The Tragedy of American Compassion

Rating:
Summary: Fellow liberals listen up!
Review: FELLOW LEFTIES AND LIBERALS, it is time to listen patiently to what Marvin Olasky has to say, at least to his main premise. If we are honest, welfare-by-government has not only helped a lot of people but also caused a lot of problems. If we are honest, we all feel there must be a better way. I was astonished to find myself agreeing with Olasky on one big point: he says that you may help the needy, but only if you are close enough to them to know who they are, and what their real needs are. A family with a jobless single parent is going to need a hand-- well, make friends with them and help out. Babysit. Feed the kids. The block drunk doesn't just need a poke of groceries, (though he may need that too) he needs a friend and mentor who loves him enough to also give him heck when he needs it. Get it? Big Blind Programs don't do it.

Having said that, Olasky is a unrealistic to think that good people will fill the void. They won't. What needs to change is the whole possession-worship, or dollar worship that we all buy into. Gerry Spence calls it "...the New King that America has crowned. His blood is green....." Property kills the godly impulse of generosity that we were all born with. Don't leave it to the gummint to love your fellow-man.

Marvin Olasky is a conservative, no doubt. But before you decide to tar-brush the man, listen to him.

Rating:
Summary: Cannot be improved upon.
Review: I rarely give out five-star reviews, but boy, if any book deserves five stars it's this one. Each page is an eye-opener, what Olasky brings to light is the severest and most truthful indictment yet of the government-sponsored poverty industry in America. Readers of William Bennett, Ann Coulter, Bernie Goldberg...and the can use this to show liberals exactly why the welfare state doesn't work, instead of simply claiming it does not work.

Rating:
Summary: Cannot be improved upon.
Review: I rarely give out five-star reviews, but boy, if any book deserves five stars it's this one. Each page is an eye-opener, what Olasky brings to light is the severest and most truthful indictment yet of the government-sponsored poverty industry in America. Readers of William Bennett, Ann Coulter, Bernie Goldberg...and the can use this to show liberals exactly why the welfare state doesn't work, instead of simply claiming it does not work.

Rating:
Summary: Masterful and courageous
Review: Just as it is easier for any of us to practice our compassion by voting for more government programs and occasionally tossing some checks at charities, it probably would have been easier for Mr. Olasky to hold the fire that is this remarkable book. While others (including some of the 20+ friends and colleagues I've favored with copies of this book) complain a bit about Olasky's somewhat comprehensive treatment of the history of charity in America, I found those portions of his book particularly illuminating. How edifying indeed to learn that over 200 years of truly compassionate reformers had warned us against the mockery of compassion that is the welfare state, that it would deprive the needy of essential personal contact with benefactors and volunteers, that it would lend "assistance" breeding dependence and personal ruin, and that it would fail to make the great demands on givers and recipients alike necessary to render compassion either true or effective. If you have ever found yourself frustrated that an attempt to help a needy person, family, or neighborhood failed, this book can likely show what was missing, just as it shows what is missing on a staggering scale in our country's misguided effort to use government to help the needy. A book destined to be unpopular among those with a stake in relieving private citizens of their personal responsibilities to their fellow man, those receiving benefits without efforts at achieving independence, and those with an agenda to expand the authority of government on the false promise of a great society. No responsible commentator on present-day American can afford not to read this book. Bravo, Mr. Olasky.

Rating:
Summary: Good ideas, questionable ideology
Review: Marvin Olasky's basic perscription for dealing with poverty in America is right-on and should be practiced by all Christians - instead of waiting for the government, we should get out there and help the poor ourselves. If we did, the world would be a better place. Our old government welfare system created a ponderous machine that punished families for staying together and made dependence a way of life.

That said, here's why Olasky's book failed to totally impress me.

For starters, Olasky doesn't seem to want to reform government programs for the poor, he wants to eliminate them entirely. It is a radically dangerous idea to absolve society's institutions of any responsibility for the well-being of its weakest members. For all of Olasky's professed "Christianity," this sounds more like dyed-in-the-wool secular humanism to me. Get rid of the external pressure limiting man's innate goodness, and man will naturally do what is good. Anyone thinking in line with the Bible will see that this is not true. People are fallen, and will not naturally do the right thing if left to themselves. That's why the Old Testament had numerous social welfare provisions in the Hebrew law directed at widows and orphans. The Bible also expresses concern for the just treatment of workers (Mal. 3:5, James 5:1-5, etc. A verse in Sirach, I forget the citation, says "To destroy a man's livelihood is to shed blood.") Olasky, like all "Christian Right" thinkers (James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Richard Land, et. al.), completely ignores the reality of the "working poor" and the surging profits of those at the top while those in the middle and the bottom were subject to massive lay-offs and downsizing aimed solely at making rich stockholders richer. Throughout the 1990s, people working one or more jobs routinely could not meet their bills and relied on beseiged food banks and other charities. The economy - booming under President Clinton - may have given some relief to these families, but we are foolish to think this economic boom has benefited everyone equally and that it will last forever. Relying on Olasky's voluntary charity is not the best - or the Biblical - way to deal with these problems. It is disturbing that Olasky seems to blame all poor people for their problems. Granted, there are many homeless people who started out as recreational drug users. But many are mentally ill. A mother working two blue collar jobs to pay for a family that her husband abandoned is not in her situation as a result of her own sin.

