Disaster management: from “aapada” through “viyasana” to “vinasa”

 Every year, around this time, we go through the rote of commemoration and remembrance of a disaster that caused the deaths of a lot of people and damaged and destroyed a lot of property. Nine years after the tsunamis hit us, we can definitely say we are good at adhering with religious zeal to cyclic remembrance. However, are we able to say with equal certainty that we are good at making sure that that sort of damage never repeats regardless of the type of event that occurs? Do we have the systems and processes in place to prepare for, respond to and mitigate the effects of disastrous events? No and no. Will we ever be in that place where people are assured that there is adequacy in our answers to these two questions? If events such as the Fukushima disaster teach us anything, then the answer to that question should also be a loud no. Are we moving towards some system that will enable us to become less worried about the impact of such events as a nation, a government, a citizenry? Good question. The answer to that one would depend on who one asks. If one asks state officials, policy planners, informed institutional officials, researchers, civil organizations, private sector organizations, well, they would probably be enthusiastic about the work done to lessen the “worry-factor” among citizens. If you ask those self same citizens they would respond with “Vinasa adukaranna kramayakda hadanna hadanne? ane nikan palayan ban yanna”.

Why?

Granted, the 2004 tsunamis were the most destructive event to have hit the country in its recorded history with over USD 1.5 billion in social, infrastructural and productive damage, over 35,000 estimated dead and over 500,000 estimated displaced. We understand this and remember this as we should. But do we also remember the 2011 floods which affected a whopping 2,524,402 people and caused Rs. 77,000 million in damage or those in 2010 which cost the country Rs.5,000 million and affected 453,429 people? No. Do we mourn their losses year after year? No. Do we know or care that over the last ten years, over 6 million people have been affected by drought or that over 8.5 million have been battered by floods? No. Do we have any solutions at all for the yearly flooding in Kalutara and Ratnapura or the cyclic droughts in many parts of the country? Well? No and no and no ad infinitum. Not only don’t we remember those so called small and medium scale disasters nor the massive cumulative effect of them over the years, we just don’t care to factor such eventualities into our strategic thinking at the level of development, governance, right to human security and indeed, democracy itself. So, at least for about 40-50% of the countries citizenry, “ane nikan palyan ban yanna” is a pretty accurate one line estimate of the sum effectiveness of disaster management efforts.   

Not that there has been no effort made towards arriving at that wonderful place also known as a “safer Sri Lanka”. As I mentioned in a previous post on climate change, disasters open up a small temporal window of opportunity to advocate aggressively for establishment or reform of policy. It happened after the 2004 tsunamis with the ratification of the National Disaster Management Act in 2005 and the setting up of a ministry to deal with disasters while its executive and functional aspects were given over to the National Disaster Management Center (DMC) through the DMC act that followed. Every type of player from academics to CSOs to the media jumped on the response band-wagon, actively supporting the government and its newly created ministry in formulating their strategies and implementing their plans.

All good. Problem? The policy framework and the acts were, to all intents and purposes, unusable. 

The setup of the disaster response infrastructure went through the National Council for Disaster Management (NCDM) which comprised of the President of the country, its Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, All PC chief ministers, 5 members of the opposition and the ministers in charge of 21 line ministries (Social Services, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, Home Affairs, Health, Housing, Science and Technology, Irrigation, Coast Conservation, Power, Defense, Police, Finance, Land, Fisheries, Foreign Affairs, Water Supply, Highways, Urban Development, Education, Environment, Disaster Management and Industries). Whoa!

Just think about this structure for a moment. While it is clear that they all do have parts to play in disaster management, getting that set of personalities to sit together let alone agree on a plan in preparing for disaster or responding quickly in the event of disaster is, at best, amusing, and at worst, a joke.

The functional arm of the ministry, the DMC is a toothless tiger without any guarantees to the type of substantive yearly budgets that are required to prepare and respond to disaster and without the enforcement capabilities of an authority such as say, the CEA. Additionally, its ability to execute its mandate effectively is squashed by the aforementioned bureaucratic heffalump of an act. 

During the years 2007-2008 civil organizations and individuals such as the writer engaged themselves in efforts to reduce the top-heaviness of the act, make response systems more people centric with greater citizen ownership and to upgrade the DMC to an authority with stronger enforcement and coordination powers and worked with the Legal Draftsman’s department to formulate a set of recommendations to that effect for the parliamentary select committee.  Unfortunately, such efforts were shelved due to the escalation of the conflict during that same period.

Although this is rather um… tragic, there certainly is some sound work being done at least at the level of intellectual effort and problem analysis on the part of the DMC think tanks. A new draft national disaster management policy was prepared in February 2013 as well as a direction document for the next four years. Further, they have established somewhat strong legislative frameworks although the institutional mechanisms are far too multifariously cluttered to be effective. In the post- tsunami era, despite a few no-balls being thrown by them and unbattable doosras being thrown at them, their early warning systems and preparedness initiatives have reduced casualties against persons affected by a significant factor. Most importantly though, they understand why preparedness and mitigation fails and they recognize the lack of a strong M&E system, alienation of disaster management from the main development process, the aforementioned problems with the implementation management structure, the absence of climate integration and the inadequacy in focusing on community based disaster risk management (CBDRM) as the key resistive factors in reducing the national disaster related “worry factor”.

All good. Problem? This rather jaded activist and researcher understands that all that this has led to so far is a series of write-fests and talk fests.

He feels that overall, the sheer complexity and unmanageableness of prepping for disaster and mitigating its effects has had the effect of increasing thinking at the cost of action or, as a senior consultant to the DMC once said “we are engaging NATO – No Action, Talk Only”. 

He feels that when people are faced with impossibilities, chitting and chatting about them seems to be the preferred method of easing the pain of inadequacy on the part of good human beings facing too great a thirst, too big a flood, too large a wave or too politicized and self-serving a national development agenda. He takes the side of that group of human beings to whom he owes his filiality – the citizens of this country who get clobbered every so often by forces both human and otherwise that they knows of but vaguely and understand but less. He refuses to use the term “aapada” (disaster) and instead uses the parlance of those citizens and calls it “vinaasa” (terminal destruction).  A term that completely and adequately covers the truth: from policy, to planning, to production to peace-of-mind.

Assumption is the mother of all development...

