Blessed Are the Poor

 

I have a friend with whom I regularly share our nostalgia about N.D.G.—Notre-Dame-de-Grace, an old inner suburb of Montreal. We both grew up there, at about the same time, and went to the same church and school, although we did not know each other then. 

Recently, he sent me a vintage photo of Montreal West, knowing I had lived there for a time as well. 

But I do not have fond memories of Montreal West. The feeling is completely different.

Which makes me wonder why. 

Growing up, I lived in and around Gananoque, a small town in Ontario; N.D.G.; Westmount, another part of greater Montreal; Montreal West; and then to university in Kingston. I have fond memories of Gananoque and N.D.G., and an abiding distaste for Westmount, Montreal West, and Kingston.

Thinking about it, I recognize the commonality. Westmount and Montreal West are posh. Kingston is cut by Princess Street, and this border is deeply significant. We lived on the south side, the posh side. And I was going to Queen’s, perhaps the poshest of Canadian universities. Gananoque was necessarily, as a small town, mixed. N.D.G. was mostly recent immigrants, many families in rented apartments.  In Montreal West, I found my friends down the hill in the duplexes of Ronald Drive, the one non-posh part of the neighbourhood. My truest friend in Kingston grew up north of Princess, and had no contacts with the university.

At one point, as the family business collapsed, we moved from a huge house in Montreal West to a house without running water four miles outside of Gananoque, where we slept two to a bed. Both I and my brother, in more recent years, have reminisced about how happy we were then. “Away from it all.”

I conclude that I do not tend to like rich people, and they are on the wrong side of life. To begin with, rich people tend to be aggressive and competitive. They tend to be emotionally unavailable, always wearing a mask and blinders; not open to new ideas or new experiences. They also tend to be one-dimensional, lacking interests. This makes them seem unintelligent. They are relatively robotic. They are not fully alive. They have sacrificed real life and selfhood to an appearance of life and self.

Poor people are more varied in their characteristics and their interests. They have fewer shared assumptions, and are more open to the assumptions of others. They are often creative, and often kind. 

They smile more. 

My poorer grandmother, a farmer’s wife with eight kids, used to laugh with her whole body; I remember her always smiling. 

I never remember my richer grandmother laughing; she would titter, but it was obviously calculated. She was a good woman, I believe, and kind to a fault, a rebel against her class and its assumptions; but not a happy person.

It can all perhaps be summed up in a short phrase: blessed are the poor.

Some rich people are good people, and some have diverse interests. But those who do suffer for this, because they are then alienated from their milieu. Their milieu is full of  the sort of people the New Testament calls hypocrites.

It is possible that what I say about the Canadian upper class would not apply in other countries; Canada does not have an upper class in the European sense. What I describe in Canada as upper class values might correspond to what Europeans call “bourgeois values.”

But I think of Jesus’s call in the Beatitudes. He plainly spoke of the lower class, the poor, or the poor in spirit, as his people, and not the rich nor the professional class. The rich, more or less by definition, are all in on this world, have committed to it and endorsed its rules. As Jesus says, “they already have their reward.” But, as St. Paul says, the wisdom of this world is folly to God. 

The relatively poor are often the more thoughtful, who consider things more carefully, who have more diverse or more balanced goals. Things like family, friendship, faith, morality, beauty, art.

The rich do not often get this; they see the only issue as money. But I remember the resistance of one factory worker when his progressive employer wanted to end the assembly line to make his work more meaningful: “they pay me for my time. I do not want to sell them my mind. I want my mind to be free.”

Probably the philosophy of most long-distance truckers; or most farmers. Or most shepherds, traditionally. One of the most interesting and erudite people I ever met was a shepherd at the livestock market in Al Ain, Saudi Arabia. Such people have time to think.

By contrast, I was acutely conscious going to grad school, and then working as a professional editor and college prof, that one was always required to accept and endorse some shared ideology; some group idolatry. Much of what we call professional education is really vetting people for conformity.

This being so, it is the poor who are the creative element in our, or any, society. The great breakthroughs and insights and poetic epics will appear in garages, or be proclaimed by shepherds returning from the hills.

