Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Without commenting on the content, the style and language are recognizable Theroux. He's the most cynical and mean-spirited world traveller I've ever read, and I've read a fair number of his books.

There was a classic piece in Atlantic many years ago, with
the misanthropic Theroux and the panglossian Charles Kuralt
each allegedly reporting on their mutual encounter on the
Trans-Siberian railroad.

When Theroux was taking the trip he chronicled in _Kingdom
By The Sea_, around the entire coastline of Britain, I was
hitchhiking to many of the same places. (We both observed the Falklands Conflict from this perspective.) Needless to say, I
ran into much nicer people than he did.

You've overexercised yourself in summing Theroux up. It's simply an extreme rightwing position: "if people won't ('can't' is not considered) help themselves, then why the hell should we help them?" No doubt Theroux would consider George W. Bush a great self-made man.

Having read a fair amount of his travel writing, as well as "My Secret History", I decided long ago that however much I might enjoy Theroux's prose, I probably wouldn't like him as a person. Not that he'd care.

On that basis alone, I'd probably try to avoid any work of his that wasn't written to entertain. You've reinforced this prejudice.

Isn't Theroux British? The embassy staffer referred to would be at the UK embassy, not the American one, then.

"He's the most cynical and mean-spirited world traveller I've ever read"

Agreed. I read two or three of his earliest travel books, and the experience soured quickly. While the places and experiences he recounted were fascinating, he came off as a cold, nasty human being. I wouldn't want to be stuck in the same compartment with him on some night train to nowhere.

Whichever small amount of Theroux I read led me quickly to these same conclusions. He seemed to use the third world as a backdrop to himself, his psyche, his emotions, his opinions. And in a nasty way, despising various others.

He also did a highly paid thing for Playboy on Chinese prostitutes that struck me as extremely nasty and also extremely obtuse.

Absolutely horrid... I really enjoyed some of his son's work (Louis Theroux's "wierd weekends" documentaries) and wondered if the tree was very far from the apple. It looks like it is. Oh well, it'll save me some space on the reading list.

Wierd weekends, along with Jon Ronson's conspiracy-theorist-profiling "Secret Rulers of the World" are my favorite entries in the "mild-mannered Brits delving into the scarily absurd" genre.

Paul Theroux - the Hobbesian Traveller; has he ever met a person on his treks who wasn't nasty, brutish, and likely shorter than he is? I can't say I haven't enjoyed his writing, per se, but it's a mystery to me why he keeps heading out for sure disappointment. Home must be true hell.

I don't know Africa, but I saw a CARE project in the Andes cut infant mortality from 300 per thousand to 50/ thousand in 6 yearser) (clean wat. That is an unimaginable difference in people's lives and possibilities. If you can't find some of thos projects and weigh them in the balance you should just stay in your nice first world city.

kudos for that grishaxxx. Why DOES he keep heading out? This man on a mission needs to remind us that our donations are not enough. He wants to push our faces in it.
Apparently there are faces that enjoy it.

Apart from the issue of Theroux's personality, let's consider whether aspects of the argument are reasonable. I mention one data point.

What I found the single most striking point in Ian Buruma's _Dissidents_, a book about a varied collection of opponents of the Chinese government, was the fact that a variety of them, with different viewpoints, said the same sort of thing; that China's biggest problem was cultural, that because there had been no Christianity, the citizens of the country were stuck in a "me and my family, and screw everyone else" social attitude that cared nothing about the suffering of others, in a way that a Republican could only dream of. These interviewees all felt that, even in post-religion Europe, Christianity had created a certain view of the world emphasizing empathy, goodwill and co-operation that simply didn't exist in China.

Now without getting into the issue of how awful aid workers may or may not be, I think it would be interesting to know the extent to which the same issue might or might not be a factor in Africam pathologies. We've all heard the happy stories of how poverty-stricken africans accepted some traveller into their homes as part of the family, blah blah blah. The question is, moving beyond such limited anecdotes (which are problematic because of the extent to which there is a potlatch social standing aspect to their behavior), do we have good studies of how social-minded various groups of Africans are? Do they have any interesting in volunteering some fraction of their time to help others, or is this viewed as a sucker's game; or perhaps they're perfectly willing to help others, as long as others is defined as some limited (thousands or so large) group of "us", but they'll be damned if they'll do anything that helps members of "them"?

The one bit I remember from Theroux is a piece where he took the fact that british sunbathers at the beach faced the ocean as evidence of their deep disgust at England. Not, as would seem obvious to me, that when they went to the beach they liked to look at the pretty sea.

