Weekly Picks – July 21, 2024

Credit (left to right): Adrià Fruitós; Remy Steinegger/ Wikimedia; Harland Miller, Courtesy of White Cube Gallery; Staffan Widstrand/ Rewilding Europe

This week’s collection:

Further reading on Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation, and broader issues with billionaire-led philanthropic endeavors (the first three pieces are by Tim Schwab, who is quoted in the article above):

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. Literature Without Literature

“Among publishers, editors, scholars, critics, and even writers themselves, the stories we tell about literature are more and more stories of the economy of prestige, of one generation’s preferences righteously overturning those of its predecessors. Inside the academy, professors attribute great power to the publishing industry and to creative-writing programs. The syllabi of university courses in literature are yielded to student preferences, redefining the objects of literary study as matters of consumer choice rather than recognizable aesthetic criteria. Outside the academy, critics begin to stake their worth on the size and devotion of their audiences. And in the journalistic sphere, two opposing modes have emerged: that of therapeutic literary careerism, on the one hand, as writers make public confessions about their struggles to survive in comfort as authors; and that of accusatory literary consumerism, on the other, as critics express dissatisfaction not with books themselves but with the ways books are marketed, usually to somebody else, somebody they don’t like very much, such as a stepparent or a person they kissed a few too many times and would rather forget.

These warped views of literature reflect a shared tendency to explain art with minimal reference to the art itself. Novels are instead considered as commodities and demographic specimens, the products of structures, systems, and historical forces. They become expressions of brands, their authors threadbare entrepreneurs. Fiction recedes behind the chatter it generates and is judged according not to its intrinsic qualities but to the sort of reader whose existence it implies. Authors are turned into role models and style icons, mythologized for their virtues, and crucified for their sins. The numbers, as if they have meaning, are counted. The dream is of literature that can be quantified rather than read.

. . .

McGurl writes that ‘there is no way for a literary scholar, these days, to engage in strenuous aesthetic appreciation without sounding goofily anachronistic’. What he means can be grasped in John Guillory’s Professing Criticism. Taking the long view, Guillory tells the story of the emergence of literary criticism as a discipline embedded in the university after a long history of competing practices dating back to the eighteenth century and before: philology, belles-lettres, and scholarly literary history. He presents a picture of a discipline that was consolidated on campuses in the middle of the twentieth century on a par with the sciences at the cost of giving up its public role in the shaping of society, a task literary critics had long assumed as an adjunct to their popular expressions of judgment and taste.”

2. How Europe’s only Indigenous group is inspiring a greener Christianity

“In Arctic Norway, among the Indigenous Sámi people, there is a custom: When cutting down a tree, tap its trunk three times.

On the one hand, it’s simply practical advice: Only old, dead trees will ring hollow. Test the trunk, and you’ll know which trees are young and healthy, and leave them more time to grow.

But when Tore Johnsen, a Lutheran priest researching the spiritual customs of the Sámi, asked for an explanation, he heard the practice held another meaning: It was, also, a threefold blessing — a knock for the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The Sámi are Europe’s only recognized Indigenous group, occupying a broad homeland that spans Arctic Europe from Norway to Russia. For millennia before the arrival of Christian missionaries, Johnsen found, the rites and rituals of Sámi communities helped sustain a distinctive worldview that emphasized respectful equilibrium with the natural world.

“Sámi traditions and our practices all have to do with collaboration — with the place, with animals, with everything that grows,” said Lovisa Mienna Sjöberg, a Sámi theologian at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Norway. “You should not take more than is your part to take.”

But more than 600 years after their first encounters with missionaries, Sámi communities are also some of northern Europe’s most devoutly Christian. Mixing Indigenous cosmology and ethics with Christian stories, imagery and theology, the Sámi have, over centuries, evolved a multilayered faith of their own, often in the face of bitter oppression and persecution by puritan churches and state authorities.

“Through the ages, it became something that you think you need to hide, a separate hidden culture — outside the church, but from a Sámi perspective, not opposed to it,” said Jorunn Jernsletten, a senior curator at the Varanger Sámi Museum.

Now, those same churches are hoping to find inspiration in Sámi theology for addressing the climate crisis, throwing off old attitudes about human dominion over nature, and even joining the Sámi in protesting the destruction of their sacred landscapes.”

3. How Microfinance Became the ‘It’ Development Program

“Part of the allure of Yunus’s story—the origin story, for many, of microfinance itself—is the supposed singularity of his ingenuity. As he writes in Banker to the Poor and has mentioned innumerable times before and since, his decision to give $27 to 42 women was inspired by a mix of critical observation, empathy, and creativity unique to him: Only he, the son of a successful entrepreneur—someone trained in economics in the capitalist West but whose true north was his mother’s devotion to the poor, and who had his eyes opened to the harsh reality of the country he loved during the early 1970s famine—could have imagined such a solution to poverty. Only he could have “invented” microfinance.

It’s a compelling argument. Certainly Yunus has done more to proselytize the poverty-fighting power of small loans than anyone else. For many of us, if we know anything about it, the idea of microcredit conjures up an image of Yunus’s smiling face. He’s undoubtedly the icon of the idea. But the truth is that he didn’t come up with the idea alone—nor was he the sole force behind its wildfire spread.

