So I have two stacks of books sitting on my desk at home: one of books that I still need to read (I get through them rather slowly, as I mostly read during the few stolen moments available to a stay-at-home mom with 3 young children) and one of those that I have managed to read but want to write something about. I’m trying to wade through some of the latter stack, since even my generous faculty book check-out period at the university is coming to an end, and the former might need to get made into two stacks, lest they all come tumbling down.
I read Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save after hearing about it on The World, one of my favorite public radio programs. That’s the way that I hear about a lot of the books (and mostly all of the fiction) I read. I was particularly interested in this one because of the Poverty in the Global Economy course that I taught early this summer, although I didn’t end up using it directly in the course. It’s very quick to read and worthwhile, especially if you have a particular interest either in moral reasoning (he’s a philosopher, and the beginning of the book really lays out his personal philosophy around shared responsibility for survival of the world’s most vulnerable) or in global poverty, although it’s lighter on critique of the global economic structure than I would have liked or expected.
Here are my reflections on the book, with the major caveat that I am no literary reviewer, obviously. I review articles for a couple of journals, but that kind of criticism is much different, and much more regimented, than this, so take it more as though we were having a book club and I’m a member offering my take on it, okay? And then feel free to totally disagree with me and offer your own thoughts in the comments.
As an aside, I’m interested in starting a real book club for radical social workers–I’ll do a whole post on that later–but if you’re at all interested in meeting monthly for drinks/coffee/discussion of the kinds of books that appeal to me, at least, as a radical social worker…please let me know!
The basic premise of the book is that our world is rich enough to end dire poverty, if we just spread our wealth around better and that our failure to do so is an individual moral failing no less egregious than if we saw a child drowning and did not jump in to try to save her. He challenges us to think about every penny that we spend unnecessarily and whether we can legitimately claim that to be ethical behavior. It’s a premise that I personally accept, yet there were many parts of the book that gave me pause. My thoughts, in no particular order:
There’s a section where Singer challenges the validity of the whole concept of self-interest, even enlightened self-interest (see p.77). He gives several examples where compassion is obviously not stemming from self-interest and then asserts that the norm of self-interest compels people to claim it as a motivation for their actions rather than to appeal to our own higher instincts and those of others. This discussion made me question the role that self-interest plays in community organizing, in particular, where it is pretty much universally the motivating factor around which people are brought into relationships. Should it be so? Or should we, in fact, be operating from a perspective of more altruistic motivation, using different language to talk about how to bring people together?
Singer is almost apolitical in his analysis of the global economy, and I take issue with his characterization of advocacy with national governments as being so unlikely so as to be a waste of time. To expand his initial analogy, to me that sounds like saying that, if the waves are really bad and I’m not a good swimmer, so it’s unlikely that I could save the dying child, then I shouldn’t even bother trying? Especially because, in this case, we can certainly be working to exert political, social, and economic pressure on world leaders to take anti-poverty policies at the same time as we are taking personal steps to make a contribution.
There is a chapter in the book that asks, in several different ways, questions about the extent to which we are allowed to have a preference for our own children over the children of others–basically, do we have a right to give to our own children, knowing that what we give to them effectively reduces what we can give to children in poverty around the world, and, if so, what are the limits that must morally be placed on this giving? This discussion was tough but very important for me as a mom. I think quite a bit, actually, about what my kids have compared to others. We really don’t buy toys for the kids much at all, and they rarely have new clothes, but they do have all they want to eat (not what they want to eat, my 3-year-old would point out!), great medical care, clean water, lots of attention from a well-rested and well-treated mom, access to safe and free recreation, books to look at…so very, very much. I do think, consciously, about not over-buying for them, both because we should be directing our resources elsewhere and because I believe that too much stuff is bad for them, but what about taking that further? Should we live in a less expensive neighborhood even if it means poorer-quality schools? Should I be working full-time on social justice causes rather than dedicating my time to them? I’m obviously exerting a preference for my kids’ well-being over the well-being of other kids, and I guess I really didn’t think about the questionable morality of that until I read this book. But now I kind of can’t stop thinking about it.
Overall, I was pretty enthralled by this book until the last two chapters when, much to my shock and somewhat dismay, Singer distills his philosophical arguments to a formula that dictates how much people should ethically be ‘expected’ to give to fight global poverty, and I find that, according to his standard, we’re already giving what we “should”. As in, without giving up my frivolous fountain drink splurges or our (very) occasional dinner out or any of the things we currently buy for our kids. Those last sections left me feeling pretty empty, really, and a little bit betrayed. Here I am wrestling with these moral quandries about my right to love my kids more than an unknown, hungry child somewhere, and the guy who has been causing me to ask myself these hard questions suddenly says that, according to his formula, I’m all good? Even though I know that I could/should be doing more? But because we don’t make more money, we’re somehow off the hook for giving sacrificially to fight global desperation? Talk about a letdown.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has read the book or has thoughts about Singer’s other philosophy or my quandries above. And I’d also take feedback about whether reviews like this are at all helpful to you and/or how to structure them to make them more so. And I’ll keep wading through the rest of that pile!
