Last night Graham Ward presented a lecture on "Poverty and Piety: On the Loss of Civic Virtue" which is one in a series of four lectures on religion and the welfare state promoted by the Centre for Religion and Political Culture, the Centre for Jewish Studies and the Manchester Reformed Synagogue. I will discuss the themes of Ward's presentation in relation to the questions it raised for both myself and the audience.

Ward presented the scandal of Jesus's saying "The poor are with you always" (Matt 26.11, Mark 14.7, and John 12.8) as a way of introducing the perennial nature of poverty and the difficulty that it poses to us today. He then explored the example of the various discussion of poverty in 19th century English culture. This entailed an excursion through Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 which highlighted just how bourgeois Engels' understanding of poverty was. Interestingly, thought the Christian socialism which became the foundation for the Labour Party in the UK arose contemporary to Engel's book, they did not fundamentally challenge some of the basic assumptions of Engels. Rather, they adopted a similar big-brotherly approach to educating the poor into their bourgeois ideal. Ward drew attention to the way the poverty itself represented social chaos which challenged the order of Engel's conception of society.

Ward's account of poverty in the 19th century opened up two points. Firstly, that the notion of poverty is socially constructed and rooted in the particular context of those writing about it. Secondly, therefore, who we deem to be poor changes over time. Today, we consider both the economically poor, as well as the time poor and the poor in spirit as Matthew says in his rendition of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.  Furthermore new kinds of technological poverty are being cited today by cultural geographers such as Manuel Castells. Poverty therefore could be considered, as a few of the questions from the audience seemed to suggest, in terms of a fundamental lack, the deprivation we face on a number of levels no matter our geo-political economic status.

This raises a serious question. In what ways is it appropriate to even compare the time poor business executive with the economically poor farmer in a developing nation?  Is this not a gross degradation of what we mean by poverty?  In other words, the poverty that is costing people their lives due to lack of health care and basic nutrition is something other than the kinds of poverties we discuss in our urban Disneylands.

They very existence of the urban transformation in cities like Manchester, Seattle, and any number of second cities around the world challenges us to ask about the degree to which poverty is being eradicated in the west. One questioner from the audience doubted that the poor are in fact with us always. Ward's response was gracious, but challenging. The reason he continued to discuss economic poverty in the west, as he cited from a recent visit to Vancouver, Canada, was that it does in factl exists. New shanty towns are springing up. However now, poverty is being filtered out of view. Poverty is hidden. The urban consumer tourist Disneyland is secured by hidden networks of surveillance, which belie hidden fascisms in our "liberal" societies.

What I would like to emphasize is that it is true that some aspects of poverty have been alleviated in many developed countries. But, and this is crucial, current practices are in fact creating new forms of poverty. These new forms are all the more sinister than the old insofar as the poor do not remain "with us," but are being filtered out of view. You may walk through a wealthy downtown area like Vancouver and never see the poor. So too, after Seattle reinvented itself in the nineties as a consumer Disneyland, filtering the poor out of the downtown area, a number of tent cities sprung up around the area. Last I checked in the reports a few years ago in the Seattle Times, they were up to five tent cities and new laws were having to be written to dictate where these shanty towns could locate themselves.

And this brings me to Ward's own positive suggestion of a return to paternality as a civic virtue.

Here we must be careful to note the provocative juxtaposition Ward made between the big-brotherliness of the Christian socialists and the big-brotherliness of our contemporary society.In the former, the Christian socialists got involved in eradicating the signs of poverty in pro-active ways. In the latter, the Labour Party's nanny state mentality props up more surveillance cameras per capita than any other nation in the world. This big-brotherliness is in fact creating new forms of poverty in increasingly disengaged ways.

The sinister side of big-brotherliness raises a question in my mind concerning Ward's call to return to paternality and big-brotherliness as a civic virtue. Yes, churches and para-church organizations continue to serve the poor. In Seattle it is the churches which have allowed many of the tent cities to camp on their parking lots. But Ward is suggesting that this form of paternality should become a more broadly civic virtue again. How can the wealthy return to paternal care for the poor without falling into the more sinister forms of big-brotherliness we see in our society today? This question was addressed in Ward's presentation, but I had hoped he would reiterate and develop his ideas further in the question and answer time.

Ward's contention was that the Christan socialists lost a sense of scepticism concerning human potential and societal order which was inherent to the Christian tradition itself. They began to believe that a realized eschatology was possible and that the poor could be completely eradicated. This lack of scepticism however, eroded the prophetic critique of power itself and has thus opened the door to less caring, more heartless forms of big-brotherliness today which do not in fact challenge the wealthy to adopt habits of pious poverty, that is, giving of their time and money to the poor in need around them. Rather it seems that the rich simply pay the government to rid their streets of poverty by any means available.

This problem, concerning how a paternality could ever be genuinely good for civic society was confronted by the Marxists in the room who remained sceptical themselves of any attempt to address poverty that was not inherently anti-capitalist. Marxism was cited as a more totalistic response to the hierarchical oppressions which are felt in our society between the rich and poor. Without removing the hierarchy, no solution to poverty could ever be reached. Graham's response was firstly that Marxism has not cornered the market on responses to idolatry and fetishism. Far from it, religious traditions are often experts at at this form of culture critique. But in response to the need for a totalistic response to poverty, to the need to realize an eschatology, Ward responded that he was far too Augustinian to believe in such a thing. The challeng was how we might resist the potential ways in which hopeful expectancy for the grace which might bring the eschaton begin to foster a kind of complacency whereby the rich conceptualize their relation to the poor as God ordained. Jesus's claim that the poor will always be with you is not to be taken as an excuse for oppression.

