A couple of weeks ago the travel writer and memoirist Paul Theroux published an opinion piece entitled “The Rock Star’s Burden” in the New York Times. It is an article full of bitterness and bile where, in a display of almost unbelievable hubris, Theroux basically expresses a thinly disguised disappointment that the country of Malawi, where he worked as part of the Peace Corps 40 years ago, has not been able to convert his (and others’) generous donation of time and energy into becoming more like a grateful version of Switzerland:

Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children’s Village. I am speaking of the ”more money” platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for — and this never happens.

He then takes his misguided judgment of the causes of problems in Malawi and, predictably enough, generalizes it to all of Africa:

Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend’s children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

The emigration of Africans to the preposterously prosperous countries of the West particularly galls Theroux; after all, didn’t he go there to try and help them? Why can’t they stay and help themselves? Is he really seriously suggesting that if Malawians, with an average income of around 50 cents per day, 900,000 of whom are infected with AIDS, and who have a basic literacy rate of barely 50 percent, were to just stay home and “volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades,” that Malawi’s problems would go away? It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Theroux that while he had the education and the luxury of taking a couple of years off in his youth to indulge his idealistic fantasies (and turn the experience into a lucrative career writing about it–it takes the average Malawian a year to earn the amount of money Theroux probably makes in a day) through a program (the Peace Corps) explicitly designed as a propaganda tool for the American government in the cold war years, most Malawians cannot take a few years off to “volunteer” for the betterment of their country. Of course, those (and there are really very few) who are able to get to the West to make a better life for themselves will do so. And why shouldn’t they? (Mr. Theroux seems not even to have any idea of the difficulties of getting a visa to the West for anyone in the third world.)

Bono, through his high-profile campaigns for African debt relief, serves as the main lightning rod for Theroux’s odious and acidic attacks:

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson — who calls himself ”Bono” — as Mrs. Jellyby in ”Bleak House.” Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha ”on the left bank of the River Niger,” Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes ”to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade,” all the while badgering people for money.

And also:

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa’s ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the ”more money” platform…

By coincidence, at the time that I read Theroux’s hysterical screed against any money for Africa (keep in mind his saying, “I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for — and this never happens”), I had just finished reading The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, with a foreword by the much-maligned Bono. Sachs is an extremely well-respected economist, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He is also the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. I recommended Sach’s book in 3QD’s year-end round-up of the best books of 2005, and he does such a good job of not only explaining the “poverty trap” that some African (and other extremely poor) countries find themselves in, but also of anticipating and answering the objections of the likes of Theroux, that I will let him do most of the talking now:

When poverty is very extreme, the poor do not have the ability–by themselves–to get out of the mess. Here is why: Consider the kind of poverty caused by a lack of capital per person. Poor rural villages lack trucks, paved roads, power generators, irrigation channels. Human capital is very low, with hungry, disease-ridden, and illiterate villagers struggling for survival. Natural capital is depleted: the trees have been cut down and the soil nutrients exhausted. In these conditions the need is for more capital–physical, human, natural–but that requires more saving. When people are poor, but not utterly destitute, they may be able to save. When they are utterly destitute, they need their entire income, or more, just to survive. There is no margin of income above survival that can be invested for the future.

This is the main reason why the poorest of the poor are most prone to becoming trapped with low or negative economic growth rates. They are too poor to save for the future and thereby accumulate the capital per person that could pull them out of their current misery…

[The saving rate, for example, of upper-middle-income countries was 25% as opposed to 10% for the least-developed countries, according to a 2004 World Bank study.]

In fact, the standard measures of domestic saving, based on the official national accounts, overstate the saving of the poor because these data do not account for the fact that the poor are depleting their natural capital by cutting down trees, exhausting soils of their nutrients, mining their mineral, energy, and metal deposits, and overfishing… When a tree is cut down and sold for fuelwood, and not replanted, the earnings to the logger are counted as income, but instead should be counted as a conversion of one capital asset (the tree) into a financial asset (money). (TEoP, p.57)

There is much more to this, but you will have to read the book yourself to get all the details, which Sachs does an admirable job of laying out for the non-specialist reader. Much of the book is spent in showing that it is possible, using available data, to estimate fairly accurately the amounts of capital infusion needed by a country to escape the poverty trap. It’s better to just let Sachs take it from there:

Africa needs around $30 billion per year in order to escape from poverty. But if we actually gave that aid, where would it go? Right down the drain if the past is any guide. Sad to say, Africa’s education levels are so low that even programs that work elsewhere would fail in Africa. Africa is corrupt and riddled with authoritarianism. It lacks modern values and the institutions of a free market economy needed to achieve success… And here is the bleakest truth: Suppose that our aid saved Africa’s children. What then? There would be a population explosion, and a lot more hungry adults. We would have solved nothing.

