Good Intentions, Eurocatastrophe

Here the articulate eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan argues that good intentions, not any desire to dominate Europe by other means, motivated Germany's role in promoting European integration and giving so generously to other countries.  As with other charitable efforts, however (see my review of Lupton's Toxic Charity below), the result was to impoverish and maintain in a resented state of dependency those who were supposed to benefit from integration and centralization.

The contrary view, that the EU is a German plot, offers a further example of how conspiracy theories and attributions of malign intent get in the way of serious analysis, discussion, and debate.

As Hannan explains on his blog,

The most unattractive strain of Euroscepticism is the kind that sees the EU as some sort of German plot. You hear it all over Europe: from Frenchmen, from Dutchmen, from Danes, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks – even, occasionally, from Britons.

Quite apart from being terrifically rude, it couldn't be more mistaken. Far from bidding for mastery of the Continent, Germans suffer from a lack of patriotism that borders on self-abnegation. One of this blog's constant themes is that it is in everyone's interest for German national pride to be normalised.

Teuto-sceptics are having a field day with the speech which the CDU's parliamentary leader gave to his party conference. Volker Kauder demanded that Britain pay a share of the cost of bailing out the euro – specifically by accepting the financial transactions tax, 80 per cent of whose revenues would be drawn from the City of London. 'Just looking for… Read More

Retrieved November 18, 2011 from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/danielhannan/

Good intentions, toxic charity

		Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It) by Robert D. Lupton Edition: Hardcover Price: $14.84 Availability: In Stock		41 used & new from $13.04
Good intentions, toxic results, November 16, 2011

This review is from: Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It) 

Its title notwithstanding, this book is not a case for stinginess. Its author has four decades' experience of faith-based charitable work to his credit and draws on this experience as well as a host of anecdotes and research (which, however, he does not cite - the book is one of advocacy, not scholarship). His is also not an argument against voluntary or faith-based giving in favor of public welfare or rights-based claims on the state. Rather, with multiple and compelling examples, from weeklong `missions' of church youth groups to poor countries through inner-city charitable initiatives to the enormous Kroc grant to the Salvation Army, Lupton argues that this work needs to be rethought and reoriented.  As Brooks (Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism) has shown, giving by religious Americans, both to church-based charities and secular agencies like the Red Cross, is extraordinarily generous by any measure, in time, treasure, and talent, compared with that of secular Americans and citizens of other affluent countries. Lupton does not disparage these efforts or their (mostly) good intentions, but argues that most of this activity does more harm than good. Given the author's own commitment and credentials in the field, anyone engaged in this work will want to pay attention to his critique. In some ways, Lupton echoes those 19th-century critics of "sentimental charity," who sought to replace random handouts with organized charity based on a relationship between giver and recipient that offered "not alms, but a friend" (the motto of the Charity organization Societies). Those charity reform efforts, which gave rise to the profession of social work, are widely disparaged today, not least by professional social workers. But the problem of how to help those who need help, whether through government programs or private charity, in ways that do not shame, demoralize, sap initiative, and create dependency remains, as Lupton shows, as big a challenge today as ever. Lupton's approach, that of asset-based community development, aims to empower and partner with those helped, recognizing and engaging their capacity to contribute to their community with their own resources, knowledge, and wisdom. Instead of flying in with a team of eager young missioners to build a well for a poor village whose women have to carry water long distances on their heads - and coming back every year to fix `their' well - Lupton argues for an approach that facilitates engaging the skills and energy of the local people to fund, build, and manage their own well.  It is not a matter of being stingy rather than generous, but of helping in ways that truly help, without the enervating, dependency-creating disempowerment of much current charity in practice. Lupton's argument is not against charity as such, but for charity in its true sense of willing the good of the other. This implies, Lupton shows, a consistent focus on results rather than intentions, on the good of those helped rather than the supposed benefits to the giver (e.g., the 'life-changing experience' of young participants in expensive mission junkets or the warm feelings of congregations that want to help.) The virtue of charity in this view cannot stand alone. It requires the exercise of other virtues like justice and prudence, and full engagement of the head as well as the heart.  Paul Adams

Good Intentions - Paving the Road to Hell, Pt.2

Paul Adams

Good Intentions

There are two aspects of this subject.  The first is the tendency of those variously described as having an unconstrained vision of reality (Sowell), as unscrupulous optimists (Scruton), or socialists-from-above (Draper), to think their own good intentions cover a multitude of sins and to discount the human costs of achieving their goals. I discussed this aspect yesterday in Part 1 of this consideration of intentions.

The second is about how the attribution of good intentions only to your party or side and of evil intent to your opponents is an expression of intellectual laziness. It is said that when a conservative disagrees with you, say about social policy, poverty, government, or economic policy, he concludes that you are wrong.  When a liberal disagrees with you, he concludes that you are intellectually or morally defective.

