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Work and charity
Work and charity
Few things annoy me more than the frequent contention that the Welfare State, by removing the immediate threat of starvation or similarly nasty deaths from the less rich, makes them “dependent” on the State and removes their incentive to work. This sort of complaint, heard by some inconceivable fatality always from better-off individuals, assumes that work is so alien to human nature that it must be forced on it under the penalty of death. The obvious consequence is that, once deprived of this Persian lash, people will not do any more work, and society will drown under the ever-increasing burden of lazy, spendthrift welfare recipients. The prosperous Catones (among whom, I am sorry to say, one can perceive the giant shade of C.S.Lewis) have been predicting this apocalypse at various times for the last century, forever perceiving its onslaught in whatever social problems might be tormenting society (or newspaper front pages) at any time. It has not yet taken place. This does not discourage them.
In my view, this scare story shows no understanding of human nature. It assumes that a state of festering idleness is something an ordinary human being would find desirable. It assumes that the desire to be idle is part of human nature, to the extent that it becomes inevitable if anyone receives an unearned income, however small.
In my view, that is nonsense. To the contrary: the natural state of an idle person is to get up and find him or herself something to do. Beyond the ordinary and necessary work imposed by home and hearth – cooking, dishwashing, house-cleaning and so on – a person with time on their hands will inevitably start thinking of other things to do – build or repair furniture, start a garden, offer to do something for a friend or neighbour or relative. Look to your own selves: you know that this is the case. The mind instinctively will turn to things to do; and the work of the hands only actualizes the work of the mind.
This is human nature at work. It takes the most extraordinary shapes. A hopelessly unemployed man starts a curious hobby of carving Biblical sentences into walking sticks. Some people appreciate his work and start buying them from him. One day a famous man visiting an even more famous one (who is rather elderly) needs an original and suitable gift “for the man who has everything”, and fastens upon a carved walking stick. The recipient is said to be delighted. Newspapers hear of it, and suddenly the formerly hopelessly unemployed person has a waiting list a mile long for his carved canes, and the status of folk-artist to boot. This actually happened – you don’t think something so curious could have been invented? – and some of you may remember reading the story in the papers.
This is human nature at work; human nature seeking to express itself in work, to find things to do, even if circumstances are adverse. That is because it is human nature to do so. Human beings are either asleep, or else busy; they do not like idleness, and hate boredom worse than poison.
That is not to say that human nature cannot be corrupted. To the contrary, we Christians are taught that it is so from birth, and that only supernatural intervention can rescue it from the inevitability of corruption. The mistake of the doomsayers’ argument is to take corruption as the standard – to mistake the deformity for the form. They assume that every individual – except, by some inconceivable mercy, themselves – is so alien to the value and decency of work, that only force from outside can lead them to do what they have to do even to go on living. The flaws in this reasoning are many, but none more serious than the simple question: if all human beings are idle and parasitical by nature, who could be found to decide that work was good, let alone force others to work for their own good?
No: human nature tends to work as it tends to breathe, and parasitic dependency must be regarded as a deformity, a deviation. There can be no doubt that it is bad, both in itself and for society at large, and the use of force – direct or disguised – to suppress it, is not in itself a bad idea. What is a bad idea is to start from the principle that everyone will do it unless they are forced to do otherwise; which is clearly about as sensible as to assign a policeman to watch every man, woman, and child, on the assumption that, if they are not watched all the time, they will all start stealing each other’s wallets. If that were the case, after all, where would you find the policemen?
What is more, if its understanding of individual human nature is bad, its understanding of community is nothing short of delirious. The whole diatribe is underlain by the idea that being “dependent on the State” is somehow bad. To which I answer with St.Paul’s question: what have you got that you were not given? You are dependent on your parents not just for your existence but for your being, your genetic material, your appearance and gifts; and your parents, like everyone else, are dependent on others. You and your parents are dependent on the community for everything; you may brag about being independent and self-made all you want, but try using your independence to deal with your own sewage or do your own policing. And above and beyond all these practicalities, all human beings are dependent on their communities, that is on the State, for the laws that allow and defend your work and life, that marry you and legitimize your children, that validate and protect your property. As Socrates said long ago, the laws are as much your parents as your own father and mother, and therefore just as much to be respected, obeyed, and never despised.
That charity, whether public or private, does afford a place for temptation, nobody can deny; it does not however seem very sane or sensible to me to make it such an immense problem that one ought to get in its way merely to eliminate one opportunity for temptation. Granted that you can eliminate it, will that improve mankind? To the contrary: to try and prevent the rise of “idleness” among the poor will only give scope, as anyone who has seen it at work can certify, to the most debased kind of bureaucratic snooping and bullying, exerted without control because it will be largely at the expense of those who can’t defend themselves, and with a positive glow of self-satisfaction because you can justify any act of bullying, chicanery and oppression by the duty to keep the lower classes from idleness. If you want a state of Doloreses Umbridge – and I can assure you from experience that you are already very far on the way to it – do, please, indulge your itch to save the poor from their idle ways.
