-in masquerading as answers. The most serious of these is the implication that salvation lies in obtaining for the LDCs those features of richer countries – doctors, hospitals and staff, field services, equipment and a rich pharmacopeia of drugs – which ostensibly ensure health and long life [33]. But disease is not the consequence of a lack of health services, and the provision of primary health care alone will not bring about better health. Ultimately, levels of health, nutritional status and living standards are determined by national development strategies and the international economic order [34]. Straight public health and nutrition plans, while committed to greater equity, do not contain interventions conducive to attaining the objectives of a more egalitarian society [35].

Economic power, political power and poverty

The Economic and Political Discourse

To an economist, it is greed, not love that makes the world go round. While the world’s religions condemn avarice as a deplorable vice, the world’s economists exalt it as a cardinal virtue. Unlike priests, economists know that avarice is useful in understanding some of the major issues in today’s economy. Avarice is the opposite of the weather. Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. No one talks about avarice, but everyone does a great deal about it, and that is why economists believe that greed makes the world go round [36].

Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that economic injustice is not an accident. It springs from the very nature of capitalism. When profit governs the day-to-day decisions of business, the effect on the ordinary person will inevitably be considered secondary. Policy cannot be governed by the profit motive and by love thy neighbor at the same time. Under liberal capitalism the most that can be hoped for are a few compromises. These alleviate some misery, but those underfed and underprivileged millions are still among us, suffering [37].

The egalitarian pronouncements of many a political leadership come handy, but only as a smokescreen to promote the interests of the privileged classes who control the levers of political power [38]. An induced commitment to justice, on the other hand, is shakier than a genuine one, especially if ‘frightened into’ by the threat of political unrest [39]. Thus, in the long run, political (ideological) considerations will prove as potent as economic. considerations when the aim is to achieve those relevant and durable solutions we so sorely need [24].

In Western nations, it is falacious to say that as democracies we have no ideology when economics motivates and controls practically all our policy-making [40]. In the USA, for example, there’s a very effective kind of ideological control managed by politicians, media lords, business interests and mainstream American intellectuals. This system of thought control restricts how we perceive ourselves, the alternatives we can imagine, our understanding of the rest of the world, and most importantly, it prevents any major ideological changes from taking place in the USA. The US political discourse and debate has often been less diversified even than in certain fascist countries. We do not have significant Socialist journalism in the USA, and it might well enliven debate. Capitalism, albeit modified and socialized, is our way of economic life, and we’re indoctrinated to it [41].

The French have intellectual superstars because they care passionately about new ideas, while most Americans are still trying to gel comfortable with the work of our last genuine intellectual: Thomas Jefferson. We have not, as an educated people, begun to assimilate the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud that underlie most current European thought. And this makes it extraordinarily difficult for us [2].

Limited by this underlying discourse, we are left without a more sophisticated analytical framework capable of accounting for macro-economic impacts. Therefore, public-policy decisions based on the results of micro-economic cost-benefit analyses are often undesirable. If public-policy makers have additional objectives they would like to consider in making investment decisions – such as equity and distributional considerations -it becomes imperative to incorporate them into the analysis [42]. Moreover, given the current economic state of the art, mathematical cost-benefit analyses are about as neutral as voter literacy tests in the Old South. They are often ideological documents designed to prove preconceived notions. Or. as a Library of Congress review has said of them ‘they tend to support the vested interests of the sponsor of the estimate or to fit the hypothesis of the individual making the estimate’ [43].

The Poor

The poorest are the same everywhere. They are poor primarily because their needs are not central to the political priorities of governments [44]. They are prevented from translating their needs into effective demands in the only terms that the market understands: cash [45].

The problem is that the institutions which create growth are not neutral as to its distribution. The concept of market demand mocks poverty or plainly ignores it as the poor have very little purchasing power. Market demand should be substituted by national consumption and production targets on the basis of minimum human needs. A spirit of noblesse-oblige towards the poor is not enough. Development must be redefined as a selective attack on the worst forms of poverty. Development must thus be measured as the level of needs-satisfaction of the poorest 40%. Let us take care of our poverty and let the GNP take care of itself [20]. A we-must-do-for-the-poor tone will only engender guilt and defensiveness, not energy for change [46].

The Establishment and Us

The Establishment is not those people who hold and exercise power as such. It is the people who create and sustain the climate of assumptions and opinions within which power is exercised by those who do hold it by election or appointment [47]. The Establishment is thus a pretty clumsy monitor of morality [48]. In any society, the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works [49]. (Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? [50]) Sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the rulers’ claims provide us with essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his working equipment [49].

