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CENTRAL AMERICA
Weve identified four horsemen galloping through Central America in these terrible neoliberal times. They cause change, development and new identities. Weve already looked at drug traffickers and NGOs; now its the Neo-Pentecostal evangelical churches. But before following them on their wild crusade, we need to reflect on the syncretism theyve built. Its based on two harmful nutrients: management culture and positive thinking.
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he radio announcers persuasive voice seductively whispers, Need a miracle? Come and ask Jesus for your miracle. An energetic masculine voice then adds, This young woman was suffering from kidney failure, followed by a remorseful female one: My skin started to regenerate... Pastor Cash Luna, leader of the House of God in Guatemala, offered miracles on the nights of September 17 and 18, 2011, in the Dallas-Fort Worth American Airlines Center in Texas. Jesus Christ did the inviting and those blessed with enough good fortune paid for it. Miracles and miracle workers arent the post-modern novelty; thats provided by the forms currently adopted in Central America by the big gurus who oil the systems cogs
and ensure that the wealth flows, depositing fortunes for their own plump bellies and the dilated pockets of the big companies. They appeal to the same mechanism as the secular versions: the psychotic desire to see reality spiced up. The secular exploitation of this appetite appears daily on television screens: Will this be the love of your life? Do you want to be sure before taking this great step? Send WEDDING to 2525. Send GRIM REAPER to know when and how youre going to die. Send LUCK to obtain the winning lottery number. How many take the bait? Abracadabra: the anxieties and uncertainties of post-modernity can be dissolved by magic words, by prophetic advice sent to your cell phone or
43 may 2012
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by a visit to a famous conference room or church. The one sure result is millions in the pockets of the telephone companies, swindlers, airlines, hotels and other indirect beneficiaries. Both the religious and secular versions of positive thinking have expanded their influence and accentuated their role as accelerator of Christian capitalism and its mega-businesses.
its own. Its a vital and organic process, similar to the one involving food, which, no matter how diverse it may be, is injected and absorbed into the system of human life. But harmful foods are also ingested as are others that produce excreta.
After drug traffickers and NGOs, the Neo-Pentacostal churches are the third horsemen that deserves attention, due not to their large albeit not yet massive numbers, but rather to their influence and efficacy, their social impact and their capacity to leave their mark on the new map of power in early 21st century Central America
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The key to true syncretism lies in a religions incarnation in the most diverse cultures without losing its identity
Christians austere customs coincided with those of the Stoics. Christianity was open to all, including slaves. The Pauline slogan of being all things to all men had been applied effectively and gave generous fruits.
provinces invented by Emperor Diocletian (244-311)as its administrative units. To improve tax collection, Diocletian doubled the number of Roman provinces from 50 to almost 100 and grouped them into 12 dioceses, each governed by an official called a vicarius, another thing Christianity inherited from the Romans.
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basic core of the Christian faith takes form in the symbolic framework of another culture. For Boff, this supposes a conversion in the cultures nucleus, to the point of ceasing to be what it was and becoming instead an expression of the Christian faith, which is impossible without conversion. If the contrary takes place, the Christian identity will have been corrupted and absorbed by the identity of the culture with which it has come into contact. If, as appears to have happened in Brazil with the Yoruba religion, the other cultural tradition produces a syncretism using elements of the Christian tradition, then we have a Yoruba syncretism, not a Christian one. This criterion presents us with a very tough landscape because theres not a single Christian church. Even within Catholicism, despite the existence of dogmas and an official doctrine, theres no unanimity over the definition of what is essentially Christian. So how do we know if a syncretism is healthy or harmful from the perspective of the Christian tradition and its strategy of permanence? Even without completely clearing up this unknown factor, the criterion of the betrayal of the essence of Christianity has the value of signaling that each process of syncretism can go in at least as many directions as there are intervening cultural tendencies. And contrary to popular belief and plain intuition, the shark doesnt always swallow the sardine: the most callow, emotional and minority religious tradition can win the day over the most ancient, wise and massive one. Lets take a look at whats happening with the new syncretisms taking place in the Central American countries, because such processes arent a thing of the past. In a way thats just as dramatic and gradual as in ancient Rome, they are happening today in the new Romethe United States and in the peripheral provinces that we Central American Thumbelinas represent.
