In Utopia University-North, scholars concerned with rural development are constantly criticizing their own models, concepts, curricula and scientific systems. The first principle they all agree on is that no science is socially neutral. Once when I asserted this in front of an eminent American professor, he replied that he could think of lots of socially neutral sciences - poultry science, for example. I was glad he had picked such an easy example to shoot down! The chicken which grows from an imported day-old chick, is genetically engineered to eat an imported corn-soya mixture, and is sterile and thus non-reproducible is obviously not the same bird as the one which can be raised on local feedstuffs and can lay eggs that will produce other chickens ad infinitum. The social - not to mention financial - consequences of the two chicken-raising systems will not be at all the same either.
At Utopia U, every practitioner of a 'hard' or 'soft' science enjoys studying the historical and social conditions in which his or her discipline developed. Sociologists recognize that the methodology of their discipline was elaborated largely at the end of the nineteenth century in an urban, northern, white, masculine context. So they're aware that it may not be very good at asking and answering questions posed by rural, southern, non-white societies in which women play a vital role. They seek to counteract these deficiencies. Our biologists at Utopia-North know and deplore that virtually every branch of their science has been used at one time or another, including the 1980s, to promote the claim that North Americans and Europeans are superior to everybody else.
Utopia U-North agronomists, to take another example, know that their training was concerned with getting the most production per person, not per unit of land, for the very good reason that North America always had a huge frontier and relatively few people to work it. They understand that this is not the Third World's problem, where relatively large numbers of people must try to earn a living on relatively small amounts of land. In Oklahoma, what's wanted is optimum production from optimum resources. In Orissa a system that reduces costs and especially risks for the farmer is much more important, even if it's not quite so highly productive.
Out there in the real world, our occidental models have been dominant in so many disciplines for so long that we tend to think they are not just unique but inevitable as well. Yet even in the so- called 'hard' sciences, even in mathematics, the most advanced thinkers now recognize that there are many ways of looking at reality and that the social, political and economic climate of the times has a great deal to do with the ways chosen by scientists. This proposition is, of course, far more evident in the social sciences.
At Utopia University-North, I am therefore founding the Institute for the Deconstruction and Relativization of Elementary and Advanced Models - whose acronym is, of course, I-DREAM. At the I-DREAM, philosophers, historians and social scientists will work with their colleagues in the physical and natural sciences to examine the origins, development and curricula of the various disciplines; their function in the societies where they are practised and the particular interests they have served and continue to serve. At the I-DREAM, researchers will be concerned with taking apart mathematical, physical, biological and social models and putting them back together in novel and interesting ways - or at least proving that other ways exist.
Of course the Institute will also work in practical disciplines like medicine, architecture, engineering, agronomy or city planning. I suspect that researchers at the I-DREAM may discover, for example, that centralized, hospital-based curative medicine and the highly industrialized, expensive food systems used in Western societies are certainly not the only ways (and perhaps not the best ways) to care for people's health or provide them with a varied and nourishing diet. I'm almost sure that these researchers will find that the United States needs land reform as much as does Latin America, and that the assembly-line system in our factories was designed for the benefit of people like Henry Ford, not for the workers. They may further determine that solar energy is preferable to nuclear power in every respect except that it is de-centralized by nature and cannot be tightly controlled by the State. Thus it will not be adopted in most countries.
In short, these research workers will concern themselves with understanding what political, economic and social power has to do with the development of science, technology and the several arts.
The Institute for the Deconstruction and Relativization of Models will not be merely a research institution. It will dispense one general, compulsory course, for all the students in the university, wherever they come from, whatever their chosen area of study.
This course will start with the deconstruction of models in the more technical and easily understood disciplines and work upwards towards models in biology, physics and mathematics. Furthermore, each advanced undergraduate student will be expected to attend a seminar at I-DREAM related to his or her major field of study. Anyone who intends to deal professionally with a non-occidental society will get a double dose. Third World students who come to our university for training, and who tend to admire us more than we deserve, will be required to spend some of their time at the Institute. They will also be expected to enrich its work, through communications describing how their own societies have solved various basic human problems.
I am not entirely sure what to do with the general university faculty, beyond the walls of the I-DREAM. Will they accept recycling? Will they take part voluntarily in the Institute's work? I particularly fear non-cooperation from monetarist economists and sociobiologists, and I warn them tonight that even in Utopia we are not above subtle forms of coercion!
