After all, who needs to work for grace when it’s already crowding the shelves of the consumer economy? Who needs to sacrifice their time and their desires when you can just get drunk at an Oxfam music festival? (…)
It is now common for the simplest autonomous act—feeding the homeless—to be banned. Instead, the nascent virtue-consumer hurries home to slot some coins into the moral Laundromat of the charity sector.
…time and time again I have seen white men with clearly underage girls in hotels and bars throughout Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. I have never been able to understand how this became normalised. (…)
As for the underlying worldview, in which aid workers see poor countries as a moral vacuum in which to purchase pleasure while we sympathise because they are working in difficult situations – that won’t change until we fully understand the colonial hinterland on which some attitudes rest.
