Mean(s) Testing and Compassionate Conservatism

Most self-proclaimed conservatives who believe government has any legitimate role in alleviating poverty, believe that role must begin with means testing, that is, checking to make sure that any would-be recipient of government aid to the poor really is poor. They underline their case with horrifying references to “welfare queens” using food stamps to buy steak and lobster, and travelling to and from the welfare office in Cadillacs. The goal these compassionate conservatives claim to be aiming at is a reasonable one–let’s give scarce public resources only to the people who really need them. Even when public resources are more plentiful, they are still most effective when targeted to those most in need.

But the c.c.’s–who normally presume that all the consequences of any governmental program not aimed at killing the enemies of the people at home (police) or abroad (army) are unintended–seem to have lost their grip on this fundamental law as it applies to means testing. Means testing really does have unintended consequences. At least, one hopes they are unintended. (Oliver Stone probably thinks they are intended.)

First, the eligibility line for any means-tested program is always set at least a couple of notches below the income which would enable a person to purchase all of the goods and services supplied by such programs in the private sector. There is always a group of people in the middle, too poor for private health insurance but too rich for Medicaid, too poor to be able to afford a balanced diet on their own funds but too rich for food stamps, too poor to be able to afford the rent on a decent private-sector apartment large enough for the whole family but too rich for public housing, too poor to be able to afford a lawyer but too rich for Legal Aid. Naturally that group in the middle will direct their envy and anger, not upward at the legislative and regulatory bodies that set the eligibility standards, nor at the agencies that administer them, but at the people below them who do qualify. This too, we must presume, is unintended.

Second, the procedure for qualifying for such programs requires the applicant to supply humiliating and exhausting detail about his or her personal life, beginning of course with the public (or at least on-the-record) acknowledgment of being poor. Most of us would rather confess to having sex with an underage dead chicken than to poverty, these days. But the mere admission of poverty is never enough. Verification must be supplied: paycheck stubs, rent receipts, utility bills and so on. The official purpose of the ritual is to weed out ineligible applicants. But the effect is to weed out any of the eligible applicants who still retain any pride or still value their personal privacy. This mostly gets rid of applicants without dependents, since most of us will endure a lot more humiliation and intrusion to provide for our children and disabled or elderly relatives than for ourselves. Anyway, we know for a fact, and repeated studies have verified it, that nearly half of those eligible for governmental assistance to the poor either never apply for it, or drop out of the process in the very early stages. We have known it for well over 50 years. I’m with Oliver Stone on this one–we want it this way.

Third, once we have designated a program as being for “the poor” and no one else, no one else but the poor will have any interest in maintaining it, or administering it properly and effectively. Once a program has been labeled “for poor people only”, its days are numbered. Why should “we” pay for a program that benefits only “them”?

Most of us have lived with this situation so long that we respond almost reflexively, “But of course the people who need the programs can’t afford to pay for them–otherwise, why would they need them? And of course the people who pay for the programs don’t need them. The best we can do is appeal to their sense of generosity and charity. ” (We do that, of course, only after a concerted campaign to discredit those virtues.) But we literally cannot imagine any other way to distribute public benefits, except by putting the people who pay on one side of the Great Divide and the people who receive on the other, and making sure than never the twain shall meet.

Well, no, it’s not quite accurate to say we cannot imagine any other way. We have in our midst a program open to most citizens and residents of this great country regardless of their current resources, and paid for by almost all of us. It is the most popular government program in the history of this country. And it is currently under constant assault in a relentless effort to discredit, privatize, and ultimately destroy it precisely because, to most of us, until very recently, it was proof positive that government could do something useful in alleviating poverty without humiliating the beneficiaries of the program.

I am referring, of course, to Social Security. Until a decade ago, the closest thing to a means test for Social Security (or its younger brother, Medicare) was an earnings limit. Now, even that is long gone. And the compassionate conservatives–including even some “centrist” liberals–cannot stop fulminating at the thought that Bill Gates will someday be able to collect his $1,100.00 per month from the public treasury. Under current law, most of that $1,100.00 would actually be taxed away (although the value of Gates’ Medicare would not.) Most American senior citizens can live with that arrangement, because it spares them the necessity of confessing poverty and pleading for charity. But conservatives and “centrists” simply cannot swallow the idea of giving a public benefit to anyone without collecting the recipient’s dignity in return. Indeed, now that we have finally given up on the idea of privatizing Social Security, our main suggestion for “saving” it is to means-test it.

Most honest conservatives will come out and say that, regardless of where it comes from or what we call it, any aid to the poor from the non-poor is charity, and the poor should acknowledge that fact. Means-testing is one of the more effective ways of rubbing it in. Which might be acceptable, if we were willing to allow dignity to the recipients of our charity. If “poor” were not a four-letter word. If we did not, at heart, believe that all of us get what we deserve and deserve what we get. Or don’t get.

I prefer the Jewish tradition in its view of charity. To the extent that we have any resources, they come ultimately from the Holy One, Who makes all of us conduits for those resources. I like the approach of Maimonides, Writing in the 1200s in highly-urbanized Spain and Northern Africa, he is realistic, and perfectly willing to admit that there are phony beggars out there, people who claim needs they do not in fact have. The Holy One has allowed these fakers to exist, he tells us, to create a benefit of the doubt for people who refuse to give to beggars (Maimonides was realistic about those people, too.) If all the beggars out there were really destitute, he says, anyone who failed to give to one of them when s/he could afford to would be committing a grave sin. Since some of them are fakes, those who refuse to give are guilty only in proportion to the ratio of real beggars to phonies. Ultimately, he says, means-testing is the job of the Holy One.

Cynthesis

Back Down the Rabbit Hole

I guess I must have repressed my memories of the Republican opposition to the Clinton administration. It required too much suspension of disbelief even for a long-time Coleridge fan. Reminds me of the time I tried to turn my experiences running a legal aid office in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago into a series of short stories. The one that finally ended that career detour was the two kids I interviewed about their juvenile court case, who told me they had run away from home because their parents were practicing black magic.* I realized, as I reviewed my notes, that there was no way I was going to be able to make truth as believable as fiction, and I might as well go back to writing briefs and memoranda.

So here we go again, with the MSM trying to make the opposition loonies as believable as the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen. Lewis Carroll, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Remember poor Vince Foster, supposedly murdered by White House operatives because he Knew Too Much? Nobody could ever enunciate just what he knew too much about, but si non é vero, é ben trovato. And the apocryphal Secret Service agent whose job was to recruit lesbian bimbos for Hillary? Lesbian bimbos? Gimme a break. The scandalized reporters who discovered that Hillary, in her brief forays into the investment market, had actually made money? Omigod. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! (sorry, I know I’ve used that before, I just can’t find anything more apt.)

Some saner conservatives are pointing out that the loonies are raising some valid points, such as the proper role and size of government, which deserve a serious debate. Some liberals have pointed out that we just had that debate, which, in this great country of ours, is called an election, and our guy won. Some other liberal commentators suspect that the reason the loonies can’t accept the legitimacy of the Obama presidency is that he’s Black. Obviously, they have the same trouble I did remembering the Clinton administration, which the loonies also never accepted as legitimate, even though Bill is at least as pale as I am, and Hillary is a good deal more so. They just started with the axiom that the Clintons had somehow snuck in under cover of darkness and then changed the locks on the White House. Color was never an issue. The issue is, and has always been, who qualifies as a Real American. A few Blacks and Hispanics (especially Cubans**) actually do. But anybody who believes the government has a valid role providing help for non-rich Americans really doesn’t qualify.

