I just want to thank my readers for being patient with me, and continuing to check the page. I’ve been focusing on reading and writing out my research that I haven’t taken the time to just write on the blog. I’ve had plenty to write about, though… I just couldn’t sort it all out.
I often tell some of my friends and family that there are two realities in our lives that aren’t really realities at all: race and money. I mean, they are realities in that we use these concepts to organize and govern much of our lives, they make human life intelligible, and give our lives value and meaning in many ways. It’s just that I’m not convinced that they deserve the type of reverence we often give them.
Consider race, for example. Most Americans, especially Black Americans, treat race as if it were some natural law… something that God created in order to govern human life on earth. Often times, it’s like we think that all white folk are racist, and that every social institution is set up to discriminate on Black people. We believe that Blacks, and other people of color for that matter, have forever been considered as inferior in the minds of [especially] white people. We can see evidences of this belief in many of the things we do and say on a daily basis.
Now, there is no denying the fact that race is a reality, especially in American and Western life. There is no shortage of evidence that Black people, and other people of color, have been considered inferior to whites and, often times, less than human. I make no effort to dispel or discount the consequences this reality has on everyday life; however, I refuse to use current reality to justify a hopeless outlook. Race as we see it today, specifically in subjugating whole groups of people to human inferiority, is a new concept on the scales of history. And we should be able to see through the smokescreen of current events to see the lack of substance in many racial “realities.” But, this is not what I’ve chosen to write about today.
As far as money is concerned, we have always had money or some other medium of exchange. However, networks and electronic banking combined with the power of interest and cultural capitalism have transformed a method of ascribing value to the things we need and produce into an unprecedented repressive spiritual stronghold. Money is largely virtual now, and it’s difficult to imagine how something so invisible (especially in the world of freely available credit) can be so real.
So, one must imagine how amused I must have been when I read about the anthropology of development economics. I think I’m running out of time for writing, but the point I want to make is that the messianic image we ascribe to capitalism is largely a cultural idea, supported by a tenuous attempt of capitalism to aspire to the level of a science detached from other parts of human life. As if the value you attach to the food you eat, the jobs you take, the leisure you enjoy, and the philanthropy you engage can be defined apart from every other part of your life. Yet, capitalist economics tries to tell that story relying primarily on mathematics, production, input, and output. Often times, development economics assumes that such an isolated view of capitalist economics is the mathematical encoding of universal economic truth. This is where much of devleopment economics has largely fallen into trouble–development economists’ inability to account for societies’ histories, cultures, and traditions when trying to harness the “underemployed” and “unemployed” workers in the “backward” and “underdeveloped” regions of the world.
But we’ll hold much of this discussion for another day.