The Invisibility of Poverty

In the Book Review in the June 21, 2009 issue of the New York Times, Maurice Isserman wrote the Essay section, entitled “Warrior on Poverty”, in which he wrote about Michael Harrington. It brought to mind the advertisements run by the Salvation Army during December, 2008 (see below).

Prof. Isserman wrote that in the late 60’s Harrington wrote that nearly a third of the U.S.A. population lived below the poverty line. Unfortunately I suspect that we haven’t made much significant progress since then. Harrington talked of a “culture of poverty” in which poverty was not just an absence of resources but was a culture of its own, another “nation” within the U.S.A., with its own way of life. I don’t see that we’ve made much progress since then. Particularly during these trying economic times I see the situation being exasperated. Harrington further wrote that poverty was an “invisible land” that is “not simply neglected and forgotten … What is much worse, they are not seen.” I ascribe to the social compact theory of the formation of society (enunciated by philosophers such as John Locke, William Blackstone, David Hume and Thomas Hobbes), that peoples banded together to do as a group what each was unable to do individually. Typically this would be works engaged by government. So collectively we can provide an education system, whereas individually we each would unlikely have the wherewithal to do that. I think we need to recognize that poverty is one of those elements of life which cannot be addressed individually, but takes us collectively as a society to take care of. So where is government in addressing the causes of poverty? It is noble that as a society we have the Salvation Army, food banks, organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, and charitable organizations which provide relief for the effects of homelessness, hunger and poverty. They see past the invisibility of poverty. But that is truly addressing the “effects”. What we need is coordinated action to address the “causes”. I think that falls to the responsibility of government given the magnitude of the causes and the resources that are needed to address it. As I read the Essay I was reminded of the Salvation Army ads and video (see below) which so poignantly presented the invisibility of poverty and challenged us to step up and do something about it.

Here is part of the Essay:

If there is a heaven, and it has a place for virtuous skeptics, I imagine Michael Harrington is looking down, amused by the recent cover of Newsweek proclaiming, “We Are All Socialists Now,” not to mention Newt Gingrich's lament that the United States is seeing “European socialism transplanted to Washington.” Back in the 1960s, Harrington had some experience trying to “transplant” some socialist ideas to Washington — and the results were rather different from what he had hoped.

Fifty years ago this July, Commentary magazine (at the time a journal of bracingly liberal sentiments) ran Harrington’s article “Our Fifty Million Poor,” in which he sought to overturn the conventional wisdom that the United States had become an overwhelmingly middle-class society. Using the poverty-line benchmark of a $3,000 annual income for a family of four, he demonstrated that nearly a third of the population lived “below those standards which we have been taught to regard as the decent minimums for food, housing, clothing and health.”

Harrington’s own knowledge of poverty was decidedly secondhand. Born in 1928 in St. Louis and educated at Holy Cross, Yale Law School and the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1949 to become a writer. In 1951 he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement as a volunteer at its soup kitchen. Within a few years he left the Catholic Worker (and the Roman Catholic Church) and joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the battered remnants of the American Socialist Party.

In researching the Commentary essay, Harrington picked up the notion of the “culture of poverty,” a casual bit of intellectual borrowing with fateful consequences. The phrase was coined by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who contended that being poor was not simply a condition marked by the absence of wealth; rather, poverty created “a subculture of its own,” and those raised within it were unlikely to escape. However different their places of origin, he argued, poor people in Mexico might have more in common with their counterparts in New York than with better-off people from their own countries.

Echoing Lewis, Harrington argued that American poverty constituted “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” He elaborated on this idea in “The Other America: Poverty in the United States,” published in the spring of 1962. It was a short work with a simple thesis: poverty was both more extensive and more tenacious than most Americans assumed. An “invisible land” of the poor existed in rural isolation or in crowded slums where middle-class visitors seldom ventured. “That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them,” Harrington wrote. “They are not simply neglected and forgotten. . . . What is much worse, they are not seen.”

The full Essay by Prof. Isserman can be read at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/books/review/Isserman-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=essay%20isserman%20warrior%20poverty&st=cse

When I saw the Salvation Army ads it really highlighted for me how homelessness and poverty is often very invisible to us, and that’s why Prof. Isserman’s Essay touched a chord with me. How many times have we seen the homeless and just carried on about our business? How many times have we kept them in our mind as we consider what we can do, in our personal or professional lives, to help to make them more visible – to help to resolve, and (wouldn’t it be nice) to eliminate the culture of poverty? A big challenge, unquestionably! But worth us all doing our bit as part of this collective we call society, including encouraging our governments to do what they can to address the causes of poverty.

The advertisements run by the Salvation Army can be viewed at http://www.torontosalvationarmy.ca/images/stories/content/PDF/media%20kit/Christmas%20Ads%202006/Wee%20See%20What%20Most%20Don

And the Salvation Army’s related video at
http://www.torontosalvationarmy.ca/content/view/89/153/