The Giving Review: Tragedy and triumph

This article first appeared in the Giving Review

Reflecting on the historic federal Welfare Reform Act three decades after its signing, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently noted,

we had been deeply influenced by Marvin Olasky’s 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion, which clearly articulated that traditional reformers disliked giving the poor money because they were convinced it increased dependency and subsidized alcoholism and drug addiction. Olasky made the case that Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty were sharp breaks from the classic American approach to effective philanthropy. In his view, the president’s methods had institutionalized a passive vision of the poor as helpless and inevitably requiring government help.

The first book I read on upward mobility that made the case against this passive vision of the poor—The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers are Reviving our Streets and Our Neighborhoods—was published four years after Tragedy by my late boss and mentor, Bob Woodson. And while Olasky was enormously influential and provided a much-needed corrective to the prevailing wisdom on poverty alleviation at the time, Woodson’s work pushed back much more vigorously against the dehumanization of the poor by insisting that low-income people of all races be viewed through the lens of capacity rather than pathology. His vision extended beyond the ability of the nondisabled poor to be economically self-sufficient to the idea that struggling low-income communities could and must lead their own renewal from within.

Woodson and Olasky were friendly throughout Bob’s life; notably, in 1995, Olasky’s World magazine published a very-helpful article about Bob’s (ultimately successful) efforts to protest the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse—under then Governor George W. Bush—placing barriers to grassroots substance-abuse-recovery programs that utilized ex-drug addicts as counselors. And while—as far as I know—neither man read the other’s book, there is plenty of reason to believe each would have found plenty to agree with. Yet as America continues—despite some bumps along the way—to become more prosperous, Woodson’s vision to move beyond reducing dependency to releasing the full human potential of the poor may offer the more-relevant framework today.

A fuller understanding of the history of American charity

Chapters 2 through 5 of Tragedy survey a wide variety of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish charities that served the poor from colonial times to the early 20^th Century. Olasky’s accounts highlight the locally led organizations that not only labored to alleviate the material suffering of the poor, but also worked hard to discern the causes of their poverty and hold them accountable to high moral standards. Unfortunately absent are any examples of the plentiful mutual-aid societies and church-led efforts that were present within both slave and free Black communities during this same time period.

Although Woodson’s emphasis was on contemporary solutions to social problems, Chapter 3 of Triumphs does offer a helpful supplement to Olasky’s overview. Community “leaders urged blacks to avoid reliance on charity and promoted mutual aid organizations which they believed would encourage thrift, industry, and morality,” Woodson writes. “The Free African Society, the first recorded black mutual aid organization, was founded in Philadelphia by Absolom Jones and Richard Allen in 1787.” Members contributed to care for the poor, but aid was given with the condition that “their necessity was not brought about by imprudence” and that they were committed to live “an orderly and sober life.” Just three decades later, Woodson notes, there were at least 100 similar (Black) organizations in Philadelphia alone, and more than 30 in Baltimore.

Both Olasky and Woodson thought future efforts should be built on the successes of the past. But Woodson’s inclusion of the “black heritage that was marked by determination, self-sufficiency and achievement” and Olasky’s omission of the same meant that they had fairly different ideas about how to transform contemporary struggling urban neighborhoods. In his preface to the 30^th-anniversary edition of Tragedy, Olasky apologized for “colorblindness regarding the effects of segregation,” conceding that there were components of Black American history and experience that were unfamiliar to him.

Morality and motivation

Both Olasky and Woodson condemned the perverse incentives in public policy that subsidized economically unproductive and morally bad behavior while penalizing work and self-restraint. Both also recognized the powerful role of social pressure in shaping individual behavior, as well as the destructive effect that changing norms had in what they saw as a deadly moral decline.

As its title indicates, much of Tragedy is devoted to critiquing the liberal/progressive interpretation of the term “compassion” and offering what the author believes to be a more-accurate definition. Thanks to Jonathan Haidt, we can understand that the liberals Olasky critiqued were almost single-mindedly concerned about the care/harm “moral tastebud,” while Olasky and his supporters focused more on a proportional understanding of “fairness.” This conflict of sentiment pervades the book, with one of its chief goals being to teach the reader what “true” compassion toward the poor should look like, while promising that “true” compassion would also be far more effective at reducing poverty.

While Woodson would have agreed that false or misguided compassion was harmful, he saw the greater crime as the overlooked and thus wasted human capital in low-income neighborhoods. In his view, America didn’t just need to be relieved of the economic burden of the poor; it desperately needed the creativity, innovation, and wisdom of all of its citizens, not just the already well-educated or well-off. Rather than mouths to feed or bodies to clothe and house, Bob looked at low-income people and saw potential businessmen, inventors, doctors, teachers, and leaders for the entire country.

The authors’ respective emphases on how to motivate positive change mirror their moral arguments. Each recognizes the role of both shame and aspiration in suppressing bad behavior and driving good, but Olasky emphasizes the decline of shame as a primary factor in negative developments such as the rise of dependency and decline of intact families. Woodson would have agreed, but believed that people were more motivated to change by victories that were possible rather than by injuries to be avoided.

