In the year 2000, the governments of 191 United Nations member-states approved eight Millennium Development Goals to be reached by 2015: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Achieve universal primary education. Promote gender equality and empower women. Reduce child mortality. Improve maternal health. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. Ensure environmental sustainability. Develop a global partnership for development.
No one would deny that these goals are worthy. But are they attainable? More than five years after the goals were approved, movement toward them has been difficult to measure. According to some estimates, at the current rate of progress the elimination of avoidable child deaths will not be achieved until 2115, universal primary education will not be achieved until 2129, and it will take until 2150 to halve the level of poverty.
For John Hammock these daunting realities don’t mean the problems are insolvable. They mean that we must intensify our efforts to confront them. Action on these problems makes the world a better place in every way—safer, more secure, more viable and fulfilling. For Hammock, it starts at home—wherever home may be. Hammock would know because for more than 30 years he has traveled to hundreds of nations in crisis or acute need and had countless meetings with international leaders and officials. After earning a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy and a doctoral degree at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, he shaped a career in non-profit organizations. Hammock was executive director of the microfinancing agency ACCION International from 1973 to 1980 and executive director of Oxfam America from 1984 to 1995. In 1996, he became the founding director of Tufts’s Feinstein International Famine Center, established to improve humanitarian relief and refugee efforts in conditions of famine, war, and complex emergencies. Currently he is the Alexander N. McFarlane Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Fletcher School.
“Every person,” Hammock says, “has the right to feel secure.” That means having a stable economy in a safe environment. Achieving that requires people agreeing on what Hammock calls “a vital core.” And that requires talking about it wherever local communities talk—with family members and neighbors, in civic organizations, book clubs, chat rooms, and classrooms.
And, especially, during one’s college experience. “College carries a strong sense of relationships,” Hammock says. “People get pushed together there.”
Hammock spent two weeks of this spring at his alma mater conducting seminars with Denison students and faculty and giving public lectures on how three topics—war, human development, and human security—relate to a concept he calls practical idealism. He defines practical idealism as “trying to figure out what one person can do to have meaning in life—with both feet planted in reality.” In other words, can a person hold fast to high ideals and still make a living in this world?
Practical idealism, says Hammock, is “trying to figure out what one person can do to have meaning in life—with both feet planted in reality.” In other words, can a person hold fast to high ideals and still make a living in this world?
Against such high ideals, Hammock has confronted some uncomfortable facts over many years, especially when it comes to war. For instance, he points out, most wars today are not between nations, but rather between clandestine, ideologically-based groups. From the 1990s on, they have been funded by diamonds and oil and other natural resources. Often they are tied to exponentially-growing shadow economies (illicit drugs and arms trade). About 90 percent of today’s war casualties are civilians (the opposite of the percentage in World War I). And wars today are being fought for protracted, seemingly ceaseless periods. Think Angola. Think Burundi. Think Colombia. Think Sudan. And of course, think Iraq.
But what may be a nightmare for many is an opportunity for some. “People make a killing off a crisis,” Hammock notes. He cites as an example one man moving his boat through flood waters to homeowners huddling on their rooftops. He turned out to be an enterprising investor who was buying properties dirt cheap from the desperate homeowners. After the flood waters receded and the crisis was past, the investor sold the properties for considerably more than he paid for them. Hammock notes of course that what’s good for capitalists is also good for philanthropies. “A crisis is when the money comes in” to non-profits, he says.
Now 61, Hammock seems as tightly wound up as a sprinter at the starting line. Lean and chiseled, he twists his red Denison Relay for Life wrist-band around his little finger as he talks. “I ask a lot of good questions,” he says. “But I don’t have the answers.” He has learned that the best way to search for the answers is to listen. To listen carefully. “We’re trained not to listen,” he says. “Nobody’s listening to anybody because everybody is thinking of the next thing to say.”
Hammock tells a story about not listening, hearkening back to the 1970s, when ACCION International launched an agricultural co-op in Costa Rica. “When we inaugurated it,” Hammock says, “no one from the village showed up. We couldn’t understand it. Where were they? We had solved their problem of securing credit for agriculture. But they needed credit period. They were worried that if they used the credit service of the agricultural co-op, the local loan shark would stop giving them credit. So they stayed away.” After Hammock and his staff learned of this from the villagers, they broadened the co-op’s services—and got the support of the local residents.
Earning the trust of the Costa Rican villagers was central to the co-op’s success. Indeed, establishing a secure society, Hammock says, “is all a question of building trust.” In his travels around the world, Hammock has found that “the poorer the community, the more open they are.” He remembers traveling with Danny Glover on an Oxfam America mission in Zimbabwe and being welcomed by villagers with songs and dancing, followed by a festive dinner. He remembers as well journeying with his daughter Amy in the Highlands of Ecuador and being invited into modest homes by natives. “People sit you down and offer what they’ve got,” he says. “They throw the last chicken in the pot.”
Hammock has always believed in confronting every crisis head-on and learning from it, and that became distinctly personal several years ago. “One of the things I got from Denison,” Hammock says, “is my marriage.” John and Tina Smith Hammock ’66 had been married for 37 years when she died in 2003 from a brain tumor. During the final year of Tina’s life, they found themselves, along with their daughters, Ana and Amy, united in dealing with this overwhelming event. John approached it in his typical manner. With the help of the hospice program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, the family moved with greater strength and support through this final crisis. The lesson they learned, John says, is that “the body that’s sick is broader than the patient. It includes the family. When it’s time to say good-bye, hospice helps that body to heal.”
Hammock left Denison after his two-week residency greatly encouraged by his work with students. “This was my first opportunity to spend quality time with undergraduates in quite a while,” he says. “I loved it. Denison students are smart, committed, and eager to hear about what can be done to change the world. I was told that I would find a big difference between graduate and under-graduate students. I found I was talking about the same issues in the same way—and that the Denison students were reacting strongly and positively. Great questions, excellent insights and a willingness to speak up about sensitive issues—all of these characterized the interactions with Denison students.”
Tim Hofmeister, professor of classical studies and co-director of the Lilly Program at Denison, which brought Hammock to campus, says that Hammock’s topics invited open discussion about the idea of community—or, as Hofmeister phrases it, the location of comfort zones. “Where are people’s comfort zones?” Hofmeister asks. “I think we often find out how far apart they are. But it’s in the nature of a comfort zone for one not to see it.” People define themselves by the communities (small and large) they belong to. But people need to understand and respect other communities. “We all have a strong sense of identity, a core of principles and preferences that persist amid change,” Hofmeister says. “But we need to make ourselves open to other influences—to study things through more than one lens. In other words, we ought to be able to step out of our comfort zones. John has the remarkable ability to gently push us outside of them so we can better see what they consist of.”
Hammock’s newest undertaking is an initiative “to shift the current paradigm of development to a human-centered, ethically-based approach that allows for the flourishing of human potential.” Collaborating with Sabrina Alkire of Oxford University and applying the development economics of Amartya Sen, Hammock is using the initiative to zero in on the problem of poverty. “There are not eight Millennium Development Goals,” he says. “There’s just one: eliminating poverty.”
For Hammock, that’s the sickness, and it’s much broader than the patient. It affects all of us, and Hammock’s resolve to help that body to heal is stronger than ever.
Dennis Read is an associate professor of English at Denison University. He is a leading scholar of William Blake, and his writing appears regularly in Columbus Monthly.