Because policy is of necessity a more general tool than research and covers a much broader set of interactions, the danger exists that policy will be based on the dominant mythology [51]. When helping to shape policy, the politically disengaged scientific community frequently answers that not enough information is yet available to make definitive assessments of the interaction of different variables. The next response is, then, a call for more research. This argument is advanced even though absolute proof is an impossible goal. Political and economic opponents of any advocated changes are, of course, happy to espouse the scientist’s argument that proof is not yet adequate, definite or sufficiently general to dictate policy [51]. The same scientists also somehow ignore the mechanisms of economic/military/political power and how such power was achieved. (It takes more than a myth to conquer half the world. [52])

Here, we need to remember that morality is one of the forms of social consciousness. It changes with each change of social order. The ruling class imposes its morality and puts it into practice in accord with its historical class interests. Politics, science, morality, art and religion are all forms of ideology, and there are only two ideologies: bourgeois and socialist: for now, humanity has not elaborated a ‘third’ ideology (Lenin) [53].

In our analyses, the ‘bourgeoisie’ is too often left undefined, but its characteristics are clear. Its ideology is based entirely upon commerce. Qualitative values are postponed in favor of the quantitative. Its rationality negates all that is different from itself. Everything in everyday life, from our films to our cooking, is dependent upon the notions the bourgeoisie makes us have. The bourgeoisie succeeds in its conquest by infiltrating everyday life with consolatory myths. Modern myths justify and enforce the power of the bourgeoisie by presenting it as a natural force. But such myths based on false universals are insidious and only dull the pain; they may appear innocent, but in fact, have a stronghold upon our life [54, 55].

Attitudes Towards Poverty

No government can do everything. To govern is to choose. But poverty will persist and grow if the choice too often favors the peripheral extravagance over the critical need. Even in those underdeveloped countries that have enjoyed rapid growth, the poorest income groups have not shared in it equitably; their incomes have risen only one third as fast as the national average. No government wants to perpetuate poverty. But not all governments are doing something about it [56].

If we consistently fail to address in an explicit way the core question of power, we miss what is wrong with the gross inequalities we face every day. We cannot probe into the moral core of our societies’ ills unless we make clear that wealth conveys power over others – including political power -and that is the essence of the moral problem. Otherwise, one is left only with a moralistic admonishment – the concentration of wealth is bad because it reflects greed [46].

Therefore, the crucial test of ethics is who defines who is functioning as a true social change agent. Without clear definition and accountability, the search for the true innovator can be the excuse for repressive behavior. Scientists have little to offer in this process of identifying change agents. Many people believe that the scientists’ psychic energy is so powerful it can transform all around it. The question is: How can this gathered energy confront the Pentagon, Exxon or any other political or economic institution? What is missing, then, is an urgent political strategy for committed scientists [52].

Our acceptance of the established ways has an important consequence. It leads to a belief that those with wealth and power – even if inherited -deserve their good fortune. If the rules are fair – and we seldom question that they are – those who make their way must deserve what they have amassed. But a corolary of the acceptance of good fortunes is the acceptance of bad fortune. A man who is poor deserves to be poor – be must not have tried hard enough; perhaps if he had worked harder, he might have inherited something. Abroad, we doubt that poor nations really deserve our assistance. They must not have tried hard enough or, had they looked harder, they might have found oil. This attitude towards the permanently poor is confused with our attitude towards the temporarily afflicted those faced with sudden disaster. No nation is more generous than the USA. Yet, this generosity is only a natural extension of this same vision. Victims of disaster cannot be held responsible for their plight. This being so, any poor nation should not only be grateful, but permanently beholden to us for any aid, because it should be recognized that the receiving nation really does not deserve the money [57].

The USA is at its best in foreign scientific and technological programs when it treats foreigners like colleagues and not like wards. The ‘ugly American’ has too often been a patronizing US expert [58]. Therefore, a new relationship between the developed countries and the underdeveloped countries is needed. Not one of self-sacrifice and charily, but one of solidarity that leads to harmonize our own changing needs with the aspirations of the underdeveloped countries [24]. Charily cannot do the work of justice [59]. The barriers of class, race, and ethnic prejudice, along with political and economic naivete separate us from reality [60].

