Decades of foreign aid have
not helped Tanzanians
To sympathize with
those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to
commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive.
But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking
into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental
condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously
hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to
policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to
combine all three errors.
No subject
provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this
recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the
wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not
affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained
what it had long been--one of the worst countries in the Western world in which
to grow up. This was not the consequence of poverty in any raw economic sense;
it resulted from the various kinds of squalor--moral, familial, psychological,
social, educational, and cultural--that were particularly prevalent in the
country (see "Childhood's End," Summer 2008).
My remarks were
poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of
the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child
psychologists. One fellow panelist was the chief of a charity devoted to the
abolition of child poverty (whose largest source of funds, like that of most
important charities in Britain's increasingly corporatist society, was the
government). She dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply
the "maldistribution of resources"; we could thus distribute it away.
And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was
poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.
