I left Irvine Auditorium inspired yesterday.
As hundreds of students and faculty poured out of the theater, there was something in the air. I feel like I can change the world, friends said to one another.
And they can, according to Paul Farmer.
A physician who has helped patients around the world, Farmer gave the keynote address at the annual Dean's Forum. He founded the international organization Partners in Health and is one of the nation's most outspoken global health advocates. Yesterday, he spoke about building a health-care movement to fight the worldwide AIDS crisis.
"The world's going to be all right if the people like the ones I met today will be taking on its problems," Farmer said. "They know why this is important."
Today, a very different speaker will address some of the same issues, complex questions about international aid and disease, and chasms of wealth disparity.
Farmer left an auditorium full of people feeling empowered to tackle those questions, and William Easterly leaves us afraid to.
Easterly will speak tonight about his book The White Man's Burden: How the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.
A professor of economics at New York University, Easterly has earned a reputation as an academic renegade.
He bills himself as someone who challenges the politically correct assumption that all international aid is good.
He writes op-ed pieces with titles like "The West Can't Save Africa"and he attacks celebrity do-gooders for their hypocrisy. Easterly has made a career out of making activists feel guilty for the flaws in their work.
If you can get through all the inflammatory rhetoric, of course, Easterly does make some good points.
Not all U.S. aid dollars directly benefit those who need them most. Many poor nations lack the infrastructure - like health clinics and schools - to make aid programs effective. There can be a kind of condescension, and even racism, in assuming that developed nations know how to best improve other cultures.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie generate news story after news story for adopting children from developing nations, while local community activists get little credit for their endless work.
Easterly's appearance at Penn - thanks to the Penn Society for International Development and the Provost's Office - will spark talk about global aid: A good thing for any intellectual community, regardless of your take on the issue.
But it's precisely Easterly's confrontational style that makes his message so dangerous.
In a Washington Post piece last year, Easterly condemned the West's exclusive focus on the dramatic tragedies of poverty: AIDS, child soldiers, genocide.
They "deserve attention," Easterly wrote. "But the obsessive and almost exclusive Western focus on them is less relevant to the vast majority of Africans - the hundreds of millions not fleeing from homicidal minors, not HIV-positive, not starving to death, and not helpless wards waiting for actors and rock stars to rescue them."
Compare this to what Farmer said today:
"If we believe in rights at all . can we offer rights to people living in poverty? I think the answer is no, unless we work with others."
Which message makes you feel like you have the ability to change the world?
When Easterly speaks this afternoon, he will likely leave the audience so terrified of committing a cultural faux pas that they may feel like they shouldn't even bother trying to help. Easterly teaches us that since our efforts are inadequate, we might as well forgo them.
He does support aid work, but he is so caught up in bullying first world activists he misses the big picture: as people living in America, we have the power to fight injustice.
Farmer's clinic in Haiti, for example, has provided a viable model for health care in other impoverished nations, and is proof that not all foreign aid goes to waste. Farmer is an idealist and a pragmatist; students in any field would do well to follow his example.
We at Penn have an education, and we have the instinct to do good. That's not all we need to make a difference, but it's a start.
As the thinkers of the next generation, we have an obligation to hear Easterly out, but we can't let him scare us.
Our aid efforts won't eradicate poverty or eliminate AIDS or stamp out racism. But they will help, and that is enough.
Mara Gordon is a College junior from Washington, D.C. Her e-mail address is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com. Flash Gordon appears on Thursdays.
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