Moralists will send money to a distant Mother. Theresa but ignore the poor and scorned only a few blocks away. We can look with anger and contempt on the selfishness of the rich in Calcutta who let the poor starve, but how about our own responsibilities for conditions here in the ghettos of our own cities? Are we ourselves perhaps guilty? This is an unpleasant question. Better to think of the poor in Calcutta. The big difficulty arises from the traditional attitudes of the American people. We are afraid of radical change. How to reduce our fear – transform our cowardice. really -is a mystery that no one has figured out [37].

Where do liberal food and nutrition workers stand?

A Need for Another Commitment

Unless philosophically (ideologically) inclined. many of us are content to take life as it comes when things go reasonably well, preferring to evade the troublesome question of life’s purpose or meaning. In times of trouble, however, the problem forces itself on our awareness. The greater the hardship we experience, the more pressing the question becomes for us [61].

We, as members of contemporary society, derive our well-being from expertise and position in large, complex organizations. As scientists, technicians and intellectuals we are restless, often dissatisfied and critical and urgently in need of an ideology. (But we are also doing quite nicely: we have a vested interest in the status quo.) And what is the ideology to be? Just a vague consensus for equal opportunity, but not for an egalitarianism which ends up with equal shares of everything for everybody? We prefer to emphasize morality and fundamental values and are good at exposing unintended consequences of well-meant measures. But this can be downright dangerous. This position has evolved into an independent force threatening to give legitimacy to a situation where essential conditions are set by corporate elites, where great inequalities are rationalized and where democracy becomes an occasional. ritualistic gesture [62].

The Liberal Approach

As liberals we are committed to stability as the prerequisite for justice. rather than the other way around. We have connections in the Establishment. We do address fundamental questions. In short, we are a new cast of experts (technocrats), and ‘reform-professionals’, yet ‘stability professionals’ might do equally well [62].

Are we just an example of a depressing genre: powerful diagnosis joined to feeble therapy? When making decisions we often play zero-sum games in which losses and gains cancel out. However, once growth slows, it is much harder to play zero or positive sum games in which everybody or almost everybody wins something. We are good at allocating gains but horrible at sharing out losses. We have acquired the capacity to stall indefinitely on policies and needed changes we oppose – just as organized interests do – showing us how honest rationality and self-interest frequently clash [63].

Much of what has been called liberalism in the last half century has been merely an accommodation to historical change – to circumstances. It represents a triumph of circumstance over ideology. Liberals, if sometimes reluctantly, make virtue of adjustment. Conservatives have a moral commitment to the past: that’s why they are conservatives. What has been called liberalism in the past has, in fact, been a kind of adaptive pragmatism [64].

In fact, no conservative thinker – not even Milton Friedman or Irving Kristol or Alexander Solzhenitsyn – has been fit to provide capitalism with a moral brain, a theology. And, without a creed, the future can look awfully bleak. As Daniel Bell has written: ‘Scarcely one intellectual figure has defended the sober, unheroic, prudential, let alone acquisitive, entrepreneurial or money-making pursuits of the bourgeois world’ [65].

Not too differently, in the world that liberalism finally made – the world of the welfare slate and the transnational corporation – liberalism itself has become politically and intellectually bankrupt. Having overthrown feudalism and slavery and then outgrown its own growth pains, capitalism has evolved towards a new political ideology, welfare-liberalism, which absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as victims of social circumstances. Even reformers with the best intentions still condemn the lower class to a second rate education (to take just one example) and thus help to perpetuate the inequalities they seek to abolish. In the name of egalitarianism. they preserve the most insidious form of elitism [66]. The disparity between what liberals say in public and what they do in private is actually the reason why it is so easy for young people to unmask the hypocrisy of their liberal parents [67].

In the liberal tradition of the West, individual rights are valued more than social rights, and civil and political freedom are more important than economic freedom. In socialism, on the other hand, the right to work and to minimal levels of nutrition and education outweigh personal freedoms, which are limited by economic and social considerations [681. For Marxists, the freedom from hunger and disease and other social evils is more important than freedom of expression which they view as a bourgeois value devoid of sincerity [24].

To liberals, support from a liberal international environment is essential to alleviating poverty; bureaucratized interventions are despised and thought to be usually against the interest of the poor. Thus. it is no surprise that liberals do believe in the market and in competition. The market is to save the poor by slaying bureaucratic regulations, scheming landlords and businessmen who shelter behind them. Just how selective market rigging, to benefit the poor, is to he achieved is seldom analyzed or elaborated on by liberals. Not surprisingly, liberals seldom see trade unions as valid market forces or as institutions to be backed.

