Interesting article, thank you for sharing this perspective.
I was busily reading away waiting for a solution to this kind of thinking, then the irony hit me.
The same is true for the relationships we hold both with people who we pertain to be working for the benefit of (other than ourselves?) and the daily action-takers.
In my experience they face greater poverty in more recent history than myself, and to not acknowledge their needs and transitions to more comfortable states is to fail to understand that it’s not just about the impact (it’s good to be able to justify one’s actions from time to time) but about the quality of relationships and the journey we go on, together, each working for ourselves and for others around us.
While I get Mr. Meade’s point of being addicted to causes, solutions and impact to a certain extent, I’m having trouble with the ideas in his last paragraph. Recognizing my emotions about the subject, they have less to do with poverty and more to do with justice. Part of our individual and collective squirming in regard to poverty has to do with how icky in makes us feel. Regardless of what side of the equation we’re on, we know there is something inherently wrong about one group having a lot and another group having very little. In that sense, I can’t accept the world as it is now, and I would hope that were I to live in the past, I would push back against the way the world was then. Poverty is a symptom of injustice, and that—I think—is what we’re rallying around most: How do we make the world more just?
Thanks Eric for inspiring me with this article. No doubt my experience of poverty will change from now. “Our addiction to causes creates separateness rather than connectedness”... food for thought indeed… Thanks again.
I agree with Paul. Poverty is an issue of justice, and I find it hard to believe that accepting injustice is the answer to ridding the world of it.
All in all, this seems awfully detached… It seems to be coming from a place of privilege. As if it’s coming from someone who perhaps has never lived in destitute developing world poverty while others in the world live a life of basic comfort and dignity, just because they happened to be born somewhere else in the world and into different circumstances. The first line assuming “we’ve all felt poverty” was a pretty good indication that this was going in an unsavory direction. I think it’s an offense statement, to be honest, because it belittles what it is actually like to live in poverty. Living in a state with continuous scarcity of resources has many practical and psychological impacts on human well-being, I think most experts would agree that it is not comparable to a brief state of wanting or your family’s ancestry. I find the psuedo new age tone to be especially disturbing as well, because it seems to be used as some kind of ticket to by-pass true empathy.
Another point I found distasteful was the assumption that evidence-based development in solutions to poverty illustrates an “egoist claim of competence.” Is this suggesting that altruism doesn’t exist at all? Is nobody working to alleviate suffering in the world altruistic? Are we all just trying to one-up each other and boast our intellectual prowess? Surely what motivates most people to try and make the world a better place for others is that they DO feel “connected” to others, rather than “separate” as he has suggested.
I kind of get where he’s trying to take this point, but to say from a position of privilege that “the world does not have problems, but that people have problems because they would like the world to be other than as it is” is actually absurd. If we access our emotions, our empathy, surely we can see that poverty and all its ills ARE problems; not simply because because we desire change, but because it causes unnecessary suffering. It creates real problems felt by real people in real situations that CAN be solved, if we don’t sit complacently and “accept the world as it is.”
How else is humanity to achieve progress if we are complacent with the suffering we have largely created?
Mike’s got my vote! BS a-go-go! Why don’t you try running those ideas by one of those beggars in the street, “hey there buddy, how about you stop trying to find a solution to your poverty and just be present and open to it, maybe then you’ll get a job and your mental illness will evaporate,”! Give me a break!
Our ability as “thinkers” to gather and use data and high-mindedly question everything about “what works” can insulate us and can greatly remove us from the realities of those we’re serving. Andrew Natsios, a former Administrator of USAID, in 2010 coined the term, “Obsessive Measurement Disorder” to refer to the rules and reporting requirements that crowd out innovation and create perverse incentives in the aid sector. Susan Beresford, former president of the Ford Foundation, calls this “evidence disorder” in philanthropy.
My main concern with the data dash of recent years is that the space for possibility and the need for control or certainty can operate in an inverse relationship, plus our attempts to strip away emotion don’t actually serve to neutralize our decision-making and make it as objective as we believe.
I’ve also observed that the evidence-push also creates a glass ceiling to prevent the participation of those who supposedly matter most. We have to be careful that “Obsessive Measurement Disorder” doesn’t exacerbate the inequalities in our grantmaking relationships.
Undoubtedly, soundly-gathered and -interpreted data can provide important new perspectives for us all to consider. But now more than ever, having more information at our disposal than ever before in our history means that we will need to employ a rigorous humility to increase our tolerance for the risk of “not knowing.” I could not agree more with Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger in “The Rise of Big Data” in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, that “There will be a special need to carve out a place for the human: to reserve space for intuition, common sense, and serendipity.”