I am not denying that such corrupt behaviour exists, nor, indeed, that some measures ought to be taken to discourage it. To the contrary, the superficial credibility of the pub-philosopher theory of labour rests on the fact that the form of human behaviour it describes does certainly exist, and which has the frightening visibility of all wrong things – things that stand out, as the Italian expression has it, like a fist in your eye. It is not only possible but easy for a person in receipt of money s/he has not earned by the sweat of his/her brow to lose the habit of mental and manual work. But unless a stronger destructive power than mere idleness seizes his/her spirit, this will only be temporary. The instinct to form things in the mind for the hands to do – be they as apparently idle and useless as carving walking sticks – is too profoundly set in human nature to be silenced for ever. One day the idle person starts naturally doing something with him or herself, and, with any luck, may find a path to employ his/her energies usefully. The Devil may indeed find work for idle hands, but better spirits are also capable to do so.
But what is really revolting about such cheap moralizing is that it as often as not comes from people – politicians, for instance, or tabloid journalists – who are doing less constructive work in their lives than any of the unemployed. It is not only the poor who live on unearned income, and it is hardly only the poor who are in danger of falling into idle, spendthrift and wasteful ways. And when the poor fall into idle ways, they waste infinitely less than the average trustafarian. The miserable pittances which, in welfare-state countries, stand between the unemployed/homeless and starvation would not serve an idle rich person for three minutes of expensive lounging about.
Of course, these people are idle because others in the past have worked to build their inheritance. And whether or not the heirs waste it, it would be insane and criminal to condemn the work of those among their fathers and forefathers who had worked so that their children and descendants might have an easier life. (That is not to condemn inheritance tax as such; but inheritance tax should not be pitched so low as to prevent the heir of a hard-working parent from getting the nest egg that represents a lifetime’s good intentions. It is one thing to prevent a man from getting an unearned mountain of money and power that he has done no more to deserve than the Man in the Moon, and another to prevent the legitimate concern of one ordinary, hard-working generation for the next.) But it is revealing that nobody ever seems willing to cast the idle rich as a social problem, or to look for ways to force them to contribute more to the community. Certainly nobody is ever threatened with the sequestration of his trust fund until he has done 1800 hours of community service, or sat his way through a mockery of a course on getting employment. Now why is that? Surely, the waste of a rich man is more wasteful than the waste of a hundred poor? Could it be that nobody wants to take the risk of tackling this particular evil, because the average rich man is very well prepared (see Nicholas Mosley) to defend his waste and his evil pleasures with expensive lawyers and every kind of money-procured harassment? Evidently there is no percentage for Dolores Umbridge in going after the idle rich rather than the idle poor.
Another important point is that money is neutral. Its recipient might do anything with it, good or bad, but it is not receiving money as such that causes the evil. It is therefore profoundly illogical to tie the reception of charity, as such, with idleness, or to act in such a way as to show that you assume every person in receipt of charity to be intending to abuse it. It would make far more sense to pay attention to bad behaviour as such. Addiction causes welfare dependency at least as often as it is caused by it. How many comfortably employed and settled persons are there who, suddenly, seemed to start driving their lives straight towards wreck? It is often these whom you see hanging around social security offices, the evidence of their state in their breath, their clothes, their hair. The neo-Darwinist pub philosophers imagine that it is State charity that has reduced them to such lack of self-respect; because the neo-Darwinist pub philosophers have never troubled to find out who they really are and where they really come from. If they did, they would find that to most of these people, State charity is not the first step, but the last barrier, on the road to self-destruction
The tissue of errors in pub-philosopher Social Darwinist arguments arises from profound ignorance of history. They talk as though the welfare state were something new; and they talk as though the social darwinist “let’em starve” strategy had never been tried before – or, if tried, had not been found wanting. Both assumptions – rarely raised to the elaboracy of arguments – are utterly false. The “Let’em starve” strategy was unleashed upon Britain, and even more upon Ireland, by bookish and arrogant Whigs fed upon economic theory (emphasis on “theory”), throughout the early and middle nineteenth century. Its most thorough application – a mighty, public, determined airing – took place in Ireland in 1845, when the Whig leadership of State and Anglican Church (the behaviour of the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin was beyond belief) decided that the great potato blight was the proper occasion to sift out the shiftless and useless part of the Irish population and force a Darwinian struggle for life (the term did not yet exist, but the concept was central to Whig laissez-faire economics) to let the most competent elements reach the top. The Irish peasantry, having displeased its London rulers for centuries by refusing to be mass-murdered (the solution proposed by Edmund Spenser to Queen Elizabeth) or enslaved (the improved solution of Stuart and Commonweath times – it is not widely known that the first slaves imported to England’s new American colonies were not African, but Irish) out of existence, had nevertheless been reduced by centuries of hostile legislation, persecution and subversion into a poorly educated rural lumpenproletariat with almost no middle or leading class except for a few priests. A bookish interpretation of Whig theories made it obvious that they were doomed to be eclipsed by the forces of History and Economy, and when the potato crop failed in 1845, it seemed that Malthus’ natural starvation had finally caught up with them. Britain, the richest country on Earth at the time, decided to follow their dogma and let the wholesome play of economic forces carry out the extinction of the unfit Irish.
The results of this experiment were failure in the central issue and the most extraordinary complications on the side. Starting from the central issue: there was no wholesome Darwinian struggle for life in which only the fittest survived. The Irish did not all die at once. The slaughter was indeed colossal. Two million Irish out of eight million died in the most terrible circumstances over three horrible years. But the Irish vermin, slated for extermination, did not behave as their kindly masters had expected, and lie down to die in order to leave their green and pleasant land free for their betters (once the skeletons had been cleared, that is). They had the insolence to struggle to survive, as if economic theory had been invented for them and not for the comfort of their masters. They went where the food was, boarding ships in their millions to America, Britain, Australia, Argentina. Soon, these social dregs were an established presence in the land. They survived, at least for a while; and for as long as they survived, people – landlords, shopkeepers, market traders, pawnbrokers – earned a living from catering to their needs. This is the great Victorian economic discovery: not Social Darwinism, but its opposite – that it is possible to make money even from those who have next to none, so long as there are very many of them.
