Eleemosynary, My Dear Watson

 

 

Bestowing goodness and generosity

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If you're living in or visiting Ho Chi Minh City you’ve likely noticed the evolution of the Pullman Saigon Centre Hotel going up in the western end of District 1. George Pullman was a Victorian industrialist who in the mid-19th century invented the railway sleeping car. It was in essence putting lavish hotels on rails. George fancied himself a benevolent man to boot, building his workers a 'company town' just outside of Chicago, unsurprisingly named Pullman. He provided his workers with what he took to be all the necessities of life—a park, school, gymnasium, library, company store and of course, company housing.

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During the Depression of 1893, Pullman cut wages because of a slump in passenger traffic and declining demand for new railway cars. But he refused to cut the company town rents or food prices. The workers started rioting and went on a strike that spread nationally in the summer of 1894. Pullman was flabbergasted his workers could show such ingratitude, given all he had done for them. Nearly 100 people were killed or injured that long hot summer.

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The United States government, in an act of contrition for sending in the Army to smash the strike and quell the rioting, inaugurated Labor Day shortly thereafter.

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Pullman, like a modern day Lear (see also activist Jane Addams’ scathing 1912 essay of the same name), exercised a self-glorifying, but blind, altruism based on his wishes and interests. And, like Lear dismissing his daughter Cordelia, he ignored one of the most crucial needs we all have—the need for autonomy.

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They near burned that model town down to the ground.

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This is why community assistance packaged as benevolent aid doesn’t help people help themselves and in Pullman’s case, it led from resentment to open hostility, which naturally is bewildering to those who derive moral gratification from 'doing good' and making others 'happy'. If it's not self-directed then capacity Put another way, where was the self-directed capacity development of the rail car workers?

 

Another Victorian social activist, Charles Dickens, writing in Bleak House called it 'rapacious benevolence'. Dickens was ruefully acknowledging the need many have to exert control over others, while still claiming they are indeed building the capacity of the person they're 'helping' to self-direct their own lives.

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Someone I used to work with was adamant that her previous gender and livelihood activities in Latin America were 'absolutely' suitable for implementation elsewhere because 'poor women pretty much face the same challenges everywhere'. Catch the whiff of what Dickens' was mocking?

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Avoiding conflict in our own projects, programs and communities must be based on ending rapacious benevolence or eleemosynary activities, those dependent on charity and good intentions. How?

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For the economist E.F. Schumacher the answer was simple. “Find out what the people are trying to do,” he said, “and help them to do it better.” Developmental change cannot be bought and handed out. It has to come from the communities themselves. Like a friend or lover, husband or wife, kid or colleague, we all want to be listened to and really heard. And so do marginalized populations since they typically are not given a voice. So, it’s about listening. It’s that elementary, my dear Watson, it really is.

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Peace.

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Photo: Stephen Radford / unsplash.com 

 

This article originally appeared in Word Vietnam magazine and has been adapted.