Remember the New Deal?*** FDR made it happen by making a deal with the Devil, or rather, the Dixiecrats, that would guarantee that none of its benefits would extend to Black people. Social Security and Unemployment Compensation specifically didn’t cover agricultural and domestic workers, who made up the majority of employed African-Americans at the time. Black sharecroppers didn’t count as “farmers” for purposes of the New Deal agricultural programs. Aid to Dependent Families was off limits for Black single mothers, because it was too easy to prove them “morally unfit,” unlike White widows, or to show that, unlike White women, they could never qualify because they always had a way to support their children, namely domestic labor. And so on. Well, what the loonies are looking for this time around is a guarantee that Obama’s health care reform won’t just exclude illegal immigrants from coverage, but will guarantee that they can never, ever, get treatment for any medical problem in any medical facility that receives federal funds, or from any doctor or nurse whose education was paid for with federal grants and loans. Anything less than that will forfeit all support from that side of the aisle.

But everybody in this particular controversy, on all sides, seems to have forgotten that, unlike FDR, Obama doesn’t need the support of the loonies to get his program passed. Yes, it would be nice to end the LaRouchie/teabagger/loony-sponsored sniping and become One Nation. But every time Obama extends a hand across the aisle, somebody cuts off one of his fingers. Now, apparently, he has only one left. Let’s hope it’s the one he needs for the appropriate gesture.

Red Emma

* In fact, what the parents were doing was Santeria, which most people at the time didn’t know about, and which the kids didn’t know about because their parents had always told them “We’re Catholic,” until the kids came home from school early one day and found their parents and some friends in the basement doing stuff Sister had never taught them. The solution, as in most juvenile runaway cases, was to encourage better parent-child communication.

** In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m Cuban, but like many second or third generation Cuban- Americans, I do not consider Castro the AntiChrist.

*** See Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White for the best historical treatment of this era.

Talmudic Copyright

“Whoever tells a thing in the name of the one who said it, brings redemption into the world.”  (Pirkey Avot 6:6, and in Talmud Bavli (the Babylonian Talmud) Megilah 15A, Hulin 104B, and Niddah 19B.)

While the area of intellectual property becomes ever more complex and confining, it deals only with the rights of the owner of the “property” in question, not with the rights of the people who actually created the work in the first place, if they are not the current owners. Cases in point: (1) Milli Vanilli, which got rich lip-synching the performance of another group, whose names (individually and collectively) the public has never been able to ascertain; (2) Paul Anka’s infamous “Having My Baby,” in which the female soloist (who is, presumably, playing the role of the person who is in fact having the baby) is never named; and (3) somewhat less well-known except in Chicago folk music circles, Jan Hobson and her Bad Revue, whose best-known songs (“Throw Your Cat Away” and “The Racoon Song”) she filched from her ex-boyfriend, who used to sing with the group, and whose name, again, the public has never been able to find out.

Legally, I think such arrangements have a serious flaw. Yes, an artist can sell somebody else the rights to perform the work in question and get paid for it, if all the requirements of contract law are fulfilled. But the artist can’t waive the right of the public to know the artist’s name (or at least his/her/their pseudonym) and allow the new owner of the “rights” to fool the public into believing that the owner is also the artist. (Any more than the custodial parent of a child can waive the child’s right to receive child support from the other parent.)

For yet another slant on intellectual property law, take a look at Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons (creativecommons.org/) with more regard for creator’s right to credit and the public’s right to know the creator’s identity than conventional intellectual property law.

So anyway, that’s how the writings of the Wired Sisters is protected. Don’t mess with it.

CynThesis

Do Americans Watch Too Many Hospital Shows?

Watching Marcus Welby may have led Americans of a Certain Age to expect house calls and long conversations with their doctors.  Watching ER may have led younger Americans to expect a lot of noisy rapid action.  Watching Grey’s Anatomy or General Hospital may have led many of us to sneak a peek into supposedly empty hospital rooms in hope of catching younger medical personnel in flagrante delicto.  Popular culture undoubtedly shapes our expectations of the health care system, for better and for worse.

Age, class, and gender play their part, too.  Younger males, especially blue-collar men, want as little contact with the health care system as possible.  Real men don’t go to doctors and don’t take meds.  Real blue-collar men watch ESPN, which rarely deals with medical issues other than the ingestion of illegal substances by professional athletes. Naturally, this tends to make doctors, when seen at all, the bad guys.

Women generally get stuck functioning as the designated interface with the health care system on behalf of everybody else in the family until they are old enough to need somebody else to handle those duties on their own behalf.

Middle-class, educated, white-collar Americans have higher expectations, because in addition to watching Private Practice and Hawthorne, they read Scientific American and the Health section of the daily paper.  Which leads them into the same trap we collectively fall into:  losing track of the distinction between what we can imagine being able to do, what science has worked out the how-tos for but not implemented yet, what elite medical care can provide if paid enough for it, what is actually being done in the majority of American facilities, and what poor people can get if they’re really lucky.  The popular culture culprit here may not be a hospital show at all, but CSI and other purveyors of gee-whiz technology.  In an earlier generation, we didn’t have so much trouble realizing that Dr. McCoy’s scanner was a couple of centuries away. Today, we rarely think about the fact that the various non-invasive technologies for imaging and surgery  that we really do have available now are EXPENSIVE.  ER was pretty good about discussing the financial facts of medical life where they were relevant to the plotline, but of course, in an emergency room, the law requires every bona fide emergency patient to be treated regardless of ability to pay, so the issue didn’t necessarily come up until much later, usually long after the show was over.

Quite possibly what popular culture and the health care system should be working on together is a medical version of Car Talk.  You know, that Public Radio show on which, every Saturday morning, two Italian-American mechanics (both MIT-educated, and one of whom has a PhD, so much for blue-collar credentials) take questions from listeners nationwide about the foibles and failings of cars and mechanics.  They have a pretty healthy and realistic attitude toward both.  Cars are mortal.  All cars eventually disintegrate and die.  Mechanics are fallible and sometimes greedy.  Car dealers and their repair and maintenance facilities are not necessarily much better.  But most of us can keep our cars running for well over 100,000 miles by paying attention to telltale noises (Car Talk makes me wonder if good hearing and possibly even perfect pitch are Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications for a car mechanic), tending to routine maintenance regularly, and not doing Really Dumb Things.  Some car problems are Really Dangerous, and some are just trivial or unpleasant.  Check with your mechanic to see which is which, and don’t hesitate to get a second opinion when the first one doesn’t sound right. Since most of their calls involve cars over five years old (that’s forty-five in people years), they have no gee-whiz technology to call upon, just basic grease-monkey stuff.  [Cars with GPS and rear view cameras are still brand new and under dealer warranty, so the Car Talk Boys never hear about them.]