Consider the Arab Spring - could big data have predicted that? From where we sit, there remains quite a lot we cannot know about how social change occurs.
And I, for one, am okay with that.
So I offer these 12 steps to our addictions, reworked for us philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, aid workers, and volunteers, written as if we had successfully gone through the program and come out the other side—stronger and more devoted to our purpose: http://www.how-matters.org/2012/05/05/aid-12-step-program/
Referencing your final paragraph, please “start the conversation” you seek by sharing with us your authentic experience of “how it feels to live here.” Furthermore, have you gleaned insight as to how to “move out” from there? To express your ideas from a place of vulnerability and experience could be quite useful to all in a larger conversation.
A good number of readers signed up for the free webinar mentioned in my bio, and I’ve written that webinar up in a blog post at http://www.ericmeade.com/equity-and-anger/. Those of you who commented on the injustice of poverty may find it interesting, and in fact the post references Paul Brown’s comment above. The next free webinar will be held on December 4, 2014 at 11:00 Eastern Time (U.S.A.) and the registration link is at http://www.anymeeting.com/PIID=EB51D982844B38. Future webinar registration links will always be posted at http://www.ericmeade.com/bpp-webinar-registration/.
Nancy, thank you for your call to share more about my own emotional experience of poverty. Our emotional experiences are all unique, but you point to an opportunity for me to model the vulnerability required for their expression. This is in part what I’m intending for the free webinars mentioned above, but perhaps you will see me take that conversation more public in future SSIR articles. Thanks again!
Thanks, Eric. Glad to know that you’re willing to share from a personal vantage point vs. providing factual/opinion oriented information-so much more powerful and incentivizing for others when any of us tell a part of our own story.
COMMENTS
BY Ed Forrest
ON October 7, 2014 12:46 AM
Interesting article, thank you for sharing this perspective.
I was busily reading away waiting for a solution to this kind of thinking, then the irony hit me.
The same is true for the relationships we hold both with people who we pertain to be working for the benefit of (other than ourselves?) and the daily action-takers.
In my experience they face greater poverty in more recent history than myself, and to not acknowledge their needs and transitions to more comfortable states is to fail to understand that it’s not just about the impact (it’s good to be able to justify one’s actions from time to time) but about the quality of relationships and the journey we go on, together, each working for ourselves and for others around us.
BY Sabatina Andreucetti
ON October 7, 2014 03:31 AM
\need time to digest this. Food for thought. Both resources that are hard to come by when poverty is the baseline of a persons existence.
BY Paul Brown
ON October 7, 2014 03:43 AM
While I get Mr. Meade’s point of being addicted to causes, solutions and impact to a certain extent, I’m having trouble with the ideas in his last paragraph. Recognizing my emotions about the subject, they have less to do with poverty and more to do with justice. Part of our individual and collective squirming in regard to poverty has to do with how icky in makes us feel. Regardless of what side of the equation we’re on, we know there is something inherently wrong about one group having a lot and another group having very little. In that sense, I can’t accept the world as it is now, and I would hope that were I to live in the past, I would push back against the way the world was then. Poverty is a symptom of injustice, and that—I think—is what we’re rallying around most: How do we make the world more just?
BY Manu Henrard
ON October 8, 2014 06:10 AM
Thanks Eric for inspiring me with this article. No doubt my experience of poverty will change from now. “Our addiction to causes creates separateness rather than connectedness”... food for thought indeed… Thanks again.
BY Mike
ON October 8, 2014 03:18 PM
The BS meter in my head exploded after reading this.
BY Natasha
ON October 9, 2014 10:00 AM
I agree with Paul. Poverty is an issue of justice, and I find it hard to believe that accepting injustice is the answer to ridding the world of it.
All in all, this seems awfully detached… It seems to be coming from a place of privilege. As if it’s coming from someone who perhaps has never lived in destitute developing world poverty while others in the world live a life of basic comfort and dignity, just because they happened to be born somewhere else in the world and into different circumstances. The first line assuming “we’ve all felt poverty” was a pretty good indication that this was going in an unsavory direction. I think it’s an offense statement, to be honest, because it belittles what it is actually like to live in poverty. Living in a state with continuous scarcity of resources has many practical and psychological impacts on human well-being, I think most experts would agree that it is not comparable to a brief state of wanting or your family’s ancestry. I find the psuedo new age tone to be especially disturbing as well, because it seems to be used as some kind of ticket to by-pass true empathy.
