Enacting Integral Human Development - Softcover

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Clemens Sedmak is professor of social ethics and interim director, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame. His recent books include The Capacity to Be Displaced: Resilience, Mission, and Inner Strength (Brill, 2017), and Enacting Catholic Social Teaching (Orbis, 2022).

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RELIGION / Christian Living / Social Issues

RELIGION / Christian Theology / Ethics

RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic

Enacting Integral Human Development

Cover design: Michael Calvente

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A few years ago, the Washington Post featured an article in its September 10, 2018, edition that described Chamseddine Marzoug, a fifty-two-year-old former fisherman who scours the beaches of his Tunisian town for bodies of drowned refugees every morning. “When he finds one, he puts it in a body bag. He delivers the bodies to the hospital for a medical report. Later, he washes the corpses and takes them to the graveyard—marked by a sign displayed in six languages: Cemetery for Unknown—where he has dug the graves with a spade and pickax.” The article is entitled A Tunisian Gravedigger Gives Migrants What They Were Deprived of in Life: Dignity. 1 Chamseddine Marzoug’s engagement reflects a commitment to the dignity of the human person beyond an obvious economic advantage. He has a sense of the human person that motivates expressions of respect and solidarity beyond the lifespan. Terms like “piety” or “a sense of the sacred” could be used to characterize this practice. There seems to be a specific moment at work here, a moment of being in the presence of something bigger than oneself, be it death, be it the dignity of the human person, be it human suffering. Chamseddine Marzoug’s service is a sign of a commitment that is nourished by something deeper than sympathy with the living. In short, Marzoug’s engagement could be seen as a commitment to Integral Human Development (or IHD).2

The concept of “Integral Human Development” seems grand and lofty. It can however be explained quite easily through a short formula: Integral Human Development is the development of the whole person and the development of each person. This deceptively simple characterization dates back to 1967, when Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Populorum Progressio, talked about “authentic human development.” Development “cannot be restricted to economic growth alone. To be authentic, it must be well rounded; it must foster the development of each person and of the whole person.”3 The official Latin version uses the word progressio for “growth,” whereas the Italian and the Spanish translations work with “sviluppo” and “desarrollo” (development), respectively. Growth, progress, and development point to different aspects of organic change that happens in steps whereby one step is based on the previous one.

Origins of the Term

The origin of this idea is indicated in the quoted passage from Populorum Progressio with a reference to Louis-Joseph Lebret.4 Lebret himself used the term développement authentique (Lebret 1961, 75). Lebret had been one of the experts the pope had consulted in the making of the encyclical and was explicitly mentioned in the press conference on March 28, 1967, by Monsignor Poupard, when the encyclical Populorum Progressio was officially presented. Lebret, a French Dominican priest and economist, was inspired to take a closer look at ethical questions of development on noting that processes of societal advancement that benefit some give rise to the deprivation and suffering of others. In 1929, he came face to face with the dire poverty of French fishermen in his own homeland on the coast of Brittany; he traced the roots of their poverty and found them to stem from global changes and the fact that family fishermen no longer stood a chance of making a decent living against large-scale commercial fishing with its mechanization.5 The internationalization and the industrialization of fishing found its victims in village fishing communities and family fisheries. “The experience of fishing exploitation by a foreign industry at the expense of local workers gave him concrete knowledge of the injustice of a system that was not limited to the problems of a particular region” (Bossi 2012, 253). There is a valuedimension from the beginning in Lebret’s thinking about development.

In the late 1960s, the concept of “development” had been conceived mainly in terms of economic progress. It included agricultural assistance, water purification plants, installation of new wells, distribution of medicine, and a variety of other measures. Economic planners argued that the greatest poverty in Latin American countries could be alleviated by massive job creation unleashed by substantial infusion of investment capital. (Pope 2019, 126)

Lebret challenged this view. Through participatory research in France and in Latin American communities, he arrived at an understanding of the necessity of human-centered development. Development is not the same as economic growth; this also means that development is not the same as measurable living standards and that ethics and theology are no less important as conversation partners on development than political science and economics. Development is not something that is done to people, but rather done through people, with people. Lebret’s first concern was people, not processes, projects, or products. Lebret was deeply interested in and committed to social transformation. In 1941, he founded Économie et Humanisme, a Dominican-supported movement of research and practice. He also helped found IRFED (Institut Internationale de Recherche et Formation en vue du Développement Harmonisé) in Paris in 1958, a training and research center on development, worldwide, thus “pursuing his ambition of developing a practical ethical vision for development globally” (Anaehobi 2021, 129).

Lebret’s vision of development is a vision of organic and harmonious growth and change—using “a living image: a plant develops, an animal develops, and a human person develops. It is about an internal balance that continues in growth. It concerns a harmony that is related to the nature of being in the process of development” (Lebret 1961, 38). This idea of organic growth works best with the idea of an order in which the human person is embedded; it is less compatible with a constructivist understanding of reality and the person, and also less compatible with an approach to “top-down planned development.” Lebret’s image of organic growth expresses his sense of and respect for the human person. He coined the term “human economy,” that is, an economy that would be “favourable to human development,” to “a fully human life,” as he wrote in his 1954 essay “Économie et Humanisme.”

A “fully human life” is more than a provision of basic goods. It respects “dignity needs.” Dignity needs are a class of personal needs that allow a person to live a dignified life. They include, according to Lebret, space—a space to which one can retreat and contemplate, perhaps also a space to entertain friends or to ponder a literary work or other artistic evocations of one’s inner life (Bossi 2012). A dignity perspective moves us beyond food and shelter and necessary external conditions. It moves us to an inner sphere, to the inner life, to the space that has been called the soul. Even though psychologists and theologians may talk about different things in their discourses on the soul, the concept of the soul generally points to interiority, an inner “force” or “space” that can be formed and that animates the person. Integral human development expresses an understanding of development that recognizes the importance of (the idea of ) the soul.

Immanuel Kant famously made the point that the existence of the soul cannot be proven but that the postulate of its existence plays an important role in moral philosophy. Belief in the soul allows us to tell a different story about human agency and the human person. It allows us to tell a story about the “More” of human existence (there is more to human life than the...