This is precisely the level of technology most of us need to hear about when our bodies act up, except that we don’t usually give off telltale noises (other than the stuff stethoscopes listen for, which was probably a much larger part of the practice of medicine seventy years ago.)  Unfortunately, doctors are mostly too nervous about getting sued to offer medical advice to strangers on the public airwaves (note that the Car Talk Boys never issue any disclaimers about their advice. Is this because so far, most of us don’t sue our mechanics?)  There should be ways to work around this.  Because, at least until we start heading into the Geezer Years, most of us think of our bodies pretty much the way we think of our cars: we just want to keep them running reasonably well at reasonable cost for as long as possible.  We want our doctors to function like good car mechanics.  Mostly, we want them to specialize in doing things we mostly think we could do for ourselves if we wanted to take the time and trouble, but it’s easier to let somebody else do it.  We want hints on how to do some of the easy stuff for ourselves, and then we just want to leave the complicated stuff to them.  If we could drop our bodies off at the hospital and come back for them later, most of us probably would, especially if we could get a suitable loaner in the meantime (Here’s a slightly used Mel Gibson, shouldn’t give you any trouble, but it’s only got a quarter tank of gas, be sure and have dinner on the way home tonight…)

And in the Geezer Years, we probably don’t expect what the medical establishment seems to think we do.  We don’t want to live forever. We just want to keep functioning more or less normally for as long as possible. We don’t want to fight as long as possible.  Whose idea was it to depict medical intervention in terms of combat in the first place anyway?  These days, a lot of patients regardless of gender seem to buy into the model, but I suspect that’s mostly because they are made to think they ought to.  I know the denizens of That Other Blog will say I’m pushing euthanasia or assisted suicide or something, but I think if the medical establishment were willing to tell patients it’s okay to give up or give in beyond a certain point, a lot of people would, thereby sparing themselves a lot of unnecessary pain and perhaps also cutting down on the enormous proportion of lifetime health care expenditures that is now spent in the last six months of life.    Nurses are often better at talking about these realities than doctors, and maybe they should be encouraged to do it more often.  It is their primary job, after all, to care about how the patient feels. Maybe hospital chaplains should be recruited for these discussions too; they are mostly connected with faith traditions that tell us the soul is more important than the body, after all.  Doctors, on the other hand, tend to see themselves as the patient’s designated champion in the combat against death.

Well, enough of awkwardly chosen metaphors (a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?)  Now that Obama has started talking about what used to be health care reform as health insurance reform, we will need to start looking elsewhere to change the health care system.  Stay tuned for The Body Talk Boys, Mark and David Welby, and don’t eat like my brother.

CynThesis

The Wise-*ss Latina Woman, and Other “Racists”

Full disclosure: I guess I’m a Latina woman, sort of.  My parents were both born in Cuba. They told their secrets in Spanish, which is a great way to raise a bilingual kid without working at it.  Wise?  Dunno, let the reader decide.

Anyway, I’m fascinated by the latest tactic of the Radical Right:  calling any person of color or member of a minority group “racist” when s/he suggests that colorless people may in a particular instance be behaving in a prejudiced manner, or that race may still be a significant factor in current social conditions.

Sonia Sotomayor mentioned (in 4 or 5 different versions of the “wise Latina” speech) that the experience of being a double minority might enrich her judicial perspective, and the Republicans glommed onto the remark as if it were their last hope of salvation. In fact, it was more like their last chance at having anything at all to say in her confirmation hearings, in light of her 14 years of impeccably straight arrow judicial decisions.  Maybe if her paper trail had looked more like Robert Bork’s, they wouldn’t have bothered with the “wise Latina” stuff.  But her Republican opponents and several other critics have called her a racist for using the phrase.

And then the President called the behavior of the Cambridge cops “stupid” when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for having broken into his own house. He started out by admitting he didn’t have all the facts yet.  In fact, he never will, and neither will the rest of us. The facts will undoubtedly never be completely clarified, since so far we have 4 different (and discordant) accounts, and there are a number of participants who have not yet been heard from.  Does that mean nobody is allowed to express an opinion, or just that POTUS should have kept his highly influential and controversial mouth shut?  Anyway, despite his diligent efforts at trying to cool things down with the aid of a Bud Lite, the “stupid” remark got him called a racist by several conservative types.

Apparently the reasoning of the Hard Right is that we are, or at least should be aspiring to become, a color-blind society.  Anyone who reminds us that race is still a significant social reality is obstructing this effort.  Anyone who obstructs our progress toward color-blindness by definition is a racist.

Some of my best friends espouse the ideal of a color-blind society.  They refuse to check the white/black/other boxes on the various forms everybody has to fill out these days. I can see why that’s attractive.  It would be nice to just cast off the shackles of our old errors and move on into a bright future for all of us, without regard to race, creed, color, or gender or………………….

Hey, wait a minute!  Would that mean we shouldn’t notice any difference between men and women?  Ummm, words fail me.  The species could be seriously disadvantaged in its chances for survival if the two sexes couldn’t even recognize each other.

And, assuming that there is some serious metaphysical difference between distinguishing characteristics people are born with and those they choose, does that mean that we should stop noticing race, but it’s okay to discriminate against Unitarians or anybody else who chooses a minority religion?  The gay rights movement has in some quarters gotten bogged down in a dispute over whether sexual orientation is inborn or chosen.  Are we sure we want that to matter?

Okay, I don’t want race to matter, when it comes to distributing social goodies, like the right to vote or move into a neighborhood or go to school or get a decent job.  I also don’t want religion, gender, or sexual orientation to matter for those purposes.  Does that mean I don’t want to KNOW about those things? Or that I don’t want the people distributing the social goodies to know about them?

Sometimes we do set up blinding mechanisms to screen out possible discriminatory effects.  It’s how we do reputable laboratory research—divide our subjects into two groups, without letting anybody know which group any individual subject is in, and experiment on one group while leaving the other along except for placebo tinkering.  It’s how the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra does its auditions—the musician plays from behind a screen, so the judges cannot ascertain his/her race, gender, age, or physical appearance.  They start with the premise that none of those things matter for their purposes.  All they need to know, and therefore all they want to know, is how good the candidate sounds.  Some academic journals do peer review by removing the author’s name and other identifying details from the article before distributing it to reviewers, to keep them from being blinded by gender, past reputation, or academic affiliations.  They don’t need to know any of those things to know whether the article is any good.  It should stand on its own anonymous merits. Same goes for juried art exhibits.

And it’s how the civil service system and the union seniority system are supposed to operate. Individuals get “points” for seniority and test scores, and if your points put you at the top of the list, you get the next job.  But as a practical matter, you don’t get into the seniority system until you get into the union, and until fairly recently, that often required a recommendation from a friend or relative.  As a practical matter, the civil service points awarded to military veterans are essentially an affirmative action program for men, since the military sets limits on both the number and the proportion of women admitted into the service.  Civil service doesn’t screen out as many high-scoring women as it used to, since there are a lot more women veterans than there used to be.  But the system still favors males.

Mr. Wired had a brilliant suggestion some years ago:  why don’t employers get serious about deciding what the real qualifications are for doing a particular job, advertise the job opening and qualifications to the general public, and then just hire the first qualified person who walks through the door?  These days, most employment discrimination doesn’t involve hiring unqualified people in preference to qualified people, but in choosing one qualified person over another for reasons having nothing to do with qualifications.  So let’s eliminate that step from the process.