Third World students will come to Utopia U for work on advanced degrees, but we will recommend that they do their undergraduate work in their own countries or regions. I doubt whether the crimes of the past are still being perpetrated in most northern universities. Still, who has not heard stories like the one about the Indian soil scientist doing his Ph.D. in the US on moon soils - or the African architect learning in Canada how to construct buildings to withstand snowfalls of several metres. Our faculty advisers will all be attuned to the special needs of their Third World students - sometimes beginning with special language needs - and the students' dissertations will all reflect concern with the problems that their own societies need to solve.
Thus may our University help to encourage critical thinking about Western models and to stem brain drain.
On the campus of Utopia University-South will be founded a sister Institute to the I-DRE AM. For want of a better name, I shall call it the Institute for the Decolonization of the Mind. Here again compulsory courses will be taught to all the students: courses concerning the values and achievements, past and present, of the civilizations born on the three so-called 'poor' continents.
The Institute for the Decolonization of the Mind will, like its sister Institute, undertake studies in the practical disciplines as well as the arts and sciences. This will be called the Birthright Programme. Researchers will learn to make maximum use of the renewable resources of their environment. Subjects like the curative powers of plants, the beauty and practicality of earthen or wooden architecture, and the rationality of peasant systems of cultivation will be studied scientifically. The Birthright Programme's aim will neither be to enforce traditional practices nor to place them in some sort of museum; even less to persuade Third World societies that they should make do with second-rate technology. Instead, the programme will try to discover the scientific principles underlying traditional solutions so that these practices can be improved rather than destroyed, as is so often the case today.
Because we have no financial restrictions at Utopia University North or South, or at our sister Institutes, exchanges between their students and faculty will be intense and definitely run on a two-way street. Though the North specializes in deconstructing and multiplying models and the South in restoring Third World accomplishments to their rightful status and perfecting them, they share a communications network. Video conferences, computer linkages and
personal visits keep them abreast of each other's work.
Frequent joint meetings of Northern and Southern Utopians will also lead to solving some practical problems which are in effect political problems. At present, most University cooperation is arranged, like it or not, on a State-to-State basis. Third World governments are usually the ones to decide which students will get a chance to study abroad. With the help of their Utopia South colleagues, northern university people may be able respectfully to suggest that these governments offer such an opportunity to a much larger proportion of women who, for example, are now fewer than 10 per cent of the francophone Third World students in France.
Because Utopians recognize that knowledge is not neutral, they also realize that research itself is necessarily situated somewhere in national and international power structures and that it does not necessarily serve all classes of society without bias. Experience tells them that all States requesting university cooperation programmes do not, alas, take a deep interest in the needs of their own poor, rural populations - the very people most in need of 'development'. Utopian Universities entering into cooperative arrangements thus have the right to establish a list of priority countries - those whose leaders have demonstrated 'political will, honesty and true respect for the population', as French Ambassador-at-large Stephane Hessel recently put it.
To state matters bluntly, no scholar from Utopia U North or South will ever be asked to contribute to, say, nuclear research in a repressive country where half the population is malnourished. Such scholars might, however, perfectly well undertake research needed or requested by peasant associations or non-governmental organizations in the same country. In other words, Utopia U personnel will seek out partners for research cooperation beyond governments, and they will make substantiated judgements, political judgements, about States, based on their human rights record.
Let's assume that Utopia University in the North has received a request from a Third World government for cooperation in a rural health care programme. Will it hand the problem over to the medical school and have done? Certainly not. In our University, we have long since recognized that something labelled 'health' cannot be conveniently situated within the limits of medicine or biology. Health implies nutrition, and nutrition implies the equitable distribution of food, which in turn depends on agrarian structures, the relative power of landowners, and rural people's access to land and to jobs. A healthy population also needs clean water, which raises problems of engineering for wells and dams - but also such social problems as who will fetch and carry the water. In most places, women will; and, if the clean water well is too far away, they may prefer the brackish pond. One could go on lengthening the list of factors that must be considered if the health programme is to work, but the need for interdisciplinary thinking should be apparent.
Utopia seems to be a necessary prerequisite for even the most basic improvements, if one is to judge by what occurs in the real world. Consider the apparently simple matters of the exchange of knowledge and academic courtesy. Arguably, one of the reasons why so much research work is done on poor communities is because researchers feel they need not ask the permission of such communities to examine them. People are observed, whether they like it or not. In Utopia we are first going to find out what these communities themselves believe needs to be researched, and we will make our results available to them as we go along. It is likely that what they need is not more research on their own practices, which they understand perfectly well, but research on the doings of moneylenders and the workings of commodities markets. Utopians will spend much of their time learning about the rich and powerful, in order to convey this useful knowledge to the poor and powerless, in hopes of altering the balance.