proof that the language of managers has become the lingua franca of the professional discourse of development cooperation, the organization and accreditation of universities, reflection on politics and alsothe most novel of noveltiesreligious discourse. Ive taken the term from an Anglo-Saxon source. In an article on NGOs, British anthropologist David Lewis referred to managerialism when denouncing the strong emphasis on merely management issues in the form of managerialist language. He revealed the concentration of issues such as organizational strengthening, capacity building, strategic planning and best practices based on a language that pays no attention to theoretical density applied to the management science of NGOs and aimed at doing things in the cheapest, best and quickest way possible, just like any business. Lewis stresses the influence of managerialism in the literature on and by NGOs.
Managerialism is proof that the language of managers has become the lingua franca of the professional discourse of development cooperation, the organization and accreditation of universities, reflection on politics and alsothe most novel of novelties religious discourse
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benefit. The virtues become techniques that can be acquired through training. Following this thread leads to the ball of yarn that is the funding of strategies. In this sense, the problems and solutions of society and the economy find their most polished expression in the financial worlds objects, concepts and methods. If theres corruption, the solution lies in the famous concept of accountability. On the field of play, that reductionism means that proposals must be formulated in terms that are mathematizable, quantifiable money-wise, procedural and/or expressible in a plan with objectives, activities, goals and success indicators. The managersoften business administration professionalsare strategists who design roadmaps, advise the disoriented and, like Don Quijote, roam the world, setting wrongs right, redressing injuries and protecting maiden businesses.
The current NGO reductionism means that proposals must be formulated in terms that are mathematizable, quantifiable money-wise, procedural and/or expressible in a plan with objectives, activities, goals and success indicators
a context in which the State and society have declined as sources of legitimacy, powerwhich remains unauditable legitimizes itself through rituals of control. The Audit Society stresses the dysfunctional consequences that audits generate among the bodies audited, due to their limited possibilities and the reductionism that perverts them. This is perceptible when, for example, evaluationswhich should assess the relationship between the changes observed and what was programmedare reduced to audits, which are incapable of assessing all the changes and often concentrate on dogmalike rules and procedures that imitate rituals. British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern argued that while the practice of audits tends to appear as an inevitable element of bureaucratic processes, looking at it in perspective shows us its contours as a distinct cultural artifact and its character as an instrument of neoliberalism. An old name is used for a new phenomenon: accountability. It doesnt matter what accountability used to be: theres a new consensus about what constitute good practices and the need to achieve economic efficiency. Only a determined set of procedures which Power and Strathern refer to as ritualscan measure that efficiency and adaptation of practices. Only certain operations count. This is how the financial and the moral meet in one turn of the century rendering of accountability, says Strathern, in a process thats molding culture: theres an emergenceand predominanceof socially plausible ways and modes of assessing the processes. In this favorable context, the concept of auditing leaped from the level of finances to all of the stages and is now synonymous with all evaluations and measures. Both professionals and the uninitiated are becoming devotees of implementation. And the language of the managers is talked and listened to on the left, right and center of the political spectrum as the language of standardization and organization. These practices and that language determine the flow of resources and appear crucial to business credibility.
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events preceded, produced, compensated for or replaced the real events. Face value was superimposed over real value. Now, however, managers are the new priestly class and accountants their acolytesthat divides businesses, people and countries into solvent and insolvent, deficitmaking and surplus-creating, precarious or consolidated, profitable or impoundable, efficient or supernumerary. Their verification rituals can redeem or excommunicate. If the only things that exist for the legal pen-pushers are what can be classified and regulated, all that counts for the managers is what can be counted.
