Sound Thinking about Poverty Alleviation
An excerpt from Ismael Hernandez's new book on "rethinking charity"
Over the next few weeks, Freedom & Virtue Review will be presenting excerpts from the latest book by Ismael Hernandez, Rethinking Charity: Restoring Dignity to Poverty Relief (Acton Institute, 2024). A few of this remarkable book’s endorsements include Andreas Widmer of Catholic University of America—“a must-read for anyone serious about the real solutions to poverty that respect the dignity and potential of every human being”; Micah Watson of Calvin University—“judicious, convictional, readable, and hopeful”; Anne Bradley of the Fund for American Studies—"a persuasive and must-read book that compels us to put the human person at the center of our efforts”; and Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research—“bringing together good philosophy, sound economic theory, and the insights of years of experience.” The excerpts are reproduced here without footnotes.
Excerpt from Chapter 2: Sound Thinking about Poverty Alleviation
For those using political philosophy to claim a right to relief, the notion of redress is preeminent. Unequal outcomes or even inequalities of intellectual or social endowment are grievances that deserve remedy or compensation to be achieved through direct, top-down, intervention by the state or other institutions of civil society. Again, the logic is clear: if relief is a political right of the citizen and some citizens lack certain goods and services, then something must be wrong with the political structure or with the grand design of the universe when these goods are not delivered in abundance. As affirmation of the need for redress is parasitic to belief in an expanded human intellectual capacity to accomplish it, it highlights the hubris of the intelligentsia. Thomas Sowell aptly calls this hubris “cosmic justice,” a type of unattainable justice in eternal antagonism with reality. It is also a concept irreconcilable with individual freedom, the rule of law, and an objective assessment of human capacities to rearrange the order of things.
Meeting Deeper Needs
In reality, economic inequality persists because human beings are not equal in every way, and because the human capacity to realign the stars does not exist. Unequal outcomes are not grievances but necessary results from facts of human nature. As human beings are more than constructs of the political system or biological organisms with determined organic features, it follows that removing the moral demands from welfare will spell failure. These failures, however, are often used to increase claims for greater political power to finally make it work.
My experience with having been poor and later working with the poor moves me to believe that there are deeper human needs people carry with them. The most important one is the need for a recognition of their subjectivity. The apparent need is but a step the poor take toward encounter and involvement. As Hilaire Belloc said long ago, “Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his environment.” Yet, unlike every other organism, man cannot live without working and engaging in second-order activities that transcend his environment and give him an inward movement of the will and the intellect. This basic human constitution and the activities that flow from it are pre-political: they are natural in the human constitution and their existence is revealed through human work. That is, working to gain sustenance is a sort of spontaneous order. They reveal order in the mind of God as he created human beings, order in the natural state of those created, and order in human action….
We must then go deeper than a mere assertion of political rights. Those political rights are invariably asserted against the labor and production of other human beings with the same human constitution and inclinations to actualize their subjectivity. The “servile state” is a result of the politization of the question of the economic and social welfare. This is the state where positive law intervenes to force some people to labor for the advantage of others, corrupting the whole social order with this imposition. The servile state becomes the “intrusive state,” where positive law forces some to labor for others and both positive law and private institutions encroach significantly on the lives of the poor, infringing their right to act on their own behalf and stamping society with the mark of paternalism. Confiscatory paternalism is an injury to the whole body politic and especially to the poor themselves….
If there is a primary area for attention on the question of poverty in the American context, it is not in finding clever schemes for more programs meeting unmet needs. The most important activity before us is the changing of the narrative of victimization that prevents the poor from seeing themselves as the protagonists of their own development whose primary right is to engage in productive activity on their own behalf. The narrative of penury and pauperism does not fit American poverty, because the context for economic and social advancement is there, greater than any other place on earth. Regulation of the poor, even with the lofty language of human flourishing and political rights, is an enemy. It incentivizes passivity in the realm of economic activity and activism in the realm of political intervention by patrons. It goes even further, demanding an entire restructuring of our vision of the place of the individual person in the configuration of society.