Now I have no statistical evidence of that, though it does conform to my impressions of the liberal-academic and social work worlds in which I have spent most of my life.  I do not listen to conservative rant radio, but I am struck by how the much more reputable New York Times will print what can only be described as liberal rants, full of personal venom, sneering, and scorn, on its op-ed pages (Dowd is perhaps the worst but certainly not the only perpetrator), whereas the more conservative commentators (Brooks, Douthat) there are thoughtful and make reasoned arguments (usually followed by hundreds of contemptuous posts from readers in their comboxes). 

In any case, my point is not to determine who is most prone to this kind of intellectual laziness and degradation of public discourse, but to identify the problem and its consequences for social policy debate.

Take the case of the Catholic, and now more general, concept of social justice.  The liberal, secular political scientist, Brian Barry, wrote a substantial book on Why Social Justice Matters that simply assumes that social justice means the social-democratic welfare state.  Anyone who opposes that approach to poverty, inequality or other social problems, is simply an enemy of social justice.

Michael Novak, by contrast, has argued carefully and at length for a different conception of social justice, one similar to that of the Center for Social Justice in the U.K.  It is not a statist conception – it emphasizes the importance of the caring and helping energy and institutions that mediate between individual and state, that is the “mediating structures” (Berger & Neuhaus) and civil society.  It emphasizes the need to empower individuals and families, rather than to substitute state provision (see Gilbert, Transformation of the Welfare State).  The U.K.’s Centre for Social Justice seeks to address the same problems of poverty as concern Barry, but it “highlights the work of profoundly differing and unique small voluntary organisations and charities”  and takes the view that “The war on poverty can be won if government gets off the back of the armies of compassion and helps them to succeed.”  In line with the principle of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching, this approach emphasizes the need to find solutions as close as possible to the people involved.

Debate between these viewpoints is simply pre-empted by making the assumption that your opponents do not support justice at all.  If they did, they would agree with you.  If you want to relieve poverty, you must support expanded government programs. A preference for the poor, which the Catholic Church calls for, is taken to mean a preference for government programs. Can we just assume that those who oppose or criticize liberal nostrums in social policy are ipso facto against social justice or the poor?  But who supports injustice?  Or poverty?

The intellectual laziness in this move is evident.  It saves you the trouble of engaging your opponents and it has the advantage of portraying them as morally defective and heartless.  It is how social policy is taught, in my experience, in schools of social work.

The Occupy Wall Street movement highlights this tendency, in that it has no coherent analysis of the object of its anger and no trace that I have found even of a coherent demand.   It appeals to hatred of “fat cats,” bankers, and not so subliminally, Jews.  That bankers have caused the economic crisis by their greed and predatory lending is simply assumed.  This despite the more than 30 books and numerous studies since 2008 that have “established the flow of events, activities, policies, behavior and characters that led to the debacle” (Kramer, 2011).  They tell a different story. As financial columnist Gerald Kramer puts it,

The irrefutable conclusion from these resources: while banks facilitated the bubble with mortgage proliferation, they would not and could not have flooded the market with the $7.8 trillion in subprime loans outstanding in 2008 without the overt incentives of government guaranteed agencies….

          

I have not read the 30 books and do not want to adjudicate between the different analyses, except to say that the OWS assumption rests on no serious analysis at all.  It substitutes emoting for reason and evidence, while assuming the evil intentions or motivations of those it holds responsible (its scapegoats). 

The other point, easily missed by conservative critics too, is that discussion of the issues in the public square is more likely to be productive if it begins from the assumption of good intentions on the part of those who are blamed or with whom you disagree.  That is, government policies under Clinton and Bush may have led to a sudden climb in U.S. home ownership from 65% (holding steady for 30 years) to 69% in 2007 – much of that increase accounted for by subprime loans to people no bank (without government guarantees) would ever consider for a loan, let alone a large mortgage with no downpayment.  But the bubble, we should assume at the beginning of a serious discussion, did not result from greedy bankers or power-hungry government agencies and bureaucrats, but from a well-meaning effort to expand home ownership to more Americans.

Much the same seems to be under way with the next big bubble, that of higher education loans.  Higher education becomes more expensive by the day, and with less prospect of offering much education to most of its “consumers.”  Yet the loans to pay for it are given in vast quantities to people who either have no prospect of ever repaying them or at best will be burdened for life with enormous debt. Again, the impending bubble results not from evil intent on the part of lenders or government, but from the well-meaning effort to expand access to higher education.

To raise these questions is the responsibility of anyone seriously engaged with such policy issues.  It does no good to say they are simply the expression of nasty rightwingers who are against home ownership or education.

