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 :) ) 

...and then the poor impoverished the contented

A medicant lives on just four requisites. Scraps of discarded cloth dyed in the boiled juices of tree bark to cover his body, scraps of food begged from here and there to feed him, a tree to provide him with shelter from the elements and cow’s urine as medicine. The common denominators for all of these is a) they cost nothing and b) they are abundantly available. They provide him with all his material requisites.

Now, the question that comes to mind is this: Is a medicant poor? On the surface it would seem so. However, if he were asked he would in all probability, respond with the German proverb “A poor person isn’t he who has little but he who needs a lot” Indeed!

The keyword here is “need”. Need, not lack of accumulation or lack of wealth or lack of position or lack of power, determines who is poor and who is not.  So, if one were to minimize need, one would minimize poverty. Eradicate need and one eradicates poverty.

OMG! Is this really true? But of course!  And yet, “come come” I hear you say “…everyone has needs so everyone is poor at some level or other”.  Brilliant. “True. Glad you acknowledge that you are poverty stricken pal” I retort. “No! I didn’t mean to say that. That’s not what I meant!” comes the outraged counter from you. “Ah! Pal, who are we kidding? Regardless of what you wanted to say, what you’d really want is words such as ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ redacted from any measure of your ‘worth’, right? Having those in there implies a negative balance to your idea of your own wealth, mm?  Rather, you would want a positive spin put on it and instead of counting the things you need, you’d rather count the things you have right?”

Therein lies the problem with the world. You see, what a person has or doesn’t have has not the slightest bearing on how poor that person is. From her dream man, to his dream boat, to her dream home, to his dream position, it is what one dreams of having but cant that truly causes people to suffer that mind bending pain and desperation commonly associated  with paucity.

“Aspirations” therefore, like its partner “need”, contrary to popular belief, has the opposite effect to the one intended. Instead of allowing one to reach even a basic  level of contentment, it forces one to rev up one’s wants to the umpteenth degree, forcing one to live very large segments of one’s life fretting, fuming and fumbling, unable to get to grips with what flies and what dies in the happiness department. The aspiring, needy, greedy, goal driven people of this earth, therefore, live their lives out not entirely like whirling dervishes, mostly unsatisfied, always uncomfortable, never happy, definitely poor, until death mercifully takes them, removing them from that self-inflicted hell also known as life-on-earth. For them, poverty is indeed the worst form of violence and it is mostly self-inflicted. You thought that what Gandhi said was about other people right? Gotcha!

Now, here is the insanity of it all: “Life-on-earth”, in its majority, thinks it is actually fashionable to live like this. In fact, it thinks this is the best way to live. Not only that, it promotes this as the only way to live. “Expand your choices”, “become greater than you are”, “fly with the eagles”, “become achievers” are all straplines we hear repeated in a monotonous rote that gives religious chants a good run for its money.  It doesn’t take rocket science to very quickly figure out the fallacy of this argument but, of all things that can cause people to be blind to simple stupid truths, “need” has the greatest potency.

Everyone knows this one would assume. One assumes wrong. All of the little post-its and old German proverbs that appear here and there, from time to time, saying the same thing in a hundred different ways, are simply there to be filed away under “sayings”. Or, to use their actual definition “things that are true but are either not fashionable or not convenient or not useful to practice in the here and now” *winks*

So,

What we have as a result is not the blind trying to lead the blind, but rather the blind trying to tell those who can still see that lack of ocular faculties is actually good for one’s health. The blind, in their blindness, are trying to put out the eyes of those who see. The poor, in their poverty, are trying to drag those who are not into that hell pit.

Who promotes this kind of foolishness? Obviously, those who have the most, because they need the most and therefore measure everyone else’s lives by their yardstick of “wanting more”. And they are powerful enough to do it and have such fallacies as GDP, GNI, PCI (all based on what one has) to popularize it.

World “poverty” statistics say “Oh my gosh! Did you know that a full 80% of the people on this earth live on less than ten dollars a day???!!! That 50% live on just two and a half dollars a day???!!!” Oh PUH-LEEZ. People don’t live ON $2.50 for crying out loud. No one can. They live on other things. $2.50 is merely what they have.  But this fact is unknown to those that measure wealth by their individual accumulations. It is hidden from those who measure their “livability” by what they have. It is removed from those who call the un-needy who are supposed to live on a few dollars “poor”.

So, in their aggression, armed with those aforementioned three letter dirty words, they declare their war on poverty and actually get buy-in for their effort from the nouveau uninformed. Be they activists, advocates, creators of charities, placard holders - all of these well intentioned, good hearted fools have bought into the rubbish that is being sold to them by those who created the problem in the first place. And, so, in their war, destructively, disastrously, they sell this horrid idea of poverty to the world and engage in rather charming little activities that go under the heading “poverty reduction”. Primarily what they are trying to do is make those who are content discontent. Essentially what they do in the name of poverty reduction is poverty production. HOOT!

Lordy lordy! That slicing was hilarious. It was. What a joke. ROFLMAO. But seriously folks, what about that half of the world whose as-at net worth is somewhere between USD 0 and 2.5? What on earth do they live on?

First, they live on not needing much… much like that medicant that was mentioned at the start of this post and the referral in that piece of German wisdom. Next, and this is crucial to the argument, they live on what they can use, not on what they can own. What are these? Free water, free fruit from the jungle, free access to land for cultivation, free air to breath, free smiles and communal giggles, free help from their communities. Basically, social wealth defined as something that is commonly available to all for use whenever one needs it, in just the right amounts, not too much, not too little.

Against this background, what do the poverty mongers do? How do they create the conditions for poverty for those that have no idea what it is? Having defined wealth the way they have, they attempt to acquire as many of the common resources as they possibly can so that essentially, the people who are supposed to live on $2.50 really do have to live on it since the things that their lives depended on are now in the hands of “those that have”. Emphasis – have.  Voila! Now, the well-heeled can rightly claim “OMG! 50% of the world actually lives on just 2.50 a day”. Where earlier, “poverty” per se was never a problem, this enforced impoverishment of common resources caused by a few people commandeering that which is used by most ensures true paucity. Over the last 400 years, these rats have taken everything that most people use and now call it their own. From world politicians to global policy planners to academics, to the media, to the various movers, shakers and implementers right down to that not-so-innocent lady holding that there placard, this is what they did. This is what they continue to do. And it is to their advantage to do so. Poverty is one of the easiest commodities to sell and one of the best ways to get hold of geographies and people who would otherwise not be all that easy to control.

Wouldn't  you want to shoot them for this heinous crime they are either purposefully, ignorantly or legitimately perpetrating across this planet? Well, I don’t. I want to put them all in a humungous barrel and have every single person who has less than tne bucks to their name to spit once in it so that they drown in the saliva of 5.74 billion people who were never poor to start with but were impoverished by them.

So far, Sri Lankans have been relatively safe because of their culture of sharing and their use of communal strengths. However, this is changing rapidly within the current political economy. If this continues for just a few more years we will have an “Asian Winter” to deal with (We went through our spring, summer and autumn uprisings centuries ago). In that winter, all that we will all have to live on is blinding white darkness regardless of who is richer and who is poorer.

(This post was triggered by that “war on poverty” photograph that my friend Imtiyaz Razak posted on facebook recently. Thanks, friend. It gelled my thoughts on an issue I’ve been battling for close to a decade and allowed me to write a giggle on the rather well known poverty-impoverishment slicing)