(Ok good people, this post is long and based on ongoing inquiry into development mechanics. As with all my research based writing for mass media and blogs, the delivery is anecdotal and in this particular case, since it is still work in progress, I make no firm claims. However, given the fact that many of the southern economies are aid based development driven that urgently needs to be um... re-imagined, I thought I'd write this up a bit but sincerely apologize in advance for the rather lengthy yak) 

The point: 

CLASHING MULTIPLICITIES TAILORING DEVELOPMENT FOR DISASTER

In December 2012, at the annual symposium of the Center for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) and titled “Reimagining development”, Dr. Harni Amarasuriya, in her address, made one of the most significant observations on development that I have heard in recent times from anywhere in the world. Referring to log-frame analysis, she said “We discuss in particular the column that is titled assumptions and we reflect on how the assumptions columns describe in detail the context within which development is practiced. However, the logic of the log-frame places the assumption column outside of the project - what is listed in this column is usually regarded as those issues that may impede the successful implementation of a carefully constructed development project. In other words, the social, political, environmental and cultural processes that shape our lives are seen as external factors beyond the control of the development project. Herein lies one of the greatest contradictions of development: while professing to be about transformation, development is also particularly uncomfortable with risk, or uncertainty. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that more than after 50 years of development, we are still debating its worth”.

She goes on to pick apart the nature of development as essentially a process through which “global and local interests converge with a sufficient level of incoherence so that multiple interests can be served” through a delightful and insightful anthropological treatment of the issue, the full text of which may be read here. I propose, through this post, to consume a few hundred words to try to start the process of unpacking the implications of her assertion from a more procedural / mechanistic standpoint.

The first, most obvious assumption made by development practitioners is in the singularity of the meaning of the word “development”.  There is, among them, a refusal to acknowledge the multiplicity of meanings associated with (and implied by) any set of phrases identifying a given development project. A determination to studiously ignore the essentially subjective nature through which different parties and players, planners and ideologues, targets and beneficiaries view the same set of initiatives, their associated actions, their associated objectives, their associated goals. 

What results from such a multiplicity of attitudes and views is neither certitude, nor peace nor help for pain.  Instead, we land on a darkling plain, swept with loud alarms of struggle, fight and flight, where selectively knowledgeable and questionably learned armies clash by day and by night (sorry Matthew).

This is why the assumptions column is so important in project design. It gives the practitioner a false sense of safety from such skirmishes although they are intrinsic to the implementation process and critical to address if any semblance of success is to be achieved. Removed from the social, political, environmental and cultural attributes that background the development tapestry, it gives the practitioner an impetus to start with enthusiasm that which will eventually end in catastrophe.  It lulls the practitioner into a false sense of security and calmness and, at least initially, shields her from the fact that the situational implementation of a project will quickly degenerate, disintegrating into chaos.

The possible mathematical parallels to the point: 

Towards informing us on the issue, I believe that perhaps, theoretical mathematics might provide some helpful pointers.

On the one side, development practitioners might be informed by deterministic chaos theory (DCT), based on the fact that when the present determines the future, the approximate present does not determine the approximate future under certain conditions. As of this writing, I am not completely sure if development adheres precisely to the theoretical base of the math modeling but it is certainly interesting to note the parallels between development dynamics and chaos dynamics – both are sensitive to initial conditions, both are topologically mixing (in the case of development, via social, cultural, political and environmental rubrics and, to some extent, their metrics), and, both have periodic orbits that are dense (in the case of development, many if not all instances of a contiguous set of anthropological, social and financial occurrences are approached by the involved entities over a specific period of time).   Therefore, the approximation outcomes of DCT seem applicable to development at least in a general sense.

Now, assumptions are not simply approximations. They are very large, built in errors in identifying the present and therefore, can yield wildly differentiated results from the ones intended. I surmise that the inability of development mechanics and project programming to substantially address the chaotic nature of development or, its fundamental incoherence that Dr. Amarasuriya notes, is one explanation for the very low global achievements of the project of development. Additionally, I surmise that if a development goal is in fact achieved it is despite of the programming and designing but rather, results simply as a chaotic outcome of a highly inexact process.

On the other hand, development practitioners might be informed by catastrophe theory. Small changes in one or more specific parameters of a non-liner system such as development (for instance the amount of funds periodically skimmed off a development project or the amount of money paid to families that lost land to it) can cause the stability or equilibrium to appear and disappear or to change from attracting to repelling and back again, causing sudden (catastrophic) changes in its behavior. Depending on the number, intensity, pervasiveness and type of phenomena that impact each exercise, any of the catastrophic models can be identified and applied to a given development project.

For example, projects can annihilate according to fold models (such as might exist when fund embezzlement reaches a critical fiscal bifurcation point or when a delay in approvals reaches a critical temporal bifurcation point), get dropped leaving residual identifiers such as land and buildings according to cusp models (such as might exist when funding has not sufficiently addressed sustainability or when the continuity of application of state/donor policies and priorities reach into a project up to a given point and no further) or more complex models such as those applicable to say the Southern Transport Development (STPD) project in Sri Lanka which waxed, waned, waxed again, given up on, re-initiated, complained about…finally ending up with a road that neither completely satisfied nor completely dissatisfied the many thousands who got involved in building it, resulted in  near non-usage by the majority citizenry and irrevocably damaged wet zone agriculture and water management. 

In fact, the STDP is an ideal example of the wildly tangential results of  misguided assumptions leading to severe development astigmatism that ultimately, only served up a chaotic, confused, catastrophic meltdown. A tragic reality attested to by the fact that the estimated 30% graft off the project funds did more for the citizens through trickle-down economics in a pseudo-feudal political economy  than the highway itself and the fact that the environmental and sociocultural fallout of the project caused more real long-term socioeconomic damage than any originally imagined economic gains of the project (Seneviratne:2009). 

It might be of note here, that the stability point of the generally chaotic processes and catastrophic outcomes of most development projects is in the extraction of two phenomena that comes very strangely labeled as “lessons learned” and “best practices”. These are the job savers and safety nets of the industry. Commonly, from each initiative, we stabilize our feel-goodness and salvage our professional dignity from program disintegration and chaos with a very large number of lessons learned and a very small number of best practices. Development practitioners might be informed by the fact that in most human endeavors, history has shown us that very few lessons are actually learned and very few best practices have actually been replicated.

