verging_on_random

Why giving is wrong

March 3, 2008 on 3:34 pm | In Uncategorized |

Noblesse oblige is one of the virtues of the true conservative. Genuine conservatives accept that there will be great inequality within society and that nothing much can be done to change that without causing consequences (predictable or unanticipated) that make the overall situation even worse. However, along with this attitude goes a sense of duty, a belief that those who find themselves in a privileged position as a result of life’s great lottery are honour bound to give to the less fortunate.

That being the case, it’s always interesting to read people masquerading as conservatives trying to explain why noblesse doesn’t really oblige at all and in fact charity is actually deplorable. Thus we’ve seen some privileged souls arguing with straight faces for years that tax cuts help the poor but only if they are given to the rich, and welfare just makes the lives of recipients more miserable, and so on. Their arguments inevitably depend on a fantabulously imaginative model of human behaviour that owes its plausibility much more to its inventors’ idiosyncratic notions of human motivation than to any empirical data.

Even though I’m well accustomed to these kinds of arguments that rationalise why it’s not only excusable but positively moral for those with power and wealth to refrain from sharing even a tiny bit with the masses, I had to admire the latest example I read a few days ago. It mounts an argument against more foreign aid, an area where Australia’s performance has consistently fallen well below the levels expected of wealthy nations. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Sitting in a region that includes some of the world’s poorest, Australians understandably feel they should give more to the less fortunate. But we should not be blinded by superficial compassion. Simply giving more foreign aid is not going to solve, or build the foundations for, the solution to poverty alleviation.

Did you ever read two lines with such a dazzling array of rhetorical devices? If I had Noam Chomsky’s email address I’d send it to him as an exhibit for his next book.

First of all, our urge to give is ‘understandable’. Presumably this is meant to make us feel good about ourselves, even though I can’t say I’ve noticed that Australians en masse have this urge of which he writes. But it’s OK because if you were feeling uncomfortable that you hadn’t kicked in a few bucks for the Papuans lately you can relax: you have in fact avoided being ‘blinded’ by the compassion that afflicts your fellow-citizens. You needn’t feel at all guilty because their compassion is ’superficial’, the meaning of which is not clear but it ought to be enough to salve any qualms of conscience you were starting to have. Presumably anyone who feels deep compassion already understands that it is more blessed to receive than to give.

The real zinger in the paragraph is the final sentence though, in which the point suddenly switches from the urge to help the less fortunate to a ’solution to poverty alleviation’. This little sleight of hand fundamentally changes the topic which he’s discussing but he doesn’t mention this. The intention is clear: it’s to alter the way the reader frames the whole issue of foreign aid. What, did you think it was a way for wealthy countries to share a tiny part of their wealth with poor countries in accordance with charitable principles that have been preached for thousands of years by all religions and most secular philosophers? Huh, we have to get you away from that kind of superficial compassion. No, according to the article the aim of foreign aid is to find a solution to poverty.

It’s as if the writer has caught you about to give a starving child a sandwich. “Nooooo!” he’s cried. “Your urge to help does you credit but superficial compassion has blinded you! Keep the sandwich for yourself while we go figure out a solution to urban poverty.”

Now the obvious comeback, I would have thought, is “Why can’t we do both?” I mean the extreme poverty of many neighbouring countries is an objective fact, experienced in the daily lives of millions and millions of people. They need help now for little things like food and housing and education. Giving money or other practical forms of aid now is the only way to help those people. They don’t really have the luxury of waiting around while we find the solution to poverty.

Our writer gives us his take on that:

Too often profligate spending by foreign aid projects rarely reaches its intended target. Instead bumper aid budgets and loose approaches to project delivery simply creates the opportunities for corrupt foreign government officials to intercept money before it reaches its destination and use it to line their pockets.

No doubt that is true of some aid projects but why is it a reason to stop trying to help? To me it’s grounds to be careful in the ways in which one gives and for great suspicion of any projects which involve either government agencies or multinational corporations. That still leaves lots of other avenues to satisfy our superficial urge to be compassionate.

However it becomes increasingly clear that the author isn’t really concerned about the impact of poverty on individual human beings at all. His topic is the way to encourage economic development:

But Australians should not get bogged down in believing that more aid is the solution to development. Foreign aid is not the best way to promote development that will meet the social, environmental and economic needs of the world’s poor.

Our blogger is on a mission from god the owners of capital:

The best way to promote development is the spread of capitalism and the structures to support a free market economy.

And by the happiest of coincidences, the people who think this way just happen to be capitalists who might even make a buck out of the spread of the free market economy to all these poor countries.

By the way, I bet you were wondering when we’d get to read the shopworn line about teach a man to fish and you feed him for a day etc etc. Well don’t worry, it’s there:

If the structures of a free market economy are established the system necessary for the world’s poor to catch fish will become available. Such an option is a significant improvement from them being given a fish out of foreign aid dollars.

Damn right dude. I can’t wait to tell my Filipino friends squatting in the Manila slums “No more fish for you! I’m investing my money in a system that lets you catch fish.” Of course they’ll point out that all the fish were dynamited out of the oceans around the Philippines ages ago but I’m sure I can come up with a cute response if I think about it. Grow bamboo for ethanol then so people in rich countries can still drive their cars! That should shut them up.

In the meanwhile our learned author from the Institute of Public Affairs can hang on to his hard-earned cash secure in the knowledge that giving any of it to poor nations would be wrong because it’s the system that needs fixing. And I’ll keep wanting to help real live people who are hungry and sick and uneducated because they don’t have anywhere near as much money as I do, thanks to a system that neither they nor I had any hand in designing and no opportunity to change.

The IPA is of course free to argue that government aid should be devoted to reforming institutions in order to get rid of corruption and improve governance. With some qualifications I would even go along with them. But couching their argument as if helping the poor is an act of blindness is unforgivable. One is forced to conclude that they are not concerned with improving the lives of the poor so much as they are with rationalising their own selfishness.