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Enterprising Spirit as Saving Grace
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16151 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1989 |
3,037 Words |
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Curt Cadorette
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What precisely is the relationship between our socioeconomic activity and the evolution of more humane societies? Does one social or economic system produce better, happier human beings than another? Some people will quickly answer such questions in a straightforward way. Their world is indeed the best. Others will retreat from such questions as hopelessly complicated and go about the business of living their lives as effectively as circumstances permit.
Yet the complexity of the questions does not absolve us from attempting to find answers. Behind every social and economic system lies a set of values, an ethical code that presumes to have some insight into what it means to be human and how human beings should act. It is precisely for this reason that certain theologians and ethicists feel that their training and vocation oblige them to wade into the murky waters of social and economic analysis. At the risk of being misunderstood and categorized as interlopers, they try to assess the pros and cons of socioeconomic systems by discerning their root values and juxtaposing them with the society's religious and ethical traditions.
In The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third world, Hernando de Soto attempts to loosen the economic and political bind that constrains his native Peru and other Latin American countries. A trained economist and successful businessman, he sees the wherewithal for the resurgence of his country's vitality in the people themselves. He argues that the tenacious, irrepressible ability of the poor of Peru to organize and make things work, even under the most restrictive and oppressive circumstances, could ultimately be their saving grace.
Do Soto is proposing more than an economic system mechanically understood and implemented. He is also calling for a new vision of what it means to be human, a vision that is radically different from traditional Peruvian and Latin American definitions based on colonial mercantilism and a rigid social and economic hierarchy. His prescription for Peru's ills includes a call for democracy and the licensing of the Peruvian entrepreneurial spirit. Make no mistake about it, The Other Path is a clarion call to profound social transformation.
As de Soto points out, finding a way out of the country's current morass is an urgent task. Peru's economic structure is in deep crisis, with declining per capita income, an inflation rate in 1988 that exceeded 2,000 percent, and a government that issues new economic policies as often as it devalues the national currency--about once every three months.
However, economic chaos is not the only problem: Peru is caught in a vortex of political violence whose pull seems to be growing more rapidly than inflation. For the past eight years, an ultra-leftist organization, known as Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path, has waged battle for the hearts and hands of the Peruvian populace. Preaching a violent version of Maoist Marxism laced with Andean symbols and myths, it calls for the utter destruction of capitalism and eradication of all vestiges of Peru's colonial Spanish past. To give credibility to its rhetoric, Sendero Luminoso has unleashed a bloodbath of revolutionary violence that parallels Pol Pot's savage madness in Kampuchea. Since one psychotic political vision tends to generate another, ultra-rightist groups have developed in the past few years; these, like Sendero Luminoso, answer violence with violence.
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