PHA-Exchange> Food for a troubled set of thoughts (3)

[Claudio]

From: "Matt Anderson" <bronxdoc at gmail.com>

The questions you are asking reflect debates that go back to the 
Enlightenment.  Do ideas change the world?  Or does the world need to
change in order to influence ideas?

 I think that your questions pose a problem faced (and debated) by social 
reformers for some time.  How and when do moral
arguments become political forces?

 It was the naive belief, particularly pre French revolution, that it was 
simply enough to "enlighten" people regarding how things should be done and 
social reform would follow from this enlightenment.  For
example, Jefrey Sachs thinks that extreme poverty can be eliminated and that 
it is the moral mission of our generation to do it.  Now that the MDG are 
clearly not working, he is creating 10 model villages in Africa to show how 
his ideas are practical so that others will follow him. This strain of 
thinking is generally considered utopian, has a  long history, and is not 
particularly productive.  But a careful
critique of this type of thinking is useful to point out precisely its 
weaknesses and that critique can profitably draw on the previous
critique of prior Utopians.  In fact someone has written a book comparing 
side-by-side the  ideas of Sachs with those of Robert
Lawrence, an American utopian from the mid 19th century.

 To what extent does a Human Rights approach suffer from similar defects? 
This is the question that I think you were formulating in your many 
questions and I was just suggesting that a historical perspective might be 
useful.