I’ve had a really hard time understanding the Sudan conflict, and I don’t think it’s due to a lack of effort on my part. Media coverage is sporadic and often betrays biases and the issues themselves are muddled by too many groups with too many competing interests. Reading a linear narrative of one Lost Boy’s experience is enlightening, if painful.

This summer, one of my favorite people ever mentioned somewhat cynically that he was safe in his country because Ghana is relatively poor in natural resources. The entire continent of Africa is fascinating to me because it has been forced to remain (like much of South America) simultaneously so rich in raw materials and so poor in technology to process it. The ethnic, cultural and religious tensions having plagued much of the area for so long are so incredibly easy to exploit for material gain and it’s way too frustrating to me to watch the West continue to do just that, decade after decade. But, so it goes, and I think the only way any of us will ever be able to have any sort of impact is through seeking answers on who is exploiting whom and to what gains.

But. How can I possibly hope to sort it out when China’s providing 90% of arms to the Sudanese army while exploiting its significant oil reserves? What’s the point of aid if UN rations are systematically intercepted by the Janjaweed? How can I make a difference when global warming is quickly turning much of central Africa into the Sahara?

I’m frustrated.

I haven’t been able to vote in my life and it kills me to hear how many people around me who very well could are choosing not to out of a sense of futility. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — we can’t be taking away our own power to make a difference, there are enough external sources trying to do just that already. Our governments can and must act because there no longer is such a thing as a regional conflict.

“There is a perception in the West that refugee camps are temporary.”

Pretty much the best short stories ever.

It doesn’t feel like reading the same story over and over again at all. Each is unique and way too much fun.

Yeah. Brains are cool.

It’s neat to read about an elegant and fully integrated theory on human intelligence. Plus it’s very approachable.

“You can be intelligent just lying in the dark, thinking and understanding.”

“The brain uses the same process to see as to hear. The cortex does something universal that can be applied to any type of sensory or motor system.”

“Intelligence is measured by the capacity to remember and predict patterns in the world, including language, mathematics, physical properties of objects, and social situations. Your brain receives patterns from the outside world, stores them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now.”

“The real world’s nested structured is mirrored by the nested structure of your cortex.”

“Predictability is the very definition of reality. If a region of cortex finds it can reliably and predictably move among these input patterns using a series of physical motions (such as saccades of the eyes or fondling with the fingers) and can predict them accurately as they unfold in time (such as the sounds comprising a song or a spoken word), the brain interprets these as having a causal relationship.”

“to predict what we will sense next, we have to know what actions we are undertaking. Motor behavior and sensory perception are highly interdependent.”

“Try to program a computer to find similarities between objects such as pianos and vibraphones and you will see how incredibly difficult this is. Prediction by analogy — creativity — is so pervasive we normally don’t notice it.”

“Pseudoscience, bigotry, faith, and intolerance are often rooted in false analogy.”

Lately, there have been a lot of fancy summits and conferences on AIDS, poverty, globalization, global warming… but it seems like most of those areas are in the midst of crisis rather than in recovery. The summits, the lofty goals, the thousand page manuals don’t make people richer and healthier in and of themselves.

For generations, now, we westerners have assumed cultural superiority and attempted to impose our values and core institutions in all other parts of the world. Some chunk of that has been well-meaning — a lot of us are honestly concerned about the health, safety and life expectancy of all global citizens. But even purely altruistic endeavors have failed to make life better for those we’re supposedly helping. This has pretty much been completely baffling to me.

Reading Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty, it seems clear that the problem is just that western countries have been corrupt and lazy in their approach to aid and that if only everyone read the darn book and got excited about it Everything Would Be Fine. By 2015.

Easterly paints a much grimmer picture, but it seems a lot closer to my version of reality. He really helped me understand how it is that with billions of dollars spent on aid, conditions continue to worsen for a lot of people. His argument is essentially that failure of aid efforts can be attributed to leadership being far from those they are attempting to assist and looking primarily for politically helpful, high-visibility projects with no accountability to the poor. The aid industry is full of “Planners” who feel they know what’s best for everyone and would rather have highly advertised meetings than to get someone to shovel shit out of a Lagos ditch.

The great thing about this book is that Easterly lays out a bunch of case studies of things that have worked. There are plenty of examples of “Searchers” who never set out to save the planet but simply worked their darnest to find a localized solution to a localized problem and succeeded. Little things can go a long way, he argues.

One of the reasons I love Seattle so much is that there are a lot of Searchers here trying to find ways to improve everyone’s lives a little. I’m particularly impressed by the University District Service Provider Alliance (maybe just because I know them best). UDSPA loosely brings together a bunch of organizations providing different services for the homeless population. There’s a shelter, there’s a clinic, there’s a meal program… each institution is highly specialized. The loose grouping brings an incredible amount of value to each individual service because they can easily refer patrons to each other and provide consistent information, staffing, safety… most importantly, I think, they can each focus energy on what they do best knowing that someone else is doing an equally good job in other areas. There’s huge value to the Teen Feed program easily being able to alert all other organizations of a violence outbreak. If a shelter volunteer can specifically refer a guest he or she has known for a long time to an acquaintance at the 45th street clinic, the guest can be much more trusting that his/her cocaine habit won’t be revealed to the cops as soon as s/he goes in for help regarding an infection of some sort. Since the education access group knows that they can refer people to local shelters and clinics, they don’t have to worry about providing basic needs and can instead focus on education.

