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Decent Poverty Report: Poverty and Misery
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty, a phrase attributed specifically to the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act and more broadly to his administration's efforts to expand the social safety net and improve education, housing, job training, and health care. The writer and social gadfly Paul Goodman was at the height of his popularity in 1964. As "the philosopher of the New Left," Goodman surely approved of a tighter social safety net, though as an anarchist, he was caustically critical of the federal government's encroachment into arenas better served by local and community-based groups.
But I suspect he had a deeper, more philosophical quibble with the "War on Poverty" rhetoric, stemming from his often-stated commitment to what he called "decent poverty." The essay "Politics Within Limits," in Goodman's posthumously published book Little Prayers and Finite Experience (also available in Crazy Hope and Finite Experience, 1994, edited by Taylor Stoehr), contains this reference to the decent poverty idea:
There must not be horrors that take me by the throat, so I can experience nothing; but it is indifferent to me what the Growth Rate is, or if some people are rich and others poor, so long as they are pauvres, decently poor, and not misérables (Péguy's distinction). I myself never found that much difference between being very poor and modestly rich.
This distinction between poverty and misery, which Goodman made in several essays and speeches, is very interesting and rather clarifying. Charles Péguy was a socialist French poet from the turn of the century. Goodman's reference is to Péguy's 1902 essay called "De Jean Coste," a piece of literary criticism about a novel called Jean Coste by Antonin Lavergne. The title character of this novel is a rural schoolteacher who is paid so poorly that he can't make ends meet; with a sick wife and sick mother, he gradually falls deeper into squalor. The novel's irony comes from the hero's valiant efforts to keep up appearances, which succeed so well that those around him, looking on with indifference, are blind to his suffering. (My source for this is an essay by Charles Coutel, in French.). Here's the key Péguy passage, roughly translating from the French:
Misery and poverty are frequently confused, because they are close-close, but located on either side of a limit. On one side, economic life is not assured; on the other side, it is assured. Beneath that limit, there's misery, no certainty of a viable life, constant risk; above the limit, the risk stops, and poor or rich, there is assurance. Immediately above the limit is poverty, and above that are the successive zones of affluence. All below is misery; poverty is only a little above; thus the two are close in quantity, closer than much affluence is to poverty. Judging only by quantity, wealth is much further from poverty than poverty is from misery; but between poverty and misery is a distinction in quality, in nature.
Goodman understood both styles of deprivation from his own life experience, growing up fatherless and fancy-free on the streets of New York, then struggling to raise children as a proud, starving artist in a two-income household. The distinction between poverty and misery was very clear to him, but for numerous reasons of ideology and culture, it's a distinction the Americans have never recognized or respected. And I think he's on to something. It's a bigger deal than it might seem.
Poverty itself, the absence of money to spare, is not the enemy, Goodman told us. We should be more precise and define the problem as economic insecurity, the threat of utter destitution, the constant specter of misery and ruin. If America could eliminate or substantially reduce that threat, for millions of people-say, the threat of homelessness, foreclosure, or eviction-then living here in poverty would be tremendously improved, and suffering greatly diminished. If the nation could put a firmer floor under its people, and ensure a roof over their heads, decent poverty might begin to resemble a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity. It could be something a person or family might choose: off the grid, out from behind the wheel, extricated from the cash nexus, downscale. Such a notion seemed out of step with the affluent ethos of the early sixties, literally countercultural. But today, when it's ever clearer that the affluence of a few and the consumption of the many are at the core of our economic, environmental, existential exigency, the time for this idea may have come.
A war on poverty, like a war on terrorism, can never be won because it's so poorly defined. But some strategic skirmishes against economic insecurity, if the political will existed, could still make a big difference. Can we imagine a war for poverty-decent poverty?
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Show All"If America could eliminate or substantially reduce that threat, for millions of people-say, the threat of homelessness, foreclosure, or eviction-then living here in poverty would be tremendously improved..."
Yes, but it is exactly this insecurity that is vital to the capitalists maintaining wages low enough to extract profit from the labor. A worker with even a minimal basic assurance of food, shelter, and medical care, would be able to "hold out", in the same way his wealthy boss can, when bargaining for the price of the worker's labor. It is this equality in bargaining power, or a genuinely free market in labor, that leads the bosses into such apoplectic rage over welfare programs or the right to organize unions.
I know most CD readers understand this elementary principle of socio-economics - understood by both Marx and Adam Smith well before him, but it bears repeating. One would think that those advocates of "free markets" - the "libertarians" would understand this too.
