The Tragedy of American Compassion by Marvin Olasky
Regnery Publishing, Inc. 1992
ISBN 0-89526-725-X (alk.paper)
1. Charities
– United States – History. 2. Public welfare – United States – History. 3.
Social work administration – United States – History.
I. Title. HV91.052
1992
Maybe I have lived a sheltered life but I never imagined that a soup kitchen was anything other than the height of charity. I had the greatest admiration for those that gave of their time to provide a meal to those in need. It is an understatement to say that I had no comprehension that volunteering in a soup kitchen could be stingy. It is stingy in human contact. Making and serving soup creates no affiliation. It makes no evaluation how to build a foundation for someone’s self respect. Once the meal is over, nothing has changed. It is stingy also if the door to a meal was open to anyone regardless of their ability to provide for themselves. Therefore those in truly desperate need ultimately receive less from our charitable efforts.
Centuries of intellectual meaning of compassion have been drowned in a sea of utopian social reorganization. Marvin Olasky has done a remarkable job in The Tragedy of American Compassion to provide an historical perspective on its true meaning. "Compassion resembles love: to demand it is a good way to kill it." Since colonial times people have known that bad charity drowns out good charity. It was important to be both warm hearted and hard-headed. We must do good with as much clarity as wicked people employ in doing evil. They saw and believed that giving away money too freely corrupted the spirit needed to succeed in life. All this began to change in the mid 19th century with the swell of utopian socialists. For them, poverty was just an outgrowth of free enterprise. They wanted a new system of distributing wealth. This meant charity for all comers. Soon religious leaders were advocating a social gospel which formed the intellectual foundation for our current onslaught of government programs. Politicians have learned to pander to the poor. People and politicians now actually believe that we can hand out the American Dream. Are we doing good when we try to eliminate poverty by handing out money?
Compassion used to mean very personal involvement in the life of someone in need. "If every person possessing the capability should assume the care of a single family, there would not be enough poor to go around." This concept of compassion has been lost. In its place is the TV commercial pleading for a check each month. In its place is a tax bill. There are many charitable people but the true connection between one human being in need and another willing to help is very rare.
If you have any interest in poverty or helping the poor, you must read this book. I am not saying that Olasky has "the" answer. It is just the opposite. There are no short cuts to fighting poverty. Each person and each family presents a different shade of gray. Big government and big charity with their rules and regulations are the utopians. According to them, all we need to do is throw more money at it and it will go away. With all of our wealth in this country can’t we just write a check and make problems vanish? The reality is far more complicated.
Contrast that with Olasky’s very clever alphabetical list of the marks of compassion: Affiliation, Bonding, Categorization, Discernment, Employment, Freedom and God. Huge numbers of poor people have lost their connective affiliations. Helping someone means reconnecting them to people that love them. Children are born out of love; maybe some effort can avoid a single mom living for years in poverty. It could be as simple as reconnecting a grandparent to help with day care. Bonding does not mean writing reports or preparing soup. It means making a difference in someone’s life over the course of years. It is inexhaustible kindness. (Think how different this is from class warfare; wealthy people spending years helping those in need.) Categorization means charities, unlike government, are not required to treat people equally. And different charities may have completely different definitions of "worthiness." Knowing who needs a meal and who needs a kick in the pants takes hard work getting to know people. Charities used to have "work tests" to help categorize. Discernment is learning to weed out the gamers and fakes. This is important at many levels. It saves charities money; it prevents demoralizing the struggling poor, and prevents charitable fatigue. Employment means pride; it means good habits; it is what society expects of you. Employment is the key to mobility and the end of personal impoverishment. (I get exhausted with liberals who complain about inadequate wages as if your first job back in the workforce is going to be middle management.) Freedom fits in this list very well. Theresa Funiciello in Tyranny of Kindness suggests that many welfare candidates are simply unemployable. (Pointing to a room full of disabled individuals, she asks, "Which ones would you employ.") But freedom from government restraint means being able to pay exactly what someone is worth. If it is only 25 cents/hour until they sober up, so be it. The point is that compassionate efforts should expect people to work as best they can. Therefore government must get out of the way to legalize jobs at all levels of skill. The last one on Olasky’s list is God. I am a practical kind of guy. If it works, do it. I suspect belief in God helps motivate people to help others. I suspect that many people need God in their lives to help them get back on the right track. Government obviously must stay away from religion. But government and bad charities are drowning out good charitable compassion. Someone with a crisis of the soul is far less likely to bring his needs to a religious based charity. It is folly to think that a hand out or a bowl of soup can produce the good that compassion can do.
"The existence of misery, and the necessity of relieving it, are not in controversy....It is only the remedy to be applied..." that forms the debate. The Tragedy of American Compassion shows the tremendous change in our society over the last century. When was the last time you heard words from a politician like those of Franklin Roosevelt: "we must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination..." Today we have welfare, medicare, medicaid, subsidized housing, food stamps, etc. The paradox is that poverty is no longer declining. The number of impoverished single moms is not declining. Hard core poverty is as virulent as ever.
Government programs and bad charity are stingy. Offering a single mother a welfare card, section 8 housing and a medicare card is stingy. We give money and nothing of ourselves. Maybe patching up a relationship with grandma solves the riddle. No one is saying single moms don’t work hard raising their children. But, are they being told quite clearly that "deciding" to raise a child on their own means a life of poverty and more. The necessity of helping is not in question. The question is strategy. Hand out money, and single moms may believe they do not need affiliation, bonding, employment or God; they will not show up. Only through inexhaustible kindness will we approach the nuance of individual problems.
I am intrigued by the question of moral condemnation that was highly prevalent in the 19th century. If you didn’t work, you were a bum and a pauper; if you drank too much, you were a sinner, lazy and indolent; There was a real distinction made between the truly needy and the pauper. The difference was the ability to help yourself. Widows were not expected to work and were poor without fault. Those who are lazy or drunkards were paupers. I am not sure whether we benefit from all of this moral condemnation. Certainly some of it is good to remind people that sitting around and doing nothing is wrong if you are capable. Nor am I squeamish about using labels if they fit. Stealing from others is sinful even if you are in need. But can’t we make our point without all of the "holier than thou" finger pointing?
Work is difficult. Growing up is difficult. It is not easy to get out of bed early to do thing that you may not love. On top of that, all of us have different talents and weaknesses. Plus, bad things happen along the way. But somehow we persevere or we should. Incentives matter. As Jane Addams said: "We have all accepted bread from someone, at least until we were fourteen." But most parents also know to let their children fly on their own. Some kids may need to be pushed out of the nest. Society as a whole should be careful not to interfere. Handouts can be corrupting. That means that neither government nor charities should provide a serious alternative to the incredible sacrifice and perseverance needed to get by and get ahead. Today we call it tough love. We all have responsibilities to ourselves and our families. Government is there to protect our rights but it should also respect our responsibilities. Giving money too freely fails to respect those responsibilities.
Marvin Olasky recalls the debates, in the mid 19th century, between those who saw man as good and those who saw him as evil. Having that discussion may be intellectually interesting but I don’t see how it moves us forward. Bad charity hurts good charity. Government programs are often "well-meaning, tender-hearted, sweet-voiced criminals who insist upon indulging in indiscriminate charity." It is lazy and stingy to give a dollar or a bowl of soup where true compassion is better.
