Poverty of the Soul and the Common Good

I recently (belatedly, really) read the rather brilliant article 'What is Poverty?' by 'Theodore Dalrymple.' Written all the way back in 1999 for the City Journal, this piece attacks the presumption that what ails the Western poor more than anything else is their poverty, and that their most positive improvement must come from ameliorating economic conditions. He makes the argument that, in spite of the massive progress in the living standards of the poor, the fundamental issues that afflicted the poor a century ago have not only not been eliminated, they have instead crystallized into deeper and more debilitating problems.

Where do these problems come from? From an apathetic culture that rewards antisocial and nihilistic behaviour; from a philosophical tolerance that supposes every wrong to be not the fault of the individuals who make bad decisions, but of the social conditions in which those individuals were born and bred.

To make his point, Dalrymple uses the example of doctors from vastly poorer countries such as India and the Philippines visiting the hospitals and streets of East London:

[T]hey are at first impressed that our care extends beyond the merely medical: that no one goes without food or clothing or shelter, or even entertainment. There seems to be a public agency to deal with every conceivable problem. For a couple of weeks, they think this all represents the acme of civilization, especially when they recall the horrors at home. Poverty—as they know it— has been abolished.

Their judgment changes, however, when the doctors become familiar with the kinds of problems the London hospitals try to resolve, and with the attitude of the patients, who exhibit no sense of thankfulness for the care they receive, but instead view it as their inviolable 'right,' something that they own by nature.

Dalrymple tells the all-too-typical story of a young woman who has deliberately overdosed. When they interview her about her history, they learn that she has been robbed and beaten by her ex-boyfriend, whose unborn child she wants to abort. She has had two children from two other fathers, neither of whom she sees (one was a one-night-stand and the other she left because he had sex with 12-year old girls). After explaining what will happen to the depressed and damaged woman, namely that she will be moved to a new flat with all the 'necessary' amenities of our age, Dalrymple asks a doctor from Madras if he thinks this was 'poverty':

He said it was not: that her problem was that she accepted no limits to her own behavior, that she did not fear the possibility of hunger, the condemnation of her own parents or neighbors, or God. In other words, the squalor of England was not economic but spiritual, moral, and cultural.

It turns out that a culture that is based around individual desire, and is entirely neglectful of communal relationships, creates individuals who do not have any consideration for the community, or how their actions affect their fellow man. It is said that massive welfare programs create a sense of 'solidarity' among the different classes; how, then, does it happen that the recipients of this redistributed wealth are invested only with selfishness and a sense of ingratitude? People who are on the receiving end of benefits their entire life are not edified by any kind of social belonging; on the contrary, they are inculcated with the idea that society owes them more and more, regardless of their own contributions (or lack thereof) to their neighbours. 

Dalrymple goes on, telling how he would walk with these foreign doctors through the 'neighbourhoods' instituted by social housing, which he describes as being full of litter, where even the private lawns are overgrown and cluttered with refuse. A doctor from Bombay asks, 'Why don't they tidy up their gardens?' 

A good question: after all, most of the houses contain at least one person with time on his or her hands. Whenever I have been able to ask the question, however, the answer has always been the same: I've told the council [the local government] about it, but they haven't come. As tenants, they feel it is the landlord's responsibility to keep their yards clean, and they are not prepared to do the council's work for it, even if it means wading through garbage—as it quite literally does. On the one hand, authority cannot tell them what to do; on the other, it has an infinitude of responsibilities towards them.

That is what happens in a society where there is no give-and-take, where there is infact only take (which applies to every social class, of course, albeit in different ways). The common good exists only as a spectre used to justify the parasitic activity of a growing underclass.

Another important point that Dalrymple makes is how all this trash that's tossed around as though the world is full of food is demonstrative of how the real problem is not 'poverty' at all. If people were truly impoverished, they would not be so carefree with the things that we really need to survive; they would infact cherish every meal as a gift from God. 

I ask the doctors to compare the shops in areas inhabited by poor whites and those where poor Indian immigrants live. It is an instructive comparison. The shops the Indians frequent are piled high with all kinds of attractive fresh produce that, by supermarket standards, is astonishingly cheap. The women take immense trouble over their purchases and make subtle discriminations. There are no pre-cooked meals for them. By contrast, a shop that poor whites patronize offers a restricted choice, largely of relatively expensive prepared foods that at most require only the addition of hot water.

The fact that both groups are economically comparable means that the problem goes well beyond 'poverty'; it goes into how differently they approach the essentials of our world. People who come from a society where you have to do things yourself, where there are traditions of fellowship and community, tend to put more effort into the most important things intrinsic to our nature: food and drink, health, family, and the spiritual life. When you cut off your relations with the social whole, when your entire existence becomes centred around what you want and how much you can get, these things suffer proportionately.

By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidized apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They come to realize that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial egotism. The spiritual impoverishment of the population seems to them worse than anything they have ever known in their own countries. And what they see is all the worse, of course, because it should be so much better. The wealth that enables everyone effortlessly to have enough food should be liberating, not imprisoning. Instead, it has created a large caste of people for whom life is, in effect, a limbo in which they have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is a life emptied of meaning.