Jeebus H. Christ, Brad! How can you be reading, much less blogging Paul Theroux at a time like this?

The GOP is right now, as we speak, so to speak, in the process of disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters in Ohio and Florida and who knows where else!

You're in danger of being booted out of the Sacred and Arcane and Most Esoteric Order of the Shrill if you keep it up.

Seriously.

Q: What time is it?

A: It's time to get shrill!

Man, I'm so shrill I'm afraid only the cynics can hear me now.

At some personal risk of a demotion in the Order of the Shrill, I nevertheless feel compelled to comment:

"He's the most cynical and mean-spirited world traveller I've ever read"

Nope. Naipaul by a country mile.

Just finished that book myself, and loved it! A few comments:

- Where else are you going to find this stuff? His account of traveling through Sudan down a highway built by Osama bin Laden makes the book worth reading all by itself. Then there's the stuff about Rimbaud's career as an arms trader in Ethiopia. And that's all in the first 100 pages.

- For those who point out that PT isn't a nice guy, or that they wouldn't like him very much: That's the effect he's going for. He seems to take pains to make himself out to be unlikeable. A standard part of his schtick.

Or at least the character he portrays himself as in his travel writing. This is-it-really-me-or-not game (consider his two conflicting pseudo-autobiographies, My Secret History and My Other Life) is something I find interesting about his writing.

He has referred to his writing as "ironizing." I think he's happier and enjoys it more than he likes to admit.

But travel really can be that way a lot of the time--boring, frustrating, aggravating, disappointing. Why lie about it? Compared to travel writers who tell us how much they love the world and how much the world loves them back, I find this kind of refreshing.

- The people he's hardest on are well-intentioned affluent whites, Americans especially--IOW, the people he most resembles himself. Eg, pointing out that his offer to speak to students in Malawi was more do-goodiness just like the NGO people. Yes, self loathing is not an attractive trait. See above.

- If he notices that native Africans of all races help him and give him rides, and that white charity workers in the their white Land Rovers never do, why shouldn't he be able to say that in his book?

- As a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 60's, Theroux was one of the original white do-gooders who went to Africa to make it a better place. Dark Star Safari is a story, not a political or economic treatise.

It's the story of him returning 40 years later and seeing how badly things have turned out, that every change he saw was a change for the worse. His experience was one of realizing that they--and he--either didn't help or haven't helped nearly enough. He never lets himself off the hook or claims to be better (well, much better) than the folks in the Land Rovers.

Guess that's enough from me. I suppose his stuff is like anchovies: Some people like it and some don't, and even the ones who do admit that it's an acquired taste. Definitely not sweet candy, not meant to be, but you won't get stories like this from anyone else.

Tim

One more thing: the sunovabitch sure can write.

Fazal: PT is an American, born in Massachusetts, living in Hawaii last I heard. Lived abroad many years (Malawi, Uganda, Singapore, Britain) but always US citizen.)

Barry: Dunno about Brad but I sure needed a little downtime from the campaign. Even so, the chapter about Sudan sure couldn't be more topical.

Tim

"Therefore Europeans and Americans have no business providing aid to Africa"

However they promised in 1992 to provide aid.

The statistics for aid as a %age of GNP in 2003 are:
1. Norway 0.92; 2. Denmark 0.84; 3. Netherlands 0.81; 4. Luxembourg 0.8; 5. Sweden 0.7; 6. Belgium 0.61; 7. Ireland 0.41; 8. France 0.41; 9. Switzerland 0.38; 10. United Kingdom 0.34; 11. Finland 0.34; 12. Germany 0.28; 13. Canada 0.26; 14. Spain 0.25; 15. Australia 0.25; 16. New Zealand 0.23; 17. Portugal 0.21; 18. Greece 0.21; 19. Japan 0.2; 20. Austria 0.2; 21. Italy 0.16; 22. United States 0.14.

Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan were the locations of the 22 countries that apparently undertook to donate 0.7% of their GNP. As of 2003, five countries are meeting that commitment - all of them in Europe. http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp#Agenda21RichNationsAgreedattheUnitedNationsto07%ofGNPToAid

Yet another consideration for Bretton Woods 2?

Treated hypothetically in fiction, the issues are not much less discouraging.
http://print.google.com/print/doc?articleid=8rZ7lNaize9
http://www.absinthe-literary-review.com/book_reviews/littlefair.htm

When we finish sucking up all the world's available oil, America will end up looking pretty much like Africa.