As can be guessed, liberalism has no operational political economy at its core. On the one hand it is abstractedly economistic and on the other its desire to demonstrate mutual interest has resulted in expunging any real perception of the nature of political/economic conflict perceived in interest group or class terms. Unfortunately, the consequences of this are serious.

Even more striking is the so frequent lack of comprehension by liberals of transition to socialism strategies and practice (to the point of lack of mention). Algeria and even Yugoslavia are not taken to be seriously different from Brazil, South Korea or Taiwan in economic strategic or conquest of poverty terms. Very true, liberals cannot become advocates of bourgeois democratic revolutions let alone of transition to socialism [69].

Conversely, when we think of the left or leftists, we think of people who espouse equality as an absolute and who measure injustice by distribution of wealth. But the right and the left do not occupy two extremes with a middle made up of liberals. Liberalism is another dimension altogether. It remains empty of standards, committed to everything and, therefore, to nothing [70].

A caveat at this point, though, is that the problem with labels is not that when they are applied too soon or too loosely, they are. while not necessarily despicable, usually not to be trusted. By trying to encapsulate too much, they oversimplify or mislead. We can also be accused of sometimes trying too hard to pin down the presence of a new political consensus where, by our own admission, something a lot less than a real consensus actually exists, i.e., we can tell in the greatest detail what these groups are opposed to or simply worried about. But when it comes to the question of what. in positive terms, they stand for, answers are often a puzzle [62].

The Core Issues

The above notwithstanding, the time has come, perhaps, to ask the question modern liberalism has always ducked: Why is the wealth of any ‘egalitarian’ nation distributed so unjustly? The question itself sounds vaguely Marxists, which is one reason why welfare-state liberals have always ducked. The long march of liberal solutions to social injustice is evasive of the more fundamental questions about wealth and its gross maldistribution. The liberal mindset, honorable and well-intended, cannot confront the limits of a harsh reality that always will stand in its way: in the final balance, the welfare state cares best for the prosperous, not the poor [71]. Paradoxikally, this does not necessarily lead to immediate crises; in the USA, for example, because there is more or less enough to go around. the system can get away with less equity [72].

Perhaps as a corolary, the fashion of the times dictates that, even in countries that are not fully committed to genuine social development, health and nutrition programs have become glamorous, popular subjects. Thus, one can see a political commitment to the ‘ideas of health and nutrition’ without commitment to deal with the concomitant deep-rooted social problems [73].

In actually trying to solve malnutrition, agriculturalists emphasize the need for agricultural extension and application of technology; monetarists see production incentives as the key to remedying distortions in relative prices; educators emphasize general education as the way to achieve motivation and overcome cultural barriers; and structuralists focus upon the contradictions of a class-structured society that explain economic inequalities and malnutrition [74]. The question remains, though, whether these planners, program-officers, administrators and advisors in fact have anything relevant to offer.

People cannot wail forever: many of us want to do something now, the danger being that we will run the risk of being persecuted [75], With this risk hanging over us, food and nutrition planning suffers greatly from the mystification of the issues involved through the language used – perhaps this being a device used to disguise issues that are often politically hot. with a technical cover [76]. Technocrats amongst us lend to dodge the moral issues of undernutrition: ‘we’ re afraid to confront the hard-nosed reality on nutritional issues, because it comes down to moral questions and these are non-scientific and hard to grapple with. So we slide away from them’ [72].

Our well-known predilection for nutrition education interventions is precisely the result of our adherence to a concept of society which derives from functionalist social theory. For the functionalists there are ‘practical difficulties’ and ‘obstacles to desirable changes’, but fortunately there me also ‘various services and/or facilities’ to overcome them, so in the end everything will be fine. We, nutrition professionals, face a double problem: To judge the objective oppressive constraint mechanisms, and the subjective social, cultural and psychological reactions to them. A major task for us as professionals should, then, consequently be the analysis and exposure of the impact of those constraint mechanisms on health and nutrition [6]. For instance, in the USA, the strategy of ‘life-style polities’ for correcting the deficits and imbalances in the diet of our population, by individually changing the food consumption patterns (diet) of individual persons, avoids the political question of why the individuals consume that diet in the way they do. Thus, it ignores the enormous power and the economic needs of specific corporate interests determining that consumption [77].

There is also often a total lack of social imagination among us nutrition professionals. We are in for a period of rough and agonizing reappraisal if we are to contribute to a world that is changing with remarkable speed. It is incumbent upon us to make governments conscious of food and nutrition problems emphasizing that health interventions alone do not solve nutritional problems and that the answer is not to be found in small projects or with a few experts running around [78].