If your head was just nodding yes, please read this chapter with special care. The paragraph above repeats conventional rich-world wisdom about Africa, and to a lesser extent, other poor regions. While common, these assertions are incorrect. Yet they have been repeated publicly for so long, or whispered in private, that they have become accepted as truths by the broad public as well as much of the development community, particularly by people who have never worked in Africa.  I use the case of Africa because prejudices against Africa run so high, but the same attitudes were expressed about other parts of the world before those places achieved economic development and cultural prejudices could not hold up. (TEoP, p. 309)

Hmmm, does the first paragraph above remind you of something you’ve read lately? In the rest of the chapter, Sachs answers these and other objections to aid for Africa in careful detail, with section headings such as:

• Money down the drain
• Aid programs would fail in Africa
• Corruption is the culprit
• A democracy deficit
• Lack of modern values
• The need for economic freedom
• A shortfall of morals

Just to give a flavor of how Sachs’s refutations of these cliched arguments go, let me first quote our self-appointed Africa expert, Mr. Theroux, one last time:

When Malawi’s minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa’s problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Now here is Sachs again:

In the past, the overwhelming prejudices against Africa have been grounded in overt racism. Today the ever repeated assertion is that corruption–or “poor governance”–is Africa’s venal sin, the deepest source of its current malaise. Both Africans themselves and outsiders level this charge…

The point is that virtually all poor countries have governance and corruption indicators that are below those of the high-income countries. Governance and higher income go hand in hand not only because good governance raises incomes, but also, and perhaps even more important, because higher income leads to improved governance…

Africa’s governance is poor because Africa is poor. Crucially, however, two other things are also true. At any given level of governance (as measured by standard indicators), African countries tend to grow less rapidly than similarly governed countries in other parts of the world… Something else is afoot; as I have argued at length, the slower growth is best explained by geographical and ecological factors. Second, Africa shows absolutely no tendency to be more or less corrupt than other countries at the same income level. (TEoP, p. 311)

As for Africa’s lack of democracy, Sachs notes that:

Africa’s share of free and partly free countries, 66 percent, actually stands above the average for non-African low-income countries in 2003, 57 percent…

Democratization, alas, does not reliably translate into faster economic growth, at least in the short term. The links from democracy to economic performance are relatively weak, even though democracy is surely a boon for human rights and a barrier against large-scale killing, torture, and other abuses by the state. The point is not that Africa will soar economically now that it is democratizing, but rather that the charge of authoritarian rule as a basic obstacle to good governance in Africa is passe. (TEoP, p. 315)

Well, you get the idea. Buy the book and read it. As for Theroux, he should stick to doing what he does best: writing gossipy accounts of much better writers than himself, like, In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, his book trashing his former mentor, V. S. Naipaul. And more power to Bono!

From Sach’s website: How You Can Help End Poverty.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

Justin E. H. Smith

One often hears that Montreal is the New York of Canada. It seems to me one may just as well say that Iqaluit is the New York of Nunavut. Both analogies are true enough, insofar as each settlement in question is the undisputed cultural capital of its region. But analogies can often work simply in virtue of the similitude of the relation in each of the pairs, even when the two pairs are vastly different the one from the other. Montreal is the New York of Canada, to be sure. But Canada, well… Canada is the Canada of North America.

This will be the first of two articles in which I lay out a scurrilous and wholly unfounded diatribe against the place I now call home. The second part will consist in a screed against Canada as a whole; today I would like to direct my bile towards Montreal in particular.

Sometime in early 2002, there was an amusing article in the New York Times, chronicling the fates of a few New York families that had fled to re-settle with relatives in Canada for fear of further attacks. Within a few months, they were back. As I recall, one man was quoted as saying something like: I’d rather go up in fireball, I’d rather be vaporized, than live out the rest of my days up there.

New York pride is not only quantitative, yet it is interesting to note that there was more square footage in the World Trade Center than in all the highrises of Montreal combined. Still, in terms of square feet, if not of lives, September 11 scarcely made a dent in Manhattan.  It is of course not everywhere that the greatness of a city is measured by the number of skyscrapers it hosts. If this were the universal measure, Dallas would have London beat by a long-shot. But in Montreal the skyline is constantly pushed, on the ubiquitous postcards and tchotchkes sold along St. Catherine Street, as though this were some great accomplishment of human ingenuity, rather than a paltry imitation, a mere toy model, of the envied city to the south.