Shouldn't the question be, Is he accurate?

Since Theroux was himself an embassy staffer, I'd guess he knows of what he writes.

I just can't understand why he and Naipaul can't come to some sort of reconciliation. They could do it on the backs of all the poor people they hate.

Theroux has made a cottage industry out of expatriate lit, and in particular the disreputable practice of passing oneself off as a regional expert by way of frequent flyer miles. (If he's going to be unpleasant in his writings, he could at least take pains to be accurate; as Hemlock has pointed out, the likelihood of a factory being located in the eponymous district of Theroux's "Kowloon Tong" is as high as opening a sweatshop off DuPont Circle.)

My experiences in Africa have been precisely the opposite: I've been impressed with the dedication of the PCVs and NGO employees. Where I've seen microcredit implementations, the locals have displayed remarkable energy in creating local businesses and organizations, despite the significant institutional barriers plaguing most developing economies. Indeed, it's only French expats and peripatetic professional pessimists like Theroux that bother me.

More to the point, if Theroux is going to make arguments falling within the realm of development economics, he should know something about development economics. I'm not expecting him to debate Rostow's linear development theory or to analyze the appearance of locals "doing nothing but sitting under trees" in the context of the Lewis model (well, actually, maybe I do expect the latter), but anecdotes do not replace analysis.

There are 47 countries in southern Africa, and hundreds of millions of diverse people. Malawi is not Botswana is the Niger is not Nigeria. There are dozens of distinct peoples in Nigeria, peoples whose languages and cultures differ. Generalizing about Africa can be most foolish and can have sad consequences if the generalizations are belittling and pessimistic. There is need for development through southern Africa, and promise that assistance can often spur development.

There is also a health care crisis that affects different countries in different ways, but is increasingly severe the further south we may look. AIDS is a devastating epidemic, and there must be an obligation for us and others to do more to help stem the spread and treat the sufferers. Think of 8 of 100 African adults dying of AIDS, and we may understand the problem and need. Think of countries in which 10 or 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 of 100 adults are HIV positive. Where are we?

Isn't Africa one of the world's vastly underpolluted places? Maybe we could ship them some pollution.

Looks like a lot of people have got their drawers in a knot here, but why? I haven't seen anyone argue that PT did not see what he says he saw. Yes, maybe what he saw isn't representative, but one must admit, he's seen much more of the world than most of us. So here's the nub: which is the more accurate portrait of the world and the way it works? I mean, are we really making the world a better place by ignoring the (surely inadvertent) outcomes of our good intentions? "The road to hell...", and all that, right?

Personally I find PT a useful corrective to the usual Sally Struthers blather about saving the world (and salving the conscience) from the comfort of one's armchair for pennies a day. The world is a harder place than that.

I can't read Theroux's bitter travel writings any more either. I still try to keep up with the novels, though.

I'm not sure what he's trying to achieve with the body of his work. The most mystifying stuff was in the New Yorker a few years ago, where he wrote some short "fiction" detailing his disgust with Naipal and the oral proclivities of the deceased William Empson ("Seven Types of Ambiguity").

Theroux makes himself miserable on his travels (third-class travel in poor countries will make you irritable after a few weeks, especially if you throw in dysentery with no facilities anywhere close, an almost comical amount of pickpocketing, and that one mosquito that keeps whining in your ear).

His conclusion seems to be "How could they do this to me?"

Maybe he's a natural-born misanthrope.

But I'm beginning to wonder if he has a further conclusion in mind, one that Michelle Malkin, Thomas Sowell, many of my uber-conservative friends, and my dead grandfather have already reached, which is ...

...when do we get to call them "bloody wogs" again?

It's so much less work and so much more effective demagogically for today's America than combing through the poverty stats.

Ronald Reagan's fictive Cadillac-driving welfare queen, Willie Horton. Janet Jackson's boobies ...

... it's been a winning strategy. It will continue until someone stops it.

I like Naipaul and Theroux, though I haven't read anything recently by either of them.

A lot of the comments here seem to start with the assumption that Theroux's criticism has to be fair. I think if he sees NGO employees parading around in their SUVs like they own the continent, he's entitled to write about his reaction. He has no obligation to balance it by looking for successful microcredit implementations and writing about them as well. For one thing, he can write eloquently about his negative reaction to NGOs, but would probably sound like he was making a forced apology if he added comments about what NGOs might be doing well. He should stick to what he does well. His reader is paying for the whole book.

