Looking at the medieval and (largely) early modern societies described herein with more ancient eyes reveals patterns of expectations that are familiar from the longer history of the three major religions studied in this collection. First and foremost, those who founded and administered the charitable institutions of early modern Europe and the Middle East plainly carried in the back of their minds what might be called a particular “aesthetic of society,” the outlines of which might be blurred by the quotidien routines of administration. This “aesthetic of society” amounted to a sharp sense of what constituted a good society and what constituted an ugly society, namely, one that neglected the poor or treated them inappropriately.

Europeans and Ottomans alike instantly noticed when charitable institutions were absent. Of the great imarets of the Ottoman empire, Evliya the seventeenth-century traveler, wrote, “I, this poor one, have traveled 51 years and in the territories of 18 rulers, and there was nothing like our enviable institution.”

The article delves into comparisons of social norms of charity—of which I have quoted before:

Divided as European Protestants and Catholics were in their ideas about the good society, the differences between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire were even more decisive, subtle though they sometimes could be. Christian Europe concentrated on a quality of mercy that was essentially asymmetrical. It strove to integrate those who, otherwise, would have no place in society. As the founder of Christ’s Hospital wrote in the sixteenth century, “Christ has lain too long abroad … in the streets of London.” To him, those deserving of mercy were “lesser folk,” and those who “raised them up” were “like a God.” In Catholic countries, much charity was “redemptive,” directed to tainted groups who might yet come to be absorbed more fully into the Christian fold—including Jews, some of whom might yet be converted, and prostitutes, some of whom might yet be reformed. In the more bracing air of Protestant Hadleigh, however, “reform” meant making sure that those who were “badly governed in their bodies” (delinquent male beggars) were brought back to the labor force from which they had lapsed. For both Catholics and Protestants, the “reform” of errant groups was a dominant concern.

By contrast, in Ottoman society, receiving charity brought no shame. To go to an imaret was not to be “brought in from the cold.” Rich and poor were sustained by the carefully graded bounty of the sultan: “Hand in hand with the imperial generosity is that of a strictly run establishment, carefully regulating the movements of its clients and the sustenance each received.” The meals at the Ottoman imaret are reminiscent of the Roman convivium, great public banquets of the Roman emperors, in their judicious combination of hierarchy and outreach to all citizens. Nothing like it existed in Christian Europe.

So who cares? (This is always a good question to throw at the dewey-eyed young-ins):

One issue concerning the “aesthetic of society” that deserves to be stressed is often taken for granted in studies of poverty: Why should the poor matter in the first place? The heirs to centuries of concerted charitable effort by conscientious Jews, Christians, and Muslims are liable to forget that concern for the poor is, in many ways, a relatively recent development in the history of Europe and the Middle East, not necessarily shared by many non-European and non-Middle Eastern societies.

The Greco-Roman world had no place whatsoever for the poor in its “aesthetic of society.” But ancient Greeks and Romans were not thereby hardhearted or ungenerous. They were aware of the misery that surrounded them and often prepared to spend large sums on their fellows. But the beneficiaries of their acts of kindness were never deaned as “the poor,” largely because the city stood at the center of the social imagination. The misery that touched them most acutely was the potential misery of their city. If Leland Stanford had lived in ancient Greece or in ancient Rome, his philanthropic activities would not have been directed toward “humanity,” even less toward “the poor,” but toward im– proving the amenities of San Francisco and the aesthetics of the citizen body as a whole. It would not have gone to the homeless or to the reform of prostitutes. Those who happened, economically, to be poor might have benefited from such philanthropy, but only insofar as they were members of the city, the great man’s “fellow-citizens.”

The emergence of the poor as a separate category and object of concern within the general population involved a slow and hesitant revolution in the entire “aesthetic” of ancient society, which was connected primarily with the rise of Christianity in the Roman world. But it also coincided with profound modiacations in the image of the city itself. The self-image of a classical, city-bound society had to change before the “poor” became visible as a separate group within it.