pointed out, The primary data, to which the interpretation of historical objects goes back, are not data of experiment and measurement but unities of meaning. If we dont attend to the world of meanings, to the production of meaning and therefore to experiences as the essence of what is human, social constructions are incomprehensible. In managerial analyses, human events and slip-ups lack any meaning. They are errors of calculation, accidents, collateral damage They end up in the black boxes of accountancy. Migrations, while experienced by millions of Central Americans, were negligible as a social event for the macro-economists who calculate the national accounts. For years they tossed migrants remittances into the category of errors and omissions. That was until the error grew to such an extent that it exceeded the main export categories, foreign investment, international finance institution loans and international donations. The world of experiences has to guide the administrative space, not the other way round. The administrative arena is a fragment of the world of experiences, yet there is no space for that world of experiences in theintendedmanagement universe, savein a caricature-like wayin the millions of recipe books on business leadership and personnel management, which is an area where managerialism and positive thinking intersect. There are no great discourses to transmit in managerial literature. Its nothing more than a host of recipes. Technology has been converted into doctrine. Apparently there is no imago figurata other than the calculation protocols, the formats, the sequence of steps, the formulas. The dogmas are procedures. But for the same reason, this new modality of indoctrination is more penetrating and persistent; the concealed catechesis makes inroads with
In its desire to legitimize itself as a scientific authority, a managerial technocracy that concerns itself with essentially social matters reduces experiences to mere digits, statements, variables and other abstractions from which the world of life escapes
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unprepared subjects. The field is free of scrub, clean for inoculating value systems. No school of cadres has had such effective prior recruiting work, such customary training sessions, such a-critical students or so many pro bono multipliers. But then, what criticism could be made if there are no theories to refute?
The priests who talked of social justice in the eighties are now up to date and preaching the gospel of social management. Those who embodied the preferential option for the poor now negotiate business social responsibility
Theres no longer a search for meaning, just logical frameworks and SWOTs
Philosopher Max Horkheimer observed that the triumph of instrumental reason meant the reduction of reason to its operational dimension: calculating probabilities and determining the right means for achieving a given end. From the point of view of this kind of reason, it doesnt make sense to discuss the rational preeminence of one end over another. The original task of reason, before being reduced to mediating between means and ends, was precisely to understand and determine the ends. Bourgeois tolerance, an extremely ambiguous concept, assumes freedom from dogmatic authority, but also a neutral attitude toward any spiritual content, which is thus surrendered to relativism. Formalized reason, the intermediary between ends and means, is profoundly relativist. Having its autonomy taken away, reason degenerates into a mere instrument. Its unrelatedness to content is played up and its operational value is lauded: Its operational value, its role in the domination of men and nature, has been made the sole criterion, explained Horkheimer. Any use transcending auxiliary, technical summarization of factual data has been eliminated as a last trace of superstition. Concepts have become streamlined, rationalized, labor-saving devices. It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedulein short, made part and parcel of production. When this current was becoming alarmingly massive
but still atypical, Horkheimer considered that the search for sense was disappearing in the administered worldwed call it managed today. Philosophy and rigorous reflection were tending to disappear and could come to be considered things for children. In the new instrumental/managerial thinking the instrument becomes the goal; technology and procedures replace doctrine; and the preacher/manager replaces the preacher/theologian and philosopher in the task of explaining the world and texts. The manager supplants the lawyer, the accountant the sociologist, and the businessperson the knight errant. Logical frameworks and SWOT (Successes, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analyses have replaced current, structural, semiotic, historical and folkloric analyses or any other label that got slapped on analyses before the management era. The priests who talked of social justice in the eighties are now up to date and preaching the gospel of social management. Those who embodied the preferential option for the poor now negotiate business social responsibility. Sermons, which once aimed to produce a hermeneutical exercise to penetrate and illuminate the meaning of life, history and the scriptures, cede to motivational talks their indisputable millenarian first place in the top ten of introjectors of norms and values. The institutions of Christian inspirationincluding parishes and other pastoral bodies no longer analyze reality or conduct see-judge-act exercises. Almost all do strategic planning following the guidelines of some business school from the North.
