“The only consequence of inadequate progress on the solutions suggested by a UN summit is usually—another UN summit.”
– William Easterly, The Tyranny
of Experts[1]
Fifteen years have passed since the
UN established the Millennium Development Goals, and here they are with more
goals. The MDG’s were supposed to be realized by 2015, and the new Sustainable
Development Goals are set for 2030. There are more goals than before, and these
ones are more specific. What can be noted by an overview of these goals is that
the UN has, if nothing else, gotten better at describing our dreams of world
peace and harmony.
My most fundamental concern with
these goals involves taking a step back and asking, Who among us really expects
them to be accomplished? Is it not much more likely that in 2030 the UN will
release another set of goals, perhaps aimed at 2045? I do not see around
negative answers to these questions. Their own verbiage seems to even make way
for the possibility of failure. William Easterly has called attention to
various “escape clauses” in the goals. The 193 leaders that gathered for the
summit are not actually bound to any of their commitments, but in fact are
given quite a bit of leeway:
The
signatories are committed to “respecting national policies and priorities.” The
SDGs, we learn in paragraph 55, are only “aspirational,” with “each Government
setting its own national targets.” In case you still don’t get this point,
Target 17.15 is to “Respect each country’s policy space and leadership”—that is,
to do whatever they want regarding the other 168 targets.[2]
The real message seems to be, “All
of these things would be nice, so try to live up to them in the coming years.”
But when has this not been the case? When has the UN not had grand goals
for acquiring future peace and harmony? The story is an all too familiar one: they
come out with goals, in the following decade some modest progress occurs in
certain areas of the world, the UN takes credit for it, and then when it comes
time they make more goals, which are justified by the meager progress “occasioned” by the previous goals. This logic depends on what Easterly calls a
“Blank Slate” reading of contemporary situations, in which so-called experts
ignore a country’s history and impose a narrative on the country’s situation.[3]
If these goals are not going to
result in any remarkable change, we must ask, What are their function? What is
it that these goals do for us time after time? Critical analysis of the UN
goals, I think, reveals a supremely ideological function. These goals
sustain the status quo by inviting us to think that things are getting better
and will be ultimately better soon. The character Don Draper in Mad Men,
while pitching an advertisement to the Lucky Strike cigarette company, reflects
on the nature of advertising in the following way:
Advertising
is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is
the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of
the road that screams with reassurance that, whatever you are doing…it’s okay.
You are okay.[4]
The sustenance of happiness via reassurance that what you are doing
is okay is depicted here as the ideological function of advertising. I find the
UN development goals to have the same ideological function.
In springing from
an impulse for the privileged to act—to do something, anything—for the
underprivileged, the concern of the UN development goals turns out to be not so
much for the benefit of the underprivileged, but for the privileged. Bob
Gedolf, organizer of the Live 8 concert which supported the movement to end
poverty, stated, “Something must be done; anything must be done, whether it
works or not.”[5]
This statement makes one suspect that such movement organizing has more to do
with alleviating the guilt of the privileged than alleviating poverty.
In the recently
launched Amazon.Smile program, Amazon committed to donating 0.5% of customer
payments to a charity of the customer’s choosing—which means you’d have to
spend $10,000 in order to donate $50 to charity. Little to no actual aid is
given, and the only thing that changes is that the customer can now moralize
and feel good about her consumerism.[6] A similar
campaign by Starbucks was tellingly launched with the slogan, “It’s not just
what you’re buying. It's what you’re buying into.”[7] Slavoj
Žižek comments,
The
point is that, in buying [coffee], we are not merely buying and consuming, we
are simultaneously doing something meaningful, showing our capacity for care
and our global awareness, participating in a collective project.[8]
He calls this phenomenon “spiritualized hedonism.” The UN
development goals, I claim, offer the same recompense. We do not need to
question the systemic conditions which bring about the problems we address; we
do not need to critically analyze our own contribution to the suffering of
others; we need only to do something—anything. Or, at least, we need to know
that there are organizations and bureaucracies taking care of the
underprivileged on our behalf. And, we need to think that the underprivileged
view our organizations and bureaucracies as agents of positive change. This is
the ideological function UN development goals serve, and it is by this ideology
that the status quo is perpetuated, and true change fails to be made.
I join Žižek in
calling for more theory, more critical analysis, and less emphasis on immediate
action: “There are situations when the only truly ‘practical’ thing to do is
resist the temptation to engage immediately and to ‘wait and see’ by means of a
patient, critical analysis.”[9] We
need to study the conditions which bring about the problems of poverty,
government corruption, et al. We need to answer, How have things come to be
this way? Who benefits from the status quo? How have the problems been
addressed in the past? What was wrong with how they were addressed? How can we
hope to approach the issue better? We need to subject our problems to relentless,
scrutinizing analysis. Without comprehensive understandings of the issues we
address, history is only going to repeat itself and we will only have more
empty UN goals in the future.
[1] William
Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten
Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 206.
[2] William Easterly,
“The Trouble with the Sustainable Development Goals,” Current History,
November 2015.
[3] See Easterly, The
Tyranny of Experts, 129–200.
[4] Mad Men,
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” episode 1, July 19, 2007.
[5] Quoted in
William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the
Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Books,
2006), 17.
[6] See Brady
Josephson, “Why Amazon Is Smiling and Charities May Be Losing,” The
Huffington Post, December 2, 2013.
[7] Quoted in
Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Brooklyn: Verso, 2009),
53.
[8] Ibid., 54.
[9] Slavoj Žižek, Violence:
Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 7.
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