that made for a happy or unhappy village had much more to do with the things they were interested in than with the things I was interested in.
My small epiphany had nothing to do with theories of social change, just the simple truth that Alexis de Tocqueville had in mind when he began his examination of American political institutions, one hemisphere and more than a century removed. “It is not by chance that I consider the township first,” he wrote in Democracy in America:
The township is the only association so well rooted in nature that wherever men assemble it forms itself. Communal society therefore exists among all peoples, whatever be their customs and laws. Man creates kingdoms and republics, but townships seem to spring directly from the hand of God.1
Had I read Tocqueville more thoroughly in my college days and remembered it better, I would have seen much more quickly how the villages worked and how effective “development” in them came about:
It is in the township, the center of the ordinary business of life, that the desire for esteem [and] the pursuit of substantial interests . . .
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are concentrated; these passions, so often troublesome elements in society, take on a different character when exercised so close to home and, in a sense, within the family circle. . . . Daily duties performed or rights exercised keep municipal life constantly alive. There is a continual gentle political activity which keeps society on the move without turmoil.2
But it did not occur to me to consult my foggy memories of Tocqueville in trying to understand what I was observing. These were Thai villages in 1968, not New England townships in 1831.
The half-formed thoughts that came to me during the early stages of the research were brought more sharply into focus as the research proceeded. One of the next two villages we chose was a model village, the pride of the Mukdahan District. An energetic and engaging young Thai official had been imported into the community and had brought about a cascade of development projects—a fishpond, a new school building, a cotton-growing project, a rice cooperative, even a health clinic. This time, we were sure we would get material about our assigned topic, for in this village the official Thai government was very much a part of current village life.
We first occupied ourselves with trying to find how each individual project had affected the village. (Were there fish in the fishpond? How many people used the health clinic? How had these projects affected the villagers’ lives?) Again, we ran into a problem. The villagers’ answers about the effects of any individual project were short. But their discussions of the ways in which the life of the village had changed overall were spontaneous and subtle and deeply felt—and the news was not good. The energetic and engaging young official had taken over (with the best interests of the villagers at heart), and in so doing had supplanted the mechanisms by which the villagers ran their village and pursued their lives. The villagers said plainly and without qualification that the life in this model village had gotten worse, not better.
Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, right? It’s too bad, but one of the costs of modernization is the breakdown of some quaint old-fashioned ways. They’ll adapt to it after a while. Such were the assumptions I had brought to the work. But it was hard to
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listen to these villagers and be as confident as before. Again, it would have helped me to understand what had happened if I had remembered Tocqueville:
The difficulty of establishing a township’s independence rather augments than diminishes with the increase of enlightenment of nations. A very civilized society finds it hard to tolerate attempts at freedom in a local community; it is disgusted by its numerous blunders and is apt to despair of success before the experiment is finished.3
And again: “The institutions of a local community can hardly struggle against a strong and enterprising government.”4 And yet again: “If you take power and independence from a municipality, you may have docile subjects but you will not have citizens.”5
I still did not see as acutely as Tocqueville, but I began to entertain a suspicion that within a few more weeks had become another small epiphany in that spring of 1968: Once again, the villagers were right. The things being lost in that village were at least as important as the things being added. The losses involved deterioration in the bedrock functions performed by any community, in Missouri or Brooklyn as in Northeast Thailand—settling neighbors’ disputes, helping people in need, solving common problems. These in turn represented the bedrock resources for the individuals’ pursuit of their private lives. The village had been doing a damned good job of filling those functions—not according to a romanticized Rousseauistic image of noble villagers, but by any standard for a civilized community. The conventional wisdom of development policy said that modernization must transfer functions and powers from communities to larger units. I began to ask myself a question that twenty years later I ask of contemporary America in this book: Are we really sure that’s a good idea?
I did not subsequently try to stand athwart the bows of rural modernization yelling “Stop!” I continued to think (as I do today) that it is a good thing for villages to acquire fishponds and health clinics. When I returned to the United States, I continued to think (as I do today) that it is a good thing for hungry people to be fed, for the uneducated to be educated, for the disadvantaged to be given a helping
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hand. But two thoughts that I brought home from my experience in Thailand never completely left me.
The first was a notion that what I had seen in small rice-farming communities was relevant to complex American communities. The thought took a long time to mature; the reasons to resist were for a long time overwhelming. But I finally came to rest in the belief that Jeffersonian democracy is still the best way to run society, including the society in which we find ourselves today. Yes, I am aware that Jefferson himself said the earth is for the living, and that he chided those who “ascribe to the preceding age a wisdom more than human.”6 But it just may be that on certain fundamental questions of government, Jefferson and his colleagues were right more universally than they knew. In particular, they understood that the vitality of communities and the freedom of individuals are intertwined, not competitive.
But that conclusion came very late, as it does in this book. I reached it indirectly, by way of the second thought I brought home from Thailand: Whatever the best of all possible worlds may be, policy analysts have not been doing a very good job of deciding whether we are getting from here to there. By counting whether fishponds have fish and health clinics have patients—or, in America, by counting the number of people under the poverty line or the number of people who receive Medicaid benefits—policy analysts are not just failing to see the forest for the trees. Ultimately, the trees we are counting do not make up the forest of interest.
Policy analysts—and I include myself in the indictment—have been in the position of the drunk in the old joke. You have probably heard it: A man who has had too much to drink is on his hands and knees under a streetlamp searching for something. A passerby comes up and asks him what he is looking for. The drunk points to a nearby house and says that he was unlocking his door and dropped his keys. But, the passerby observes, the door is over there. “I know,” the drunk replies, “but the light’s better over here.”
We have looked where the light is, and for modern policy analysis the light consists of quantitative analysis. I do not say this altogether critically. Give a policy analyst variables that can be expressed in numbers, and he has at hand a powerful array of analytic tools to probe
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