America is rediscovering the work of Spectator writer Shiva Naipaul. His 1980 book about the Jonestown massacre, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, was reissued by Outsider Editions last month. There has also been much talk recently about so-called “Third-Worldism,” a quasi-ideology that some on the right blame for the West’s ills. The Third World is a concept about which Naipaul had much to say. Below is an essay he published in The Spectator in 1985.
We do not see people as they are anymore. Instead, we see – or learn to believe that we see – those ghostly entities we call “relationships.” There’s me, there’s you – and, somewhere in the middle, there’s our relationship. And of all the relationships that there are, none is more problematic or contentious than that between the rich and the poor, the developed and the underdeveloped, the advanced and the backward, the “North” and the “South.” Or, to employ one of the most entrenched buzzwords of our time, there is no relationship more problematic or contentious than that posed by those hundreds of millions of human beings lumped together by the term “Third World.”
The idea of a Third World, despite its congenial simplicity, is too shadowy to be of any use