I don’t know anybody other than Mr. Wired and us who likes that idea.  Most employers think they want to hire the most qualified person available for a particular job.  Of course, a lot of things get in the way of doing that, like figuring out what the qualifications really are for a particular job, and deciding how much they’re willing to pay for stellar qualifications, and dealing with candidates whose wage demands may be as high as their qualifications.

And of course, there are the intangible qualifications. “Character.”  “Fit.”  “Comfort level.”  How the candidate comes across in an interview (which, of course, is never conducted from behind a screen.)  All the things that serve as proxies for whether the candidate reminds the interviewer of his/her best friend.  All the areas into which considerations of race, religion, class, age, gender, and sexual orientation can creep unrecognized, especially if one isn’t even allowed to notice how they affect the total employee mix that results from these decisions.

I would love to live in a society in which none of this stuff mattered to a person’s chance at the Good Life.  Gandhi says “we must live the change we wish to see,” and a lot of the time I think he’s right.  But living as if we had already overcome racism and other forms of discrimination will not actually overcome them.  It will merely blind us, not to color, but to its effect on the world we live in.  No doubt some of the people obsessed with race and discrimination are racists, or maybe just politically savvy race card players.  But most of them, I suspect, are just trying to avoid being blinded to the racist realities that still surround us.

Watch This Space for a further examination of such questions as:

Do we presume that the unspoken basic job qualification for most decent jobs is white middle class culture?  Are we willing to treat people of color, women, GLBT types, and people with disabilities like white middle-classniks only to the extent that they can disguise themselves as white middle-classniks?

If we do admit these outgroups to the white middle class, do they become fully qualified members of the Tribe, or only a cheap knockoff (I was going to say “pale imitation,” but that obviously won’t work) of the real thing?

Are we willing to accept people we recognize as different from ourselves as nonetheless entitled to be treated like ourselves?  That is, is equality possible without sameness?

CynThesis

Miscellaneous Meanderings

There is, somewhere in one of “Official Rules” books, a Law which states, “Any organization founded to unite a proliferation of splinter groups invariably becomes one more splinter group.”  By the same token, any attempt to sum up everybody’s wide-ranging opinions on a particularly controversial subject invariably becomes yet another wide-ranging opinion.  But whattheheck, I’m going to try anyway.

There seem to be two repeating themes in the Gates-gate discussion:

 the police are entitled to be treated with respect or even deference, and are also entitled to use their power to enforce that right; anybody who mouths off to a cop deserves what s/he gets.
and
 there is a persistent disparity in the way different racial groups are treated by the law enforcement system, which cannot be completely explained by the behavior of those groups and their members.

These two propositions are not mutually inconsistent. They could both be true.  My sister Red appears to think that the former proposition is just plain dead wrong and is responsible (perhaps as part of a larger pattern of the male sense of entitlement and willingness to enforce it by the most direct means available) for a lot of serious violence between police and people of color.  I haven’t talked to Jane about this yet, but, being something of a statistical wonk, she probably accepts the latter proposition without boggling, and would be willing to go along with the former just for the sake of everybody getting along.

Everybody getting along is, in fact, a laudable goal.  When the major cause of death among the 16 – to – 35-year-old males of a particular group is homicide, mostly committed within that group (let’s leave the cops out of this for a moment), maybe the male sense of entitlement is a particular problem within that group.  As Jane would say, this needs more thought.

But, on the perennial other hand, unlike such cultural subgroups, the police are not “them.” They are “us.” They are acting in our name, on our behalf, and on our money. We cannot dismiss their behavior as “men will be boys.”  We cannot merely advise them to talk amongst themselves to come up with a better method for achieving their goals. Their goals, after all, are our goals.  They are doing the job we have assigned them to. If that job gets innocent people killed, that blood is on our hands.  We need to decide, as a society, whether we want the police to be able to protect the authority they wield in our name by arresting people, or worse, merely for transgressing social boundaries.  Maybe we do.  If so, the Constitution and the legal system we live by require that we put it in writing, and set written limits to the power we confer.

And, by the way, our mother always told us that “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”  We have recently discovered that flies—at least the ones that frequent the Wired residence—like vinegar.  Haven’t tried them with honey yet, but this casts doubt on all the old verities.  As Jane would say, this needs more thought.

CynThesis

The Anti-Ugly League

When I was in college, I dated a city planning major for a while.  A friend of his belonged to the Anti-Ugly League, an organization that had its roots in Britain but apparently was trying to branch out into the US.  Its mission was to oppose ugly architecture, either by written criticism or by public demonstrations such as picketing with signs like “This is an ugly building”, and occasionally by throwing eggs at really ugly buildings.  I just tried googling the league, with no results, so I can only conclude that they have shut down, probably because there was just too much work for them to handle.  Apparently, in the UK, Prince Charles has taken over some of their job, as we see from That Other Blog.  The Chicago chapter, if we ever get around to starting one, should probably be called Friends of Donald Delgade (he being the hapless ex-mental patient who drove his car through the glass walls of the Thompson Center in Chicago in 1999.)

Since my brief relationship with The Planner, I have become something of an architecture buff myself. In college in the early 1960s, I audited a course on the history of American architecture.  A few years later, Mr. Wired and I moved to Chicago, where roughly half of the buildings we had covered in the course had been built. By that time, half of them had been torn down.  But I actually had the privilege of working in two of those remaining, and living two blocks away from a Frank Lloyd Wright house.  (And my favorite niece is an architect.)

All of which has led me to a top-of-the-head classification scheme for architecture. There are Great Buildings, and there are Good Buildings.  Great Buildings are impressive to look at from the outside, in isolation or in their geological and architectural setting. What they mainly impress the viewer with is the importance and greatness of whoever or whatever commissioned the building in question.  The ultimate Great Building is the Great Pyramid of Giza.  Note that the Great Pyramid is not only not intended to be lived in, it is in fact a tomb.  Once completed, it was never intended to be seen from the inside at all.

As opposed to Good Buildings, which are judged by how well they suit the people and entities that live and work inside them.  The major architectural thinkers tend to do most of their thinking about Great Buildings, perhaps because it’s easier and pays better.  By definition, after all, anyone who can commission a Great Building can afford to pay for it.  Whereas most of the people who will be living and working inside buildings can’t.  Working out ways to get Good Buildings paid for is a major economic discipline in itself.

Some horrible examples of attempted Great Buildings at their worst: in the 1950s and 1960s, it became fashionable to construct major public buildings, such as schools and colleges, out of poured concrete, and with flat roofs.  I had the misfortune to teach in several such buildings in Chicago.  Over the following 20 years, all of them developed leaks and cracks, and ultimately crumbled.  All of them have since been either completely rehabbed, or abandoned and rebuilt altogether.  The big secrets are that (a) flat roofs don’t work in cold wet climates like Chicago’s; moisture doesn’t pour off them as it does from pitched roofs, so, since it has to go somewhere, it is likely to end up inside the building, or worse still, inside the walls of the building. (Flat roofs are for deserts!) and (b) poured concrete is susceptible to expansion and shrinkage in extremes of temperature, which sooner or later leads to cracking, leaking, and crumbling.  As an added bonus, buildings that leak sooner or later attract mold spores and become medically dangerous to those who live and work in them.

