One of the best points that Charles Murray makes in his Coming Apart is that our present economic elite generally knows what to avoid—irreligiosity, bastardy, obesity, and so on—but is so utterly devoid of confidence that it is unwilling to demand that those dependent on its largesse emulate its better habits so as to eventually escape dependency.1
In fact, the current elite is so lacking in confidence that it preaches non-judgementalism at the same time as those behaviors it ought be judging impose immense consequences on it. Far from demanding recipients of its largesse emulate it, it defends their refusal to do so even as it dutifully pays the taxes to fund the welfare programs that subsidize the worst habits, impulses, and behaviors of America’s underclass.
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And so we spend trillions of dollars a year on welfare programs that serve mainly to make life worse for all involved. Children are born into fatherless homes that are subsidized by the government because they are fatherless. Healthy people pay roughly $355 billion a year in increased insurance costs alone to subsidize obesity, as it is illegal for insurance companies to charge the obese higher rates.2 Entire swathes of city centers are now uninhabitable by normal, industrious, taxpaying citizens because they are inhabited by a taxpayer-subsidized criminal underclass that generally lives in government housing and wreaks havoc across the city.
Such has long been a complaint from certain sections of the right, but the utter avoidance of professed judgment despite the degree to which the vices of the welfare-dependent class are the exact opposite of the virtues of the taxpaying class really is astounding. Murray, describing this, notes:
Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture. The members of the new upper class are industrious to the point of obsession, but there are no derogatory labels for adults who are not industrious. The young women of the new upper class hardly ever have babies out of wedlock, but it is impermissible to use a derogatory label for non-marital births. You will probably raise a few eyebrows even if you use a derogatory label for criminals.
That would be one thing if the problems with which the welfare system is trying to reckon were mere matters of money. Getting everyone fed, for example. That could be accomplished at next to no cost by providing the poor with rice and government cheese.
But that’s not the case. Unlike the “Hungry Forties” of Victorian days, no one is starving. What “food deserts” there are exist because the criminal population of the area repeatedly robs what grocery stores attempt to open. What is lacking in America’s wrecked communities is largely not money, but the will to demand better behavior. As such, the problems with which we have to deal are largely ones of dysfunction, and the welfare system struggles to reckon with them. As Murray puts it:
The problems these changes have engendered are different in kind from the problems of poverty. The problems that children suffer because of poverty disappear when the family is no longer poor. The problems that poor communities suffer because of poverty disappear when the community is no longer poor. The first two-thirds of the twentieth century saw spectacular progress on that front. But when families become dysfunctional, or cease to form altogether, growing numbers of children suffer in ways that have little to do with lack of money. When communities are no longer bound by their members' web of mutual obligations, the continuing human needs must be handed over to bureaucracies—the bluntest, clumsiest of all tools for giving people the kind of help they need. The neighborhood becomes a sterile place to live at best and, at worst, becomes the Hobbesian all-against-all free-fire zone that we have seen in some of our major cities.
This makes sense. Our welfare system was not designed to provide relief to the poor. No, it was designed by power-hungry politicians, most of whom were on the left, in an attempt to hold onto power. LBJ’s imposition of the Great Society yoke is the most notorious example of this, but it’s true of the whole system. That it produces more dependents despite being ostensibly designed to relieve dependency should be no surprise, for the existence of dependents is how those who run it justify their jobs. They are there to receive a paycheck, not to fix the problem.
This attitude on the part of the welfare-delivering bureaucracy and the cynical politicians who created it pairs well with that of our present elite, which generally avoids anything smacking of duty and instead embraces avoiding discomfort. By refusing to judge, condemn, or discriminate based on behavior, it can stick to the non-judgmentalism that is its wont and just pay the taxes the bureaucrats demand to keep the situation from turning into a revolt. Such is largely what they have done.
Thus, we’re left with a situation in which whatever problem is supposed to be fixed by the application of taxpayer money to it is, in the name of non-judgmentalism and bureaucratic job security, instead allowed to grow worse. The problems at the conjunction of “government money” and “I feel bad criticizing this person, so I’ll say nothing” have now gotten quite bad. The black bastardy rate has gone from ~19% before the Great Society to ~70% today3; the white bastardy rate has gone from ~2% in the mid-1950s to ~26% today, an even more astounding rocketing upwards.4
So far as the bureaucrats see it, that’s a good thing. It means their jobs administering “relief” to “fatherless homes” are secure. To the politicians aiming to use the system to keep populations in thrall, it’s a good thing. Weak families, broken homes, and social atomization make for a populace that is much easier to control politically, even if it trends towards criminality; anarchy and chaos are not a threat to central power in the way strong communities and the ties that form them are. And to those “bobos” who bear the costs and shrug at them, the whole thing might be distasteful but at least doesn’t require they get involved or judge anyone. The subsidized tend not to really care if they live in hells of their own making, for it’s easier than stepping up and being industrious.
This sort of outcome is why welfare is so socially caustic. The incentives all align for it to create worse conditions than it was meant to rectify, largely because there is no party who feels duty-bound to stand athwart the tide of terrible decisions and say “stop”.
Traditionally, this was the role of the local men of note. They had a duty to perform charity, which was more than just a monetary exchange. Rather, it was a way of doing good in a way that built strong and healthy communities. I think that Johann Kurtz describes this well in his book, Leaving a Legacy, doing so in the context of the parable of the Good Samaritan:
After the Samaritan gives the innkeeper money, he nonetheless pledges to personally return, to ensure that his charity has had effect and can continue. He does not fear getting his hands dirty.
