[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how the ruling paradigm has been an obstacle to the decades-long human rights endeavor. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages, Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
Paradigms, it is never too late to recap
1. Paradigms express ideology; they encapsulate ideas, principles, theories, and concepts that are created and shaped by beliefs, discoveries, knowledge, intentions, assumptions, objectives, and perceived priorities and needs. They define and govern fields of human activity. Prevailing paradigms, that development practitioners may take for granted or be unaware-of, determine, circumscribe and control accepted thinking, standards and research, and so do shape policies and actions. As ways of viewing what is seen as reality, paradigms are like maps. They may remain intact for centuries, or be accepted as dogmas, or may have been formulated relatively recently, and may be fragile and/or contested. Like maps, paradigms need to be redrawn when they are evidently inadequate or misleading. (Geoffrey Cannon)
Should we then be surprised?
2. The ‘truth’ and ‘what is right’ is too often imposed on us* so that neither can be freely ‘discovered’, as it should be. So, we often end up doing the second best: we negotiate/bargain to ‘un-impose’ only bits and pieces of what actually needs to be completely redrawn. (David Legge) …not good enough for human rights (HR) activists.
*: The way we are taught to fit ideas into boxes in many areas of our lives is pathetic especially in academic and intellectual spaces. One of the consequences of dividing knowledge between the humanities and exact and biological sciences is that we are more likely to adopt a series of stereotypes and limiting beliefs about either field —as if our entire lives could be reduced to graphs, spreadsheets, and scientific studies.
3. We are fed the Silicon Valley version of the future, are we not? Many of us feel anxious or uncertain or nihilistic about the coming decades (if not the coming months…) as we continue to be fed bold, tech-centric predictions with unfaltering confidence. Grand utopian fantasies are still spun by the technologists and tech-believers of the ruling paradigm**, despite all of their past failures and deceptions (think crypto, AI, metaverse, geo-engineering, space-bound futures…) promoted by many tech leaders and their adoring acolytes. Take TED Talks: They are probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy responsible for the increasingly eschatological pronouncements of this cohort, i.e., concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind. (Oscar Schwartz)
**: All technology can and does contain the biases of their creators. (Mozilla)
And then, there is another sorry situation
4. Proponents of multistakeholderism and PPPs in the most recent version/incarnation of the ruling paradigm believe that the whole range of issues confronting modern polity can be solved without the mechanisms of ‘democracy’. The process follows the interests of ‘some’ in the global governance domain. Basically, interest-based stakes simplistically pursue outcomes consistent with professional, technical, or financial(!) —but not politically democratic values.
5. Multistakeholderism in the current paradigm successfully conjures-up a persuasive, but false, argument of equal footing. It hides the workings of power. ‘Stakeholder cooperation’ without political accountability is only likely to push our shared human future further into the quagmire of governance failure displacing obligations of powerful actors into dubious frameworks of philanthropy and charitable largesse.*** Multi-constituency networks, partnerships and collaborations cannot replace governance arrangements based on political legitimacy! (Anita Gurumurthy)
***: Private philanthropy can be (and often is) a threat to democratic accountability and to a just society. Reverence for big donors implies that billions of underpaid and exploited people should be satisfied with philanthropic crumbs from a self-appointed plutocracy rather than entitled to economic justice. What is really needed for a fairer, more equal society is not charity but justice… (Linsey McGoey)
The old is dying and the new cannot be born
-We know when we are in a volatile period when “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe/attain what they used to believe and attain. So, the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. (Antonio Gramsci)
6. Max Planck, the originator of quantum theory, observed, perhaps
pessimistically: “A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with the new light”. (Or as John Kenneth Galbraith said: “The difficulty lies not in understanding new ideas, but in abandoning old ideas”).
7. The polarization of opinions has reached a point where it is almost impossible to introduce the needed complexity in the discussion. Any position that contextualizes or problematizes dire social situations is considered treason. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos) …HR at a loss here.
A pertinent question to close
8. What is the good of discussions when the guardians of the paradigm have already decided they are right and we are wrong? They may feel superior, but are not; their sense of superiority actually is the end product of their conceit, i.e., of thinking they know best how life works. (Vaclav Havel, Redevelopment) Herein lies the challenge for us HR activists! …Food for thought.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com