By Jeremiah Keenan
Monday, April 30, 2018
When I was about 14 I overheard a close family friend
comment on another woman’s hair. “Such long hair! Quite expensive in terms of
shampoo.” The involuntary exclamation illustrates a part of the world I grew up
in. Some women really did view their hair from the standpoint of incurred
expenses in shampoo, and kept it short as a result.
My family was better off than that, but we still lived
along the U.S. poverty line. We didn’t own a house, car, or TV. My parents
rented a three-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle compound, made us kids a big
bookshelf out of plywood, and taught us how to type on a used Mac with a 1995
facing-smile logo that spent a lot of time looking at me above progress bars on
the screen.
That life wasn’t bad. Or, at least, most of the bad parts weren’t caused by “poverty.” You see, we
lived in a socialist country where the government allowed enough free
enterprise to fuel economic growth but maintained firm control to ensure
economic equality. President Xi Jinping described our government’s strategy:
“We want to continuously enlarge the pie, while also making sure we divide the
pie correctly. Chinese society has long held the value of ‘Don’t worry about
the amount, worry that all have the same amount.’”
Previous instantiations of this long-held value meant
pretty much everybody (except powerful Communist Party members) did not have
enough to eat. But 1980s reforms aimed at enlarging the pie had improved
matters a great deal, so the common people lived better every day. Kids of my
generation had soft little jaws and even chubby tummies. We did not eat the
leaves off trees. We lived in apartments with electricity and, in the cities,
running water.
The bad part of life was that the government maintained
such a firm control of everything. This meant no freedom of speech or of
religion. A couple million innocents were ground through the labor camps while
I grew up, and one or two family acquaintances subjected to physical torture,
but it was the only way government could firmly control everything. Without
this control, they could not ensure that the pie, instead of simply growing
larger, would be correctly divided. No government can equitably divide what it
does not first control.
From Poverty to
People’s Ideas of Poverty
From this environment, I was grafted, at the age of 18,
into the American Ivy League. I became interested in U.S. politics: wrote for
the newspaper, attended debates, tickled my brain with honors classes and the
popular books of the American elites.
Young American elites love to talk about income
inequality. Last spring, a great lecture hall was filled with them, debating a
proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy to fight poverty in America. The Left
side of the room gave impassioned speeches on the moral necessity of fighting
poverty.
One had a relative who earned only $10 an hour. This
relative suffered greatly from her wage, and the speaker doubted she could
survive if she weren’t living with her parents. There was a tremor in the
speaker’s voice: “It’s immoral; it’s ridiculous,” she said, to have such
immiseration in a country of so much wealth. We have a moral obligation to raise taxes on corporations and the top 10
percent.
These arguments are mainstream leftist. If you do not
want the government to take rich people’s money for the poor, you are very
selfish. The New York Times says
Jesus rebukes you if you don’t. Now, the members of my team opposing tax hikes
were eager to not be selfish, so they did not dare contradict the notion that
$10 an hour was an immoral wage.
On the contrary, they agreed society must fight poverty. But they warned against high taxation’s
dangers to the economy and deplored the ineffectiveness of simple income
redistribution. The pie must be big, they argued. Jobs are what ultimately save
people from poverty.
This debate reflected the perennial economic squabbles in
Washington. This week, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a plan for made-work
guaranteed by the government that pays $15 per hour. Predictably, the center
and right have argued it will make the economic pie shrink, which hurts the
poor. But they do so without examining the moral
framework that undergirds leftist economic policies like this. So let’s do
that.
Expanding the
Economy Won’t Fully Solve Poverty
I don’t believe that making a bigger pie will save people
from “poverty.” Some people will always produce—and so earn—less than others
do. If you really believe it’s immoral
for one person to live on $400 a week while another lives on $4,000, then the
obvious solution is to let pie-growth suffer a little, if need be, and start
dividing people’s incomes among everyone.
Now, nobody really thinks herself morally obligated to
give every poor person she meets half the value of their difference in income.
This argument assumes morality is intrinsically a personal matter, and leftists
do not believe this—at least, in China they don’t. In China it is generally
understood that income inequality is wrong not because God or conscience
declares you must give to those with less, but because utopia cannot be
achieved when one person owns what another does not.
American leftist elites express things a little
differently. They like the term “social justice” instead of “social morality,”
but they adhere to the same premise that individual morals are the product of
social organization, not the other way around. In other words, people do not do right or wrong things with respect to
their income; they simply reflect the
rightness or wrongness of the social structures that control them. Therefore,
the path to being better people is to organize and vote for a better system.
Most of the leftists sitting on three sides of me at the
Ivy League debate would have agreed that any notion of universal personal moral absolutes—a God-given
obligation to be chaste, charitable, truthful, temperate, or virtuous in any
way—was a dangerous fiction. They were devotees of socialized morality—“our”
obligations to follow expert opinion in organizing our society, not “my”
obligation to follow God or conscience regardless of society.
Within this framework of socialized morality, voting for
the rich to give money to the poor really does make you “good.” So I had to
start at square one when it was my turn to speak, with the very concept of
individual morality. I had to advocate directly for private virtue and true
charity.