International aid tends to work in a highly centralized fashion. It’s not working. Maybe something should change and maybe there’s something to learn fro UDSPA’s successes.

So. A friend told me this was required reading after The End of Poverty. I agree.

“There is now a regular cycle in the literature on foreign aid and growth. Someone will survey the evidence and find that foreign aid does not produce growth. There will be some to-and-fro in the literature, in the course of which a few studies will find a positive effect of aid on growth. Foreign aid agencies will then seize upon the positive effect, usually focusing on only one study, and will publicize it widely. Researchers will examine the one positive result more carefully and find that it is spurious.”

“…any government that is powerful enough to protect citizens against predators is also powerful enough to be a predator itself.”

“Rich-country politicians control the foreign aid agencies. [...] The big problem already noted is that the principal is the rich-country politician and not the real customers, the poor in poor countries. Voters in the rich country and their representatives are the ones who choose the actions of the foreign aid agency. They love the Big Plans, the promises of easy solutions, the utopian dreams, the side benefits for rich-country political or economic interests, all of which hands the aid agency impossible tasks.”

“The military is even more insulated from the interests of the poor than aid agencies are. People don’t give reliable feedback at gunpoint. Invading soldiers and covert destabilization are not great ways to ascertain local peoples’ interests. The poor on the receiving end have few votes on whether they want the Americans to save them.”

“Nor is self-reliance a magical panacea for poor people — many unlucky poor people, no matter how hardworking, live in states run by gangsters or simply in complex societies that have not yet discovered the elusive path to development. Western assistance, suitably humbled and chastened by the experience of the past, can still play some role in alleviating the sufferings of the poor.”

It seems super important to always consider the impact of what I’m doing on others. One of the things I’m becoming way too acutely aware of is that I can’t just look at the people directly within my circle of influence but rather have to take a huge step back and think of global repercussions. We’re constantly making industries viable or not by our purchasing decisions; every time we discard something we’re potentially contaminating someone’s drinking water; by being unaware of global happenings, we’re possibly tacitly agreeing to our governments’ international bullying… it’s scary, really.

The structure of this book makes a ton and a half of sense to me. There are four chapters: one atmosphere, one economy, one law, one community and those four areas pose important and sadly, sometimes conflicting ethical concerns. My favorite thing about the whole thing is that Singer doesn’t hold back criticism of U.S. policy when it comes to all aspects of globalization. At the same time, he provides very clear, actionable ways for the country to become a much better world citizen.

I’m a big proponent of encouraging local programs that provide services to those who most need them. This is one thing Yaw and I disagree on and interestingly, he tends to bring up similar arguments as Singer does to argue that allocating resources to those in greatest absolute need (as in the Seattle homeless youths are still way better off than the Sierra Leone refugee who has AIDS, five kids with malaria and whose leg got blown off by a land mine) is most important even if those people are tens of thousands of miles away. I follow the arguments and they definitely reach me in a number of ways, but I still stand by my approach: if I’m donating money I’ll target programs that reach those in greatest absolute need, but I still place greater value in providing time and in-kind donations locally (and who knows, “locally” could become a village in Sierra Leone at some point). Maybe I’m selfish, but I feel I need some kind of fulfillment in return for sharing resources, and seeing someone benefit from my contribution is much more gratifying than reading a report stating that tuberculosis is killing N% fewer people a month this year as compared to last. Also, I’m living here. If I can better the community here by helping people get better education, by helping provide services for the homeless, whatever, I directly benefit because the people I interact with on a daily basis are on average more educated, less prone to violence, etc. Finally, it may be a naive delusion, but I believe there is some sort of ripple effect. If we all work to better our local communities there’s a momentum that builds up and reaches out to neighboring communities and neighboring countries and so on.

“The thesis of this book is that how well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world. For the rich nations not to take a global ethical viewpoint has long been seriously morally wrong. Now it is also, in the long term, a danger to their security.”

“Today the overwhelming majority of nations in the world are united in the view that greenhouse gas emissions should be significantly reduced, and all the major industrial nations but one have committed themselves to doing something about this.”

“As the protests at meetings of the WTO, the World Bank and other international bodies continue — from Seattle to Washington D.C., Prague, Melbourne, Quebec City, Gothenburg, Genoa, and New York — genuine open-minded exploration of the crucial and difficult issues arising from globalization is losing out to partisan polemics, long in rhetoric and thin in substance, with each side speaking only to its own supporters who already know who the saints and sinners are. Endlessly repeated rituals of street theater do not provide opportunities for the kind of discussion that is needed.”