Similarly, in the context of the Chinese empire’s governmental tradition, the victims of famine were not so much “the poor” as they were “subjects” who happened to need food, the better to be controlled and educated like everyone else. This state-centered image had to weaken considerably before Buddhist notions of “compassion” to “the poor” could spread in China. Until at least the eleventh century, acts of charity to the poor ranked low in the hierarchy of official values, dismissed as “little acts” and endowed with little public resonance. They were overshadowed by a robust state ideology of responsibility for famine relief, which put its trust, not on anything as frail as “compassion,” but on great state warehouses controlled (it was hoped) by public-spirited provincial governors.

If the phrase “aesthetic of society” connotes a view of the poor deemed fitting for a society, one implicit aspect of it notably absent from the ancient world and China was the intense feeling—shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims—that outright neglect of the poor was ugly, and that charity was not only prudent but also beautiful. Despite the traditional limitations of charitable institu– tions—their perpetual shortfall in meeting widespread misery, their inward-looking quality, and the overbearing manner in which they frequently operated—they were undeniably worthwhile ventures. The officials who ran them and the rich who funded them could think of themselves as engaged in “a pro– foundly integrative activity.” This widespread feeling of contributing to a “beautiful” rather than an “ugly” society still needs to be explained.

Why remember the poor? There are many obvious answers to this question, most of which have been fully spelled out in recent scholarship. Jews, Christians, and Muslims were guardians of sacred scriptures that enjoined compassion for the poor and promised future rewards for it. Furthermore, in early modern Europe, in particular, charity to the poor came to mean more than merely pleasing God; it represented the solution to a pressing social problem. To provide for the poor and to police their movements was a prudent reaction to what scholars have revealed as an objective crisis caused by headlong demographic growth and a decline in the real value of wages.

Yet even this “objective” crisis had its “subjective” side. Contemporaries perceived the extent of the crisis in, say, Britain as amplified, subjectively, by a subtle change in the “aesthetic of society.” The poor had not only become more dangerous; their poverty had become, in itself, more shocking. As Wrightson recently showed, forms of poverty that had once been accepted as part of the human condition, about which little could be done, became much more challenging wherever larger sections of a community became accustomed to higher levels of comfort. When poverty could no longer be taken for granted, to overlook the poor appeared, increasingly, to be the mark of an “ugly” society. Moreover, that the potentially “forgettable” segments of society were usually articulate and well educated, able to plead their cause to their more hardhearted contemporaries, had something to do with how indecorous, if not cruel, forgetting them would be.

Paul’s injunction to “remember the poor” (Galatians 2:10) and its equivalents in Jewish and Muslim societies warned about far more than a lapse of memory. It pointed to a brutal act of social excision the reverberations of which would not be confined to the narrow corridor where rich and poor met through the working of charitable institutions. The charitable institutions of the time present the poor, primarily, as persons in search of elemental needs— food, clothing, and work. But hunger and exposure were only the “presenting symptoms” of a deeper misery. Put bluntly, the heart of the problem was that the poor were eminently forgettable persons. In many different ways, they lost access to the networks that had lodged them in the memory of their fellows. Lacking the support of family and neighbors, the poor were on their own, floating into the vast world of the unremembered. This slippage into oblivion is strikingly evident in Jewish Midrash of the book of Proverbs, in which statements on the need to respect the poor are attached to the need to respect the dead. Ultimately helpless, the dead also depended entirely on the capacity of others to remember them. The dead represented the furthest pole of oblivion toward which the poor already drifted.

Fortunately for the poor, however, Jews, Christians, and Muslims not only had the example of their own dead—whom it was both shameful and inhuman to forget—but also that of God Himself, who was invisible, at least for the time being. Of all the eminently forgettable persons who ringed the fringes of a medieval and early modern society, God was the one most liable to be for– gotten by comfortable and conadent worldlings. The Qur’an equated those who denied the Day of Judgment with those who rejected orphans and neglected the feeding of the poor (Ma’un 107:1–3). The pious person, by contrast, forgot neither relatives nor strangers who were impoverished. Even though he might have had every reason to wish that they had never existed, he went out of his way to “feed them … and to speak kindly to them” (Nisa’ 4.36, 86).

