[Second in a series] – 1 2 3 4 5 6

To understand the depth of our conundrum – and to fully appreciate the role ICTs play in development – we must first explore the history of development in general to its roots in the Western tradition. These historical snapshots reveal the origins of the binarism that creates the contested spaces of our debate.

Rist follows his lineage from Aristotle through Augustine up to Leibniz, Buffon, and Condorcet who divides human history into ten stages, the last of which would introduce the abolition of inequality between nations, the true perfection of mankind. Gunaratne presents a version that shows how Hegel’s Enlightenment philosophy established a foundation for Weber’s theory of modernization and traditionalism. In his Philosophy of History lectures, Hegel claims the supremacy of humankind, led by Europeans, over Nature. Hegel dismissed African and Asian ways of knowing as “more or less congruent with Nature” and argued that the enslavement of Negroes was justified because they were essentially “Things” – objects of no value (63). Gunaratne, citing Nabudere, connects the dots from Hegel to Weber, whose Enlightenment ideologies reflect how scientific methodology, specifically the idea of ‘progress’ modeled after Newtonian physics, would allow the modern age to rid itself of inherited superstitions and prejudices (62).

Gunaratne and Unwin both recognize the importance of Rostow’s five economic stages to the modern concept of development, although Unwin arrives at Rostow along a different path. Unwin starts his lineage before the Enlightenment through the works of Locke, Descartes, Bacon, and Hobbes which were “essential to later discourses about rationality, empiricism and the rights and duties of individuals” (8).

The doctrine of social evolution in the 19th century can be seen as the final extension of these long-tailed arrows pointing toward the modern development paradigm. Comte’s stages move from theology to metaphysics to scientific fact verified by experience; Marx begins with feudalism, then bourgeois capitalism, ending with communist society; and Morgan’s stages bring humankind from savagery, through barbarism, to civilization. Although each set of stages reflects the author’s specific field of interest, they each share three important characteristics:

“[T]hat progress has the same substance (or nature) as history; that all nations travel the same road; and that all do not advance at the same speed as Western society, which therefore has an indisputable ‘lead’ because of the greater size of its production, the dominant role that reason plays within it, and the scale of its scientific and technological discoveries” (40).

This brand of cultural one-sidedness or arrogance is what Latour calls particular universalism:  “One society – and it is always the Western one – defines the general framework of Nature with respect to which the others are situated” (105). The ‘natural’ process of development is the “notion of human progress as a continual process of internal and external expansion based on values of rationality, secularity and efficiency” (Castles, 2). Internal expansion in this definition refers essentially to the economic, industrial, and governmental growth “of the modern capitalist nation-state” while external expansion refers to “European colonisation of the rest of the world, with the accompanying diffusion of western values, institutions and technologies” (Castles, 2).

This was the face of development until the time of the Second World War. Until that time, the Western paradigm of cultural primacy stuck to its guns of binary dichotomization: we are civil, the other is savage; we are rational, the other is superstitious; we are meant to lead, the other is meant to follow; and so on. Since the mid-40s, several modern development movements have departed from the explicit hegemony of Western thought, transitioning through stages that focus on “economic growth, to growth with equity, to basic needs, to participatory development, to sustainable development” (Agrawal, 1).