(In a supreme irony, one of the law students who worked for me a few years ago had been an undergrad architecture major at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which prides itself on most of its buildings—sorry, Great Buildings–having been designed by Mies Van Der Rohe—flat-roofed glass boxes.  My student’s opinion of Van Der Rohe was seriously impacted by the fact that one of those buildings, in which he had his studio, leaked all over a major set of his drawings and nearly cost him his degree.)

Even the Great Buildings I really like, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s stuff, have the same problems.  Falling Water is, well, falling.  The Robie House (two blocks from where I live) is in a constant state of rehabbing.  One would think that the first requirement for Greatness in a building would be that it stays up without undue effort and keeps out the weather.

Architecture, in addition to aspiring either to Greatness or Goodness, has politics.  Totalitarian architecture, like that sponsored by Hitler and Stalin, is readily distinguishable from democratic architecture like the Acropolis.  The easiest way is to look for doors and windows and other “envelope penetrations,” as engineers now call them.  The Acropolis has them all over the place. Admittedly it is situated in a mostly warm and dry climate.  But fascist architecture—regardless of climate–has as few as possible, often no windows at all, or no street-level windows, and only one or at most two doors.  This enables The Authorities to monitor and control who comes in and goes out.

You may have noticed an increasing proliferation of fascist buildings, both public and private, especially since 9/11.  Older buildings have for many years been caught in the crossfire of a war between architects (who try to design buildings with doors in all the most convenient places for ingress and egress) and administrators (who then lock all but the single least convenient one.)  Additionally, in the years since the time of Hitler and Stalin, more and more public buildings have been erected with their only entrances in places other than on a pedestrian-accessible street—one floor up from an entrance kiosk, down in a parking garage, or around the corner in a parking lot. And that was before metal detectors.

It’s easy to talk about Great Buildings and their drawbacks.  It’s harder to define Good Buildings, much less analyse them.  Christopher Alexander has taken some useful stabs at it.  Stewart Brand, in How Buildings Learn, talks about the ways a building can change, for better or for worse, throughout its lifetime. In the process, he says some useful things about how Good Buildings change for the better.  Aside from that, not being the Prince of Wales, I haven’t had the time to construct a reading list on the subject, much less read everything on it.  But we should be encouraging underemployed royals, and anybody else with the time and the inclination, to think about this stuff seriously, since there isn’t enough money in it for the rest of us to do it for a living.  Buildings shape the lives of the people who live and work in and around them, just as they are shaped by those people.

Jane Grey

Space Control: a Thought Experiment

This is an exercise I like to think of as “womanthink,” even though I know there are men who do it very well, and lots of women who don’t do it at all.  It asks three questions: What do we have lots of?  What do we need more of? How do we turn what we have into what we need?

For instance, the foreclosure crisis.  What it actually means is that we now have lots of unoccupied houses. At the same time, there is a shortage of rental housing, especially affordable rental housing.  How do we turn unoccupied houses into affordable rental housing?

In fact, this one is easy compared to, say, spinning flax into gold, or turning dog manure into transportation fuel.  Why don’t the banks, who own these unoccupied houses, get together with realtors, who at the moment have almost nothing to do with their time and no way to make a living, and have them rent out the houses, preferably on one- or two-year leases, so the tenants would stick around a while and take care of the property?

Yes, of course, most of those houses will have to be rehabbed before they are rentable.  Unless, of course, you want to take the thought experiment a bit further and rent them to people who are willing to invest some sweat equity into making them livable in order to live in them.  Say, in exchange for a waiver of the first month’s rent.

Which brings us to the next question: why isn’t it already happening?  Mr. Wired thinks it is because the banks, having been conglomerated to within an inch of their lives (and sometimes beyond) have absolutely no sense of local demand, because they no longer have any location.  So they simply don’t see any relationship between their “toxic assets” and real houses in which real people could be living and paying rent, if only somebody had the wit to see it.

You heard it here first.

CynThesis

Two Rubies Plus Ten Percent

A Thought Experiment

Rosewood. Tulsa.  Native American treaty rights cash-outs.  The American internment camps for Japanese-Americans.  The German slave labor camps.  Four hundred years of African-American slavery.  Reparations are once again in the headlines.  Reparations have even been, or are now in the process of being, paid, to the victims of all but the last-listed category of injustice.  Randall Robinson has been trying to rouse public awareness of and interest in reparations to the descendants of African-American slaves for years, and he is once again gaining notice.

All of these campaigns that have resulted in payment plans have ultimately been worked out by lawyers, for better and for worse.  What lawyers typically worry about in such cases are two problems: calculating the damages, and identifying and locating the persons to be compensated.  The smaller the number of original victims, and the shorter and more recent the period over which damages were incurred, the easier the solutions.  So the consequences of the race riots in Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, have been highly manageable.  The Japanese-American internees were not only a small group, but easily identified from records still available to the federal government.  The German slave labor camp inmates and their families have been a lot harder both to identify and to locate, and the calculation of damages has likewise been difficult, but a settlement has nevertheless been worked out.

That leaves the really hard cases.  Reparations for four hundred years of slavery, for instance.  How would the damages be calculated?  The easy way–the current value of forty acres and a mule, times the number of persons to be compensated? Or the hard way–the surplus value of 400 years of agricultural labor in an economy almost unimaginably different from our own, which has left only incomplete records, times some arbitrary rate of compound interest?  And to whom should these funds be paid?  All provable descendants of African slaves in North America, regardless of their current racial identification?  Most of the known descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s slave and alleged mistress Sally Hemmings today consider themselves “white.”  In all likelihood, that is also true of a significant proportion of the descendants of other slaves.  Are they still entitled to be compensated for the suffering of their ancestors in the generations before their family succeeded in “passing” as white?  Perhaps on a pro-rated basis in comparison to descendants of slaves who are still classified as “African-American”?  For that matter, what about the large proportion of today’s African-American community who have significant white ancestry?  Would this too require some pro-rating formula?  Or should compensation be paid only to those who are currently living as African-Americans, since they are the ones who bear the burdens created by slavery in the first place?  That depends on exactly what is being compensated in the first place–the labor stolen from generations of slaves, or the damage done by the residuals of slavery to the African-Americans now living.  Obviously, this is the kind of problem the lawyers will have to tackle after agreement is reached on the principal of paying any kind of compensation at all, to anyone.

Assuming we ever reach that point, that brings us to what may be the hardest case of all, one which has never been discussed anywhere by anyone, so far as I know–reparations for the stolen labor and lives of women.  Think about it–not a week of race rioting, not eight years of internment, not four hundred years of slavery, but at least the ten thousand years of known human history.  Not isolated ethnic or racial minorities, but 53% of all the human beings who have ever lived on this planet.

From the lawyer’s point of view, of course, that is precisely the problem.  The larger the projected sum of reparations, or the number of people eligible to receive it, the less likely it is that it will ever be paid, or even recognized as a moral obligation.  Reparations for ten thousand years of unpaid women’s labor could only take the form of a drastic transfer of wealth from men to women.

And, unless some very careful planning and preparation were done beforehand, much of that wealth would be transferred back to fathers, husbands, and pimps within the year (much the way many Native Americans who were paid for the transfer of treaty lands away from their tribe found themselves back in poverty again within a few months or years after the payment was made.)  The use of debt peonage, sharp dealing, and just plain intimidation would play the same role between men and women as they did between ex-slaveowners and ex-slaves in the post-bellum South.   Poverty often involves not only lack of resources, but lack of the power necessary to hold onto the resources one acquires.

