COVER -> DAY ONE
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The consistent finding of opinion polls that over 90% of the people of the United States believe in God is sure evidence that to be religious is by no means the same as to love your neighbour. Indeed, America's social policy, or lack of it, is one of Christianity's greatest contemporary failings.
This might be explained by my encounter on a long haul flight with a 19-year-old trainee sports instructor from Minnesota returning from a mission to convert the good people of the Ukraine to Christianity. Not only did she not know that adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church are Christians, a theological equivalent of the Bush geography deficit, she also knew absolutely nothing about the New Testament. She was, if anything, a synagogue free Jew.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that but it might explain the emphasis in American Christianity on God as moral judge rather than God the leading advocate of loving thy neighbour as thyself. There is a world of difference between Jewish scripture refined for two millennia by Rabbi¹s and the same books swallowed undigested by Christian fundamentalists.
I was, then, a little startled to hear President Bush in his Inaugural address making a specific reference to that New Testament story of the Good Samaritan who, you may recall, unlike a number of others before him, did not cross the street to avoid the man in want of assistance and dug into his own purse to provide it. Perhaps the moral of the story for Bush is that those who preceded the Good Samaritan along the way were public officials, drawing the moral that private philanthropy is more laudable than public fairness. The thought struck me when Bush mentioned the Good Samaritan that he was thinking of John Ashcroft but it didn't linger. Sadly, it must be concluded that the poor get by much better on social democratic legislation than on the Book of Deuteronomy.
Regulars of this column will recall two of my previous pronouncements:
- the first, that whenever something or other goes wrong there is an immediate call from all sides -- including the opponents of 'Big Government' -- for the Government to do something about it;
- the second, that people on the political right are caught in a hopeless contradiction between moral authoritarianism and economic liberalism.
The case of the Transatlantic Twins is an interesting one in these respects. They were bought via information on the Internet but there was some double-dealing on the part of the adoption agency so that the children, Belinda and Kimberley, were sold to both the American Allen's and, then later, were then sold to the British Kilshaw's. Separating the general from the particular, there was an immediate outcry against the buying and selling of children, yet another sickening example of babies being used as commodities, as lifestyle trophies.
At this point I had just put down yet another Dickens novel which turns on the status of young children and the power of the rich to relieve the sufferings of the poor through adoption and had picked up a Thomas Keneally book which recounts, among other things, the tale of an Aboriginal orphan rescued by a prosperous Australian settler. Of course it is unsatisfactory that it should be the rich who pay for adoption and take up the unwanted children of the poor but that is better than taking them for nothing. It is a paltry and morally queasy form of redistribution but better than the care home, the modern equivalent of the Victorian orphanage.
Those who are inclined to look down their noses at such squalid dealings might care to examine fundamental causes. There have been calls this week for the British Government to pay for the support of adopted children, enabling poorer people to adopt on equal terms. Why not, I ask, give poorer people more money to do what they like with, including the option to adopt? But, as I have said before, those who wish to improve society in one way or another generally think that money is a last resort and, unaccountably, the rich always have much more need of it than the poor.
At the root of the adoption controversy there lies a simple statement supported by every major social survey in modern times:
economic deprivation leads poor people to acts of self preservation which are biologically driven and short-sighted. The civilisation that we value is based, above all, on deferred gratification but the harder pressed you are the more difficult it is to defer anything and if you have nothing, you have nothing at all to defer.
A society based, as the far 'Right' would have it, on authoritarianism may simply be a case of the rich and powerful mercilessly exploiting the poor but perhaps there is something more psychologically fundamental here, a feeling - perhaps self serving - that some people are beyond remedy; that there is nothing to be done for the drug addict, the prostitute, the layabout, on this earth.
And, if you believe in Calvin's theory of the "Elect", nothing to be done for them in the next world either. If that is true, then a person doomed to damnation from the start is not worthy of attention in this world. Thus we have a tight weave of exclusivist theology and exclusivist prosperity, each justifying the other.
To escape the biologically driven, short-sighted act requires self discipline but self discipline requires resources, moral and material. The more one has of the first sort the less one relies on the second; but repression and moral authoritarianism do not transfer moral resources from the powerful to the weak but quite the reverse, they let it be known that the weak are beyond moral self expression, thereby reinforcing a self fulfilling prophesy.
At a more fundamental level, however, the poor and the weak know selfishness when they see it and if their supposed betters are chronically selfish in the best of worldly circumstances it is too much to ask those living on the margin of physical and mental viability to be any better?
This all may seem a very long way from the Inaugural of President Bush and the fate of the twins but it is not.
We have a tendency to revert to the "Noble poor", the law-abiding ghetto dweller, and we cannot have enough of the story of the rich man's difficulties in passing through the Eye of the Needle.
But, as with everything else, a moderate amount of well being makes life much easier than having too much on the one hand or too little on the other.
Let us hope, perversely, that President Bush's knowledge of scripture is as threadbare as his knowledge of almost everything else, that he did not mean the remark about The Good Samaritan literally (as is the fundamentalist tradition), that the tax cut will be moderate and benefit the less well off, leaving enough room for an expansion in welfare programmes. Let us hope.