Whatever merits that our material abundance afford to us, they cannot be worth the 'spiritual impoverishment' that accompanies it, nor can it be worth the fragmentation that occurs between the giving and the receiving classes. In the Middle Ages the beggar, who was truly in a state of poverty, responded to his benefactor by praying for his soul. Conversely, the giver, by his act of charity (his 'alms'), participates in the virtuous life thereby.

This relationship is reversed in the welfare state: the giver, the state, is virtuous only in the eyes of a socialist intelligentsia (which seldom gives its own money), and instead of prayers receives demands for more, while the receiver, the 'lumpenproletariat,' instead of being content with the basics of life grows increasingly covetous. What was once a very personal relationship imbuing both parties with a natural connection becomes a systematic process which dehumanizes the giver and the receiver. 

The article closes with Dalrymple revealing how he had the same experience as the Asian doctors, only from the opposite direction. When he was in Africa, specifically Tanzania, he was at first appalled by the physical conditions and the political corruption that ailed the country. Scarce food and medical care, rampant tuberculosis and various forms of cancer, children suffering and dying from snake bites, emaciated villagers and fat party men, these things characterized the African society, these things characterized true poverty. 

Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.

If we are going to advance to a real understanding of what avails our civilization, we might start with our true impoverishment, which as Dalrymple says is more spiritual than material. We do not mean here merely to attack the lower classes, which, being destined to follow the intellectual and political currents of the day, are in truth those which possess the least moral and social agency. We mean to attack the culture emptied of real solidarity and community that allows rapacious overlords to charge their renters and patrons the most and pay their workers and employees the least amounts possible. They do this because they make more money this way, and our prevailing economic ethic presumes this to be a fundamental good. This is behaviour that is no less antisocial and even more reprehensible than the selfish and parasitic activity of what we might call the 'slave' classes of the corporate 'elite.'

There is no one villain in this story; the society we share is the product of a conspiracy of classes, all equally self-serving and insulated from one another. It is moreover the effect of a long intellectual tradition that subordinates the needs of the community and the common good to the 'rights' that allegedly belong inherently to human nature, 'rights' that increasingly look like desires. 

When 'poverty' is defined as being drastically poorer than the wealthiest of their neighbours (who really exhibit an obscene state of luxury and should not be used as a frame of reference for anything) in a society which is enormously wealthier than anything else in human history, we lose the real meaning of the word. While the members of any community deserve to share in its success (and indeed there should be a reduction in the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest), it is futile and misleading to pretend that 'poverty' is our first concern when the richest nations in the world still exhibit all the symptoms of a diseased social body: suicides, drug dependency, illegitimate births, divorces, atheism, abortions, sodomy, low birth rates, etc.

It is clear that, in spite of rising living conditions, state subsidies, and a more or less uninterrupted period of peace, modern and modernizing countries have only experienced a corresponding growth of the malignant tumours that attach to all our attempts to create a world without God at its centre. The crisis of 'poverty' is thus the ultimate red herring, because it distracts us from the real crises at work in our culture. To obsess over the 'miserable' state of the poor in our societies, to suppose that unconditionally sharing more and more wealth with them will do anything else than create further dependents on the productive classes, is to do the same thing as the laissez-faire capitalists do in reverse and consider society as first and foremost a product of merely economic relations.

This attitude is in fundamental opposition to the common good, which, according to Pope St. John Paul II, 'is not simply the sum total of particular interests; rather it involves an assessment and integration of those interests on the basis of a balanced hierarchy of values.' This means that our own interests, which in the limited perspective of the individual usually amounts to an increase in wealth and social prestige, are subsumed into our real interests, which are ultimately communion with God and our fellow man. As men are made in the image of God, we intrinsically desire social justice (in the real sense of the term), however much this desire may be warped by our fallenness. Therefore, when people receive their 'just deserts,' whether great or small, we are inwardly satisfied, because justice has been done.

When we operate according to our own interests alone, something which is vindicated by our utilitarian ethical system, the common good gives way to an irremediable conflict between different groups in society, which results in 'class warfare' and 'identity politics.' Each individual or group of individuals is imbued with a desire to gain more for themselves, irrespective of whether their increase is just or not, and irrespective of the effect that their actions may have on the whole.

The fact is that total equality is just as much of a myth as is the total abolishment of poverty. This does not mean that we cease finding ways to palliate the conditions of the poor; far from it, acts of charity to the suffering are central to the social teaching of Christ's Church (something which the higher classes tend to be forgetful of in their lavish and frivolous spending).

It does mean, however, that we cease chasing dreams of an equally privileged community based on a homogeneous distribution of wealth, not only because this is utopian, but because it completely misses the real errors of our age. We have established modes of living that have far surpassed anything we have known in history, that certain parts of the world still do not know. In doing so, however, in sating our most pressing physical needs, we have opened up new existential challenges that cannot be overcome by merely economic salves, but by radically reëvaluating our interior livelihood. This is why we have to stress the fact that it is not our material 'poverty' that is principally responsible for the malaise of our communities and the ejection of Christ from the social plane, but our poverty of the soul.