David Rieff: The Road to Hell is Paved

As Beckett said, “The old complaints, the old complaints are best.” In Victorian Britain, what social welfare that did exist was grounded in maintaining a fundamental distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The Victorians thought this both the moral thing to do and that it was in the practical interests of the poor. In our own time, the conservative intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has favorably contrasted the Victorians’ success in combating social pathologies then rampant among the poor by steadfastly making morality “a conscious part of [their] social policy” with what she called the “de-moralization” of our own.

Both of Himmelfarb’s major works on the subject—The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984) and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991)—were meant as revisionist correctives to the consensus view among historians of Britain, which was that the deserving/undeserving distinction had been cruel and counterproductive. Jeremy Bentham, surely even by Himmelfarb’s exigent standards, cannot be thought of as a sentimentalist. And yet the father of utilitarianism essentially repudiated the Victorian consensus Himmelfarb supports so passionately. He understood character as being a product of people’s social environments. Unlike later British social reformers, like Charles Booth and, above all, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who provided the intellectual basis for the post-1945 British welfare state, Bentham had little sympathy for the poor, deserving or undeserving. But like the Webbs, Bentham, too, ‘de-moralized’ poverty, and emphasized its structural nature.

This argument between the moralizers and de-moralizers continues to rage on in both Britain and the United States. The leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron, has staked his political career on the claim that he incarnates a new brand of Toryism, repeating over and over that the Conservatives are no longer the “nasty party,” and that they are genuinely committed to helping the poor. But in reality, while there are elements of the British welfare state that he dares not criticize—above all, the National Health Service—Cameron has revived the neo-Victorian conception of how to give that help. Essentially, he has promised to shrink the British welfare state both on the assumption derived from US “trickle-down” economics that only lower taxes can generate wealth and enterprise, and, in the long run, break the cycle of poverty, above all urban poverty, and that the British welfare state had had the opposite effect, causing the atomization of society, breaking down the natural bonds of duty and replacing them with a dependency culture with its reliance on the state. Cameron concedes that this will create gaps, but these, he insists, will be covered by charity.

The Tories’ rhetoric with its evocations of people who could work if they wanted to or were compelled to “sitting at home on benefits” (the phrase is Chris Grayling’s, Cameron’s shadow minister of employment and pensions) will remind many Americans of Ronald Reagan’s evocation (he never identified her by name) during his 1976 presidential bid of a “welfare queen” from the south side of Chicago who “has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."

Thirty-four years later, confronted by what they view as an all-out effort by the Obama administration to vastly expand the federal government’s role in the economy, and to in effect compel those who pay income taxes to subsidize the social benefits of the poor (who largely do not), the Tea Party movement is awash in the same kind of rhetoric. Reacting to a government plan to subsidize the refinancing of mortgages for homeowners in over their heads, the CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, a hero of the Tea Partiers, claimed on air that the government was “promoting bad behavior” by “subsidizing losers’ mortgages.” Or, in the words of a Tea Partier complaining about the misrepresentation of the movement in the media, “Why can’t you see that we are not against Government? We are just angry at supporting people who have never worked, never will work and therefore never paid taxes. We pay for their food and health care, they receive subsidized rent and usually free or reduced cost utilities.”

In conservative intellectual circles, many of these same analytical templates and moral intuitions hold sway. Fred Siegel, an urban governance specialist at the Manhattan Institute, has spoken of the welfare state’s encouragement of what he calls “dependent individualism” (a less loaded term encompassing the same ideas would surely have been “unconditional assistance”). Instead, Siegel, along with University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and writer Reihan Salam, have called for “conditional reciprocity,” defined by Wax as “the popular expectation [that those being helped] make a reasonable effort towards self-help.”

Salam explicitly acknowledges the similarity between this view and the attitude of the Victorians that Himmelfarb has extolled in her work. In a recent post on his National Review blog, The Agenda, endorsing Wax’s ideas, Salam approvingly invokes “the moralistic distinction between deserving and undeserving recipients of public aid,” which, he asserts, “most people” who accept society’s collective responsibility for the poor demand as a sine qua non of such support. Salam ties this view (in his post, he offers no support for that “most” but he is unquestionably right if all he means to say is that many people in America take this position) with the widespread popular opposition to programs many view as the Obama administration’s efforts to “effectively [expand] the freedom of one class of individuals at the expense of another.

And as a description of what many Americans (like their Cameron-leaning opposite numbers in Britain) feel and fear, what Salam says is undeniable. And his (and their) impatience with some of the politically correct pieties of the welfare state is understandable, even if their own pieties are hardly less vulnerable to similar scrutiny. But here, Salam is far too indulgent toward the Tea Partiers, and, in my view, far too uncritical of “conditional reciprocity”—aka dividing the poor into those who deserve

society’s help and those who don’t—in his failure to ponder the conclusion Bentham drew in the essays he wrote in the 1790s on the English Poor Laws and what he called the “management” of the poor. As Bentham saw clearly, the deserving/undeserving distinction is all about individual endeavor. In opposition to Dickens (who Himmelfarb uses frequently in her work as a club against Bentham), he thought such endeavors largely irrelevant since the environment in which the poor lived was far more likely to determine how they fared than any individual’s qualities and failings.

In our time, what can “conditional reciprocity” possibly mean for the poor whose early lives are shaped by lower birth weights on average, and who often receive neither balanced diets nor proper stimulation during the neurologically determinative period between birth and three-years-old? The neuroscience of nutrition and early child development is now absolutely clear: on average (though obviously there are many exceptions), if you are such a person, your cognitive abilities are impaired compared to those who are properly nourished. What can “conditional reciprocity” mean for people who are badly educated, suffer disproportionately from a range of preventable diseases, and have far less access to information than their more prosperous counterparts? In such circumstances, what can reciprocity of any kind possibly mean?

Like many on the Left, but also many who come from the European Christian Democratic tradition, my own view is that the moral imperative of solidarity is more than justification enough for what, in Salam’s terms, could indeed be called the expansion of the freedom of the needy at the expense of the more prosperous classes. Better that than the patriotism without solidarity of the Tea Partiers. But, for the sake of argument, assume that the goal of social policy should indeed be “conditional reciprocity.” Given the realities of how the poor live, shouldn’t the emphasis be reversed—that is, first improve the education, health care, nutrition, and access to information of the poor and only then demand reciprocity? The day that the Tea Partiers are as willing to march against the indignities with which their fellow citizens who are poor cope every day of their lives as they are over the possibility that they may have to pay more to support them is the day I will believe that there is more at play here than good old-fashioned ressentiment.