Another point I found distasteful was the assumption that evidence-based development in solutions to poverty illustrates an “egoist claim of competence.” Is this suggesting that altruism doesn’t exist at all? Is nobody working to alleviate suffering in the world altruistic? Are we all just trying to one-up each other and boast our intellectual prowess? Surely what motivates most people to try and make the world a better place for others is that they DO feel “connected” to others, rather than “separate” as he has suggested.
I kind of get where he’s trying to take this point, but to say from a position of privilege that “the world does not have problems, but that people have problems because they would like the world to be other than as it is” is actually absurd. If we access our emotions, our empathy, surely we can see that poverty and all its ills ARE problems; not simply because because we desire change, but because it causes unnecessary suffering. It creates real problems felt by real people in real situations that CAN be solved, if we don’t sit complacently and “accept the world as it is.”
How else is humanity to achieve progress if we are complacent with the suffering we have largely created?
BY Felicity
ON October 9, 2014 05:33 PM
Mike’s got my vote! BS a-go-go! Why don’t you try running those ideas by one of those beggars in the street, “hey there buddy, how about you stop trying to find a solution to your poverty and just be present and open to it, maybe then you’ll get a job and your mental illness will evaporate,”! Give me a break!
BY Jennifer Lentfer
ON October 9, 2014 05:55 PM
Our ability as “thinkers” to gather and use data and high-mindedly question everything about “what works” can insulate us and can greatly remove us from the realities of those we’re serving. Andrew Natsios, a former Administrator of USAID, in 2010 coined the term, “Obsessive Measurement Disorder” to refer to the rules and reporting requirements that crowd out innovation and create perverse incentives in the aid sector. Susan Beresford, former president of the Ford Foundation, calls this “evidence disorder” in philanthropy.
My main concern with the data dash of recent years is that the space for possibility and the need for control or certainty can operate in an inverse relationship, plus our attempts to strip away emotion don’t actually serve to neutralize our decision-making and make it as objective as we believe.
I’ve also observed that the evidence-push also creates a glass ceiling to prevent the participation of those who supposedly matter most. We have to be careful that “Obsessive Measurement Disorder” doesn’t exacerbate the inequalities in our grantmaking relationships.
Undoubtedly, soundly-gathered and -interpreted data can provide important new perspectives for us all to consider. But now more than ever, having more information at our disposal than ever before in our history means that we will need to employ a rigorous humility to increase our tolerance for the risk of “not knowing.” I could not agree more with Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger in “The Rise of Big Data” in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, that “There will be a special need to carve out a place for the human: to reserve space for intuition, common sense, and serendipity.”
Consider the Arab Spring - could big data have predicted that? From where we sit, there remains quite a lot we cannot know about how social change occurs.
And I, for one, am okay with that.
So I offer these 12 steps to our addictions, reworked for us philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, aid workers, and volunteers, written as if we had successfully gone through the program and come out the other side—stronger and more devoted to our purpose: http://www.how-matters.org/2012/05/05/aid-12-step-program/
BY Nancy Jacobs
ON October 10, 2014 06:55 AM
Dear Eric,
Referencing your final paragraph, please “start the conversation” you seek by sharing with us your authentic experience of “how it feels to live here.” Furthermore, have you gleaned insight as to how to “move out” from there? To express your ideas from a place of vulnerability and experience could be quite useful to all in a larger conversation.
BY Eric Meade
ON October 27, 2014 06:40 AM
Thank you all so much for your comments.
A good number of readers signed up for the free webinar mentioned in my bio, and I’ve written that webinar up in a blog post at http://www.ericmeade.com/equity-and-anger/. Those of you who commented on the injustice of poverty may find it interesting, and in fact the post references Paul Brown’s comment above. The next free webinar will be held on December 4, 2014 at 11:00 Eastern Time (U.S.A.) and the registration link is at http://www.anymeeting.com/PIID=EB51D982844B38. Future webinar registration links will always be posted at http://www.ericmeade.com/bpp-webinar-registration/.
Nancy, thank you for your call to share more about my own emotional experience of poverty. Our emotional experiences are all unique, but you point to an opportunity for me to model the vulnerability required for their expression. This is in part what I’m intending for the free webinars mentioned above, but perhaps you will see me take that conversation more public in future SSIR articles. Thanks again!
BY Nancy Jacobs
ON October 27, 2014 08:49 AM
Thanks, Eric. Glad to know that you’re willing to share from a personal vantage point vs. providing factual/opinion oriented information-so much more powerful and incentivizing for others when any of us tell a part of our own story.