Les gratte-ciel are also celebrated shamelessly in Quebecois art and cinema. Take Denys Arcand, the tiresome and repetitive director of The Decline and Fall of the American Empire and its sequel The Barbarian Invasions, as well as of the slightly more compelling 1989 film, Jesus of Montreal. The way he cuts to new scenes with panoramic shots of the city’s skyscrapers at night, alto saxes blaring, you would think you were watching a promotional segment of the in-flight entertainment program on an incoming Air Canada plane. You would almost expect this schmaltzy segue to be followed by scenes of children getting their faces painted at a street fair, of horse carriages in the old town, or of a group of young adults, sweaters tied around their necks, laughing in a restaurant booth as a man in a chef’s hat serves them a flaming dessert. And yet this is not Air Canada filler, but the work of a supposedly serious director, himself only one example of a very common phenomenon in French Canadian movies. Every time I see the Montreal skyline glorified in Quebecois cinema, I think to myself: if Nebraska had a state-subsidized film industry, Omaha too would be portrayed as a metropolis.

But pay attention to the panorama, and you will see that there is simply not much there. Montreal is probably a notch closer to Iqaluit than it is to New York on the scale of the world’s great cities. I place it just behind Timisoara, and just ahead of Irkutsk, Windhoek, and Perth. It is admittedly not just an aluminum shed and a ski-doo or two. But still one gets the sense there that the entire settlement could be easily dismantled and quitted overnight, as one might pack up a polar research station. I’ve lived in Montreal for three years, and still, every time a Canadian commences another soporific paean to the place I think to myself: where is this city you keep mentioning? I must still be lost in the banlieue. I must not have discovered that dense and vital core of the place that would justify all this effusive praise. And so I consult the map repeatedly, and determine to my confusion that I have by now been just about everywhere in the city, indeed that I live in the centre-ville. In New York, in contrast, I always know, in the same way I know I exist, that I am most assuredly, metaphysically there. You cannot be in New York and doubt that you are in New York.

A student of mine recently returned from her first trip to New York and announced that it is ‘not all that different’ from Montreal. She noted that there is virtually the same concentration of hipsters in each place, and that many New York hipsters are listening to Montreal bands such as Les Georges Leningrad. Call it ‘the hipster index’. In Baltimore, Tucson, Cincinnati, and even Edmonton, there are plenty of ruddy youngsters who collect vinyl, make objets d’art with trash they find, do yoga, declare ‘I’m not religious per se, but I consider myself a very spiritual person,’ read Jung and Hesse and Leary and (‘just for fun’) their horoscopes, have spells of veganism, try to build theremins, decorate with Betty Page artifacts, and speak disdainfully of that empty abstraction, ‘Americans’. I’ve been to these places, and seen them with my own eyes. All these places rank very high on the hipster index. I’m afraid, though, that I am reaching a period of my life in which I measure the greatness of a place by other indices. Like beauty, for instance, and the intensity and importance of the things the grown-ups there are up to.

The other city often invoked in order that Montreal might borrow a bit of greatness is, of course, Paris. The city on the Seine, but without the jet-lag, is how the tourism industry packages it. I think this has something to do with the fact that a French of sorts is spoken in the province. But an English (of sorts) is spoken in Alabama, and nobody thinks to invoke London to try to get people to go there. It is odd, when you think about it, to make a claim to greater affinity with the Old World on the mere basis of la francophonie. After all, every major language of the New World –excluding those of the First Nations—is part of the European branch of the Indo-European family, but this doesn’t give Brazil, Panama, or the United States any special foothold in Europe.

I have been to Paris, and stood at intersections waiting to see pick-up trucks pass by with bumperstickers exclaiming the French equivalent of ‘This vehicle protected by Smith & Wesson,’ or ‘U toucha my truck, I breaka u face.’ They don’t have these there. They don’t have strip malls, or ‘new country’, or donuts, or (regrettably) coffee to go, and WWF wrestling has not made much of an impact.

The situation is quite different in Quebec. La belle province is 100% American, in the early-18th-century sense of the term, and Montreal is but an outlying provincial capital. The metropolitan capital to which Montreal is subordinated is New York. What counts as center and what as periphery does not, of course, stay the same forever. A few more decades of incompetent US government and global warming may change the balance between the two cities. For now, anyway, this is just how things are.

A very happy new year from 125th Street in Harlem. I will be returning to my usual, deracinated life up north a few days from now. If they’ll still let me in.

