When I read the conference theme: Development as Freedom: The Role of Education, I felt that something was amiss, and I was immediately on guard. The title sounded like a slogan; it didn’t ring true. Having worked in the development field in education, since 1964 both overseas and in the United States, I knew that socio-economic development has not always led to “freedom.”

As a matter of fact, right away I can think of many examples where many “development-oriented” societies have not led to freedom. Nazi Germany was certainly a “developed society”, but it was also a police state. Similarly, the USSR put emphasis on development, as a rival to the United States, and neither was it free. And in recent times, I can think of any number of development projects in Latin America and Africa that not only have not succeeded, but, on the contrary, have left people worse off than they were before.

Furthermore, the title, Development as Freedom, seemed to have a sense of coercion: “You WILL develop, and you WILL be free”. There was a faint suggestion of a development that is implicit in what we now know as “globalization”.

This title brought to mind George Orwell’s prophetic book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell wrote his book in 1948, shortly after WW2. You will recall that Orwell described some future society where everything was controlled by Big Brother, and where values were turned upside down: “war is peace,” “love is hate,” and then I thought, “Is Development freedom?”

The purpose of Orwell’s book was to pose a warning to post-WW2 societies about their futures. He foresaw the televised and media-oriented society, but could not foresee the worldwide electronic network, which today compounds his vision. Considering the internet and cable TV, Orwell’s book is even a more cogent and important book today than it was in 1948. (But at least nowadays, the TV sets are not yet two-way. Big Brother can’t yet enter your living room via a two-way screen as in Nineteen Eight-four though we do wonder whether that is true of our computers.)

A few days later, as I turned these things over in my mind, I realized I had been naive. The title, “Development as Freedom” had not been fictive; it had been taken from the recently published book by Amartya Sen, entitled Development as Freedom.

The book is a scholarly work in political economy, and was published in 1999. It was commisioned by James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, and its author had additional support from the MacArthur Foundation. A number of other experts in the development field contributed to the author’s research, and among them was Emma Rothschild, the author’s wife, who is a specialist in Adam Smith and his book, The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Looking at the context of the World Bank in toto, and at the theme of development as freedom, I took a very critical view, and I concluded that:

1. Development as freedom is misleading; it is an opinion, a slogan--not a “truth.” It is a bit of advertising to promote and make softer the image of the World Bank.

2. Basically and intrinsically, banks are in business for profit, and as they say, that is “their bottom line”. But we have been persuaded that the Bank, whose real name is International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) is altruistic, and has as its goal to improve the lot of poor people in the developing countries. If that were so, the Bank would have forgiven the debts of those countries years ago. And it could have taken up the suggestion made by Lester Pearson, Prime Minister of Canada in the 1970¹s, to set up a world tax of one tenth of one per cent of the Developed countries’ GDP as a world development fund to finance the development process in the poor countries.

3. In the Orwellian sense, I suspect that Amartya Sen’s book is a strategy to shift the focus of the development agenda from PROFIT to the more palatable, humanitarian goal of FREEDOM, in keeping with the rhetoric of globalization so prized nowadays by the hegemon.

Of course, I am theorizing, and using Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a point of departure. I allow myself to do this by using the critique taken from Paulo Freire’s work on “concientizacao” which in its basic translation from the Portuguese means “awareness” or “awareness-raising”. I consider my presentation here a form of consciousness-raising.

In this instance, my context is present time: during the first year of the Second Gulf war and during the early phase of globalization. I am guided culturally, and sensitized, by my reading of Lewis Mumford’s: The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power(1970), and especially by Manuel Castell’s The Rise of the Network Society (1996) and End of Millennium (1998).

Mumford’s work shows how mechanization and systems theory have tended to overwhelm humankind, and have encouraged and informed militarism and its partners, industrialism and space engineering, and where product takes precedence over process .

Castell¹s work brings us forward by two generations into the Information Age, a transitional period where we are now, and in which sovereignty, global politics, and economics are being transformed by Informationism.

Let me say in closing, that I can only admumbrate these ideas in the time allotted us. I think it is regrettable that we have let these implications of the conference title slip by unnoticed. But I am not blaming anyone. It seems inevitable, and true to Orwell¹s vision, that the Zeitgeist of our times should creep in, almost unnoticed, and unwittingly plant its agenda at the forefront of this year’s Comparative and International Society’s Conference. This is why we are going against the flow.

Bibliography:

Manuel Castells (1996, 1998) The Rise of the Network Society, Vol.1, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Blackwell Publishers.

Paulo Freire (1970 ) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.

Lewis Mumford (1970) The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

George Orwell (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Amartya Sen (1999) Development as Freedom. Anchor Books.

Adam Smith (1776) The Wealth of Nations. Penguin.