Meghan Elizabeth Kallman - The Death of Idealism: Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps

[The Peace Corps] gave rise to my last burst of true idealism.

Returned Peace Corps volunteer, 1960s, Turkey

E sther offered the remark above over the phone, nearly fifty years after she had completed her Peace Corps service in Turkey. She spoke of enthusiasm for public service during the Kennedy years, of becoming an internationalist through her experience abroad, and of the dismay she felt upon returning home to the upheaval of the 1960s. After a long career in nonprofit work and international development, she retired. I now live outside Washington, she told me. Imin a modest waypolitically active, and I understand that many government policies affect me. Her experience mirrors the political and professional trajectories of many thousands of others who served in the Peace Corps.

Esther is one of nearly 250,000 returned Peace Corps volunteers, or RPCVs. She is one of over 140 people with whom I spoke to help me make sense of my questions about when, why, and how idealism is lost. Why do so many citizens in Western society find themselves, early in the twenty-first century, starved for a sense of meaning and purpose? How does this happen, even (or especially) in the context of doing socially engaged work?

Idealismenvisioning things in an ideal form and living under the influence of that potentialis usually understood as an individual phenomenon: people are idealistic. And people who are idealistic usually say that it is an important part of their identities; they use idealism to justify, explain, and make sense of themselves in relation to others, to their work, and to the world. In other words, I will argue here that idealism is a social phenomenon.

The questions of how people experience idealism, why it dies, and why that matters are the central puzzle of this book. I answer them by looking at one of the most clear-cut cases of organized idealism in U.S. history: the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps is a fascinating irony. Ostensibly established to capitalize on idealism, the organization has, in practice, ended up discouraging it. This is a result of rationalized society forcing maladaptation in an organization through routinized professional practices: a combination of social forces and organizational pressures depoliticizes Peace Corps volunteers and reshapes their idealism. And these changes are broadly consequential: volunteers political and social attitudes diffuse widely through international development organizations and the U.S. social sector via their lives and careers. This analysis allows me to speak to another question circulating in two decades worth of social scientific debate: What is responsible for the persistent failure of development organizations? This book explores both the sources of the death of idealism and the consequences for people and their careers, their organizations, and the efforts to advance justice and development more broadly.

While few social scientists have studied idealism, a great many have looked at cynicism, which is also known within sociology, management, and social psychology as burnout or disengagement, and there are many theories about its origins. In this explanation, the death of idealism is attributable to persistent and ongoing emotional exhaustion related to ones work. A fourth line of thought points to a perceived dichotomy between idealism and realism, suggesting that once nave workers, activists, or volunteers come to understand the complexities of the social world, they will default to realism, a term marshaled to capture the range of ways in which peoples expectations are altered. (Peter Senges quip that if you scratch the surface of most cynics, you find a frustrated idealist: someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations neatly captures this perspective.) And so idealism dies.