Addressing the point: 

Once the uncertainty principle of development is understood, the problem reduces to "how can/should/must we respond?". Well, I shall offer a caveat before I proceed: The denseness of the anthropological occurrences that exist in a given development situation are, at this writing, far too complex to chart to any degree of measure-based validity. 

However, a key requisite to at least move towards a less uncertain development environment is to integrate the assumptions column of log-frames directly into the programming. Instead of the classical matrix of “Goal/ purpose / outcome / output / activity / responsibility” against “description/ indicator / verification / assumptions” I propose that the entire process starts by removing the assumptions column.

Then, (pending affirmation of the math modelling, the efficacy of layering and the structuring of the specific matrices), the following steps are, at this writing, strongly indicated: 

• First, create a risk map of the social, cultural, political, environmental and economic parameters paying particular attention to the heat created by cross-pollination and overlap of linear risks in each discrete area of concern,  

• Next, replace the assumptions column with an assertions matrix of anthropological phenomena against groupings/sectors of entities impacted by them and informed by the risk map),  

• Next, move that in the priority lists to a point above the log-frame. Assertions, in this context, should be deep thought and not brought under silly little labels such as "power analysis”, “situation analysis”, “background” etc. but encompass as much of the spectrum of life parameters of the group(s) and sector(s) involved in and targeted by the project,

• Next, remove goals and objectives and replace them respectively with accomplishments (like-to-haves that are far better but less certain) and achievements (must-haves that are less tasty but more certain) both of which are informed by the assertive factors associated with as thorough a reading as possible of the social, cultural, political and environmental realities of the scope of control and scope of effect of a given development exercise,

• Next, since moving from assumptions to assertions and from achievements to accomplishments is fraught with high levels of applicability of the chaos principle, for each activity, output and outcome, have a column named reflections which inform the practitioner qualitatively on the fuzziness of the entire project process through language based on probabilistic logic that explicitly takes uncertainty and belief ownership into account and is based on thoughtful reasoning that understands that in development initiatives, there are no absolutes and that the truth value  of the linear combination of an idea-process-outcome  is simply an informed approximation based on consideration of the assertive factors, and, 

• Finally, perhaps most radically, remove the logical framework of action (LFA) completely and replace it with an Estimation Framework of Possibility (EFP), and, remove the results framework (RF) completely and replace it with an Approximations Framework of Aspirations (AFA).

Now, armed with an EFP and AFA, we are capable of improving the possibility of an outcome and, as programming goes into implementation, use a system of continuous evaluation to increasingly better approximate the reality to the aspirations of a development project over the associated temporal envelops and bounds. Most importantly, they will give us, by default, better predictive analytics, early warnings and durability measures related to overall project health. 

While it is obvious that this approach necessitates recursive revisits of the initial project design as well as significant levels of measurable, built in flexibility (has anyone ever even tried to understand how to measure the level of flexibility of any kind of effort be it development or otherwise... in quantitative terms? heh), such a course of action would remove us from making wild claims about the behavior or outcome of a development initiative and move us from the built-in opacity of assuming things to the comparative transparency of approximating things. 

Chaos certainly does exist but it is not completely incoherent or unconsidered or ignored and the truth value of our efforts, the level of trust of those who are part of its ownership cloud and the ability to manage the vector resultants would perhaps be substantially higher.

The problems associated with addressing the point: 

Well, simply put, going in this direction would be an absolute nightmare for development practitioners as well as development financiers. And that horror is not only in terms of the need to meet risk head-on or in terms of the massive amounts of additional time/work/expertise/resources required for it but also in terms of the sheer effort required to break the inertia of ingrained belief systems with respect to the procedural aspects of development programming. With the classic log-frame, scoping or designing a project is relatively simple, requires very little qualified expertise and is very easy to tag to results frameworks. Indeed, an entire industry has developed around MFDR (Managing for development results) which is strange given the fact that our accomplishments in the development arena are so few and so bereft of both qualitative and quantitative results as meta-research has shown us (Doucouliagos, Paldam et al:2007-2010). At present, though development modeling is relatively easy, we are merely engaged in a lot of busywork with very little practical take-home for those involved.

Furthermore, against the  existing development topography, practitioners know very well that the key resource that is always at a premium is time. Through no fault of their own, they are always pressed to deliver strategies, plans, programs, projects – mostly against externally imposed temporal limitations (funding cycles, election cycles, employment contract cycles, project life cycles etc.). 

It needs no rocket science to figure out that those are unnatural cleavages, mostly short or mid-term and guaranteed to negatively impact efforts that require long-term sameness of thinking to produce real results. So, it is not to be wondered that even the best, most thoughtful, most careful practitioners find themselves slap-dab in the middle of a sea of misery that is pervaded by a sense of less, loss and helplessness. It is not to be wondered that the ideology of the entire development industry can be synthesized by the sentence “never mind what it accomplishes in the end, just make the yearly target, process, management and M&E look good on paper. We can take heart in our MFDR, lessons learned and best practices and discuss the outcomes or the lack thereof through a report we can table at the next annual progress meeting”. 

This, to put it very mildly, is a copout. It is a virtual comfort-zone for all those within the development arena that is hard to attack and has the added advantage of ensuring job security.  Moreover, this type of thinking organically creates risk-aversion, reluctance and affirmation biases in reporting results and removes the mandatory requirement for reflection that can actually yield some real lessons learned (for example: “we must stop this method of trying to get development to become effective since it has failed over 40 years”) and best practices (for example: “we must insist on working with a broader, tougher, harder, sweatier set of parameters that can actually yield sustainable results).

It is a copout that need not be if people are willing to fight for risk, fight for better scoping,  fight for reality checks at every turn, at every milestone regardless of who may fight them back with more vicious weaponry, fight for a bigger slush fund to mitigate negative outcomes that are impossible to chart at project inception and always, always, fight, two swords drawn, for that not-really-contradictory self-contradictory need for a "carefully cavalier approach to development". 

But, no. I don’t think that people are interested in actually accomplishing something using a more inexact set of reference tools. Ten times out of ten, they would rather go for a gung-ho goal that makes great copy for political or mass media distribution but was always a bridge too far. Ten times out of ten, when they fail, they will hide behind that massive list of excuses built up over forty years of development madness that is so readily available to them.  