Most of them, in spite of the frightful death rate, did not die before they had bred. The death rate, however, was a success in this: that it left many of their children motherless and fatherless before anyone had time to provide for them. How they then fared, Dickens told us. They grew up in a world where dishonesty and begging were normal; boys and girls, when still young and beautiful, populated the brothels; and they emerged from such childhoods, illiterate and dangerous, to survive – if they did – on the fringe of the lowest dregs of the business world, through long intervals in jail which were accounted parts of ordinary life, and reproduce themselves in turn, till the horrors of Victorian city life became an object of awful fascination to the world at large.
But the world could not just look on, whether in fascination or in any other attitude. The pathology could not be contained. There is a dark side to the great motto, Homo sum, nihil humanum mihi alienum est, I am a man, nothing human is alien to me. Not only the good, but the bad of other human beings cannot be alien to you. And once the four horsemen of the Social Darwinist apocalypse had been unleashed over Britain and Ireland, the unleashers discovered that crime, and even more disease, knew no barriers. Allow a squalid, ignorant, desperate population to breed in the interstices of your world, and you will find that the things that breed among them will batten on you too. Disease is contagious, and does not take social status into account. And if disease ignores rank, crime and immorality have a positive attraction for the rich and settled; even where they do not contaminate their daily lives, they establish power and complicity in a thousand thousand ways. The ordinary criminality that festered among the desperate of the Victorian cities had a poisonous influence on the whole of social intercourse. Bourgeois landlords collected the rents of starving accumulations of almost-families in slum tenements, next door to boy brothels popular among the likes of Oscar Wilde. Corrupt businessmen and traffickers in human flesh placed their hard-earned income in respectable bank accounts alongside the fortunes of Dukes and Bishops, and dealt with them. Prostitution on a massive scale helped corrupt attitudes towards women, boys, and sexuality. Tired members of the middle and upper classes found absinthe and opium easy to come by in twisted corners of slum alleys, and lay down to indulge their new-found addictions next to the scum of the earth.
This, then, was the most immediately visible result of the let-them-starve policy: the rise of monstrous tenements populated with millions of the rejects of society, surviving not on the individual and collective self-discipline that Darwinists fondly imagined would serve to survive and triumph, but on any kind of desperate, dishonest, dangerous shift. But that was only the beginning. Those boats did not just carry starving men and lice; they also carried ideas and a religion. Far from annihilating “shiftless” Irish culture and “obscurantist” Irish Catholicism, they spread them to the British mainland, to the United States, to the British Empire and all over the world.
Results were not slow to come in. By 1850, the Pope felt strong enough to establish a regular hierarchy of Bishops in England and Scotland. They were, by then, inevitable: the demand was beyond denying. British Catholicism had been transformed at a stroke from the cloistered concern of a few country squires, some remarkable intellectuals, and the Duke of Norfolk, to a mass movement swarming across the slums and tenements of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, and London itself – London, where until then the very wearing of Catholic vestments exposed you to insults and mud-pelting. Suddenly the energies of outstanding men such as Manning and Newman were being daily dedicated to the care of hungry, filthy, illiterate, lice-ridden Irishmen. And it is perhaps less than coincidental that the clash that altered the British consciousness about Catholicism for ever – the writing of Newman’s Apologia – took place after the impact of Irish immigration. Newman was no longer writing only as a brilliant intellectual convinced by the claims of Rome, but as a man whose whole life had been changed in every way, a refined Oxford intellectual whose daily work was now to listen to the confessions and caring for the souls of illiterate Irish washerwomen and labourers in Birmingham. The experience helped him to write one of his masterpieces, the Essay on Belief. Almost within living memory of the Gordon Riots, Catholic hierarchies were re-established in England and Scotland, as they already had been established in the white colonies of the British Empire.
Stunning though the result of Irish immigration into Britain and the British Empire had been, it was nothing compared to what it did to the United States of America. Until 1845, the USA had been, with the troublesome exception of black slaves, an ethnically and culturally cohesive country. Had it not been for their common English language and culture and their common vaguely Protestant heritage, it would have been impossible for the Thirteen Colonies to form a nation even after they had cleared the English from their shores; and subsequent events had done little to change that. Immigration was a comparatively minor phenomenon, easily absorbed, and at any rate mostly from culturally compatible countries such as Britain and Germany.
The Irish swarm changed all that. In a few years, as the by-product of the potato catastrophe, the great cities of the East had both swelled enormously and experienced tremendous cultural change. Elements were poured into American life that were unknown before and were to take roots and become native.
