Progress as a Moral Imperative

I enjoyed a lecture many years ago by a Jesuit history professor who opined that the real injury to Ireland from the Norman invasion was that the Normans did not finish the job—instead, the people got a long-term, partial, hostile occupation without the nation-building transformation the Normans had wrought in England.

Around that time, I read a semi-serious paper by two African academics (I am unable to locate a copy) who called for a re-colonization of Africa by the United Nations. They argued that the legacy of European colonization left national boundaries unrelated to ethnic or historical groupings, weak governments that were pale imitations of colonial bureaucracies crippled by corruption and political instability. Their proposal was to replace virtually all of Africa’s governments with the rule of law, administered by non-corrupt technocrats empowered by powerful nations that would establish patterns, habits and expectations required for a functioning modern democratic economic order and then let new, modernized nations emerge with viable foundations.

Rather than obsessive “de-colonialization” of culture and curricula, it would seem to be more beneficial to examine which concepts (democracy? human rights? limited government?) have been of demonstrable global benefit. Given that there is no option of returning to any technological and cultural order that existed prior to the encounter with the West, why not examine and celebrate the most successful syntheses and adaptations instead of cataloging the worst abuses of colonial power?

When the intellectually deadening effect of the Marxist zero-sum mindset is combined with authentic Christian compassion for the poor, redistribution becomes a political imperative without any moral inquiry into the causes of mass poverty. Why isn't it a moral imperative for a basket case nation to religiously imitate Western law, culture and values unless and until they have a societal alternative that provides comparable material results? If their people are starving, don’t they have a greater responsibility to act than do Canadians, Swedes, Japanese or Americans to bail them out with aid?

Thomas Sowell noted that Marxists obsess about redistribution but exhibit little or no curiosity about how that wealth was created in the first place. It is insane to condemn that which works as if conscience mandates cultural and economic suicide, especially when it appears that we are on the verge of technologically driven geometric leaps in productivity. A corresponding intellectual and philosophical reform would be salutary even if seemingly unlikely.