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davidswanson Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 12:25 PM
Original message
American Samaritans
There are probably three things necessary if the United States government is to better provide for the American people: First, expose as baseless and harmful the pseudoscientific theories that claim to show that helping people actually hurts them, that charity is cruelty, that a higher minimum wage hurts workers, that health coverage leads to poor habits and health, that altruism doesn't "really" exist and therefore should not be engaged in, etc. Second, recount for people enough stories of actual altruism, both individual and collective, that they understand its power and are inspired to engage in it and promote it. Third, make some systemic changes in our government so that the will of the people, thus developed, can have some impact on it.

The first two requirements are accomplished in a wonderful new book called "The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor?" by Deborah Stone. She sets out to address the problem that many Americans do not think of government as a way to help anyone or do good in the world. Those who want to do good often choose to do so privately, and are often then frustrated by the much greater harm done by the government they've ignored. She traces dismissal of government as a way to help to claims of the past few decades that government aid goes to parasites who would actually be better off if forced to shape up and take care of themselves.

Stone agrees that there are many cases in which people are best served by showing them how to help themselves. But, she points out, "The problems that get people pumped up about politics are ones that are beyond the capacity of individuals to solve themselves, no matter how smart or skilled they are or could become and no matter how hard they try. Among these problems: health insurance; much if not most illness and injury; safe and affordable housing; steady work with sufficient pay and benefits to take care of a family; adequate retirement income; affordable higher education and effective primary education; broken, violent neighborhoods; transportation between where people live and where they work; and all the various forms of discrimination, in which people are treated on the basis of stereotypes, no matter what their merits."

Stone even blames the Help-Is-Harmful ethos for the diminishment of community in the United States and the rise of bowling alone. Disagreeing with Robert Putnam, she writes: "I trace this withdrawal to a deeper moral source: People who think of themselves as kind and compassionate hesitate to belong to a club of meanies. When people are told not to reach out to other people because help is harmful, they have to harden themselves and act mean when they would rather be kind. If citizens don't join groups, cooperate with each other, or participate in politics as much as we used to, it's likely because we can't get along with OURSELVES. The contradiction between our private and public moralities is too hard to bear."

Chapter 2 is the key to Stone's eight-chapter book. In it she lays out seven arguments against helping people and convincingly reduces them to laughable fairy-tales. These arguments tend, Stone shows, to be based on sleights of hand that occur prior to the arguments. Those in need of help are depicted from the start as not needy, not hungry, not suffering in any way. And help is defined from the start as a reward, not as alleviation of any sort of suffering. "To believe help is harmful," she writes, "you have to think of it as something people can do without. You have to have already decided that they don't really need it. And that is the big deception, the invidious moral claim at the heart of conservative logic."

At the heart of libertarian logic, Stone suggests, is the notion that a government can only provide for anyone by ENSLAVING others. But, as Stone points out, we tend not to agree with this belief that we have been enslaved. In fact, despite the success of the help-is-harmful crusade in demonizing welfare, polls show that most Americans want their government to take some of their money and give it to those in need. When you've reached the point of alleging voluntary slavery, it's time to check the battery in your BS detector!

Chapters 3 through 7 consist largely of accounts of altruism, most of them very small scale and personal. If you're in search of debate talking points and syllogistic proofs you might be tempted to skip all of this and jump to chapter 8 to find out what any of it has to do with government. I would advise against doing so. We do not learn good behavior by syllogism, but by example. And these examples are not without several key lessons along the way. Through Stone's accounts of altruism, we discover not only that many Americans are very altruistic, not only that we are ourselves altruistic in various ways, but also that we want to be more so, and that much altruism is discouraged by government policies that should promote it and shamed by public perceptions that ought to praise and honor it. Prominent are stories of home healthcare workers who are forbidden to have contact with their clients outside of official visits and forbidden to assist them in various ways, but who go out of their way to help anyway. Far from doing so to win praise, these workers take these steps with a sense of shame that they are weak and doing wrong, violating public morality. That's a public morality I want no part in.

Stone does an outstanding job of debunking the rightwing application of theories from the physical sciences to moral prescription. Sadly, she then engages in a bit of it herself, arguing that neuroscience has shown that humans and other animals engage in altruism. Stone had already shown that sufficiently by her extensive account of the presence of altruism in our behavior. Playing along with the pretense that somebody with a microscope and a lab coat has to sanction our behavior by agreeing that it exists serves no useful purpose and only sets people up for a fall the next time some new scientific finding is alleged to discover the dominant presence of sadism.