In the real world, if you want to do a dissertation on the Rockefeller or the Tata dynasty, you will be given limited opportunity for direct observation, or you will have to grovel to obtain their consent; and then you may risk having to write a hagiography. Why do most researchers feel no accountability to the subjects of their work, provided those subjects are in no position to control or to protest? These same subjects will help to assure the scholar of university tenure and a comfortable income for the rest of his days, yet he seems willing to give them little in return.
Does this sound like an exaggeration? Why, then, did a Latin American Development Studies Institute offer space, counsel and every courtesy to over 300 North American Ph.D. candidates and receive in return - how many copies of their dissertations would you guess? I hope you will be as incredulous as I was when you learn the number, which I discovered from the Director of the Institute in question. Exactly twelve. Why, again, was a massive study on the Sahel, undertaken by the University of Michigan and published in the US by US AID in 1977, unavailable to scholars in Upper Volta as of 1979?
These examples do not reflect a lack of academic courtesy alone but also a demonstration of the priorities and loyalties of mainstream scholarship. At Utopia U, students who do not supply at least three copies of their work to institutions of their choice in the country where the research was carried out will receive diplomas entirely unsuitable for framing, because they will be emblazoned with a scarlet letter: 'F', perhaps, for 'Freeloader'.
I'm tempted to continue playing the absolute power game, but this excursion to Utopia has been long enough. You will doubtless come up with many ideas for improving my ideal university cooperation programme - or revamping it altogether. Perhaps you will have found many of my recommendations obvious - but for me Utopia is also a place where no one needs to fear making a fool of himself (or, in this case, herself) by asking naive or obvious questions. If these remarks help in any way to make all of us participating in this conference more creative individually and collectively, I shall be well content, and I thank you warmly for your attention.
11
ORDERING THE WORLD: FROM ICIDI TO ICIHI
The Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues - ICIHI - grew out of UN resolutions concerning the 'International Humanitarian Order', but its real impetus and dynamism came from its co-chairman, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan (former UN High Commissioner for Refugees), who shared the chairmanship with Hassan Bin Talal, Crown Prince of Jordan. The twenty-four additional commissioners were 'eminent persons' from all over the world. Some of ICIHI's members had already served on the Brandt Commission in the late i^yos-early 1980s. The Brandt Commission's formal name was the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, or ICIDI, though I doubt whether anyone ever actually called it that.
During its three-year lifespan (1983-6), ICIHI commissioned independent research on three major topics: humanitarian norms in the context of armed conflicts; natural and man-made disasters; and vulnerable groups {refugees, children, indigenous peoples, etc.). It also held consultations, one of them on food security issues which I attended in July 1984 with a few other 'experts' and a couple of the commissioners.
ICIHI's report Famine: a Man-Made Disaster? (Mark Malloch Brown ed., Pan Books, London, 1985) was an excellent and forthright statement, possibly because it was a report to, not a report by, the Commissioners. It thus avoided the consensual demands and blandness of the Brandt Commission reports. Subsequent ICIHI publications also appeared, on deforestation, desertification, etc. I prepared a couple of background papers for the Commission at the request of its then Secretary, Brian Walker; but, aside from these and my attendance at the above-noted consultation, took no part in its work.
This letter to the participants in the consultation is included here because it raises important points about our choices of political categories and highlights some of the shortcomings of the Brandt Commission.
Page references in the text are to the first and second reports of the Brandt Commission: North-South: a Programme for Survival and Common Crisis, both published by Pan Books, London, 1980 and 1983.
A personal memo to the participants in the Geneva meeting of 27 July 1984
Beyond the pleasure I had
in participating, our meeting left me with two major impressions. First, the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues (ICIHI), or at least the part of it that I met, genuinely wants to go beyond the conclusions of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (ICIDI), better known as the 'Brandt Commission'; ICIHI seeks to break new ground and to make meaningful recommendations. Second, the Secretariat was somewhat disappointed that its invited 'experts' had no ready-made blueprints to offer in the food/hunger area, where lies our presumed expertise.
On reflection, perhaps our greatest problem was one of classification: what to put in and what to leave out. We got a bit bogged down in the 'seamless web' syndrome where everything is connected to everything. Well, everything is connected to everything, but, as Joan Robinson said, 'To know anything one must know everything. But to talk [and, may I add, to write] about anything, one has to leave out a great deal.'
Since progressing 'beyond Brandt' and classifying seem to me intimately related, let me try to sort out (i.e. to classify - one can't escape) some thoughts to show why that's so.