The Micro-lend­ing Rev­o­lu­tion has done more to improve the lot of ordi­nary human beings than any oth­er social move­ment. It has many anti­ci­dents, since rotat­ing cred­it asso­ci­a­tions and fra­ter­ni­ties have a long, though most­ly undoc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry. The island of Oki­nawa, for exam­ple, has had mul­ti-pur­pose, demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly man­aged co-oper­a­tive asso­ci­a­tions called moai for cen­turies, which oper­ate as effec­tive micro-lenders. [1] The moai are such con­vivial and effec­tive insti­tu­tions that many Oki­nawans attribute their unusu­al good health and long lifes­pans to par­tic­i­pat­ing in them [2]. Nine­teenth cen­tu­ry pio­neers of sav­ings-and-loan co-oper­a­tives in Scot­land, Bohemia (Raif­feisen), and Cana­da (Des­jardins) were at first involved in the kind of small scale pro­duc­er-cred­it that is today called micro-lend­ing, and it was this ele­ment in them that helped cre­ate aston­ish­ing leaps in social equal­i­ty and pros­per­i­ty in those places, though the insti­tu­tions they found­ed grad­u­al­ly came to be con­ven­tion­al con­sumer-ori­ent­ed banks. In 1976, Muham­mad Yunus found­ed the Grameen Bank, which began as a research project by Yunus and the Rur­al Eco­nom­ics Project at Bangladesh’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Chit­tagong to test his method for pro­vid­ing cred­it and bank­ing ser­vices to the rur­al poor. The first loan was for only $27.  Read more »

Many things irri­tate me when I read anthro­po­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, and the work of his­to­ri­ans who absorb the premis­es of anthro­pol­o­gists. Ter­mi­nol­o­gy is every­thing, and no ter­mi­nol­o­gy is “neu­tral”. All names for par­tic­u­lar behav­iour among humans car­ry with them imag­is­tic over­tones and unspo­ken val­ue judg­ments. Some­times I learn, dis­con­cert­ing­ly, that many schol­ars cus­tom­ar­i­ly use a sim­ple term with an implied mean­ing entire­ly oppo­site that which seems obvi­ous or nat­ur­al to me.

One of those terms is “indi­vid­u­al­ism”. Time and time again, I’ve read some aca­d­e­m­ic paper, book, or arti­cle in which the term “indi­vid­u­al­ism” is used with overt or sub­tle hos­til­i­ty. When the hos­til­i­ty is overt, the terms “self­ish” (bad) and “atom­istic” (under­stood to be very very bad) are added in sprin­kles. Since “indi­vid­u­al­ism” is, in my mind, a word that des­ig­nates the most pro­found­ly moral and pos­i­tive of human atti­tudes, this usu­al­ly leaves me some­what baf­fled. Many schol­ars (espe­cial­ly, it seems, British ones) seem to use the word “indi­vid­u­al­ism” to mean “self­ish­ness”, and to asso­ciate things like class dis­tinc­tions, cru­el­ty, dis­hon­esty, theft, and bul­ly­ing with the word. This, to me, is incom­pre­hen­si­ble non­sense, since the word “indi­vid­u­al­ism” means “the prac­tice of respect for all human beings as equal, autonomous, self-gov­ern­ing indi­vid­u­als, with con­sis­tent respect for their rights”. Class dis­tinc­tions are the prod­uct of col­lec­tivist thought, and indi­vid­u­al­ist thought requires, by def­i­n­i­tion, a total and absolute rejec­tion of class dis­tinc­tions. All forms of bul­ly­ing are vio­la­tions of indi­vid­u­al­ist morality.

Often, I’ve seen writ­ers con­trast “indi­vid­u­al­ism” and “co-oper­a­tion”… entire books being some­times built on the premise that they are oppo­sites. Again, this defies any ratio­nal def­i­n­i­tion of indi­vid­u­al­ism, or any use of the word that I would endorse or find nat­ur­al. Co-oper­a­tion is some­thing that only indi­vid­u­al­ists do. No col­lec­tivist ever prac­ticed co-oper­a­tion. Co-oper­a­tion is the nat­ur­al, log­i­cal, and nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship between indi­vid­u­al­ists; it is how things are done by indi­vid­u­al­ists when they act togeth­er. To the col­lec­tivist men­tal­i­ty, the nat­ur­al modes of inter­ac­tion are vio­lence, the threat of vio­lence, and fraud. All the crimes and hor­rors of human his­to­ry, from the slave and death camps devised by the ide­ol­o­gy of Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx, to the small­est exam­ple of bul­ly­ing in a school­yard, are the prod­uct of some form of col­lec­tivism, some sort of assault on the rights of the indi­vid­ual. All that is praise­wor­thy, and desir­able in human rela­tions is the prod­uct of the asser­tion of the equal dig­ni­ty and rights of the indi­vid­ual human being, in oth­er words, of indi­vid­u­al­ism. Indi­vid­u­al­ism, co-oper­a­tion, egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, jus­tice, free­dom, democ­ra­cy, and civ­i­liza­tion are near cog­nates, that is, words that always belong togeth­er. Any con­cep­tion of human affairs that attempts to con­trast them is false. Col­lec­tivism, vio­lence, hier­ar­chy, injus­tice, oppres­sion, aris­toc­ra­cy, and bar­barism are the con­trast­ing set of near-cog­nates, words that also belong togeth­er at all times.

