February 24, 2000 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Few institutions in American society are as sacrosanct or vaunted as our charitable organizations. At least rhetorically, one of the few things that seems to unite business and labor, liberals and conservatives, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, whites and non-whites, is the provision of non-profit social services.
Like the proverbial symbols of the flag and motherhood — or perhaps, more currently, the Internet — neither charity nor the claims of social service are to be challenged. Our nation can’t stop talking of the “virtues” of volunteering and giving to charity. What’s more, the “therapeutic state,” as one author calls it, increasingly seems to be a shared American vision in which rhetoric and the sentiment of caring (“I feel your pain”) come to replace structural efforts at income redistribution or eliminating poverty.
To challenge the American “glorifying myth” is to challenge what for most people is a noble tradition. But is all this patting on the back appropriate considering the real American condition? The United States has the sharpest rate of income inequality in the Western world, the sparest public social-welfare system in the industrialized world, a poverty rate among the highest in the Western world, and a host of festering social problems that produce more violence and imprisonment than elsewhere.
Indeed, the American love affair with charity obscures how little we Americans actually do for people who find themselves in adverse circumstances. All of America’s talk of virtue reveals a nation that, like Lady Macbeth, protests too much — that has a surplus of guilt because of our inability to arrange a better organization of our overall community life. A core of nice people and a rhetoric of kindhearted feeling cannot replace a more intelligent and generous social policy.
Despite the famous French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville’s claim that Americans in the 19th century practiced the “beauty of virtue,” or former President Ronald Reagan’s assertion that Americans have always had “a deep-rooted spirit of caring,” such statements do not reflect either our past or our present. When de Tocqueville visited the United States, prominent religious leaders were justifying forced evictions of Indians from their homelands, and most supported slavery. The philanthropic societies of the day advocated sending the poor to poorhouses and workhouses. Charity leaders of the 19th century fought the “dangerous classes” through a mix of repressive measures.
The contrast between rhetoric and reality is as sharp today. While most industrialized societies provide their citizens with family allowances to support children, free health care, and other services as a basic right, Americans, as a general rule, have a harsher, more punitive view of poor and needy people. Furthermore, the major positive changes in the conditions of poor people have come not from philanthropy or good will but from social struggles, particularly in the 1930’s and the 1960’s and 70’s. Labor unrest, civil-rights struggles and ghetto riots, and the demands of the elderly have been far more central to the creation of an expanded and improved social-welfare system than have the actions of charity officials, social workers, or religious volunteers. But even with the changes that have occurred, the conditions of America’s inner cities shock foreign observers.
Not only does our “virtue talk” obscure how little we as Americans are actually willing to do for people, but more subtly, America’s worship of giving, volunteering, and non-profit human-service work allows the two other sectors of American life — business and government — to be legitimized. Americans seem to ignore the decline in real wages over the last 25 years and the crushing of labor unions by corporate America, and they generally support the war on drugs, the growth of prisons and capital punishment since the 1970’s, and the demise of government benefits for the poor. Americans seem to believe something close to, “After all, the needy can (still) receive charity, and we give so much.”
Compassion and altruism may not always be as they seem. As the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt once said: “Compassion may itself be a substitute for justice … compassion always already signifies inequality. The compassionate intend no justice, for justice might disrupt current power relationships.”
Indeed, there is much about charity, the non-profit sector, and the vague expressions of caring emanating from government and business that requires a critical eye. They are often compensations for our guilt and important symbolic rituals of national reassurance. Reassurance in a society ridden with injustice and inequality is not a particularly positive thing.
David Wagner is a professor of social work and sociology at the University of Southern Maine. This piece is adapted from his new book, What’s Love Got to Do With It?: A Critical Look at American Charity, published by The New Press.