Foremost among them was the party machine and the city boss. Destitute and desperate as they were, the Irish had one weapon in America that they had always been denied in Britain: the vote. And they used it. Out of nowhere, a whole culture of politics as mutual assistance and mutual self-defence, with overtones of violence, corruption, and secrecy, blossomed in New York City and across the wildly growing urban centres of North America. Tammamy Hall became the name itself of corruption; but the Irish did not care. Used from the cradle to the contempt of their “betters”, they recognized in the preaching of newspaper writers and the cartoons of Thomas Nast (who hated Catholics on principle – or what he called principle) the old Orange arrogance and violence with which life in the Old Country had made them all too familiar. Only here they could fight back, and they did. The ever-replenished pool of poor Irishmen provided labour for the violently growing American industries. Their numbers gave them political power: no political leadership can exclude the representatives of the leading and most economically significant cities. They built schools, churches, and universities; colonized politics, city administration, and, famously, the police; provided for their children to rise socially; and became a power in the land. And Britain paid for it dearly. Apart from continuous support for Fenians and IRA, even the moderate part of the Irish interest hated England. In this, if in nothing else, they agreed with the native feeling, reinforcing the instinct against English monarchy and class prejudice inherited from those who went to war in 1776. As a result, the American prejudice against the British Empire was a driving force until at least the Eisenhower presidency – and the dissolution of the Empire itself.
But the Irish came not only as themselves, but as the first wave of a new kind of immigration – something that America had neither experienced nor expected before. Instead of small numbers of mostly decently educated North Europeans, mostly Protestant, easily absorbed in the culture and religion of English-speaking America, emigration would from then on consist of huge, dirty, hungry, desperate waves of increasingly alien masses, eager for work but not always easily assimilated: Italians, Poles, Jews, East Europeans, Syrians, Russians, Hispanics, Japanese, Chinese. The small Catholic community and the minuscule Jewish presence of the years before 1845 changed beyond recognition both in size and in make-up, and America received, very much against its will, a cosmopolitan character and widespread interests that had certainly never been envisaged by its founders. One wonders whether the very notion of mass transfer of entire poor and aspiring populations of any ethnic and cultural kind to the United States would even have arisen across Europe, had not the great wave of Irish despair and hope first struck New York City (the one American city that Europeans knew about, and from which their journalists wrote). It must have given the shipping industry – without which nothing could have been done – the idea that there was plenty of money to be made even from penniless people, if carried in bulk. Once again we get back to the great Victorian economic discovery: it is possible to make money even from those who have next to none, if there are a lot of them.
In Ireland itself, the blight did eventually empty out the country – not only by the first wave of flight, but by establishing a tradition of emigration that lasted for over a hundred years and slowly diminished the numbers of a population known for its fertility. Irish immigration to Britain, America and the Empire did not slake until recently, and for generations the Irishman and his brogue remained a stock character in any description of British, American or Australian society. Yet even in Ireland the heartless calculations of the Whigs and their political economists failed completely. The large swathes of the country emptied by emigration were not filled by “energetic and sober” Protestants, but by cattle owned by Catholics and eagerly purchased by the urban markets of England and Scotland. For the first time since the destruction of the Irish aristocracy, a social stratum of rich, powerful and assertive Catholics, embittered by memories of starvation and tales of oppression, grew in Ireland. The inevitable – though, in its actual development, rather fortuitous – result was the final independence of Catholic Ireland.
For this the benevolent Whigs of 1845 had delivered a whole country under their charge to slow and hideous annihilation. One is almost tempted to quote Talleyrand; but stupid though their policy was – immensely, colossally, fathomlessly stupid – it was even more criminal than it was stupid. It was the second most shameful crime of the nineteenth century (the worst was the rule of Leopold II over Congo), and it strikes me as comparable at every important point with more modern crimes. Those who find the twentieth century unusual in the savagery and deliberation of its criminality ought to compare, for instance, the British government’s reaction to the Irish potato blight to the work of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It may surprise some, but they can be compared both easily and closely. Both are reckoned to have killed a couple of million people in a couple of years in a country of some eight million. Both are the results of deliberate government policy rather than of a natural disaster. (The potato blight was only the occasion; two million Irish died of hunger while being citizens of the richest country on Earth at the height of its power. If this does not prove government intent, nothing proves it.) Both result from the bookish application of an economic theory – classical liberalism or Marxism. Both were intended to bring about the complete social and cultural renewal of the country that was subjected to the experiment. And both failed.
So much for the practicalities of the let-them-starve policy, even when applied with committed rigour by a great power – one of the world’s greatest. Far from cleansing what they regarded as the Empire’s plague-spot, Ireland, for its “sober, hard-working” Orange citizens, it changed its social structure and that of its greatest daughter country for ever, and for what the Whigs would have regarded as very much the worse. Far from strengthening Irish Protestants and assimilating Ireland to Britain, it led the greatest empire the world has ever seen to its first major defeat in 140 years, losing Ireland for ever after 700 years, and reducing the Irish Protestants to six small, provincial counties, unloved in Britain and ignored elsewhere. Far from starving Catholicism to death in the one distant province where it had survived the onslaught of British power, they made it a power in the mother country and across the Empire. They affected the whole world, and affected it in every possible way that its Whig protagonists would not have wanted: resurrected a Catholic Church in Britain (which drove the Whigs crazy with anger for a time), strengthened it across the Empire, made it primary in the great rising American power, and contributed to the enduring of that power’s hostility to Britain.
Altogether, the world has had a lot, one way and another, from one small country slated for starvation by a stronger neighbour; and the whole process began exactly with the decision to let it starve. Even on a purely practical level, then, the let-them-starve policy does not work. You are lucky if it does not change your whole world against you, as it did with Ireland. Trust your better instincts; give generously to charity; support decent public policies, and if you ever hear anyone talking about drains on the economy and about idleness, answer back.
