- The objective consequences of many a development project may turn out to be different from their original subjective intent. We need human rights (HR) activists who are strong and elastic enough to ask the right questions rather than sell the wrong answers. 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 sowed differently 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.
The bottom line is that only those strategies that somehow (and at some point in time) include the latter optic have any long-term potential.
- The problem with HR activism is that, too often, we try to find reducible solutions to irreducible problems. Technological fixes are the answer to reducible problems, but many hoped they would solve the irreducible problems as well. Misjudgment of the kind of problems and type of solutions needed actually compounds the problem.
- Good young people respond to the seduction of technology. “It’s more independent of experience and you don’t have to know much”. 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.
- Technology dilutes and dissolves ideology. Political revolutions always have motives –a Why. 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.
- The obvious question, then, is: Why not changing our order of thinking rather than trying to reverse hunger and malnutrition, for example, 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 re-education of us all. A technocratic utopia is the most banal of all utopias.
- 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. So, faith in technocratic warriors developing the world, remains unshaken. This leads an outsider to see a picture of general harmony of interests. It also leads to incoherences. We need to drop the fallacy of this universal harmony of interests.
- 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 and gadgets), 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, ignorance and the whole host of other HR violations.
- 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’ (Paulo Freire) need to be pushed in this endeavor.
- 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.
- Success in HR work means liberation. Any action that gives the people more control over their own affairs is an action for HR, even if it does not offer them better health or more bread. But this approach needs to be built from the bottom up. If this does not take place, one has Social Darwinism: the ones who survive and whose rights are not violated are the richest, the most powerful, the whitest and the malest.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org