The poor challenged the memory like God. They were scarcely visible creatures who, nonetheless, should not be forgotten. As Michael Bonner shows, the poor, the masakin of the Qur’an and of its early medieval interpreters, are “unsettling, ambiguous [persons] .… whom we may or may not know.” In all three religions, charity to the easily forgotten poor was locked into an entire social pedagogy that supported the memory of a God who, also, was all-too-easily forgotten.

The poor were not the only persons in a medieval or an early modern society who might become victims of forgetfulness. Many other members of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies—and often the most vocal members—found themselves in a position strangely homologous to, or overlapping, that of the poor, and they often proved to be most articulate in pressing the claims of the poor. They also demanded to be remembered even if, by the normal standards of society, they did nothing particularly memorable.

Seen with the hard eyes of those who exercised real power in their societies, the religious leaders of all three religions were eminently “forgettable” persons. They contributed nothing of obvious importance to society.

And of course, I respect any scholar who manages to connect their paper to their ability to continue drawing a salary:

The manner in which a society remembers its forgettable persons and characterizes the failure to do so is a sensitive indicator of its tolerance for a certain amount of apparently unnecessary, even irrelevant, cultural and religious activity. What is at stake is more than generosity and compassion. It is the necessary heedlessness by which any complex society can and a place for the less conspicuous elements of its cultural differentiation and social health. Scholars owe much to the ancient injunction to “remember the poor.”

No related posts.

It takes a lot of words for academia to say “We’re can’t describe the experience of poverty”. This is from “Using a sustainable livelihoods approach to assessing the impact of ICTs in development” by Sarah Parkinson and Ricardo Ramírez:

…the way development professionals conceptualise development and poverty is very different from how poor people themselves view these. Poor people perceive poverty in a much more complex manner than do development professionals and they employ a range of strategies, not only to maximize income, but also to minimise risk and to protect or increase other things that they value.  Poor people’s priorities are often different from those imputed to them by development experts, and their strategies are often more complex, both in terms of activity and motivation Thus it is argued, the sustainable livelihoods framework [above] provides a conceptualisation that is more appropriate to the perspectives and realities of poor people. (Chambers 1995).

And more:

The focus of “livelihood” in sustainable livelihoods (SL) frameworks is an attempt to move away from narrow definitions of poverty, and as such reframes the broad aim of development as an effort to improve people’s livelihood options.  “Livelihood” refers broadly to a means of making a living, and includes the assets, access to institutions and processes, and strategies that a person utilizes to achieve livelihood outcomes (Ashley and Carney, 1999).    The term “sustainable” refers both to the characteristic of a livelihood to endure the various shocks and uncertainties likely to be encountered in the environment, and to avoid contributing to long-term depletion of natural resources (Chambers 1987).

For the record, I’m much more comfortable with this conceptualization than the standard “poverty is the absence of money”…and this involves a flow chart. Via Peter Miller’s dissertation.

No related posts.

Today I am wearing:

1. Cotton American Apparel T-Shirt (with print-design from Woot!)
2. Denim Banana Republic Jeans
3. Saucony Synthetic Running Shoes
4. Old Navy Underwear
5. Hanes Cotton Socks
6. Leather Belt purchased from Brooklyn St. Fair with Levi’s Metal Belt Buckle
7. Penguin Lambswool Sweater

Discussion Set 1: What types of information have I included in this list? What have I omitted? What types of information would you have included (or omitted)? Why?

Discussion Set 2: In my clothing, what could I have done differently, within the broad context of poverty? Why?

Discussion Set 3: How have you approached this exercise: Realistically, Positively, Pessimistically, Cynically, Pragmatically, Comprehensively, Reductionistically, etc? How did the context or presentation of this exercise affect how you did (or did not) perform it? How might someone else approach this exercise and why?