Few things annoy me more than the frequent contention that the Welfare State, by removing the immediate threat of starvation or similarly nasty deaths from the less rich, makes them “dependent” on the State and removes their incentive to work. This sort of complaint, heard by some inconceivable fatality always from better-off individuals, assumes that work is so alien to human nature that it must be forced on it under the penalty of death. The obvious consequence is that, once deprived of this Persian lash, people will not do any more work, and society will drown under the ever-increasing burden of lazy, spendthrift welfare recipients. The prosperous Catones (among whom, I am sorry to say, one can perceive the giant shade of C.S.Lewis) have been predicting this apocalypse at various times for the last century, forever perceiving its onslaught in whatever social problems might be tormenting society (or newspaper front pages) at any time. It has not yet taken place. This does not discourage them.
In my view, this scare story shows no understanding of human nature. It assumes that a state of festering idleness is something an ordinary human being would find desirable. It assumes that the desire to be idle is part of human nature, to the extent that it becomes inevitable if anyone receives an unearned income, however small.
In my view, that is nonsense. To the contrary: the natural state of an idle person is to get up and find him or herself something to do. Beyond the ordinary and necessary work imposed by home and hearth – cooking, dishwashing, house-cleaning and so on – a person with time on their hands will inevitably start thinking of other things to do – build or repair furniture, start a garden, offer to do something for a friend or neighbour or relative. Look to your own selves: you know that this is the case. The mind instinctively will turn to things to do; and the work of the hands only actualizes the work of the mind.
This is human nature at work. It takes the most extraordinary shapes. A hopelessly unemployed man starts a curious hobby of carving Biblical sentences into walking sticks. Some people appreciate his work and start buying them from him. One day a famous man visiting an even more famous one (who is rather elderly) needs an original and suitable gift “for the man who has everything”, and fastens upon a carved walking stick. The recipient is said to be delighted. Newspapers hear of it, and suddenly the formerly hopelessly unemployed person has a waiting list a mile long for his carved canes, and the status of folk-artist to boot. This actually happened – you don’t think something so curious could have been invented? – and some of you may remember reading the story in the papers.
This is human nature at work; human nature seeking to express itself in work, to find things to do, even if circumstances are adverse. That is because it is human nature to do so. Human beings are either asleep, or else busy; they do not like idleness, and hate boredom worse than poison.
That is not to say that human nature cannot be corrupted. To the contrary, we Christians are taught that it is so from birth, and that only supernatural intervention can rescue it from the inevitability of corruption. The mistake of the doomsayers’ argument is to take corruption as the standard – to mistake the deformity for the form. They assume that every individual – except, by some inconceivable mercy, themselves – is so alien to the value and decency of work, that only force from outside can lead them to do what they have to do even to go on living. The flaws in this reasoning are many, but none more serious than the simple question: if all human beings are idle and parasitical by nature, who could be found to decide that work was good, let alone force others to work for their own good?
No: human nature tends to work as it tends to breathe, and parasitic dependency must be regarded as a deformity, a deviation. There can be no doubt that it is bad, both in itself and for society at large, and the use of force – direct or disguised – to suppress it, is not in itself a bad idea. What is a bad idea is to start from the principle that everyone will do it unless they are forced to do otherwise; which is clearly about as sensible as to assign a policeman to watch every man, woman, and child, on the assumption that, if they are not watched all the time, they will all start stealing each other’s wallets. If that were the case, after all, where would you find the policemen?
What is more, if its understanding of individual human nature is bad, its understanding of community is nothing short of delirious. The whole diatribe is underlain by the idea that being “dependent on the State” is somehow bad. To which I answer with St.Paul’s question: what have you got that you were not given? You are dependent on your parents not just for your existence but for your being, your genetic material, your appearance and gifts; and your parents, like everyone else, are dependent on others. You and your parents are dependent on the community for everything; you may brag about being independent and self-made all you want, but try using your independence to deal with your own sewage or do your own policing. And above and beyond all these practicalities, all human beings are dependent on their communities, that is on the State, for the laws that allow and defend your work and life, that marry you and legitimize your children, that validate and protect your property. As Socrates said long ago, the laws are as much your parents as your own father and mother, and therefore just as much to be respected, obeyed, and never despised.
That charity, whether public or private, does afford a place for temptation, nobody can deny; it does not however seem very sane or sensible to me to make it such an immense problem that one ought to get in its way merely to eliminate one opportunity for temptation. Granted that you can eliminate it, will that improve mankind? To the contrary: to try and prevent the rise of “idleness” among the poor will only give scope, as anyone who has seen it at work can certify, to the most debased kind of bureaucratic snooping and bullying, exerted without control because it will be largely at the expense of those who can’t defend themselves, and with a positive glow of self-satisfaction because you can justify any act of bullying, chicanery and oppression by the duty to keep the lower classes from idleness. If you want a state of Doloreses Umbridge – and I can assure you from experience that you are already very far on the way to it – do, please, indulge your itch to save the poor from their idle ways.
