Frederick
C.
Crews
LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD
Americans tend to pride themselves on their eagerness to
solve the world's problems. In agency reports and Sunday supple–
ments one finds much benevolent discussion of the steps that should
be taken against war, overpopulation, poverty, famine, plague, pollu–
tion and so forth. The discussion has a business-like air; first you find
the means and then you do the job. Yet this progressive spirit
is
in–
adequate to explain our behavior in actual cases-to take one in–
stance, our government's withholding grain from millions of starving
Indians last year during some ruthless bargaining over the terms of
"cooperation" imposed by an American fertilizer combine. To my
mind the exploitative aspect of this behavior was less interesting than
the fact that few Americans who read about
it
seemed to consider
it bothersome- and those who read about it include, no doubt,
some future authors of articles on the plight of India. The relevant
question
is
not "What can we do about India?" but "Why is it so
hard for us to understand our own feelings toward India?" Marxian
terms take us part way toward an answer, but in the last analysis
they are insufficiently radical. Indifference or hostility toward those
who are poor and distant and colored
is
a psychological matter, one
which involves not only our economic interest but also our shared
fantasies and our available modes of expressing feeling.
Enthusiasts of the Vietnam war, for example, are fond of show–
ing that our involvement cannot be properly explained in "seHish"
terms; they then go on to make such fanciful remarks about treaty
obligations and the championing of seH-determination and democ–
racy-remarks which have no basis in any known facts-that one
must interpret them as unconscious hypocrisy. Evidently there are
unacknowledgeable gratifications in the busywork of this particular
war: eradicating villages, poisoning the crops of whole districts, drop–
ping thousands of tons of explosives within map-coordinates which
ought by the laws of probability to contain some enemy soldiers, bull-
