Leaving the garden by Miriam Meinders

We all want to be good. We are heavily invested in our identity as good, well-meaning people. This accounts for the appeal of the development narrative as it is usually told: go to exotic places, meet interesting people, and help them. We don't want to know about unfair trade practices or resource exploitation, but we do want to know about how we could fund an orphanage, dig a well for a village or get more African girls in school. It is easier to congratulate ourselves for helping others than to think about how our comfortable position depends on their uncomfortable lives. It is easier psychologically, but it's also easier intellectually. Neither mainstream media nor the various NGOs and development organizations have much reason to complicate the story of the good North (sometimes called the First World) reaching out to help the poor benighted South (sometimes called the Third World).

In Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender and the Helping Imperative, Barbara Heron, a former development worker, concludes that the "desire for development" is at heart a "profound desire for self." Working in the South can be a path to self-actualization, to a more fully realized life. You can have a meaningful experience, and do good at the same time. If you are troubled that your meaningful experience comes via the suffering of others, you can tell yourself, "Well, at least I'm helping. Or trying to help."

I am being both facetious and non-facetious here. Helping is one of the things humans can and should do for one another. Our species is interdependent, after all. But there are unseen power dynamics at work. Paulette Goudge, a scholar whom Heron quotes, foregrounds the idea of domination rather than the idea of helping:
The more I have reflected on my experiences, the more I have realized the crucial role of notions of white superiority in maintaining the whole structure of global inequality. The aid industry is deeply implicated in these structures.

Rather than acknowledging our participation in structures of domination, however, we would prefer to maintain our innocence. Our innocence is the key to maintaining the moral high ground, and the moral high ground is very dear to the hearts of Northerners (especially if we are white and middle class). It is territory we consider ours by right. It is crucial to our self-concept.

You have to live far removed from the exigencies of survival to believe in the possibilities of your own innocence. That is, the further removed you are from the labour that made your clothes or grew your food, and the less you know about the pipelines bringing the natural gas to your house, the more easily you can convince yourself that life can be pure.

With knowledge comes responsibility, but that responsibility is more than can be borne sometimes, which I take to be the meaning of the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Once you eat of the Tree of Knowledge, you have indeed been cast out from Paradise. To cling to the notion of your own innocence is a way of trying to get back into the garden. But what if we look around and accept this world as our home - this reality here and now, mixed and troublesome as it is? Would that help us accept our knowledge and our responsibility?

In Ursula Le Guin's short story, "The Shobie's Story," a spaceship crew does a ritual to prepare for a dangerous voyage with experimental technology. One character explains the purpose of the ritual: "'We all use each other,' Oreth said. The ritual says: we have no right to do so; therefore we accept the responsibility for the suffering we cause.'" I suppose this could turn into a source of easy comfort - we could say, "Ah, well, we all use each other, therefore I might as well get what I can out of other people" - but it seems profound to me. There is no living without using and being used, there is no remote safe place from which to maintain one's innocence. If I give up on a fixation with the idea of purity, I am better able to conceive of the possibility of action, I am more willing to embark on a course of trial and error, I have less fear about pushing up against the world with my foolishness and having it push back and show me the error of my ways.

My sense of self can rely less on a static concept of goodness and more on my interdependence with others who need me, and help me, as much as I help them.