As Cold as Self-Righteous Charity

Being Seduced by the Dark Side

Oxfam long ago became seduced by leftwing political ideology.  The trajectory is easy to understand.  A charity is formed to provide relief against famine, aka hunger and malnutrition.  The struggle soon broadens into fighting not just at the bottom of the cliff, but at the top–by which we mean the focus upon preventing or palliating conditions which cause poverty and hunger.   

In every society there are relative disparities of wealth and property.  The facile fix at the top of the cliff is for groups like Oxfam was to begin to advocate for the redistribution of wealth and property as more permanent prevention of hunger.  We call this the first degree of abstraction, representing the initial step towards adopting a left-wing political ideology.

The second degree of abstraction comes when the illuminaries in an organization like Oxfam begin to form the view that fighting hunger at the top of the cliff requires not just paying attention to the socio-economic conditions causing poverty, but focusing upon the power structures, the political regimes which exploit the lower socio-economic sectors, and which use them as tools, keeping them subjected to poverty so they are kept perpetually dependant.   This is the second degree of abstraction into left-wing political ideology–identifying the governments and regimes that are evil exploiters of the poor and vulnerable, and opposing them by the ban and the black-list. 

The third degree of abstraction occurs when organizations like Oxfam begin to exclude certain regimes and practices as inherently evil–regimes that they will ban and boycott to the best of their abilities.  At this point, Oxfam and their fellow-travellers are willing to sacrifice the poor and needy whilst they conduct their politically fashionable campaigns against the fomenters of sin.
  The glorious humanitarian end justifies using means which actually harm poor people.  Top-down, ideological abstraction rules; people become irrelevant pawns in the greater ideological struggle. 

Every so often we get a glimpse of the resulting perversity.  For the latest insight we need to thank actress, Scarlett Johansson who, although a former Oxfam ambassador, has unintentionally exposed the corruption of a once honourable charity into just another ideological puppet.  It turns out that Johansson’s cardinal sin was to support publicly a company named SodaStream.  Oxfam recoiled in ideological horror. 

Maybe this company produces something which poisoned the hungry, or which used poor people as unwitting guinea pigs for their product research?  Not at all.

SodaStream was founded decades ago in Europe as a cheap, environmentally friendly, at-home alternative to buying fizzy beverages at the supermarket. Users carbonate their own water using replaceable gas canisters and can flavor the liquid with a variety of syrups, which are also sold by SodaStream. In 1998 the company was acquired by Soda Club, then a seven-year-old Israeli company, which adopted the older company’s name. [National Review Online]

SodaStream’s crime?  Setting up shop in “occupied territories” and employing (aka, exploiting) Palestinian labour in their factories.  Well, actually, that’s not quite true.  It turns out that SodaStream is a pretty decent employer in a part of the world where good work is hard to come by.

First, SodaStream offers comprehensive benefits, including health insurance, and high wages for the Palestinians it employs in its Ma’aleh Adumim facility — better jobs than are available in most of the West Bank. The company’s CEO “just can’t see how it would help the cause of the Palestinians if we fired them,” as the boycott movement effectively desires.

What about the Palestinian workers fortunate enough to be employed  by SodaStream?  This, from the NZ Herald:

Yasmin Abu Markhia, 22, is proudly Palestinian – when the Herald asked her nationality she lifted her sleeve to show a Palestinian flag-themed bracelet.  Abu Markhia, who lives in Jerusalem, checks and stacks the carbon dioxide canisters that go inside SodaStream machines and has worked at the factory beside a Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank for four months.  She sees no conflict in working at SodaStream. “We are human, we earn good money and the work is good.” . .  .

Palestinian worker Nabil Basharat, 40, from a village near Ramallah, has worked for SodaStream for four years and is now a shift manager. He supports his wife and six children on an income he says is high by both Palestinian and Israeli standards.  “We understand their [BDS and Oxfam] opinion, but they need to understand what the factory gives the Palestinian workers and there are a lot of factories in this area doing the same thing,” he told the Herald.

Johansson  has now been effectively dumped as an ambassador for Oxfam, which found her actions supporting SodaStream to have betrayed its ideological commitments.

“This is like supporting the apartheid system in the old South Africa,” thundered Mustafa Barghouthi of the Palestinian National Initiative. Johansson “has no excuse for allowing herself to be used to support the violation of international law.”

The boycotters also urged Oxfam, for which ScarJo has served as an ambassador since 2005, to sever its ties with the actress. “Palestinian civil society, and indeed all who care about human rights around the world,” asserted Omar Barghouti, a founder of a leading boycott group, “expects Oxfam to immediately end its relationship with an actress that has knowingly lent her name to whitewashing Israel’s illegal occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.” On Wednesday, Johansson terminated her relationship with Oxfam, citing a “fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.”

Now, let’s imagine that as a result of SodaStream’s scandalous behaviour being exposed and the consequent ratcheting up of the boycott, it closed down its Palenstinian factories and the 500 Palestinian workers it employs lost their jobs.  Oxfam would cheer.  Oxfam would rejoice in the impoverishment of 500 Palestinians and their families.  Oxfam has become an “end justifies the means” exploiter of the poor.  Oxfam has become the very kind of organisation it professes to oppose–as is always the case when one’s political ideology uses a utopian end to justify using people as pawns. 