But this is a minor note in a valuable book that goes on to show that people are most likely to be more altruistic if you tell them that they already are, give them credit for it, and give them responsibility for it. And the best way to give people responsibility is often to ask them to help someone else. The best programs and organizations for developing active citizens are not those that refrain from helping, but those that show people how they can help others. It's not "Teach a man to fish" so much as "Teach a man to teach others to fish."

Now, imagine that we work privately and through local and state governments to put our energy into helping people through programs that give them responsibility, show them how to help others, and develop in them the idea that they have an interest and a responsibility in government. We would be moving in the direction of influencing Washington. But we would still be miles away. It is very rare for majority opinion to carry the day in our capital. We would still be shut out of the corporate media, not because our ideas are less attractive than those of people who claim to oppose charity for the good of the poor, but because the corporate media is corporate. We would still have very little influence with elected officials, because a legalized system of bribery puts them in the pockets of wealthy interests. Winning over individual elected officials would still be of little value, since the two voices of two overgrown factions known as "parties" command the obedience of most so-called public servants at the national level. We would still be hard-pressed to elect real representatives without verifiable vote counting, elections on weekends, instant runoff voting, election day registration, and so many other reforms needed to make voting easier and more credible.

And we will never have money to spend on doing good as long as we are borrowing trillions of dollars to spend on killing people around the world. Sadly, Stone's few references to war in her book are not helpful. She claims that what the United States is doing in Iraq is "trying to seed" democracy and attempting the almost impossible task of "protecting Iraqis from insurgent violence without killing innocent civilians." Apparently oblivious to eternally stop-lossed contracts, she even proposes as admirable altruists the "experienced soldiers who stay with the armed services <"services" - a phrase she does not question> instead of switching to a private security firm to do the same dangerous job for ten times the military pay." I'm sure Stone imagines it insignificant in a book on domestic ethics to swallow whole the Pentagon's laughable propaganda, a pile of lies and nonsense that Stone would be more than capable of debunking were she so inclined. But she should consider the harm done when books on foreign policy or other topics mention in passing their complete acceptance of the hooey and bunkum that Stone has devoted her book to denouncing.

We will have to tackle all of these problems if we are to build a better world. Stone has given us several strong bricks to work with.
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salguine Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 12:42 PM
Response to Original message
1. The first sentence exposes the problem...
"There are probably three things necessary if the United States government is to better provide for the American people"...It should be evident to pretty much everybody by now that the United States government isn't INTERESTED in better providing for the American people. The United States government doesn't give a shit about the American people. The sole function of the United States government is to transfer as much of the country's wealth and resources into the hands of a tiny number of well-connected people and entities, as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. The well-being of American people is, in fact, an impediment to this objective, which is why they're left to literally drown in shit as a major American city floods out, while every single government entity, at every level, that should, in theory, provide assistance and relief stood by without lifting a finger...In fact, not only were they not helped, but they were used as an opportunity for even more loot-transfer, as eight or nine layers of new bureaucracy were quickly put in place to make even more money off the tragedy.

"...if the United States government is to better provide for the American people". Gimme a fucking break.
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davidswanson Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 01:20 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. you're right
i had it all wrong

it was the "fucking" that convinced me

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salguine Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 01:51 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Sorry about that. I get a bit (more than a bit)
furious about this stuff, and that, coupled with a thing I have for plain speaking, sometimes means I don't rein myself in quite as diligently as I should.
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unpossibles Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 02:41 PM
Response to Reply #1
5. well, the real problem then is that we the people need to take back the government
I know - easier said than done, and I am not advocating anything outside of the system, just that the government is, and should be, us.
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salguine Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 02:59 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. I never used to advocate anything outside the system...But in recent years I've come
to the conclusion that something extraordinary—and extremely outside the system—is the only thing that's going to clean out the rot in Washington.
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unpossibles Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 04:17 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. as the saying goes, I understand it, but can't condone it
not at this point, any way. There does become a point where that is necessary, but that time is not now.
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Time for change Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 06:25 PM
Response to Reply #1
9. It seems to me that he's not talking about the current U.S. government
What he's saying is that the American peoples' way of thinking about these things has got to change in order to elect a better government for ourselves. I think that's a very important point.
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bertman Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 08:34 PM
Response to Reply #9
11. I so hate to admit it, Time for change, but the prospect of changing the American people's
way of thinking--at least for the minority who actually, you know, THINK--seems like an insurmountable task. Doesn't give me much hope for stopping the empire. We are as complicit as the Germans when the Nazis came to power. We are rationalizing that we DO live in a democracy and that we DO actually have the ability to influence the course of our government. When, we DO NOT. At least through the ballot box anymore.