The problem of designating recipients would be the easiest part of the settlement, for a change.  Everybody with the double-X chromosome.  Since everybody’s ancestry is 50% female, ancestry becomes useless as a criterion.  What about transsexuals? some would ask. On one hand, they have chosen their status, but on the other hand, once having chosen it, they are now subject to the same disadvantages as their double-X sisters.  Last week, an Iranian who had undergone gender reassignment from male to female some years before proclaimed that she wanted to change back, because of the social, political, and legal disabilities imposed on Iranian women by the religious establishment.  Clearly, she would be eligible for reparations.  Transgendered women are a small enough proportion of the population that their inclusion in the settlement would have little or no impact on anyone else’s benefits.

As a socioeconomic “thought experiment”, the idea is useful. It could certainly be used to impress upon the human race generally the magnitude of its debt to women.  It might also be useful as a way to figure out the point at which the effort to redress past injustices becomes the futile task of unscrambling eggs or putting the toothpaste back into the tube.   That point probably lies just beyond calculating and paying reparations for  four hundred years of African-American slavery.

Am I saying this is a futile enterprise?  On the contrary, I would love to see some serious number-crunching.  The short way?  That would be based on the biblical statement that a valiant woman’s worth is above rubies.  That means at least two rubies, plus.  Hence the title of this essay–the current value of two rubies plus an arbitrarily-chosen ten per cent, for each woman on the planet today.  The long way would involve something like the following:  figure out the total value in modern dollars for a thirty-hour week of domestic labor and child-care.  Multiply that by the average lifespan of human beings over the last ten thousand years, minus 6 years (the average length of unproductive childhood), times 53% of the number of human beings who have ever lived on the planet.  That takes care of housework and child care.  Then calculate an average figure for the uncompensated labor of women in agriculture, pastoral work, and other “family businesses,” and perform the same set of calculations with it.  Maybe figure in an additional 25% for “pain and suffering” resulting from domestic abuse (something, by the way, that could also reasonably be done in calculating reparations for the descendants of African-American slaves as well.)  Then divide the resulting total by the number of women currently alive.  The final figure could be used for all kinds of things, beginning with calculating alimony and personal injury awards for the incapacitation or wrongful death of women in Western countries, and calculating bride prices elsewhere.  Forget the “price above rubies”–let’s crunch some real numbers!

CynThesis

Panhandlers and the Jewish Tradition

These are hard days for street beggars.  More and more municipalities have tried to ban their activities by law (the courts have held that merely asking somebody for money is free speech, protected by the First Amendment, but that “coercive” panhandling can legitimately be barred. So far there has been no binding precedent on the constitutionality of laws prohibiting camping in public parks, sleeping in public spaces, and searching for food in dumpsters and garbage cans.) Police conduct regular “sweeps” of places ordinarily frequented by homeless people, seizing and destroying their property, and packing the residents off to shelters or jails, or just “away.”  Dumpsters behind restaurants and multi-residential buildings are locked, or noxious or even poisonous substances sprayed on their contents.  Citizens approached by panhandlers are becoming less and less likely to be generous or even polite.  Municipal governments tend to see panhandlers as, at best, a blight on the landscape, and at worst, potential or actual criminals.

The liberal response to panhandling isn’t much better.  Community organizations which have traditionally thought of themselves as “do-gooders” are almost universally taking the position that panhandlers are either people with mental disabilities, who belong in some proper care facility, or substance abusers, who will use cash contributions only to degrade themselves further by feeding their habit.  The best response they can come up with from this perspective is voucher systems–would-be contributors buy vouchers for fifty or twenty-five cents each, and then hand them out to panhandlers.  The latter can redeem the vouchers at local food pantries, soup kitchens, grocery stores, restaurants, and sundry shops, but only for “legitimate” purchases, such as food, non-alcoholic beverages, and personal hygiene articles.  Not surprisingly, in some cities, a thriving black market for vouchers has already developed; the panhandlers sell them to “fences” at a discount, for cash, which they then presumably use for whatever anti-social purpose the vouchers were supposed to defeat, and the fences then use them for purchases of food etc. for which they would have otherwise paid cash, often twice as much. To the extent that they see any ethical quandary in this situation, the “do-gooders” define it as “How can I keep this person from starvation without helping him/her feed an addiction?”  The voucher system in fact does this job more or less adequately.  But it ignores a much older system of ethical priorities.

We Americans of the 1990s did not invent street beggars, or programs to repress and eliminate them, or voucher systems for that matter.  Third World countries take for granted the presence of swarms of beggars in any place likely to generate any surplus food or other resources.  Police may try to keep them from being too much of a nuisance to tourists and honest working people, but they rarely define the mere presence of any beggars as a “problem.”  Nor do the tourists and working people in question; “this is a Third World country,” they presume.  “The poor we have always with us.”  People give to them, or not, based on purely individual decisions.  Those decisions may in turn be motivated by religious tradition, emotion, or political commitment.  This is pretty much the traditional approach to beggary in such countries, dating back to the beginning of money economies.  It was also the accepted attitude in pre-industrial Europe.  Several religious orders, in their early years, supported themselves by begging.  The implicit bargain was that those who donated were freeing the friars to devote their time to prayer and good works, and in return would receive some of the merit therefrom.  This arrangement also existed on an individual basis–”give me a penny, kind sir, and I will pray for you.”  In addition, the medieval Catholic Church defined “feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless” as “corporal works of mercy”, meritorious in and of themselves, regardless of the deserts of the beneficiary. Many aristocrats and wealthy burghers retained “almoners” to take charge of giving out alms to people in need.

Islam and Judaism have similar traditions.  The giving of alms is one of the four pillars of Muslim practice.   “Tzedakah”–usually translated “charity”–is one of the obligations to which religious Jews are commanded.  In the Buddhist tradition, the monastic orders supported themselves by begging, and the laypeople who donated to them gained spiritual merit by doing so.

But the coming of industrialization to Europe, and especially the dissolution of the monasteries and religious orders in Britain and Northern (Protestant) Europe, changed this picture.  The presumption took hold that any able-bodied adult (and both terms were defined very loosely) could work, and anyone who could work should work, and deserved no support from anyone if s/he was not working.  “Sturdy [able-bodied] beggars” could be driven out of wherever they appeared, often with corporal punishment, or rounded up and imprisoned in “workhouses.” Substance abuse was not the issue–until quite late in the 19th century, almost everybody drank prodigious amounts of alcohol, and anyone who could afford it could legally obtain various kinds of opiates and cocaine derivatives over the counter for self-medication of various real and imagined ailments. Probably at least half of these people would today be classified as addicted to something.  That was not a major social concern, except among a few minority religious groups like the Methodists and their offshoot, the Salvation Army.

