Salient Polymaths R Us

Well, not really--I thought this article was going to touch on Illich and de Soto more, but it expounded a strikingly different point of view:

http://www.libertyhaven.com/regulationandpropertyrights/tradeandinternationaleconomics/newliberation.shtml

A few comments. Firstly:

The tragedy of the old liberation theology is not only that it penalizes individual enterprise, but that it requires sweeping away all traditional religious structures in Latin America.

This doesn't take into account the liberated reformers we met with.

Here's a neat lead:

...true to Schumpeter's prophecy that capitalism would create many idle critics of the very system that enriched them.

Better yet:

...quoting John Wesley: "Make as much money as you can. Save as much money as you can. Give away as much money as you can."

And best so far:

We live at a time when all respectable churchmen are supposed to be exercising a "preferential option for the poor" and hostility towards the rich. But I submit that the proper Christian attitude is to show a preferential option for human beings, rich or poor, East or West, South or North, without regard for class or condition. And, like Wesley and Schuller, we need to encourage all people to discover the possibilities within them, to become everything God means for them to be. They must start where they find themselves, or where God finds them.

This is over ten years old, yet sounds quite fresh.

Comments to come later hopefully. Gotta leave work now.

Bonnie Whitlow and Norma General

March 20th, the next "Mexico Day" on my list, I found to be one of the most interesting days of all the trip, but it wasn't located any further away than a little spot on the Six Nations reserve just outside my hometown that I had never been to before.

Most of the day was a presentation by and dialogue with Bonnie and Norma, which was a fascinating reversal for me. Not that I ever evangelise as much as I could or even should, but I'm not usually actively evangelised either, and this definitely was different from discussing things with door-to-door Jehovah's Witnesses. Also, I had remembered reading about how evangelists going way out of their own culture usually only had a breakthrough when they could find a parallel to some Biblical theme in the culture in which they were working.

I think I already came up with adequate words in an e-mail to Bonnie about a week after our meeting:

It was an interesting afternoon last Saturday, because you were evangelising us in the same way some of us seek to evangelise you. I think we can both use each other's evangelism, because you are closer to the truth in some matters and we in others, and it's been God's pleasure to make it this way so that neither of us becomes arrogant thinking that we have all the answers (as your ancestors and my ancestors both thought.) That's not to say that truth is relative, or that parts of the Bible are invalidated by what you say--it's just that you have a better grasp of the spirit behind the letter (again, in some areas more than others) than we do, because we are clouded by our cultural lense.

(About the parallels, she later gave me a book lead that turns out to be available online too: http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/iro/parker/.)

Anyway, it definitely makes sense that the majority of we who call ourselves Christian would in no way be able to evangelise Six Nations peoples as they were presented to us that day, because they act more Christian than we do. In an interesting twist, I think Western-minded truth-seekers would migrate to Six Nations spirituality (as many do in the vague popular movement toward nature and such), but they would unfortunately probably stop there before coming to the full realisation of the reality of Jesus Christ in the world, because Christians who really are a light in the world are spread, and once one is comfortable in a worldview (even a new one), one usually stops searching. This is how I've spent nineteen years beside a better example of how to live without ever noticing, and could've easily spent nineteen, thirty-eight, or fifty-seven more if not for the inclusion of a meeting with our Aboriginal friends as part of the pre-trip days.

For all we cry about freedom of religion in order to generally supress it in schools, we've done powerfully well at caging it within an aura of irrelevance. The very fact that it's not mandatory where, say, English and math are within our K-12 school system implies to any student that it's not worth studying in order to live more successfully in the "real world." Sure, we were taken on a trip to the reserve in sixth grade or so, and the general sentiment was "that's nice," but we were more interested in whether we'd be back in time to play wall ball before hometime. Contrast that with our three or four trips to App's Mill for ecological education/games once every two or three years, continuing into high school.

Our collective lack of seeking to understand where people are really coming from is why September 11th was hardly more of a shock to me than the second season finale of 24. Unfortunately, of the few who really are seeking to understand, some still are only doing it in order to control. While you can't mandate a good heart, you can stamp out many misunderstandings without too much effort. (This is while we're still within the K-12. After that you have to expend much more effort un-learning first, go on campaigns, buy media attention, and so on. Watch strategies on getting people to stop smoking, and see if it isn't more effective to quit before you start.)

In later entries I'll get to Mexican indigenous peoples. There are many differences, but hopefully this time around I'll see some similarities and balance it out when I write here.

Another book lead

I was just reading through this to refresh my memory, and besides the ending revealing the possibly (once again) dangerous assumptions (i.e., about economics and about spirituality) behind the view presented, I did find this intriguing quote and book lead:

My other book, The Other Path, was written for Peruvians, but I was amazed when it spread beyond Peru to all of Latin America and became a Latin American best seller. And then it started going to other developing countries, and one of the other countries it went to was Indonesia. And I was also thrilled because my publishers in Indonesia were the extreme left-wing press, which I thought was interesting.

I'll have to get a hold of that and some Illich or other liberation theology and see how the two reconcile. (Everything reconciles in the end.)

I'm still at a loss for deciding in which direction to present in September.

Poverty

"To be continued." Proof positive you shouldn't stop for dinner when you're on a roll. But I knew that already from the red-haired inmate with the beard in The First Circle.

Just in case I go way off the philosophy bent and more into the poverty end of economics: I was tossing most of my long-term todos today that had expired, and I came across the Fraser Institute's student essay contest (topic: free trade's relation to poverty), and thought I'd take a look at their suggested bibliography:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:wwCB5vqxSaEJ:www.fraserinstitute.ca/studentcentre/files/Resource_Guide03.pdf+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

(In HTML to make it easy to copy and paste to check out addresses.)

Weighing these articles against what I learned in GS102 last term and read in that Canada Watch special was interesting, to say the least. I think that I have a few leads:

a) I need to continue in mathematics, otherwise I cannot have an opinion either way on some of what the WTO says. Some of the stats calculations they do look familiar, but some I've never heard of. On the other hand, you need not have passed grade twelve mathematics to see that their newer "more comprehensive" development index is heavily flawed when there are negative changes for a number of countries in every area besides technology (the heavyweight champion of categories), yet every country's overall index comes out with positive change. If technological prowess isn't leading to improved education, health care, GDP, etc. for a particular country, how could it possibly outweigh those categories in a so-called Human Development Index on "its own merits"?

b) I need to keep in mind the power of primacy and recency, and be more objective. Both sides of the globalization issue have fun with the stats to some degree, both sides ignore some key issues of the other, and both sides seem to ignore the spiritual side of the equation (at least when talking about the "real" issues) altogether.

c) It might be worth exploring the idea that free trade might actually be the best way to go (for everyone), provided that social considerations are put first, and that it's not selectively applied as it is now, with Northern states bullying the South into "one-way free trade" by allowing just enough of the particular protectionist element to have it both ways.

d) Mexico is way more important in all of this than my old dim thought debris might've had me guess.

I'll have to get back to you on those some day.