To her credit, Johansson did not back down. 

I remain a supporter of economic cooperation and social interaction between a democratic Israel and Palestine. SodaStream is a company that is not only committed to the environment but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbors working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits and equal rights.

Sounds about right.  Sounds like the kind of sentiment that thirty years ago Oxfam would have lauded and championed.  But not now.  Its seduction to the dark side is complete.  

Misleading Unhelpful Poverty Propaganda

Charity is Mandatory

The chattering classes were all agog and aghast for a couple of days earlier this month over child poverty in New Zealand.  Such a problem is worthy of attention and concern.  Unfortunately the protagonists are once again proving to be dishonest traders and so have devalued their cause in a silly attempt to shock and (in marketing speak) achieve cut through to the common mind.  They have grossly exaggerated child poverty in New Zealand. 

A few years ago, the cause d’jour was violence against women (by men).  We were painted as a terribly violent society, since research “showed” that one in four women had suffered abuse.  But common sense is a tenacious beast.  Folk (both men and women) started to think, “Well, I know lots of women–and I am very sure that one in four of them have not suffered abuse at the hands of men.  Where did that figure come from?  Well, in a specious, dishonest attempt to gain attention and traction, the cause-protagonists decided to define abuse so broadly that abuse itself became an inflated, devalued concept.  The end result: people dismissed it and stopped listening.  Those who continued to quote the mantra (“one in four women in this country has suffered abuse”) were increasingly seen as coming from the lunatic fringe. 

Now similar folly is being perpetrated by the child abuse industry.  Sadly, the cause is worthy; the issues are genuine.  The propagandists, however, are dishonest brokers.
  How so?  Poverty is defined so superficially and generally that it has no meaning.  It is derived from an income statistic.  Therein lies the deceit.  One in four children in New Zealand is living in “poverty” but, given the definition of poverty, that will always be the case because around twenty-five percent of children will be living in houses where the income is below sixty percent of the national median (which is the most widely used measure of poverty).  According to the NZ Herald:

In fact, that figure is an income statistic. This year, 25 per cent of children in households surveyed by Statistics NZ for the Ministry of Social Development were in families living on less than 60 per cent of the median income after tax, adjusted for family size and composition. Some of those children are going without material necessities but by no means all.

Ergo, one in four children is living in poverty.  The uselessness of this definition can be illustrated thus: in a mythical country with ten families, the median income was one million dollars.  Around 25 percent of the ten families were living on an income of only 60 percent of the median.  That is, they were living on an income of $600,000 pa after tax or less.  Poverty thus defined is a meaningless concept.  It is certainly not newsworthy, since poverty so defined will always be so. Again, common sense will apply, and a national collective yawn will eventually be the result when, once again, “terrible” and “alarming” poverty statistics are trotted.

The best measures are qualitative ones:

A better measure of child poverty, also used for the commissioner’s report, is a ministry survey of household possessions and economising behaviour. It asks whether the household can keep its main rooms warm, provide a meal with meat at least every second day, pay for water and electricity on time, provide good beds, replace worn out clothes, visit the doctor, replace broken appliances, afford clothes for important or special occasions, and so on.

A household that says it cannot afford any six of 16 such expenses is considered to be in hardship. Last year 17 per cent of children in surveyed households were in that predicament. That produces a national estimate of 180,000 children, not one in four but more than one in six.
However the households in hardship are not always those on a low income. The report notes that “living above the income poverty line is insufficient to protect some families from material hardship. Conversely, not all with an income below the poverty line experience material hardship.” In fact, it says, only 35-45 per cent of poor households are poor on both measures.

Now we are getting into more realistic territory, and as a consequence the incidence of actual child poverty is dropping substantially, once more valid measures are used.

But we need to go further still.  Some poverty is wilful and self-caused.  It is a result of too much money being spent on alcohol, tobacco, the pokies, and drugs.  While children living in such households are not responsible for the sins of their parents, they most certainly suffer because of them.  The kind of help needed in such cases is quite different from households that have fallen on hard times due to no fault of their own, such as losing jobs, sickness, or debilitating health problems.  Then again there are families which have fallen into the debt trap and are now hopelessly imprisoned therein.  Others are temporarily struggling and will soon move out of poverty due to getting more work, having two or more jobs, or generating more household income by more household members finding work. 

The kind of help each household needs can vary substantially.  It is generally true that the best help is from neighbours and relatives and friends.  It is also true that this kind of help is often squeezed out by government programmes.  But one thing is very clear: helping is not optional.  Not for Christians.  But it must needs be the right kind–discerning, intelligent, constructive, and when needed, tough, not emotively driven by guilt and pseudo-pity. 

 

The Humanist Millennium

Dashed Hopes and Bitterness

God does not exist.  Evil is not intrinsic to the soul of man.  The cosmos is evolving.  Man can take control of his own evolution and perfect himself.  These were the doctrinal foundations upon which the West built its Tower of Babel at the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth.  These same doctrines remain regnant in the West to this day.

Back in the day combating evil had two main fronts of engagement.  The first focused upon human conditions.  Improve the external conditions and mankind would be made more perfect.  The second front was an overt attempt to alter human beings themselves by means of psychology, eugenics and education.

The campaign to improve the external living conditions in order to perfect mankind had two main lines of attack.

