Mark Bernstein on the Future of Books (and on Bob Stein)
I’m a liberal whose would gladly send the page to the wall if we could get something better, because people need something better if we’re to have any hope of saving the world. And they need it now.
The UN has finally managed to create an agency specifically tasked with working towards gender equality. As Stephen Lewis argued years ago in his Massey Lectures, the lack of a centralized agency for women is a longstanding embarrassment. The new web site is here.
Denis Stairs (whose class on nationalism pushed me into a Ph.D. more than anything else) lightly chides the CIC on their pretensions of Canada leveraging its toleration and democratic traditions as an export for the less than democratic world.
I have not yet read the report, so more later.
A Fine Report: But Does it Have an Imperial Touch? – Canadian International Council
In any case, the evidence indicates overwhelmingly that democracy and political civility are not easily exportable commodities. They are not, in fact, commodities at all, and those whom we expect to cherish them need first to feel they own them. On occasion, outsiders can help them (a little, and at the margins) to acquire them. But in they end they are not “gifts,” and they cannot be given.In this, as in so much else in an unevenly developed world, we need to be aware of our own limitations, to both understand and sympathize with those who face daunting challenges that we do not confront at all, and to be wary of the impulse to volunteer. Certainly we should be willing to assist-but only if we are asked, and even then only when we think we can be of genuine use.
In this field, these are among the practical implications of a tolerant disposition. To push harder, to intrude more forcefully, is to court the punishment that the imperially-inclined so often reap.
I always feel a bit dirty when I agree with our friends at Aid Watch (which happens more than I would like to admit). But the overall tone of this post is spot on:
Curriculum and course materials proposed by the central “Secretariat”
for development practice are housed in Columbia’s Earth Institute. Will
the new programs produce students with a standardized,
narrowly-prescribed view of how to approach development problems? Or
will the melding of disciplines encourage critical thinking and help
straddle the theory-policy divide, making global cooperation run more
smoothly and international aid more effective?
Aid watch documents how various maps of the Horn of Africa documents the gradual impact of colonialism on the region.
The Map History of an Unhappy Place, 1829-present: “ Among the forces at work changing the map are Europeans’ increasing knowledge of the area, the expansion of European colonial control, European border changes, and Ethiopian expansion. Somehow it led to the present mix of tragic mess, cultural richness, and potential for hope.”
(Via Aid Watch.)
