- ‘In-the-way-things-are’, society makes disprivilege look right. Human rights (HR) violations are simply ‘explained-away’.
- Although development scholars sometimes engage in 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 political passivity that has become the central theme in Northern-led development efforts.
Intellectual liberation is difficult to achieve, since many of us are prisoners of our own past training and somebody else’s thought.
- We also often use ‘statistical-illusions’ or ‘computer-models’ (tricks?) devised by our own academic elites that do not fit any real-world cases anywhere in the world. Measuring poverty in detail can often be a substitute for –or an excuse for– not acting in response to perfectly visible needs. (Some have called this “paralysis in analysis”). In that sense, regression analyses, for example often lead us to the cardinal error in reasoning of confusing correlation with cause.
- Moreover, too many of our economists and too many international organizations are seeking to take the politics out of the political economy of HR and of the daily decision-making process: basically to-avoid-discord-or-conflict. I think 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.
- Among others, excessive institutional compartmentalization has separated political from socio-economic analyses resulting in a passive reluctance to-call-a-cat-a-cat. There is a tendency to stop 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 that 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.
- The complex nature of the problems of HR 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 fit (and interact dialectically). 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. As I have said so many times, it is more necessary than ever to pass from a state 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.
- We ought not to retreat into helpless passivity, watching the HR values 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. One of the greatest challenges facing humanity today is the challenge to meet the fundamental (denied) rights 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.
- From the effectiveness-in-combating-HR-violations-point-of-view, in international and national HR meetings, HR activists should, more than others, leave behind academicism and begin to look at real people and their bare rights.
- Fulfilling the minimum entitlements of the poor majority 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.
- Human rights defined in material terms, with services delivered by a bureaucracy and planned by an elite, can create client groups, can demobilize community groups and do create new patterns of dependence. Devoid of a clear ideological orientation, human rights work does not clarify but mystifies, does not mobilize but manipulates. Technocratic approaches assume that the problems are largely management gaps within the decision-making groups together with a lack of ability to grasp opportunities by those rendered poor.
- The technocratic approach ends up just keeping track of HR violations, because it has so many non-solutions built-in masquerading as answers. An example of such an approach is the implication that ‘salvation’ lies in obtaining for the poor countries 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’ 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, the fulfillment of health and nutrition rights and of decent living standards overall are determined by national development strategies and priorities, as well as by the international economic order.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org