Sluggards, Politicians and the Poor

Nothing a Special Grant from WINZ Won’t Fix

We are about to have another talk-fest on child poverty and income inequality in New Zealand.  This will be a politically inspired confabulation. 

Deputy Prime Minister Bill English and Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia are setting up a ministerial committee on poverty under the Maori Party’s post-election agreement with the National Party.  (NZ Herald)

Some social researchers have discovered that children born to parents living in “poverty” are likely to be significantly poorer than others in their demographic cohort for the rest of their lives.  In other words, if they are born into poverty, it, more often than not becomes a trap, a deep slippery pit from which they never climb out.

A long-term study of 1265 children born in Christchurch in 1977 has found that those whose families were poor in their first 10 years of life earned about $20,000 a year less by the age of 30 than those who grew up in rich families.  Those from poor families were more likely to leave school without qualifications, have babies before they were 20, commit crimes, go on welfare and have addiction and other mental health problems in adulthood.

This is the sort of thing that politicians don’t like to hear because it means that intergenerational poverty is not something which can be fixed with a few more taxpayer dollars being showered down upon unworthy recipients.

Professor Fergusson said the study showed that income inequality and behavioural issues, such as parents’ addictions, both had to be tackled to fix social problems.  “For example, increasing the income of substance-using parents may be counter-productive since it will give them more access to purchasing alcohol or drugs,” he said.

The academics are not sure what the critical factors or switches are which consign the children of poor families into lifestyles of poverty.  No doubt there are many.  Far too many for bureaucrats and state programmes to fix.  So, the politically inspired confabulation will contribute to global warming, but little more.

We will state the matter plainly.  Poverty is not the problem.  Humanity, or the human soul is.  The perpetual, intergenerational poor are that way because they have a malady of soul.  Yes, the children caught this from their parents, but having caught it, they are enslaved and conditioned to such an extent their escape is virtually impossible, without a radical conversion.

What are some of the characteristics of this spiritual affliction?

Firstly, self-indulgence.  You can be poor without being self-indulgent, but once self-indulgence has overtaken the soul, poverty is a perpetual occupant of the household.

Secondly, an epicurean “living for the moment”–that life is a matter of eating, drinking, and being merry, for tomorrow we all die.

Thirdly, a deep sense of envy and entitlement–that things are bad because someone or something owes us something, and we are doing it tough only because they haven’t been made to pay it over yet.

Fourthly, a view of time and the future that counts the future in hours or days.

Fifthly, a lust for possession and consumption goods to satiate and  provide temporary pleasure.

Sixthly, wealth is something which comes by chance, good luck, or winning Lotto.  This is an outworking of the belief that there is no, or little, sense denying oneself in the present for the sake of the future.  Everything is existential.  Everything is now.  Or, it is not real.

Seventh: hard work is an affliction that society from which society ought to protect me.

Eight: there is no sense of duty, obligation, or responsibility.  There is no sense or belief that one has come into this world to serve, to honour, and to obey.

These are the eight deadly sins of poverty.  In our view, a person can be living in threads and yet not be poor in heart or attitude.  They can be far richer than their economic circumstances.  By the same token, some people can be living in the lap of luxury and be poverty-stricken in heart.  But once the richer person had squandered his or her wealth and are at the bottom of the heap, neither they nor their progeny are likely to escape, without a change of heart–a conversion, if you will.

The real issue, then, is whence and how will such a conversion come?  Call us cynical, but state programmes are just never going to cut it.  In fact, the underlying premises of statist amelioration actually locks the spiritual malady in place, reinforcing it, making it stronger.  State programmes implicitly reinforce the maladies of envy, covetousness, demand rights, instant gratification, and instant satiation.  (Why else would the State own and run lottery companies?)

In complete contrast, consider, for example, the testimony of the Proverbs (chapter 6)

⁶ Go to the ant, O sluggard;
   consider her ways, and be wise.
⁷ Without having any chief,
   officer, or ruler,
⁸ she prepares her bread in summer
   and gathers her food in harvest.
⁹ How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
   When will you arise from your sleep?
¹⁰ A little sleep, a little slumber,
   a little folding of the hands to rest,
¹¹ and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
   and want like an armed man.

Proverbs 26:

¹³ The sluggard says, “There is a lion in the road!
   There is a lion in the streets!”
¹⁴ As a door turns on its hinges,
   so does a sluggard on his bed.
¹⁵ The sluggard buries his hand in the dish;
   it wears him out to bring it back to his mouth.

Proverbs 20:4

  The sluggard does not plough in the autumn;
   he will seek at harvest and have nothing.

But, no worries, mate.  We’ll all take care of you through a multitude of state programmes taking other peoples’ money and giving it on to you.

Proverbs 24:

³⁰ I passed by the field of a sluggard,
   by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,
³¹ and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns;
   the ground was covered with nettles,
   and its stone wall was broken down. 

You poor thing.  Here’s a special grant from WINZ to tide you over.

Nope.  Our expectations from the government talk fest on poverty and inequality are exceedingly low.  Somehow, we don’t think we will be disappointed.

One thing is clear: these texts from Proverbs are entirely offensive and unacceptable in a religious culture which believes in demand rights or state-funded entitlements.

More to Come?