Strikes have engulfed New York City this winter. While members of the Transit Workers Union have gone back to work, NYU graduate assistants are preparing to resume picketing with the start of term on January 17th (usual disclaimer: me too). The situation is simultaneously encouraging and grim. Administrative threats of three semesters’ loss of work and pay have caused some attrition, but, impressively, have not broken the strike. By comparison, the 1995-6 Yale grade strike ended after threats of a similar variety – perhaps having already had union recognition and a contract has made the NYU graduate assistants more optimistic. Individual departments’ attempts to protect students from the severity of the administration’s punitive measures have mostly fallen short of extending any promises to those who continue picketing on the 17th. The climate, then, has become inhospitable to assistants who, for entirely legitimate reasons (among them, concerns over visa status, financial hardship, and impeded career advancement), no longer find enough certainty with respect to escaping potential reprisals. So far from signifying dissent from the union, however, these losses measure instead the level of vituperation with which the university sees fit to treat its members – the preservation of a ‘collegial’ relation to whom supposedly necessitates the union’s destruction. Here, rather than attempt an ethical adjudication (a perusal of the relevant documents will allow you to do that for yourself), I think it might be useful both to narrow and widen the usual perspective, which sees the university as the relevant object of focus, in order to consider some relevant internal differences as well as some external factors in this conflict. (For the basic dossier, see the Virtual Mind strike archive.)

To begin with, a narrower focus. Much discussion of late has had to do with the alleged concentration of strikers in the humanities and social sciences. Like many assertions in this debate, it usually remains unsubstantiated, circulating instead as a dark hint that the strike is the result of naive idealism. Consequently, NYU President John Sexton often describes graduate assistants in infantilizing terms,  reinforcing the idea that their grievances are an immature form of teenage rebellion. Furthermore, such infantilizing rhetoric carries with it the paternalistic notion that the university administration should be trusted to have its charges’ best interests at heart, even and especially when said charges are misbehaving. The longstanding association of the humanities with countercultural protest, amplified by the academic “culture wars,” in this case serves to delegitimize, and render strictly cultural, complaints of exploitation by graduate students. Strategically, then, this emphasis on the culture of protest over social analysis is a favored tactic of the administration and its supporters: as one anti-union philosophy professor put it on a weblog discussion of the strike, “if graduate students don’t want to be treated like spoiled children, they should stop behaving like spoiled children.” (Of course, the irony of this tautological ad hominem attack is that graduate assistants are attempting to dispute just this characterization of their position.)

Here I might return to the theme of “collegiality.” The picket line, with its chanting, drumming, singing – in short, its performativity – is by its nature often carnivalesque: not only the ordinary collegial etiquette, but the very habitus, or social and bodily disposition, of university life is suspended by it. The result is an unleashing of pent-up energies and frustrations of many kinds, including elements that exceed the basis of the conflict, such as the offensive nature of the university’s communications with graduate assistants. This is why the defense of collegiality has become an important high ground to the administration: harping on it allows the picket line’s symbolic excess to be depicted as a form of reactive immaturity. Paradoxically, immaturity is also seen to be a form of belatedness: Sexton’s euphemistic corporate terminology of an “Enterprise University” and “University Leadership Team” leaves no room such “dated” practices as strikes and protests, and the supposedly expired sixties radicalism from which they are thought to stem. Just as the domain of the humanities is linked to anachronistic countercultural protest, so then is the social practice of picketing. On both counts, we’re both too young and too old, past our sell-by date before we grow up. This argumentative tack, however, allows for the obfuscation of the original conflict. Even so, analyzed as a cultural form, the picket line performs an important function: it inscribes and instantiates the strike both to observers and in the minds and bodies of those striking. As Louis Althusser might have said, it “interpellates” (roughly, allows the self-recognition of) those who take part, and thus functions as a radicalizing action. Insofar as it refuses collegial dialogue and substitutes the implacable presence of the bodies of strikers, picketing only belongs more purely to the category of action.

Whatever the ideological hailing effects of picketing, if humanities students are strongly in support of striking, the true cause is not a nostalgic commitment to counterculture. The sociological facts on the ground, which are cleverly obscured by the strategy of infantilization, provide much more compelling justification. Unfortunately for the University Leadership Team’s propaganda efforts, graduate study these days tends to include discussion of the sociology of graduate education itself, which has become an important sub-field in literature departments. Doctoral students thus know all too well that fewer than half of them receive tenure track jobs within a year of receiving a diploma; that the number of non-tenured teachers continues to grow at a much faster rate than that of tenured faculty across the disciplines; that universities continue to rely on graduate and adjunct labor, while relatively fewer and fewer tenured professors enjoy the privilege of teaching only upper-level and graduate courses; that graduate assistants teach nearly all introductory courses in language and literature; and that collectivization is the rational response to the exploitation of a labor pool. These are not cultural differences between bohemian graduate students and technocratic administrators; they are social realities. And although these realities are not restricted to the language and literature programs – not at all – these departments have been affected very deeply by this macrocosmic shift in the structure of university teaching.

