Better Red than dead in Africa John Waters

Right-wing politics requires that you evade your own feelings of guilt about the injustices and contradictions of the world by…

Right-wing politics requires that you evade your own feelings of guilt about the injustices and contradictions of the world by means of a series of rationalisations. Left-wing politics demands that you lump your guilt on to someone else, writes John Waters.

Bono seeks another way - not a third way or a middle way or a wishy-washy way, but a practical, pragmatic, commonsensical and genuinely moral way to confront not merely the spectre of inequality in the world but also the cultural paralysis that this brings to the prosperous half. It is not necessary to like Bono to find this interesting. As it happens, I like him considerably, though I lost my sense of what his band was looking for back about a decade ago.

Of the two problems - the inequality and the cultural paralysis - it seems axiomatic that the inequality is the more urgent. Western guilt, you might say, is a pretty high-class problem. But this is to miss the connection between the two. Because the culture of the West remains unable to look squarely at poverty and disease in the Third World, these problems are regarded as insoluble. And this insolubility, feeding back into western culture, begets guilt which begets defensiveness which begets the political responses mentioned at the outset. We either have talking shops which result in nothing but self-accusation, or a self-justificatory aversion of the gaze that compounds both the guilt and the problem. And so it goes on: guilt feeds the defensiveness, which justifies a further introversion.

We are all, by African standards, wealthy. A standard objection to what Bono is trying to do takes the form of the jibe that if he really wanted to help Africa he could give all his money away. This is an idea that emanates from some cramped, oxygen-deprived, ideological corner somewhere in the air-vent between socialism and Christianity. Come to that, we could all give everything away, but what would it achieve? A gesture, no doubt - almost certainly a vain one, with some emphasis on the vanity.

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The answer to the problem, surely, is not to make the West as poor as Africa but to approach things from roughly the other direction. Gestures, still less rhetorical accusations about the morality of inequality, achieve nothing apart from the false consolidation of the accuser's sense of moral righteousness.

The Red concept launched by Bono as a method of engaging both the corporate and consuming West with the idea of world inequality is a brilliant idea that taps into both ends of the problem. It brings the issue of Africa on to the western high street, making evasion more problematic but also less necessary than before. Addressing the sense of individual impotence that digs at this issue, it offers a practical means of addressing the issue in the personal realm: buy Red label goods instead of something else and so do something apart from feeling guilty or accusing others of doing nothing.

Last week, Bono launched a new mobile phone, an attractive unit with an MP3 player which can be used on all UK mobile networks. Some £10 (€14.70) from the cost of every phone and 5 per cent of call revenues goes to raising funds for Aids medication and education in Africa. Already, several top fashion and financial operations have announced the launch of Red products, including American Express, Armani and Gap.

The philosophical content of Red might in its political dimension be tracked to the response Bob Geldof gave me a good few years ago when I bearded him about the politics of Live Aid. I had put to him various arguments being mounted against Live Aid: that such ventures simply lift the responsibility from where it should properly lie, salve the consciences of rich rock stars, and delay and frustrate the process of Third World self-determination. What had Sir Bob to say to that, eh? "I say," he said: "F**k up and gimme a pound. Because that pound will keep somebody alive, and your useless meanderings, and your useless f**king third-rate philosophising achieves nothing."

Something, in other words, is better than nothing, and what little we can do in the context of maintaining our lives pretty much as we know them is better than the alternative. But Red goes further, beyond philanthropy, beyond charity, beyond politics, acknowledging that there is no future in the marshalling of mere altruism and certainly none in knee-jerk, ideological responses.

Red offers a functional economic model that will work for cause, consumers and commercial interests. It widens the scope of the equation to embrace and harness for Africa the hitherto unproductive sentiment of the prosperous West - idealism, guilt, sorrow, shame . . . and love.

• I should have made a declaration in last week's column on the Garda Reserve that I was paid to speak at the recent Garda Representative Association conference. The invitation was extended on the basis of views I advanced on RTÉ's Questions and Answers some weeks ago, along similar lines to those expressed in last week's column.