24 Nov William Easterly visits celebrity-dom and causes

I follow the AidWatch blog with some infrequency. It often depends on how brave i am in the morning when i check my RSS feeds and iGoogle gadgets. But today’s post by William Easterly, Lennon vs. Bono, got me thinking (in a positive way, not in the sometimes-way that makes me gnash my teeth and pull my hair way).

We use Bono as a foil in our courses on globalization, development, and all manner of classes. He’s an interesting character in so far as he represents a kind of caricature of “do-gooders.” I’m not being very eloquent, so i’ll point you to Ananya Roy’s talk on her book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the making of development.

It’s well worth the hour and a half that she talks. But if that frightens you, take at least 10 to catch her opening remarks.

But back to Lennon vs. Bono. Maybe it’s the romanicization of the 60’s and the anti-war movement, and the wild attempts to exact real change, but Lennon’s involvement in radical change movements always struck me as being seated in a kind sincerity that is missing from Bono’s high profile, jet-setting Save-the-World-ing-ness. Easterly puts it beautifully when he says, “Bono’s support of aid to Africa and the MDGs is more like a feel-good consensus that does NOT challenge Power. Celebrity counter-weight to established power seems much more constructive than celebrity expert.” Expert…

What is an expert? I was given a chapter from Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts in an early year of undergrad. The chapter struck me long before i’d decided to become an academic (which means, i never registered who wrote it or where it was from, only what it was about – it took 2 seconds for an office full of Geographers to point me in the right direction). These days, i’m not even sure it takes much knowledge of calculability to be an expert. It takes a winning smile and enough money to fly around periodically to photo-op with other experts.

That’s an unfair assessment.

But we’re talking about Bono. and Gwyneth Paltrow (no, GP, you are *not* African, no matter how much you wish you were). Is this a fair place to bring up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?

But really, all of this comes back to a much bigger issue: how can we really bring about change? What does it mean to want to “bring change”? What is it to know that things aren’t working and to want to change they way they do?

I’m feeling a bit lazy today…i’ll return to this later.