Finding Meaning in Peace Corps Service
A Positive Look at Peace Corps Using Virtue Ethics and Positive Externalities
When I first arrived to my Peace Corps pueblo, I reached out to the volunteer that had lived there before me. We spoke often during my first months at site. On one occasion, I complained to him that someone had failed to show up to a meeting we had scheduled. “Welcome to the suck,” he replied.
As I’ve written about at length before, Peace Corps service is hard. Whether it’s the exhaustion of battling one’s way through literally any task or the mental deterioration from agonizing over how to pursue an objective in a way that seems meaningful, service pushes the Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) into a dark corner where they will question everything from the impact of their service to their own personal resilience and fortitude. Putting oneself out on the forefront of international relations, coupled with many, many schools of thought labeling development work at best as inconsequential and at worst as harmful, can make it easy to focus on the negatives of one’s Peace Corps experience.
A friend of mine often states that one’s motivation for doing Peace Corps must have some selfish component. Seeing as one is undoubtedly better equipped to do volunteer work in their home country where they speak the language, understand the culture, etc., it would make more sense to try to do impactful work there. In order to draw educated, idealistic minds to service abroad, Peace Corps must appeal at least somewhat to the volunteer’s vanity: their sense of adventure, their nostalgia for American exceptionalism, or their desire to accumulate international experience. On the surface, such selfish drives may seem like they should be added to the negative pile; however, I would argue here that these desires find their positive footing through how they represent the character of the volunteer and how they shape that volunteer for the future. This ‘volunteer shaping’ can be seen as a net positive through the lens of virtue ethics and positive externalities.
Virtue Ethics
Without getting too lost in a philosophical quagmire, a basic understanding of virtue ethics is important to understand how it applies to Peace Corps. Basically, virtue ethics places emphasis on the individual, rather than that individual’s actions. Something is good, not because the individual action is good, but because the action is consistent with what a generally virtuous person would do. Unlike other moral philosophies, virtue ethics places emphasis on the person, and whether the decisions they make over a lifetime are consistent with those of virtue.
So how does that apply to Peace Corps? Well, Peace Corps is generally something pursued by those who — albeit naively — yearn to make the world a better place. The aspects often factored into joining the Peace Corps may be a desire to improve international relations between countries, increase intercultural understanding, make oneself a more globally minded individual, or to in some way contribute to the betterment of the countries in which Peace Corps operates. Moreover, the fact that Peace Corps is a major life decision (27 months of service), likely separates it from voluntourism opportunities, as it requires a much more drastic commitment, evaluation, and foregoing of more lucrative opportunities back home. One can easily pick apart the individual actions pursued by PCVs. Does having one American citizen in a foreign town really help in that town’s pursuit to learn English or to develop their economy? Maybe — maybe not. But is the decision to attempt to accomplish such goals align with the decisions that would be made by a virtuous person? I think a virtue ethicist would say yes.
If we assume the aforementioned idealism as a sign of virtue in an average PCV, we can assume that they will continue to act in a way that is virtuous in the future. They will attempt to do right by their community, regardless of whether their efforts yield results. They will not make decisions that attempt to glorify themselves, while exploiting or belittling their community, as is often the result of voluntourism (it is worth noting that, though some disagree, Peace Corps stresses the reduction of negative impacts of volunteers). They will act in a manner consistent with their character, virtuous, and for the virtue ethicist, that’s enough. That’s not enough for me, though, so let’s continue.
Positive Externalities
Formally, externalities are costs or benefits that are accrued by those who did not knowingly choose to incur them. Put plainly, they are unintended consequences. Positive externalities are good ones, and negative externalities are bad ones.
As mentioned before, the PCV pursues — albeit naively — making the world a better place. We also learned that acting virtuously may in itself be something worth pursuing, regardless of whether such acts have a positive impact. I would like to argue now, though, that Peace Corps does in fact generate positive impacts through positive externalities. In other words, Peace Corps service creates positive consequences that were not those originally intended by Peace Corps or the PCV. They are as follows:
1. Peace Corps Volunteers learn the limits of their impact.
The hardest part about Peace Corps service is the inevitable realization that one is much less powerful than they once thought. The PCV enters their service with optimism, expecting to accomplish great things unanimously celebrated by Peace Corps, their community, and their friends. Unfortunately, most PCVs don’t realize that they will also encounter their hardest critic: themselves. Through service, the PCV will have to come to terms with their own arrogance that accompanies attempting to inject American-based measures of progress into non-American cultures. In this regard, the Peace Corps offers an inimitably humbling experience for the volunteer, who will use this new perspective to guide their decisions in the future.
In other words, the most valuable positive externality of Peace Corps service may be the realization of the limits of international development itself. Using myself as an example, if I weren’t here, I would unequivocally believe in international development and aid , without understanding the rarely discussed and often exploitative nuances of international “assistance.”
2. Peace Corps Volunteers learn the power of resourcefulness.
Take a (usually young) U.S. citizen, drop them in a town that has loosely expressed wanting their help, give them minimal guidance, and set them free. Such is the experience of the typical Peace Corps Volunteer. PCVs have to learn how to make action out of nothing. This might involve searching for associations with which to start a community savings group, looking for local institutions to sponsor a community class, or simply finding a counterpart that wants to improve their community and listening. Most of these feats, if not all, are accomplished through sheer force of will. Through service, the PCV learns that if they do nothing (and they can), they will accomplish exactly that — nothing. The Peace Corps environment coupled with the idealistic nature of the average volunteer forces PCVs to take action in circumstances in which they would otherwise feel too intimidated. With a bit of self-awareness, the volunteer can realize that they have more capabilities than they think when they return home. By asking themselves questions such as “how can I get the mayor’s office to help me with my community project?” during service, they realize that previously disregarded, comparable action is likely also available in the U.S. For example, seeking support from a local government in the United States may seem like a more realistic option for the returned PCV after being forced to seek support through such a channel during service. If the first example of “volunteer forming” made the PCV aware of their powerlessness, the second empowers them.
3. Peace Corps Volunteers leave with new perspectives.
My friend Maya has described it as becoming more “sappy.” Others have used it to backhandedly compliment me as being the “most improved” member of my cohort. However you choose to label it, Peace Corps changes people. It is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to understand the deep, unseen roots of culture, beyond the visible manifestations that one observes. Peace Corps forces the PCV to confront these often seemingly nonsensical manifestations every day and try to come to terms with them. A progression of this might look something like:
1)This person annoyingly mansplains bus routes to me.
2) Okay, but why does he seem to want to explain stuff to me so much?
3) Well, maybe he doesn’t have a lot of things to take pride in so expressing his knowledge about a local bus route makes him feel empowered.
The identification of the cultural underpinnings to an observed action is often referred to as the iceberg metaphor, and I would argue that it is incredibly difficult to truly understand unless experienced firsthand.
The Peace Corps has historically been an initiative with bipartisan support, and I think that’s a good thing. For the idealists, Peace Corps represents — albeit naively — a desire to improve the standing of the world and the goodwill of the United States within it. For the virtue ethicists, this effort is enough. For the realists, Peace Corps crafts better U.S. citizens, that — through their successes (and many failures) of service — become more well-rounded, realistic, and humble human beings that will carry their Peace Corps service with them into their future endeavors.
