Spoilt Rotten

Africa, therefore, is the current focus of sentimentality about poverty

There seems little doubt that the proportion of mankind living in this kind of poverty has decreased dramatically in the past quarter century, the World Bank suggesting indeed that it has halved

The disadvantages of absolute poverty are so obvious that they hardly need enumerating: a shortened life span, increased experience of physical illness, pain and disability without access to treatment or relief, unremitting and monotonous toil merely to survive even at a low level, insecurity and anxiety about the future, and so forth.

On this view, a society in which everyone has an income of $200 per year is less poor than one in which ninety per cent of the population has an income of $1,000,000 per year, but ten per cent have an income of only $300,000

If it is the latter, of course, poverty will never be history until there is equality, more or less

But what, exactly, is the poverty that is to be made history? Is it absolute poverty or relative poverty? Is it the kind of poverty in which women have to walk miles to the nearest source of water and do not have enough to feed their children, or is it the kind of poverty that exists so long as incomes are not equal, that is to say among people whose income is less than sixty per cent of that of the median income, a definition that is often used and means that, in a society of billionaires, a multi-millionaire could be considered poor?

For the sentimentalist, of course, there is no such thing as a criminal, only an environment that has let him down

What had been deemed moral defect became victimhood whether conscious or not; and since mankind was born happy as well as good, unhappiness and suffering were likewise evidence of bad treatment and victimhood.

The Christian view, that man was born imperfect but could and should strive in person towards perfection, was first challenged and then replaced by the Romantic view that mankind was born naturally good but was corrupted into badness by living in a bad society.

The idea that those who certifiably suffer are victims has a further undesirable corollary, namely that assistance should be rendered according to need and not according to desert.