It should be noted that Olasky is the editor of World magazine, a Bush campaign advisor, and has been associated with groups like the Council for Biblical Man and Womanhood and other organizations that blame society's predicament on feminists, homosexuals, the media, college professors, etc. I'm not saying that these criticisms are wrong - on the contrary, "the cultural left" is very real. But it's hard to sympathize with Olasky and his Christian Right cohorts who see deconstructionists in Ivy League English departments as a larger threat to families than both parents having to work two jobs each to keep a roof over their heads. It's incredulous that these groups berate women for working - the majority of women work to pay the bills, not to attain feminist glory (Olasky may not know this, since his biography makes it clear he was raised by well-to-do Jewish parents and attended top schools). Of course, with all the money folks like Olasky and Dobson get from groups like the Council for National Policy and the Unification Church, we can be sure that evangelical Christians aren't going to get to hear any opinions other than those that fit neatly into the Republican party platform any time soon. I'd like the Coors Foundation or Rev. Moon to drop me a few million so I could set up a radio show or a magazine and suddenly become an evangelical "leader," but I guess I'll have to content myself with the web.

Rating:
Summary: Deceptive and Dangerous
Review: Marvin Olasky's book, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Regnery 1992) is a dangerous work. The danger comes from Olasky's obviously correct belief that one of the key ingredients missing from private and governmental programs designed to show compassion to the poor (and he focuses only on compassion to the poor, not other groups who might somehow be disadvantaged), is the lack of personal contact. The danger is that he marshalls an enormous amount of evidence that ultimately proves nothing to make his implicit case for the reduction or elimination of governmental aid programs and to prove that the Great Society experiment of the 1960s and even the New Deal substantially (and tragically) have failed.

First, Olasky's definition of compassion is a self-consciously fundamentalist Christian and lexicographically literal one, "suffering with." Thus he dismisses the feeling of compassion as inadequate because it does not incorporate within it the act of co-suffering. O.K. But what Olasky fails to explain (except perhaps to a true believer in Protestant revealed truth) is why we should be compassionate in the first place, what the roots of our motivations to care are, although he hints towards the beginning of the book at something like Humean moral sympathy. This is an important question - because it is only if we understand why we care that we can evaluate whether how we manifest that caring is good or bad.

More to the point, even if Olasky is right about compassion, he draws heroic conclusions from evidence that fails to support them. He spends more than a hundred pages (of a 230 page book) giving us anecdotes about the conditions of the poor before the twentieth century and the efforts that were made to help them and concludes that (i) poverty was as bad or worse then, and (ii) efforts to alleviate it were more successful. Nowhere do we find any serious study of the conditions of the poor; nowhere do we find comparative income figures, the relative cost of living, evidence of what people considered necessities and how they dealt with it, the distribution and quality of health care and education, and the like. Nowhere do we have a sense of what the mean and median incomes might have been over time, what the level of inequality was (the Gini coefficient is never mentioned) which would at least give us the benefit of knowing how people were living relative to one another. Olasky doesn't even tell us the absolute populations at any given time, so that his stories of numbers of people helped give us no relative sense of how successful the charitable endeavors he details really were, nor how vast was the problem they were addressing. Nor does he do this for the present, when good statistics are readily available, preferring instead again to rely entirely on anecdote and impression. With such a body of evidence, Olasky's conclusions are nothing other than statements of impression or opinion, statements that he gives us no basis for evaluating, and therefore statements that we ultimately must reject.

Another major failing is that Olasky implicitly assumes that competitive capitalism is the normal state of nature. This is disappointing, because he is careful to distinguish between the views on human nature held by various people concerned with the poor (and he is clearly on the side of original sin). The American market economy is clearly not a fact of nature but constructed on the basis of a founding philosophy of liberty and private property and is sustained and supported by laws (enforced by government) and governmental institutions (like legislatures, regulatory agencies, and courts) that keep the markets functioning at public expense. Thus, it seems disingenuous for Olasky who is clearly smart enough to know this, to treat government aid as somehow inappropriate (even to those to whom he refers as the "unworthy poor"). If we have caused structural poverty, then we are obliged to fix it.

Of course Olasky doesn't believe that we have caused structural poverty. While he allows for the occasional need for low-cost housing, he asserts or assumes at various points that every able-bodied person who wants to work could find a job. But of course, as with the rest of the book, there are no statistics on job availability, national distribution of work, wages, and the like, statistics which are readily available for the period with which Olasky is most concerned - the present.