The Moral Superiority of the Poor

 

Ibn Khaldun

The great Ibn Khaldun theorized that, over time, all cultures become decadent. The ruling classes become complacent and selfish, and keep shaving more and more off the top of the economy, until the culture is no longer efficient. It then, sooner or later, cannot compete with a poorer culture nearby, the government of which is closer to the common people.

I think he is right—I think history reveals this pattern. It is why cultures rise and fall. And the modern West is at such a point of decadence. Who is the less bureaucratic, more egalitarian, more ascetic culture ready to take over? 

Ibn Khaldun’s theory implies that the same thing will happen with individuals and families. Not that being rich is immoral, but because they become too accustomed to having their way, rich people are likely to grow less moral and more selfish than poor people. Narcissism, or as the Greeks more properly called it, hubris, is a disease of the rich and powerful.

The New Testament, especially Luke, agrees, and makes the same point repeatedly. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

This seems to tally as well with my own experience. Most often, poor people are nicer than rich people.

The matter is obscured by the influence of Calvinism on our culture, so that we often imagine, contrary to the gospel, that material wealth is a sign of heaven’s favour. And that a prominent and rich family is a “good” family.

"Make the Rich Pay" -- The Rich

The rich tend to be on the political left.

Have you noticed?

Sure, you have heard about “the Koch brothers.” Or Conrad Black. But they are the exception. Conrad Black was one big newspaper proprietor who was on the right. He made news because of this. How many newspapers are on the right? Apparently, the owners of all the others are on the left. Rupert Murdoch makes news for running a TV network on the right. But this was also a huge profit opportunity, precisely because most media are strongly on the left, and a customer base was not being served. Other proprietors were so strongly on the left that they were prepared to let their businesses suffer for the sake of their politics.

Pick a posh neighbourhood in the US or Canada. Odds are, it votes left. Westmount—Liberal. Outremont—NDP. Rosedale—Liberal. Vancouver Quadra—Liberal.

The left claims to be “for the poor.” It is really for the rich. The poor in the last US election seem to have mostly voted for Trump. Not that the right is necessarily for the poor—but they do not make this their banner slogan, either.

This is how that works.

Everyone who has more money than they really need sees poorer people and, even if they do not feel a tad guilty about this, they at least fear envy. So there is always a market for some scheme that will “help the poor.” This allows the rich to point for vindication of their own wealth to the fact that they have publicly supported such schemes. They are “progressives.” It’s a less painful alternative to the alternative of either actually, personally, giving money to the poor, or admitting they are a little selfish for not doing so.

Not, let us note, that there is any positive moral obligation to give money to the poor. But that is a separate and more complicated argument. People do feel guilty, and do experience envy.

The standard and most popular tactic among politicians, to meet this client need, is to conjure up an imaginary class of “rich capitalists” whose responsibility it is to divest their wealth for the sake of the poor, and not us, we poor people in Rosedale or Outremont. After all, they have more money than we do.

No matter how rich you actually are, this is necessarily always true. You can always pass the buck up the chain to someone who has more and is not doing their share. Everyone can use the same logic, and make the same claim, all the way up to the one last person who actually is the richest soul in the land, or the world. “Why should I be giving up what I have? After all, Warren Buffet has more. Take his money first.”

But even at the very top, a lot of the madly rich, like the magnates in Silicon Valley, are also on the left. You can find all kinds of them calling for higher taxes—obviously on themselves.

“Heck, I’m for helping the poor. I’m not greedy. I think we should all pay more taxes.”

This works for the really rich, too, who cannot fool themselves into believing they will not bear the higher taxes. They are passing the buck back down the line, in effect. You think he should pay instead of you. He says he’ll pay if you pay too. The positions are actually contradictory, but both on the left. They both come out as “the rich should pay more taxes.”

There are other considerations. It is naive, in the end, to imagine that money going to government goes to the poor. Most of it, of course, goes into the pockets of bureaucrats, and bureaucrats can be among the very rich. Indeed, just about all of the richest neighbourhoods in the US are in the suburbs of Washington D.C.. Guess who lives there (and guess how they vote). Even money specifically earmarked in budgets for the poor goes, apparently, 70% on administration costs—to bureaucrats—and only 30% to the poor. The figures are reversed, on average, for private charities.

At the same time, big government is to the advantage of those who are now rich. More regulation restricts competition. More corporate welfare is available, more fat contracts are put out to tender for established businesses. There is no reason for a big business to prefer a free market.