Policy makers may or may not have good intentions in any particular case.  But the assumption that they do not – or that they do and that is enough – is usually a lazy substitute for analysis and an obstacle to serious public discussion and debate.

The first wisdom in social policy is that policies are prone to unintended (and too often unforeseen) consequences.  The worst consequences often flow not from the worst, but the best intentions.  In policy it is often the broad road to hell. At the same time, the assumption of bad intentions blocks policy analysis and debate in the first place.

Paving the road to hell: Intentions, conspiracies, and visions

Paul Adams 

Many Americans traveling to Europe have first-hand experience of European anti-Americanism, an angry, contemptuous prejudice that attributes the worst motives and intentions to Americans in culture and politics, often mixed with 
- cultural self-loathing or ethnomasochism that is at the same time self-righteous, 
- hatred of Christianity, 
- anti-Semitism, 
- excusing of the worst excesses of Islamism by way of moral equivalence (the U.S. and Israel as rogue states, the real terrorists, etc.), and 
- assumption of superior virtue on the part of a post-national, multicultural Europe. 

The aspect I'm interested in here is the substitution of intentions, good or evil, our own and those of our enemies, for analysis, evidence, or results.  

There is a piece in the First Things blog by David Mills, whom I take to be an old leftist, on the incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.  He misses Marxism, which offered a serious analysis and at its best programmatic and organizational leadership.  

The problem, I think, is that nearly everyone has accepted the Occupiers’ anger as validating their movement, but an anger so general has no political value. It gets you nowhere. It offers no critique of, no challenge nor any alternative to the vague abstract thing at which you are angry. “We are the 99 percent” angry at the remaining 1% doesn’t tell anyone who the 1 percent are, and what they’ve done wrong, and what they should have done, and how the system itself encouraged them to do some things and not others, and what the nation should do now.They make you, as I say, miss Marx. Or not Marx, exactly, but the kind of coherent and thought-out leftism he represents, ideas you can engage and challenge, and be challenged by, which is very different from the establishment liberalism of (to mention them again) the editors of the New York Times.

The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the challenges only the left will (at the moment) provide.  

The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the challenges only the left will (at the moment) provide. 

Even Sowell, who talks about the unconstrained vision of utopians (what Scruton calls the 'unscrupulous optimism' of revolutionary/utopian/bureaucratic elites), sees Marxism as different - it is not utopian in that sense.  Well, he says it's anti-utopian with respect to past and present but falls into utopianism with regard to the future. It would be fairer in my opinion to say, as Hal Draper did, that there are 'two souls of socialism' - the bureaucratic-plannist-topdown-Stalinist-Reformist-utopian kind and the socialism-from-below, the authentic revolutionary Marxist tradition in which the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working-class itself.  If the latter is utopian (which Draper denied), it is in the belief that such struggle from below, where successful, can, has, or will ever fail to result in practice (in the not very long run) in some version of the first kind.

An important distinction between utopian, romantic social thinking and the aim of the ‘scientific socialism’ that Marx and Engels espoused is that the latter bases itself on analysis of actual historical forces and formations, and the constraints and possibilities to which they give rise at a particular, “concrete” historical conjuncture.  It identifies a specific social agency – a class and its leadership – that can play a revolutionary, progressive role. 

Utopian thinking, as Draper pointed out, is intrinsically authoritarian and anti-democratic.  This is true even though, or even because, the utopian has good intentions and wants the best for society.  The elite believes its rational, comprehensive plans are best for those who are to live under them.  The implementation and defense of the plan justify any amount of suffering along the way; and failure of the well-intentioned plan requires ruthless suppression of those with different idea or goals, who must be saboteurs and traitors.  The revolutionary elite substitutes its vision and knowledge for the experience of the infinitely less enlightened and progressive masses, for the inherited culture, the wisdom of the generations – all that must be discounted or scrapped, and we must start from scratch (appealing to the elite's Reason alone) with Year One of the Revolution.   


This is the “unconstrained vision” in which collective experience is to be jettisoned, the elite takes control, and the enlightened aim to bring the rest of us up to their level.  The good intentions and plans of the revolutionary elite justify trampling all the expressions of human culture that stand between the citizen and the all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent  state – like family and church in particular.

As Sowell and others have observed, this unconstrained vision, this utopian hypertrophy of revolutionary will and intent over all material, cultural, and moral constraints is what distinguishes the French Revolution from the American.  The French Revolution, for one example, murdered unarmed cloistered nuns (as the Spanish revolutionaries in the 1930s desecrated and destroyed churches and shot unarmed monks).  The American Revolution produced unique (in the history of the world) constitutional protections for the free exercise of religion from control, interference, or suppression by the state.  These protections stood for over a century and a half and are only in recent times being whittled away by liberal secularists and courts that turn the First Amendment on its head.