The British Riots Risk Being the New Normal

Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent piece on the recent riots in Great Britain. Disaffected youth suddenly took the to the streets and took control.  The (liberal) British establishment shook its head and said, “We warned you.  This is what happens when inequality takes hold.”  Dalrymple shreds the idea. It is timely given the Left’s preoccupation in this country with the alleged national sin of the rich getting richer and the poor, poorer.
 

Theodore Dalrymple
Barbarians on the Thames
A postmortem of the British riots
Autumn 2011

Complex human events have no single or final explanation. The last word on the outbreak of looting and rioting that convulsed large parts of England, including London, in August will therefore never be heard. But some of the first words were foolish, or at least shallow, reflecting the typical materialistic assumptions of the intelligentsia.

An August feature story on the riots in Time offered a particularly striking example. The author suggested that to understand the riots, we should start with “something called the Gini co-efficient, a figure used by economists to indicate how equally (or unequally) income is distributed across a population.” In this traditional measure, the article notes, Britain fares worse than almost every other country in the West.

The lower the Gini co-efficient, the more “equal” is the distribution of wealth.  Britain’s Gini co-efficient ranked relatively high on the list.  This led the paper down the oh-so-common fallacy of false cause.

This little passage is interesting for at least two reasons. First is the unthinking assumption that more equality is better; complete equality would presumably be best. Second is that the author apparently did not think carefully about the table of Gini coefficients printed on the very same page and what it implied about his claim. Portugal headed the list as the most unequal of the countries selected, with a 0.36 coefficient. Next followed the U.K. and Italy, both with a 0.34 coefficient. Toward the bottom of the list, one found France, with a 0.29 coefficient, the same as the Netherlands.

Now, it is true that journalists are not historians and that, for professional reasons, their time horizons are often limited to the period between the last edition of their publication and the next. Even so, one might have expected a Time reporter to remember that in 2005—not exactly a historical epoch ago—similar riots swept France, even though its Gini coefficient was already lower than Britain’s. (Having segregated its welfare dependents geographically, though, France saw none of its town or city centers affected by the disorder.) . . . .  And all this with a Gini coefficient of only 0.29! How, then, could it have happened? It might also be worth mentioning that the Netherlands, with its relatively virtuous Gini coefficient, is one of the most crime-ridden countries in Western Europe, as is Sweden, with an even lower Gini coefficient.

One reason offered for the riots was that the government had reduced spending on “services”. Youth had taken to the streets, looting and killing because they did not have enough to entertain them.  Remember the scenes of well-dressed, designed clothed kids running out of stores with i-pods, computers, phones . . . .  Yes, the “system” had indeed failed them, or so the liberal intelligensia reasoned.  But Dalrymple asks a much more profound and relevant question.  How is it that these people had become dependant upon the provision of such “services” in the first place?

. . .  It is hardly surprising, then, that when people claim that service reductions provoked the riots, they are unable to see that if this were so, the problem would be not the removal of services, but dependence on them in the first place. In any case, as Time pointed out, the effects of the proposed—and economically inevitable—spending reductions have yet to be felt (and few of the reductions have been implemented to date).
But Time also proposed, perhaps without fully realizing it, a more plausible explanation of the riots: that “some of the disaffection with Cameron and his government has more to do with who they are than what they’ve done.” And what they are is upper-class. This theory implies that the rioters’ “disaffection” was more self-consciously analytical than was probably the case; but it does capture a characteristic of the rioters and, indeed, of many British intellectuals: resentment.

For “resentment”, read covetousness or envy–one of the most powerful human moral forces shaping any society–for good or ill.  This has been long known and spoken of, from political theorists such as Montesquieu, Rousseau and de Tocqueville onwards.  Yet, it is now completely disregarded or forgotten.  Why this should be so is an argument for another day.  But Christians know that envy is the root of all sin.  It is what led the first man and woman into rebellion against God.  The serpent accused God of envy of human beings.  He inflamed in Eve the idea that she and Adam deserved more, and could have more, were God not enviously withholding from them.  

Resentment is a powerful, long-lasting emotion that usually is self-serving and dishonest (I have never heard a criminal complain that his defense lawyer is upper-class, as he often is), as well as useless. Resentment is undoubtedly part of everyone’s psychology, at least potentially, and few of us have never heeded its siren song. A population’s general level of resentment, however, is not a natural phenomenon that one can analyze in purely mechanical terms, as if it increased geometrically with the Gini coefficient. Britain itself has been far more unequal in the past without widespread riots’ breaking out, so it is clear that we cannot understand people’s behavior without referring to the meanings that they attach to things.

. . . . One rioter told a journalist that his compatriots were fed up with being broke all the time and that he knew people who had absolutely nothing. It is worth pondering what lies behind these words. It is obvious that the rioter considered being broke not merely unpleasant, as we all would, but unjust and anomalous, for it was these qualities that justified the rioting in his mind and led him to suggest that the riots were restitution. . . . (I)t is again obvious that the rioter believed that he had a right not to be broke and that this right was being violated. When he said that he knew people with “nothing,” he did not mean that he knew homeless, starving people left on the street without clothes to wear or shoes on their feet; none of the rioters was like this, and many looked only too fit for law-abiding citizens’ comfort. Nor did he mean people without hot and cold running water, electricity, a television, a cell phone, health care, and access to schooling. People had a right to such things, and yet they could have them all and still have “nothing,” in his meaning of the word. Somehow, people had a right to something beyond this irreducible “nothing” because this “nothing” was a justification for rioting. So people have a right to more than they have a right to; in other words, they have a right to everything. 

