Aid and Prejudice T. R. M. Creighton Canada for the
Canadians Donald S. Macdonald Catholics and Birth Control A Future Catholic Parent, Erika Fallaux, Tom Sullivan Roger Casement Sean 0 Rafartaigh, P. 0 Coneluiir Charles l's Bible
Sir Alec Martin, The Earl of Crawford
Festival Dimness Geoffrey Summerfield Roman Pavement at Woodchester William Pinching Freud and Brainwashing
Dr. William Sargant, Analysand I!
MI) AND PREJUDICE
SIR,—It is some time ago now that Mr. Co1m Brogan's 'Pride and Poverty' was printed in your journal, but it will be a good deal longer before it is forgotten by overseas readers. Mr. Brogan and those who think like him see the affluent societies of the West as suddenly confronted with a new problem, the poverty of underdeveloped countries, and a new obligation to go out and relieve it. They suggest we have a right to the gratitude and even subservience of the inhabitants of these countries and exhibit an umnistakableprejudice that these people are in some way less qualified to manage their own affairs than we are. It is not particularly surprising that an argument based on these and other false premises should lead to such conclusions as that 'perhaps neo-colonialism is what these countries need' and that (as Dr. Hawes wrote) all higher edu- cation for Ghanaians and Nigerians should be closed down and their college fees used 'to feed the starving.'
The real problem today is not the poverty of the poorer countries, but the wealth of the affluent societies. The peoples of Asia and Africa are living at the sort of standard of living which we all en- joyed in Western Europe until about a century ago —and on the whole with fewer social distinctions and economic inequalities. The incidence of infant mortality, malnutrition, undernourishment and disease and the adult expectation of life are roughly the same. The poverty of these poorer countries is not absolute (there is no absolute poverty short of extinction), but exists by comparision with our affluence. The divergence between their standard of living and ours, the gap between the haves and the have-nots, is real and absolute. It is even more our problem than theirs, morally and materially. Poverty is neither a crime nor a barrier to human dignity, self-respect and happiness. Riches easily can be. To attach a stigma to poverty and to regard 'it as a target for paternalistic humanitarianism as Mr. Brogan and his supporters do (they demand grati- tude which true charity, we are told, does not) is to speak with the voice of thc Victorian poor law administrator.
The division of the world into haves and have- nots would present the haves with numerous incon- veniences and dangers, even without the other divi- sion of the cold war; with it, the temptation it
' Presents to both sides to exploit poverty for com- petitive purposes makes any permanent security im-
possible. (The efforts of both Russia and China to dislodge us from so many key positions have, after all, only just begun, and can be expected to in- crease.) Our own interests demand the elimination of this gap, not as a charity to relieve our affluent
consciences, not to appease our guilt about the colonial past and not to curry favour for cold war purposes—though all these motives operate in our present confused and muddled thinking on the sub- ject—but simply because the world which our own technology has .made one world can only be a safe place for anyone if the human race is one race without gross distinctions of wealth or privilege. We cannot bring this abort by offering the have-nots the palliative of humanitarian relief, but only by learning how to make the greatest contribution we can to their permanent, long-term development on terms acceptable to them.
Mr. Brogan did not make the distinction between relief and development, but it is crucial in this context. The etiolated adults and pot-bellied child- ren of the charity posters are not the normal in- habitants of these areas (I speak from first-hand knowledge only of Africa), but the products of disaster which may as well occur in post-war Ger- many or contemporary Yugoslavia as in the Congo or Pakistan. The normal inhabitants of these areas have built up social institutions, systems of law, government, authority, economy, religion, culture- civilisations—of which they are rightly as proud and fond as we are of our own—on a basis of what appears to us to be considerable material poverty. Their communities are at least as stable, happy, morally healthy and sane as our own. They still accept as a matter of course much in the way of physical hardship, wastage and suffering which we have just learnt to reduce. Yet most of their societies are founded upon a much more egalitarian sharing of all material benefits than we have had and upon systems for the care of children, the aged and distressed which put the history of the West to shame. Indeed, most of the real troubles of Afri- can countries today (over-rapid urbanisatiOn, for instance) result from the activities of those Euro- peans Mr. Brogan praises who 'just arrived and, started work' uninvited and broke up as many tradi- tional and local customs as they could without understanding them. It is not our duty now to go out to these countries to 'feed the hungry, cure the diseased and train the unskilled' (to quote Mr. Brogan), nor to fashion them in our own image without understanding them. Such pretension is more than enough to keep all overseas students away from university charity meetings for years and to excite the most justified suspicion of Western aid in the minds of their people at home.
What we have to do, on the contrary, is to co- operate with them in their own development. De- velopment is not a humanitarian activity and often involves leaving existing hardship alone and using resources to eliminate its long-term causes. (The obviously greater usefulness of spending money on higher education than in relieving the hungry is a case in point.) To do this the affluent societies will have to be ready to share their resources, capi- tal, knowledge and—yes, certainly—their skills (but not to impose them as if they were the only valuable skills in the world) on a far greater scale than we have yet thought of and to make real sacrifices ourselves instead of just offering the left-overs that don't hurt. (Leaving aside defence expenditure, can we really be sure that £20 million will save more British lives by changing all the road signs in Britain than the same sum invested in overseas de- velopment?) We shall have to learn to think in terms of a world economy, not a national or re- gional one. The effort of co-operation that is needed cannot be made or succeed with 'strings' of any kind attached to the political alignments of poorer countries or to the forms which their internal growth and development take. Governessy control or neo- colonial claims will bring about its rejection, not because the poorer countries are any more touchy, unreasonable or ungrateful than anyone else, but because these people are sick of being told by Westerners what to do and how to do it and are quite determined to do things for themselves and to do them better than we have. There is no reason why they should not. Those who believe that they will in the end always submit to the power of the purse cannot have first-hand experience of them. Mr. Brogan cited General de Gaulle to support this view, but I wonder if he is aware of the small degree of popular support the governments enjoy
in most French Community States or of the sig- nificance to its whole future of the fall of Abb6 Youlou.
Morvcrn, Argyllshire T. R. M. CREIGII1ON
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