“If MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] secured the neocolonial bridgehead, it was British academics, such as Randolph Kent and David Booth, and NGOs, like Oxfam and Save the Children, that explained how to understand a world where “capitalism” and “imperialism” had been magicked away. Causal narratives were deemed invalid because of the chaotic “complexity” of the interactions between people, things, and nature. General laws or determining relations were impossible.
“What was, essentially, a celebratory rationalization of ignorance, served to render the outside world unknowable beyond immediate experience. Problems were tied to specific times and places, allowing no general historical connections to be drawn. If French political revanchism reached out to neoliberalism, British empiricism linked Western humanitarianism to quantification, cybernetics, and machine-learning.
For Western humanitarianism, intercommunal warfare had no generalizable or overriding cause beyond the scarcity and ignorance that afflicted those involved. The West’s publicly funded “aid industry” would interpret the coming decades of violence and instability through the ahistoric but quantifiable lens of cybernetic complexity.
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