white people know what’s best for poor people*

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s easy to cover up the dismal reality of a situation with a slur of fancy rhetoric (a few charts also don’t hurt). As the wealthy west continues to help save poor African children (as if we were the only ones that could save them), let us tread very carefully.

These excerpts below from the book, Planet of the Slums, by Mike Davis, criticize NGOs, which have been recently heralded as the hope for developing nations, since it has been very clear that various government policies have failed. However, the real picture is not quite so rosy.

What Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his brief tenure as chief economist for the Bank described as an emerging “post-Washington Consensus” might be better characterized as “soft imperialism,” with the major NGOs captive to the agenda of the international donors, and grassroots groups similarly dependent upon the international NGOs.

For all the glowing rhetoric about democratization, self-help, social capital, and the strengthening of civil society, the actual power relations in this new NGO universe resemble nothing so much as traditional clientelism.

…development economist Diana Mitlin, writing about Latin America, describes how, on one hand, NGOs “preempt community-level capacity- building as they take over decision-making and negotiating roles,” while, on the other hand, they are constrained by “the difficulties of managing donor finance, with its emphasis on shortterm project funds, on financial accountabilities and on tangible outputs…

… Lea Jellinek, a social historian who has spent more than a quarter-century studying the poor in Jakarta, in turn, recounts how one famed NGO, a neighborhood microbank, “beginning as a small grassroots project driven by needs and capacities of local women,” grew Frankenstein-like into a “large, complex, top-down, technically oriented bureaucracy,” that was “less accountable to and supportive of” its low-income base…

… Veteran Mumbai housing activist P.K. Das offers an even harsher critique of slum-oriented NGOs:

Their constant effort is to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealize people so as to keep them away from class struggles. They adopt and propagate the practice of begging favours on sympathetic and humane grounds rather than making the oppressed conscious of their rights. As a matter of factor, these agencies and organizations systematically intervene to oppose to agitational path people take to win their demands. Their effort is constantly to divert people’s attention from the larger political evils of imperialism to merely local issues and so confuse people in differentiating enemies from friends.

The unfortunate thing about nonprofit organizations as they grow, become more sustainable and access more resources(things that logically should allow them to accomplish more good), is that they risk alienating themselves from the community they were striving to help in the first place and end up getting caught in a tangle of funding streams, reports and board meetings.

As we professionalize “community organization” and “grassroots”**, do we give the impression to the people we are trying to help, that they aren’t really capable of anything?

* Implicit assumptions: poor people are not white; That title is also taken from an entry on the blog Stuff White People Like.
** I previously posted a series of entries on this topic of "professionalizing care": 1, 2, 3, 4

until death do us part

On March 1st, 2008, things too wonderful, things high and lofty, will occur in this life. Amidst flowers, bouquets, dresses and ribbons, two will become one flesh. I will no longer belong to myself, and no longer will Matt belong to himself.

But while I can wax eloquent about the abstractions of marriage, its physical instantiation may appear commonplace. Getting groceries, cooking dinner, doing dishes, brushing teeth and all the little bits and pieces of everyday life.

But we forget that the high and lofty, the wonderful and mighty, is to be experienced and lived in the very mundane. We’re foolish to think that the spiritual is something above and beyond us, that which cannot be experienced on an everyday (and tangible) basis. We will not be faithful with much if we cannot be faithful with little.

In plenty and in want… In strength and in weakness… in joy and in sadness

~

“He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least –sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.”

~ Uncle Screwtape, a wise old demon, to his novice nephew demon Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters

of gold dust and cleavage

I didn’t think I would be posting on makeup again, but I stumbled upon this:

I know there are people reading this essay who will say that makeup is absurd, and I won’t quarrel with them. All esthetic activity is on some level absurd. By the same token, philosophers have argued since the dawn of time that there is an essential human need to engage in ostensibly useless and purely esthetic activity. Applying makeup is a small act of artistry, performed every morning and touched up throughout the day. It’s the same old canvas, to be sure, but it offers itself anew again and again. All art involves repetition with variations. Besides, the sameness of the face is belied by the fact that it contains a mutating consciousness, that it shifts in its relationship to the world, that it ages.

The return of youth that makeup promises is not really bought seriously by most women. We know that makeup is a frail stop-gap measure, a lame palliative. We don’t need Hamlet to tell us that we can “paint an inch thick, [but] to this favor [we] we must come” — we know it every time we look at ourselves in the mirror. We don’t expect it to stop us from aging, only to gussy us up a bit in the face of time’s relentless sickle.

One of the most poignant and wondrous spectacles I know is seeing a very old woman insist on having someone put on her makeup. It’s something I’ve seen numerous times in hospitals and nursing homes. I did it for my own mother before she died. Even as she knew she was close to death, she still wasn’t prepared to give up on art and succumb to nature. I loved that determination in her and cling to it in myself. If we are, as Shakespeare said, “this quintessence of dust,” let it at least be gold-flecked and luminous.

~ Paula Marantz Cohen, All Made Up

While Cohen tends to ignore the corporate behemoth that moves and shakes the cosmetic industry, she writes eloquently and thoroughly about the “art” of makeup. She writes about makeup as it were an act of play, of interaction with your face as a canvas, and not so much as a coverup, a crutch upon which we rely, a sign of a society where appearances are so often valued more than substance.

Meanwhile, this other article reviews a book that provides a slightly different perspective:

“Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I’ll show you a woman who, rightly or wrongly, has little faith in her powers of conversation.”

~ Hadley Freeman in book The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable

While we may like to believe that clothing and makeup is all about self-expression and art, more often than not, it’s a matter of hiding parts of body we’re ashamed of, or of impressing the opposite (or the same) sex, and of a comfortable escape of deeper pains that afflict us.

the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning*

What is lost in an instant-fix society where there exists a pill to remedy every little discomfort there is to be had...

But does the American addiction to happiness make any sense, especially in light of the poverty, ecological disaster and war that now haunt the globe, daily annihilating hundreds if not thousands? Isn't it, in fact, a recipe for delusion?

And aren't we merely trying to slice away what is most probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world? Bereft of this integral element of our selves, we settle for a status quo. We yearn for comfort at any cost. We covet a good night's sleep. We trade fortitude for blandness.

~ From The Miracle of Melancholia by Eric G. Wilson

*Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 ~ It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

skin deep

I don’t know if this entry is going to be of any interest to anyone—it’s essentially disjointed ramblings on makeup and the cosmetics industry. This has been on my mind since I’ve been spending the last two weeks roaming around trying to figure out what I will be wearing on my face on my wedding day. Because I haven’t really bothered with makeup recently—my usual grooming routine consists of deodorant, sunscreen, and lip balm or lip gloss—this has been quite a confusing and involved process.

My mother was not a makeup wearer so my initial forays into the world of cosmetics was guided by the mighty and trusted writers of Seventeen and YM magazine and my preteen insecurities, and provided adequate adornment for my not-so-great middle school years. Orangeish Cover Girl Foundation. Drugstore lipstick on the teeth (and uneven lip colouring—actually I still can’t get my lipstick to look even). Bonnebell Concealer that was too light for me. I don’t think I ever learned how to apply anything properly except eyeshadow and powder.

I used makeup more frequently in college, when I found foundations that actually matched my skin, because I went to more expensive stores where they actually let you try it. It was somewhat addictive—the subtle way that your face seemed to immediately brighten whenever you put the stuff on. However, I eventually reduced my makeup usage upon hearing that it wasn’t very good for your skin (It was pretty much reserved for when I wanted to impress certain ::cough:: people). Ironically enough, that came primarily as a result of Douglas Cosmetics Sales Associate telling me that “You don’t really need makeup! This stuff is bad for your skin anyways”.

Part of my avoidance of cosmetics stems from feeling like we have too much of a “pill society”.* In today’s mass customization consumer society, we’re always looking for a simple fix for all our problems. Wrinkles? Try buying anti-wrinkle cream. Want your eyes to be whiter? Try buying Visine. Want longer eyelashes? Try using a lengthening mascara.

Moreover, many beauty treatments seem to prompt an endless cycle of further purchases: You buy gel to style your hair—resulting in the need for clarifying shampoos to get the gunk out; You use a hairdryer to give it volume—you need to apply hair damage-treating conditioner to repair the heat damage. In fact, some women have been experiencing hair loss as a result of all the treatments they’ve put their hair through. Exfoliating face washes can irritate the skin, causing them to produce more oil, potentially leading to acne, or the need for powder, which may in turn clog the skin, producing the need for concealer…).

~

My recent experimentation in wedding makeup has made me less wary of make-up. The results have been fairly positive—eyeliner apparently makes my eyes appear huge, and though I can’t seem to tell the difference, mascara makes it look as though I actually have eyelashes. Part of me is tempted to undergo this beauty routine daily, but at what cost? I don’t want to end up being one of those people that can’t leave the house without makeup because they think they look terrible without it.