Moreover, Bob understood intuitively that the more prosperous a society became, the more-important aspiration was to motivating transformation. If something is possible for one person, why can’t it (or something equally desirable) be possible for you? This was what he called “constructive envy:” not covetousness, but a healthier alternative to resenting people who seem to have been handed so much more than you have.

Addressing the knowledge and free-rider problems

Both Olasky and Woodson were acutely aware of the moral hazards of helping the poor in the wrong way, even with the best of intentions. But how could any person or organization accurately determine what would actually be helpful to any given low-income individual or community, versus what might do more harm than good? Relatedly, any kind of support would theoretically be vulnerable to exploitative free-riders. Here again, they differ not in their diagnosis of the problem, but in their prescriptions for how to best mitigate it.

Olasky’s “Seven Marks of Compassion”—affiliation, bonding, categorization, discernment, employment, freedom, and God—focus on strategies and guidelines for “helpers” to lovingly gather as much information as possible about the people they are helping. “Categorization” and “discernment” are meant to guide the helper to assess as accurately as possible why a particular person is struggling and whether or not he is being honest with the helper and/or himself. Likewise, the expectation of “employment” is meant to mitigate against free-riding.

Perhaps ironically, much of Tragedy traces the growth and development of the bureaucracy of both private charity and entitlement programs as valiant, if sometimes misguided, attempts to address the knowledge and free-rider problems, before ultimately (for the most part) giving up. Complicated forms filled out in triplicate, countless attachments and follow-up questions added by various departments, and repeated interviews managed to be both humiliating and ineffective. Not only did the morass of paperwork fail to meaningfully improve outcomes for the poor, but as Woodson points out, it also created a secondary perverse incentive: an entire subset of bureaucrats whose livelihoods depended on an endless supply of poor people to give forms to.

Woodson’s approach to the knowledge and free-rider problems wasn’t to gather endless information about the individual poor. It was to support and empower leaders who understood their own neighborhoods. They already knew the person in question, or had enough local understanding to ask the right questions, receive honest answers, and ultimately make the right judgments, at least most of the time. Woodson did not value these leaders (the titular “Josephs”) as cultural translators for outside helpers, but as the catalysts of the individual and community transformation themselves. His list of defining characteristics of a Joseph is not meant to guide the outsider to become directly involved in the lives of the poor, but rather to identify and support the people who are best suited to do so.

Imago Dei and viewing the poor through the lens of capacity

Both Olasky and Woodson write with an understanding of the tragic brokenness of all humanity, as well the inherent immeasurable worth of every human being. Thus, both men seek ways to help that affirm rather than undermine human dignity. For Olasky, this largely means helpers physically keeping company (“bonding”) with the poor. Although he acknowledges that former addicts are remarkably effective at ministering to recovering addicts and that there were “religious and ethnic ties that underscored the efforts of Jewish organizations and other groups” to effectively “aid members of their own community,” the essential resources in Olasky’s view are the “time and smiles” of the morally upstanding members of the middle and upper classes, and it is “stinginess” to not allow the poor ample time in their presence.

Woodson actually directly objects to this approach. He writes:

Recently, from conservative corners, the idea of “effective compassion” has been posited as a means of reforming counterproductive charity. It suggests replacing services provided by distant, cumbersome, counterproductive bureaucracy with personalized, privatized services to the poor. Although this is a step in the right direction it is still a flawed paradigm for the strategies to aid the poor, for it still retains the image of the poor being “rescued” by agents from outside the community, rather than supporting the indigenous agents of health and healing that exist within low-income neighborhoods. The same pitfall is inherent in a recently announced initiative for “volunteerism” that has been promoted by many on the left and the right.

The essential resources in Woodson’s understanding are the wisdom and insight of the morally upstanding members of struggling communities who he believed are much more capable of catalyzing lasting transformation than the most morally upstanding outsider.

Much has changed in America in the three decades since these books were published, revealing both tragedy and triumph. Despite welfare reform, entitlement spending has grown to $4.1 trillion, so the dependency of most low- and middle-income Americans on federal dollars—and the accompanying unsustainable national debt—continues. On the other hand, the violent-crime rate—astonishingly high when both books were published—fell for decades all over the country, due at least in part to the indigenously led groups Woodson championed his entire career.

Olasky notes in his 30^th-anniversary preface that many authors and thinkers have taken up the mantle of Tragedy and write on similar themes. And while he is rarely acknowledged by name, echoes of Woodson’s ideas can be seen in the recent astounding homicide reductions in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Stockton, Oakland, and other cities across the country. Both Olasky’s properly compassionate helpers and Woodson’s indigenous leaders doubtless have roles to play in efforts to increase upward mobility in the future. However, Woodson’s more-robust view of the capacity of all Americans—regardless of current income or education level—likely has greater potential for lasting, meaningful transformation.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-tragedy-and-triumph/