A great new post from Richard Hamas about "Missionaries"
I
have spent twenty years watching a certain kind of man arrive in this
part of the world, and I have never once managed to like him. Today
the mercenary comes with a consultant’s slide deck. He has flown in
from Geneva or Washington or, lately, from a regional office in
Singapore that lets him claim he is local. He is courteous, often
genuinely kind, and he is here to help. He has a framework. The
framework has pillars. He will run a workshop, and at the workshop
there will be a maturity model — a diagram, usually with five
stages, along which your country can be plotted like a patient on a
chart. Thailand is at stage two. Vietnam is showing even more
promise. The framework doesn’t say where he is standing, because
that’s stage five. Stage five is the end of the road. It’s the
place from which the diagram is drawn. He doesn’t experience
himself as standing anywhere specifically. He experiences himself as
describing how the world actually is. I
have watched him do this in ministries and in town halls and in the
air-conditioned function rooms of hotels that charge more for a night
than the people outside earn in a season. I have watched him explain
participatory governance to communities that were governing
themselves by consensus when his own ancestors were burning each
other over the question of transubstantiation. And I have watched the
faces of the people receiving the help — polite, attentive,
entirely unconvinced — waiting for him to finish so the real
conversation can resume after he leaves. They have seen him before.
They saw him a hundred years ago. He was wearing something different
then. He is not selling nothing. This is what makes him so hard to be
rid of. If the consultant were a pure fraud, a snake-oil salesman
with an empty bottle, he would have been laughed out of the region
decades ago. He is not altogether bad. The commodities in his case
are partly real. Independent courts do protect people from arbitrary
power. Constitutional constraint does correlate with lower
corruption. The dispersal of authority does, on the whole, make
ordinary life less frightening, and I wouldn’t raise my children
under a government that lacked these protections. I have lived close
enough to the alternative to mean that without sentiment. The
benefits are not propaganda.
And
that’s precisely the problem. A man carrying something worthless is
easy to dismiss. A man carrying something valuable, who has mistaken
the value of his cargo for a licence to lecture you from a pedestal,
is the hardest figure in the world to answer – because the moment
you object to his posture, he holds up his cargo and asks whether you
are really against good courts and clean government. Of course you’re
not. You are against the posture. But the posture has hidden itself
behind the cargo. It’s the oldest trick in the West’s book, and
they’ve got away with it for so long. Pluck up the courage to pull
the mask off the consultant, and you find the missionary. And behind
the missionary, paying the fare for them both, is the mercenary who
was always there. The resemblance is not a metaphor, nor is it an
insult I have thrown in for effect. It’s a structure and a real
one. Once you have seen it, you can’t stop seeing it. The
missionary who came to this region in 1850 believed, as today’s
consultant believes, that he had arrived from a more advanced
situation. A place of authority. He read the people in front of him
as lacking something – sophistication, perhaps? In his case, they
were souls in the dark rather than institutions below benchmark —
and he understood that lack as temporary, curable, and on its way to
resolution under his guidance. He had a single path in mind. It was
the one his own civilisation had walked, and he interpreted his
presence as support along the way. The cruelty of what he was doing
was folded, always, inside a promise. You are not being conquered.
You are being saved. You are being given better knowledge.
Change
the vocabulary and the costume and you pretty much have today’s
consultant. Souls are institutions. Salvation becomes development.
Damnation equates to underdevelopment, then transition, then the long
purgatory of the almost-but-not-quite-democratic. And “transition”
is not an abstraction. It’s the IMF arriving with a
structural-adjustment programme, conditioning a nation’s place in
the modern world on a plan it didn’t choose, drafted by economists
who would have been wounded to hear the word ‘missionary’ — the
cure once again administered from outside, for your own good, on
terms you were not invited to set. The
missionary’s Gospel becomes the consultant’s methodology. The
custodian who once carried scripture now carries an index, and he
would be upset — sincerely, deeply wounded — to be told he is
doing what the missionary did, with the same zeal, because he has
been taught that the missionary is the embarrassing ancestor his
entire profession was invented to replace. He can’t see that he has
inherited the man’s bones. He believes he has buried him.