So, I believe they will continue with the status quo at the project level, at the community level, at the national level, at the state level - until an annihilation parameter reaches its chaotic, catastrophic critical mass with respect to the project of development.  I believe they shall take comfort in the fact that they don't really care that they have no clue as to why that happened. I believe that they will assume that the fault can be laid at every door but their's. I did not complete the title of this piece. I shall do so now:

Assumption is the mother of all development ef-ups.

A climate of change ripe for advantageous instability

Everything changes. Including the climate. We seem to have forgotten that. We believe that we can somehow wish this change away or use some sort of mantra to prevent that universal principle of “anithya” from affecting the climate. We cannot.

Change isn’t exactly a bad thing as we all know. However, instability certainly is. When things are in flux for any length of time, things don’t just change. They fall apart. The operative word here is “things” - in the plural. Four: the fiscal thing, the food thing, the energy thing and the climate thing. All are very much in flux, very intrinsically interconnected, very politicized and very much in the news. One thing that is not in the news is the one thing that seems to be relatively stable and unchanging inside of this roily, shifty gruel.

Attitude.

We think we can respond to these life threatening crises by holding desperately on to phraseology such as “our ways of life”, “businesses as usual”, “this was the way then and this will be the way now”  even though they were the cause of this mess.  We think we can pack, couch or sugar coat the same tired, useless models in new phrases such as “alternatives sources”, “sustainable development”, “nuancing and contextualizing”, “common but differentiated responsibilities”.  We go from RIO to COP, from G8 to G77, from OECD to UNDG, from FAO to IFAD, uprooting ourselves from one watering hole and heading off to the next, always moving, always fluxing, always changing in a quixotic effort to find “stability”.

The reason why we make like nomads is because stability is not a goal. Rather, it is a ruse.

When faced with crises, we, collectively, expend enormous amounts of time, money, materials and effort to continue within the framework of our attitudes, to win throws when every dice is loaded against us, to make for ourselves our personal havens and heavens while damning everyone else to wastelands and hell. We! Want to fiddle while the planet burns – with exactly the same mentality and for exactly the same reason that Imperator Nero Cladius did, 1949 years ago.

We! Instinctively think we must somehow hold to our comfort zones, our respective understandings, our separate conclusions, our exclusive experiences, our unique perspectives, our personal advantages and battle to the death all who dare contradict us, oppose us or threaten us. Even if we give way, we give grudgingly, attempting to acquire as much if not more than that which we cede.

Let us take climate change and see where our attitudinal adherences have taken us. Well, we have come a long long way – going nowhere. Here’s why:

The climate crisis is utterly bound up with the other three crises mentioned above. The segregationist views of modern science and the application of specialized expertise is supposed to solve the problem of climate per se. Will it succeed? No.

 Scientific experts from physicists to economists legitimized uncivilized behavior in the name of civilization. They laid the foundation around 400 years ago for the eventuality of the multiply threatened existence we are experiencing now. Within their scientific realities they have, over two decades, proposed about 200, mostly contradictory response strategies. None of them have even the remotest chance of succeeding and scientists now, as scientists then, will happily retreat into their laboratories and studies sniffing and snorting at the lack of political will to see their ideas brought to fruition.

So we shall argue and we'll compromise and realize that nothing's ever changed...

Political will I: Good one. Laughable. Politicians are willed by self-servitude. When the ex-biggest polluter of the world, the USA tenaciously hung on from COP 13 to 18 to its right to be “America” and the “right to pollute”, it (and Canada) were smoothly broadsided by China (and India) who want to occupy center stage in the “fight against climate change”. The chief polluter is dead, long live the chief polluter!

Political will II: This is good two. It changes from year to year, from COP to COP. The current flavor of how not to do while talking about how much to do was at the recent COP (19). This time it was carbon credits for REDD where developed countries are ready to spend millions to see that forest resources in developing countries are in sound working order. Small problem here: apparently they are not willing to spend a single dime until there are reliable reference levels to show how much capturing is done. Developing countries are not willing to spend a single dime to obtain these figures until someone flashes some green their ways. We are very self-willed aren’t we? We are progressing…onwards…  march…  to the next COP!

Ok. So we recognize we are going nowhere. Where then is nowhere? I don’t know?  By definition, that should be apparent but crisis politics seem to enthusiastically tell me that it is a utopic place lurking just beyond the scope of my vision. If someone can enlighten me, please, do so. I’ve been waiting a long time and have paid my dues.

Here are some indicators that I like from Alex Evans to that chimerical place. They are not exclusive paths, crisscrossing and riding rough shod over one another constantly.  There are many more and they are just as good or just as useless as any since no one has gotten there yet, but, for whatever they are worth:

• They who argue for “one last push” believe that nothing short of a global deal based on binding targets and timetables will cut the mustard. But it also doesn’t think that ‘big bang’ approaches can work either. So they argue for a ‘muscular incrementalism’ based on the steady, hard work of assembling political coalitions to make progress and open up political space, one step at a time. 20 years, 19 COPs, 2 RIOs, 1 Kyoto and no, it’s not happening ducky. 
• They who argue for “technological competition” reckoning that the main driver of change will be countries competing with each other to secure shares of massive future clean technology markets. Competition got us in this mess. Competition won’t get us out of it so, sorry, no cigar.
• Those who argue for a “tooling up to a zero sum world” who knows climate change is a problem but don’t care much about solving it. Instead, they focus on coping with heightened competition for oil, land, food and water implicitly boosting low carbon tech that can yield energy independence and other such national goals or, drive investment into less sustainable options like tar sands, shale gas etc. Fear of tomorrow? You are about to have a very bad day my son. 
• Those who argue for “new designs for living” do not trust the policy elites and try to work from the bottom up on small scale, sustainable mechanisms. Works. Problem? Impossible to upscale despite all the love and goodwill in the world. Political wiliness shall kill your efforts dear lady, even if political unwillingness doesn't. 
• Those who argue for “using shocks intelligently” and seek to deal with the lack of political space for action on climate by being ready for shocks – extreme weather events etc. - and using the political windows of opportunity that open up (usually suddenly and only briefly) in their wake. Like Alex, I like this one the best. In a world where no one knows where nowhere is, it charts a map that has a shade more clarity than any of the others combined.

However, one of these days, the collective crises might yield a series of minor shocks over a very short window of time that taken together will be tantamount to one mega shock that no one will be able to survive - regardless of our specific attitude or our individual comfort zones and regardless of the fact that cop-out 19 just like the 18 before got undone and undusted.

