Editorial

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkThe Salvadoran Mother and Downward Mobility

Elias Crim

I recently read an essay whose title introduced me to a concept I’d never come across before: downward mobility. The author was Dean Brackley, a radical Jesuit priest writing in 1988, during the time of the wars in Central America.

He begins with an encounter he had one night in San Salvador with a mother and her two children, displaced by the war, simply seeking a bed for the night. The look in the woman’s eyes, he explains, struck him so forcefully that he later went home and began to reflect on his life.

In our capitalist society, the dominant form of human community, Brackley suggests, is a ladder. From our early years, we are taught that we must climb this ladder — we must demonstrate our upward mobility. And the higher we climb, the safer we are from those beneath on the ladder — such as the Salvadoran mother. Because many of us live lives not far from precarity, we reach upward for safety. Our clutching after technology betrays our hunger for certitude and predictability, even as the fragility of the world becomes more obvious.

The radical humility of this reflection has a social dimension: it points toward solidarity (and even friendship) with the poor. It can also mean the freedom to lose status as well, beginning to share in the obscurity of the poor, enduring injuries and rejection. The upward progression on the ladder equals riches, honor, pride. The downward progression, Brackley observes, is humility, insults, poverty.

We find it difficult to imagine that the rich need the poor — need their friendship, if not their condition — in order to overcome their own spiritual poverty. We desire a share of actual poverty, Brackley suggests, in order to become friends with the poor, an action which will expose for us the great fraud of the ladder. Now we see the supposed superiority of the great dissolving, as does the supposed inferiority of the small.

What is striking about the movement toward economic justice and the solidarity economy today is the way in which we can see a hunger for a kind of downward mobility among those with privilege, especially younger people. (I’m thinking here of groups like Resource Generation and the Next Egg.) They are feeling the spiritual death which great wealth can bring and, like the marginalized people from whom that wealth was extracted, they too want liberation.

How do we know when we have become friends with the poor, Brackley asks. It is not so much a matter of the things we have. It’s rather the moment when we become comfortable in the homes of the poor and they at home in ours. And the question of whether we have made their cause our own. 

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkHow Shareable Built a Movement

A Conversation with Neal Gorenflo

Elias Crim

Neal Gorenflo is a co-founder of Shareable and served as its executive director for over a dozen years before stepping away a few months ago for a sabbatical year. Based in the Bay Area, he describes himself as a social entrepreneur working toward a more equitable, resilient, and joyful society.

Commentary

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkWhat Development Means Now

Júlia Martins Rodrigues

 In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.— Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional

When the missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas traveled to the Americas in the 1500s, he wrote directly to the Spanish crown, debunking the narrative of indigenous peoples as uncultured aboriginals. Las Casas defended their right to self-governance against conquest and colonization, arguing their communities’ governance was fair and equitable, following rules that often surpassed the European legal standards.

Despite Las Casas’ challenge, the historical narrative that prevailed for ages was Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas, placing Europeans as masters of the New World sent by God to bring Christianity and advancement to the “savages.” The disregard for the ancient civilizations and their knowledge rooted to the land is part of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos described as the abyssal thinking that excludes everything that lies outside the dominant socio-political paradigm.

To this day, abyssal thinking continues to guide our perception of the world.

There is a false divide between the developed and the underdeveloped. When we think about progress, technology, and western medicine, the first picture that often comes to mind is the kind of development fostered by the oil industry in the global north. One man, John D. Rockefeller, galvanized a vision of technological advancement based on the petrochemicals he produced, especially those which created new compounds from oil. Plastic quickly replaced other materials and became the base layer of everything perceived as modern and advanced. This new industrial paradigm soon enveloped and controlled the medical industry, marginalizing natural and herbal medicines from Indigenous traditions.

Overall, progress became everything that distances us from the state of nature, detaching humanity from its animal essence — reminiscent of the earlier Christian campaigns against any sort of savage and barbarian existence outside its divine rhetoric. “Progress,” in this view, happens outside of nature.

We could recall that glass manufacturing in Mesopotamia and Egypt was a revolutionary discovery that flourished in the Roman Empire and soon spread across the globe. Over five thousand years later, glass continues to be one of the most used materials, completely recyclable.