Discussion Set 4: Is this an appropriate exercise for addressing poverty?

No related posts.

To begin this post, I'd like to explore the idea of participation as an opposite of poverty. Using participation as a guide, we can thus provide a conceptual benchmark: a society can be measured by the people who are excluded from it.

Describing poverty as exclusion is not unique. Prof. Yves Cabannes writes extensively upon South American anti-poverty movements and their notions of exlusion. Urban organizer Martin Longoria of Brazil has said "You know what is the opposite of exclusion for us? It is not inclusion, but participation. Active participation is what makes you a full citizen." ("Poor, or excluded? lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean". UN Chronicle, March-May, 2001)

Within the United States there are many examples of exclusion, but an illustrative one is an exclusion of age: will our older population, expected to grow with the influx of Baby Boomers (and others of the same age), continue to be able participate within society at the same level they currently do?

There is no easy answer to this question (or the multitude of questions like it); and that we frame it within an easy/complex binary system is perhaps the problem. In approaching questions like these, our most common impulse is to look towards existing problems:

• Older people have difficulty voting
• Older people have difficulty earning a living-wage
• Older people have difficulty socializing with younger people

And breaking these down, we usually approach them as essential elements that are missing or unfulfilled:

• They can't register to vote
• They can't get to polling stations
• They are not engaged on issues or by candidates

It is easiest to frame issues as the absence of something currently existing, rather than creating something new. We look for simple indicators of success, rather than describing the outcome as a whole. Our collective inability to accept diversity and create participation can be viewed as a failure of imagination.

Experiment: Describe society if people over 65 years old were fully able to participate within the political system. Do so using language that doesn't actually use "old people" (or senior citizens, or any subject that would stand-in for an idea of them).

It's difficult. Instead of saying something easy like "Old people can easily get to polling places", you have to reframe it as "Polling places are close to and accessible to where people live." And even more difficult, imagine what form that would actually take: more polling places (micro-polling centers?), transportation (who do you imagine driving?), more opportunities to vote so missing one election is less consequential (micro-ballots?).

Imagine solutions not as absence or fulfillment, but as practice.

Experiment: Describe a society that has entirely eliminated recreational drug use (we'll say alcohol, tobacco, and everything else too)? Don't use the word "drugs" (or any other stand-in). How are people spending their time? How do they relax? Or find thrills Or explore their mind and body?

You may find yourself imagining everyone as being identical---we naturally seek homogeneity as it is a simplifier and makes imagining easier but at a cost. Try to push away from this and think of the diversity of people you know (or even common stereotypes)? Do not imagine them disappearing; instead imagine their activities transformed according to the constraints of the experiment.

Thinking along these lines allows you to explore incremental changes and improvements that may be more achievable, and, when taken together, be more effective than strictly seeking absence or fulfillment. It also helps you avoid framing things as absolutes. Think middle.

I've got one more method to help overcome our innate desire for absolutes and homogeneity: use the double-negative.

Experiment: Describe "not not-poor". Avoid the logical or mathematical desire to cancel out nots like negative signs. If not-poor is rich, than what is the opposite of that, if it is not poor?

The purpose of this exercise is not necessarily to come to a categorical answer ("...the middle-class..."), but instead explore the meaning and connotations of these words and the alternatives that present themselves when you move beyond them.

From feedback to my last piece, I have left the explanation of this method to the end---but I still find it greatly interesting. It comes from the Ismaili philosopher Abu Yaqub Sijistani, who advocated speaking of God in double negatives: by saying He was "not no-thing" or "not not-wise", it allowed seekers to "become aware of the inadequacy of language when it tried to convey the mystery of God." So says Karen Armstrong in A History of God (p. 179-80).

Related posts:

1. Reductionist function and practice Rob Haitani on Palm OS from Designing Interactions: One bit of advice that I gave to people designing the Palm...
2. Philanthropy’s progressive legacy The following excerpts is from a paper Lenore T. Ealy and Steven D. Ealy entitled “Progressivism and Philanthropy”, published in The Good Society. Author Stephen...

