Feed-and-forget

A stingy form of compassion that meets a vulnerable person's immediate needs but does not help them to overcome the causes of their vulnerability.

"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."

With these words Marvin Olasky skewers the 'feed-and-forget' approach that masquerades as compassionate.

In 'The Tragedy of American Compassion' Marvin Olasky – who George W Bush described as compassionate conservatism’s “leading thinker” – reviews the USA’s poverty-fighting traditions. He concludes that the state can be good at providing needy people with material assistance but it lacks the ability of 3D institutions to meet the ongoing, and special, needs of every individual person. That is why the most effective charities will mend a person’s community and family relationships.

In addition, Olasky emphasises discernment. Charity without discernment, Olasky wrote, “not only subsidised the unscrupulous and undeserving but became a chief hindrance to spontaneous, free generosity.” The failure of Britain's existing welfare state to focus help on the most vulnerable people is one of the chief causes of its unpopularity.

The welfare state is made in the image of the god we worship

Every age, Marvin Olasky concludes, builds its idea of compassion in the image of the god it worships:

"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"."

This belief in restoring people to “self-respect and self-support” has led compassionate conservatives to reject the dehumanising ‘feed-and-forget’ philosophy that has come to characterise the bureaucractic welfare state's attitude to its dependent clients. Compassionate - or progressive - conservatives want to see ‘help-to-change’ and free charities becoming an increasing feature of society’s response to poverty.

Comments

[Deivid]

I too agree with Patrick Mercer 100% and devoutly hope that Cameron is revmeod in the near future. After a lifetime of voting Tory (I am 75) I will never vote Tory again as long as Cameron is PM. There is no reason to vote for the Tories under Cameron as they are no different from Labour.