And that perhaps is the last and most damning bit of evidence against Olasky's case. When he arrives at the present, he blames the increase in homelessness and poverty on the misguided social experiments of the 1960s, and continues his analysis into their application in the 1970s and 1990s. There is a decade of discussion conspicuously absent - the 1980s. There is no discussion at all of how the philosophy, attitude, and practice of Reaganism increased homelessness, poverty, inequality, and the national debt. The fact that Olasky doesn't even discuss this destroys the credibility of his book and reveals him as a (smart) shill for right-wing conservativsm.

Olasky's heart is almost certainly in the right place - the problem is that he allows his politics to blind his vision and ultimately his scholarship. He may be right in his conclusions - but you can't know from reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: The Tragedy of American Confusion
Review: Normally I'd advise against reading this cruel book, but since Olasky is now a close friend and advisor of George W. Bush, I'd suggest it to give an idea just how bad a president he will be if, heaven forbid, he is elected.

Compassion is singled out here as a "Cause" of social ills like poverty and despair. Olasky has no sympathy for the downtrodden-it's their own fault, he tells us, or, better. the product of liberal bleeding hearts who want to help. Notions of social justice and human rights have no place in the Social Darwinian model of this "Christian" whose ideology goes against everything Christ taight and stood for.

Olasky is just another tool of the rich. Hoe apt that he is now an advisor to George W., the "Compassionate Conservative". If Bush is elected, and Olasky's ideas become instrumental in his social policies, that will be the REAL American Tragedy.

Rating:
Summary: Good ideas, questionable ideology
Review: Olasky takes his readers on a very thorough, and rather academic, journey, looking at how society historically provided for those less fortunate and what lessons we can learn from it today. Whether one agrees with Olasky's religious views or not, he presents a compelling historical argument for the success of private institutions providing for those of us who are less fortunate.

This book is not written by an armchair quarterback academic writing in a sequestered academic office in some ivy-league shool. It is good, line-level writing from someone who has lived among those of whom he writes - all the more credible the writing.

Rating:
Summary: The Tragedy of American Conservatism
Review: Olasky's book shows nothing but his hatred of those who can't survive when they can't work or when they can on the low, low wages millions of people are expected to live on, not their oppression. Employers are those who are subsidized when they don't pay enough for workers to survive on in order to work for them and taxpayers provide food stamps and other forms of assistance. Jesus himself said "The laborer is worthy of his hire" He had respect for the working person and his needs and valued his humanity. Olasky would rather disregard the importance of decent stable income as a stabilizer and incentive in personal and family life and try to fix people and problems piecemeal - those largely caused by Republican callousness and greed. Olasky is always righteous about abortion, but if you're a poor working woman, Republicans are very much to blame if you can't afford to keep your child. They say welfare encourages dependence. It's not good, but a mother has to protect her child. Olasky and his cronies including George W. Bush, Jr., now, they're great friends, will go to any lengths to deny that low wages encourage our dependence on the cheap labor of the poor. Capitalism is not evil in itself,it just needs more of a human context and the type of challenging Democrats do to protect the value of work and bring recognition that the people largely own the means of production - their labor - the Clinton administration hasn't done so badly. They've beat the Republicans at their own game without big tax cuts, putting the taxpayers in more debt, and all of Olasky's friend Gingrich's nonsense. Olasky is primitive. Don't let him make you feel dumb or unhcristian. People like him cause big problems from their churches and ivory towers and businesses and political offices. And they don't have to suffer the consequences.

Rating:
Summary: Big Brother Gets a Make-over
Review: Olasky's facile solution to America's problems lies in re-"sanctifying" the two-parent (read "heterosexual") family and re-stigmatizing single-parent (read "women") homes. He holds that the government, under pressure from feminists, offers "incentives" to women to set up their own households guaranteed to insure that children are raised in poverty and abuse.

Olasky blames it all on women "A poor woman is most likely to escape from poverty if she does not get pregnant. If she does have children, marriage is the leading way to escape poverty. The single best way for children to escape from poverty is to have their mothers marry or to be adopted; only two percent of adopted children are poor. The common factor in all of this is re-affiliation." Although statistically all of this may be true, Olasky's conclusions are self-serving. Is it the lack of a husband that makes a single mother poor, or the lack of adequate child care, equal pay, equal opportunity, and an increasing lack of access to reproductive technologies, including abortion? Olasky suggests that no one is more detrimental to a child's wellbeing that her or his mother, unless she is sponsored by a Bible-banging male father figure, preferable her husband.

And if you enjoy Olasky's views on women, you'll positively love his views on the homeless, most of whom he compassionately dismisses as the "Mumbling Majority."

H.L. Menken said "For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it is always wrong". Olasky's solutions come at the expense of personal and societal freedom. The government is not meant to be Big Brother, snooping into private lives, legislating moral objectives clearly based on Fundamentalist Christian-Judeo ideals, and laundering all this extra government through the church.

Olasky, fluent in double-speak, proves that "compassionate conservatism" is double-plus good.