Slouching Towards Flatland
Reflections on the Millennium Development Goals and Their Impact

Zaid Hassan, 2007

Thanks to Jeff Barnum, Mia Eisenstadt, Andrew Campbell, LeAnne Grillo, Andrew Lyon, Kelly Teamy, Wick Sloane, Mustafa Suleyman and Ethan Zuckerman for comments.

________________________________________

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
                        — WB Yeats

“If your life has not three dimensions, if you don’t live in the body, if you live in the two—dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere. You don’t see the archetypical world, but live like a pressed flower in the pages of a book, a mere memory of yourself.”
                        — Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Carl G. Jung

“Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard and with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe": but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.”
                        — Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott

________________________________________

India is the land of my grandparents and a country my family has fled from several times. For some reason, it keeps calling us back. We keep going back, to discover how much and how little it has changed. In 2006 I was involved the launch of an ambitious development project in India. Its initial stated goal was to halve the rate of child malnutrition in India within ten years. There are some 100 million children in India that suffer from some form of under-nutrition. The goals of this project were derived from and closely linked to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—in particular those relating to women and children.

The project took roughly three years to put together. A large part of this time was spent talking to stakeholders and funders. Stakeholders largely consisted of government officials (including some panchayat leaders), corporate executives and civil society leaders. Part of the reason this phase of the project took three years was that in its earliest conception the project was to be located in India, without a decision being made about where exactly in India. Over the course of this time the geographic focus of the project emerged, with factors such as political support and infrastructure being key determinants for where to start work. The project ultimately involved a number of Indian institutions, including various departments from the Government of Maharashtra, a UN agency, a small number of corporations, a number of NGOs, a New York-based development NGO and us.

In many conversations with stakeholders and funders, a PowerPoint “deck” was used to frame and explain the project, its scope and its reason for being. A set of the MDGs relating to women and child development in India were used near the start of the presentation. The “indicators” concerning the question of India meeting its MDGs came from UNICEF, part of the UN system that conceived the MDGs. This data showed that India was not going to meet these goals. In the meetings that I sat in, I remember many questions being asked, such as where the funding would come from and so on, but I have no recollection of the goals ever being questioned nor the data ever being queried—even though it was a key part of framing the project. The Economist itself, staunch defender of the market-as-solution, points out the attraction of MDG-think.

This MDG-think is seductive. It is a potent mix of inspiration (saving lives and educating minds is eminently doable) and accusation (why, then, is the rich world not doing it?). But this thinking is also misleading. However laudable, the goals wrongly invite people to think of development as akin to an “engineering problem”, as Lant Pritchett, now of Harvard University, and Michael Woolcock of the World Bank have argued. The task is to pour money in one end of the MDG pipeline and then count the tubewells and school enrolments emerging from the other.[i]

The MDGs themselves and the whole business of tracking indicators can be thought of as an intellectual and cognitive exercise belong to a very peculiar universe, one that many people, at least in the West, are increasingly choosing to live within (and one that most people in the non-West do not yet live within). The MDGs come from a way of being and thinking, from a place, that can be thought of as “Flatland” a two-dimensional, self-referential, closed universe defined by the boundaries of reports and PowerPoint presentations.

Edwin Abbot’s classic book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is the story of an inhabitant of a two-dimensional world. It explains what life is like in a story the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world sketches the qualities of this world. In a Flatland universe, a sphere can only be perceived as a circle. In a Flatland paradigm, people are not people but statistical cases, suffering from “grade 1,2,3 or 4 malnutrition” or simply “ill”–not whole people.

People do not live in PowerPoint presentations. People are not categories. People are not shadows. Or are they?

The government of India runs one of the largest development projects in the world, Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). ICDS has an 2007-2008 annual budget of Rs 4761 core[ii] (USD$1,185,212,845.41) or just under USD$1.2 billion. On paper, there are ICDS centres that sometimes don’t exist in the real world. One ICDS centre I went to looked like a fire-bombed wreck. The young doctor showing us around shrugged and said that these things sometimes only exist on paper, or they really exist (that is, have a building and a worker) but the food that is meant to be arrive never makes it because it’s siphoned off along the way and some unknown number, of course, function as they are meant to (which is not to say that this is necessarily a good thing).