In industrialized Eastern Europe, especially in what is now called Poland, the Jewish community was called on to respond to several waves of increased indigency, often connected with the movement of refugees from the various wars which infested the area over the 17th through the early 20th century.  Community organizations, soup kitchens, food pantries, and other large-scale charitable organizations were set up, drawing on the financial support of wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs and the moral support of the rabbinic establishment.   And some of these organizations set up voucher programs, to discourage beggars from “bothering” working citizens and make sure that only “deserving” poor people received alms.  There is a story about one such campaign in Poland a hundred years or so ago; a meeting of the umbrella community organization was held, and one of the major items of “new business” on the agenda was a proposal for a voucher program, which would prohibit beggars from approaching individuals directly, and require them to apply to some authorized agency for help.  The Hafetz Hayyim, a very holy rabbi, who had been asked to attend the meeting to lend his moral support to its decisions, raised his hand. “Point of order,” he called out. “What is your point of order, rabbi?” asked the chair.  “You have called this proposal ‘new business.’  But in point of fact this is old business.  It is as old as Sodom and Gomorrah.”

This requires an explanation. In Genesis 18:20, the Holy One tells Abraham “The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah cry out to Me.  I am going to destroy them.”  After a charming interlude in which Abraham tries unsuccessfully to talk the Holy One out of His plan, the latter sends a couple of angels into Sodom to tell Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family to get out of town before the sulfur and brimstone hit.  The local citizens, on seeing these personable strangers enter Lot’s house, gather outside Lot’s door and demand “Send out these men, that we may know them.”  As we all learned in Sunday school, when the Bible says “know”, it means “have relations with.”  The angels and Lot’s family get out safely, and Sodom and Gomorrah get what’s coming to them.

Christians read this story as an indictment of the evils of deviant sexuality.   They presume that the sins that “cried out to heaven” and got the Holy One’s attention in the first place were also sexual sins.  But that is not how the Jewish tradition reads it.

To elaborate on this tradition, we need to understand the Jewish concept of midrash. Loosely translated, it means “story- telling.” In practice, it means that, unlike the Saturday Evening Post in its heyday, the rabbis have taken responsibility for what the characters in the biblical narrative do between installments. While the stories woven to account for how the dramatis personae got from here to there do not have the authority of scripture, and may often wildly contradict each other, they provide us with a world-view and a way of looking at scripture that is part and parcel of the Jewish mindset. Jews do not read the Bible raw and unaccompanied; it is always filtered through commentary and midrash.

So what does the midrash say about Sodom and Gomorrah? (My source, for the sake of convenience, is Louis Ginzberg’s  Legends of the Jews.) “If a stranger merchant passed through their territory, he was besieged by them all, big and little alike, and robbed of whatever he possessed. Each one appropriated a bagatelle, until the traveler was stripped bare. If the victim ventured to remonstrate with one or another, he would show him that he had taken a mere trifle, not worth talking about. [Anyone involved in consumer protection work knows that it is vastly easier to steal one dollar each from a million people than a million dollars from one person--and far less likely to be prosecuted and punished.] And the end was that they hounded him from the city….After a while travelers avoided these cities, but if some poor devil was betrayed occasionally into entering them, they would give him gold and silver, but never any bread, so that he was bound to die of starvation.  Once he was dead, the residents of the city came and took back the marked gold and silver which they had given him, and they would quarrel about the distribution of his clothes, for they would bury him naked….

“The cause of their cruelty was their exceeding great wealth.  Their soil was  gold, and in their miserliness and their greed for more and more gold, they wanted to prevent strangers from enjoying aught of their riches.  Accordingly, they flooded the highways with streams of water, so that the roads to their city were obliterated, and none could find the way thither.  They were as heartless towards beasts as towards men.  They begrudged the birds what they ate, and therefore extirpated them.  [Nowadays, in some place, people get arrested for feeding pigeons.]  They behaved impiously towards one another, too, not shrinking back from murder to gain possession of more gold….

“Their laws were calculated to do injury to the poor. The richer a man was, the more was he favored before the law. The owner of two oxen was obliged to render one day’s shepherd service, but if he had but one ox, he had to give two days’ service….For the use of the ferry, a traveler had to pay four zuz, but if he waded through the water, he had to pay eight zuz [one of the earliest examples of the now well-known fact that the poor pay more].” Ginzberg follows with a story of a outsider woman who had married a man of Sodom. “Once a beggar came to town, and the court issued a proclamation that none should give him anything to eat, in order that he might die of starvation. But [the woman] had pity upon the unfortunate wretch, and every day when she went to the well to draw water, she supplied him with a piece of bread, which she hid in her water pitcher.  The inhabitants of the two sinful cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, could not understand why the beggar did not perish, and they suspected that someone was giving him food in secret.  Three men concealed themselves near the beggar, and  caught [the woman] in the act of giving him something to eat. She had to pay for her humanity with death; she was burnt upon a pyre….

“The people of Admah [one of the other "cities of the plain" destroyed with Sodom and Gomorrah] were no better than those of Sodom.  Once a stranger came to Admah, intending to stay overnight and continue his journey the next morning.  The daughter of a rich man met the stranger, and gave him water to drink and bread to eat at his request.  When the people of Admah heard of this infraction of the law of the land, they seized the girl and arraigned her before the judges, who condemned her to death.  The people smeared her with honey from top to toe, and exposed her where bees would be attracted to her. The insects stung her to death, and the callous people paid no attention to her heart-rending cries.  Then it was that God resolved upon the destruction of these sinners.”

Which brings us to the visit of the angels to Sodom, and the locals’ demand to gang-rape them, that actually appears in the narrative in Genesis. Midrash explains it thus: “It was not the first time that the inhabitants of Sodom wanted to perpetrate a crime of this sort. They had made a law some time before that all strangers were to be treated in this horrible way.” In short, the midrashic tradition is that the cities of the plain were punished for their inhospitality to the poor and the stranger. Their proposed attack on the angels, like most rapes, was not a sexual act, but an act of violence. It was especially evil because it was directed against victims especially protected by Heaven–strangers and travelers, people with no other source of protection among the locals.

For the origin of this idea, we need to look at the book of Deuteronomy, for instance 24: 19, where “the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor” are repeatedly described as being under the special protection of Heaven (one might even say that Heaven has placed them under an affirmative action program.)  This protection is necessary, in an agrarian society, because these people in particular have no link to the means of survival–ownership or share-cropping rights on agricultural land.  The Book of Ruth–in which the title character is a widow, an orphan, and a stranger, and is given what she needs to survive and feed her family–is the paradigm of the proper treatment of this protected class.  The Sodom and Gomorrah story, in the Jewish tradition, is the paradigm of the improper treatment of this same class.

So when a rabbi talks about Sodom and Gomorrah, chances are he is talking about mistreatment of  poor and helpless people.  Clearly, that was what the Hafetz Hayyim meant.  And that is the lens through which religious Jews have to decide what to do about panhandlers.  We have a divinely-imposed obligation to help those who cannot support themselves.  Anyone who has any resources whatever to spare (over and above the support of their own family) is subject to that obligation, even poor people–even, in fact, a beggar who has had a good day, vis-a-vis one who has not been so lucky.