I realized I take a very broad view of poverty; perhaps as broad as they come. One of the activities involved each of us (about 40 people in all) writing on a tacky note their definition of poverty. My definition I gave was:

Poverty is the inability to fully participate in or benefit from society.

The other responses were along the standard lines of material poverty (not having basic survival needs met), and what I would breezily (and in the current economy) define as the "making under $30k a year" type of poverty (and the personal/social issues that come along with that). And to be perfectly clear, I fully acknowledge that these are the standard and usual definitions of poverty---the attendees were a wicked smart bunch.

Now moving beyond that dialogue, what do I find interesting about my definition:

1. It's a continuum: I don't believe there is a hard cut-off for, "ok, you're good to go." Obviously two people who are making $100k a year, one of whom went to a state college and the other went to Harvard, have perhaps a trivial separation, but there exists one.
2. It's relative to society: from the dialogue, it was pretty clear that the attributes we choose to evaluate poverty on are relative (thanks Abby for mentioning Ishmael)
3. It's about the interplay between individual and society: beyond strict material poverty---at which point personal survival make social needs effectively moot; i.e. dead people don't have agency)---poverty is about an individual's ability to effectively function as a contributory member of society. What form those contributions take are defined by the society (see above).

So where am I going with this?

Poverty is a moral challenge. The Moral Challenge. Moral as in God. God as (and this is the tricky part) being a superset of the human condition. For you non-set-theory people, that means that the the experience of being human is an essence of God. But I don't want to get caught up on the metaphysics of it, since they aren't the point, may be heretical depending on your beliefs, and I probably don't know what I'm talking about away. But for legitimacy's sake---and being breezy again---this is a belief of many religions like Buddhism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Kabalism and Sufism to name a few, each of which have also influenced their respective trunks (e.g. Sufism to Islam, Kabalism to Judaism)---pretty much anything with a touch of mysticalism. At least, that was my impression from reading books by Karen Armstrong.

But I want to move beyond the specific religion aspect and back to poverty for the next statement:

The conception of poverty is a secular humanistic version of what Buddhism calls dukha, a fundemental element of life. I'm the first to be suspicious of people quoting eastern philosophies, but the idea of dukha is illuminating: usually it's defined as "suffering", that something is wrong, that life is "awry". I woul advance a more rigorous (and humanistic) definition along the lines of:

Human beings, as innately and uniquely compassionate, imaginative and intelligent creatures, have fundemental anxiety over existing within a universe/reality of scarcity. Not just a scarcity of energy/food/shelter, but of, among other things, time (our linear lifespan), physical space (our necessary physical existence displaces other beings) and understanding (we cannot perfectly communicate ourselves to one another). This anxiety is dukha, which is innate to being human.

As Karen Armstrong would argue, the purpose of a practical religion is to help people overcome, transcend or accept this suffering (or help people move towards such unattainable perfects). Such practical religions attempt to reach towards this goal through both material, psychological and social means (the latter two being what we might call spiritual means).

Of course, as secular humanists, we cannot define poverty to such a broad holistic and potentially spiritual scope: it touches upon elements that are outside rational discourse (how can we conceive of a goal beyond the realm of human experience?) and, within more practical terms, is of a breadth our current bureacractic institutions would be unable to handle.

In my next blog post, I'd like to explore how poverty stems from our collective inability to accept diversity. Also, I'd like to write about how the concept of poverty at its core cannot exist without reasonable antithesis, why we're incredibly bad at conceiving of that alternative, and how we might reasonably search for it.

Lastly, just to make it clear, I don't believe that by expanding the definition of poverty it negates or in anyhow diminishes the incredible contributions and advances having been made or being made by people across the globe to improve the conditions of people who need that assistance most. In other words, this is in no way, shape, or form a statement that current anti-poverty work is pointless, "a drop in the bucket", or we should just stop trying because we'll never fix everything. Also, this isn't leading up to a nanny-state rant (pro or con) either.

