Terry Pratchett : mackenzian

The PG version of one of my favorite pieces of life advice is “Never annoy the secretary.”

It’s from the days when office administrators and managers were rather known as “secretaries,” and hapless visitors underestimated just how essential these staff members were to the smooth functioning of the office. Distracted by the glitter and shine of class, rank, and conventional authority, someone might learn how easily paperwork can go astray, how variably messages can reach their intended recipients if left unshepherded, and how important it is to acknowledge others’ full humanity no matter where they sit around the organizational table.

The recent 1960s nostalgic series Mad Men includes several moments where the secretarial pool exercises its power from below over executives—almost all men—who assume that their formal titles and conventional authority mean that what actually happens in their world is up to them.

I’ve been fascinated by these power dynamics for years. Perhaps what started my curiosity was watching majority-female congregations being run by men who kept voting to exclude women from the highest formal roles in their tradition. Yet major actions in those congregations didn’t happen without the buy-in of the older women in the community, some of whom were eventually endorsed as elders.

Native people are maintaining their socio-political and spiritual resistance to the powers that have been destroying them since the 15th Century. Women are marching, and scientists and LGBTQ people now plan to do the same. In this climate, business as usual seems impossible because those without conventional power are simply too fed up to permit it.

The national park service social media teams (and those writing in their name), and EPA staff with them, are all responding to new White House restrictions with much more passion and concern than I would have predicted even a week ago. And, even if the probabilities aren’t ours, I can’t help but hope that this energy means that ordinary people “several levels down” from the new president and his administration are about to get good things done.

"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage." —Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad — From the writing of British satirist Terry Pratchett.

Terry Pratchett was a prolific English writer and a keen observer of social dynamics. His major work, the Discworld novel series, explored human nature and sociology through the eyes of marginal social figures: librarians, trainee magicians, elderly country witches and wise women, and even DEATH HIMSELF. (The all-caps in the previous sentence are entirely appropriate in the context of the books!)

In the 1991 book Witches Abroad, one of the elder women argues with a sister about the most appropriate way to use their gifts. Granny Weatherwax insists that they should not use their powers to dominate, coerce, or control other people: intentions to benefit others don’t wipe out people’s agency over their own lives.

This is a lesson that people in any discipline might learn, but the international development community has become especially sensitive to it over the last few years with the rise of “voluntourism”—structured trips that combine vacations, international aid, and volunteer or low-wage service, but often allow for limited engagement with the complexities of local culture or the problems that volun-tourists hope to resolve.

In January, Courtney Martin wrote about idealistic youths’ expectations of faraway Others and their problems for Medium’s The Development Set vertical. (She later republished the essay in the Guardian.)

The rise of the social entrepreneurship field in the last few decades has sent countless young people packing across continents… And, to be sure, a lot of those grads are doing powerful work.

But a lot of them, let’s be real, are not. They’re making big mistakes — both operationally and culturally — in countries they aren’t familiar with. They’re solving problems for people, rather than with, replicating many of the mistakes that the world’s largest development agencies make on a much smaller scale. They drop technology without having a training or maintenance plan in place, or try to shift cultural norms without culturally appropriate educational materials or trusted messengers. Or they’re spending the majority of their days speaking about the work on the conference circuit, rather than actually doing it.” —Courtney Martin

Along with the question of these trips’ impact on the people who go is how they impact the communities who host. Communities all around the world are receiving idealists and ideologues who want to change the world not with their hosts but for them.

The challenge for all of us who want a better world is that, just as Granny Weatherwax says, we “can’t go around building a better world for people.” Sometimes good work means laying aside our visions for others and choosing instead to support their materialization of the worlds that they imagine for themselves.

Even our prayers must honor others’ agency: we can’t strong-arm the emergence of the good, but we can choose to revise our common stories together.

Read more: Check out other comments on voluntourism and humility compiled by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.