Peace Corpse

An Army of Peace

Spiro Agnew, UN Ambassodor under the JFK administration, once characterized the America Peace Corps as "a spirit of national masochism, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." His statement has stood the test of time, regrettably.

Designed to corral the virile and sustained optimism common amongst youngsters proceeding graduation and in an effort to funnel it into constructive programmatic development projects rather than have it siphoned off into the degenerative abyss that is after graduation domestic employment in the US, the American aide agency, the Peace Corps, is by most standards a valiant, worthwhile development objective. It attempts to marry the quixotic views of American peaceniks with that of its unwieldy though equally ambitious paradigmatic cousin: the American development agenda. It is un-holy alliance, between those that make policy (Government) and those that are the physical manifestation of it (Peace Corps volunteer). This grotesque partnership is personified by the unabashedly opinionated, helplessly unintelligent, overwhelmingly ignorant, and lastly, and perhaps most regrettably, ubiquitous Peace Corps volunteer.

The first thing that strikes you about the Peace Corps is the name. It suggests a sort-of Hobbesian world, where anarchy reigns. Peace is won, but only through the legions of idealistic, lost, confused 20 somethings fighting for it. It implies an army of Peace (which is in itself an unadmirable oxymoron), in which individuals are labeled volunteers, or, when taken collectively, a corps. Despite its intentions, the semantics are decided militaristic. Secondly, it registers ‘volunteers’ despite the fact that the stipend they receive far exceeds that of any ‘native’ they are charged with aiding. It is indicative of another paradox within the Corps. The Corps relies heavily on appealing to one's self interest (in the form of tuition repayment schemes, career opportunities and a substantial stipend upon completion: $7,000) to recruit people. Yet it asks them, once signed, to be selfless, to teach and propogate. It thus attracts a brutally self-seeking, opportunist type of individual interested only in preaching.

Crouched over, attempting to escape the thunderous rain under an awning in downtown Nairobi, I had the misfortune of meeting my first Peace Corps volunteer. It was a loud night, the rain hit the awning with a deafening, consistent beat a sound I was soon to beg for. I stood in a corner hoping the only other white person corralled in with us wouldn't drag me into a conversation that I not only did not wish to participate in but feared might involve the weather. Luckily neither happened. She ended up speaking to me, but neither about the weather nor with the intent to elicit dialogue. This happened to me a lot with Peace Corps people: they tended to talk about things not with, but at me and not about anything but rather about everything. I found this lack of coherence disturbing partly because it sounded very similar to how I had envisioned a subject in a Picasso picture might talk, struggling to open its disjointed jaw only to spew out a distorted and disjointed smattering of vowels, ultimately resigned to the fact that it simply was not meant to speak. Simple resignation however, was not a trait possessed by peace corps volunteers. I often used art as a basis through which I could compare Peace Corps volunteers to normal people. It provided for me the visual representation necessary in understanding what seemed to me a species not only appropriate for but the heinous product of another world. A world where being a wallflower was not only not a euphemism but also an admirable trait and, all be it, a functional reality. Mostly, though, it took my attention away from having to listen to them. It was not so much my first encounter with the Peace Corps that piqued me, but rather, the consistently bad encounters that followed. The mind can only take but 5, at very most, 6 conversations with these idealistic, uber-motivated muftis before it begins to wonder not just about the Peace Corps, humanity and life itself but of more reasonable questions like: the reason for their ubiquity. They are everywhere, inescapable, the personification of spam. Unfortunately, no human faculty of mine could discern an ‘x’ on which I might click. It was not long before I made the seemingly simple philosophical leap from not concerning so much of the guy (Peace Corps volunteer) as I did about the ‘guy behind the guy’: the US government. To a certain extent, those who participate within the Peace Corps are given, through the mandate on which the Peace Corps is itself framed, a sort-of moral, intellectual and culture ascendancy. They are told to teach rather than to learn, to patronize rather than to care and to talk rather than to not. Despite that many Peace corps volunteers are liberals, they exult views that are neither progressive nor open. It is fundamentally opposed to the idea of indigenous knowledge. Indeed the phrase itself is understood as an oxymoron. The ethic of willful ignorance is palpable.The first goal of the Peace Corps is to " Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women."

There is little effort to learn from the subjects as they are told not to listen - and most are inclined to not without having been being told - but to teach. Perhaps Incapable of making the connection, peace corps volunteers spend their time disaffected, ignorant and irritated. The peace corps volunteer is thus the ultimate manifestation of their government’s moral, ethical and philosophical core: ignorant, infuriating and everywhere.

Coping with Hoping

Hope did this

A recent survey by Gallup International Association of 50,000 people across the world found that Africans are the most optimistic people. Asked whether 2006 would be better than 2005, 57 percent said yes. Asked if they would be more prosperous this year than last, 55 percent said yes.

Where does such relentless optimism in the face of unyielding misery come from? Africans can expect to live the shortest lives, earn the lowest incomes and suffer some of the worst misrule on the planet. They are more likely than anyone on earth to bury their children before the age of 5, to become infected with HIV, to die from malaria and tuberculosis, to require food aid.