The workers who run ICDS are required to fill in reams and reams of paperwork, which all gets shuffled vertically up the chain of command. The workers who collect the data never really know what it’s for or how it will be used. Decisions are made on the basis of this “data” far, far away from the collection point. But often the “data” is inaccurate. In one ICDS centre I saw a chart that said one thing (that there was no Grade Three of Four malnutrition in her village) with the worker talking near a child that was almost certainly suffering from Grade Three or Four malnutrition (determined by height to weight ratios). Suffice to say the “data” sometimes has nothing to do with reality and is always an extremely poor representation of reality. Elements of ICDS sit on the ground but it is run out of Flatland. The bureaucrats who run it live in a massive parallel universe of paper and “data”.

Entire projects live and die in Flatland, never really coming to grasp that the real world (or the world of “Space” as Abbot calls it) does not consist of circles and squares, but spheres and cubes, not of statistics and models but people of flesh and blood who have their own beliefs and thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately, armies of governmental, corporate and NGO staff labour in Flatland, dealing not with reality but with a parallel universe of intellectual abstractions; that is, people as categories, often treating development as an engineering problem, sometimes treating it as an abstract systemic problem. Work in Flatland consists of creating cognitive categories and then treating these categories as reality, building an entire world with categories as building blocks. Flatland paradigms are well-suited to commodity-intensive societies, where commoditization of the real allows for the management of the real through abstractions. From time to time, this world of Flatland intersects with the real world, not by design, mostly by accident.

In India, we took participants of our programme out into communities for three nights to engage with the world. We took them to engage their senses directly in the phenomenon of malnutrition (as opposed to the epiphenomenon of malnutrition represented by documents and PowerPoint presentations.) This was a challenging process. Initially, many people objected to this activity. Should we not instead sit in the office and listen to presentations from the experts on malnutrition? Why do we have to go and live in a village without plumbing, without proper amenities? Why can’t we stay in a hotel and drive in every day (in my case the nearest hotel was 2 hours away)? What can we learn there? Why had we not given them a list of questions and then they would simply go and collect the data?

Once the shock of the situation wore off, the group I was with (which included government officials, a medical doctor, two young corporate executives, an NGO worker with impressive academic credentials in nutrition but no experience “in the field” and an activist) generally began appreciating the experience of engaging with real people without any specific data-gathering agenda (or agenda-shaped space, for that matter). Simple engagements revealed complex issues, for example one participant reported that “It was revealed that the Anganwadi (ICDS) worker who herself was illiterate did have the material but didn’t use it out of fear that the kids would tear it all up.” The fact that the worker was illiterate and was worried about losing training material (and so never used it) raises a great many practical questions about the success or failure of nutritional programmes on the ground. If the worker was illiterate then how was she coping with the reporting requirements? If the worker was not using the materials then what was she doing about teaching people about malnutrition?

More than simple insights into the nature of the “system that produces malnutrition” we got a rich, visceral, body-centric insight into the reality of malnutrition–whether we liked it or not. We experienced the heat and the dust and the thirst of malnutrition. Speaking for myself, I felt that until I had lain on a string-cot, parched in the searing afternoon heat, trying to protect my ears and eyes from a dust storm, I did not know what the reality of malnutrition is.

This kind of exposure, unfortunately, is extremely rare in the world of Flatland. Three nights within a community was considered a large investment of time, whereas decades behind a desk is considered acceptable. In my experience, development professionals rarely hang out [iii], pay attention to and make friends with the villagers or communities they are meant to serve. If this happens it is generally an accident, not seen as relevant to the goals of a project. At best they might run a PRA type programme and at worst they might fly in and out, speak some platitudes and roar off in cloud of dust.

As we made our way through our project and the stress of presenting to champions what we had come up with mounted, we retreated further and further into Flatland. Planning actions on paper, creating PowerPoint presentations and so on became more important that anything we had seen, anything that we might feel or the relationships we had built. One champion complained loudly about the difference between talking to the group and reading the document they had prepared: “Who can afford these [commodities]? The group knows this but this paper says nothing.” Intriguingly, Edward Tufte, a fierce critic of PowerPoint makes the following case:

Why should the structure, activity, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Are there worse metaphors? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

The pushy PP style tends to set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience, as the speaker makes power points with hierarchical bullets to passive followers. Such aggressive, stereotyped, over—managed presentations–the Great Leader up on his pedestal–are characteristic of hegemonic [iv] systems and of Conway’s Law[v] again in operation…

The Roman state bolstered its authority and legitimacy with the trappings of ceremony…Power is a far more complex and mysterious quality than any apparently simple manifestations of it would appear. It is as much a matter of impression, of theatre, of persuading those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation. Insofar as power is a matter of presentation, its cultural currency in antiquity (and still today) was the creation, manipulation and display of images. In the propagation of the imperial office, at any rate, art was power.[vi]

In other words, the power dynamics and the hierarchy of large hegemonic bureaucracies are embedded in and particularly well-suited to Flatland tools, particularly PowerPoint. PowerPoint then becomes the language, the iconography, that shapes and moulds thought within Flatland.