Between
the missionary and the consultant stands the whole imperial century.
The mission civilisatrice — the civilising mission, France’s gift
of itself to people it was simultaneously bleeding — kept the
structure intact and only swapped the deficit from damnation to
barbarism and the cure from the church to the lycée and the colonial
administration. The white man’s burden was the same skeleton raised
to the pitch of self-pity; the custodian is now so exhausted by his
own benevolence that he asks you to feel sorry for him for the weight
of all the help he is obliged to give. Heathen, savage, native,
underdeveloped, transitional, not-yet-democratic: it’s one word,
spoken across five centuries, and the word means ‘behind’. Behind
us. Less advanced. On our path but not yet arrived at the place we
already occupy and from which we so generously and so tirelessly
reach back to pull you forward. There’s
a name for what he becomes at that pitch, and it is not his to take.
He becomes the martyr. The word belongs by right to the ones who died
under him – the resisters, the burnt villages, the actual dead –
and he claims it anyway, because he has discovered that suffering is
the one currency a refusal cannot argue with. This is the custodian’s
second face, and he turns it to you the moment the gift is declined.
He does not withdraw from the road. He bleeds for it. He shows you
the cost he has borne to bring it – the years in hardship posts,
the fevers caught in your service, the comforts surrendered at home
so that you might be improved – and the wounds become a charge
against you. To say no to the offer was a disagreement. To say no to
the martyr is ingratitude, an injury done to a man who gave
everything for your sake. The colonised are not even permitted the
dignity of refusal, because refusal now spits on a sacrifice. This is
the cruellest turn in the whole repertoire: the subjugated is made to
feel he has wounded the one who came to subjugate him. The
declaration that announced the rights of all mankind was written by
societies that held slaves and ran empires, and no contradiction was
felt. I want to dwell on that for a moment, because the usual
response is to call it hypocrisy and move on. ‘Hypocrisy’ is
exactly the wrong word — it lets everyone off the hook too lightly.
Hypocrisy is a gap between what you preach and what you do. This was
not a gap. The men who wrote the universal declaration of human worth
and the men who ran the plantations were frequently the same men,
holding both notions in the same mind without tension. The absence of
that strain is the whole point. The university was not betrayed by
the empire. The universal was announced ‘from’ the empire, at its
height, by its beneficiaries, and the colonised were not left out of
the grand human family. They were given a place in it. That place was
behind everyone else. They were inside the universal human family in
the only role the universal had ever written for them: candidates,
provisional members, interns who would receive the full dignity being
described as soon as they had been developed enough to deserve it, on
a timeline their liberators would set.
This
is the discovery the postcolonial writers spent fifty years trying to
force into the Western view, against a resistance that was itself the
proof. Frantz Fanon, writing from inside the experience, described a
colonised world in which every native value had been classified as an
absence before the native could open his mouth — the deficit
assigned in advance, the verdict entered before the trial. Edward
Said showed how an entire scholarly apparatus had built the East as
the West’s slow, sensual, backward shadow self, a shadow self to be
studied precisely so that it could be administered. And the
decolonial writers who came after, Walter Mignolo among them, pushed
the hardest claim of all: that the West’s inspirational story of
progress and its darker story of conquest are not two stories but
one. This was the same movement seen from the sunny and the shadow
side. The universal itself — the very ambition to speak for all of
humanity at once — was not the cure for empire but its symptom.