Anoth­er prac­tice that annoys me is the arbi­trary use of the word “sim­ple” to des­ig­nate demo­c­ra­t­ic and egal­i­tar­i­an struc­tures. I recent­ly read a paper which reviewed a vari­ety of “expla­na­tions” for egal­i­tar­i­an polit­i­cal struc­tures among var­i­ous hunter-gath­er­er soci­eties. In every sin­gle sys­tem reviewed, egal­i­tar­i­an and pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic polit­i­cal struc­tures were defined as “sim­ple”, as opposed to hier­ar­chi­cal, monar­chi­cal, and aris­to­crat­ic struc­tures. This usage remained unques­tioned by any of the schol­ars involved, and in fact, obtains in vir­tu­al­ly every book and arti­cle I’ve ever read that touch­es on the sub­ject. Yet it plain­ly makes no sense. What is so damn “com­plex” about a polit­i­cal sys­tem that con­sists of a bunch of ass­holes scream­ing orders at peo­ple, backed up by a bunch of thugs who beat them up? The fact that huge empires and big pyra­mids have been built by this process does not make it either com­plex or sophis­ti­cat­ed. This kind of polit­i­cal sys­tem exists, in iden­ti­cal form, among many troops of baboons. Egal­i­tar­i­an deci­sion-mak­ing, by con­trast, requires sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­niques of debate, con­cen­sus-form­ing, and accom­mo­da­tion. There is noth­ing sim­ple about it. Bash­ing in heads is sim­ple. Democ­ra­cy is sophisticated.

But, if you accept the premis­es behind the cul­tur­al clas­si­fi­ca­tions employed by most of our his­to­ri­ans and anthro­pol­o­gists, then the polit­i­cal body that I inhab­it, in which mil­lions of peo­ple with dif­fer­ent eth­nic, reli­gious, and cul­tur­al back­grounds engage in a myr­i­ad of eco­nom­ic and social inter­ac­tions with vis­i­ble har­mo­ny and good tem­per, and in which I can eas­i­ly approach a fed­er­al cab­i­net min­is­ter and argue nation­al pol­i­cy, is defined as “sim­pler” and “more prim­i­tive” than the hier­ar­chi­cal Nazi death camp at Buchen­wald, where there was no trou­ble deter­min­ing who was in charge and who was not.

This sil­ly scheme of hunter-gath­er­ers exem­pli­fy­ing a “sim­ple” polit­i­cal sys­tem which sup­pos­ed­ly inevitably evolved into a “com­plex” and “sophis­ti­cat­ed” sys­tem of aris­toc­ra­cy and inequal­i­ty is part of the over­all bun­dle of non­sense that we have inher­it­ed from nine­teenth cen­tu­ry philoso­phers. They trans­formed their wor­ship of pow­er into a frame­work of clichés, all of which re-enforced the sup­po­si­tion that indi­vid­u­al­ist-egal­i­tar­i­an-demo­c­ra­t­ic ideas are “prim­i­tive”, while col­lec­tivist ones are “advanced”. You see the residue of this in every muse­um dis­play or school text­book in which it is glibly explained that some soci­ety “evolved” into a “civ­i­lized” state by acquir­ing an aristocracy.

It is time we grew up, and real­ized that thug­gery is not sophisticated.

Neigh­bour­hood in Yan­gon, Bur­ma — Bur­ma (also called Myan­mar) is con­sid­ered one the most eco­nom­i­cal­ly mis­man­aged coun­tries on earth.

The great­est shame and degra­da­tion for human beings is to be ruled by an aris­toc­ra­cy. Whether one is reduced to abject slav­ery, or mere­ly forced to sub­mit to grad­ed snob­beries and unearned priv­i­lege, it all comes down to the same truth. Aris­to­crat­ic gov­ern­ment is a vio­la­tion of fun­da­men­tal moral­i­ty, and an intol­er­a­ble insult to human dig­ni­ty. It fol­lows that the heroes of our species are those who defy, resist, and over­throw aris­toc­ra­cy, and strive for the only moral­ly accept­able arrange­ment of human pol­i­tics: democ­ra­cy. It also fol­lows that those who seek to impose or pre­serve dic­ta­tor­ship over human beings are the pal­pa­ble vil­lains. And as for those who stand by while oth­ers risk their lives for free­dom, encour­age their oppres­sors, and rush to trade and social­ize with the tyrants ― well, no lan­guage is vivid enough to describe their cow­ardice and treachery.

It’s not hard to pin­point who are the cur­rent heroes and vil­lains. Read more »