However, when the plastic boom happened, it came accompanied by a “throwaway lifestyle,” creating an ingrained culture of disposable items, cheaper to produce and harder to recycle. Both artificial glass and plastic were disruptive innovations, but each carried its distinct footprint over history. New products and materials are constantly invented to optimize production and drive down costs. As long as they keep the shelves full and the market machine running, they often lack more profound reflections on their long-term impact on people and the planet. Not every innovation should be praised, not every novelty should be a sign of development.

Books

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkThe Trouble with (White) Liberalism

White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order (2021) by Maribel Morey

Elias Crim

I want to use this review of Maribel Morey’s first book to talk about not only the excellent social history she has written but also her remarkable new organization, the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences. Not surprisingly, perhaps, these two things are connected.

Back in 2008, Barack Obama gave a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech in which he made a reference to a massive research project by Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish sociologist, called An American Dilemma. Sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation (a non-profit), it landed in 1944 to almost universal acclaim as the most influential study of race ever produced in this country.

The study outlines the many facets of white discrimination in this period of the 1930s and 1940s: employment, housing, voting, policing, court practices, as well as anti-Black violence (lynchings), etc. Myrdal argues that the latter run counter to American egalitarian ideals and “the American Creed.” He urged use of the federal government to address these issues.

By 1954, the book’s reputation was such that it was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in the language of Brown v. Board of Education as evidence that segregation by race was damaging to Black students. Since then, civil rights scholars have viewed the book as a quintessential study in the way it both reflected and inspired racial liberalism in court rulings on integration, affirmative action, etc.

An American Dilemma does detail levels of structural racism in various aspects of U.S. life and institutions. Yet Myrdal presents these various forms of anti-Black practices and policies as a moral dilemma that white Americans will be eager to correct (particularly, as Myrdal reasoned, among white Americans in the North and the New Deal government, both of which he viewed as particularly moral forces).

The main issue for the critics whose perspectives Morey amplifies is that Myrdal left the agency, speed, and content for progressive change in “race relations” in white Anglo-American hands. Thus Myrdal presents a positive image of white Americans as a particularly moral people, with little pressure for them to prove it immediately or at any speed or content uncomfortable to them.

Even more, the definition of racial equality that Myrdal proposes (assimilation into whiteness) would leave undisturbed white Anglo-Americans’ belief in the superiority of white (and inferiority of Black) culture, institutions, etc. So rather than necessarily challenging white Anglo-American supremacy, Myrdal in An American Dilemma provided means for white supremacy to continue to thrive in the U.S.

Despite the European origins of the researchers, the sponsors were careful to cast the study as a purely American project. Morey, as a careful historian, has done an excellent job unveiling the other influences at work here, especially the Carnegie Corporation’s long-time interest in colonial Africa.

That interest was evident in two studies funded by the president of the Carnegie Corporation, Frederick P. Keppel, both of them focused on African countries whose white imperial policymakers he wished to support through the judicious deployment of social science methods.

What Morey documents in this previously-submerged story is the real motivation at work here — that of reinforcing the white elite’s social control during this period of the rise of Black nationalism (in figures such as Marcus Garvey in the U.S.) and Black consciousness in South Africa.

Thus despite the negative reception of An American Dilemma by the Southern power elites, the book was, in Morey’s words, “an exercise in white Anglo-American domination, helping to solidify rather than to challenge white rule.”

By way of contrast, she offers us what were at the time the subdued but perceptive critiques of several notable Black figures, such as Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Harold Cruse, and others. These more radical observers were mostly unswayed by the book’s hope that merely describing the gap between Black and white societies would suffice to narrow it.

Morey’s book is thus a historical reflection on the rise and use of the modern social sciences, especially their seemingly high-minded but often ideological work in maintaining the Anglo-American racist status quo.

Launched not long before the book’s publication in 2021, the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences (Morey is its founder and executive director) is clearly a kind of response to this history, especially the cultural and racial imbalance between the Global North and South in intellectual work. Board members include scholars Grieve Chelwa, Evelynn Hammonds, and Caroline Shenaz Hossein.

The Institute’s mission is “to enable the scientific output of the Global Majority to play its proper role in the social transformation and development of our shared world as well as the theoretical advancement of the social sciences.”

Its forums have focused on the areas of economics, philosophy, and sociology, as well as one on the Social and Solidarity Economies in Latin America.