Anyone reading this might think I am talking about changes in natural climate. Well…yeah. That too.

Here's a mangling of the lyrics of Billy Joel's song on the subject: 

And so we argue and we compromise, 

And realize that nothing's ever changed, 

For all our mutual experience, 

our separate conclusions are the same. 

Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity, 

Our reason co-exists with our insanity. 

And though we choose between reality and madness... 

It's only sadness no euphoria. 

How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies 

Perhaps we don't fulfill each other's fantasies. 

And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives, 

With our respective similarities... 

It's only sadness no euphoria.

The four societal shields

Rajakama, Vedakama, Gurukama, Pavidikama

The things that protect us and make us safe, we value over all else. The people that protect us and make us safe, we revere above all others.  There are four ways in which we are protected and there are four types of people who use them for our protection. 

We are protected by knowledge, we are protected by the truth, we are protected by medicine and we are protected by the material requisites of food, clothing, shelter and security from physical attack. Not too long ago, these factors, also known as the four societal shields against disaster, were deemed so critical that they were provided to all for free. The first was provided by teachers, the second by the renunciates, the third by healers and the fourth by the kings. 

Those who extended that helping hand through one of those four activities did so at great cost to themselves and their wellbeing. They walked, mostly, lonely paths and they did what few people could aspire to do or wanted to do. They did it for gratis and they put themselves on the line at every turn, twist and eventuality that could have the slightest bearing on the wellbeing of the people they watched over. They did it simply because they had unique talents and skills and the emotional strength and fortitude to use them for the good of others. They heeded the calls because they had the ability to respond to them. Granted, such as those were few but merely by dint of superior abilities and commitment to sacrificing themselves for others, those few were quite capable of seeing to the protection of at least very large multitudes if not entire nations.

They could, because of this ability to respond, be rightly called responsible human beings whose footprint reached into each substratum of society, succoring, regenerating, restoring, establishing, consolidating. They moved amongst the multitudes, strengthening the people, their lives, their livelihoods, their belongings, their health, their understanding. They were in turn, given optimal leverage to engage in those activities and they were revered and worshiped by the people for what they did for them. Never claiming their actions as a livelihood, they were simply the custodians of the four shields and were showered with an excess of physical, social, emotional and intellectual requisites as a humble act of recognition of their effort on behalf of the people and not as a reward for what they were doing.  For the people, the very presence of one of two such supremely enabled beings assured their peace of mind and was cause enough for joyful celebration.   

Things are far better these days. Now, we have hundreds of thousands of doctors, teachers, clergymen and leaders and wherever we look we see more and more of them being churned out by their hundreds. We should be swooning in exhilaration. We should be drowning in joy. We should be living so peacefully that even a sneeze should startle us. We should be sleeping so soundly that we should be able give Kumbakarna a run for his money and we should be dreaming so wondrously that we should be rejecting the lotuses of Odysseus’ crew as beggar’s fair. No? Not really? We are not happy? We are not peaceful? We are not secure? Oh, how sad. How very sad. 

The explosion in our times of the practitioners of the big four “callings” has actually had the opposite effect to the one that originally created those callings. There is a simple enough reason for this. The big four are not longer “callings” but rather “livelihoods”. Those who engage in them, do so, not in order to protect others but to protect themselves. Desiring security for themselves, they offer it either conditionally or only as a last resort when all else has failed them.

Kings have been replaced by politicians manipulating the fickleness of human emotion to become, not our protectors but rather, our leaders. Healers have morphed into doctors who, quite apart from being “dosthora” or “dosha-thora” (bereft of ills) are full of “dosha” (illnesses). Teachers have turned into educators who are desperately in need of being taught a few things themselves and the renunciates have transmogrified into the clergy, who, instead of being disciplined and insightful enough to understand the truth are unable to even understand the fallacies under which they live. 

More dangerously though, they are overarched by a business class that promotes politicians for their own advantage, decide who should be teaching what to whom, how many times, where and why, determine what sort of “truths” are sermonized by the clergy and what sort of illnesses get treated to what level. The needs of the people are not even on the radar. Profit is the sole reason for the exercise of these livelihoods. In cahoots with one another, one sees constant exchange (internal migration) of individuals between the business class and the four shield areas.

It is not to be wondered at that these people, collectively, are completely bereft of the “ability to respond” and therefore implicitly irresponsible by default. They would not think twice about throwing the people to the wolves to ensure their own profit, position, pandering, pimping. Unlike in the past, when shield custodians cared not for the type of legacy they created or what they gained from their actions or the type of recognition and respect given to them, the current crop demand, command and threaten people into giving them a respect they do not deserve. 

The people in turn would be entirely justified in protesting the enforced presentation of dubious bouquets and the outright rejection of this band of misfit renegades who now hold monopolies on their peace of mind. But they don’t. They can’t. These manipulative thugs preempted that eventuality through a very simple, clever and diabolical strategy. They institutionalized the four shields and labeled them as “state”, “education”, “religion” and “medicine” and brought them, their instruments, their hierarchies and their rituals into a system bound over with either fear or legislative instruments or both. They made sure that the people had no choice but to engage them, work with them and serve them. In the process, they created for themselves a very advantageous state of affairs where they can enforce recognition of their positions and power and expand the depth of their scope of control and their scope of effect without having to provide the type and quality of services that are deserving of such accolades. 

So, apart from a few exceptions to the current rule, many ordinary citizens recognize the positives of optimizing gain while minimizing effort and, having conveniently converted these callings into careers, they fight each other to the death to come out on top of this dung heap of human non-achievement.  When one of these misbegotten critters takes a hike to hell, a thousand others are ready to step into its shoes and put on its mantle of dishonor.  Our institutions ensure that dishonor is worse compounded. Our practicalities confirm our resultant vulnerabilities. Our realities affirm our certainty of doom. Protection is damned in everyone’s future. We are kaput. 

Teacher's Day -Educating for a lesser idea of knowledge

The greatest knowledge there is, is that there is no greater knowledge than that which enables one to be in harmony and in contentment with one’s self and the externalities that affect one most.

