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99 Chapter 5 Development or Egoism? Development The term development is like the devil, or the Holy Ghost among Christians, so often mentioned but hardly understood. To give a holistic definition of development is as tasking as piercing a nail through a dry log of a Thai teak. Put differently, it is as difficult as getting a live cat to lie on its back. We all talk about development of ourselves, talents, religions, nations, and continents. Different terms such as civilization, Europeanization, evangelization, Christianization, Islamization, industrialization, urbanization, modernization, economic growth, liberalization or globalization, have been used over the years to denote development. For poor countries, the word means escape from backwardness and darkness, salvation from misery, and catching up with the enlightened world. For rich societies the word symbolizes heightened possibilities, the achievement of the affluent society, then its transcendence, a process culminating in a postindustrial world from which scarcity has been banished. The 1960s were hailed as the “Decade of Development,” and the Cold War, which reached its peak during those years, was fought in the name of development. The difficulty in defining development lies in its extreme vulnerability to individual or group of individuals’ manipulation in space and time; as the term migrates spatially and temporally, people twist it at will depending on their interest and social situation. Yet, we cannot give up attempting at a meaning of development since it is a fundamental goal of every human person and society. In biology, development describes a process through which living things— plants and animals grow until they mature. This process is an imperceptible one, impossible to grasp at any moment of time yet clear enough when followed over a period, and the way the process unfolds is spontaneous and predictable.141 Characteristically, we can say that development of a living organism involves directionality, continuity, cumulativeness and irreversibility. Growth in living organisms is not amorphous; it has a direction and a purpose. It follows well defined stages 141 Rist, The History of Development, 26. 100 during each of which the organism metamorphosizes or transforms into another until the final stage. Often, the final stage can be imagined from the few initial stages of growth of the organism.142 We can tell the shape of a maize plant at the first few early stages of its growth. In light of this, some scholars consider development as necessarily positive and synonymous with growth. Living organisms, for example, a lamb can change morphologically through the various stages of its growth but it essentially remains a sheep and this is the reason for insisting on continuity as a characteristic of development. Similarly, each stage an animal or a plant grows into depends on the preceding stage that is from the lower to the higher stage indicating the cumulativeness of the process. For instance, a mango plant can only flower after it has gone through a vegetative stage, and it can only fruit after it has flowered. These variations are positive and imply quantitative and qualitative additions. Once a stage is passed, it is impossible to go back; a ram cannot reverse to a lamb which is the reason why we uphold irreversibility of growth in living organisms. Sheep can however, reproduce themselves, or the seed formed at fruition of the plant can ‘die’ and germinate to begin another cycle of life. So in this understanding, growth or ‘development’ is a cyclic process. Perceiving human society as an ‘organism,’ this analogy becomes a fitting metaphor to describe development of economies.143 Development is positive, an advancement toward a desirable goal. Aristotle shares this understanding when he says that everything we do is for a telos— an end or a goal. Everything we do must have a limit and growth is not an exception; that which has no term or limit is by definition incomplete and imperfect.144 This awareness of the limit, of a kind of optimum level after which the curve necessarily moves downwards to comply with the laws of ‘nature’ has been kept within the Western tradition from the time of Aristotle till the modern period when the barrier collapsed giving way to the perception of exponential infinite progress. Development now means growth forever especially economic growth, and technological growth (physical infrastructure, automobiles). This understanding dominated the development discourse and practice over the years especially after the Second World war 142 Rist, The History of Development, 27. 143 Gustavo E. Gustavo, “Development” in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge As Power...

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