charity
A friend sent this to me this morning. Fascinating (not least because of the excellent drawings!). The main point is that charity (development, aid) is not bad, but doing charity using money made in the systems that make the poor suffer is immoral (and ridiculous, when you think about it). These interventions are simply “remedies” that prolong the actual disease. I also really liked this extract: “It is much easier to have sympathy with suffering than have sympathy with thought.” I think that’s something you could say big pushers like Enough in their blood minerals campaign ascribe to.
Siena,
I enjoyed this presentation…thanks for sending it my way and posting it here. My reaction was that the piece points out an important trend worth thinking about, taking seriously, and passionately responding to. But the claim that it is immoral to interact with the system was unsupported. What exactly is immoral…buying any Starbuck’s coffee? Buying it for the reason that they support fair trade? What’s the argument for either of these? Buying it naively, without asking questions or thinking critically about the practices they employ…granted. But that’s true about watching the film. There may be an enlightening moral claim in the neighborhood, but I missed it in the film.
There are tensions and paradoxes in many areas of life, including international trade. I think it is more useful to persuasively point to specific ways of life that resolve these tensions differently. Those sorts of claims do some good. Charges of immorality are less likely to be fruitful.
It is easier to have sympathy for suffering and for thought than for persons struggling in isolation without a clear moral compass. Sympathetic understanding of their situation is required to persuade them. The first part of the film moved began to persuade in that way. The too-easy moral condemnation was a step backward, I thought. In fact, it might have been motivated more by sympathy for suffering than by sympathy for thought.
Hey Tom,
Thanks for the comments.
I do think that the author is a bit naive to think that people act charitably as regularly as he seems to imply.
I don’t think the point of the presentation, and perhaps this is a personal preference issue, is that people should not interact with the system of Starbucks fair trade etc. I think the point is that we should be aware that deregulated corporations where people like Bill Gates, Soros and others have made a dime (which they later then reinvest in health care, for example) are bigger forces of destruction and that this earn and re-invest system doesn’t even out.
I also think he’s implying that these companies offer avoidance mechanisms for people instead of making them face the root problem – economic inequality, lack of capital redistribution and so on – by making them feel as if they do their part, when the part that needs to be done is actually a lot larger.
However, he also comes at this from a very Marxist perspective and, to the extent he is advocating a communist system, I think he fails to see some of the benefits in free markets…