Most of the people I was facing had no bonds of deep
friendship or love with “poor” individuals. They could scarcely be expected to
know that a great life can be started on $400 a week, or to understand that it
doesn’t really help truly impoverished Americans—most of whom are paralyzed
with laziness, loneliness, hurt, or depression—to send them off to a faceless
federal bureaucracy that gives them little chunks of wealthy people’s income.
So We Talked about
the Morality Underlying Poverty Relief
So I gave a lecture on charity to my leftist colleagues.
I have never seen a room full of them more stunned or bedraggled. I talked
about inviting homeless folks back to my place for dinner, which would not have
been considered impressive at my West Philadelphia church.
See, the University of Pennsylvania perches on the edge
of a big ghetto. There are always folks walking around begging for money,
trying to make eye contact, saying they’re hungry. No conservative Christian
conscience could always ignore them. So I asked the room a simple question: how
many of them, who cared so much about poverty, had ever, even once, shared
their time and a meal with one of those who asked?
I confirmed by show of hands that only three or four of
them had. The status quo among the leftist elites does not include paying
attention to someone who is not facilitating your interests or career. I was
appealing to their conscience, giving them a little peek into the possibility
that socialized morality isn’t just the smart person’s version of real
morality, but a self-serving rejection of it.
Had I had time, I could have gone on to point out that
the religious right consistently
engage in much higher rates of charitable activity than the secular left
does. They donated fully 100 times as
much money in total, and 50 times as much to secular causes. They volunteer more of their time to help those in
need. They give more blood. They visit more prisoners. They establish more
hospitals. They adopt more children, and help foster youngsters stuck in awful,
government-run orphanages.
Leftists Want to
Mandate Their Personal Stinginess
I can put up with leftists being stingy. As long as
Americans who do believe in personal virtue are allowed to freely associate,
raise their own children, control their own earnings, and spread their own
ideas, there will always be plenty of charity in our land.
But the problem is that leftists aren’t just stingy.
Leftism does not simply negate personal morals, it replaces them with
socialized ones. Income inequality, remember, is immoral. Since socialized morality is intrinsically, well, social, it cannot simply live and let
live.
The Christian can give his own money to the poor, but the
socialist must have the wealth of the
rich. The Christian can preach in his own church, but the socialist must decide
whether it is appropriate for anyone to maintain so extravagant a thing as a
house to worship God. The Christian thinks it a duty and a right to school his
own children, but the socialist must prepare every child to think and act in
the interests of society as he understands them.
In China, this is frankly understood, and the
consequences frankly implemented. Communist Party members are required to profess
atheism in order to rule. Otherwise, as Central Committee member Zhu Weiqun put
it in 2011, the party would be “divided ideologically and theoretically”
between “idealism and materialism” and “theism and atheism.”
Notice the terms used: idealism is the belief that
something is right or wrong inherently (usually because God said so);
materialism teaches that right and wrong depend on social outcomes, such as
standard of living. Everybody knows these two worldviews are not compatible, so
in China, where leftists rule, religion is simply not allowed to exist in the
government.
“All this is a lot of theory,” you may say. “A lot of
talk about ‘isms’ and morality. What does it mean for the average person?”
What This Means
for People in Need
Well, let me tell you. When I was little and went to the
hospital it was not uncommon to see folks lying beside the hospital steps
begging. I used to wonder why they picked that spot to beg. As I grew older, I
learned the answer.
JinShui was 17 when I was 15, and I met her with her
parents in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. She sat propped up on a low bed with a
board for a mattress, her left leg swollen to three times its natural size. A
month or so before, a member of our church had sat down next to her on the
street to learn her needs. She needed money for hospital bills.
Our church, though poor, pulled together money within
hours. But help had come late. The cancer had been curable early on, you see,
but JinShui was from the countryside where the people are as poor as the good
earth. Only party members could pay for cancer treatment there. And Chinese
hospitals don’t give treatment to save your life, not if they know you can’t
pay.
I remember sitting in a cold conference room a few weeks
later, where we secretly gathered for JinShui’s makeshift memorial service. Her
younger brother was sitting in front of me. His black “leather” jacket was
draped over his trembling shoulders, the arms sticking out stiff and empty on
each side. He kept rubbing his face with his hands and blowing tissues about
his nose.
The police did not break up our meeting that evening, but
they could have if they wanted to. We sang and prayed, and though the Chinese
Communist Party does not forbid religious practice, it demands that all
religions develop their ideas about God in accord with the “needs of society” first, and scriptures or conscience second.
Our little church just followed the Bible, which Chinese
authorities, like some American authorities, think does not serve the needs of
society. So people from the only widespread local organizations in the country,
like us, whose members would sit down next to a dying girl on the street, were
all law-breakers. We were poor, underground, always dodging the police, always
excluded from the public square.
We could not publically open a church hospital or charity
the way Christians do in America. We could not even walk out onto the street
and preach Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. We did our best under the
circumstances. JinShui died, but many others lived. We tried. But under
socialism with Chinese characteristics, how much really could we do?
You see, it’s all very simple in the end. People who want
to help the needy will help the
needy. People who want “society” to redistribute money to the “poor” won’t.
People who want to help the poor aren’t going to divert their resources to
jailing the innocent. But the folks who need to make others help the poor? Well, that’s a very different story.
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