DUers: Thoughts on Illich's 1968 speech to student volunteers?

[otherlander]

To Hell with Good Intentions

"I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class "American Way of Life," since that is really the only life you know. A group like this could not have developed unless a mood in the United States had supported it - the belief that any true American must share God's blessings with his poorer fellow men. The idea that every American has something to give, and at all times may, can and should give it, explains why it occurred to students that they could help Mexican peasants "develop" by spending a few months in their villages.

Of course, this surprising conviction was supported by members of a missionary order, who would have no reason to exist unless they had the same conviction - except a much stronger one. It is now high time to cure yourselves of this. You, like the values you carry, are the products of an American society of achievers and consumers, with its two-party system, its universal schooling, and its family-car affluence. You are ultimately-consciously or unconsciously - "salesmen" for a delusive ballet in the ideas of democracy, equal opportunity and free enterprise among people who haven't the possibility of profiting from these.

...The U.S. way of life has become a religion which must be accepted by all those who do not want to die by the sword - or napalm."

The rest of the speech can be found here:
http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1968_cuernavaca.html
I'm not sure whether this is a website I'm allowed to cite, but if not, the same speech can be found on several different sites.

I like Illich's views that people shouldn't have to depend on industrial society for subsistence. I agree that people who go to countries they know little about shouldn't go to teach, but to learn. Do you think it's true that any volunteer organization that sends people to other countries will wind up acting with paternalistic attitudes? Is this any more or less true now than it was in 1968?

In the unlikely event that this thread doesn't sink like a stone, please try not to turn it into a flamewar. DUers in general are pretty smart. We can contribute more than that.

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. A very interesting piece, which I couldn't let sink without comment,

but on a tired Sunday night I don't think I'm up to it.

One note, however, is that many of the naive middle-class volunteers DID learn from their time in other countries. Normal kids who had never seen poverty, and how people survived it in subsistance communities in S America, came back radicalized. At least a couple of the members of the Weathermen were such radicalized middle-class kids - one did a year in Peru with the Peace Corps, and another in Uraguay(?) if I remember correctly.

I don't see a problem, personally, with volunteers helping develop irrigation systems, dig wells, develop sewer systems, teach about crop rotation - that sort of thing that helps subsistance communities do better what they are already doing. That's just neighborly. But I have to wonder how many volunteers went there to show the 'natives' how things are done in the 'real' world - that paternalistic attitude that makes for what, at the time of this speech, was called the 'ugly American' (not a term I've heard recently, although it may be truer today than ever before).

[otherlander]

2. Yeah, I don't see anything wrong

with sharing useful information and helping people do things that they don't have the money/resources to do themselves. But he does make a pretty good point that a lot of people went with the attitude that people of other countries had to be shown the "right" way to live- an attitude that still exists today, unfortunately. And, yeah, if someone went into the ghettos of their own country with that attitude, they would be laughed at and spit on at best.