Harmony and contentment are difficult to engineer without much trial and error, without spectral scoping and without many lifetimes because one must be able to absorb and resolve both internal and external negatives and positives with joy, compassion, equanimity, understanding and insight. Tough though this certainly is, some have come very close to achieving precisely that harmony, precisely that contentment. All of them had that rare ability to heal souls and calm troubled waters not because they crusaded for it but simply because they existed. Most of them basked in happiness and signed off on their lives with the slogan “a job well done”. A few, a very few, spent their lives instructing others on how to sample that happiness and achieve it if not to a higher degree than they did themselves, then at least to a level equal to theirs.  

Some of these I have known, some I have heard of, some I have read of or studied and from others I have got to know many things.  They were the accomplished ones. They saw a lot and instructed those that came into their orbit to look both wide and deep. They knew a lot of things about a lot of things and encouraged others to know similarly before they call themselves “knowers”.  They subsumed their egos completely in order to instruct those who were full of it in the skills they required in order to perform.  They never held up a board saying “Come to me, I am a teacher”. Instead, people naturally gravitated to them and were given instruction according to their abilities. None, ever, were sent away empty handed.  They taught the world all that was worth knowing.  

“Disapamok Aduru” is the word used to describe such a one. The word literally means, “A teacher who is foremost in all ten directions” or, one who is universally knowledgeable. From Dronacharya who taught the Kuru princes to Sarvamithra who taught the young Siddhartha through Nagarjuna of Nalanda and Aryadeva of Madhyamaka,  down towards other august individuals of that same ilk, they created the great educational communities of old and edified our world and gave it the sight, direction and stratagems that it required for its continuity.

Unfortunately, by the advent of our age, such people and places of their congregation were few and becoming fewer still. The Thakshilas, Bhathkands and Santhinikethans were rare indeed. Time, that great destroyer of all things brought into being by human endeavor, slowly, surely, brought about the degeneration, sickness, old age and death of these communes.  The heyday of absolution through knowledge was going…going… and is now almost gone. 

The knowledgeable became less so. Instructors became less interested in what they knew and more interested in what they were. Seekers became therefore less well instructed and they in turn instructed yet others not on what needed to be known but on what they themselves knew. Impatience, belligerence, intolerance, extroversion, fighting, continuously assaulted these communes in serial and parallel waves that tugged, twisted and kneaded them into shallower and shallower thinking and lesser and lesser ideals of what constituted quality and what did not.  Communities therefore became less and less able to sustain themselves as the harmony and contentment that built them became slowly but inexorably corrupt, breaking apart at the seams like structures held together with substandard glue.

As the age progressed and self-enhancement became more important than self worth, as getting became more important than giving, as ego became more important than humility, the bloodlines of the greatest instructors became thinned to the point that it was difficult to even determine the original pedigree from which they had sprung. Nothing finally remained of these, other than the throw forward of their efforts, which bore not the slightest resemblance to the original.

Schools we call them. Universities. Teachers. Students. None of which had much to do with knowing, but a lot to do with learning. The ideal from which our social “knowledge gaining facilities” became, were lost in the mists of time, irrelevant, outdated and of no consequence to a world that understands itself primarily by measuring the worth of self.

When “self” walks in through the door, “teaching” jumps out the window.  Selves have this habit of labeling themselves, qualifying themselves, promoting themselves and insisting on themselves. Selves, by definition, love only themselves, their understanding, their voices, their dress, their ornaments, their style. They are possibly good at doing things, but they are disasters at teaching things. Tied inwardly, driving a train of their own make through a very narrow tunnel whose end they know not a lot about and care not much about, they would be lucky not to hit oncoming traffic let alone safely transport a trainload of students into the future.

Where once, the title of “Guru” was vested in a person, these days, selves arm themselves with qualifications, claim that title, and sally forth to desanitize the future of the world by either cauterizing or corrupting minds.

Where once, teachers strove to expand the minds of people, now  they try to contract them into their own mold. Where once the goal of a teacher was to ensure that their protégés became greater than themselves,  now they make sure that they are never even going to be their equal. Where once, teachers who were spectrally knowledgeable recognized and encouraged students to exercise their creative and intellectual faculties to optimal levels, now, they try to manufacture higher averages. Where once difficult students were a thrill and a joy to instruct, now they are labeled as unmitigated nuisances. Where once, a teacher was the first person one would go to when faced with a problem, now, they only go to them if they are forced to do so. Where once, the cane was used to correct a wrong and discipline a young soul, now, the cane is used in anger and hatred because a child has refused to acknowledge the “self” of a teacher.

So, where once, teachers were revered not for what they were but for what they made people see in themselves, now, they are ridiculed and fought by their classrooms. Where once, teachers were worshiped for what they were; now they are shot for what they are. Through successively degenerative cycles, all that we have managed to do is create arenas for these people to joust incessantly with each other  in the name of the weirdest sport ever invented in modern times: education.

Education has done just one thing. It has placed so-called teachers and so-called students in a situation of contention competing with one another for one-upmanship. Nothing more than that.  This is a great sadness and a great tragedy for our world. There is little wonder that we are faced now with impossible situations. Each succeeding generation is given less and less weaponry to battle the ills of the world. Each succeeding generation is less and less impressed by those from the preceding one that claim to be their teachers. 

.

Many laud education as a great thing and a fundamental right of people but in its present form, it should be recognized for the evil that it is, where giving an education is practiced by stunted minds and getting an education is practiced by angry minds. I understand that this is not going to happen. Since it has sold itself on this idea of education, it is hard for the world to see it as a corrupter and not an edifier. It is difficult to see it as essentially useless. It is near impossible to see it as a world destroyer.

*shrugs* Let them think as they will. Let them do what they will. I never created this mess nor subscribed to it so I shall not insist. For a world at war, these portals of war may have some relevance. Let them tie their idea of knowing to fencing bouts between teachers, students and parents, imposing buildings, pieces of paper and three letter dirty words.

In the end, most of us will say "we learned" and some of us will say "we taught" and because of this – not despite of it - I fear that a very large percentage of human beings shall go to their deaths in complete ignorance of the fact that they never acquired or imparted anything even remotely close to knowledge. More disconcertingly, most will not know much about how that death came about. 