The culture of covetousness which grips the West in an iron fist–one of the most debilitating cultural malaises imaginable–is evil, pathetic, and laughable.  Yet it is in the water we drink and the air we breathe.  It is the very warp and woof of the cloth, the bone and sinew of the body politic. It is as old as mankind, debilitating and primitive.   

 Tangible benefits, on this view, come not as the result of work, effort, and self-discipline: they come as of right. This inflated doctrine of rights has turned into a cargo cult as primitive as that in New Guinea, where the natives thought, after a laden airplane crashed in the jungle, that consumer goods dropped from the sky. Apparently, all that is necessary for people like the rioters to live at a higher standard of living, equal to that of others, is for the government to decree it as their right—a right already inscribed in their hearts and minds.

How did this debilitating social plague come about?  It was not the existence of poverty or inequality.  It originated with the “haves” not the “have-nots”.  For them, the instigation was guilt, not envy.  They had; others did not.  Therefore, to assuage their guilt they argued for the have-nots to have.

This doctrine originated not with the rioters but with politicians, social philosophers, and journalists. You need only read Henry Mayhew’s nineteenth-century account of the laboring poor in London to realize that the notion of having rights to tangible benefits was once unknown to the population, even during severe hardship. But the politicians, social philosophers, and journalists transformed things evidently desirable in themselves—decent housing, for example—into rights that nothing, including the behavior of the rights holders, could abrogate. It clearly never occurred to the well-meaning discoverers of these “rights” that their propagation might influence the human personality, at least of that part of the population destined to become increasingly dependent on exercising them; and it required only an admixture of egalitarianism to complete the dialectic of ingratitude and resentment.

Here is the deeper reality.  Appeal to envy and resentment, and a change in personality takes place.  Inflamed with lust and resentment, the entire lifestyle of the increasingly depraved person is affected.  An underclass is created in very, very short order.  But are there other causes?

What about unemployment as a cause of the riots? If there are no jobs, there is no opportunity for self-advancement. And as Time points out, unemployment for Britons between 16 and 24 years old has increased from 14 percent to 20 percent over the last three years and is much higher in the areas where most of the rioting took place.

Here, too, the explanation is superficial. The current British unemployment rate, to start with, is not especially high by European standards, though perhaps it is too early to say that similar riots could not happen elsewhere in Europe. More to the point, in the boom days before the financial crash, Britain already had high levels of unemployment among the unskilled young, even as the country imported large numbers of unskilled immigrants to work. For every 20 unskilled jobs created in the run-up to the crash, 19 immigrants found work in Britain, while millions of natives remained in state-subsidized idleness.

Three reasons explain this seeming paradox. In the first place, foreigners, initially without British welfare entitlements, found the wages for the jobs on offer sufficiently enticing to accept them. For natives on welfare, however, the financial difference between working and not working—especially when they could supplement their welfare benefits with a little trafficking or casual work in the black market—was insufficient to get them into the workforce. A locution that welfare recipients frequently use is revealing: “I get paid on Friday,” they say, referring to getting their welfare funds. Their work, apparently, is existence.

Second, many of the young foreigners possessed qualities superior to those of their British counterparts, making them more attractive to employers. Few are the jobs, especially in the service economy, in which such characteristics as punctuality, reliability, politeness, and helpfulness are not important; but these qualities were not much in evidence among the young British population. While in France, one can run a good hotel with young French employees, it would be impossible in Britain with young British employees; in Britain, hotels and many other services are good in proportion to their employment of foreigners. And while educational standards may have fallen elsewhere, it is rare that young migrants to Britain are as uneducated as young Britons. The foreigners, unlike the Britons, can do simple calculations, and they often speak an English that, if not more fluent, is more refined than that of the young Britons.

Finally, the existence of subsidized public housing, or “social housing,” as we term it in the U.K.—it would be more accurate to call it “antisocial housing”—discourages recipients from moving to find work. Because the benefit is not transferable from one location to another, moving would mean that the tenant would have to pay rent at an unsubsidized rate. At the age when young people should be most geographically flexible, many become attached to their lodgings by iron hoops of subsidy. That is why public housing in Britain so often resembles a prison without walls and without warders, and why the riots had some of the qualities of a prison riot.

Dalrymple concludes by agreeing that the rioters have genuine reason to feel aggrieved, but not for the reasons they allege.  

The rioters and the social class to which they mainly belong thus have genuine reason to feel aggrieved, but that reason is not one that they often cite. In the name of equality and redistributionism, the state has provided them with an expensive education that is nearly useless, thanks to the implementation of pedagogical theories from whose practical effects the better-off and better-educated parents are, to some extent, able to protect their children; entrapped them in de facto prisons; and driven up the cost of their labor so far by means of welfare subsidy that it is worth no one’s while to employ it. At the same time, their minds have been filled with notions of entitlement that can only breed resentment. . . .

Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The Scourge of Socio-Economic Inequality

A Modest Proposal to Reduce Poverty

It has become the new normal–particularly in these heady election days–to shriek and moan about income inequality in New Zealand.  OK, so it’s not helped by parties on the Left loudly alleging that the current government has committed the unpardonable sin of causing wider wealth disparity than when it took office.

