Missionaries

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.