“If nations, once they join the WTO, can lose significant national sovereignty in important areas, and if they are under constant pressure to remain in the WTO, the view that the WTO is no threat to national sovereignty is simplistic.”

“We should reject moral relativism. A much better case against cultural imperialism can be made from the standpoint of a view of ethics that allows for the possibility of moral argument beyond the boundaries of one’s own culture.”

“When subjected to the test of impartial assessment, there are few strong grounds for giving preference to the interests of one’s fellow citizens, and none that can override the obligation that arises whenever we can, at little cost to ourselves, make an absolutely crucial difference to the well-being of another person in real need.”

“… in recent years the international effort to build a global community has been hampered by the repeated failure of the United States to play its part.”

Of course, I'm far from the only person with a sneaking suspicion that many wars are encouraged by a political machine driven by profit. Diving into the world of war-time extralegal economies not only went a lot way in confirming my suspicions but also provided tremendous insight into the economic workings of the world's poorest regions.

I'm fascinated by fringe economies. One of my favorite college courses was a sociology class titled “Deviance” and I was really captivated by the creative ways of making profit people find at the edges of legality.

The most surprising thing to me from my short time in Ghana was encountering fewer beggars in Accra than on the Ave. It seemed like everyone's finding some reasonably constructive way of making money, which is definitely not what official accounts would have us believe. Allegedly, 90% of Angola's economy was extra-legal in the early 2000s. And of course, any foreign activity in the country is scaled and otherwise adapted to the 10% remaining which is on the radar. The Angolans who spend every day of their life finding some way to make ends meet in an extralegal way are for all intents and purposes invisible. Those heralded as heroes are always the big-idea people working within legal systems, and not those maintaining their traditional way of life against all odds.

The world is incredibly small, now. Non-state organizations and networks are gaining in importance and it's going to be really interesting to see how that affects society.

“Any excesses and atrocities perpetuated in the name of the state may be forgiven with the observation that sometimes you have to burn the village to protect the nation. No matter how bad it is, this reasoning goes, without the state, existence would be unspeakably worse.”

“It's taboo to suggest that development policies fail because they have been constructed on the basis of faulty assumptions and data. Instead, the popular cultural answer is that development policies fail because of the realities of underdevelopment, corruption, poor infrastructure, hegemony of western elitism, sociopolitical resistance, and the difficulties of implementation — both in the development organizations and in the host countries.”

I believe in a “horizontal” kind of approach to spirituality where closeness is established not with some sort of supreme, distant being, but with tangible entities around me, as equals. I don't really like the idea of disguising suffering and hardship as contributing to some ultimate goal or looking to the promise of some other, future reality to accept things happening now. Resistance — “the refusal to accept the world's evil, the commitment to act against it” — appeals to me.

The tone and strange dialogs remind me of Hofstadter.

“If we cannot trust to an essential worth that persists regardless of our measurable social accomplishments, if we cannot find a way to connect to others that does not depend on achievement, if we do not escape our slavery to an endless need for recognition, if we cannot rest in the sense that what we have done is enough, if we cannot see that trying to accomplish in the social world can be a very dangerous business, especially given the society we live in, if our actions in the public realm do not spring from a moral and spiritual center rather than a conventional ego of accomplishment, if we don't realize that society creates effects out of our actions that we ourselves don't choose — if all these things remain the way they are, then how can we not, even against our will, contribute to the damage around us?”

“For me, a spiritual view will be authentic only if it can celebrate its peacefulness not only despite personal disappointment, but also as it faces the full range of the world's moral horrors.”

B'en… c'est prenant. Le genre de livre que je ne peux pas déposer pour plus de 30 secondes et que je termine en quelques heures. Mais en fin de compte c'est un peu vide. Même pornographique par bouts et je me suis beaucoup moins attaché aux personnages que dans L'Avaleur de sable. Ils pourraient pas juste en parler, tout regler et rentrer chez eux? Franchement. Mais bon, ça fait passer le temps et je me sent en plutôt bonne santée mentale en comparaison.

Hey, that's right… I'm a woman. I have very different sensibilities than a lot of my friends — men. Seriously, I think I'd forgotten.

Disillusionment, sensuality, nurturing, sleepovers with scary movies… maybe it's because I'm really trying to find myself again, but this, to me, was some wacky celebration of femininity — the pity for weird stalkers, the incense, the spontaneous, overpowering emotional reactions…

“You'll wake up from a dream with a physical craving to touch cat hair. Going into cat mode is usually fine and entertaining, nothing too psychological. But death and nighttime complicate cat mode.”

“I thought of my sleeping bag, covered with Snoopies and Belles, Snoopy's twin dog girlfriend, and how it should have me inside it. It should have been keeping me warm that very minute. Instead, a guy was pushing me against a towel rack.”