I just read a long and thoughtful article on Victorian views of poverty which have filtered down to our own era and which influence the viewpoints of many conservatives, among them Paul Ryan.
Here it is: Paul Ryan's Approach To Poverty Is Straight Out Of The Nineteenth Century by Huffington Post writer Arthur Delaney
(The link is from the Huffington Post which is the originator of the article, so no, I can't provide you with another link)
There are so many catalysts for discussion in this article, I hardly know where to begin, but begin I will and hope you join below for discussion.
After a long prologue introducing the reader to Paul Ryan's poverty mentor, Bob Woodson, author Arthur Delaney finally gets to the thesis of his article:
Despite their calls for a new approach to poverty, however, Ryan and Woodson's ideas are extremely old-fashioned. Indeed, they echo conservative views about welfare going all the way back to the English Poor Laws of the 17th century, which categorized poor people according to their deservingness of help. These ideas have gained popularity at different times since then in response to different crises, like when "tramps" terrorized American towns in the 1870s, when "welfare queens" birthed crack babies in the 1990s, and when the so-called "food stamp surfer" delighted the Fox News crowd by refusing to get a job in 2013.
Whoever the bogeyman, the conservative response springs from the same core belief that too much government assistance causes the problem it's supposed to solve, and that any decent person can make it in America if he or she tries hard enough.
Unfortunately, that core belief proves to be a fallacy, most especially in times of recession/depression when there are more people desiring jobs than there are jobs to be had, but that inconvenient truth does not serve a fundamental conservative belief that the poor are suffering an intelligently designed destiny based on their own lack of individual righteousness and industry.
Delaney very effectively catalogs throughout his article this continuation of the Victorian mindset in our modern day of the tenet that "the poor" are comprised of two groups - the 'deserving' poor and the 'undeserving' poor. Also surviving is the idea that feeding the soul is an essential and inseverable component to filling the stomach.
To summarize in pragmatic Darwinian words this conservative neo-Victorian viewpoint - some people are "worth helping" and others aren't and those who are amenable to religious or spiritual indoctrination as part and parcel of their physical aid are the worthiest of all when providing assistance.
Delaney also describes Woodson's testimony before a House Budget committee where he makes the case that in order to provide effective aid, we as a society have to be able to differentiate between various categories of the poor: the unlucky, such as the victims of plant closures, the ill-fated through no fault of their own, such as the disabled, and a final group made up of the calculatedly lazy who prefer welfare to work combined with poor decision makers who cause their own problems. The third group is apparently the one for which we must establish some sort of qualifier to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Which brings up the whole concept of "work tests" which used to be a popular chaff sifting construct of the Victorians until the day when finally a number of them arrived somewhat simultaneously to the conclusion voiced by Edward T. Devine, General Secretary of the New York Charity Organizing Society in 1907:
We may safely throw overboard, once and for all," he said, "the idea that the dependent poor are our moral inferiors, that there is any necessary connection between wealth and virtue, or between poverty and guilt."
So, the more enlightened Victorians and Edwardians came to the not astonishing aha! that there was an undeniable link between employment and wages and lack thereof among the non-disabled poor that could be determined as the root cause of poverty and not, as many preferred to think, moral turpitude.
It is sad that the lead conservatives, such as Ryan and his ilk, continue to confuse the simple humanity of filling stomachs, providing healthcare, sheltering the homeless and other such socially conscious actions as contributing to a moral disintegration of the community, when most moderns would argue exactly the opposite.
Anyway, this is a terrific article which discusses far more than the little bit touched on in this diary. Kudos to Delaney for writing such an interesting and comprehensive essay which really does a great job of documenting the genesis of the thought processes of the Right in regard to poverty without being vituperative.
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(Note:The second and third paragraphs from the bottom were inadvertently left off when I initially published and were added.)