As critics from Burke on have noted, the unconstrained vision in power, with its insatiable need for scapegoats to blame for the failure of the utopian-elite vision in practice, is intolerant, violent, and dictatorial.  It needs to uncover conspiracies, traitors in its ranks, corrupt and counter-revolutionary elements, groups and classes (kulaks, Jews) that stand in the path of the vision and have to be swept aside with whatever violence is needed.

But what interests me is the way, in my experience, Marxism in its classic revolutionary form, resisted conspiracy theories, moralistic narratives (greedy capitalists/bankers), and scapegoating (Jews, Americans).  I recall one Marxism summer event in London, where some Brits were verbally trashing Americans over beer at the next table and a Socialist Workers Party leader sat down with them and lectured the semi-drunken comrades about solidarity, internationalism, class struggle in the U.S., and the reactionary role of national prejudice in dividing the class.  Well, I don't remember what he said exactly, but it would have been consistent with that line.  Among reformists and in the Labour Party, by contrast, as in the Guardian, anti-Americanism is blatant and unchecked, along with a hostility to Israel and all who support its existence that is distinguishable only in tone from the more blatant forms of anti-Semitism. 

The Marxist response is possible because Marxism (again, at its best) has an analysis that does not depend on evil intentions or mean, morally reprehensible villains.  Capitalism depends on the compulsion, driven by competition, to accumulate capital.  Economic crisis, in this analysis, is endemic in the system because, in a nutshell, the drive to accumulate operates irrespective of the system’s absorptive capacity.  Crises of overproduction, with financial collapse, mass unemployment, and so forth can perhaps be postponed but not prevented.  Such an analysis, or something like it, has nothing to do with the vices, the greed or malevolence, of bankers.  The least greedy, most beneficent banker in the world is not relieved by his personal virtues from the need to accumulate or go out of business.

Absent such an analysis, people readily fall into scapegoating and conspiracy theories to give expression to anger and resentment at the state of affairs they find themselves or the world in.  So it is not such a surprise to learn of the anti-Semitic origins and elements of the OWS movement:

http://bit.ly/rQODt9

http://nyp.st/og25x7

http://bit.ly/sTBeMz

http://thedc.com/tCzkPL

These stories, along with the liberal media denials of anti-Semitism in OWS, are symptomatic of an increasingly unconstrained anti-Semitism on the left as well as the right.  This in-your-face “Jewish-Zionist pig” rhetoric remains unacceptable in public discourse in both the U.S. left and Europe, despite the leftist bigot's care to add 'Zionist' to 'Jewish'. But traditional anti-Semitic tropes have become mainstream across Europe and clearly relate to the historic blaming of Jewish bankers, formerly a mainstay of specifically right-wing anti-Semitism.  If you have no serious analysis of the economic crisis and of governments' role in it, it is an easy transition from blaming greedy bankers to noting Jewish representation in finance or among neoconservative supporters of Israel.

There is, as Sowell and Scruton among others argue, a natural tendency in that direction on the part of utopians/plannists/bureaucrats/socialists-from-above who find themselves in power and who inevitably find that their schemes for improving humankind, starting from scratch to create a new world unburdened by the wisdom of preceding generations, produce results different from, or opposite to their intent.  Do they conclude that good intentions are not enough, we just don't know enough as an enlightened elite, and don't and shouldn't have that much control over the lives of the masses (even if we know what's best for them)? Some do, but more common is the response that our plans are being sabotaged by...Jews, Trotskyists, the Church, etc.  Utopian elitism requires scapegoats to blame its inevitable failures on. 

These considerations led me to a 2004 interview with Andrei S. Markovits, Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, reflecting on the rise in volume and public acceptability of both anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in the wake of 9/11.  

One of Markovits’ points is that Europe needs anti-Americanism to give it identity.  It's what (and what alone) Swedes and Greeks have in common - they are not Americans. He doesn't say this, but jettisoning and erasing the continent's core geographical and cultural definition and roots in Christianity, and not ready to embrace a new Islamic identity, anti-Americanism is what holds Europe together ideologically. (One expression of this is the readiness of high proportions of young, educated Europeans to believe conspiracy theories about 9/11 or Dan Brown fantasies about the history of Christianity, and to be completely impervious to evidence and reason on these questions.) 

Markovits also makes interesting points about the dynamics of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, which are closely related historically.  We hate those we wrong and those who do us good.  Europeans cannot forgive Americans for rescuing them from Nazism in WWII and putting the continent back on its feet afterward. 

Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex was correct in saying that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. In an analogous manner, I would argue that Western Europeans will also never forgive the Americans for being daily reminders that it was the Americans - together with the Red Army - who defeated Nazism, and not the Europeans themselves. Impotence breeds resentment, which in turn breeds disdain, hatred, and contempt.