- A word of caution is called for at this point on the issue of what I call “pseudo-basic intervention techniques or approaches” that many of us have advocated-for at one time or another. These attempts at acting in the context of basic causes depart from a flawed analysis of reality and have consequently mostly failed (and are doomed to continue to fail). Among the most prominent of these are “Multidisciplinary Approaches” to solve the problems of so many different human rights (HR) violations. There is nothing terribly wrong with this concept, but it just gratuitously assumes that looking at the problem of these violations from a ‘wider’ multi-professional perspective is going to automatically lead us to the better, more rational and egalitarian solutions.
- The call for multidisciplinarity, for sharing paradigms amongst the different scientific disciplines where practitioners come from, falls under the same optic of my criticism all along. Just by putting together brains “sowed” differently, without considering where they arc coming from ideologically, is not going to, all of a sudden, make a significant difference in the outcome and the options chosen. They may well stay in the domain of immediate causes, only now everybody involved contributing a small monodisciplinary window to the package of (still pat?) solutions proposed.
- Multidisciplinary approaches –as opposed to a dialectical approach– simply most often take the social and political context (i.e., the individual and institutional power relations) as given; they therefore end up being conservative in their recommendations.
- What this boils down to is the need to reach the point where we really get politically right in our search for solutions. But, for now, doing so seems to be like the old philosophical riddle of the turtle trying to finish the race: At every instance, it has first to go half the remaining distance to the end line before being able to actually get there; therefore, it never arrives.
We seem to get as far as a locked gate. The conservative elements of our ideology prevent us from trespassing or unlocking the gate; of reaching the end line.
- Nothing short of the equivalent to a second adolescent crisis will allow us to take that step. Need I say it again? The problem is a political one, and we are not living up to it.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org