A critical look at our profession and ourselves

Our Limitations

Is it fair to say that we keep diagnosing the obvious and giving prognosis of a tragedy? Why do we keep emphasizing sectoral solutions that deal with what is important and not with what is fundamental? Everything is important. But what is fundamental? Important is the help given to some needy groups, but fundamental is the promotion of more permanent structural changes.

We keep projecting tendencies of all what we do not want to be continued. Tendency is not destiny. The destiny is in our hands. When dealing with food and nutrition problems, it is important to act on the causes, as well as on the effects. It is useless to take care of the malnourished while the causes of hunger and malnutrition are not solved. We can propose steps to avoid those causes to act, or we can help solve the already existing problems. The greatest waste in this latter task is time. Time wasted on diagnoses for checking easily verifiable tendencies; time wasted on excess methodology. Decisions are thus delayed by a system without any synchronization with the speed of happenings [79]. We often fail to strike the right balance between theory and practice, academics and activism.

On the other end of the spectrum, and in matters of science that have implication for public policy, the politician or policy-maker often has to form an opinion based on what be hears from those who don’t know anything about the subject and are viewing it from the outside and on what he hears from those who do know a great deal about the subject and are viewing it biasedly from the inside [42].

What ultimately bothers me is that all the elements needed to study malnutrition in its wider economic and political context are there (i.e. unequal distribution between the various sectors of society, the role of state and private interests and the conflicts between them), but our colleagues continue, in spite of this, to discuss matters within a framework of cultural habits and ignorance. Their implicit social model (ideology) does not enable them to handle the complex of social and economic phenomena they themselves witness [6]. A classless approach in sociological studies, for the most part, focuses its analysis on the poor, not on the economic system that produces poverty. Thus, not paradoxically, most of the strategies for eradicating that poverty have been directed at the poor themselves, but not at the economic system that produces it [77]. Problems are thus ‘solved’ in an isolated and totally a-political way, because there is still a lack of understanding of what determinants are really important and how they need to be approached [7]. In our system, colleagues pointing out valid discrepancies between ideology and reality are disciplined rather than rewarded [80].

Projects dreamed up in a social vacuum must play themselves out in the real world of injustice and conflict [81]. Their objective consequences may turn out to be different from the original subjective intent [40]. We need nutrition experts who are strong and elastic enough to ask the right questions rather than sell the wrong answers [82]. In this context, intervention strategies can, therefore, be classified in three categories according to the principles that govern them: comprehensive strategies that are multidisciplinary in nature and call for multisectoral cooperation assuming that this meeting of minds will solve all problems; improvement strategies that ‘put the needed spare-parts to the system’ by assuming that only some things can be changed now, and transformation strategies that call for radical changes of the environment and/or the social system [83]. The idea is that only those strategies that somehow (and at some point in time) include the latter optic have any long-term potential.

Our Role and Our Responsibilities

What then is the appropriate role of science in people’s development in situations where exploitation and oppression are acute but room still exists for economic and technological initiatives to improve the material status of the poor – at least up to a certain point? Many persons will deride such initiatives as ‘reformism’. But can the masses be easily mobilized for exclusive political action for structural changes if space for economic improvement within the existing structure still exists? Should progressive forces stand aloof from such space and leave them to be filled by real reformists thereby distracting mass attention from the need for fundamental social change for a more sustained improvement of their lives? Or should a combination of economic and political mobilization be pursued [84]? The answers to these questions are surely not easy. In the USA, for example, Ralph Nader can sometimes mobilize formidable coalitions generating a potentially irresistible ‘politics of outrage’. But public indignation is difficult to sustain; it can be dissipated by token, merely symbolic responses and seldom transcends conventional ideological or political limits [56].

We just need to confront the fact that there are two kinds of problems: reducible and irreducible. The difference between them is simple: reducible problems have clearly definable solutions while irreducible ones do not. You know when you have got the answer to a reducible problem -it fits like the right piece in a puzzle. But problems such as inequality, disparity or injustice appear irreducible, because their solutions are not fixable; this kind of problem mostly generates only vague, complex and temporary solutions. The problem with development is that too often we are trying to find reducible solutions to irreducible problems. Technological advances are the answer to reducible problems, but many hoped they would solve the irreducible problems as well. Misjudgement of the kind of problem and tvpe of solution actually only compounds the problem [85].

When the world is messy, one falls back either on ideology or technology. Good young people respond to the seduction of technology. It’s more independent of experience and you don’t have to know much [86]. But technology is not the origin of change; it merely is the means whereby society changes itself- Technology comprises not just tools and machines, but also skills and motivation. The wrong technologies have for too long been destroying genuine community life and have thus led to maldevelopment [87].

