I’m not the most notorious blogger in Guatemala just because I’m a white male conservative (well, at least not only because I’m a white male conservative), but because I dare criticize NGOs, volunteers and all those who are here to save Guatemala from itself.  This makes me unpopular with everyone-the conservative evangelicals who are here to save souls and perhaps help out in temporal ways, and the liberals who see my conservatism and constructive criticism as the very cause of the injustices they are here to fix.  Add in the atheists who dislike rigorous logic and Catholics who dislike my criticism of pedophilia or corrupt or incompetent Bishops and, well, if you don’t like me I have to say, “Get in line”.

Now, if you believe in an eternal soul and a just God, then nothing could be more important than saving a soul.  It reasons that eternity would be more important than this (relatively speaking short), life on earth.  But when I point out that the evangelicals are ’saving’ Catholics, who were after all the first Christians and were saving souls long before King Henry or Martin Luther decided to start their own churches, well, watch out!  Saying those kinds of things just isn’t cool!  I mean, obviously it was wrong for the Church to try to prevent protestants from forming their own churches, but to consider evangelization of Catholics as anything less than the work of St. Paul himself is, well, heretical.

Not every evangelical is here to save Catholics though, many are helping people with nutrition, housing, medical care and the like, and some of these suffer from the same fallacies as do their well-intention liberal friends.  I was explaining-or defending-myself from a hostile group of do-gooders in Antigua recently and attempting to persuade them that after teaching people how to wipe themselves and wash their hands, education itself was the most important thing.  A man who knows how to think and learn is capable of most anything, and an educated man who has also been taught discipline and self-responsibility is the bedrock of an advanced society.  I made the mistake of explaining how this was a principal difference between this country, and much of Latin America as Spanish colonies, and the US and Australia, as English colonies.  Whoa…you just can’t say things that get to the heart of the matter without risking a stoning.  Funny how those who list diversity and tolerance as commandments are quick to call for a ban on dissent.

These ‘progressives’, by which I mean that they belong to a liberal political faction, not that they are in any way truly progressive thinkers, didn’t want to hear the explanation for how the Spanish colonial rule was so different from the English, and how the Church in Latin America was both the source of greatness and great evil, or how the Indian culture and racial differences had influenced so much here while having little effect in the US, or what the effect of mass immigration or climate or the presence of large, working mammals had meant for progress in the English colonies in the US, so instead they called me a racist and an apologist for imperial America.

I was reminded of all this because of a recent article on sympathy:

To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.

No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been—one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up. This was not the consequence of poverty in any raw economic sense; it resulted from the various kinds of squalor—moral, familial, psychological, social, educational, and cultural—that were particularly prevalent in the country (see “Childhood’s End,” Summer 2008).

My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists. One fellow panelist was the chief of a charity devoted to the abolition of child poverty (whose largest source of funds, like that of most important charities in Britain’s increasingly corporatist society, was the government). She dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply the “maldistribution of resources”; we could thus distribute it away. And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.

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