As the pressure mounted, we tacitly decided to play by the rules, to collude with the power structures of Flatland by talking to them in the language of Flatland. We were human beings behaving, increasingly as the project went on, like bureaucrats. It would have, perhaps, been more helpful (and required more courage) to the people we wanted to help to be human beings behaving like human beings [vii].

What it means to behave like a human being, however, is becoming harder and harder to grasp. Flatland is not simply manifested in PowerPoint presentations but in our very biology itself. Nikolas Rose in The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century points out a historical flattening of what it means to be human:

The “biology” that came into existence in the nineteenth century was a biology of “depth.” It tried to discover the underlying organic laws that lay behind and determined the functioning of closed living systems. But contemporary biology operates, at least in part, in a “flattened field of open circuits.” The use of visualisation techniques, starting with “X-Rays, through to mammograms, ultrasound, fetal images, and for the brain, EEG traces, PET. SPECT, fMRI scans and many more…” have “rendered the organic interior body visible.” In the interventions then “that proliferate in this flattened world, almost any vital element can, in principle, be freed from its ties to cell, organ, organism, or species, set free to circulate and be combined with any other, provided certain conditions are met. An epistemological change, then, and perhaps also an ontological change is in process.

Rose (referring to Ian Hacking) raises the disturbing prospect that we may have to reassess critiques of Cartesian dualism. Now that “…new surgical techniques enable a person to consciously observe doctors re-engineering their organs in real time, on the operating room monitor, reinforce the idea of an analogue body, with interchangeable parts, distinct from the mind. We are, he suggests, becoming Cartesian—our body is indeed as it was already envisaged by Descartes.” Flatland is not simply a metaphor. It is real.

Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century—a “Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year”—celebrates and advocates for the flattening of the world. The forces that are flattening the world are essentially technological in nature: PowerPoint and screen-based technologies. Friedman argues that “there are hundreds of millions of people who have been left behind by the flattening process or feel overwhelmed by it, some of them have enough access to the flattening tools to use them against the system, not on its behalf…What are the biggest constituencies, forces, or problems impeding this flattening process, and how might we collaborate better to overcome them?” He divides the world into two populations, the flat and those who are, well, unflat—with flat being “good” and “unflat” being “bad”—in the sense of “bad” being characterised by disease, war and general suffering.

The frightening thing about Friedman, is that he has no doubt that the flattening of the world is a good thing and that the world needs to be flattened. The idea that perhaps some people do not want to be flattened is not one that he gives any serious consideration to. The most telling self-portrait of Friedman comes within the first few pages of the book, when he compares himself to Christopher Columbus—who Friedman claims “discovered the world was round” —just as Friedman “discovered” the world is flat. The analogy is telling. Like Columbus, Friedman is essentially on a mission to save and civilize the Other–whereas for Columbus the Other was the Savage, for Friedman the Other is the “Unflat.”

From conception (by a visionary Dutch businessman) to execution (led by a “visionary” non-Indian team, including me), the goals and processes for the project were not set by the people most closely involved in delivering the project or affected by the project. In other words, many of the people involved “on the ground”—the stakeholders, the Indian facilitators, the communities—never had any voice in the conception of the most important parameters of the project. Consequently they never really owned it. When things got hard, they understandably shrugged. Why should they risk and fight for something that never gave them a voice? That they did not conceive? That did not reflect their dreams and aspirations? When they are not being seen as whole people?

Our project became a microcosm of the larger systems that it was attempting to shift. Our goals were not owned by the people that were most affected by them and neither are the MDGs. The voices of the people who, at least in theory, are most affected by the MDGs are nowhere to be found. They have not signed up to the MDGs and for good reason. They are ghosts in the wider UN system and the universe of Flatland.