Towards a study of pathological wealth?
Mark Rank, one of my professors at Wash U, opened his class on Poverty & Inequality by saying something like (this is 10-year-old paraphrase, so I hope he’ll forgive my inaccurate memory!), “If you think about it, it’s strange that we spend so much time studying poverty and the poor, and not affluence. After all, we know why people are poor: they don’t have enough money. And we know what it does to people’s hopes and health and life chances to live in poverty. What we don’t know nearly as much about is how people can get so obscenely wealthy, why people pursue wealth to the exclusion of happiness and overall well-being, and what it does to the individual psyche, and to our society, to have such sustained and excessive wealth.”
That comment has stuck with me for a decade, and it replayed through my mind during my reading of a few different books this fall. One, We Used to Own the Bronx, I picked up quickly as I was grabbing a couple of books for myself during a library trip with the kids. It is the story of Eve Pell, a former debutante from a wealthy family in New York, and while it is mostly a memoir, it tells an instructive story about the insidious effects of wealth and privilege on this family. One of the most notable points was that, even in denouncing her family’s sense of entitlement and superiority and the ways in which they eschewed authentic connections for those mediated by layers of paid help, she complained rather bitterly at being left out of her father’s will, as though, after all, intergenerational transfer of property is some kind of inalienable right.
Somewhat similar was Slaves in the Family,a rather remarkable effort by one descendant of slave owners to track down the descendants of those enslaved by his family. There was a lot going on there, including his struggles with the painful legacy of his ancestors’ actions, but, given my context at the time, I thought most about what the book had to say about wealth. It was wealth that allowed some people to purchase others and wealth and the pursuit of more wealth that prompted that evil action. It is, perhaps, the clearest example in history of the horrible, horrible consequences of having too much.
One of my students chose the book Affluenza for the reading reflection assignment that I use to open the fall Social Policy and Programs class. The assignment is designed to get students to engage with a piece of popular literature about the social condition that they might not otherwise choose, not immediately connected to their area of practice, and look for insights that might inform their advocacy and/or social administration. I hadn’t read this book yet, so I decided that I should. For the most part, this wasn’t a book that really spoke to me personally. As my students know, I don’t really watch TV, I rarely buy new clothes, we don’t really do ‘entertainment’ or ‘recreation’, my kids will only get 2 presents each from us this Christmas–mostly I work and hang out with my kids, activities that tend, particularly because of the focus of my work, to keep me rather insulated from commercialism. But I definitely saw some ways in which the lessons of this book, really a sermon on anti-materialism, resonate with social work practice, sometimes in surprising ways.
One point was that the Internet has become much more a tool of e-commerce than a revolutionary democratization of knowledge. For those of us committed to social justice, we have to care about the openness of this medium and the ways in which it, too, is shaped for corporate ends. It also occurred to me, in the section on student debt, that social work students’ debt levels may, indeed, influence graduates’ career paths. If I was graduating with more than $20,000 in student debt, it might have been harder for me to pursue advocacy (initially often a low-paying field) rather than management or private practice. How much do you think that the out-of-pocket cost of social work education influences subsequent professional specialization? The authors also stressed that we increasingly see ourselves as consumers, not citizens, a realignment that erodes the social contract and support for public goods (parks, public schools, libraries)–this is a now-familiar argument (perhaps most famously associated with the ‘Bowling Alone’ thesis), but, here it was presented as one that can be influenced even by individuals in their own behaviors as consumers, or not. Finally, and perhaps most associated with the title of this post, they cite numerous indicators of the social and psychological toll that unceasing pursuit of wealth has on individuals and families. It made me wonder how much of social workers’ collective energies are spent dealing with these symptoms: families that spend little time together, addictions that self-medicate stress, anxieties related to perceived inadequacies…what I take from this is not a ‘so we all just need to spend more time around the campfire’ kind of message, but, instead, that it really is all of this wealth that is noteworthy, and that, if we dedicated some of our study to why we have a society that allows people to accumulate so much, we might find that we build structures that prevent others from falling into such deprivation. And that, in fact, everyone is better off.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged poverty, reviews