So Goodman would say that we should define a certain level of well-being that all citizens should enjoy, a level that includes food, shelter, health care, and education. As long as those criteria are met, the differences between poor and rich are not important. I might add one other factor: control. The rich can control the direction society takes--taxation policy, budget emphases, environmental regulation, foreign policy, establishing national goals. They control these things because they are able control the media and because they can buy politicians through lobbyists, campaign contributions, and the incentives they can offer former politicians upon their retirement from public service. Those who are not rich have no voice in political discussions, neither in the questions that are considered nor in the proposed answers to those questions. Essentially, they are unable to influence the direction of society; they are like autumn leaves swept up in the current of a great river. A truly democratic society would give them a voice proportionate to their numbers. Human beings must not only obtain the necessaries of life but also gain control over decision-making. That would require a re-making of society every bit as momentous as satisfying the physical needs of all people.
What? Assure people the basics of food and shelter and medical care? People might actually choose to do work they find fulfilling and honorable in such a world rather than slave for insurance agencies and BP and become creepy lawyers and accountants. They might aquire a taste for simplicity. That would be terrible for business! Keep them terrified of sleeping on the street. That way, they'll do whatever they're told to. They won't speak up against corruption if they're afraid of losing their job.
From 1980 till now a class war has been going on and the Rich have won.
It has been below the radar and America has been the loser. The Right changed the way business does things and the worker was the loser.
Take pensions. it used to be that a worker stayed with a company for 20-30 years, then retired with a part of their pay from the defined pension system. Then came the 401(k), it seemed good, now you get your pension and the money from the 401(k), but companies dropped the pension system and just left the 401(k). Then the Great Recession happened and now most companies don't even match the 401(k) money the worker puts in.
Not to mention half the money in them disappeared.
Now the Tea Party wants to get rid Social Security.
Just think, no pension, a small 401(k) and no Social Security. No one will be able to retire.
Thank you Ronald Reagan.
Can't wait to see the spin when the elderly are roaming the streets.
Could it be any worse than physically and mentally disabled veterans on the streets.
:~(
Kudos to you three for the comments.
What if TV doesn't cover these travesties? Will they even happen/or have happened?
Ah, god. Living simply is not the same thing as poverty of any sort. Most of us are stuck needing electricity, water, transportation, and shelter...which means rent, or payments and taxes, and insurance. That raises the minimum income requirement for survival.
It is pretty hard for most people to simplify their way out of those costs. Not to mention the kind of debt that does not occur in the European Union: Student loans, health care costs.
We can't just go skipping out into a field somewhere and build a log cabin.
but we can do more/less than we're doing.
more, by continuing to educate ourselves. going deeper into our own inherent creative juices and connecting with the world around us and our families and friends. organizing and helping each other to make the most of our lives.
less, by refusing to be held captive to a ethically/morally challenged system, stepping off the wheel of mindless consumption, frequently questioning the paradigm that sits everpresent at the head of the table, demanding obedience and conformity.
no, the so-called freedoms we enjoyed in earlier times are no longer available to us. life goes on.
but we are both human and divine. we may be poor, and even suffer physical depravations. but there are always avenues. i am humbled by the example of people from other parts of the world who have it much much worse than i do, and are able, in spite of and maybe even a bit because of their sufferings to express the very pinnacle of human purpose and capacity for overcoming adversity.
no one, we like to think, has ever had it as bad as this.
i say, we all have the capacity to rise up - even the "least" among us (in whatever context you care to put that poverty) - and to fulfill our personal destinies. and just possibly some our collective ones.
"We all have the capacity to rise up" is the lie upon which this nightmare rests, it is the fuel that powers the machine.
No we do not. Nor should we be required to. Nor do all of us even want to. Why must we? Nor should the only alternative to that be anxiety, stress, poverty and sickness. Yet that is the case.
People do not need to be told to "educate ourselves, going deeper into our own inherent creative juices and connecting with the world around us and our families and friends. organizing and helping each other to make the most of our lives" they need to be able to do those things. People already want to do those things, are already trying to do those things, but the game is rigged against them.
The conditions are not the fault of the working class people, we are not defective in some way because we are not "winners," rather we are living in an armed camp and have no power or control over our lives. The illusion that if we just had different spiritual ideas or something that it could all be beautiful and work just fine is the cruel joke behind our system.
"The illusion that if we just had different spiritual ideas or something that it could all be beautiful and work just fine is the cruel joke behind our system."
As a Traditional American Indians I disagree. Our world view is one of Spirit, not science. True, as Traditionals we suffered The Great Genocide; but, we must also remember that we lived on this land as the First Americans for over 12,000 years successfully and although dramatically reduced in numbers, WE STILL EXIST.
What difference does "Traditional American Indian(s)" make? Why would you mention that? To "give weight" to your viewpoint on this with white folks?
