also meek they eventually will inherit the earth. This is, in some ways, an admirable solution. It allows the rich to enjoy their wealth while envying the poor their future fortune. [Harry Crews’s ―Pages from the Life of a Georgia Innocent‖ discusses the romanticizing of poverty.]
4. Much, much later, in the twenty or thirty years following the publication in 1776 of The Wealth of Nations–the late dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Britain–the problem and its solution began to take on their modern form. Jeremy Bentham, a near contemporary of Adam Smith, came up with the formula that for perhaps fifty years was extraordinarily influential in British and, to some degree, American thought. This was utilitarianism. ―By the principle of utility,‖ Bentham said in 1789, ―is meant the principal which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.‖ Virtue is, indeed must be, self-centered. While there were people with great good fortune and many more with great ill fortune, the social problem was solved as long as, again in Bentham’s words, there was ―the greatest good for the greatest number.‖ Society did its best for the largest possible number of people; one accepted that the result might be sadly unpleasant for the
many whose happiness was not served.
5. In the 1830’s a new formula, influential in no slight degree to this day, became available for getting the poor off the public conscience. This is associated with the names of David Ricardo, a stockbroker, and Thomas Robert Malthus, a divine. The essentials are familiar: the poverty of the poor was the fault of the poor. And it was so because it was a product of their excessive fecundity: their grievously uncontrolled lust caused them to breed up to the full limits of the available subsistence.
6. This was Malthusianism. Poverty being caused in the bed meant that the rich were not responsible for either its creation or its amelioration. However, Malthus was himself not without a certain feeling of responsibility: he urged that the marriage ceremony contain a warning against undue and irresponsible sexual intercourse–a warning, it is fair to say, that has not been accepted as a fully effective method of birth control. In more recent times, Ronald Reagan has said that the best form of population control emerges from the market. (Couples in love should repair to R. H. Macy’s, not their bedrooms.) Malthus, it must be said, was at least as relevant. 7. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a new form of denial achieved great influence, especially in the United States. The
new doctrine, associated with the name of Herbert Spencer, was Social Darwinism. In economic life, as in biological development, the overriding rule was survival of the fittest. That phrase–‖survival of the fittest‖–came, in fact, not from Charles Darwin but from Spencer, and expressed his view of economic life. The elimination of the poor is nature’s way of improving the race. The weak and unfortunate being extruded, the quality of the human family is thus strengthened.
8. One of the most notable American spokespersons of Social Darwinism was John D. Rockefeller–the first Rockefeller–who said in a famous speech: ―The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. And so it is in economic life. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.‖ [Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives was written during the time of Social Darwinism and played a major role in this ideology’s demise.]
9. In the course of the present century, however, Social Darwinism came to be considered a bit too cruel. It declined in popularity, and references to it acquired a condemnatory tone. We passed on to the more amorphous denial of poverty
associated with Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. They held that public assistance to the poor interfered with the effective operation of the economic system–that such assistance was inconsistent with the economic design that had come to serve most people very well. The notion that there is something economically damaging about helping the poor remains with us to this day as one of the ways by which we get them off our conscience. [It doesn’t follow, however, that government aid to the affluent is morally damaging; see ―The Next New Deal‖ and ―Reining in the Rich‖.]
10. With the Roosevelt revolution (as previously with that of Lloyd George in Britain), a specific responsibility was assumed by the government for the least fortunate people in the republic. Roosevelt and the presidents who followed him accepted a substantial measure of responsibility for the old through Social Security, for the unemployed through unemployment insurance, for the unemployable and the handicapped through direct relief, and for the sick through Medicare and Medicaid. This was a truly great change, and for a time, the age-old tendency to avoid thinking about the poor gave way to the feeling that we didn’t need to try–that we were, indeed, doing something about them.
11. In recent years, however, it has become clear that the
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