For this reason, which the “U.L.T.” knows as well as we do, a “New Policy” was announced in November by the university’s deans, which stipulates that graduate assistants’s normal teaching load of two stand-alone courses per semester will be reduced to one (this will primarily affect language and literature graduate assistants, as they teach most of the stand-alone courses). On the face of it, an early Christmas present, no doubt unrelated to the strike. In practice, however, it means three things: one, the university is suddenly authorizing itself to hire large numbers of new adjuncts to fill the newly vacated positions, in contradiction to its expressed aim of reducing the amount of contingent (adjunct) labor, without it looking like these are replacements for striking workers. Why, they’re simply being brought in to fill brand-new positions. The fact that these adjunct professors might conveniently be asked to substitute for striking workers is doubtless a coincidental side benefit. Second, it nourishes the university’s paternalist stance: reducing the teaching load strengthens their claim that graduate teaching is nothing more than apprenticeship or training, and that long-term shifts towards graduate and adjunct labor are being magically reversed. They really care! And third, most disturbingly, graduate assistants who choose to take on the heretofore normal load of two courses next semester can “bank” the extra course, and collect a free semester of funding in the fall. That’s right: teachers who strike this spring semester will lose their work and pay for the next three semesters, according to the Provost, whereas those who return to work and teach what until now was the standard two courses will receive a semester of free money. It might be supposed this will not foster a collegial atmosphere amongst teachers. Best of all, for the administration, this policy will primarily affect the language and literature programs, where students have a clear-eyed view of the labor issues involved because of their disciplinary location and thus strongly support the union. One is perversely impressed with shrewdness of this policy, although one is also sure that the law firm NYU employs to eradicate the union is more straightforwardly proud.

Finally, by way of briefly widening the focus beyond the institution of the university, let us consider NYU in a larger context. As this investigative piece in the Nation reveals, the MTA’s leadership has been engaged in a number of lucrative business dealings involving renting office space to its corporate sub-contractors. All this has been financed through public debt, and overseen by the presence on the MTA of the very people who stand to gain the most from such arrangements, but whose interest in public transportation is unclear. At NYU, the body with whom ultimate authority rests is the Board of Trustees (here is some background on its chair and vice-chairs). In an example of determination in the last instance by the economic sphere, to again allude to Louis Althusser, this board is populated by people with very different interests to those of university teachers. Comprised largely of financiers, corporate lawyers, real estate developers, and the leaders of media conglomerates, the board has shown very little interest in the sympathetic appeals of graduate assistants and our claim that the union palpably improved working and learning conditions at NYU. Of course, the commonly held conception of the university as the privileged space outside of the dominance of corporations in American society tends to disable the recognition that, in fact, universities reside within the sphere of economic determination, and are not necessarily any more amenable to arguments based on social justice than any other type of institution. The indifference of the board to the measurable benefits of unionized graduate assistants only reconfirms this. In fact, perhaps one can go so far as to postulate an inverse relation between the progressive prestige of a university and its hostility to a collectivized workforce: as evidence, one can adduce the immensely anti-union positions of the Ivy League schools. An ambitious school such as NYU is no doubt under immense pressure from the administrators of its more established siblings to resist precedent-setting unionization, and along the way absorb all the costs and bad publicity that accrue to union busting. Sadly, NYU seems more than happy to take one for the team it wishes to join, and thus to leave in place this inversion by which institutions who loudly condone progressive agendas in their publicity materials are the same ones who most viciously fight to prevent them from gaining any ground. A consolation: if we win, perhaps they will eventually realize that they have too.

Dispatches:
Divisions of Labor II ( NYU Strike)
Divisions of Labor (NYU Strike)
The Thing Itself (Coffee)
Local Catch (Fishes)
Where I’m Coming From (JFK)
Optimism of the Will (Edward Said)
Vince Vaughan…Eve Sedgwick (Homosocial Comedies)
The Other Sweet Science (Tennis)
Rain in November (Downtown for Democracy)
Disaster! (Movies)
On Ethnic Food and People of Color (Worcestershire Sauce)
Aesthetics of Impermanence (Street Art)