Do I look prettier with makeup because society has trained our eyes to see in certain ways? If I feel more attractive or more beautiful with painted colours on my face, am I participating and feeding into an industry that fuels women’s insecurities about their looks?

Make-up can make someone look really great, but when I look at myself more closely—it just seems all very bizarre to me—the painting of eyelashes, the eye lining, the blush. Call it my paranoia of cancer in this fabricated chemical world, but I feel uneasy with all this stuff on my face.

In the end, my approach to cosmetic beauty is much like my approach to taking exams: The best thing you can do is to sleep well, drink water, eat healthy and exercise. All else is smoke and mirrors. (Perhaps we can say, it’s what goes into your body that counts, not what you put over it).

~

I’ve been anxious, because I still have yet to figure out the “perfect makeup” for my wedding day, but I’m sick and tired of running around and trying products and returning them. Culture tells me that a bride must look absolutely perfect on her wedding day. My skin must be flawless. My makeup must be impeccable. But it’s time I stop believing in and stop fretting over the superficial elements of a wedding ceremony and concern myself with its transcendent meaning.

~

A few resources I’ve stumbled up on in my makeup adventures:

Cosmetic Database ~ rates different types of cosmetics depending on the content of the chemicals Makeup Alley ~ user reviews of pretty much every makeup product out there
Beauty Brains ~ two scientists provide some useful analysis and information on how makeup works; criticized for being little hokey/biased but there’s some useful information
Beauty Industry Who Owns What ~ Most makeup brands are owned by the same companies. Here’s a listing.


* Here’s a little humorous stab at our “pill society” from my brother's website

the eternal boredom of heaven?

“And I made him a man of the world. If it had not been for me, he would still be a needless gardener- pretending to cultivate a weedless garden that grew right because it couldn’t grow wrong- in ‘those endless summers the blessed ones see.’ Think of it, ye Powers and Dominions! Perfect flowers! Perfect fruits! Never an autumn chill! Never a yellow leaf! Golden leopards, noble lions, carnivores unfulfilled, purring for his caresses amidst the aimless frisking of lambs that would never grow old! Good lord! How bored he would have been! How bored! Instead of which, did I not launch him on the most marvelous adventures? It was I who gave him history. Up to the very limit of his possibilities. Up to the very limit… And did not you, O Lord, by sending your angels with their flaming swords, approve of what I had done?”

~ Satan to God in a conversation from H.G. Wells Undying Fire, a modern re-writing of the story of Job

"The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself. HE has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme."

~ Uncle Screwtape, a wise old demon, to his novice nephew demon Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters

Getting a little (RED)? Embarrassed?

I’ve written an entry in the past, pondering on the effectiveness of the Bono's RED campaign. A recent NY Times articles reports on its successes and failures, notably a transformative improvement in the conditions and the care provided at the Treatment and Research AIDS Center in Rwanda. On the other hand:

Yet detractors say Red has fallen short. They criticize a lack of transparency at the company and its partners over how much they make from Red products, and whether they spend more money on Africa or advertising.

“Look at all the promotions they’ve put out,” said Inger L. Stole, a communications professor at the University of Illinois. “The ads seem to be more about promoting the companies and how good they are than the issue of AIDS.”

In its March 2007 issue, Advertising Age magazine reported that Red companies had collectively spent as much as $100 million in advertising and raised only $18 million. Officials of the campaign said then that the companies had spent $50 million on advertising and that the amount raised was $25 million. Advertising Age stood by its article.

Says Co-Founder of RED, Bobby Shriver:

“I hate begging for money. In most cases when you go and ask for a corporate donation, they’ll cut you a check and that’s it. We wanted something that was more sustainable.”

While I celebrate and am thankful for the change that the money raised has been able to bring, and while I can understand Shriver’s comment on the longer-term reliability of this type of corporate donation, I do not believe this is a truly “sustainable” method to help the world. The RED campaign is merely superficial, providing handouts and alleviating symptoms, instead of addressing the roots of injustice in the world. True corporate social responsibility needs to extend beyond passing off the bread crumbs of revenue to the poor.

religious ramblings

Atheist Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg once said in relation to the question of good and evil: "With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion."

But what makes a person good and what makes a person evil?
And what if I do both good and evil?
And what hope do I have if I do do evil?

