ninme

The Times - The undeserving poor exist - just don’t say so
It is a common Tory urge to moralise about the lazy, the greedy and the dishonest. They should resist it at all costs, by Matthew Parris

Anyone would think, from the sudden interest on both Left and Right in the writings of the modern American thinker Gertrude Himmelfarb, that the argument about the deserving versus the undeserving poor has only recently been discovered. But it was a dominating sociological debate in the 18th century, and right through the 19th century too.

Anyone would think it was socialism that sold the pass on the moral society and began (as Himmelfarb has it) “de-moralising” society by alleviating distress regardless of how caused. But it was really the Victorians (preachy as they now sound) who developed the idea of undiscriminating provision. Re-read Dickens, Trollope, the parable of the Prodigal Son. Look at the social outreach work inspired by the Wesleys and the nonconformist churches. The inherent conflicts between rewarding virtue and trying to alleviate all distress are ancient, profound and logically insoluble.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, only in Britain, did the invention of the teenager mean vandalizing churchyards. I mean, there are a lot of bored teenagers in the world, and probably the highest concentration of bored teenagers in the world are in the US, and all they do here is hang around at gas stations with irritatingly vapid looks on their faces. At any rate, I’ve decided it’s to do with an unhappy coincidence of the end of Transportation and the beginning of Victorian charity. Karl Marx was a Victorian, after all. They were obsessed with the poor. That and galapagos turtles. So, it was an era of peculiar hobbies. Unfortunately, the galapagos turtles were in the Galapagos and the poor weren’t in Australia.

(It’s times like these I’m glad I’m not a famous blogger.)