The authorities (Indian and non-Indian) that conceived and designed the project—within the context of a highly bureaucratized, hierarchical system were all very well intentioned and serious about the project. They were deeply concerned about the status of children. What they and we profoundly failed to understand and internalize was one relatively simple thing. People are capable of extraordinary creativity, courage and determination when they have the agency to set their own path, create their own goals and design their own processes. Goals set far away in foreign countries, processes designed by foreigners, decisions made by technocrats in the centres of power do not start bushfires of creativity and determination. In short, when people have ownership then they are capable of addressing the most complex of challenges.

To continue working in Flatland means that the glory of spheres and cubes, of the human condition, will have been reduced to circles and squares and categories. Why should we accept such a poor view of the world? For whom? Should we not try and wake ourselves from the 2-dimensional dream-state of Flatland? Should we not live in the world of Space? Should we abandon our bodies?

Mere exposure to Space, however, is no inoculation against Flatland. Many “grassroots” NGOs are rushing uncritically to embrace Flatland as a paradigm. A distinction should be made between those activities that promote an accelerated entry into Flatland and those that support individuals and communities to “unplug themselves from consumption” or otherwise promote alternatives to commodity-based, Flatland lifestyles.

So, for

for example, little known Kufunda Learning Village in Zimbabwe supports individuals and communities in building self-reliance, be this in the form of learning how to build compost toilets or learning yoga. On the other hand, the Acumen Fund, hailed as “a fascinating model that’s shaken up philanthropy and investment communities alike” and that “most of their projects deliver stunning, inspiring results.” [i], is a thinly disguised Washington Consensus [ii] vehicle to formalise and commoditise many things that people are normally entitled to get for free (for example, clean water)—the focus on commoditisation accelerates our collective entry into Flatland. While Kufunda promotes a self-reliance that means people are able to do things for themselves, without having to pay for professional services in order to live, Acumen promotes the opposite of self-reliance, it promotes an external reliance on professional services, on money, on the market, in order for communities to cope with their situation

In their rush to join the development game, countless NGOs are formalising, attempting to commoditise and scale their work. In doing so, they unwitting forge a Faustian pact with markets that increasingly rely on Flatland paradigms (and hence tools) for their functioning. This is, in part, a response to a donor-driven agenda and the particular mindsets that exist within the world of philanthropy. When the Gates Foundation pours money into public healthcare, they demand certain accountabilities and more importantly they financially reward certain behaviour and “punish” others. Other organisations, such as Ashoka, who support individual entrepreneurs, demand that the ideas they support are “nationally scalable.” This then promotes, or at least risks promoting, a certain abstraction, a certain flattening of activities, an increasing shift of focus from embodied activities to Flatland activities that then serve re-enforce Flatland thinking in a somewhat Pavlovian manner.

This rush towards Flatland, and in particular Flatland planning, results in what James C. Scott calls “thin simplifications.” He points out:

…the necessarily thin, schematic model of social organization and production animating the planning was inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social order. By themselves, the simplified rules can never generate a functional community, city, or an economy. Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.

In trying to understand the spread of the formal economy and its effects, Ivan Illich[x] examined activities that take place outside the formal economy, all those “informal” processes that simply are not measured, ranked, assessed or commodified. This led him to make a distinction between the “shadow economy” and the “vernacular,” both of which lie outside the formal economy. He explains,

We need a simple adjective to name those acts of competence, lust, or concern that we want to defend from measurement or manipulation by Chicago Boys and Socialist Commissars. We need a simple straightforward word to designate the activities of people when they are “not motivated by thoughts of exchange, a word that denotes autonomous, non—market—related actions through which people satisfy everyday needs–the actins which by their own nature escape bureaucratic control…[and] that we want to defend from measurement or manipulation…The term must be broad enough to fit the preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth and recreation, without implying either a privatized activity…a hobby or an irrational and primitive procedure.

Illich argues that development results in the destruction of the vernacular realm (different words have been deployed to describe this phenomenon). Scott uses the word “metis” to refer to the “practical skills, variously known as know-how, knack…” that lie in the vernacular realm, the Danish professor Bent Flyvberg uses the word “phronesis” (“practical wisdom”) to describe the same thing—both metis and phronesis, however, belong to the vernacular. Scott makes the case that “the destruction of metis and its replacement by standardized forms legible only from the center is virtually inscribed in the activities of both the state and large-scale bureaucratic capitalism.” However, Scott points out that he is not arguing against “[high] modernism, state simplifications…per se” but that he believes, “what has proved to be truly dangerous to us and our environment, I think, is the combination of the universalist pretensions of epistemic knowledge and authoritarian social engineering.”