But, the government buys into the assumptions and the allegations as well, since its defence is to talk about what new programmes it is going to roll out to combat economic inequality.
  If Government is the solution to the problem the implication that Government is the cause of the same.  But, then again, what else would you expect in an ideologically statist culture, such as is regnant in New Zealand.

In 2009, the Brookings Institution published a far more thorough piece on income inequality in the United States, based on a powerful data set collected in a 40 year longitudinal study by the University of Michigan.  Clearly this piece has not been on the reading list of the disparate gaggle of  folk Occupying Wall Street or wherever.

Here are some choice bits:

The third strategy is to do everything possible to increase the share of children being reared by their married parents. Good studies have linked lone parenting (or the shock of transitions between family living arrangements) with poor education outcomes, delinquency and crime, mental-health problems, lower labor-force participation, and a host of other bad outcomes for children.

Unfortunately, Americans have perfected every known way of producing lone-parent families; we are especially good at having babies outside marriage, boosting their share of all births from about 5% in 1960 to nearly 40% in 2006. We also still have the highest divorce rate among Western nations. As a result, nearly 30% of our children live in lone-parent families at any given moment, and nearly half spend time living apart from at least one of their parents before age 18. Among black children, about 70% are born outside marriage and up to 80% live in a lone-parent family sometime during childhood (many for virtually their entire childhood).

In 2007, the poverty rate for lone-parent families was over 28%, nearly six times the rate for married-couple families. Research shows that if we had the same share of children living in married-couple families as we had in 1970, poverty would decline by almost 30% without any additional government spending. The growth of female-headed families is like a giant poverty-generating machine. Even if government programs to reduce poverty become more effective, they would have an increasingly difficult time just offsetting the powerful upward push on child poverty caused by the continuing growth of lone parenting.

“The growth of female-headed families is like a giant poverty-generating machine.”  Translate that to New Zealand.  No fault divorce laws, based upon unfounded human rights doctrines,  coupled with the DPB where the state pays unwed mothers to have more children, has ripped the social fabric of the country apart.  We make a modest prediction: you will not get rid of poverty in this country until you get rid of female-headed families, encouraged by legal and government recognition of sole parenting, and subsidized by the welfare system–incidentally one of the most generous in the world. 

So, since when you tax something you get less of it and when you subsidize it you get more, how about this for a reasonable proposal to combat poverty: reinstate fault-based divorce law; legislate an obligatory tax rate of 50 per cent on the party at fault in a divorce, and upon all people living together outside of the bonds of marriage.  Cut the DPB for every additional child born to an unmarried mother.  Solo motherhood will then stop being a lifestyle choice. Poverty will decline sharply in New Zealand within a generation. 

The inequality debate is actually a misdirection  Great wealth is not the problem; great poverty is.  Stealing from the wealthy and distributing it to the poor–the Robin Hood tax–does nothing to eradicate poverty.  Why?  Because poverty is an outcome of other, non monetary factors.  The Brookings piece concludes:

Poverty in America is a function of culture and behavior at least as much as of entrenched injustice, and economic mobility calls not for wealth-transfer programs but for efforts that support and uphold the cultural institutions that have always enabled prosperity: education, work, marriage, and responsible child-rearing. 

Poverty a function of culture and behaviour: it attenuates through education, work, marriage, and responsible child-rearing.  That about sums it up. 

"Christian" Social Justice, Part II

Demanding God’s Mercy as a Right

The concept of “social justice” has its origins in socialism.  Fairness or equity in society is believed to require a fundamental equality of outcome: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.  The achievement of this more just outcome requires the compulsion of the state to redistribute forcibly, through a progressive taxation system, taking from some to bestow upon others.  In doing so the state necessarily claims the right to suspend the eighth and the tenth commandments. 

When Christians buy-in to this non-Christian worldly ideology they often do so because they think it is a means of complying with the biblical injunction to take care of the poor and the needy.  They could not be more mistaken.
  Actually, when Christians are sucked into the “social justice” ends and means they are effectively giving up their responsibilities to their neighbours and delegating them to a pagan state.  They are deciding that the poor belong to the realm of Caesar, not the Christ.

But there is a deeper evil at work.  It is hinted at in the use of the word “justice” with respect to the poor and needy.  Justice has to do with one’s rights and getting what one deserves.  In criminal justice, this means appropriate punishment (or not) depending upon guilt or innocence in committing a crime.  In civil justice, it means (largely) receiving the rights and rewards of contractual obligations, whether explicit or implicit via the general equity of common law.

In the case of welfare, “justice” means that poorer people get the property and support to which they are entitled or to which they are due.  This means that “social justice” teaches that the poor have an implicit and overriding property right in the possessions of others.

In the Scriptures, and the Kingdom there is a sharp disjunction drawn between justice and charity (grace).  Salvation is a matter of grace and divine love, not a right.  If God treated us as we deserve–that is, justly–we would all be condemned.  The law of God, codifying the justice of God, condemns us at every point–not because the law is so high or unreasonable, but because we are wicked from conception.  But God shows mercy and sets His love upon us.  His salvation is a matter of being a free gift, not a just reward.  These concepts are at the heart, and reflect the essence, of the Gospel. 