Nepotism: it's all relative

Photo by Kentoh

The last time I had to visit a police station to sort out a problem with my driving license, I called up my uncle, a retired ASP who phoned up the OIC who talked to the sergeant who frowned at the PC who got off his butt instantly and solved my problem without my having to even go to the cop shed. Recently, when a friend was in the GH-ICU,  my wife got her student’s mother who was a doctor at the place to give us hourly bulletins that were far better than any we would have received if we had sat down to high tea with the attending surgeon. Easy. Simple. And who needs to navigate that little known and less understood monster generally known as “staying in line”? Why, for crying out loud, engage in a fruitless and time consuming activity when we can just jump the queue and have done with it?

Regardless of the type of bureaucratic process involved, Sri Lankans, as a nation, bypass due process as a matter of course. In fact, due process is the last and least preferred modality of engagement when dealing with any kind of societal process that can be even slightly resistive.  Whether it is obtaining a bank loan, getting an approval for our plans for a house, getting out of paying a traffic fine, springing a buddy out of jail, seizing state land for development, getting a contract, choosing a person to manage some area of a business… all of us, without exception, have thought, said or done things similar to the following:

• “Ikram is a high up in that place isn’t he?” 
• “Speak to uncle Para putha, he will get the paperwork sorted out at the ministry for us” 
• “Maybe their technical track record is better than ours but the chairman is married to Avanthi’s sister no? Avanthi men? Sene’s daughter? Remember? I helped her get a good college in America? Contract is ours. Not to worry…just one phone call” 
• “No no, not Senthil. Who is this fellow and whose is he? That’s what I want to know. I don’t trust him. Some bloody outsider. So he is qualified so what? He will sell us out mark my words. Better put our Pali’s brother in that position” 
• “Don’t try to bribe the bugger machan he will kick your proposal into the dustbin but send him four lorry loads of sand, he is building his house and he would like that. Trust me. Done deal.”
• “Damn in! He got the inside track because his buddies were more powerful than our buddies”

Bypassing due-process to unfairly leverage position, networks and physical resources for personal gain is ingrained in the very core of our national psyche and, measured against this broadest possible definition of the word “corruption”, we are, as a collective, as a citizenry, corrupt. Not just one or two, most of us. Some do it out of choice, some do it because they see no other choice, some don’t think twice about it. Regardless of the reason why we do it, none, but none, actually see anything wrong with it. Regardless of the level of empowerment and regardless of our specific social stratums, this is what we do. This is the way we engage society. This is the norm. This? Is Sri Lanka!

So, why are we, in the majority, prancing about like cats on hot coals, lambasting everything from the beautification of Colombo to the new highway to Kandy, pointing fingers at everyone from “the family” to the bureaucracy to the army to the clergy and shrieking “corruption..nn..nnn..nnnnnn….” in a cacophony of noise worse than an entire battalion of screwing felines?  Why do we rattle our teeth loose gnashing them together at the unfairness of it all? Why do we pour vitriol and scorn on every single man jack we perceive to be aligned with systemic corruption? Why do we air our hatred at such things as nepotism or internal circles of trust? Why, in a nutshell, are we pointing an accusing finger at any and all when three fingers are pointing back at us?

Two words. Alignment. Inequity. A lot of us are wrongly aligned and a lot of us are unfairly prevented from unfairly bypassing due process. Basically, we called the wrong people “friends” and we are reaping the non-benefits of that heinous crime. I am amused at the incongruity of it all. When we scream in anger, howl we don’t at corruption per se but yowl we do at the lack of opportunity for our own circles of trust to engage in the same thing. When we claw the walls in frustration, we don’t rake the infrastructure only because of  the thought that the friends and family of the rightly aligned are making a lot of hay, but rather, because we bake in our own misery at the thought that our friends and family are living fringe existences because of our bad choices in alignment.

People look silly when they do such things. Regardless of the millions of “righteous” excuses that people may give themselves and the world. “Righteousness” and “fairness” in our type of society are slogans only for those whose ability to be unrighteous and inequitable has been either curbed or cauterized. Transparency and accountability are useless lenses for us when they are subsumed and micronized by the lens of corruption. If nothing else, then the litany of thirty five years of reneged election promises of successive politicians of every size, shape, color and agenda, the murderous desire of small men to obtain power at all costs and the drooling madness of citizens killing each other over ideologies that trigger emotion over circumspection should prove this.

This is the age of street-smart political agendas where it is not the most law abiding driver but rather the largest bus that gets the right of way. This is the age of humungous busses mostly plying routes to either ethnicville or religiocity. This is the age where circles of trust are only as valid as their goodness-of-fit for a particular self serving purpose and the safest option is to use the most powerful vehicle that can serve that purpose. If one is fair or righteous or both, one doesn’t hop on any of those busses be they big or small, destructive or vulnerable for all of them are moving down the same iffy passage to doom.  

Rather, one gets the heck off of the darned street. 

That way, one is not responsible for the carnage created by a runaway juggernaut.  That way, one would see alignment and inequity against their proper framework of reference and perhaps, even continue to use them as one has always done without attempting to second guess the impact of others using the same process on a bigger stage for a larger audience. That way, one would have made a very right move, that way one would have made a very fair move, that way one would have made a very wise move. However, make no mistake, that way one would not have made a very smart move.

Me? I will wait for ever for a statesman to stand election before I decide to man a lie of voters. Having only seen politicians putting their hands up, I’ve never voted for anyone in my entire life and so, for whatever time I have left on earth, I can duly lay myself down to a relatively calmer sleep, processing out the tiredness that I bring upon myself by pointing my own misbegotten index finger at anyone, at everyone, and cackling insanely at the insanity of the “average Sri Lankan citizen”.

Disagreeing to disagree disagreeably

The madness of debating aid effectiveness and climate change

Let us temporarily set aside the never ending debates on what love is, what friendship is and whether religion has helped or damaged the world.

Apart from those, the two longest running debates in recent world history are the climate debate and the aid effectiveness debate. We have gone through 18 COPs, 2 Rio’s and a Kyoto on the climate debate and four HLF editions of the aid debate over the last two decades.  Not to mention the estimated 1.5 million other side-meets, side-events and side-shows at global, continental, regional, sub-regional, national, provincial and local levels.

These two discussions have a common reason for their existence and a natural congruence in the human responses to them. Both of these arose out of guilt for what the movers and shakers of the world had managed to do to this planet, its plants, its animals and its people over a period of 400 years. They meet, mesh and meld as a result of the fact that the same shudder-mongers believe that the two issues can be solved by flinging a bit of money around.

