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PARTISAN REVIEW
misinterpret their causes or their potential effect.
It
is almost as if an
immense distorting mirror, like those rippled devices found in
carnivals, has been conjured up between us and the Third World.
We believe that we look through it to reality; in fact, we see a
delayed, illusionary reflection, a chimera of an imaginary past.
At the same time, it must be said that the mirror works both
ways, obscuring the Third World countries' view of us as much as it
affects our perception of them. From the other side of the looking
glass, then, one needs to ask why it is that the Third World tends to
impute to us more power than we actually have. Why is everything
from traffic jams to changes in the weather attributed to the manipu–
lations of one or another U .S . agency? Why are the developing
countries not voicing their complaints against their oil-rich Third
World partners who are putting a tighter stranglehold on develop–
ment than any U.S . policy ever could? Finally, why are they so
silent about Soviet aggression?
Peter Berger, in his analysis of the Third World ("Speaking to
the Third World,"
Commentary,
October 1981) , argues that the Third
World's antipathy toward the United States has its source in a mis–
taken notion of economic reality; the view of the developing
countries, he says, is largely "an elaboration of Proudhon's dictum
that property is theft. ... The gain of one is necessarily the loss of
another." As Berger dissects this theory, he advocates holding to the
"reality principle" of development; that is, that the United States
should not capitulate to demands for large-scale economic transfers,
but rather assist the private sector and private entrepreneurship
wherever possible against
"the
grand fantasy of our age - the socialist
vision."
Berger is right in pointing to the fallacies in the Third World's
grievances toward us. But, unfortunately, this will do little to solve
our difficulties with the Third World and most likely will only
exacerbate them. Berger does not take sufficiently into account the
irrationality that imbues so much of American relations with the
Third World.
It
is the irrationality itself that must be addressed, and
it arises, I think, from the fact that we are sending the Third World
"double signals" while the Soviets and the oil-rich Arabs are not. The
contradictions between our humanitarian principles and our actual
policies and, more important , between these policies and the
messages conveyed via our mass-media-generated culture - which
has had a far greater effect upon the populations of the developing
countries than our official policy statements - produces the same sort