Care for the poor and providing for them is an expression of charity not justice in the Scriptural world-view.  It is an expression of love of our neighbour.  But when Christians forget this and begin to promulgate compassion for the poor and helping provide for them as a matter of justice not love, they implicitly disbelieve the Gospel itself.  If taking care of the poor is required because of the demands of justice, then the blessings and good gifts of God must be due to human rights and receiving just deserts.  This implicit denial of the Gospel leads the next generation of Christians into explicitly denying the Gospel itself: salvation becomes a matter of receiving what one deserves in the first place.

Whilst this may not appear to have a logical necessity, it certainly has a spiritual one.  Churches and denominations at the forefront of the social Gospel in the early twentieth century within a generation were openly denying the Gospel itself, along with the divinity of the Saviour, the virgin birth, the resurrection, and the life to come.  We believe there is a reason for this development.  The idea of social justice in social and political ethics eventually transferred to the Christian Gospel.

If God’s love can be demanded as a right by the poor, so it can be demanded as a right by the sinner.  The next generation will “make” it so–to their own eternal destruction.

The Right to be Dissolute

Unbelief Always Increases Poverty

Poverty is back in the news again.  Maori and Polynesian poverty to be exact.  It would appear that it is finally dawning on some that poverty–persistent intergenerational poverty–will not be overcome by throwing gummint money at the problem.  It turns out that the problems are far “thicker” than those which can be solved by throwing (not-a-few) taxpayer dollars around.  Poverty has now become institutionalised; it has become a culture all of its own–self-affirming and self-perpetuating and relentlessly powerful.   The Borg is assimilating the ship.

. . .  of the 200,000 New Zealand children living below the poverty line, more than half are Maori or Pacific.  A combination of high dependency on benefits, high rates of single parenthood and a concentration of workers in the manufacturing industries keeps families trapped in poverty, says the report released this morning.

Trapped in poverty.  But here is the all important question: does poverty lead to high dependency on benefits and high rates of single parenthood, or does benefit dependency and single parenthood lead to perpetual inter-generational poverty?  The overwhelming answer from our secularist religion is that poverty causes social disintegration.  This position represents, at root, a Marxist idea–people are the product of externalities, of material conditions.

Now those who work at the coal face with the Underclass see evidence on every hand of destructive cultural patterns that lead to dissolution, dependency, and poverty.  The cause-effect relationship is too strong, too overt to deny.  They realise in time that unless the cultural patterns are changed first, the poverty will inevitably continue. 

But they run into a brick wall of tacit implacable opposition.  Why?  Well, in order to change a culture you have to confront the wrong, condemn it, and challenge people to repent.  You have to make moral judgments.  You have to say, for example, “conceiving a child out of wedlock is wrong.  Don’t do it.”  You have to be able to declare and teach that such things are, wait for it, sinful. You have to use ethical categories for human thoughts, words and actions such as “evil”, “wrongdoing”, “rebellion”, “cursed” and “wickedness”, as well as labelling other words and deed “righteous”, “good”, “holy” and “blessed”. 

You also have to be able to offer a comprehensive cleansing and a genuine redemption from past sins, so that people can make a final break with their former culture and be truly liberated from the past.  They need to be able to declare (and experience), “I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.”

Such notions are anathema to the inquisitors of our established secular culture.  Everywhere people are catechized into believing they have rights.  They have a right to an abortion.  They have a right to conceive and raise children as solo parents.  They have a right to live perpetually on a benefit.  They have a right to conceive children to multiple partners.  They have a right to the latest wide-screen gadget.  They have a right to perpetual inebriation. These dissolutions, of course, foster institutional, enslaving poverty.

We make a mild prediction: as long as people are told they have an entitlement to live in whatever dissolution they please and that the state will happily fund them for it and in it, our society will never, ever change the culture of poverty amongst the Underclass.  Why?  Because our secular culture will never succeed in persuading anyone that such dissolute behaviours are evil.  How can they be evil when the state is happy to subsidize them and constantly frames and presents such dissolutions as amoral rights.

Here is Archdeacon Dr Hone Kaa, speaking for the lobby group, Every Child Counts: 

Spokesman Hone Kaa, who is an Anglican priest, said the levels of children in poverty were unsustainable.  “The report confirms what I have witnessed during more than 50 years of ministry and advocacy on behalf of our whanau. Maori and Pasifika children do not share in the success and prosperity enjoyed by other populations of Aotearoa.  “There is no level playing field and our children are subjected, disproportionately, to the malaise that emerges out of poverty.”

With all due respect, Dr Kaa is simply perpetuating the secularist established religion: poverty causes the malaise (which, in turn, causes more poverty).  If you believe this, then you will inevitably grasp at the only solution which can be on offer: more showers of money.  It is the “pump-priming” principle.  Bestow enough money on the Underclass, and hey presto, they will no longer live dissolute lifestyles, and therefore will escape poverty.

Wait a minute.  All the evidence we have overwhelmingly tells us that they will take the money and become more dissolute.  The money merely gives them greater opportunities and incentives for ever more dissolution.  “I get child support.  If I have another child–don’t care who with–my income will rise. Ergo . . .”  If bestowing taxpayer money upon Polynesian and Maori people was effective in making a difference, then long ago Maori and Polynesian people would have moved up the socio-economic income and wealth scales.  Instead, the reverse has been the case: the more money bestowed, the more poverty.  It is what you do with the money that makes all the difference–and that gets back to culture, religion, belief, ethics, one’s view of the future, one’s view of the past, sin, judgment, and the life to come.  All of this bears directly on what you do with the money you garner. 

