Book by Marvin Olasky
(Regnery, 1992)
Reviewed by Tim Montgomerie on 1 December 2001
George W Bush has described Marvin Olasky as Compassionate Conservatism's leading thinker. In The Tragedy of American Compassion, Olasky records the way religious and other charities in nineteenth century America delivered personal, holistic care to needy people. The results of that care were much more successful than the one-size-fits-all welfare states of today which are devoid of the personal respect, moral challenge and spirituality that every person needs in order to flourish.
Summary bullet points
· In the nineteenth century compassion was carried out person-so-person based on a proper assessment of every individual's circumstances. This led to a delivery of care that fitted the person and was likely to include not only material assistance but the insights into identity, spirituality and family that makes any person whole.
· At the turn of the twentieth century there was an impatience with the existing pattern of provision for the needy. In the utopian mood of the time government was invited to assume ever larger welfare responsibilities. The gains of comprehensive material provision were outweighed by the junking of Judeao-Christian moral understandings and the loss of bonding to families and communities.
· The welfare state has allowed the middle class to believe that the poor are being cared for. But the welfare state betrays the belief that material need is the only form of human need. Within the middle classes' own homes, children are victims of the same materialist worldview as their parents give them toys and possessions instead of time and wisdom.
Seven marks of effective compassion
In The Tragedy of American Compassion Marvin Olasky documents the extent and nature of charitable provision for the poor in nineteenth century America. In doing so he outlines an A-G, or seven marks, of compassion: affiliation, bonding, categorisation, discernment, employment, freedom and God:
1. Affiliation: well-intentioned charities should never interfere to an extent that they trample upon a needy person's affiliation with - and need for - family and neighbours. The family - from cradle to grave - is the first and most effective way of holistically caring for someone in need. Help for people or communities in distress would be counter-productive in the long-term if it 'relaxed' links within communities and between families. Particularly insofar as the supplanter of intimate and multi-dimensional family ties is a one-size-fits-all, values-lite state. This belief in affiliation is inherent in Catholic teaching on subsidiarity.
2. Bonding: where the needy are 'unaffiliated' and truly alone, a charity volunteer must seek to bond with them - getting to know them and their needs, hopes, fears and strengths and weaknesses. Where an individual is respected as a person; that individual will invariably return respect to the helper and wider society. Nineteenth century charities did employ professional managers but these managers' first duty was to train and encourage volunteers - never to supplant them. It was impossible to afford enough paid staff to bond with people. Only volunteers had the time to give the necessary personal attention to an individual or family in need. In 1989 the United Hebrew Charities said simply: "If every person possessing the capability should assume the care of a single family, there would not be enough poor to go around."
3. Categorisation: people should not be treated the same because they are not the same. Some are feckless, some unfortunate, some cruelly treated. Some people will respond best to gentleness, some to firmness. Some people will need more sustained help than others.
4. Discernment: charity without discernment "not only subsidised the unscrupulous and undeserving but became a chief hindrance to spontaneous, free generosity", Olasky concludes. Charity has come to be thought of as 'alms' - it is correctly understand as love. Love for a person in need will sometimes involve alms but it will also often involve patient guidance and encouragement. At certain points it will also involve rebuke or the withholding of aid. If love sometimes requires tough advice or action it will be undermined if the needy person in question can receive indulgent care from another charitable provider down the road.
5. Employment: in Judaism the highest form of charity is to enable a person to stand on their own two feet. By finding work the head of a household becomes independent and develops self-worth.
6. Freedom: individuals must grow intellectually, morally and in terms of basic skills so as to avoid dependence on help from any one source: charities, government or whatever.
7. God: people have spiritual as well as material needs. Olasky quotes Gertrude Himmelfarb and her analysis of the evangelistic character of religious charity in nineteenth century England: "There was nothing invidious in being preached to. What was invidious was not being preached to, not having access to the kinds of moral, religious and communal experiences that were a normal part of life for those not so poor as to be deprived of them".
The emptying of compassion
In his analysis of what went wrong in the twentieth century, Olasky highlights three key trends:
· Utopian belief in the possibilities of state welfare;
· Laziness or 'stinginess' that has led to 'feed-and-forget' attitudes to helping the poor;
· And, thirdly, weak theology.
We will take each of these three trends in turn...
1. A utopian and impatient belief in state action. Nineteenth century charitable providers took the time to get to know those they sought to help - they knew that there were no shortcuts in fighting poverty. But by the turn of the twentieth century there was impatience with this approach. "Writers and clerics who saw utopia around the corner were not satisfied with prodigal sons coming home one by one", Olasky summarises. He then quotes clerics forecasting a new age of peace and happiness. Revd Dr Newton wrote in the New York Journal of Christmas Eve, 1899: "[A] new and absolutely unprecedented dominion over Nature provides man with the physical means for preparing a new earth, in which there shall be health and wealth, peace and plenty and prosperity". Not only a new earth but Canon William Freemantle saw the state as taking over the traditional functions of the church: "We find the Nation alone fully organised, sovereign, independent, universal, capable of giving full expression to the Christian principle. We ought, therefore, to regard the Nation as the Church, its rulers as ministers of Christ, its whole body as a Christian brotherhood, its public assemblies as amongst the highest modes of universal Christian fellowship, its dealing with material interests as Sacraments, its progressive development, especially in raising the weak, as the fullest service rendered on earth to God, the nearest thing as yet within our reach to the kingdom of heaven". Again and again ministers of the church - who should know better - lead the advocacy of the state assuming responsibilities that are more effectively discharged by local institutions - not least the church.
2. Feed-and-forget. One of the most challenging insights of Marvin Olasky is to note how comfortable the welfare state has allowed the middle classes to become. We have passed responsibility for the poor to the state and our consciences can rest easy at night. But they shouldn't rest easy. The state can give people material help but it can't provide them with hope, solidarity or moral challenge. God calls us to love our neighbour; not for the state to attempt to love our neighbour for us. Olasky calls it the feed-and-forget strategy and it is essentially materialist, lazy and short-term. He writes: "The priest and the Levite who passed by the beaten traveller in chapter ten of Luke’s gospel probably tithed, but they were stingy - only the Good Samaritan was not. A professor who gives high grades to mediocre papers, so that students will go away happy and he need not explain how they erred, is stingy. Parents who give their children Nintendos or Turbographic 16s but do not walk with them by the roadside and play games with them on the dining room table are stingy." An 1834 definition of compassion demonstrates faithfulness to the Latin roots of the word: "a suffering with another, painful sympathy". But after America's state-led war on poverty and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society reforms, Olasky quotes a 1971 dictionary definition: "the feeling, or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it". It is much weaker and more sentimental. Olasky: "There is a world of policy differences between those two definitions: One demands personal action, the other a 'feeling' that requires a willingness to send a cheque."
3. Welfare systems made in the image of false gods. Olasky: "Cultures build systems of charity in the image of the god they worship, whether distant deist, bumbling bon vivant, or 'whatever goes' gopher. In colonial America, emphasis on a theistic God of both justice and mercy led to an understanding of compassion that was hard-headed but warm-hearted..., Late nineteenth-century Americans who read the Bible regularly did not see God as a sugardaddy who merely felt sorry for people in distress. They saw God showing compassion while demanding change, and they tried to do the same. Groups such as the Industrial Christian Alliance noted that they used 'religious methods' - reminding the poor that God made them and had high expectations for them - to "restore the fallen and helpless to self-respect and self-support"." In the end, warns Olasky, partial re-adoption of the seven marks of compassion will be dangerous if unaccompanied by "a spiritual revival that transforms the everyday advice people give and receive, and the way we lead our lives".
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