You fail to address the point here - spiritual ideas spring from the culture which is driven by the conditions.
Are you sure you are a Native American? That is a distinctly white view - that our ideas create reality; that the universe obeys our spiritual ideas, rather than that our spiritual ideas honor the existing reality.
You are drawing a cartoon book image here, playing on the stereotypes, with this childish distinction you are making between indigenous people here and the European settlers and colonists.
What is this "our world view is one of Spirit, not science" statement? Is that how you see it? Spirit versus science? That is a point of view popular among whites, an artifact of colonialism, a racist concept.
your present circumstances in any culture could very easily lead you to the selfsame perspectives, be they hopelessness and resignation or gratitude and compassion. spirituality does not depend on specific cultural conditions, but in the process of opening the heart and surrendering to the alchemical mystery, transcends them.
you don't have to be a native american to have the empathy required to relate to their experience - however imprecise might be the connection. certainly, as a male of european ancestry, i have gained possibly too many advantages in my life to ever be able to know exactly how it feels to be in their shoes.
but my experience leads me to know beyond any doubt that the physical laws of the universe are but the visible manifestation of a much greater reality - one that is accessible to all of humanity, regardless of time or culture.
it is not a mere exercise in wishful thinking or blind faith that is resorted to just because impoverishments may make it seem there are no other options.
throughout history, rich and poor alike have felt the urge to go beyond themselves. there is no advantage in either.
H.D. Thoreau lived in a cabin in the woods which he had made himself, grew his own food, and the state STILL found a way to tax him.
I think that now if you earn less than $15,000 or so you pay no taxes.
By far the worst thing about being poor is the deprivation of the ability to be generous.
The person who is so rich that he cannot sufficiently empathize with the poor to see that this other person, just like him, has not enough food, sufficient shelter, to live with dignity----that rich person has become poor; and he/she feels the pain of being unable to be generous.
This is the source of the psychic diseases that plague the rich such a ennui, callousness, being Republican in it's most extreme and pejorative form, affectations which border on tics...they endure all this just to be super rich, and believe they have made a fine bargain.
Of course it is better to be rich than poor, but not at this price. If the rich would enjoy their wealth they must come close to living like the poor who out of necessity find their treasure in another place. They must forget about their wealth if they would enjoy it.
I see you have bought into the "rich feel the pain of being unable to be generous" and its various reiterations. Horse manure. The rich just don't give a shit about the rabble other than to engorge themselves more on the labor of the poor. The rich look down their noses at the poor in the most despicable fashion. They have no ability to feel guilty or experience "psychic diseases".
There is a difference between the individual who was born into extreme wealth and the system that makes the individual rich person as much a prisoner of the system as the poor individual.
Of course the rich individual has an easier life, the point is that he/she has no more choices than the poor. There are expectations of family, clubs, friends, etc. It is the rare individual indeed who can just walk away from all that----Hell, how many poor people can defy their family, close 'friends', coworkers, to stand up for what they know to be right. Racial slurs is a good example.
I think this is what Jesus meant when he said he had not come to bring peace but a sword; to turn family members against each other for the sake of what they know to be right. Absolutely NOTHING is more important than being true to what your inner voice tells you is right.
You may be describing most super rich, I don't know any of them, but there have to be some of them who 'are more right than their neighbors and therefore constitute a majority of one'. (rough paraphrase from Thoreau)
Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.---Tom Robbins
I remember reading Paul Goodman back in the early Sixties, esp. a book in which some existentially troubled young man decides that the solution to what troubles him is to move to Israel.
Goodman was not easy reading to me. I was an existentially troubled young man back then and Israel seemed like an idealistic alternative to the United States. Back then, Israel was selling itself as "greening the desert."
By the mid-Sixties documentaries were appearing on college campuses (but not on TV) about the plight of Palestinian refugees. I was reminded of Sartre's "No Exit" and was glad I didn't go.
The author of this article seems to be quoting Goodman, whom he calls an anarchist:
"I myself never found that much difference between being very poor and modestly rich."
Obviously, Goodman was never "very poor." By today's standard he was most likely "modestly rich" for most of his life. The author writes:
"Goodman understood both styles of deprivation from his own life experience, growing up fatherless and fancy-free on the streets of New York,..." and I gather that by "both styles of deprivation" he means the dichotomy he chooses to make between mere poverty and misery. Relevant here is the author's strange juxtaposition, "growing up fatherless and fancy-free on the streets of New York."
1964 is a key year here. Goodman was by then a mature social philosopher who grew up in FDR's New Deal, while LBJ had just come into office in a time of extreme social trauma and sought to secure precisely the safety net the author suggests, yet LBJ is never mentioned by the author. Instead, to prove his erudition we are treated to obscure French authors (How obscure? I better check with The NY Review of Books!)
