I'm Not Even Hungry

How Bout This?

From my late, lamented column.

On Friday morning, while most students are busy sleeping off hangovers, or pretending to have to sleep off hangovers because if everyone knows that you go home instead of drinking on Thursday nights they’ll think I’m...I mean you...are a loser, some people are in class. Many are pre-meds in Orgo, because Columbia decided to prove the Duke of Gloucester’s observation in King Lear that, “As flies to wanton boys are [pre-med students] to the [Columbia scheduling] gods, / They [schedule classes really early for] us for their sport.” About 130 people, though, have come to a class that does not fulfill any academic requirements and that many of them probably would not take if the directory contained only its title, “Challenges of Sustainable Development.” But right next to the title is the name of the professor. That name, of course, is Jeffrey Sachs.

For those who don’t know who Jeffrey Sachs is, I hate you. Seriously, go read something that isn’t US Weekly. As those who skim Time, which excerpted his most recent book as its cover story, or watch television, where he appears frequently, or read people’s shirts, which let the world know that, like Jesus, he is the wearers’ “homeboy,” or whom he has told himself, already know, Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia, is really famous for being really smart. Closely tied with the U.N. and Kofi Annan, he played a key role in the creation of the Millennium Development Goals, a plan for eliminating extreme global poverty.

He also has a devoted contingent of followers on campus. These are the people selling the shirts and going to his class. Last week, Chris Kulawik, whose column runs in this space on alternate Wednesdays, discussed them in an article called “The Cult of Sachs.” The title matches the column’s less-than-admiring tone. The same day, my e-mail box exploded with angry letters from students demanding the chance to defend Sachs, or, failing that, put Kulawik’s head on a spike so they could drink from it, become stronger, and sacrifice it to their dark master.

More importantly, the letters demonstrated that although their authors loved Sachs, they cared about eliminating global poverty more. This argument repeated itself in almost every letter: “No one is expecting that you would want to ‘cuddle with poor African orphans,’ but maybe it would be cool if you wanted them to be able to stay alive past their 5th birthday. Both of their parents are dead already because of AIDS and other diseases. You can’t even imagine what that is like. Neither can I, but at least that doesn’t stop me ... from wanting to help.”

The absolute misery of the lives of the more than one billion people who live on less than a dollar a day make this sentiment understandable. For them, the suffering Hurricane Katrina brought to its victims in America would make for just another, albeit wetter, day. As Sachs details early on in his book: “Every morning our newspapers could report, ‘More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty’ ... The poor die in hospital wards that lack drugs, in villages that lack antimalarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water.”

Jesus said “the poor are always with us,” but he lived 2,000 years ago, when people were even stupider than they are now. Eight hundred pages earlier, Adam tried to hide from God—who had created the universe a couple of days before—by sneaking behind a tree. Today, no educated person has an excuse for ignorance or apathy concerning the severity of global poverty. Regardless of his program’s merits, Sachs has at least made this clear.

But to his groupies on campus, the details of Sachs’s plan matter less than it’s righteousness. Even those who don’t actually do anything about global poverty can feel a sweet rush from their moral endorphins every time they condemn someone for cold-heartedness, ignorance, and inhumanity.

Anyone with true sympathy for the conditions of the world’s poor, though, might have that superiority high undercut by the massive guilt that comes from living surrounded by the privileges of life at the top of American society. In truth, we all could, and perhaps should, sacrifice everything we have, move to Malawi, and devote our lives to helping others, and that would still help only an infinitesimal fraction of the people who need it. Small acts of charity make a difference; dropping out of school and having your parents donate the rest of your tuition to UNICEF does more. Claiming sympathy for the poor comes with a price. Even Jesus knew that.

In every class that deals with people who lived more than 50 years ago, someone always takes the time to condemn the inexplicable stupidity of those who somehow failed to live by our contemporary standards. If Thomas Jefferson can’t defend himself from angry undergraduates today, imagine what future generations will think when they look back on a time when the wealthiest, most influential people stood idly by while thousands died unnecessary deaths every day. They’ll despise those who ignored the problem just as much as we despise slaveholders like Jefferson today, and they’ll be right to do so. But they won’t think too highly of those who sold T-shirts (and wrote columns) either.

posted by Tim @ 10:43 PM