There are, therefore, two kinds of revolution – technological and political. It is technology which is flattening differences around the world – cultures which look centuries to build and sustain have been transformed by ‘development’ in a few decades. Technology dilutes and dissolves ideology- While political revolutions are almost always successful in response to a fell need – more liberty, a different racial division, or simply more bread – technology invents needs and exports problem. Political revolutions always have motives – a why – such as grievances, and the need for redress. These are. as Jefferson told us, neither light nor transient, but involve a long train of abuses and usurpations. Great technological changes, on the other hand, do not have a why. Technology, unlike politics, is irreversible. We may be able to develop a new strain of wheat and so cure starvation somewhere. But it may not be in our power to cure injustice anywhere, even in our own country, much less in distant places [88].

The obvious question, then, is: Why not changing our order of thinking rather than trying to conquer hunger and malnutrition by the use of technology? Technology is basically improvisational. It treats the symptoms; it provides no lasting cures. Moreover, technology is part of the problem. New policies will thus require a patient and possibly painful reeducation of us all [89]. A technocratic utopia is the most banal of all Utopias [90].

Technical pragmatism by men of good will can build national. regional and global strategies with no political sensitivity, appealing to all reasonable men and capable of being implemented. Technocrats shore up fragments wrenched from ‘incomplete’ alternatives, often resulting in a pastiche and not a real synthesis. If this is the best that the best applied thinkers of the international development establishment can produce, then indeed development thinking is a burnt-out case wandering in a desert. Nevertheless, faith in technocratic platonic warriors developing the world, remains unshaken. This leads an outsider to see a picture of general harmony of interests. It also leads to incoherences and to Western development aid not with a human face, but with bleary eyes and a nagging headache. We need to drop the fallacy of this universal harmony of interests so that areas of real parallel interests, negotiable compromises and package deals can be identified and promoted [91].

The future challenge

The real challenge in our present world is not to maximize happiness (in practice interpreted as maximizing economic growth, GNP, or the quantity of goods), but to organize our society to minimize suffering. Human happiness is undefinable; human suffering is concrete; it manifests itself as hunger, sickness, unemployment, poverty, illiteracy and ignorance [92]. Western civilization will, therefore, not be judged so much on its vast accumulation of scientific knowledge, as on its trusteeship of that knowledge and its efficient application to the betterment of living and the minimization of that suffering [93].

A program of conscientization directed at the scientific community should perhaps then be undertaken as an initiative to apply science and technology to ‘another development’ in the sense described above [29].

The role of science in raising mass consciousness is critical. It can generate an attitude of inquiry among the masses so that they can move from fatalistic prejudices to a realization of their own power to change reality in their favor. Scientists can bring to the masses systematic knowledge of a wider social structure and its working, a knowledge that is critical in the choice of strategies for social change: bring to them knowledge of initiatives to change society taken elsewhere, so that they may learn from those experiences [84]. The power of new ideas needs to be mobilized through the communications revolution which is upon us. New forms of learning, education, awareness creation and conscientization need to be pushed in this endeavour [10].

We do have a responsibility to abolish absolute poverty wherever it exists. Relative poverty (dissatisfaction with one’s relative position in the income pyramid) is important, but not morally important as a priority. We cannot continue increasing our affluence, while most have not even gotten their essentials. The affluent 640 million people in the world must pay for the minimum income reforms needed. This will require a new ethos, a discouragement of consumerism and experience shows that this cannot be done without a substantial change in power relations [94].

Conflict is common where there are competing interests. Therefore, avoiding it – as we often do – is no solution. Conflict is not necessarily violence. Conflict is a necessary means to attain true dialogue with people in authority. The poor do not achieve this until they have shown they are no longer servile and afraid. They need to move from the culture of silence to a position of dignified persons [95]. Where do you and I stand when it comes to promote this transition and to provide rallying points for mobilization in this direction?

Development means liberation. Any action that gives the people more control over their own affairs is an action for development, even if it does not offer them better health or more bread [96]. But this development needs to be built from the bottom up. If this does not lake place, one has social. Darwinism: the ones who survive are the richest, the most powerful, the whitest and the malest [97].

References

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61 Adapted from Bettelheim, B.: Surviving and other essays (Knopf, New York 1979).

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90 From a speech by Erhard Eppler, former Minister of Economic Cooperation FRG.

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Dr. Claudio Schuftan,