Why don't we care about the poor anymore?

A recent report by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund fingers the United States as the industrialized nation with, by far, the highest poverty rate among children. UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy says the United States "has basically turned its back" on its poorest children. For example, without government assistance, both France and the United States would have a child poverty rate of about 25 percent. However, welfare programs in France succeed in cutting the rate to 6.5 percent, while American programs reduce it only to a bit above 21 percent.

Not many people truly believe our nation's record will be improved by recent legislation to "change welfare as we know it" by terminating federal aid to families with dependent children, transferring responsibility for the poor to the states, and, in general, dismantling the federal response to poverty that has been in place for sixty years. A brave title the Personal Responsibility and Employment Opportunity Act of 1996 merely papers over a wearied and frustrated withdrawal from the War on Poverty. After decades of dashed hopes and expenditures that have produced few tangible benefits, the nation seems to have tacitly acknowledged that we fought a War on Poverty and poverty won.

Politicians could dismantle federal welfare programs with out political risk because the non-poor have replaced' their former compassion for the poor with indifference, even hostility. In If You Came This Way, a report on his recent journey through the world of the underclass, Peter Davis notes that "white people who have money are fundamentally not terribly concerned about brown and black people who do not." The underlying reason for this is that poverty today has lost its meaning.

Until recently, poverty has never been simply the existence of poor people. It was that, combined with a set of understandings about how poor people fit into the overall scheme of things, how economic destitution and its possible eradication relate to ideas about divine providence, human nature, and the ideal society. These larger meanings inspired the non-poor to take an interest in poverty and to commit themselves to do something about it. Today, however, the idea of poverty has been reduced to a drab, predominantly economic issue. Its social concomitants--drug abuse, violence, panhandling, children having children--inspire few visions of opportunities to enhance compassion, equality, and justice. Their sordidness is unalloyed, encouraging the rest of society to block out poverty and retreat to its own more comfortable and intelligible world.

Medieval Piety

Poverty s conceptual impoverishment is obvious when today's view is compared with three earlier concepts of poverty in the last millennium. During the Middle Ages, poverty was no social pathology but, rather, an intrinsic part of the established social order. Rich and poor alike were said to owe their positions to the grace of God rather than to anything they themselves had done, and all were expected to accept their lot with humility. No stigma was attached to poverty. If anything, the poor were thought to be morally superior to the rich. Monks, nobles, and wealthy people would wash the feet of paupers and invite them to dine. In a religious society that suspected this--worldly things, the poor represented a Christ-like way of life. Moreover, the poor were downright useful to the rich and powerful as an outlet to atone for their sins through almsgiving.

Rugged Individualism 

By the nineteenth century, the prevailing view had been utterly transformed. The poor were despised instead of honored, and poverty became a social cancer to be eradicated. The idea that the poor were in the image of Christ ended when bad harvests, famine, plague, and runaway inflation--striking at various times from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries--produced an army of ragtag paupers who wandered from town to town begging, stealing, and assaulting. During this period, the distinction was established between the deserving poor (the aged, infirm, orphans, widows with young children) and the undeserving poor (able-bodied paupers). While people were willing to assist the former, the latter were chastised for idleness and moral debauchery. Undeserving poor were subject to flogging and even death for infractions of the laws and decrees designed to restrict their wandering and force them to work.

A second ingredient in the redefinition of poverty was the philosophy of the Renaissance. While the image of the humble pauper had splendidly exemplified the medieval ideal of pious acquiescence in one's God given lot in life, it was totally at odds with the new worldly emphasis on individual effort and aspiration, self-reliance and self-realization. From the perspective of those ideals, the able-bodied poor came to be viewed as incompetent, ludicrous, and dangerous human failures.

Also important was natural law's notion that the fit will survive and the unfit perish. A corollary to this is that, while its operation may seem harsh, in the long run this law works to the benefit of species and societies, and we interfere with it at our peril. Paupers belong to the category of the unfit, and certain social theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries held that it would be better for paupers to perish and decrease the surplus population.

Although its valuation had changed radically from positive to negative since the Middle Ages, poverty in the nineteenth century still conveyed a significance extending well beyond itself. The prevailing religious ethic demanded sobriety, responsibility, and self-sufficiency. The poor, falling short of some and perhaps all of these, were degraded spiritually as well as economically. For many crusaders against poverty, relieving material need was secondary to the main objective of saving souls.

Nineteenth-century ideas about poverty were also bound up with concepts of human nature and social progress. In his celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus addressed the necessity to control human numbers. This, Malthus said, is achieved by constraints on the sex drive--specifically, by delaying marriage and children until one is financially able to support a family. Beyond placing a brake on population growth, this stimulates industriousness, frugality, and the exercise of reason over base passion. Precisely these virtues, he continued, build individual character and propel humanity's rise from brutish existence to the state of civilization.

