Scholar-at-large
@kfitz I wonder about that factors that feed into your conclusion: "Generosity becomes ruthlessly pragmatic, a means of ensuring that we all thrive." I wonder about the need for transparency and full cost accounting in economic reporting -- is there a certain openness of information required to achieve collective caring ?
Generosity and Pragmatism
I'm haunted by a point that Chachra makes near the end of How Infrastructure Works. "For wealthy, developed countries that benefited from extractive or settler colonialism," she notes, "dedicating resources to a global technological transformation might be seen as altruism, although 'reparations' would be more accurate. It's also ruthless, selfish pragmatism, because the single best way to safeguard their way of life is to ensure that everyone has access to it" (278). I've never come across the argument framed in quite this way, but it resonates deeply with something I've thought several times on listening to racist relatives fret about immigration: if you genuinely want fewer people to feel the need to come here, focus on making there not just survivable but genuinely livable, with all of the quality of life of here. Refusing to contemplate that is evidence not just of wanting to protect what we have, but of wanting to ensure that others don't -- preserving hierarchy as integral to our way of life. And it's part and parcel of an assumption that we live in a world ruled by scarcity, in which you can only get something by taking it from me. If, as Chachra urges, we can shift our ways of thinking from the individual to the collective, and our mindset from one of scarcity to abundance, caring for others becomes a crucial component of caring for ourselves. Generosity becomes ruthlessly pragmatic, a means of ensuring that we all thrive.
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