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stake. The mental economics of mathematics might be good for industry, but not for reasoning about institutions, development, justice, equality, happiness: the statement that justice and freedom are better in themselves than injustice and oppression is scientifically unverifiable and useless, complained Horkheimer, for whom the result of this suicidal change of direction in reason is a spiritual impoverishment, a constant dumbing down. Parodying Horkheimer, we could say that the management culture is one of those perversions of reason that degenerates against it. But it is a perversion that became the norm. The management culture has penetrated universities (with its audit culture), NGOs and development cooperation (with its SWOTs, logical frameworks, strategic planning) and international finance institutions (with its accountability as a panacea). Certain religious tendencies are also assimilating it. That absorption is perceptible in whats known as Ignacian social management in the Catholic Church and in the theology of prosperity and the business and leadership schools in the Pentecostal and NeoPentecostal churches.
I dont care how big it is. What kind of house do you want to live in? Do you want to be a millionaire? What kind of business do you want to have? Do you want more success? What do you really want? The Secret offers good news: It doesnt matter who you are or where you are, the law of attraction is forming your entire life experience, and this all-powerful law is doing that through your thoughts. You are the one who calls the law of attraction into action, and you do it through your thoughts. The Secret lavishes pieces of advice that its millions of readers blindly believe: To attract money, focus on wealth. Its impossible to bring more money into your life when you focus on your lack of it. Its helpful to use your imagination and make believe you already have the money you want. Make it your intention to look at everything you like and say to yourself, I can afford that. I can buy that. You will shift your thinking and begin to feel better about money. Give money to bring more of it into your life. When you are generous with money and feel good about sharing it, you are saying, I have plenty. Visualize checks in the mail...
Religions absorption of the management culture is perceptible in whats known as Ignacian social management in the Catholic Church and in the theology of prosperity and the business and leadership schools in the Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches
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Byrne is convinced that People who have drawn wealth into their lives used the secret, whether consciously or unconsciously. They think thoughts of abundance and wealth, and they do not allow any contradictory thoughts to take root in their minds. Their predominant thoughts are of wealth. They only know wealth, and nothing else exists in their minds. Whether they are aware of it or not, their predominant thoughts of wealth are what brought wealth to them. It is the law of attraction in action. Digging around to discover the roots of positive thinking, Ehrenreich takes us back to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. The father of the New Thought movement and grandfather of positive thinking, he discovered that Calvinist doctrine was producing a growing number of psychosomatic illnesses among its followers; they were frequently plagued by feelings of guilt or terrified by the idea of their inevitable and eternal sentence. Quimby became famous developing therapeutic talks aimed at convincing his patients that the universe was fundamentally benevolent, that they formed a single unit with the Mind from which they were constituted and that they could cure their illnesses with the power of their minds. In 1863, Mary Baker Eddy, a 42-year-old invalid who had been widowed by her first husband and abandoned by her second, became his patient and disciple and benefitted from a miraculous healing. As a prolific writer and charismatic teacher, Eddy disseminated the focus of the new thinking so successfully that she turned it into a religion, known as Christian Science. The core of its doctrine is that there is no material world, only Thought, Mind, Spirit, Goodness and Love, or, using the economic term she tended to employ, Supply. Therefore, illness and maladies do not exist except as temporary delirium.
Many applauded the advent of Christian Science and New Thought. From an eminently pragmatic point of view, William James recognized that an academically trained mind resists admitting its postulates, but has to recognize and accept its results. Christian Science cured legions of that illness called Calvinism, which was responsible for neurasthenia and associated with the outdated theology of hell.