And it is at this point that I wanted to expound a little further and tease out something the moderator mentioned concerning the Jewish Kibbutz experiments. He noted that when all the social hierarchies are removed and people are allowed to commune as it were, human nature inevitably fills in the power vacuum. Powerful personalities take over and the rest fall in line under their oppression. This is precisely what we saw in the former Soviet Union. I would add that it is also precisely what we see in any community which pretends that they can commune without leadership structures which challenge the oppression of "might makes right" politics. This is a lesson for many of the more idealist emerging churches which pretend to have no leadership structures or rules that govern their practice and beliefs. It is all too easy for them, like the Kibbutz movement, to end up creating worse forms of oppression. As in communist countries you inevitably get new forms of idolatry, chiefly the cult of particular personalities.

The point being made here was that communism does not in fact offer a credible response to hierarchy. In fact, as history has shown, it reinstantiates the powerful over the poor in even more radical if not sinister ways.

What I wish Graham would have had the time to discuss in more detail was the particular ways Christianity responds to the oppression of the poor through good servant forms of leadership. The solution to hierarchy has always been to focus on transforming leadership into servanthood. I think this is probably the heart of what he meant by paternalism, but I think needs to be emphasized.

Too often, people try to present a better vision of humanity without realizing that to instantiate that vision without the consent of others is fascism. This was, to some extent, Engels' and the Christian socialists of the 19th century's crime. They never stopped to ask what the poor themselves would like. They never stopped to wonder if they were in some sense oppressing the poor with their programs. This isn't to say that no good came of their programs or that people did not want them, but rather, that once they lost their sense of self-criticism, once they stopped being open to the possibility that they could be wrong in what they were doing,  they abandoned what was most central to Christian faith and teaching concerning social justice.

Jesus healed the sick and he fed the poor. But he did not heal those who did not ask for it. He does not feed those who weren't genuinely hungry. This is the absurdity of the ex-leper in the Monty Python film, The Life of Bryan. It is a rather comical scene and warrants a citation to contrast the difficulty of the topic being discussed here.

Ex-Leper: All right, sir. My final offer: half a shekel for an old ex-leper.

Brian: Did you say... 'ex-leper'?

Ex-Leper: That's right, sir. Sixteen years behind the bell, and proud of it, sir.

Brian: Well, what happened?

Ex-Leper: I was cured, sir.

Brian: Cured?

Ex-Leper: Yes, sir, a bloody miracle, sir. God bless you.

Brian: Who cured you?

Ex-Leper: Jesus did, sir. I was hopping along, minding my own business. All of a sudden, up he comes. Cures me. One minute I'm a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood's gone. Not so much as a by your leave. 'You're cured mate.' Bloody do-gooder.

The ex-leper is begging in the streets complaining that Jesus took away his livelihood. He is equated to being a do-gooder which implies that in fact, his version of good wasn't necessarily good at all. It resonates with us today because this kind of "do-gooder" behavior is all too common amongst the Christian socialists Ward mentioned and many church groups today that promote a social agenda regardless of what the people that agenda applies to think or want.

What I want to emphasize here is that such "do-gooder" behavior is antithetical to the Jesus's own behavior. Jesus only responds to those who ask for his help and healing. And this brings us to a central aspect of his leadership and what the meaning of service is. When Jesus washes his disciples feet before he dies on the cross he is trying to teach them that there is no way for them to be the leaders he has clearly called and chosen them to be, if they will not adopt a fundamentally humble attitude. Service here is about setting yourself, your abilities and your assets under others. Service is the heart of what we mean when we say that elected officials are public servants. They are expected to act as representatives of what the people who elected them want. This is why it is all the more appalling when elected officials don't act in this way. But even more appalling when Christians don't. In both cases however, I would suggest that the possibility of a return to paternality as a civic virtue utterly depends on our ability to practice genuine humility in our service to others. Such humility is rare and difficult to cultivate. This is most likely why the Marxists are so skeptical of any critique of poverty that does not not address capitalist hierarchies. I would suggest however, that maybe the place to start on civic virtues is not paternality, but humility. 

It seems to me that any paternality that does not take humility seriously will inevitably degenerate again and again into the kind of heartless big-brotherliness that has become commonplace today.

Update on Monday, October 29, 2007 at 12:57PM by Timothy Stanley

I finally got a chance to see The Lives of Others, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on DVD last night. It was this year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film. I mention it because it portrays the heartbreaking choices people had to make under communist rule in East Germany before the iron curtain came down. The story revolves around a Stassi secret poiice operation which investigated a playwright and his girlfriend, a local actress. Through the surveillance the Stassi officer listening in begins to question the morality of the government he has sworn to protect. For instance, he finds that one of the motivations for the surveillance operation is to try and have the playwright jailed so that a government official can have his way with his girlfriend. The film is particularly poignant to the discussion concerning the solution to corrupt leadership and hierarchy above because it showed time and again how the ambitions of the men in power led to the exploitation of the people they were supposed to be equals with. The choice of many was suicide.