Related posts:

1. Philanthropy’s progressive legacy The following excerpts is from a paper Lenore T. Ealy and Steven D. Ealy entitled “Progressivism and Philanthropy”, published in The Good Society. Author Stephen...

Because of constructive criticism of some of my organization’s archaic language, I asked the Mission Based Massachusetts Listserv, a nonprofit discussion list, what terms they use in place of “poor people”. Below are all of the responses I got, which were awesome!

Some terminology…

• low-income
• under-resourced
• under-served (Barbara humorously notes that “overserved” is a euphemism for intoxicated)
• people living in poverty
• historically and persistently marginalized groups

(thanks Michelle, Felicia, and others who are quoted below)

Some general strategies…

• Use a preposition: Instead of “poor children” the phrase “children from low income households”. Therefore, it’s not the subject themselves, but rather their circumstances. (thanks Barbara!)
• Use a specific measure, like “125% of the federal poverty threshold” or “50% of area median income,” whatever’s most appropriate in the context.
• For a grant proposal, look at the language the grantmaker is using and follow their lead. (thanks Dennis!)
• Think of the program as asset based rather than deficit based: people who benefit end up being associated with the problem and not the solution (thanks Alan!).
• “Describing the populations we want to serve as ‘marginalized’ or ‘most vulnerable’ makes our donors feel good about themselves, but at the risk of objectifying people, using a dominant culture’s description of them as somehow Other. We try to incorporate this awareness into our outreach materials by assuming that the people we serve will be reading the materials. How would they feel about this description? How would they describe themselves? Does a description assume that the people have brought their situation on themselves? Does it assume that the people are simply victims and not actors in their lives? Does the language carry implicit judgment? Calling an activity ‘drug abuse’ carries many more judgments and assumptions than calling it ‘drug use.’ (thanks Kathy!)

• “‘Working poor is a helpful phrase for those who are working, which reminds people that we aren’t talking about ‘welfare queens’, a term I fear may still have resonance.…I like to remind people what the actual Federal Poverty Guidelines are. We know, but many people outside our profession don’t actually know how low it is, and if you take a minute and ask people to think about how it compares to their own household income, you can see people digest what that means.” (thanks Michelle!)

  To note, from the 2008 Federal Poverty Guidelines, an individual making less than $10,400 is in poverty, while for a household of 4 poverty is earning less than $21,200 (in the lower 48 states, slightly more in Hawaii and Alaska). As of 2006 there were 36.5 million Americans in poverty (according to the US Census Bureau).

Some said that the terminology wasn’t the issue…

• “I’m poor. It doesn’t upset me when people say I’m poor. It does upset me when the thought police waste everyone’s time talking about language issues instead of actually fighting poverty.” (thanks Pat!)
• “There’s nothing degrading about saying someone is poor. It’s an insult only if you believe their poverty indicates their own moral failing, and THAT’s an antiquated attitude.” (thanks Dennis!)

And a related example…

This is interesting to me because I work at a prison education organization. We have lots of materials that talk about “prisoners”. An ex-prisoner recently called that word into question, saying that it was dehumanizing and he preferred to be referred to as a person (perhaps incarcerated person?). However, I work with a group of folks who deliberately call themselves Ex-Prisoners. So there’s no easy answer. (thanks Mea!)

External Resources:

Michael pointed me to two great resources:

• Two Penny Project: To build public support for human services in Massachusetts: “…The problem with the Sympathy/Poverty frame is that it reinforces the idea that poverty is the result of bad individual choice rather than a condition that requires systemic reform. This message also recreates the sense that people will think nothing can be done that doesn’t make matters worse.…The Ford Foundation recommends that advocates frame their messages in terms of responsible planning and economic vision, with a strong secondary or reinforcing message about community planning.…” (page 3)
• For An Economy That Works: There are a lot of resources and studies here on language. Their goal is creating effective frames of reference for poverty issues to effect policy, which may or may not be applicable to grantwriting or appeals.

No related posts.