The Spastic Hedgehog writes:

Greetings from New Hampshire where it isn’t snowing right now! Yay!

I was recently blown away by Simcha’s refreshingly honest post about having to go to a food pantry for food. Between that post, the closing of Legal Assistance in Nashua, NH, the Washington Post article you linked to on a Catholic family with 12 kids, and a good editorial in the New York Times including the jarring statistic that 4/5ths of Americans who are in legal trouble (criminal or civil) cannot afford an attorney, I’ve been thinking about something that always seems to come up in the comments here, there and everywhere. What do you think of “choices?”

Whenever and wherever the poor are discussed, there seems to be the inevitable refrain of “well, they should make/should have made better choices.” For a while, I thought this way too but then I actually worked with the poor and I started to see two things: “choices” are often illusory and one bad choice often has the far reaching effects of a tsunami.

For example, it seems a person who is underemployed is expected to just look for and get a better job. Don’t want to be a $7 an hour hotel maid? No problem! Look for a higher paying job! Nevermind that jobs are about as abundant as albino truffles these days or that you may not be qualified for a higher paying job. But then, if you weren’t lazy, you’d choose to go to school so you could get a degree and get yourself out of poverty! This “choice” of course, ignores that school costs a significant amount of money: money that simply cutting the cable bill won’t magically make materialize. Or that class schedules often conflict with work schedules and most employers don’t care what you’re leaving for, you’re not leaving work early without getting docked pay or even putting your job in jeopardy. Or even if you get a scholarship and can make your class and work schedules balance, who is going to look after your kid(s) while you’re gone another 10 to 12 hours a week?

That leads me to my other point: the far reaching and unintended consequences of one bad decision. Perhaps our hypothetical maid became pregnant by her high school sweetheart at the tender age of 18. That one choice, namely to conceive a child out of wedlock, has a trickle down effect into every single area of her life. She’s no longer able to easily go to a good college which means her ability to earn a living to support herself and her child is greatly diminished. And the odds are stacked pretty heavily against her on her boyfriend standing by her, going to college and being able to earn enough to support their family. If she has a functional family, maybe it’s easier but, at least in my experience, not by much. So she has a low paying job, works long hours and is able to scrape by with no money set aside for junior’s college or her retirement.

With little money set aside is this woman condemned to work till her body wears out because of one bad choice? And the rest of us are entitled to look on and sneer “Well she should have known better” and refuse to help her because that would somehow just be giving her something she didn’t deserve – after all, look at the poor choice(s) she made/makes. Or worse, a “handout” would just be encouraging her to make more poor choices?

I get subsidiarity and wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone, even those who don’t believe in any God except the fluffy “Live Laugh Love” spirituality that makes them feel good about themselves, gave 10 percent of their income to some charity somewhere! But instead of listening to our better angels, we find that most people don’t give till it hurts. Here in New Hampshire we’ve beat out the Pacific Northwest for lowest Church attendance and with attendance often goes financial support. Churches (and most secular charities) cannot possibly bear the burden of those in need in the current climate unless the cans in the Saint Vincent de Paul pantry get some loaves ‘n’ fishes mojo. So what now? What do charity and prudence demand?

I’m curious as to what you think because I know you aren’t a liberal/conservative ideologue and while I think I understand where Chesterton et al. are coming from with distributivism, I’m not sure I understand how that would look/work in meatspace though this has been kicking around in my head for weeks now. Thoughts?

I don’t know that I’ve got too much I can say here that’s of much use. It seems to me that you are intuiting the weakness of the libertarian/Randian position, which appears to me to be a heretical tendency to sacrifice solidarity and charity on the altar of a false subsidiarity.

Heresy is not so much “false teaching” as it is *selective* teaching. A heretic *loves* a particular Catholic doctrine so much that he wants to take it home and put it in a jar and never think about anything else. The word from which “heresy” is derived has behind it the image of a thread being drawn out from a whole cloth. Result: the sleeve falls off and the garment is ruined. Throughout history, sectarians and people trapped in what Chesterton called the clean, well-lit prison of a single idea have latched on to some truth (“God the Father is God” “Jesus is fully Man” “God is sovereign” “Man has free will”) and then used it as a stick to attack some equally important truth (“God the Father is God, therefore the Son is a creature” “Jesus is fully Man, therefore he cannot be God” “God is sovereign, therefore we have no free will.” “Man has free will, therefore he must save himself apart from grace.”)

It’s the same among a growing cadre of Catholics, who have latched on to buzzwords like subsidiarity (which basically means that those closest to a particular problem are generally the people who should take care of that problem) and turned it into a sort of theologized rationale for “I’ve got mine, and if the poor be like to die they had better do it and help decrease the surplus population.” Just the other day I was involved in a combox discussion where we were treated to the spectacle of Catholics (American, of course) explaining that the main problem with the economy was “illegals taking our jobs”. Because, you know, so many Americans have been beating a path to the lettuce fields to do back-breaking work for crap wages. And no Americans at all have been responsible for hiring millions of Mexicans and integrating them into our economy for decades by employing them (at crap wages) to do all this work that Americans won’t do. And there are no fabulously rich people running corporations which have exported much of our economy overseas to be done by foreign workers (at crap wages). And that wasn’t fully endorsed by dozens of Talk Radio gurus who instructed the faithful that what’s good for Corporate America is what’s good. And Corporate America hasn’t been getting sweet trillion dollar welfare deals under the table from our Ruling Classes or anything.

In short, the weird thing about the libertarian spin on subsidiarity (ripped bleeding from the whole weave of Catholic teaching) is that it starts by talking about the dignity of the individual and seems to always end by denouncing some poor guy out in a field in California trying to make ends meet for his family, while turning a blind eye to the fact that vast concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few is not, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, what subsidiarity is about.

Meanwhile, the Church also talks about “solidarity” which libertarian torquers of “subsidiarity” generally tend to dismiss as “socialism” (note the recent hysteria from a right wing think tank when Pope Benedict dared to suggest that economics was made for man and not man for economics). Solidarity basically means “we’re all in this together” and refers to the fact that God intends the goods he has given us for our human dignity to go to all of us, not just the rich and powerful. It is founded on the fact that we are all made in the image and likeness of God and that no man is an island. A poor man is as entitled to food, shelter, work, play, and medicine as a rich one. It’s something a healthy conservatism used to know, before all concern for the poor began to be treated like code words for Marxism:

Note the comments on the Youtube page, with present day conservatives warning about the incipient socialism of the scene. Amazing.

The atomized individualist approach to the human person you are reacting to was summarized by Anatole France when he said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

I have no plan or program for what do about this growing tendency to put “subsidiarity” (or at least the cartoonish version of it embraced by the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism) against Subsidiarity and against our duty to the poor, the alien, the orphan, and the widow. I’m still trying to digest the Church’s teaching here. But, like you, I cannot escape the sensation that there is something radically and terribly wrong with the American approach to all this and that, not just the poor, but the middle class (who are increasingly becoming the poor) are going to figure out soon enough that we must all hang together or we shall most assuredly all hang separately.