Only the powerful have ever been positioned to claim they speak for
all of humanity but from nowhere in particular. They have made that
claim every single time from a place as particular as a flag. You
can wave the postcolonial writers away as the West’s guilty
conscience talking to itself, and many do. So notice that the same
suspicion grows in liberalism’s own garden, planted by people who
owe Fanon nothing. John Grey, who reached the position from inside
liberal philosophy rather than in revolt against it, spent a career
arguing that the Enlightenment belief in one universal civilisation
toward which all societies are heading is a faith and nothing firmer
– the Christian conviction that there is a single truth and a
single history leading to it, with the providence stripped out and
progress bolted into the vacancy. Same shape. Same single
destination. Same suppression of the local by the universal, now
riding reason and markets instead of grace and mercy. Alasdair
MacIntyre drove at the joint from another angle entirely: liberalism
is not the neutral referee among rival ways of life that it claims to
be. It’s one way of life among all the others, with its own parish
and its own past, that’s pulled off the most audacious move
available to any tradition — disguising its own explicit
commitments as the absence of commitment, its parish as the whole of
reason, so that to disagree with it is not to hold a different view
but to be irrational and superstitious and behind. The referee is a
player who has talked everyone into letting him keep score.
That
is the reflex laid bare, and here is why it can’t be fixed by good
intentions. Make the consultant kinder. Make his framework more
participatory, his metrics more culturally empathic, and his workshop
more humble. You have improved the cargo. You have not touched the
posture because the posture was never in the cargo — it was in the
standing-apart-from, the path that runs one way, the diagram drawn
from a vantage that calls itself stage five and refers to you
patronisingly as stage two. A gentler custodian is a custodian still.
A more enlightened mission is still a mission. The structure is
perfectly capable of absorbing its own critique and emerging
unharmed, now with a chapter on listening and a budget line for local
voices, still drawing the map from the same spot it always drew it. I
have sat through that workshop too. The humility is new. The vantage
point exactly where it was before.
I
should be careful here not to swing to the lazy verdict waiting on
the other side, because it’s just as false and far more popular.
The lazy verdict says the cargo is fake too — that the rights and
the courts and the constraints are nothing but the empire’s pretty
packaging; that the West’s whole moral vocabulary should be binned
as the cant of the strong. That is nonsense, and comfortable
nonsense, the kind that saves you the work of discerning the real
from the rotten. It can’t explain the dissident in the cell who
reaches for the language of rights against her torturer and is not
fooled into doing so. It can’t explain why the powerless, again and
again, in Manila and Seoul and Jakarta, have picked up exactly this
vocabulary and turned it on their own rulers — not because they
were tricked into it but because it stung, because it worked, because
there was something real in it to grip. A creed that was only a
weapon of the strong would not fit the hand of the weak so well. Both
claims are true at once. You have to hold them as that or you
understand nothing: the goods are beneficial, but the manner in which
they are carried into the world is imperial. The substance is
defensible. The grammar is not. And the substance is the perfect
hiding place for the grammar, because a man certain he is offering
you something good can almost never see that he is offering it as a
superior to an inferior. His sincerity is the disguise. The better
his gift, the more total the blindness.
Blindness
is the real cost, of course — not to us, the helpers, who can see
him perfectly well and always could, but to him. This is the part the
consultant would least expect and least believe. A civilisation that
takes its own values as universal loses the ability to recognise them
as values — as choices made by certain people under particular
pressures that cost something and excluded something and might have
gone another way. It can no longer find itself on a map that holds
other positions, because it has confused its own position with the
map. And a power that can’t see itself as one position among many
has disabled the most fundamental instrument of statecraft: the
ability to imagine how it looks from somewhere else. Somewhere that’s
not itself. It reads every refusal as backwardness or bad faith. It
can’t conceive that a society which has heard the offer in full and
declined it might be neither stupid nor hostile, but simply standing
somewhere else, on ground of its own, with good reasons. That man
believes he is looking through a window at the world. He is not. He’s
looking into a mirror, and the finer his civilisation’s real
achievements, the more flattering the reflection and the less reason
he has ever to doubt the glass. He cannot see past himself because he
doesn’t know that’s all he has been seeing. I
have argued elsewhere that the West misreads Xi Jinping’s China as
an enemy when it’s better understood as a rival worldview. I will
not repeat that case here. I want only to land it where this argument
has been heading all along. Because China is where the whole
five-hundred-year reflex meets, at last, a society too large and too
old and too successful to be plotted at stage two and told to wait.