We must see the task of walking side by side with those in need as a journey whose destination is uncertain precisely because it requires risk. The greater risk is that of renouncing our dominion over the lives of the poor, as if they are so fragile that they cannot fail to crack without our benevolent management. Arthur Brooks often speaks of earned success not merely as a practical possibility but as a moral imperative. We must create systems with critical components that highlight positively the capacities of the poor to engage in free and creative economic activity. An environment of profound respect for the poor demands free-market economic activity, with all its glories and warts.
As theologian Jordan Ballor points out, those in the developing world are now more confident about free markets than those in developed countries that benefited from free markets. One reason is human corruption in the marketplace. Another is what I call the boredom of affluence, which leads us to take such benefits for granted. Yet another is an intelligentsia invested in ideas contrary to free enterprise. I also believe that a problem is that we do not see the economic sphere as being part of a system that supports the poor. We see charity here and the market there. We see volunteering as a corrective of earned success. In so doing, we impede movement toward authentic love. As Ballor eloquently puts it, “A system within which service is valued, stewardship is expected, and sustainability is pursued is that which will tend to produce a more accurate earthly reflection of heavenly shalom.”
Accompanying, Not Intervening
The cloak of invisibility engulfing the poor remains in place because we have become cowards with a smile and a bag of rice to hand out. An authentic Christian response rejects subsuming the primary responsibility of individuals toward their basic communities—especially the church—within the role of the state (or charities and ministries) as it moves to grant welfare the status of a “sacred” political right. It also rejects the idea that welfare is a political right whose main enforcer is the state (and its subsidiaries) as it fosters the common good of the community within its jurisdiction.
A problem we have in grasping this essential understanding is that the target community for state action is the entirety of society within its jurisdiction. As the target is the whole, it is easy to believe that the state has plenary authority over the whole. It is important to affirm, however, that having the community at large as the target does not give the state a comprehensive role; it merely identifies its target without conferring expansive powers. The power of the state is as limited as the power of any other community. Identifying the role of each community is crucial. No one has expressed this truth better than the late Pope John Paul II:
By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbors to those in need. It should be added that certain kinds of demands often call for a response which is not simply material, but which is capable of perceiving the deeper human need.
Our lack of courage and discernment incentivizes what Frédéric Bastiat called “a fatal tendency of mankind” to live and prosper at the expense of others. “This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man—in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.” The least possible pain in what we may call biologistic charity is seen in the already mentioned admixture of activism with passivity. The giver avoids the pain in the effort to establish a relationship, while the receiver has some immediate physical pain relieved for a while. Living and prospering at the expense of others does not refer only to the receiver. The giver may experience a semblance of psychological prosperity in the reign of instinct that informs the transactions that occur when resources pass hands. A type of comforting paternalism offers those helping the poor a measure of satisfaction with the least possible accompanying pain.
The alliance between the state and the church in the American context, where the state is the one with the purse and the hand on the cradle, threatens the church as an independent and vibrant institution. As Alexis de Tocqueville warned of what he observed in the European context, “European Christianity has allowed itself to be intimately united with the powers of this world. Now that these powers are failing, it is as if it were buried under their ruins. A living being has been tied to the dead; cut the bonds holding it and it will arise.” What we need is the courage to sever the tie.
The “outsider’s dilemma” must be addressed if we are to avoid the condescension of paternalism. Study after study shows that aid does not work. As economist Dambisa Moyo puts it, “The idea that aid aimed at economic development helps to alleviate systemic poverty is a myth.” Atlas Network president Matt Warner describes the dilemma as the question of how to help without interfering. How can we foster personal responsibility for one’s future and idiosyncratic solutions to poverty while avoiding the type of interference that nullifies agency? The Atlas Network has found a response when it comes to international aid and philanthropy: Philanthropists must agree to become subsidiary supporters of the research, advocacy, and initiative of local scholars and advocates. The focus ought to be the expansion of indigenous institutional space for local economic initiative informed by economic freedom and market-oriented solutions.