~

Eagleton lets out a sharp laugh. 'I certainly hope I am morally superior to people who believe in slaughtering innocents. But what I object to is the dangerous fudging of the line between the Muslim world and the Taliban, and the easy moral superiority that leaves us blind to our own crimes, or the crimes done in our names. It is an obvious point, but one still worth making, that it was our own barbarism and colonialism in the Middle East that has helped to create these situations in the first place. Amis and Hitchens have become perversely silent on the crimes of Western civilisation. Western civilisation has produced enormous advances, but not to see the darker side of that, not to see the barbarism of the West, and not to see that at a time when we are killing thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems extraordinarily naive.'

~ from the Armchair Revolutionary

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

~

Below follows an excellent opinion article in the New York Times called Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love. While by no means will I excuse religion from being the cause of much conflict, hatred and intolerance in the world, I also would not agree with Bertrand Russell’s pronouncement from Why I am Not a Christian: “You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.” Props to Kristof for being able to examine his own position critically and for attempting to move beyond verbal mockery to meaningful action:

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives. And the Democratic presidential candidate (particularly if it’s Mr. Obama, to whom evangelicals have been startlingly receptive) has a real chance this year of winning large numbers of evangelical voters.

“Evangelicals are going to vote this year in part on climate change, on Darfur, on poverty,” said Jim Wallis, the author of a new book, “The Great Awakening,” which argues that the age of the religious right has passed and that issues of social justice are rising to the top of the agenda. Mr. Wallis says that about half of white evangelical votes will be in play this year.

A recent CBS News poll found that the single issue that white evangelicals most believed they should be involved in was fighting poverty. The traditional issue of abortion was a distant second, and genocide was third.

Look, I don’t agree with evangelicals on theology or on their typically conservative views on taxes, health care or Iraq. Self-righteous zealots like Pat Robertson have been a plague upon our country, and their initial smugness about AIDS (which Jerry Falwell described as “God’s judgment against promiscuity”) constituted far grosser immorality than anything that ever happened in a bathhouse. Moralizing blowhards showed more compassion for embryonic stem cells than for the poor or the sick, and as recently as the 1990s, evangelicals were mostly a constituency against foreign aid.

Yet that has turned almost 180 degrees. Today, many evangelicals are powerful internationalists and humanitarians — and liberals haven’t awakened to the transformation. The new face of evangelicals is somebody like the Rev. Rick Warren, the California pastor who wrote “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Mr. Warren acknowledges that for most of his life he wasn’t much concerned with issues of poverty or disease. But on a visit to South Africa in 2003, he came across a tiny church operating from a dilapidated tent — yet sheltering 25 children orphaned by AIDS.

“I realized they were doing more for the poor than my entire megachurch,” Mr. Warren said, with cheerful exaggeration. “It was like a knife in the heart.” So Mr. Warren mobilized his vast Saddleback Church to fight AIDS, malaria and poverty in 68 countries. Since then, more than 7,500 members of his church have paid their own way to volunteer in poor countries — and once they see the poverty, they immediately want to do more.

“Almost all of my work is in the third world,” Mr. Warren said. “I couldn’t care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas.”

Helene Gayle, the head of CARE, said evangelicals “have made some incredible contributions” in the struggle against global poverty. “We don’t give them credit for the changes they’ve made,” she added. Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense, said, “Many evangelical leaders have been key to taking the climate issue across the cultural divide.”

It’s certainly fair to criticize Catholic leaders and other conservative Christians for their hostility toward condoms, a policy that has gravely undermined the fight against AIDS in Africa. But while robust criticism is fair, scorn is not.

In parts of Africa where bandits and warlords shoot or rape anything that moves, you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians. In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic.

Unlike the religious right windbags, she was passionately “pro-life” even for those already born — and brave souls like her are increasingly representative of religious conservatives. We can disagree sharply with their politics, but to mock them underscores our own ignorance and prejudice.

~

on the separation of church & state

In the State of the Union address, Bush advocated for Congress to permanently pass legislature to allow religious charities to more easily compete for federal funds. While I understand how something like this has the potential to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”), I do not believe that an elected official, making choices in policy based on his religious faith, is violating this clause.*

You cannot (and should not) draw a line between an individual’s faith and his or her actions. Faith is not something that can be compartmentalized and separated. For a true believer, faith is the foundation of one’s entire being. It cannot be discarded and put aside when making choices about how to lead a city or a nation. Likewise, an atheist in a government position will draw on his opinions on how to govern from his base assumptions about the world and human nature.

The First Amendment does not allow government to show preference or discriminate a certain religion or to establish an official state-wide church, but does nothing to forbid individuals serving in government to make choices in policy, based on values and beliefs stemming from their faith. There may be plenty of other issues or challenges to their policy decisions, but separation of church & state is not one of them.