Anti-Western Inconsistencies

If you are going to be anti-Western, please be consistent. Promises Not Kept by John Isbister is not. It is a required book for a class that I now regret signing up for. As the title suggests, the book is all about how evil the western world is for creating empires and bullying the poor third world countries. While there is much truth in this, Isbister is far from consistent and uses flawed arguments.

He says that the indigenous societies that existed before the imperial powers were doing just fine before we ruined them. In fact, it even seems that these countries weren't poor until the evil Europeans told them they were poor. He admits that the pre-imperialized societies were in fact poor by our standards. He also says that they were just fine that way. But apparently once they were occupied and oppressed they became poor. In other words, we could sum up his opinion like so: "Poverty is evil. Of course, in traditional standards these people are not poor---their culture was rich, even though they were starving. If we only didn't tell them that..."

The real big issue I have with this worldview is that liberals are quick to decry Western influence in the Third World (yes, I used a politically incorrect term) but are the first to push for running into these nations and teaching everyone birth control methods and how great abortions are. For example, our new President's third executive order was to allow for federal TAXPAYER money to fund international abortions.

As if that weren't bad enough, people like Isbister say that "The imperialists brought with them public health measures that lowered mortality and caused the unprecedented population explosion in the third world." He actually thinks that that is a BAD thing! Seriously, he does. If you read the whole context of the chapter he is saying that LESS death is another imported evil western action. I'm sorry, I didn't know that valuing life was bad. But wait! He says the evil imperial powers killed countless millions....and that's bad, but of course only in the context of people over and below a certain age. Because we all know that those are the real people. Who needs the old, the weak, the young anyway?

Isbister also has a tendency to say, in effect, "The following are some suspect statistics that could be wrong but I am going to use in my argument anyway...." Oh, and I also love it when he basically says, "There's no data on this, but if there was, it would say_____."

And one must not forget religion! We have a moral responsibility based on common humanity, he says, to deal with poverty. The disease of poverty must be cured! After all, most conflicting religions say so. That's his opinion. Essentially, and I'm exaggerating a bit for effect, he's saying: "Because all religions believe that we should be nice to the poor, including religions that believe in one god, two, three, none, 66, and 205.1, we can therefore surmise that the United States government should increase its foreign aid, especially for abortions."

He also blasts trickle down and then admits that it works on like the same page.

All of this to say that I'm upset that this is required reading. And, my response: If you are going to decry the injustice of the Western, "Imperial" nations...please don't turn around and tell the third world to kill their young.

Guess what my other book's worldview is? If we only had the right policies the world would be perfect. The great modernist, Jeffrey Sachs...