A similar thesis applies to domestic efforts to end poverty, where helpers imagine that enough money poured into local communities and the work of agencies, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropists will have the effect of solving poverty at that level. This is the same kind of “magical thinking” that has been the norm in justifying foreign aid in Africa and other regions. Interventionist powers are often government agencies disbursing direct aid to individuals but also churches, ministries, and other relief organizations that act upon local communities with good intentions but without the insight provided by people within these communities.
Even when these institutions are located within these very communities, they may have an interventionist mindset. The hubris of expertise and planning remains embedded in processes that attempt to fabricate solutions instead of strengthening local institutions such as the family and fraternal aid organizations while supporting local entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial initiatives. Moreover, these solutions often bypass the need for individuals to not only participate in the process beyond being clients but also to have a leadership role in the process. We need fewer agencies and more support for those in the local community who stand for freedom, especially the aid of churches and other indigenous organizations who see themselves in the same light of subsidiary assistance to individuals and families. In other words, a local organization might not be the best to change the face of a community if the core vision of that organization is interventionist.
The hubris of central planning is at the heart of interventionism. The arrogance of interventionism is accompanied by the hubris of what I call tokenistic love. In society at large, but especially among believers, there is always the temptation of loving-sounding religious verbiage or perfunctory or symbolic efforts that avoid a deep commitment based on a consistent striving to actualize principles. We must be careful of unwittingly transforming the poor into a kind of religious currency, with them becoming a sort of token of authenticity, with not much more value than checking a box that needs to be filled. If we have a church, the thinking goes, we must also have an addendum of services for the poor—some service, any service. Very often we have a food pantry, help people with paying bills, welcome state agency services to our premises, and conduct drives and events. These are justified by way of biblical passages referring to poverty or instinctively accepted as something Christians are supposed to do. Almost invariably they provide something tangible to clients. Mobilization heightens during holidays and other events such as school openings, and they decrease in between celebrations. We have a plan of activities that provide something we find important for the poor at that moment.
Yet, as James Schall asks in On Christians and Prosperity, “If we love our neighbor because we are ‘commanded’ to love him, do we really love him?” Or, as Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert add in their influential book When Helping Hurts, “What truly motivates you? Do you really love poor people and want to serve them? Or do you have other motives?” Are we objectifying the poor for the sake of scoring brownie points with God or of garnering the accolades of society?
The temptation to romanticize the poor and love poverty instrumentally is always there. That is, poverty becomes the occasion to fulfill some command by doing the minimum necessary to satisfy the command. At times, the poor become a symbol that advances an ideology. It seems as if our attitudes toward poverty float between utopianism, with a call to end poverty by the redistributive activity of the non-poor or via the revolutionary activism of movements to change structures, and instrumentalism, with the poor becoming an abstraction out there in the outskirts of our existence. We can “love” them by sending a donation, supporting certain redistributionist policies, or giving away some food through the small bureaucracies of compassion we have created in our churches and charitable institutions.
Have we given some thought to the possibility of loving the poor because they are persons with dignity and skills, becoming ourselves secondary aides for the expansion of economic activity initiated and led by the poor themselves? It has always bothered me that we use certain phrases, such as “our children,” to justify increases in spending for failing public schools or to justify transactional events where the poor receive items. If they are really “our children” instead of individual persons with the moral capacity for self-realization and the children of their actual parents, then we must reflect on how good parents treat their own children. Granted, good parents love their children by directly providing for them. But they love them the most by challenging them, expecting much from them, assisting them in developing the habits of virtue, and allowing them to struggle at times. We allow the struggle because it is good for them. They are not our pets; they are our offspring. Our instinct is to immediately intervene. Right reason invites us to discern.