The loss of vernacular culture, of practical wisdom, opens up communities and individuals to the dangers of authoritarian social engineering. It renders them legible, flat, like a map, for anyone with the power to do so to walk over them. It shifts communities from being able to fend for themselves to being reliant on either governmental services, handouts or brutal market forces. These are, in effect, the unintended consequences of a historically blind embrace of Flatland approaches [xi].

Unfortunately, engagement with Space is not what modern educational institutions train us for. It is possible to get a graduate degree in nutrition without ever seeing malnutrition or even practicing good nutrition yourself. Nutrition has been disconnected from the body. Our schools and our universities train us to deal with epiphenomena; with charts, with PowerPoint, with numbers, with words, with images—with Flatland. I am starting to see how this training re-enforces the power structures and dynamics of hegemonic systems of control. Fortunately, these systems of control will never really succeed at forcing people to own goals that are alien to them. Yet they continue trying, spending billions in the process[xii] and probably failing to shift situations that are, to put it mildly, deeply unjust. If we are genuinely interested in change then we will muster up the courage to question our own systems and ask ourselves why we have retreated into the paucity of Flatland [xiii].

The question of why we, and I in particular, retreated into Flatland is a question I continue to carry with me and puzzle over. Yeats’ question, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” raises the question for me of what a retreat into Flatland will mean, of what beast will be born? What happens when we abandon our bodies, when we become disembodied people? What are we giving up? It raises questions of courage and of fear, of power and powerlessness, of hope and hopelessness. As I contemplate these questions I feel a chill running down my spine, I feel a dull fear in the pit of my stomach. What are we giving up here? What is the cost?

As long as development projects and efforts remain housed squarely within institutions [xiv], bound by the myriad of rules and constraints that govern institutions, they will continue to generate disembodied people, ghosts. Somehow, as we witness the pain of malnutrition (or AIDS or any other countless human sufferings) we must figure out how to bring our very human response back into our bodies, into our hearts and guts. We must figure out what a human, embodied response looks like, rather than a disembodied, institutional response [xv]. We must figure out how to meet human beings as human beings, as friends, not as clients or statistics. How do we put our bodies back into the suffering we witness? What, in other words, does a response to human suffering characterised by “bodily depth” look like?

It has become clearer and clearer to me that the work I am engaged in involves building our capacities to cope with phenomena—that is, the mess of the world, “the swamp,” the heat, the smell, the emotionality, the conflict and all the things that come from engaging as whole people with whole people. This means leaving our desks, holding our models lightly and engaging our senses. The reward being work that is deeply rooted in the complexity of the world, owned by the people who are affected by them instead of opaque, unaccountable agencies.

The tragedy of our project in India is not simply that it failed in any conventional sense (we simply can’t tell yet), but rather that it points us to a simultaneously more disturbing and hopeful trajectory of failure. The greater tragedy is that we abandoned the phenomenological foundations that we started with and instead embraced Flatland as a paradigm, as a way of engaging with the world. This failure, while tragic, should not necessarily be cause for despair. While my own limited perspective leaves me wondering if the work we did in India will not simply result in further destruction of vernacular culture, I put my faith in my own limited vision and not knowing. As long as people continue to strive there is hope. It has only been eighteen months or so since we did our work in India. This is an incredibly short amount of time for any seeds to take root and grow, for individuals that continue to work within the project to learn and grow.

On the other hand, the tragedy of the MDGs is not that they won’t be met. Rather it’s that so many people with eyes and ears, with the senses to perceive and engage in the world, will have to dim their perceptions in order to operate in Flatland and continue to campaign strongly for others to do the same, that so many people are willing to become disembodied people, that so many people will live their lives,“ like a pressed flower in the pages of a book.”

Within its highly institutionalised context, our experiences hint at a potentially profound transformation in the nature of power. We find ourselves confronting the growing powerlessness of our institutions, both public [xvi] and private [xvii], to tackle our most complex challenges. Instead of despairing, we might ponder, what human freedoms might flower [xviii] as a result of this growing powerlessness? Sennet comments at the end of his book, “Perhaps, indeed, revolt against this enfeebled culture will constitute our next fresh page.”

***

***

Zaid Hassan has been working closely with Pioneers of Change on communications and documenting learning experiences since 1999. Zaid also works for Genron Consulting in accelerating learning and the U Process. He currently lives in London.