Confessions of a politically correct journalist

Not long ago I posted here a column written by Irish journalist Kevin Myers, who was once an Africa correspondent. He said, basically, that Africa's problems are largely its own fault, and in any case beyond the ability of the West to solve, so we should quit worrying about them and let nature take its course. We had a big long combox argument about that. Now Myers is back, saying that to his great surprise the overwhelming majority of the e-mail he got off that column was from people who were sympathetic to his point of view: people who wonder why the West should keep aiding Africa if Africa shows no ability to do its own part to stop the cycle of suffering.

He also makes an extraordinary admission of journalistic malfeasance, owning up to his role in distorting the news his readers got back in the 1980s, when he was reporting on African famine:

So what is the moral justification for saving a baby from death through hunger, in order to give her an even more agonising, almost sacrificial, death aged eight or 13 [By female "circumcision," which is common in Ethiopia -- RD.]? The practice could have been stamped out, with sufficient political will, as sutti in India once was. And the feminists of the west would never have allowed such unconditional aid to be given to such a wicked and brutal society if it had been run by white men.

But, instead, the state was run by black males, for whom a special race-and-gender dispensation apparently applies: thus the two most politically incorrect sins of our age -- sexism and racism -- by some mysterious moral process, akin to the mathematics of the double-negative, annul one another, and produce an unquestioned positive virtue, called Ethiopia.

I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.

Kevin Myers' cold-hearted view, which has the advantage of being realistic, is that it makes no sense to go all-out to save people who live by practices and beliefs that will result in their mass deaths one of these days. As a Christian, I cannot agree with him. But at the same time, I do wish our discussion of charity, and our moral obligation to the poor in Africa, and the poor anywhere, would factor in the kind of thing Myers brings up: the role of culture and morality among the recipients of charity in perpetuating the conditions that impoverish and immiserate them.

It's hard to get people to care about the suffering when people come to believe that they (the suffering) are suffering in large part because they shat in their own nest. This was part of the "everybody's at equal risk for AIDS" strategy back in the day -- it isn't true, and wasn't true, but AIDS activists believed, not without reason, that the broader society wouldn't care so much about AIDS sufferers if they thought the disease was isolated to certain groups, in part because of prejudice (anti-gay), but in part because people might conclude that they brought it on themselves (which, in the case of promiscuous gay men, is pretty much true).

So, the question Myers puts to we who would aid Africa in its famine is a good one: Why should we help people who won't change the way of life that helps keep them poor and miserable and in need of our charity? We who favor continuing that aid -- and I do -- need to face the realities Myers reports on, and figure out a rationale for continuing the charity in spite of these realities -- or, even better, figure out how to give in such a way that mandates a change of behavior, if that's possible.

Anyway, however politically incorrect Myers' sentiments, I'm glad he's at least telling the truth about what he sees, even if I cannot endorse the conclusion he draws from it. We don't see enough of that kind of thing in reporting on American poverty either.