"In short, how many people have to die before the ruling
paradigm is beaten back and we are rid of it once and for all?"
-- Susan George
Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire
There are no societies without religion, even, or especially, those which
believe themselves to be entirely secular. In our century, in our society,
the concept of development has acquired religious and doctrinal status. The
[World] Bank is commonly accepted as the Vatican, the Mecca or the Kremlin
of this twentieth-century religion. A doctrine need not be true to move
mountains or to provoke manifold material and human disasters. Religious
doctrines (in which we would include secular ones like Leninism) have,
through the ages, done and continue to do precisely that, whereas, logically
speaking, not all of them can be true insofar as they all define Truth as
singular and uniquely their own.
Religion cannot, by definition, be validated or invalidated, declared true
or false - only believed or rejected. Facts are irrelevant to belief: they
belong to another sphere of reality. True believers, the genuinely pure of
heart, exist in every faith, but the majority generally just goes along
lukewarmly out of cultural habit or material advantage. When, however, the
faith achieves political hegemony as well, like the medieval Church (or the
Bolsheviks, or the Ayatollahs), it is in a position to make people offers
they can't refuse, or to make their lives extremely uncomfortable if they
do.
The religion of development cannot be validated or invalidated either. It
doesn't matter whether it works or not, nor how many ordinary people's lives
are damaged or destroyed, nor how much nature may be abused because of it.
Development theory and practice cannot be validated because they are not
scientific. They have not established reliable and recognized criteria for
determining whether development has in fact occurred, except for internal
economic indicators like the rate of return of an individual project or the
growth of Gross National Product - themselves artificial constructions and
articles of faith. This being so, there is no established way to identify,
correct or avoid error either. When Susan George wrote the Afterword to A
Fate Worse than Debt, she put it this way:
"Scientists are trained to avoid error by testing their hypotheses
systematically. Normally, development theorists and practitioners should
also be trained to test their hypotheses by observing what they do to
people, since human welfare is presumably the goal of development. 'People'
here does not mean well-off, well-fed elites but poor and hungry majorities
whose fundamental needs are presently not being met. If decades of
application of the reigning development paradigm have failed to alleviate
their suffering and oppression or, worse still, have intensified them.., the
paradigm ought to be ripe for revolution."
She then asked, naively, "In short, how many people have to die before the
ruling paradigm is beaten back and we are rid of it once and for all?"
thereby largely missing the point. The point is that priesthoods are not
elected and they need not answer to the faithful; they are specially
invested with the truth and with sacramental functions from which, by
definition, the common herd is excluded. The faith they serve is itself a
greater good in whose name present suffering is mysteriously transformed
into future salvation. Or to borrow an old favourite from secular religion,
eggs must and will be broken. One's children, or theirs, or theirs, will
eventually sit down to enjoy the omelette.
This, for us, is the final and most compelling reason not to concentrate on
pointing out yet again how multifarious are the World Bank's ill-conceived
projects, how unresponsive its leaders, how impervious to criticism its
doctrine. Such things may be entirely or partially true, but are at bottom
expressions of a world-view. It is the foundations of that world-view we
shall try to dig for.
The Bank resembles the Church and this will be a guiding analogy in these
pages. Both believe themselves invested with a mission, both (the Church
historically, the Bank at present) have set themselves against the state.
Both celebrate the poor rhetorically while refraining from actually
improving their capacity to change their earthly lot.
The Church, more than the Bank, is like God himself "a mighty fortress, a
bulwark never failing" in the words of the splendid hymn. The Bank has lost
many of its fortress aspects - particularly compared to the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) - and is more open to exchanges with outsiders. The
overall vision that guides its practice cannot, however, seem to transcend
the narrowest of economic orthodoxies serving a smaller and smaller fraction
of transnational elite interests worldwide. The Ba