I think one advantage of unconstrained, unfair criticism is that it is more effective in getting problems out on the table. If NGOs are riddled with people out on "joyrides"--probably many people would only take this kind of job as a career stepping stone--then they should hear the complaints.

I also agree with Brad that the problem is more likely to be too little help than too much, but it doesn't follow that people who say "Europeans and Americans working for NGOs in Africa are BAD PEOPLE" are themselves BAD PEOPLE for saying so. And even if Theroux is a bad person for being so nasty, the NGOs are big enough to stand some criticism, and it might even do some good.

Theroux's one of the most unpleasant writers I've ever read, and I don't believe he's an accurate reporter.

I spent two years in Samoa (then Western Samoa) as a PCV. Theroux wrote a book around the same time period -- The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific -- in which he visited Samoa. Now, one of the more difficult things about Samoan culture for Westerners to deal with is that traditional Samoans really don't get private property as a concept. Ownership of stuff is very fluid; essentially, if something is lying around and you'd like to use it, you do, and you might return it, or you might not -- if the original owner needs it, he can come find it or he can walk off with someone else's. In a culture where most useful things are low value and produced with very little labor, the system works just fine.

Now Westerners tend to find this maddening, and tend to analyze it as dishonesty, which isn't really a useful way of thinking about it. On the other hand, traditional Samoans aren't idiots, and they do deal with palagi expats and tourists reasonably often -- they know that palagi are irrationally touchy about 'their' stuff and so generally will respect a tourist's stuff.

In The Happy Isles Theroux told a story of having stuff stolen in Samoa, and related it to the fact that 'everyone knows Samoans are thieves' (quote invented, I haven't read the book for years). The story as told just didn't make sense from what I know about local conditions; while anything is possible, and people do do uncharacteristic things, I am personally convinced that Theroux talked to some expats living in Samoa who told him that Samoans are dishonest, and invented a corroborating story to make it sound like he was reporting rather than repeating racist gossip.

Given that I don't believe he's truthful about the one place I know anything about personally, I don't believe a word he's ever written.

The fact that Theroux was an embassy staffer carries no weight with me. My experience as a PCV was that the embassy staffers knew next to nothing about what the country was like. They are the ones who tend to stay real close to the capital and go to all the parties and such.

Theroux can be unlikable but his experience is genuinely reported. You may not like his point of view but you cannot quarrel with the reality of his experience. He WAS there and he really DID all the things he said he did.

He is not dishonest, only unpleasant.

Theroux is a man who lives in the bitter end of humanism.

What he's found going back to Africa, -- something that is unlike his experiences in Samoa because he's given quite a bit of his life to places like Uganda and Malawi -- has to take a toll on anyone, especially a Kennedy-inspired Massachusetts boy in the Peace Corps.

It's been 40 years and he found Malawi in WORSE shape than when he lived there before. Then he found that his Ugandan classmate, now a government minister, has become the same kind of foolish, corrupt, decadent that they used to be against.

On the political end, of course you're right. We don't do enough for Africa -- where's the 10 billion in AIDS money that was Bush's sole 'compassionate conservative' excursion? -- but that's different than saying the Canadian NGOs he came across weren't assholes.

At any rate, I go back to his books for that embittered sense of humanity. Yes, he's terribly inconvenienced and bitchy, but in his irrascible way he finds a kind of decency in these remote parts of the world: The dead and forgotten British couple in Malawi, the man and son who drive him through Sudan (and cry when he gets out of the taxi). I don't find him hating the 'wogs' or anything of the sort, I think he hates the cruelty and stupidity of ignorance, whether it comes from globalism, colonialism or is an indigineous trait.

Many of the comments do not reflect the book very well. PT finds a lot in Africa -- including people -- to like. He's paid some dues there too. One thing I like is that he doesn't patronize anyone. He likes to pick fights -- in a civil way -- and challenge people. Why not?

His take on aid and NGOs of course I found very troubling. I want those sorts of things to work, to have some hope. The implications if they don't are horrendous. At the same time, PT does not pose as an expert or scholar of development. He makes it plain, I think, that he is venting. It's a thread in the book, but it is not the backbone of the book. The backbone is him roughing it, telling what he sees and who he talks to. If you're curious about parts of the world you'll probably never see, or would be better off not seeing, this is a pleasurable way to satisfy that curiosity.

Some people are put off by misanthropy. These people are just as well avoided.

My 'kind of decency' passage was put the wrong way. It's not difficult to find decency in remote places (nor in urban for that matter).

I think his 'misanthropy' highlights the decency he encounters -- and there's quite a bit of it.