I am not denying that such corrupt behaviour exists, nor, indeed, that some measures ought to be taken to discourage it. To the contrary, the superficial credibility of the pub-philosopher theory of labour rests on the fact that the form of human behaviour it describes does certainly exist, and which has the frightening visibility of all wrong things – things that stand out, as the Italian expression has it, like a fist in your eye. It is not only possible but easy for a person in receipt of money s/he has not earned by the sweat of his/her brow to lose the habit of mental and manual work. But unless a stronger destructive power than mere idleness seizes his/her spirit, this will only be temporary. The instinct to form things in the mind for the hands to do – be they as apparently idle and useless as carving walking sticks – is too profoundly set in human nature to be silenced for ever. One day the idle person starts naturally doing something with him or herself, and, with any luck, may find a path to employ his/her energies usefully. The Devil may indeed find work for idle hands, but better spirits are also capable to do so.
But what is really revolting about such cheap moralizing is that it as often as not comes from people – politicians, for instance, or tabloid journalists – who are doing less constructive work in their lives than any of the unemployed. It is not only the poor who live on unearned income, and it is hardly only the poor who are in danger of falling into idle, spendthrift and wasteful ways. And when the poor fall into idle ways, they waste infinitely less than the average trustafarian. The miserable pittances which, in welfare-state countries, stand between the unemployed/homeless and starvation would not serve an idle rich person for three minutes of expensive lounging about.
Of course, these people are idle because others in the past have worked to build their inheritance. And whether or not the heirs waste it, it would be insane and criminal to condemn the work of those among their fathers and forefathers who had worked so that their children and descendants might have an easier life. (That is not to condemn inheritance tax as such; but inheritance tax should not be pitched so low as to prevent the heir of a hard-working parent from getting the nest egg that represents a lifetime’s good intentions. It is one thing to prevent a man from getting an unearned mountain of money and power that he has done no more to deserve than the Man in the Moon, and another to prevent the legitimate concern of one ordinary, hard-working generation for the next.) But it is revealing that nobody ever seems willing to cast the idle rich as a social problem, or to look for ways to force them to contribute more to the community. Certainly nobody is ever threatened with the sequestration of his trust fund until he has done 1800 hours of community service, or sat his way through a mockery of a course on getting employment. Now why is that? Surely, the waste of a rich man is more wasteful than the waste of a hundred poor? Could it be that nobody wants to take the risk of tackling this particular evil, because the average rich man is very well prepared (see Nicholas Mosley) to defend his waste and his evil pleasures with expensive lawyers and every kind of money-procured harassment? Evidently there is no percentage for Dolores Umbridge in going after the idle rich rather than the idle poor.
Another important point is that money is neutral. Its recipient might do anything with it, good or bad, but it is not receiving money as such that causes the evil. It is therefore profoundly illogical to tie the reception of charity, as such, with idleness, or to act in such a way as to show that you assume every person in receipt of charity to be intending to abuse it. It would make far more sense to pay attention to bad behaviour as such. Addiction causes welfare dependency at least as often as it is caused by it. How many comfortably employed and settled persons are there who, suddenly, seemed to start driving their lives straight towards wreck? It is often these whom you see hanging around social security offices, the evidence of their state in their breath, their clothes, their hair. The neo-Darwinist pub philosophers imagine that it is State charity that has reduced them to such lack of self-respect; because the neo-Darwinist pub philosophers have never troubled to find out who they really are and where they really come from. If they did, they would find that to most of these people, State charity is not the first step, but the last barrier, on the road to self-destruction
The tissue of errors in pub-philosopher Social Darwinist arguments arises from profound ignorance of history. They talk as though the welfare state were something new; and they talk as though the social darwinist “let’em starve” strategy had never been tried before – or, if tried, had not been found wanting. Both assumptions – rarely raised to the elaboracy of arguments – are utterly false. The “Let’em starve” strategy was unleashed upon Britain, and even more upon Ireland, by bookish and arrogant Whigs fed upon economic theory (emphasis on “theory”), throughout the early and middle nineteenth century. Its most thorough application – a mighty, public, determined airing – took place in Ireland in 1845, when the Whig leadership of State and Anglican Church (the behaviour of the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin was beyond belief) decided that the great potato blight was the proper occasion to sift out the shiftless and useless part of the Irish population and force a Darwinian struggle for life (the term did not yet exist, but the concept was central to Whig laissez-faire economics) to let the most competent elements reach the top. The Irish peasantry, having displeased its London rulers for centuries by refusing to be mass-murdered (the solution proposed by Edmund Spenser to Queen Elizabeth) or enslaved (the improved solution of Stuart and Commonweath times – it is not widely known that the first slaves imported to England’s new American colonies were not African, but Irish) out of existence, had nevertheless been reduced by centuries of hostile legislation, persecution and subversion into a poorly educated rural lumpenproletariat with almost no middle or leading class except for a few priests. A bookish interpretation of Whig theories made it obvious that they were doomed to be eclipsed by the forces of History and Economy, and when the potato crop failed in 1845, it seemed that Malthus’ natural starvation had finally caught up with them. Britain, the richest country on Earth at the time, decided to follow their dogma and let the wholesome play of economic forces carry out the extinction of the unfit Irish.
The results of this experiment were failure in the central issue and the most extraordinary complications on the side. Starting from the central issue: there was no wholesome Darwinian struggle for life in which only the fittest survived. The Irish did not all die at once. The slaughter was indeed colossal. Two million Irish out of eight million died in the most terrible circumstances over three horrible years. But the Irish vermin, slated for extermination, did not behave as their kindly masters had expected, and lie down to die in order to leave their green and pleasant land free for their betters (once the skeletons had been cleared, that is). They had the insolence to struggle to survive, as if economic theory had been invented for them and not for the comfort of their masters. They went where the food was, boarding ships in their millions to America, Britain, Australia, Argentina. Soon, these social dregs were an established presence in the land. They survived, at least for a while; and for as long as they survived, people – landlords, shopkeepers, market traders, pawnbrokers – earned a living from catering to their needs. This is the great Victorian economic discovery: not Social Darwinism, but its opposite – that it is possible to make money even from those who have next to none, so long as there are very many of them.