Malthus held that the poor do not understand these things. Placing no rein on their passions, they marry early and have many children. Thus, he believed, they unwittingly plunge themselves into destitution and fail to develop the finer qualities of character which come from self-control. While Malthus favored the abolition of welfare, he wanted to do it gradually and only after his primary proposal for solving the problem of poverty--educating the poor--had been put into effect. Once the poor realized that the cause of their poverty was their own profligate reproduction, Malthus predicted most of them would mend their ways. This would have the multiple salutary effects of enabling paupers to escape their poverty, preventing young people from falling into poverty, and turning both groups into more productive citizens and more civilized human beings as they bring their animal drives under rational control. Hence the battle to end poverty was also, on a larger stage, nothing less than the struggle for human betterment and social progress.

Socialism

A third image of poverty flowered in the early to middle twentieth century. It held that poor people are helpless victims of larger economic and social conditions. Karl Marx was immensely influential in the development of a systematic account of poverty from this perspective. In Capital, Marx proposed as a basic characteristic of capitalism that, as wealth accumulates, the demand for labor also increases but at a constantly diminishing rate. Conversely, the inevitable result of the slowing demand for labor is unemployment. Those who are chronically unemployed are the paupers--"the dead weight of the industrial reserve army." The responsibility for poverty is thus found in the nature of the economic system, not in personal failings of the poor.

In the 1950s, anthropologist Oscar Lewis expanded this view with his concept of the "culture of poverty." This is the idea that poverty is a whole way of life, marked not just by economic destitution but also by the absence of a prolonged and protected childhood, the early initiation to sex, a low rate of formal marriage, the frequent abandonment of wives and children, maternal dominance, and strong psychological feelings of marginality, dependence, and inferiority. The culture of poverty, Lewis held, is resistant to change because its attitudes and values become irredeemably internalized in poor children by age six or seven.

This idea recommends revising the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, for it is unjust to hold people who grew up in a culture of poverty personally responsible for their inability to extricate themselves from their state. While they may be able-bodied, they are not "able-minded" or "able-cultured." and the ranks of the deserving poor should be expanded to include them. Others at this time denied the existence of a culture of poverty but still held that the poor were not personally responsible for their plight because they are systematically held down by a lack of education and other opportunities.

In the widely read 1962 book The Other America, Michael Harrington sensitized many Americans to the plight of those living among us who, through circumstances beyond their control, are condemned to lives of want and misery. Another influential work was The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, originally prepared as a confidential government report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor. Moynihan contended that the cycle of black poverty would not be broken so long as the pathological pattern of illegitimacy, divorce, desertion, and female-headed families remained in force. His report had a major impact on public policy, for President Lyndon Johnson relied on it in his commencement speech on black poverty delivered at Howard University in 1965.

The new way of thinking restored to poor people a dignity they had not enjoyed since the Middle Ages. Not, of course, that poverty was again viewed as a positive condition, but the poor themselves came to be viewed as unfortunate rather than blameworthy. Victims of circumstances beyond their control. they deserted not contempt but a helping hand.

And because the problem lay in the system, its solution must be to fix the system. That was (and still is) a tall order. The only agency capable of designing and enforcing change in something so huge and sprawling as the overall socioeconomic system is government. Hence, solutions to poverty were sought in centralized planning, programs, and regulation. This approach already dominated in communist countries, but it has also been central in the social welfare democracies of Western Europe. In the United States, it informed the establishment of Social Security and the federal welfare system in the 1930s and, three decades later, civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and the War on Poverty.

As with its predecessors, this view of poverty was also embedded in larger meanings capable of inspiring the nonpoor to committed action: we live in a flawed and unjust system that consigns millions of innocent people to misery; therefore, by joining together under a wise and benevolent government to apply our growing knowledge, coordinate our efforts, and allocate our vast resources, we can eradicate poverty, crime, and other social ills and create a truly just and egalitarian community. Such is the stuff that Marxist utopias are made of, or a Johnsonian Great Society.

Contemporary Individualism

But communism collapsed, the War on Poverty was lost, and recent thinking about poverty has taken a decidedly different turn. At first blush, it looks like a return to the ideas that dominated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As then, contemporary writers and legislators have little patience with notions that the able-bodied poor are helpless victims of an unforgiving economic system and the culture of poverty. Instead, the blame for poverty is placed on the poor themselves. Thus, in a passage in his 1984 book Losing Ground Charles Murray conveys a curiously staccato concept of human experience: "People--all people, black or white, rich or poor--may be unequally responsible for what has happened to them in the past, but all are equally responsible for what they do next."