Nevertheless, I suspect that there is something to be said for the idea of "decent poverty." Until, in this country, you break a leg and unless you weren't really careful (most people would have to hire a lawyer), they can take your house away.
"Unable to afford to hire a young man to repair her roof, the elderly widow Mrs. Smith attempted the repair herself. She got the ladder set up but then upon climbing it she lost her balance, fell off, and suffered a back injury. She rapidly declined."
Shit happens. If we do not hang together we shall all hang separately.
"Decent poverty" today would require a "decent government," and even the idea of that is rapidly slipping away.
Perhaps it is wise to remember that even the YOYO comes with a string.
-30-
Sometimes an obscure French philospopher may have something useful to say-and maybe he's not so obscure in France, or in Anarchist circles generally.I don't think the author is trying to impress us with his erudition. He doesn't mention LBJ, but he doesn't mention the West End Bar either. You make choices when you write a short article.
The price of prostitute will be a loaf of bread. The price of a loaf of bread will a pound of flesh.
Which one is decent poverty?
We are all poorer - even the rich, although they do not know it. We are all poorer because the rich web of life that has sustained humankind for all it's existence has been abused and tattered by our industrial gluttony. Although the ridiculously rich have advantages now in their abilities to influence events on this sad orb, that will not last as the consequences of what we have done to our one and only biosphere catch up with us.
Wandering by a dam in rural KwaZulu-Natal (where Oprah is most definitely not from) in eastern South Africa, I came across a whole bunch of tiny, hardened clay figures lying by the side of the road - cattle, people, dogs and wagons - obviously rather lovingly crafted by local kids who had never heard of Walmart or Father Christmas or laissez-faire economics.
Now, by anyone's standards these kids are poor. I mean dirt poor. The sort of poverty Americans just cannot conceive, and about which, therefore, they have no right to pontificate nor prescribe, much though it tugs at their heart-strings and their warped Protestant sense of Manifest Destiny.
I am not saying these kids are "happy" in some Arcadian, "Noble Savage" sense of the word. They have their own stresses and obstacles. But there is a clarity in their eyes which one does not often see in many western kids, pumped full of human rights and mood-altering drugs and sugar and trans-fats and promises of being unique little darlings, owed a life and owed happiness.
It makes me question this idea of poverty. Sometimes, it seems, the more a person has, the poorer that person is. Almost as if a person's possessions determine not their worth, but rather the extent of what is lacking in their life. The more you need, the bigger the hole you need to fill.
But, having tasted this saccharin-sweet, empty shell of a life that is capitalism, who would ever turn their back on it? Who would ever turn back the clock on our MacCulture?
Not a one of us. Perhaps extreme climate upheaval will force humanity to redefine poverty.
When your rich you accumulate so much crap that it owns you. You need alarm systems on it, your afraid to be gone too long, you worry who you can trust to mind it while your gone. I know, I had tons of crap, but the only thing I miss is my library, sometimes my tools, and occaisionally that "ability to be generous" (see Nietzsche above).
Living in poverty in the city is way different from camping out in a wilderness area. Two-leg predators, w/ or w/o badges scare me more than lions, tigers and bears! Living in a tent or a camper ain't bad at all, although I would't care to try it with kids or in populous areas, as being away from people is the best part!
As for control, it's pleasant to imagine you have some, but do we really? I read an article on Wired:Latest Extinction is the Gratest, a few days ago, which cites a 2yr old study in PNAS which claims the current Extinction Event is occurin 1000 times faster than anything previously seen!
(www.pnas.org/content/105/37/13736) The Wired article further remarks that "mankinds activities as an agent of global annihilation are worse than any asteroid." Party while you can folks!
What ever happened to that "poor but honest" woodcutter in our old fairy tales? Now all the poor are criminals, not welcome in "decent" society. That pain is not really a necessary adjunct to poverty but it does serve a useful purpose, it keeps people from voluntarily choosing a non-consumption lifestyle.
Decent poverty is an interesting idea.Years ago, I travelled around Spain on a moped, hanging out, observing,being invited into people's homes. There seemed to be lots of people living in reasonable, if poor circumstances, who took care of what little they had, and made a life with friends, family and community. They didn't expect much of life in material terms, but they seemed to be doing alright with what they had, which was not abject: it was a kind of 'respectable' poverty, and it seemed to be based on the notion that this is what you get, so get on with it as best you can, and add some beauty where you can: clean up the trash, and put flowers in your windows. After the US, this was refreshing. I'm probably romanticising. Then I went to Mexico a few years later, and saw miserable poverty, that made the crcumstances of poor Spaniards look like paradise by comparison.