Most of them, in spite of the frightful death rate, did not die before they had bred. The death rate, however, was a success in this: that it left many of their children motherless and fatherless before anyone had time to provide for them. How they then fared, Dickens told us. They grew up in a world where dishonesty and begging were normal; boys and girls, when still young and beautiful, populated the brothels; and they emerged from such childhoods, illiterate and dangerous, to survive – if they did – on the fringe of the lowest dregs of the business world, through long intervals in jail which were accounted parts of ordinary life, and reproduce themselves in turn, till the horrors of Victorian city life became an object of awful fascination to the world at large.
But the world could not just look on, whether in fascination or in any other attitude. The pathology could not be contained. There is a dark side to the great motto, Homo sum, nihil humanum mihi alienum est, I am a man, nothing human is alien to me. Not only the good, but the bad of other human beings cannot be alien to you. And once the four horsemen of the Social Darwinist apocalypse had been unleashed over Britain and Ireland, the unleashers discovered that crime, and even more disease, knew no barriers. Allow a squalid, ignorant, desperate population to breed in the interstices of your world, and you will find that the things that breed among them will batten on you too. Disease is contagious, and does not take social status into account. And if disease ignores rank, crime and immorality have a positive attraction for the rich and settled; even where they do not contaminate their daily lives, they establish power and complicity in a thousand thousand ways. The ordinary criminality that festered among the desperate of the Victorian cities had a poisonous influence on the whole of social intercourse. Bourgeois landlords collected the rents of starving accumulations of almost-families in slum tenements, next door to boy brothels popular among the likes of Oscar Wilde. Corrupt businessmen and traffickers in human flesh placed their hard-earned income in respectable bank accounts alongside the fortunes of Dukes and Bishops, and dealt with them. Prostitution on a massive scale helped corrupt attitudes towards women, boys, and sexuality. Tired members of the middle and upper classes found absinthe and opium easy to come by in twisted corners of slum alleys, and lay down to indulge their new-found addictions next to the scum of the earth.
This, then, was the most immediately visible result of the let-them-starve policy: the rise of monstrous tenements populated with millions of the rejects of society, surviving not on the individual and collective self-discipline that Darwinists fondly imagined would serve to survive and triumph, but on any kind of desperate, dishonest, dangerous shift. But that was only the beginning. Those boats did not just carry starving men and lice; they also carried ideas and a religion. Far from annihilating “shiftless” Irish culture and “obscurantist” Irish Catholicism, they spread them to the British mainland, to the United States, to the British Empire and all over the world.
Results were not slow to come in. By 1850, the Pope felt strong enough to establish a regular hierarchy of Bishops in England and Scotland. They were, by then, inevitable: the demand was beyond denying. British Catholicism had been transformed at a stroke from the cloistered concern of a few country squires, some remarkable intellectuals, and the Duke of Norfolk, to a mass movement swarming across the slums and tenements of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, and London itself – London, where until then the very wearing of Catholic vestments exposed you to insults and mud-pelting. Suddenly the energies of outstanding men such as Manning and Newman were being daily dedicated to the care of hungry, filthy, illiterate, lice-ridden Irishmen. And it is perhaps less than coincidental that the clash that altered the British consciousness about Catholicism for ever – the writing of Newman’s Apologia – took place after the impact of Irish immigration. Newman was no longer writing only as a brilliant intellectual convinced by the claims of Rome, but as a man whose whole life had been changed in every way, a refined Oxford intellectual whose daily work was now to listen to the confessions and caring for the souls of illiterate Irish washerwomen and labourers in Birmingham. The experience helped him to write one of his masterpieces, the Essay on Belief. Almost within living memory of the Gordon Riots, Catholic hierarchies were re-established in England and Scotland, as they already had been established in the white colonies of the British Empire.
Stunning though the result of Irish immigration into Britain and the British Empire had been, it was nothing compared to what it did to the United States of America. Until 1845, the USA had been, with the troublesome exception of black slaves, an ethnically and culturally cohesive country. Had it not been for their common English language and culture and their common vaguely Protestant heritage, it would have been impossible for the Thirteen Colonies to form a nation even after they had cleared the English from their shores; and subsequent events had done little to change that. Immigration was a comparatively minor phenomenon, easily absorbed, and at any rate mostly from culturally compatible countries such as Britain and Germany.
The Irish swarm changed all that. In a few years, as the by-product of the potato catastrophe, the great cities of the East had both swelled enormously and experienced tremendous cultural change. Elements were poured into American life that were unknown before and were to take roots and become native.
