Half-an-hour with Bill Clinton, and you know what the politics of charisma is. It's a con. He is the living proof that the art of charismatic politics is not the pursuit of the possible, but the opposite. Charismatic politics requires people to suspend doubt, to put their own natural scepticism aside and to accept what their thinking brains would never otherwise believe. Yes, yes, anvils swim, turtles fly, green forests flourish on the Arctic tundra, and then you feel for your wallet and it's gone.
Bill Clinton gave every appearance of believing just that on Monday night when he gave the eighth "Independent Annual Lecture" at Trinity; and because he did, with such enthusiasm and energy, so did I - for a while. Out of the desolation that is Africa, he painted the picture of possibilities, with the theory of the non-zero sum game (the zero sum game meaning that what one side loses, the other gains, the result being equal in minuses and pluses: together, you get zero).
Fancy terminology
This is the theory being advanced in the US by Robert Wright to describe the advance of mankind so that contact between groups produces a non-zero sum game. Well, think about it for a moment: before the days of fancy game theory terminology, we used to call such things trade. Trade is the original no-zerosum game. A sells to B. Each makes a profit if the terms are reasonable; both are gainers, and if they are not, then either A or B will not repeat the experience.
Trade is the basis of civilisation, the certainty that the outcome of the caravan traversing the desert, the caravelle crossing the seas, will not be a zero sum game, but a gain for every single participant, from the peasants of Asia harvesting peppers and the gossamer of worms to the medieval burgesses of Galway relishing the savouries of the Spice Islands, and their wives caressing the silks from Samarkand.
There is hardly a philosopher in world history who would not have agreed that trade is better than war, commerce better than conflict. Knowing this brings us no closer to solving the problems of Africa, though Clinton's few moments of charisma nearly convinced us otherwise.
For he beguiled us with a non-zero sum theory about how the expenditure of a few billion pounds could solve the AIDS crisis in Africa and thus give us markets in which to sell our goods. He did not speak of the kleptocracies which are ruining African countries, but he did speak of two countries which will be the sheet anchors of African prosperity - Nigeria and South Africa.
African nurses
As it happens, on the day Clinton spoke, official figures revealed that last year 2,000 Nigerian and 2,000 South African nurses sought jobs in Britain; and I dare say the figures for applications to Ireland are comparable. So as Clinton was weaving his charismatic spells around the simplicity of the solution to Africa's AIDS crisis, the very solution to the crisis was fleeing from Africa's vital countries; and moreover, we were helping it to.
So what do you do? Do you tell an "asylum-seeking" nurse from Nigeria coming to a nurse-starved Ireland that she is to go home to corruption and poverty on the off-chance that one day the bandits running her country will give way to law-abiding democrats; and meanwhile all patients she would have tended in Ireland lie unwashed and unnursed? Or do you say, "Yes, we welcome immigrants from poor countries looking for a better way of life; come in, we have loads of work"? What is the right answer?
In the latter transaction, the zero sum equation comes dramatically into play. By their own efforts and whatever modest resources are available, these young women become nurses; so whatever Africa loses, we thereby gain. Four thousand nurses from just two African countries seeking employment in Britain last year. How many nurses wished to leave the continent of Africa for the developed world last year? How many next year? And at what point does the population of nurses in any African country fall below critical mass, so there are no longer enough to recruit and train their successors?
With VD and its open lesions rampant throughout sub-Saharan Africa, almost any act of sexual intercourse can be the intravenous highway for AIDS. And in the absence of a medical infrastructure, that means lingering death. Such is the reality of Africa today; yet that reality was almost totally absent from Clinton's speech - though to be sure, that absence was largely invisible in the testosteronic charisma he exudes.
Hideous truth
Yet even he, in his up-beat pronouncements for Africa, let slip the hideous truth that the existing triple cocktail of drugs for AIDS (to be administered, of course, by Africa's non-existent corps of nurses) will at best transform Africa's 24 million AIDS sufferers into 24 million chronically ill patients. And that is no solution at all; indeed, it is far worse than straightforward death. Except, of course, it will not happen. As the continent's nurses flee for the developed world, there is not a single African country which has either the infrastructure to run such a scheme, or the political will to transform the dying into the chronically ill who will be permanently dependent on poverty-stricken communities where even the able-bodied go hungry. In other words, what Clinton was saying was lofty, finesounding, amoral rubbish, and it cost Sir Anthony O'Reilly £100,000 to hear it. Now that truly was a zero sum game.