Live 8 was a great concert, but...

Easily Distracted doesn't think much of it.

Bob Geldof responds that at least he’s doing something, and that doing something is better than doing nothing.

No. It’s not. Not when the entire event and most of the language surrounding it just encourages the ghostly recurrence of the white man’s burden view of world affairs, that everything bad out there is somehow the fault of privileged white Euro-Americans and is somehow theirs and theirs alone to rectify. Not only were African artists almost entirely missing from the concert–a few pencilled in hastily at the end–but so were Africans as actors in their own ongoing drama. They’re welcome as former victims thanking their saviors, but otherwise, it’s not about them. That entire attitude is as much as–indeed, far bigger–a problem than the underfunding of development. It’s the liberal mirror image of neoconservative interventionism, a refusal to face the world in its moral and political complexity, instead trying to make it something that people with good intentions and an exaggerated sense of their own power can remake.

No. It’s not. Not when your concert is flogging two generic remedies for African poverty, neither of which has any real specific promise of changing the status quo. More money from the G8 or debt relief in and of themselves will do nothing. In fact, there’s good reason to think that both remedies proposed at that level of generality will aggravate the poverty of some African societies. Now if Geldof wanted to get up and flog something like reform of property rights a la Hernando de Soto, or Jeffrey Sachs-style targeted community development, or dropping agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe–anything–he’d at least be worth a listen. But he’s got no right to scream righteously at anybody given the flabby, content-less nature of his demands. I’m no fan of the current G8 leadership but in this case I hope they’re laughing at him in private while they pretend to be concerned and attentive in public.