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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 10, 2005
Aid, aides, & AIDS
As the son of an industrial designer, I can tell you there are two ways to do anything: elegantly, or for show. There are a number of sub-categories. “For show”, for instance, may include anything from the accomplished theatrical (which requires craft), to the merely slovenly. But as the expression announces, illusion is the purpose of anything that is done “for show”.What is “elegant” does not call attention to itself. It may get a great deal of attention, once noticed. But it will not be noticed when it is doing its job. It will instead become part of the operation, an extension of the act. I’m not a puritan. I am not against “show”, per se; against what is decorative. Sometimes it is necessary to draw attention -- say, to the door that leads into a building. In a sense, so noble a piece of architecture as a church is designed entirely for show. There is no formula which can reduce modesty to a simple virtue. In this exemplary case, the question is, does the church draw our attention to God? Or just to the architect? Even what is done for show can be a species of elegance. All the elements in this hypothetical church should conspire to lift the user of the church to its highest function. The building is a liturgical act, in stone, wood, glass, brick and mortar. The mediaevals understood these things better than we do. At least, they understood churches. It is the tawdry show against which I am implacably set: the cheap gesture, the “put-up job”, the inelegant solution, “the horse designed by a committee”. To the extent our eyes were focused on Edinburgh this week (and not distracted by the explosions in London), we saw an excruciating example of the tawdry show. The G-8 meeting consisted of a bunch of politicians trying to design a scheme for lifting Africa out of poverty, to the instructions of a mob of slogan-blathering demonstrators -- the “anti-poverty campaigners, progressive pop stars, socially aware bishops, labour union executives, environmental radicals, ‘thoughtful’ corporate statesmen, anti-globalisation net-workers and young idealists of various kinds,” as John O’Sullivan listed them. Armed only with the treasure of their nations’ taxpayers, and a working knowledge of what looks good on TV, the politicians struck their poses and promised to discharge plenty of money. All of it, in principle, to be directed through bureaucratic aid programmes, and almost all destined to line the pockets of big and small tyrants along the way. And the dribble that gets through the end of the pipe, destined to corrupt everyone it touches. In the words of the Kenyan economist, James Shikwati, “For God’s sake, please just stop!” He was interviewed recently in the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel: “Huge bureaucracies are financed, corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. ... If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid. ... “Unfortunately, the Europeans' devastating urge to do good can no longer be countered with reason.” I would need to provide a bibliography many times longer than this column to point my reader to all those reasons, why government aid programmes are, invariably, counter-productive. And not only fiscally, but morally -- for the notion that we can improve hygiene, and elevate the position of women, by spreading condoms and abortion clinics through Africa, is another fact-defying construct of the Western aid mentality. (It was only when they stopped that approach, and began emphasizing chastity instead, that the AIDS rate in Uganda began to fall.) Nobody reads the literature, anyway. But we should be able to guess something is very wrong, from the inelegance with which our foreign aid is designed and delivered. It is, after all, a form of carpet-bombing. To expect it will “make poverty history” is like expecting to eliminate the underclass in the West by using welfare to reward self-destructive behaviour. We may reason, or we may succumb to the extraordinary power of idiots chanting slogans. It is a battle of slogans at the moment, so let me conclude with one of my own: “The three scourges of Africa today are aid, aides, and AIDS.” David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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