Aid to Africa, aid to D.C.

Rod Dreher has been following the evolution of Irish journalist Kevin Myers’s take on aid to Africa. As Dreher puts it,

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 worth reading Rod’s posts and Myers’s columns (this one first, then this). The reason I link to them, however, is because they remind me of a discussion I had with myself about DC and why crime persists here. How do you fix a problem with a society when that society refuses to help itself? How do we stop the spread of AIDS and famine in Africa when the people there are too busy waging civil wars and regressing into barbarism to fix themselves? How do we stop the rash of violent crime in a city where out-of-wedlock births and drug use–two problems rooted entirely in personal deficiencies that contribute directly to poverty and the associated crimes–are far too high? How can you help people who won’t help themselves?