Could the paradox of African optimism be reducible to pure idiocy? Perhaps it is simply a rational response to an overwhelming sense of pessimism; a sort of collective cognitive dissonance. Often this perceived dissonance is reduced, without justification, to a cliché: those without anything have only hope to live for. However, this specific cliché, as argued here, mistakes ends for means. Hope is insufficient as an end. Alone, it is but the mere motivation inspired, embodied by and emanating from a desire (often this hope is manifested as an irrational reliance on events extemporaneous from the self). That is to say that hope alone, baseless as it is, is never an end nor is it even sufficient as a means to a desired end. Thus no one lives for hope nor does hope allow the possessor of it to live for the end it irrationally motivates. Re-defined then, hope, is merely the perpetrator of irrational perseverance.

In Greek mythology Hope is personified as Elpis. Elpis, mother of Pheme - Goddess of Rumor - is often portrayed as a young naive woman. In the one myth that involves Elpis directly, Pandora - the main character - opens her box so as to let out all the ‘evils’ except one: Hope. These associations are not coincidence. Hope’s propinquity to evil and her birthing of the Goddess of Rumor call attention to her capacity for perversion. Taken within the context of contemporary events in Africa, its role, though equally as devious, is, however, more likely the subversion of reason rather the propagation of rumor.

Primo Levi, in his book Hope and Despair in Auschwitz, suggested hope and reason, opposite as they are, lie within the same continuum. He calls attention to this continuum by locating the idea of hope antithetically to reason: “…and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day.” His uncertainty, rather than his hope, allowed him to persevere beyond the limits hope had set for others. Hope implies a certain amount of perseverance, a perseverance born not of reasonable inclinations, but rather, in contradiction to them. It is the act of believing that something is possible even when there is some if not all evidence to the contrary. Being that it is fundamentally counter-productive to solve problems through the willful neglect of reason and reality its purpose and ultimately its survival within the human psychee is reliant upon the suspension of reality. In doing so it operates as a mechanism through which leaders and major religions in Africa enslave those they claim to represent. It is a theme not unfamiliar to those with power in Africa.

Steven Biko and Frantz Fanon, two philosophical towers of black consciousness thought, believed that the balance between hope and despair - that which the British and French colonial governments had mastered - had prevented the development of identity and purpose in the oppressed and had led to the perpetuation of the fractured self, which was, and remains still, manifest in the idea of 'hope'. Under its spell, hope compels one to look forward rather than at and beyond rather than within. The Black 'self' under apartheid, Biko argues, was incapable of finding meaning in action and thus resorted to hope. This psychological state, elegantly phrased by Biko in his only book, I Write What I Like, led him to believe that "the most valuable weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed". This condition, as it concerns the manipulation of the mind by the conjuring of hope, resonates within contemporary events.

Distinguishable, if only by its topicality, Kenya's First Lady - Lucy Kibaki - after a spate of 'bad luck' (famine in the north plane crash in same region) has, by some grotesque miss-use of governmental fiat, established a day of prayer so as to heel the country of its bad luck. Kibaki, the ruthless shrew she is, is not herself so much concerned about the spate of “bad luck” as she is the detrimental effects bad luck has on the perseverance of hope within the minds of the Kenyan psychee. That is to say, her reliance on divine intervention is merely a thinly veiled ploy in an attempt to maintain a level of hopefulness. What better way to deflect scrutiny then to chalk it up to the gods. Read more about Kenyan dignitarial despairs with Moi's call to arms (be they the extensions of clenched hands in prayer) here: http://allafrica.com/stories/200604210891.html.

It should also be noted that even amongst this optimistic, hope-filled fervor there remain pockets of pessimism, though these pockets of optimism often reside exclusively within sectors of African society (government) that might inspire the exact opposite emotion: optimism (if only because African governments have a remarkable track record of absorbing their country's resources, and within it, the optimism the citizenry might otherwise lay claim to). The resulting paradox, then, that pervades virtually every ‘social space’ in Africa is: how individualistic and cynical African politicians are, and how communal and hopeful most African citizens are. Between rulers and ruled, there is little connection or even shared values. The result is a dysfunctional political culture where big men operate within the most cynical realms of Machiavellian real-politik and the citizens below within the cushy confines of ignorance. So why then are politicians – individuals with, comparatively speaking, far better life prospects then the underlings that support them – pessimistic, while lowly citizens – people who have little to live and very much to die for – are optimistic? Religion.

Religion, if anything, seeks to re-conceptualize pessimism as optimism. It harvests an optimism far removed from any rational thought. In fact, the very foundation on which religion is based requires the existence of a gap between reality and reason. In the west it does so through employing, and indeed, evangelizing the sanctity of the written word of god – as captured, they reason, in the Bible. In Africa, not only is the space between fact and fiction infinitesimal (as described in several oral history accounts that bear no resemblance to truth), but the arbiter defining which is what (fact or fiction) is not the written word, but rather, the spoken one. Oral testament in African religion, culture, society is profound. It carries a moral significance and omnipresent relevance that’s rivaled by no other communicatory method. In Africa, compelling and charismatic reconnoiters decide where and to what extent this gap exists. They’re bounded not by antediluvian ethics delineated in some tome 2000 years ago, but rather only by the whim of their wit. They are, essentially, responsible for both the rhyme and reason. Africans, then, are optimistic precisely because the leaders that rule them have provided the religio-ethical edifice necessary to make it so.