The relationship becomes a personal one, characterized by love.
Finally, we can see why we should be skeptical of the notion that leaving assets in our will to impersonal organizations, to be executed by others upon our death for the theoretical benefit of those who we do not know, should qualify as true charity.
How did society arrive at this error? The answer can be found in examining the rise of philanthropy.
Philanthropy is an offshoot of progressivism— the ideology that society can be perfected if we cast off the dogmas of traditional wisdom and instead treat human governance as a science. Progressives attempt to reassess their environment from first principles, and turn to data in order to engineer the consequences that they desire.
The point of charity is not just to alleviate the material burdens of suffering. It is to do something more: to put those who know better in a position to say “no” when necessary. Caring for your neighbor, as Christ commands of us, means substantially more than slaking the thirst of his material wants. It means putting him on the right course.
This means exercising judgement. It means paternalism. It means someone being sovereign and deciding the exception when it comes to doling out that charity. This is, after all, why it is called noblesse oblige: it is the obligation of the noble, the local rule maker and decider, to address the problem and address it kindly but firmly. To exercise Dominion as traditionally understood in the Western, Christian tradition—authority over he who can not rule himself for his benefit.
Such is how functional communities are built, and their existence is an aid and credit to the local man of note: unlike bureaucrats, he is benefitted by the success of those on his lands rather than their dysfunction. Strong families of industrious people make for better tenants and allies, after all. Charity is a coherent and natural part of how that is brought about over the long-term.
One can imagine how this plays out differently than with charity: who has not heard of “urban” parents showing up to food drives for the needy in a Mercedes or BMW and carting away boxes of food? Who has not seen the videos of EBT recipients bragging about using the largesse of taxpayers to purchase fast food? Who has not seen the familial devastation wrought because of policies that effectively require the dismantling of families for the poor to receive relief? Who has not seen homeless relief policies that seem only to spur the creation of more vagrants, at unending cost to taxpayers?
None of that is pro-social. None of it is good. It exists because it is detached, impersonal, and rooted in bureaucracy rather than concern for a community and the people within that community.
The old way of handling charity had its flaws, though the Fitzwilliams set an incredible and impeccable standard, but at least it was properly ordered and calculated to do good if doing good was possible. Lords kept liquor off their estates because they knew the havoc it would wreak amongst the lower orders. Charity was doled out personally to the deserving poor, so as to not stimulate the creation of a class dependent on it or to encourage poor behavior. Much more effort was put into finding ways for those who could improve themselves to do so, such as by involvement in opportunity-affording colonial enterprises, than on subsidizing them.
Admittedly, it was cruel and uncaring at times, as Dickens made famous. But often it wasn’t. As the Earl of Dunraven records in his memoirs, Past Times and Pasttimes, often the supposedly intractable complaints of even Irish tenants were not the demands of a hopelessly impoverished tenantry, but a call to take the time to deal with the seemingly petty complaints of those of humble station. To administer affairs justly and forthrightly, pay a bit out of pocket for needed kindnesses here and there, and do one’s duty to ensure the place was rightly ordered. When such was done, as he notes, even the complaints of the most vociferous and outraged tended to fade away. Unfortunately, hostility had crept ever more into the relationship by his day, and so few on either side heeded his advice. But exercising a bit of noblesse oblige worked in his case.
The welfare system is too expensive, and it produces terrible, abominable results. We need to get rid of it. Importantly, however, that doesn’t mean just ending it and moving on, or replacing it with some new cold and unfeeling system such as UBI. The same disasters of neglect will result, even if material wants are addressed. Nor does it mean “philanthropy,” another vague and impersonal system that carries with it all the same issues.
We need to bring back a spirit of noblesse oblige, and true charity. That means we need to inculcate a sense of rootedness, which is what leads to such a spirit when paired with virtue.
That spirit was undone, seemingly intentionally, by the social catastrophe best represented by the destruction of Detroit. The Cultural Revolution killed whatever parts of it survived the World Wars and the New Deal, with all the expropriation and class warfare that came with them. Now we are atomized, transient, and floating atop a cold sea of bureaucracy.
The welfare administered by such a system is toxic, even if the population is better fed than ever. It’s time to change that, beginning by rediscovering true charity and what it looks like.
As with much of the path to renewal, it looks like rejecting centralized bureaucratic systems and embracing non-abstracted forms of local governance in which duty is demanded of those with privilege, and dominion over those who have shown themselves to be incapable of self-rule is an accepted fact of life.
Otherwise, we’ll just keep seeing the bastardy and obesity rates go up as social cohesion and national achievement crash down.
Read another article of mine on a similar subject here:
Murray notes:
That’s what I mean by loss of self-confidence. The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead.
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never enjoy.
My own sense of the relationship between the elite and the rest is that the elite needs society to function while the rest need it to fail. The elite also believes, at least correctly in the short term, IMHO, that it is cheaper to trade concessions rather than seek to correct subversion. We saw the consequences of efforts to correct subversion in the early days of ICE operations when the elite shat its pants and backed off. There are numerous other examples of this syndrome not least of which was the acceptance of BLM insurrection and subversion.
To get the elite to properly confront subversion, there would have to be a great deal more at stake for them because the cost of an effective correction would be extremely high.