Murray echoes Malthus in contending that welfare programs actually do more harm than good by encouraging poor people to become dependent on the dole. For both of them, the proper solution is to do away with public welfare entirely. The current legislation--the Personal Responsibility and Employment Act of 1996 with its insistence on work from those who are able and its lifetime caps on welfare payments, recapitulates Malthus' proposals of nearly two centuries ago to do away with the British Poor Laws. This desire to return to the past is explicit in Marvin Olasky's 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion. In it Olasky professes an overtly Christian view of the corruptibility of human nature and recommends that policy toward poverty stress the tough love of uncompromisingly requiring work and moral improvement from the poor, just as our ancestors did years ago.

Despite these similarities, an anecdote from Olasky himself encourages deeper probing into what turns out to be fundamental differences between conceptions of poverty today and then. As part of his research, Olasky stopped shaving for a few days, dressed in ragged clothing, and joined the throng of the homeless in some of Washington, D.C.'s soup kitchens. In one of them, he asked a volunteer server for a Bible. He had to repeat the question before being understood, and then the answer came that no Bibles were available. That he raised the question is evidence that Olasky himself shares the earlier notion that the larger and more important goal in rescuing people from poverty is to save their souls. That he received the answer he did is evidence that--the Salvation Army and store-front missions notwithstanding--for most people today the evangelistic component has disappeared from work and thought on poverty.

Several other meanings associated with the nineteenth-century view of poverty are equally absent from the contemporary version. One of them is the Social Darwinist idea that nature's way of maintaining the health and well-being of a population or species is to weed out the least fit individuals. Today, this sort of explanation is regularly encountered in the presentation of other species on television nature programs, but it would provoke instant outrage if it were applied to human poverty.

Finally, contemporary poverty has lost many of its previous associations with larger ideas about human nature, human betterment, and human progress. To be sure, the notion remains that destitute dependence erodes character while responsible self-sufficiency enhances it. However, this attitude takes the basically negative form of annoyance and impatience with people who cannot get and hold a job, and with unmarried teens with children. But, even here, this attitude has been much diluted, at least in sexual matters, for censure of premarital sex and parenthood was far more severe 150 years ago than it is today. Vanished entirely are the more positive implications, previously perceived by Malthus and others, of the eradication of poverty for general human improvement and the rise of civilization. The virtue of controlling impulses and faith in social progress have both been devalued of late. Departing with them are the nineteenth-century notions that what raises us above brutish existence is voluntary, rational government of our natural instincts, and that precisely there lies a spur to the upward growth of civilization.

This last difference clearly emerges from a closer comparison of Malthus' proposal of nearly two centuries ago to end public welfare with the apparently identical recommendation advanced in our time by Charles Murray. Malthus' convictions about social progress and the value of controlling base passions were embedded primarily in his desire to educate the poor, and Murray does not recapitulate this part of his program. Indeed, where Malthus believed that the poor could escape their poverty through education, Murray joins Richard Herrnstein in the leaner and meaner view of The Bell Curve: that limited innate intelligence restricts the degree to which the lower class can benefit from education. This, of course, provides a convenient justification for the rest of society to decline to allocate the resources to improve public education.

The contemporary concept of poverty is depleted of larger meaning in comparison with all three of its historical predecessors. In itself, current poverty depressingly denotes want, stagnation, and hopelessness. What few larger connotations it has are even more sordid: drug addiction, violence, and crime. Of course, the nonpoor would like to see an end to all of these things, but this is no longer part of some larger dream. It bears no relation to a transcendent crusade to save souls or create a truly just and equal society. The motivation for the non-poor to commit themselves and endure sacrifices has gone slack. Past failures raise their doubts that poverty can be eradicated, and current visions and values do not offer much stimulus for continuing to try.

In these circumstances, increasing numbers of non-poor are opting for an alternative posture. Lacking confidence in and commitment to the proposition that poverty can be eliminated, we at least can order where we live, where our children go to school, what we read, and whom we encounter in such a way that we insulate ourselves from contacting or even thinking about the poor with their sordid lives and criminal tendencies. This is the coming solution to the problem of poverty to make it go away by the cheap and simple expedient of refusing to acknowledge it. The impoverished meaning of poverty, and the resulting indifference toward it, enables and encourages politicians to join the rest of us in turning our backs on the poor."

F. Allan Hanson is a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, whose most recent book is Testing, Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life. His e-mail address is hanson@ kuhub.cc.ukans.edu.