While Yunus was tinkering with tiny loans in Jobra, several other small-scale lending programs were starting in other parts of the world, from Latin America to Indonesia. Their growth reflected a larger shift that was taking place alongside anti-colonial independence movements around the world—away from top-down, big-ticket, Western-led development programs and toward grassroots efforts that repudiated Western models. Anti-colonial thinkers like the Guyanese writer Walter Rodney, the author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, explicitly rejected the economic model put forward by Europe and America, which Rodney saw as a kind of overdevelopment, a grotesque excess that newly independent nations shouldn’t emulate (he suggested that the reason Guyana was “underdeveloped” was the centuries of theft by Britain). At the same time, a variety of other anti-colonial leaders and movements were advancing potent alternatives to interventionist Western programs, including Mahatma Gandhi and his movement for Indian self-sufficiency; the Black Panthers, who spearheaded free breakfast programs and other mutual aid efforts; and Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and then president of Ghana, who championed the idea that Africa’s economic and political development should be left up to Africans. One Bangladeshi organization described the skepticism toward outside intervention and the turn to grassroots, bottom-up development this way: “Man must be given the opportunity to think for himself, speak for himself, work for himself and even make mistakes for himself.”

The ineptitude of the growing numbers of outside development projects only strengthened their case. There were reports from many countries—Bangladesh, India, Mexico, and others—of communities flooded by new dams and displaced by new roads; of half-built schools without textbooks and clinics without medicine; of waste, mismanagement, nepotism; of money going to the already enriched—all of which seemed even more unfortunate considering how much debt poor countries were taking on to fund them. Independence and post-independence leaders expressed indignation at having to whittle down already limited budgets to pay off foreign loans that had done little to benefit their countries in the first place. In the 1980s, Thomas Sankara, the Marxist-Leninist and Pan-Africanist president of Burkina Faso, observed, “The origins of the debt date back to the origins of colonialism. Those who lent us the money, they are the ones who colonized us. They are the same people who managed our states and our economies. It was the colonizers who led Africa to contract loans with creditors of the North…. We are strangers to this debt. Therefore we cannot repay it.” Julius Nyerere, the president of Tanzania from 1964 to 1985, implored the country’s creditors: “Must we starve our children to pay our debts?”

By the last third of the 20th century, there was a prevailing sense that expensive, top-down development projects had failed. Many skeptics, from Accra to Mexico City to the corridors of Washington, DC, were gravitating toward a new approach—slow and small, with the poorest in mind.”

4. To a Starving Orphan Who Died Alone in Rubble

“The little boy wailed at night in the ward, sometimes nearly all night, keeping us all awake. Only the deep voice of our eldest resident, a boy of 13, had any hope of calming him in his misery, his despair, and what seemed to him his complete separation from his parents, although they drove 100 miles a day every day to see him in the summer of 1953 during the last worldwide polio epidemic before the Salk vaccine arrived and soon caused people in the wealthier nations to forget polio entirely.

“But don’t they see,” he seemed to say through his sobs, “that I need them here now, in the night, when I am all alone in the dark and scared?”

As I remember it, they let his parents into the ward. The rest of us visited our parents through the blue tinted, south facing windows. Sometimes, my father, a doctor, came in bearing new comic books for one and all. I was 10. You cannot imagine how important the touch of a parent is to a child until you are without it and you saw the envy in the eyes of your fellow patients, who sometimes went for more than a year without it.

We didn’t know until that night that the little boy, only 4, was sobbing out his life, his whole, short life.

I am obsessed with telling this tale. It is my small way in my small life to relate to the figure Lancet, the British medical journal, came up with this week, of 186,000 dead in Gaza, not the 40,000 generally spoken of. Numbers mean so little these days that it means even less to say how little they mean. How does a number, any number, express the reality of the death of a child or several or many or many more every day?”

5. Philanthropy’s Power Brokers

““We’ve been made to understand that Bill Gates is a philanthropist,” writes Tim Schwab after reporting on the Gates Foundation for years, “when he is, in fact, a power broker.” The allusion to Robert Caro’s massive volume on Robert Moses’s reign in New York City’s municipal governance, which sought to explain how an unelected man in an ostensibly democratic polity could amass so much influence, is likely no coincidence. The Gates Foundation is the wealthiest nonprofit in the United States. It’s the second-largest funder of the World Health Organization (after the US government), and it operates as a powerful and influential industry titan. It funds, for example, more malaria research than the entire pharmaceutical industry. As an individual, Bill is also the US’s largest landowner. When he and his then-wife, Melinda, announced their divorce in 2021, it was no exaggeration to call it an event with geopolitical ramifications.

The broad contours of Bill and Melinda Gates’ trajectory are by now familiar. As the story goes, Bill rode the wave of innovation in information and communications technology in the late 20th century, cofounding Microsoft and becoming the world’s richest man. Then, he decided with Melinda to change course, pledging to eventually give all their wealth away by forming the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since then, the Gateses have been most comfortable in the future tense, with visions, goals, and proclamations of proposed distributions of their vast fortune. In the present, the numbers remain so large as to feel abstract. As of 2022, the Gateses have given their foundation $59 billion, with another $36 billion coming from Warren Buffett, leaving it with an endowment of $67 billion and an annual budget of around $8.3 billion.

On May 13, 2024, Melinda Gates announced her departure, along with $12.5 billion, from the organization that will be known moving forward simply as “the Gates Foundation.” With the foundation in transition, the time is ripe to take stock of the role it played in the world during its first quarter century. Two new books—Tim Schwab’s The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire and Amy Schiller’s The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It—offer some of the most extensive critical assessments yet of the Gates Foundation’s philosophy and the political implications of the mammoth power it has grown to wield over the lives of everyday people across the globe.”