Foremost among them was the party machine and the city boss. Destitute and desperate as they were, the Irish had one weapon in America that they had always been denied in Britain: the vote. And they used it. Out of nowhere, a whole culture of politics as mutual assistance and mutual self-defence, with overtones of violence, corruption, and secrecy, blossomed in New York City and across the wildly growing urban centres of North America. Tammamy Hall became the name itself of corruption; but the Irish did not care. Used from the cradle to the contempt of their “betters”, they recognized in the preaching of newspaper writers and the cartoons of Thomas Nast (who hated Catholics on principle – or what he called principle) the old Orange arrogance and violence with which life in the Old Country had made them all too familiar. Only here they could fight back, and they did. The ever-replenished pool of poor Irishmen provided labour for the violently growing American industries. Their numbers gave them political power: no political leadership can exclude the representatives of the leading and most economically significant cities. They built schools, churches, and universities; colonized politics, city administration, and, famously, the police; provided for their children to rise socially; and became a power in the land. And Britain paid for it dearly. Apart from continuous support for Fenians and IRA, even the moderate part of the Irish interest hated England. In this, if in nothing else, they agreed with the native feeling, reinforcing the instinct against English monarchy and class prejudice inherited from those who went to war in 1776. As a result, the American prejudice against the British Empire was a driving force until at least the Eisenhower presidency – and the dissolution of the Empire itself.
But the Irish came not only as themselves, but as the first wave of a new kind of immigration – something that America had neither experienced nor expected before. Instead of small numbers of mostly decently educated North Europeans, mostly Protestant, easily absorbed in the culture and religion of English-speaking America, emigration would from then on consist of huge, dirty, hungry, desperate waves of increasingly alien masses, eager for work but not always easily assimilated: Italians, Poles, Jews, East Europeans, Syrians, Russians, Hispanics, Japanese, Chinese. The small Catholic community and the minuscule Jewish presence of the years before 1845 changed beyond recognition both in size and in make-up, and America received, very much against its will, a cosmopolitan character and widespread interests that had certainly never been envisaged by its founders. One wonders whether the very notion of mass transfer of entire poor and aspiring populations of any ethnic and cultural kind to the United States would even have arisen across Europe, had not the great wave of Irish despair and hope first struck New York City (the one American city that Europeans knew about, and from which their journalists wrote). It must have given the shipping industry – without which nothing could have been done – the idea that there was plenty of money to be made even from penniless people, if carried in bulk. Once again we get back to the great Victorian economic discovery: it is possible to make money even from those who have next to none, if there are a lot of them.
In Ireland itself, the blight did eventually empty out the country – not only by the first wave of flight, but by establishing a tradition of emigration that lasted for over a hundred years and slowly diminished the numbers of a population known for its fertility. Irish immigration to Britain, America and the Empire did not slake until recently, and for generations the Irishman and his brogue remained a stock character in any description of British, American or Australian society. Yet even in Ireland the heartless calculations of the Whigs and their political economists failed completely. The large swathes of the country emptied by emigration were not filled by “energetic and sober” Protestants, but by cattle owned by Catholics and eagerly purchased by the urban markets of England and Scotland. For the first time since the destruction of the Irish aristocracy, a social stratum of rich, powerful and assertive Catholics, embittered by memories of starvation and tales of oppression, grew in Ireland. The inevitable – though, in its actual development, rather fortuitous – result was the final independence of Catholic Ireland.
For this the benevolent Whigs of 1845 had delivered a whole country under their charge to slow and hideous annihilation. One is almost tempted to quote Talleyrand; but stupid though their policy was – immensely, colossally, fathomlessly stupid – it was even more criminal than it was stupid. It was the second most shameful crime of the nineteenth century (the worst was the rule of Leopold II over Congo), and it strikes me as comparable at every important point with more modern crimes. Those who find the twentieth century unusual in the savagery and deliberation of its criminality ought to compare, for instance, the British government’s reaction to the Irish potato blight to the work of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It may surprise some, but they can be compared both easily and closely. Both are reckoned to have killed a couple of million people in a couple of years in a country of some eight million. Both are the results of deliberate government policy rather than of a natural disaster. (The potato blight was only the occasion; two million Irish died of hunger while being citizens of the richest country on Earth at the height of its power. If this does not prove government intent, nothing proves it.) Both result from the bookish application of an economic theory – classical liberalism or Marxism. Both were intended to bring about the complete social and cultural renewal of the country that was subjected to the experiment. And both failed.
So much for the practicalities of the let-them-starve policy, even when applied with committed rigour by a great power – one of the world’s greatest. Far from cleansing what they regarded as the Empire’s plague-spot, Ireland, for its “sober, hard-working” Orange citizens, it changed its social structure and that of its greatest daughter country for ever, and for what the Whigs would have regarded as very much the worse. Far from strengthening Irish Protestants and assimilating Ireland to Britain, it led the greatest empire the world has ever seen to its first major defeat in 140 years, losing Ireland for ever after 700 years, and reducing the Irish Protestants to six small, provincial counties, unloved in Britain and ignored elsewhere. Far from starving Catholicism to death in the one distant province where it had survived the onslaught of British power, they made it a power in the mother country and across the Empire. They affected the whole world, and affected it in every possible way that its Whig protagonists would not have wanted: resurrected a Catholic Church in Britain (which drove the Whigs crazy with anger for a time), strengthened it across the Empire, made it primary in the great rising American power, and contributed to the enduring of that power’s hostility to Britain.
Altogether, the world has had a lot, one way and another, from one small country slated for starvation by a stronger neighbour; and the whole process began exactly with the decision to let it starve. Even on a purely practical level, then, the let-them-starve policy does not work. You are lucky if it does not change your whole world against you, as it did with Ireland. Trust your better instincts; give generously to charity; support decent public policies, and if you ever hear anyone talking about drains on the economy and about idleness, answer back.