Love for Development

I am because I love. Would you relate to such a statement? Is love what makes us human or do we love because we are human?

Every day I see poverty around me. I see suffering. I see anger and hatred. I see opulence. I see overwhelming wealth and indulgence. I see joy and happiness. I see humility and kindness. Of course I see just another day in South Africa — the land at the tip of Africa that reflects the good and bad of the entire planet. But I also see it through our work at the OAD which stretches beyond borders. The world is certainly a diverse place!

I see these things and I want to wish away the pain people experience. I want to throw the great divides into a giant blender and magically merge the very happy with the very sad-and somehow come up with happy all around. I want to make people smile — not one person or a few people, but everyone. I want human beings to be happy. Because if they are happy I think it would create the right vibe for them to be able to be all the amazing things that a human can be. Happiness is more than a cool feeling worth chasing — happiness is the enabler that can make a person shine in every way possible (and that’s a whole other post…)

But happiness can also be superficial. It can hide itself in chocolate and movies, hobbies and met targets, flowers and sunsets. And don’t get me wrong, these are all actually great! The smaller the trigger for your happiness the better of course. But there is a deeper happiness that unlocks the incredible. The type of happiness that makes an ordinary person achieve extraordinary outcomes for the world. The happiness that comes from love.

Of course happiness is not the only feeling that love gives us. There is probably no topic that has been written about, sung about, talked about, more than love. Love and all the spectrum of feelings that come with it.

The thing is that love makes us feel to our maximum capacity-and then makes us feel some more. It is your child’s embrace as they take comfort from you. It is the vulnerable glance of a spouse that makes you remember your butterflies of a decade ago. The nudge of an animal looking for a cuddle. The wrinkles of a parent that reflect hardships overcome for the sake of their child. And when love moves people, people move mountains.

This is why love, actually, is probably the single most important resource on this planet. Primarily because it resides in abundance within every individual of our species — and it’s our species, these dominant human beings, who currently have the most significant influence on the trajectory of the planet.

When we talk about making the world a better place — about improving people’s lives — we use the word “development”. This word means so many different things to so many different people in so many different contexts. Yet it does stimulate a reasonably common understanding that it’s ultimately about making things better — perhaps even about making people happier. It also gives us a common language so we can set ourselves global goals like SDGs. So my use of the word is also in that spirit.

Growing into an adult in South Africa, as one of the last generations to straddle apartheid (i.e. old enough to remember apartheid but young enough to graduate and start work in post-apartheid era), we were exposed to all sorts of development initiatives. From youth clubs in high school to young professionals helping in soup kitchens and orphanages, we’ve always had the privilege of getting to know incredible community leaders and working with amazing individuals who drove development on the ground. Then my personal trajectory into “science for development” exposed me to even more such individuals, from all over the world, whose passion for their fellow human beings is nothing short of humbling. Looking at all these amazing people a very solid thread that connects them all is this ridiculously huge capacity to love. They all have such open golden hearts that they are drawn to want to make other people’s lives better. There is no greater more honourable ambition than this, which I see daily in the people we serve.

Of course this is in no way a confined group of special people. There are people in every walk of life, and in every part of the world, driven to influence others every day through love. They are the parents who make sure their children are fed and clothed. The driver who rolls down their windows to offer some relief to a beggar. The executive who decides that the organisation will sacrifice profit to maintain jobs. The teacher who gives up sleep so that their students benefit from a more detailed commentary on a test. Love makes us change lives around us. More than the stars above us, it is love that truly connects us all.

But its not all positive. We are, after all, only human. Love is so strong that it often, if not usually, supercedes our capacity to reason. Among all the acts of love towards fellow human beings we also find actions that are destructive. For the love of one we may harm another — is this not the basis for all war? In our attempt to quench this overwhelming feeling of love our decisions as people are not always informed nor rational. As a result we find those unfortunate situations when good intention derived from pure genuine love leads to a harmful outcome. As I think of so many painful examples I realise how incredibly sensitive this subject is. Even to offer examples can be painful to those who may have unintentionally harmed those they love. At the same time perhaps not talking about it for fear of pain doesn’t help either — and perhaps that is the example in itself. When does the desire to protect people you love from pain manifest as exposing them to something they would ultimately suffer from? So at risk of causing pain to people I love or triggering defences on controversial issues, I’ll give a few painful examples although life is so full of these I’m sure a reader can think of their own:

For the love of a student a teacher may help them cheat, only to lead to expulsion. For the love of a family a parent may want to push extra mileage on a road trip while they sleep, only to have an accident through driver fatigue. For the love of a younger sibling, a child may play an unintentionally dangerous game, only to lead to injury. For the love of a child, a parent may choose not to vaccinate, only to result in preventable illness or death. For the love of a friend, a person may share “one more” alcoholic drink, only to result in drunken driving disaster. For the love of a spouse, a person may hide a depressed financial situation or debt, only to leave them both homeless when it goes too far. For the love of a young adult, a mentor may encourage them to stuđy a popular field over a field of choice, only to have that person lose years of their life and become depressed. For the love of a loved one we offer decadent food or treats in excess, only to later encounter dental or health issues as a result.

There are so many sources of unhappiness that stem from love or good intention!

So here’s a possible ideal: imagine if we could find a way to harness this love for people (without compromising the purity of the emotion) in a way that maintains the rationality of well informed decision making. Imagine love in an information age. Educated love. Rational emotion. Directed passion. Informed inspiration. Evidence based enthusiasm. Optimised optimism. Contextual caring (I’m getting carried away — insert appropriate alliteration or buzz phrase here).

So this is what I mean by “love for development”. In a world where so many initiatives strive to make developmental impact, the biggest resource we have — love, and the human capacity to love — is perhaps not given enough value. Among the many 4dev initiatives, our small community seeks to use science for development, in particular the inspiring, mind bending science of astronomy. I’m in this field not because I necessarily have a thing for astronomy (my love for astronomy is beside the point), but because I see every day how people who are moved by our place in the universe are inspired to move others. I see so much love. So much caring. So much passion. The role that we hope to play as the OAD is to serve those passionate people. Hopefully we can help maximise the developmental benefits of all that inspiration, passion and basically LOVE for the universe and its people. By serving the community that promotes and tries to stimulate education and capacity building, perhaps we can leverage a greater influence on the world by contributing to the “informed” part of “informed love”. Maybe this information age is more important than we think. Maybe its actually the age when thinking and feeling come together at last, at a time in our history when the world needs the proverbial miracle more than ever. We know that only humans can fix the disastrous trajectory that humans have put the planet on. The question is whether the role humans should play is one of just leaving the planet or doing something about it! I’m hoping for the latter, and harnessing the most powerful thing humans can offer — love — for development, is surely a good way to go!