I think Theroux's point is that after years of foreign aid and NGO activities the part of Africa he has explored is much worse off today than it was 40 years ago. No one argues that the NGOs do not play an effective "safety net" role in the case of education, health care and releif in the face of natural disasters, but that is not the issue here. The issue is that they have taken the place of governments and provided the latter the opportunity to pursue the kleptocratic course observed in so many African countries. If the politicians had to answer to their constituents (and this doesn't require elections) for the stolen tax revenues, a link of accountability might be forged between government and citizens and the governments might get better. As it happens the NGOs take up the slack, the robbery continues, and no one takes responsibility for anything.
hs

"Some people are put off by misanthropy. These people are just as well avoided."

Speaking for all misanthropes, we do try to avoid those people. And everyone else, too. ;)

And, by the way, as a politically incorrect, misanthropic liberal, I want to say that Sally Struthers, referred to above, makes me sick, too. I keep expecting her to suggest that Africans might have a better diet if they would just watch Emeril on the Food Channel.

Same goes for N.G.O personnel and their four-wheel drives and career ladders.

My favorites, however, are the Christian TV channels and their missions in poor countries. "This is 7-year old Njanbo, ladies and gentleman, who has accepted our bowl of gruel but has not accepted Christ into his heart. For that, his suffering in this world will be increased infinitely and eternally in the next life. Now, send some money, because my church in Wichita needs a new boat.

Needless and unfair stereotyping, you say? You're right. The miserable, intractable human suffering in Africa and other places requires action and money. I suspect most Sally Struther liberals, N.G.O personnel, and Christian missions have good intentions and make a positive difference.

I no longer see this in Theroux's musings on the subject.

But the action and money must be free of ideological trappings -- Mugabean and Norquistian alike.

... maybe that's Theroux's bitter point.

"Naipaul by a country mile."

Mr. Freed, you may be right, but my qualifier holds. I've never read Naipaul. (Is that right? Isn't it Naipul? Looks funny.)

It seems there's a plague of Dark-Star-Safari-reading going on.

Dr. DeLong, I disagree with the premise of your post, which is that Theroux's book constitutes an argument. "Let's look at the structure of Theroux's argument here"? It's a travel memoir, which to my mind means that the different excerpts are not meant to form an overall coherent thesis on the state of charity in Africa; rather, they are meant to form a coherent narrative of Theroux's trip in Africa, during which he had thoughts one through nine.

On the substance, I think that Theroux's skepticism toward aid is absolutely justified. In the mid-eighties, Africa was experiencing a downturn (perhaps sharper than that for the rest of the world) but still in line with global trends. The poobahs of international economics decided that "structural adjustment" was in order, and since they wield enough control over African political elites to implement their prescriptions, they did so. Since then, Africa has undergone an ongoing contraction to the point where subsistence farming is the order of the day. Subsistence farming. Please understand how drastically removed that is from the economic reality for the rest of the world.

Something's wrong with the prescription, from conditionality to charity to structural adjustment.

Let me add....

1. I'ver read the book, if that wasn't clear from my post.

2. If anything annoys me about Theroux, it's his eternal sarcasm. I feel as though I'm being talked down to, but then, the point of a travel book is to convey an experience of the author. If I don't like how the author talks, I won't read the book.

3. Theroux is in no way a minion of Bush or Bushism, even though there is one passage in the book that suggests he's a supporter of George W. Bush (it happens in Sudan). Bush is the absolute epitome of stupid aid--the Millenium Challenge Account, an expression of George Bush's incoherent philosophy writ large.

Naipaul

My bad, too.

Well, we have sadly set African health problems off to the side as we discuss a sole account of a limited African panorama. African health is the monumental problem.

I've read Kowloont Tong, Mosquit Coast, On the Edge of the Great Rift. I'm also from Kenya so the last book is a devastating caricature of immediate postcolonial East Africa. Though he is guilty of condenscension. I would love to read "Dark Star". He does show an unsavoury side of the continent which many would rather ignore. At the end of the day, his is a brutally frank look at the regions he travels and despite his (many) failings. There may be something to what he says.

I've read Kowloont Tong, Mosquit Coast, On the Edge of the Great Rift. I'm also from Kenya so the last book is a devastating caricature of immediate postcolonial East Africa. Though he is guilty of condenscension. I would love to read "Dark Star". He does show an unsavoury side of the continent which many would rather ignore. At the end of the day, his is a brutally frank look at the regions he travels and despite his (many) failings. There may be something to what he says.