Among the most important and best-known pronouncements on the obligation to give to the poor are those of Moses ben Maimon–Maimonides.  Most Jews and many non-Jews are familiar with his classification of the eight grades of charity, of which the highest is enabling a poor person to become self-supporting, and the next highest is the gift in total anonymity on both sides.  It should be noted that he did not intend the higher levels to replace the lower (the person-to-person face-to-face gift, with varying degrees of good grace on the part of the giver.) In his less well-known works, Maimonides, who is writing in the 1200s in highly-urbanized Spain and Northern Africa, is realistic, and perfectly willing to admit that there are phony beggars out there, people who claim needs they do not in fact have.  The Holy One has allowed these fakers to exist, he tells us, to create a benefit of the doubt for people who refuse to give to beggars (Maimonides was realistic about those people, too.)  If all the beggars out there were really destitute, he says, anyone who failed to give to one of them when s/he could afford to would be committing a grave sin.  Since some of them are fakes, those who refuse to give are guilty only in proportion to the ratio of real beggars to phonies.  Maimonides also says that anyone who cannot respond to a beggar’s request for alms by giving money or other physical goods has an obligation at least to give him/her a cheerful greeting.

“Tzedekah” is usually translated “charity.”  But in fact, its meaning is much closer to “justice” or “righteousness”–closely related to what Plato and Aristotle mean by “justice” as “giving to each person what s/he deserves.”  It is an individual obligation, and creates individual rights.  The passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy which impose it are mostly written in the second person singular (for example, Ex. 22: 20ff.; Deut. 15; 7ff.) The beggar who approaches a by-passer is not asking for a favor, s/he is invoking a right.  “Fiddler on the Roof” retells an old Jewish beggar joke–”Alms for the poor,” cries the beggar. “Not this week, business hasn’t been so good,” replies the by-passer.  “So because you had a bad week, I should suffer?” says the beggar.  Maimonides would utterly concur with him.

So we have three possible views of undeserving beggars: Maimonides in the 13th century says that Heaven allows them to exist to keep stingy people from incurring grave sin–and if we refuse to give to them, we are taking a calculated risk; the “Poor Law” administrators of newly-industrialized England say that these are people who are refusing to work despite being able to do so, and giving to them merely encourages their idleness; and today’s “liberal” organizations say they are crazy or addicted, and giving to them only encourages them in not getting the care they need to become sane, sober, self-supporting human beings.  The Poor Law administrators had no trouble distinguishing between deserving and undeserving beggars–any adult (loosely defined) with the usual number of limbs and organs who wasn’t working was undeserving. Period.  But both Maimonides and today’s do-gooders are willing to grant at least some ambiguity in this category–we can’t always tell by looking at or talking to a beggar whether s/he is for real.  Maimonides took the position that, morally, the safest way to deal with this ambiguity was to give; today’s liberals take precisely the opposite position, perhaps because they believe the proportion of really destitute people to fakes has shifted, and possibly even reversed, since the 13th century.  The various surveys and studies of homeless people, street people, and beggars have produced conflicting and admittedly inconclusive results.  We generally don’t know, and probably can’t know, which of the people who approaches us on the street is for real.

And that’s assuming that the currently respectable definitions of “deserving” and “undeserving” are valid.  Suppose every beggar, every homeless person, were to clean up, sober up, and apply for every job currently available.  Suppose–even less likely–that each of those jobs were actually filled with a homeless person or a beggar.  How many people would that leave?  Given the incomplete state of our statistics on homelessness and indigency, we can’t know–but it is hard to believe there really are jobs out there for every one of the people who “ought” to be seeking them.

Certainly it is morally, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and physically better to be unemployed and sober than to be unemployed and drunk–but who are we to begrudge the unemployed alcoholic his daily ration of rotgut if we are not willing to help him sober up?

At any rate, the point of voucher programs is to benefit people who, although probably addicted or crazy, are at least genuinely in need and should not be ignored altogether.  There are, I think, three possible ways to deal with such people:
(1) You can assume the panhandler is a person like yourself, capable of making rational decisions about allocating his/her resources and just in need of some help in acquiring resources.  In which case, the appropriate course of action is to give her/him some money. [In this society, the way to acquire full human dignity is to earn or inherit a lot of money.  But one can have at least some dignity simply by virtue of having some money, regardless of how it was obtained, and being free to decide how to spend it.  We grant that much dignity to children over the age of 5 or so, to whom most parents give cash allowances.  Arguably, even the panhandler deserves no less.]

(2) Or you can assume that the panhandler is for some reason not capable of spending money on what s/he needs without degrading him/herself even more.  In that case, if you are genuinely concerned about the panhandler as a person, you will do what I have known both my husband and my father to do on various occasions–take him/her to a restaurant–or what I have, more timidly, done–bring him/her a sandwich from the nearest fast food joint.

(3) But if all you really want is to get the panhandler out of your face so you can go on about your business, you can give him/her a voucher.  This is not a symbol or an instrument of personal concern; it is a substitute for it.  Unlike real charity, it is not a means of bringing giver and recipient closer together, but of setting a distance between them which the giver considers appropriate.

Don’t get me wrong; vouchers aren’t as bad as using the police to sweep the “riffraff” off the “nicer” streets.  And they’re a lot better than shooting street people, as is done in Rio these days. But the program should not be dignified with the name of charity, when it is really nothing but a relatively humane method of crowd control.

A final question:  should our decisions on what to do about street beggars be guided by a general policy–that is, should we always give, or never give, based on some general principle?  Or should we make our decisions one day at a time and one beggar at a time, based on our circumstances and theirs at that particular moment?  I lean toward the latter position.  Can I afford it today?  Maybe my finances fluctuate more than most people’s, but that is often a valid question for me.  Assuming I can, am I obligated to give to every beggar who approaches me, or may I pick and choose?  Assuming I may, on what basis do I make those choices?  As a practical matter, I don’t give to people who scare me, or try to intimidate me, and I have no scruples about that.  And I don’t give to people who really do strike me as phonies.  (But I do try to remember the cheerful greeting when I’m not in a position to give.)

Ultimately I have to use my own judgment, bearing in mind what Maimonides says on the subject.  I believe that part of the obligation to give to those in need is an obligation to look at each person who asks as an individual, rather than merely a vehicle for my virtue.  The Hafetz Hayyim and many orthodox Jews today would probably disagree with that position, and might say instead that if your path today intersects a beggar’s, Heaven has made that happen, for the beggar’s benefit or yours, or both.  Some people find that a really appealing spiritual path. It is the source of many legends–not only in the Jewish tradition, by the way–about beggars turning out to be Elijah the prophet, or some other spiritual VIP, who rewards those who treat him kindly, with either spiritual blessings or, sometimes, material ones.  This may be another way of saying that a beggar who seems phony may turn out to be the real thing, for all we know–an important reminder even to those of us trained in the social sciences, about where we should be applying the benefit of the doubt.

In the abstract, of course, Maimonides is right–the best thing we could do for street beggars is put them in a position to support themselves.  But when clean, sober middle managers with MBAs are being “downsized,” that solution is obviously a long way off.  An economy in which even an unskilled person with episodic mental problems can get a job that pays enough to put a roof over his or her head is what we should be working for, in the long run* .  The long run ought not to be coterminous with the messianic age.  “In the long run,” as Winston Churchill says, “we are all dead.”  Street people, if not cared for decently, are likely to be dead in the short run–some statistics indicate that the average street person will last, at most, ten years or until age sixty, whichever comes sooner.  We now know that changing the political party in power, or its philosophy, does nothing whatever to reduce the number of beggars on the street.  Until we can figure out what will, we have an obligation to tend to the short-run welfare of the poor we have with us.

Jane Grey