A Path of Our Own

Interview with Adam K. Webb, author of
A Path of Our Own

How did you come to write about this village and these issues?

I’ve long been interested in the challenges facing the developing world, and especially the values that guide economic development. The first time I set foot in Pomatambo I was only nineteen. The Shining Path insurgency was in steep decline. I went there to work on a thesis about how the Andean peasantry had experienced the guerrilla movement and what it claimed to offer them. That summer I not only learned a lot about all they had been through and how they had felt caught in the middle during the civil war. I got a deeper sense of their frustration at how, despite all the sound and fury from the guerrillas and the government, no one seemed able to deliver the goods for them. And, of course, I befriended many in the community. After some shorter visits back to the village a few years later, I was able in 2006 to spend longer there and to revisit some big questions in interviews. I felt that the story of Pomatambo was worth telling for its own sake, and that it was a microcosm of so much that the rural poor have faced around the world.

Why the title?

A Path of Our Own maps out a third way different from the two paths that these people have been offered in recent decades. The Shining Path, the Maoist movement that took up arms, was one path. It promised a social revolution that would have collectivized land and turned much of the countryside over to party administrators. It also tried to wipe out the village’s traditional structure when it got in the way. In the same years, the world-famous Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto wrote his bestselling book The Other Path in response. He expressed a view widely shared by the optimists of capitalist globalization: that giving the market free rein is the best way to lift the poor out of poverty, and to wean them away from radicalism. Obviously neither the guerrillas nor the state delivered for people in places like Pomatambo. They shed plenty of blood along the way. Moreover, both sides more or less assumed that traditional communities had to fade away, sooner or later, to make way for progress. Peasants could prosper only by turning them into something else. This book suggests a way for these communities to develop their own economic model, building on their existing strengths and values. That is the Economy of Values. It could bring development of the right kind, and in the long run give them more influence than the key political actors today really want them to have.

So does this make you a liberal or a conservative?

In the usual sense, neither. Obviously I’m concerned with social justice, with a fairer distribution of the world’s goods and with relieving poverty. I think most so-called conservatives are too enamored of an unfettered market. But I’m also a traditionalist, in that I think modern society has lost sight of the time-tested wisdom of the old civilizations, about how to live and what to demand of people. Liberals tend to neglect those foundations. And the radical left, even when it doesn’t cause carnage like the Shining Path did, tends to concentrate power in large bureaucracies. The story of Pomatambo moves me in part because I think communities like it still cling to what more prosperous parts of the world have largely lost: a sense of duty, of small decencies, of belonging. I’d like to see these communities prosper while keeping the best of what they have. I’m encouraged by one fact. My blend of traditional values and social justice may seem odd on the usual political spectrum. But it’s pretty close to what the rural poor in villages like this one want themselves. I’d even go so far as to say that, if you took the pulse of ordinary people in much of the world, you’d find more sympathy for this than for some of the fashionable ideologies of the last century. Maybe we need a political realignment in many countries to reflect that.

Do you think it’s hard for readers in the developed world to relate to the experiences of the people in the book?

I 'm sure if you put the average reader from Europe or North America in the middle of Peru’s highlands, they’d be struck by the poverty. The first time you see people living in adobe huts without water and electricity, you begin to realize that our era has the widest gap in ways of life that the world has ever seen. And few readers in prosperous and stable countries have seen bloodshed like there was during the civil war. But these things aside, I don’t think people are so different. They have—or want—most of the same satisfactions on a human level. They often feel powerless and neglected, in a world where the economy and the government seem to work for the benefit of some much more than others. I hope I’ve brought some of these people’s personal experiences to light in a way that readers elsewhere can appreciate. I also suggest that they have much more in common on the level of values and aspirations than they might now realize. A Kansas wheat farmer could get along well with an Andean peasant.

In the book, you mention a Traditionalist International. What is this?

Pomatambo’s story is in many ways the story of the world’s peasantry. The values woven into it are universal, at least among people with a certain experience of community. When I talk about an “economy of values,” I want to foster debate far beyond Peru. If a community-centered economy can work in places like Pomatambo, it can work elsewhere too. I explain in the book how these communities could form their own network across borders, so they can strengthen one another and gain ground. Economic growth of the right kind will give their values political weight in the long run. That is where the idea of a Traditionalist International comes in. A flourishing community-centered economy would help remake the political landscape in many countries. There is a natural political base there for movements with a commitment to traditional values and social justice. If they linked up across borders, the whole really would be greater than the sum of its parts. Sadly, traditionalists are quite insular nowadays. They see globalization as something to defend themselves against. A Traditionalist International would let them start redefining globalization itself.

How likely is this alternative to become a reality?

I think this is a coherent vision of how things could unfold, and I think it would resonate with a good chunk of the world’s population. Whether things will unfold this way is an open question. Sometimes I feel the building blocks just need to come together the right way, and that given enough time they will. Other times I wonder if so much of traditional community life has been eroded that there isn’t enough material left to rebuild. In any case, I don’t think history is predetermined. This is a battle worth waging, and there are many fronts on which to wage it. For what it’s worth, I don’t see this book just as a statement of some ideal scenario. Since writing it, I have been refining ideas and making contacts for a medium-term effort to put some of the economy of values into practice. There are many experiments we could do on the ground to start building a network of communities across borders.

What are you working on next?

I’m going to be in China for a year or two. The dizzying pace of modernization there—often with alarming consequences—connects with many of the challenges I talk about in A Path of Our Own. I want to engage some of these issues in China more fully. I’m also in the later stages of a book that has been in the works for a while. It is very much in the spirit of a Traditionalist International. It looks at how different civilizations made sense of one another in the past, and the lessons we might learn for an ethically richer kind of globalization in our own time.