The core of both Christian Science and positive thinking is the unshakable faith in the power of the mind to create and mold the world. Only what the mind produces exists. Reality lacks autonomy. In the most concessive of cases, the external world is a pale reflection of the mental production
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Although at first glance it would appear that positive thinking and managerialism are to be found at opposing polesone in delirious irrationality and the other in rationalism taken to its extremethere are multiple crossovers between positive thinking and the management culture
and photographs to reach the subconscious, so that the person assimilates without judging what is being assimilated. In human resource management, the best personnel administrator will be the one who can best persuade the employees and manipulate their craziest expectations. The most successful CEOs cultivate an image of charismatic leaders who make snap decisions based on the impulse of positive hunches. It doesnt matter if the manager isnt very knowledgeable about accounting or a conscientious student of stock market fluctuations. Its enough to know certain SWOT rudiments, say critical path in each paragraph and launch encouraging speeches. The image of the CEO has changed from being a responsible administrator to being a motivating leader; more similar, in fact, to a motivational speaker or a life coach. An era in which many have predicted that the spiritual world would be out of place in the rationality of business has seen the emergence of guru managers and shamanistic administrators. Magic has been technified in positive thinking strategies and management has been magicized to respond to a changing world in which all that needs be done is to administrate the chaos of the global casino, its flight capital and its volatile work posts. Hand in hand, birds of a feather sticking together through many fights, positive thinking and managerialism have united to deal a crushing blow to wage work. Ehrenreich hit the nail on the head when she defined the role of positive thinking in the world of wage work as follows: With motivation as the whip, positive thinking became the hallmark of the compliant employee. The whip has a structural extension: todays employers censure and fire workers who file complaints and demands. It also has a social extension: employees run from and censure their
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negative colleagues just as the pious previously anathematized sinners. Even with the squeezes brought on by the crisis and job contraction, if theres unemployment, underemployment or bad working conditions, the problem is attitude of the bad workers, of course.
We can say that positive thinking is the mixture of militant hedonism with the impossibility of satisfying expectations. Thats why it arises in a time of inflated expectations with only unrealistic possibilities of realizing them
one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there. In other words, people clinging to the pleasure principle build a reality that is satisfactory for them. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud explained how this mechanism works: One can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with ones own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. Those who persist in banging their heads against reality, or rather denying and substituting it, fall into psychosis. The psychosis creates a new reality exempt from the motives of dissatisfaction provided by the surrounding reality. The psychotic person does not let him or herself be dominated convinced or held backby reality. In its most innocuous version, positive thinking takes narcissism to its extreme: the actionsand even positive thoughtsof others cannot upset the realization of ones own desires. The others are no more than extras or puppets in the long Hollywood movie in which each positive thinker plays the lead. They are like the set of The Truman Show, there to satisfy the desires of the positive thinker.
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Witchcraft was responsible for obtaining the illusion that positive thinking produces. Its non-primitive version has produced a kind of technification of magical thinking, more in line with the supposed managerial rationalism, in which the old witchcraft has to rename its ancient resources so as not to be out of sync. It thus talks in terms of laws (the law of attraction, among others), self-persuasion tactics (no more than ritual repetitions), life coaching courses (rites of passage) and the six attitudes for winnersbehaviors that keep away bad spirits?and master-keys for getting rich. Positive thinkers also connect with the traditional religions. Ehrenreich demonstrated that the point of contact between the old Calvinist religion and positive thinking is their obsession with self-monitoring: Calvinists sought to extirpate sinful thinking and laxity, while positive thinking wants to eradicate negative thinking.
Positive thinking builds a nonconflictive reality that denies inequalities, structural conditionings and the barriers to the social ascent of the disinherited, non-connected and castoffs of today and always
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The Central America of the seventies and eighties offered the disobedient exile and burial. Todays Central America offers generous doses of positive thinking
The Central America of the seventies and eighties offered the disobedient exile and burial. Todays Central America offers generous doses of positive thinking. Immersed in a syncretic process, the Neo-Pentecostal and other Christian churches are absorbing and promoting the techniques and values of positive thinking and managerial ways of acting. Their pastors are the organic intellectuals of those tendencies of thinking. In the next edition of envo, we will look at how managerialism and positive thinking converge in the religious arena to convince us that it is Gods will that we be rich. Hallelujah!
Complaining was also frowned upon in Aldous Huxleys Brave New World. Nonconformity was dangerous. In response to the slightest nonconformity, the inhabitants of that futuristic anti-utopia took drugs that produced a sense of wellbeing.
Jos Luis Rocha is a researcher for the Jesuit Service for Migrants of Central America (SJM) and a member of the envo editorial council.
55 may 2012