Evil can follow from good as well as from evil
“The most powerful societies are still in the West. You’d be amazed at the damage that simple decisions in the West can make. For example, if you look at trade, a new regulation of bananas can kill an entire industry. A new regulation of apparel can deprive thousands of their jobs. One of the most remarkable stories is about how a Belgian NGO went to Bangladesh and found a factory that was employing child labor. They caught them red-handed and said, “You see? Aha. We were right.” Two years later, the NGO went back and guess what? Many of the young female child workers went into prostitution. That’s one reason why I quote Max Weber in my book: “It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.”
–Kishore Mahbubani, from Salon interview, March 25, 2002
May 12th, 2003 at 9:41 pm
While visiting in South Africa, I was informed that a law had been passed by the post apartheid government that dealt with the problem of overcrowding in schools in the black townships.
Since schools in white areas averaged around 20 students per class and the classes in black schools were sitting at 40+, the government made a law that class size had to be uniform across the country. Unfortunately, there were no additional classrooms available in the townships to allow the reduction in class size, so, to comply with the (basically well-meaning)law, the class size in white schools had to be doubled. I have no hard evidence that this is the case, it is simply anecdotal, but it rings true. Many well-meaning laws end up causing distress.
May 14th, 2003 at 7:54 pm
There are always challenges that come with trying to do good in a country (just ask any Peace Corps volunteer about this), especially when the nuances of other cultures aren’t always so easy to understand. Philip Gourevitch’s
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families has a chilling account about how much of the Western aid that poured into Rwanda after the 1994 massacres actually ended up helping sustain the Hutu militias that started the genocide in the first place. Of course, it’s easier to criticize than to actually implement positive change — but there are a lot of sloppy NGO’s out there.