Madfloridian's post about the Tennessee House race is so sickening. That's what happens when a solid Democrat gets elected. The POWER takes him out and puts one of its minions in his place.

But, David, your review of the book is a great read. So, thanks for posting it. Maybe she made the ending the way she did because she had to in order to get published. I don't know.


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Time for change Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 09:37 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. You sound frustrated
So am I, and so are the good majority of DUers.

I think that one reason why many things seem insurmountable to us is that major historical changes take a long time when considered in the context of our own life spans.

Opinions do change, even the opinions of whole nations. Abraham Lincoln would be considered a racist by today's standards, though in his day he was one of the most progressive thinkers on the matter of race.

And empires fall when enough opinions change -- though sometimes it takes a major cataclysm for that to happen.

Anyhow, I'm going to read the book. We can influence the course of our government by how we vote, by what we say, and by what we do. My feeling is that the more I understand, the more I'll be able to influence things. It's true that the influence that each of us can exert individually is quite small. But it's all we've got.
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blossomstar Donating Member (772 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jul-22-08 12:58 AM
Response to Reply #1
14. True that..
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MonteLukast Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 12:51 PM
Response to Original message
2. Good Samaritans became "enablers".
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baldguy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 05:53 PM
Response to Original message
8. And who said Ayn Rand was a crackpot with no influence?
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hfojvt Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-21-08 07:36 PM
Response to Original message
10. one problem is that we all have anecdotes
For example, the guy I know whose life ambition was to get on disability. For example, another girl I know who came back from a Grateful Dead concert and claimed she had savings she didn't want to dip into and went to the food bank instead. Heck, another example might be me, milking my unemployment benefits instead of really looking for work.

I accept though, that it's better to help 8 people who really need it and two freeloaders than to leave everybody out in the cold just because of some abuses. There's not gonna be any perfect system.

But another thing I object to is when the government helps people who are better off than me, as it always proposes. For example, there are proposals to exempt people over 55 from property tax, regardless of income. So here's a retiree with a $30,000 pension and a $150,000 house, not paying any property tax. And here's me working 40 hours a week for $25,000 and paying property taxes. Similarly, Kansas now exempts social security income from taxes, for people making up to $50,000 a year. Meanwhile, working people start paying taxes after $5,250 a year. The city where I live subsidizes the water bills for seniors making up to $20,000 a year. I work part-time and make $14,000 and get no subsidy. Food sales tax rebate, homestead credit, both of which I qualify for by income, but do not get since I have no children and am under 55. See, if you are 54 making $14,000 a year, you don't get help, but if you are 62 making $49,000, you get help, at least for another 8 years when they will cancel all those programs because there are too tanj many boomers.
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checks-n-balances Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jul-22-08 12:12 AM
Response to Original message
13. I was struck at the "help is harmful" theme being discussed
It's the first time in years I've heard anyone even point out this huge (and likely astroturf-originated) talking point that has insinuated itself into our culture for about 30 years. By steadily hearing the phrase "do-gooder," uttered by RWers for so long (and with such disdain) our society has effectively been conditioned - first to look down our noses at people in need, and then to look the other way.

I'm talking about "the pseudoscientific theories that claim to show that helping people actually hurts them, that charity is cruelty, that a higher minimum wage hurts workers, that health coverage leads to poor habits and health, that altruism doesn't "really" exist and therefore should not be engaged in..."

The "stories of home healthcare workers who are forbidden...to assist (their clients) them in various ways, but who go out of their way to help anyway" remind me of the remarkable staff who work with my mother who lives in a nursing facility due to Alzheimer's. They care about the residents as they would for their own parents, and in doing so they model for the community a way that we should behave toward others.

I've only read part of this and have to save it until tomorrow, but (except for the author's flawed view of our destructive activities abroad), it sounds like a worthile book.

Our society is going to depend on people who have grappled with these ideas and are willing to show leadership in this area. We cannot sustain a decent, humane society, let alone any kind of democracy, without teaching one another, once again, to have and show a certain amount of empathy and a sense of community.

These are ideas I'd like to read more about here at DU, since we likely won't find them much of anywhere else. Thanks very much, David S., for posting your review...
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