Anyone who has been involved in one of these would tell you they felt like they were being spun into a whirlpool while the said whirlpool was being simultaneously spun through a jet engine.

Now me? Well! I must have done some terrible karma in a past birth.

Through no direct fault of my own, I have been engaged in not one but both of these at a pretty high level (COPs, IPCC on climate and the OECD on aid). Why a crazy, long haired nutjob would be allowed inside the august portals of the OECD HQ in Paris or be asked to back-seat formulate Sri Lankan strategies for a COP or contribute to an IPCC requested communiqué is a mystery that is beyond my ability to comprehend. Yet, there you have it. I was whirlpooled into these debates and, over nine long years I served a sentence for some heinous crime I know nothing of.

I hate them with a passion. Not the unknown crimes I must have surely committed but rather the debates. In fact I have come to hate such debates with a loathing that compares only to religious and racial hate-mongering. I hate them because they exist only to promote further debate. They are there to ferment greater discontent, sadder disillusionment, deeper disappointment and darker despair. Mark you, resolving issues, neutralizing conflicting opinions, empathizing with each other’s common lot, agreeing on action, commitment to participating in solutions are all on the agenda – of the next debate on the same issue. Not the current one. The “Baalagiri Dosha” aptly describes the outcome of these debates. They exist to make the world see what busy-li’l-bees we are.

They are not there to create the instruments that will stop us jetting around the world for the next meeting cum shopping trip cum power trip cum vacation cum sex tour cum whatever… that I never subscribed to but which I've seen many of my fellow activists thrill to... blah!

And so, not only is there a common basis and convergence but a common outcome to these debates as well. That outcome can be summed up in a single word.

Useless.

Hoo… come now. Surely, there is a reason why people spend gazillions of dollars physi-conferencing, tele-conferencing, researching, identifying, sharing, speaking, contradicting and debating something?

Well, no. At least, none that readily meets the eye.

Let us take a look at the aid carousal. In a series of meta-studies conducted between 2005 and 2010 based on an Aid Effectiveness Literature (AEL) consisting of 97 econometric studies done over 40 years, Hristos Doucouliagos and Martin Paldam conclude that aid has not been effective. In “AEL – The sad result of 40 years of research” as well as through similar studies on growth and accumulation resulting from aid, they make two key points that are paraphrased below:

• The AEL reveals a highly significant reluctancy bias.  Researchers typically present one of the most positive outcomes as the key result of the study. This is a problem for truth finding/revelation. Therefore, results are too polished and fail to converge on the truth. We had to conclude that the AEL had not proved that aid is effective, even when 74% of the published aid-growth effects are positive. 

• The AEL has not managed to show that there is a significantly positive effect of aid. Consequently, if there is an effect, it must be small. In order to attract popular support in donor countries, it caters to all kinds of lofty and continuously shifting goals mixed up with stakeholder and strategic interests. In the aid discourse, the air is often stale and muggy from big, sweet and vague words that steadily shift.

 Whoa! Let’s translate the academese. What it means is that first, aid promoters, implementers and other actors routinely lie through their teeth. Second, in order to validate those lies, they come up with a weird label called “best practices” which is another way of highlighting the few small gains and projecting them to be the norm instead of the exception. Third they come up with a weirder label called "lessons learned" which is another way of saying "we screwed up but we want to save our jobs so this is a way of stating our incompetence in a way that will not make you guys mad at us". Fourth, they produce glossy, learned reports with all the right lexicon, paraphrasing and conclusions that package in virtual beauty that which is ugly in reality.

Change the word “aid” to “climate change responders” in the previous paragraph and you will not be wrong about where that circus is heading either. 

What has this debate-o-rama yielded? It has yielded about six man-years worth of reading, most of it harmlessly irrelevant. About 500,000 “best practices” which are similar to attempts to stop a tsunami with a well built sand dyke or a child’s attempts to dig trenches on the sea shore to protect its sand castle. It has given Opportunities to nonentities to participate in about 30,000 conferences a year to indulge their egos in endless, mindless talk fests. And, oh, before I forget, particularly for sad sods like me, it has resulted in the chaotic disaster that one commonly associates with the juxtaposition of humans, whirlpools, suction and jet engines. If it serves (ha!), it serves just one purpose only. It serves to keep the aid and climate change industries (yes, industries I ask ya) afloat.

If a debate is for the purpose of resolution, it can be done in three sittings (the first to outline the problem and determine possible responses, the second to fine tune what those responses are going to be and come to an understanding on how to implement them and the third to consolidate and prioritize the responses, commit to common goals and set time frames for execution /management /penalties). 

That my friends, just doesn't happen. Instead what does happens can be stated by a set of laws (some of my less cranky friends amusedly call them  "Arjuna’s laws" when I mention them) on disagreeing to disagree disagreeably.

1. The law of irresolution: If the number of debates required to resolve an issue is greater than three, then the issue that is being debated is irresolvable.
2. The collateral to the law of irresolution: If the number of sittings continues beyond the three meeting limit, then there is more advantage to all parties to continue the debate than there would be in resolving it.
3. The law of infinite disagreement: The number of points that a group of people disagree upon is geometrically proportional to the number of ways available to frame the problem. (This is actually a collateral of Pirsig’s law which states that the number of hypothesis that can be proposed to fit  a given set of facts is infinite) 
4. The collateral to the law of infinite disagreement: (more of a truism than an actual law) The volume of work generated on any given subject is directly proportional to the nebulosity of the word or phrase used to label it. (The current top five:religion, love, friendship, climate change, aid effectiveness) 
5. The law of uselessness: (again, a truism) The usability of a volume of work on a nebulously framed subject is inversely proportional to its size

*Chuckles* Welp! All of that was highly useless, no? So! whatchawegonnadoaboutitall? 

Let’s screw around in conferences earning a buck here or a tenner there until we reach that level of disagreement that can only be resolved western style with the winner being the person with the quickest draw. Nah, that won’t work. In this world, everyone’s draw is the fastest so let us all have a good giggle about it and wait for Armageddon. 

(This piece was triggered by a short communique to my brother Malinda when he inquired from me about the CAN-SA network and spiced up here and there by a research exercise I was recently working on and finally, and most importantly, by the long discussions I've had with my very insightful and very young friend Dhanusha Amarasinghe - thanks for the 515 boxing matches in Manila Dhanu :) )