Here is what the West can’t hear Beijing saying. The sharpest
charge China levels is not that liberalism is false, or that rights
are a fiction, or that democracy is a Western swindle—those are
charges the West knows how to answer, and answering them is almost
entertaining, because the answers are good and the answering changes
nothing. The charge that really lands, and that draws no reply
because it can’t even be received, is this: that the West has lost
the capacity to tell the difference between ‘we believe this’ and
‘this is universal’. That it can no longer feel its own deepest
commitments as commitments — as the hard-won inheritance of a
particular people — and so can offer them to the rest of the
species only as a standard the species is failing to meet. The
accusation is not aimed at the content of the creed. It’s aimed at
grammar. It says: your empire didn’t end when the flags came down.
It changed clothes. It set down the rifle and the Bible and picked up
the benchmark. The path was the same path. It has only ever led to
one place – back to itself.
And
then the trap snaps shut, and it’s worth watching the mechanism,
because the West springs it on itself. When China declines the
benchmark — when it refuses to accept that liberal procedure is the
measure of its legitimacy and insists that a different history has
produced a different and equally mature form of order — the West
reads the refusal as ‘the proof’. Only an enemy, the logic runs,
would reject what is self-evidently meant for all mankind. But the
refusal is not enmity. It’s the wholly predictable act of a
civilisation confident enough to look the custodian in the eye and
decline his path and his gifts. And by misreading that confident
refusal as aggression, the West confirms the precise charge being
made against it: that it can’t conceive of a genuine difference,
only of a defective sameness, of a student who has not yet been
brought far enough along. And beneath the strategic alarm runs
something older and more wounded, which the martyr explains and fear
alone does not. There is an injured astonishment in the way the West
receives China’s refusal — a sense that Beijing has not simply
declined a model but failed to be grateful, snubbed a gift the West
suffered to extend, and withheld the thanks owed for a century of
being shown the path to enlightenment. We did not only offer; we
sacrificed, or so we have told ourselves, and a civilisation that
will not walk the road we bled to build is guilty of more than
rivalry. It is guilty of ingratitude. This is the martyr’s logic
arrived at the largest scale history affords, and it blinds at
exactly the moment clear sight is most needed because a man waiting
to be thanked cannot hear what is actually being said to him. China
is not refusing to honour our wounds. China is telling us the path
was never universal — that it led, as every path we have ever
offered has led, only back to ourselves — and we cannot receive the
message, because we are still standing there, holding the gift,
nursing the slight, and waiting for a gratitude that is never going
to come.
The
evidence for the prosecution is placed in our hands, and we seize it
gratefully, because seizing it spares us the one recognition the
reflex exists to prevent — that we are standing somewhere in
particular, that our universal is a local inheritance that once
travelled under arms, and that the people who will not treat it as
the measure of all the earth are not lagging behind us on our path at
all. They are somewhere else. On their own ground. The Chinese see us
clearly. We have spent five hundred years making sure we could never
see them back. The missionary and the consultant would still despise
each other if they met. Each would see in the other everything he had
defined himself against. Neither could afford to notice that the
heathen and the not-quite-yet-democratic are the same person; that
the path to salvation and the path to good governance are the same
path; and that in five hundred years of arriving in other people’s
countries to bring them forward, we have not once managed to imagine
the people we found there as anything other than slower travellers on
a path we own. Until we can — until the West can experience even
one of its own convictions as a conviction rather than as the
structure of reality itself — every difference the world presents
will keep reaching us as a threat. And we will keep doing what we are
doing now, with the largest civilisation on earth, which is mistaking
the edge of our vision for the edge of the world.
