ABSTRACT
One of the facts essential to decoding the rescuer mythology is the understanding that 20% of the world’s people living in affluence consume 80% of the world’s resources; “the remaining 4.7 billion people-80% of the population-survive on less than a quarter of world output” (Wackernagel & Rees, 1995, p. 102). Taking 80% of other folks’ stuff does not seem to me to be very neighborly. Rushing next door after the fact to see if you can help seems the height of effrontery. It is a young Euro-American civilization that presumes upon itself the mission of rescuing the rest of the world, when, in fact, the rest of the world tends to view Euro-America as the culprit who threw them overboard to start with. Witness Lawrence Harrison, senior fellow at Harvard, reciting a familiar tune when he argues that “culture is the obstacle”’ to development in Latin America; therefore, American “social scientists” must find “ways to actively change cultural values in underdeveloped countries.” “The problem is culture, and the solution is to change it in the countries where it is impeding prosperity” (quoted in Barss, 2000, p. A15). Harrison’s remarks echo those of The Economic
journal, which, 40 years earlier in a moment of astonishing honesty, described the development-rescue-mission as follows:
Economic development of an underdeveloped people by themselves is not compatible with the maintenance of their traditional customs and mores…. What is needed is a revolution in the totality of social, cultural and religious institutions and habits, and thus in their psychological attitude, their philosophy and way of life. What is therefore required amounts in reality to social disorganization. Unhappiness and discontent in the sense of wanting more than is obtainable at any moment is to be generated. The suffering and dislocation that may be caused in the process may be objectionable, but it appears to be the price that has to be paid for economic development; the condition for economic progress. (Griffin, 1995, p. 133)
Already, over 100 years ago, “about 85% of the land mass of the earth was either a colony of Europe or a former colony of Europe,”1 their resources being diverted to what Winston Churchill (1951) would later call “the rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations” (p. 382).
