Can the big ideas help real people?

During my time working alongside an NGO in Alexandria, Egypt, I had the opportunity to interview many people, both within the organisation and beyond, about how they see the idea of sustainable development. Below is a series of extracts (interspersed with my thoughts and those of others) from one such interview.
 
"In Alexandria people are working on very superficial things, in a very superficial way. Everything from outside. And when people are used to working in a very superficial way, the feedback is very superficial, and when you are only demanded superficial results, it’s difficult to understand complex concepts like sustainable development. It’s too big for them to understand. And if they don’t understand they won’t feel part of the same planet, or part of the same project." 

This reminded me of a picture (adapted from a poem) that we were once shown in an Ethnography lecture:

I continued the discussion by suggesting that it can take time for a complex concept like sustainable development to get to real people, having gone through the United Nations, the corporate world, and the various layers of academic debate that shape it, change it, idealise it or destroy it.  

"Yes, but by this time the concept has become very poor, only a word. This happened with democracy, for example. When passing by so many institutions, there is a need for simplifying the concept, and at the end it’s like the milk without the cream. I’m sure democracy was right at the beginning, but the beginning was the beginning, it was Plato, the good concept for the context. And now, here, people speak about democracy every day, but they don’t know what democracy is, and they don’t care if they know or not. They repeat the word a lot without knowing what it means. In the taxi it happens a lot, because that’s the place that you talk to people who are not from your circle. And they say they want democracy. Like it will solve everything. But when democracy finally comes to the people here, it will be in the way decision makers want, so in the worst way."
 
So, I continued (outlining an idea for a network that had been bubbling in my idealistic mind for a while), what about a network of projects, with people who help communities directly, a group of non-institutionalised academic researchers, all working together?

"It’s a utopia. At the end the people who work here, if this happens in Egypt, after a while they will be out of their depth. And if it happens in Europe, it can happen that it’s so successful and in the end they like their name and again they say nothing. It can only happen if they are freelance researchers, but this is not sustainable. But what we were saying earlier about academics, sometimes it’s bullshit what they say. My lecturer in told me to read something (details erased due to confidentiality issues)... So I downloaded some of his articles from the Internet, I read about the first ten pages, and in those ten pages he was saying absolutely nothing. It was just words to explain an abstract idea. By the third article I lost my hope. Nothing. And we trust them because they’re academics, and they’re separate from decision makers, but they just write, and we read, and they write some more, and we read some more."
 

Just as for democracy, it is impossible to speak about the big concepts - sustainable development being one of them - without having experienced them. Has anyone experienced sustainable development? Has anyone seen it happen?

"You have to get to the source. Seeing the source is a way of understanding sustainable development because you have to go deep inside. The deeper you go, the broader your vision and capacity for global understanding... Because the memory of the person, the knowledge, is inside. But it also needs space to develop, in order to understand the reality. There are different ways to reach this. With information, with books, yes, but this is not sustainable. With the person you get a lot of intrinsic learning, that is inside. You get the memory of this person. A book can also touch you a lot and you can remember things of relevance to your life or your work. But with a person it’s much stronger."

This reminds me of some advice that my Spiritist Teacher gave me back in Bath: don't read books! Read the bits of books, the paragraphs, the sentences, the words, that you are drawn to. That's all you need to illuminate your moment. So how do we spread the word?

According to Professor Bill Scott (to who I am indebted for introducing me to the idea of sustainable development),"Just encourage assembly. And groups and discussion and like-minded people getting together and not being cynical. And test it out to see how difficult it all is.”

 
Freedom of assembly: one of our most fundamental rights. Let us finish this post with a quote from a book. But only a quote :)

"The step from bourgeois society to a democratic civil society depends in some measure on a new centrality of rights guaranteeing intimacy and personal autonomy, on the one hand, and communication and association, on the other (thereby replacing the current primacy and model character of property rights). Accordingly, the project of establishing or transforming fundamental rights is one of the most important tasks for collective actors involved in the politics of civil society.

This thesis is apparently contradicted only by the fact that in modern societies fundamental rights too must take the form of positive legal enactment. While the state is indeed the agency of the legalization of rights, it is neither their source nor the basis of their validity. Rights begin as claims asserted by groups and individuals in the public spaces of an emerging civil society. They can be guaranteed by positive law but are not equivalent to law or derivable from it; in the domain of rights, law secures and stabilizes what has been achieved autonomously by collective actor in society in the context of their own normative learning experiences." - Axel Honneth, Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment.