Theos-Talk Archives (April 2004 Message tt00384)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, Erica Letzerich <eletzerich@y...> 
wrote:
> 
> We are civilized!
> 
> In Africa millions of people die every year of
> starvation.

I must beg to differ. The problem with Africa is that most of the 
problems there are the result of deliberate and conscious human 
action. Religious wars, religious superstition, slavery, racism, 
tribalism, genocide, extinction of wildlife, the destruction of the 
farm system, and the refusal to stop the spread of HIV infection are 
not cosmic phenomena visited on them by voodoo gods, nor are they are 
perfidy of the middle class in some country other than your own. 
Unfortunately, the same general observation can be made of other less 
wealthy areas of the world, although religious superstition is the 
main problem in the MIddle East rather than destruction of wildlife 
or destruction of farms. If anyone suggests that these folks need to 
behave themselves we are told that this is their great culture we are 
talking about and that we cannot and must not question their great 
culture.

The reason this is significant is that it highlights the naivete of 
the idea that the problems will vanish if somehow a subsidy is paid. 
I would believe in the subsidy solution if it had not already been 
tried fifty years ago and failed. All subsidies are is money paid by 
the poor people in rich countries to the rich people in poor 
countries. Africa's problems are not solved by outside intervention 
because as a practical matter they cannot be solved by outside 
intervention. Nobody fixes it because nobody knows how.

I was listening to an economist lecture a few months ago and he said 
the real problem is that 200 years ago everyone was poor and now a 
few people have managed to improve their lot. From a certain ultra 
liberal perspective that is totally unacceptable, so that we have to 
return to a state of universal destitution. If we state that case 
honestly it makes the people who promulgate it look like a bunch of 
cranks. So its purveyors reverse the facts of history and subtly 
imply that there was a Golden Age in which everyone was rolling in 
money, and then somehow a few robbers stole from the many. This 
seems to be unknown to historians, but that is because they are sold 
out to the oligarchy, etc., and on it goes. This fantasy even made 
its way into the mythologies of most countries. It is similar to the 
kind of dishonest rhetoric religious theosophists are always using to 
defend irrational ideas of their own.

So here is a question for you. I know you are not one of those folks 
who pound their chest and clutch their gut and don't do anything. So 
how do you eat and pay the rent now that you have sent all your money 
to Zimbabwe?