Secular humanism, which controls New Zealand in almost every place, will continue to do two things.  It will relentlessly propound that one has a right to be dissolute.  Secondly, it will ceaselessly fund the dissolute in their dissolution.  Therefore, poverty and the poor we will not only always have with us–poverty will grow and eventually rule our society. 

It’s know as the curse of breaking God’s Covenant. 

Our Depraved Poor

Our Depraved Poor

Posted on August 22, 2011 by David French

[Editorial note: This article is has generated some controversy,  most of it positive.  Whilst the author is addressing the situation in the United States, the truths and principles are equally applicable, relevant, and true to New Zealand.] 

It is past time to admit a very hard truth: America’s poverty problem is also a depravity problem.

It is simply a fact that people who work hard, finish their education, get married, and stay married are rarely — very rarely — poor.  There is no other proven formula for lifting Americans out of poverty.  None.  Food stamps don’t do it.  Medicaid doesn’t do it.  Soup kitchens don’t do it.  Good intentions don’t do it.

Hundreds of billions of dollars of transfer payments have not budged the poverty rate.

Simply put, any anti-poverty efforts not aimed at getting kids to complete an education, get married, and stay married are a waste of time.  They may ameliorate immediate physical needs, but the very act of ameliorating those needs renders a destructive lifestyle sustainable and viable.

Walter Russell Mead reminded me of this reality in a must-read post discussing some rather sobering sociological findings.  It turns out that poor, less-educated Americans are turning their backs on religion at a far greater rate than more-educated Americans.  Here are the key findings:

The study also shows that Americans with higher incomes attend religious services more often, and those who have experienced unemployment at some point over the past 10 years attend less often. In addition, the study finds that those who are married (especially if they have children), those who hold more conservative views toward premarital sex, and those who lost their virginity later than their peers, attend religious services more frequently.

Indeed, the study points out that modern religious institutions tend to promote a family-centered morality that valorizes marriage and parenthood, and they embrace traditional middle-class virtues such as self-control, delayed gratification, and a focus on education.

Over the past 40 years, however, the moderately educated have become less likely to hold familistic beliefs and less likely to get and stay married, compared to college-educated adults.

In other words, vicious and virtuous cycles exist simultaneously.  For the least-educated, the less they attend church the less they’re exposed to “middle-class values,” which causes them to engage in behaviors that further alienate them from church.  For the educated, the cycle is the reverse.  The church reinforces the values that permit them to maintain middle-class standing, which keeps them within the “familistic” culture — and in church.

The result is a set of competing cultures, with social mobility defined primarily by the adoption of the behavioral practices of the opposing cultures.  Illegitimacy and divorce are engines of downward mobility just as marriage and education are engines of upward mobility.  Providing material support without contributing to cultural change is an exercise in futility and is often harmful.  And the key to culture is Christ.

In short, the poor need Jesus but have never been culturally more distant from Him.

Mead says this distance is largely the fault of the church:

It is the most scorching indictment of America’s religious communities I can think of that more has not been done to reach out to those most in need of both the spiritual and the social benefits of faith.  Every member of a religious congregation in this country should be asking how he or she could be doing more.

I agree in part.  Yes, we should be asking how we can do more, but in doing “more” we should realize that our anti-poverty efforts largely address symptoms and not causes.

For many, many years I spent time “in the trenches” reaching out to at-risk youth.  At first I was the stereotypical naive idealist.  ”All they need is love and a chance,” I thought.  Working in mentoring programs, I spent untold hours playing catch, going to little league games, going to parks, and just hanging out with at-risk kids as part of a variety of programs.  Seeing ragged clothes, I’d buy new clothes.  Hearing that a mother couldn’t pay the light bill, I’d kick in and help.  I spent night after night sleeping in homeless shelters, cooking dinners in the evening, pancake breakfasts in the morning, and fixing snack lunches for hard days on the streets.

I can’t remember when I first realized that I was accomplishing nothing of substance.  A few car break-ins taught me that some guys saw me as an easy mark.  A few pot purchases with the “gas bill money” taught me that others saw me as an ATM.  Admonitions to “stay in school” had little appeal compared to drug-fueled orgies for kids as young as fifteen years old.  I tried.  God knows I tried.  But it was all for naught.

Only one thing really worked.  The Cross.  There are kids today that Nancy and I worked with who are doing well, who are happily married, and who are pillars of their community.  What made the difference for them?  The Cross.  It wasn’t about my words.  It wasn’t about my effort.  (After all, I tried just as hard or harder with other kids — who are now in prison or “baby-daddies” or both.)  The kids who made it heard the Gospel, repented of sin, and were transformed through the renewing work of the Holy Spirit.

It’s trendy now for churches to put less emphasis on the Gospel and more emphasis on service.  I’ve even heard Christians almost brag that their outreach efforts don’t include any proselytizing at all.  This is tragic.  Billions of dollars of “service” won’t change hearts and lives.  We know that now.  In fact, those very billions may very well numb the human heart to the gravity of its sin.

So, yes, let’s do “more,” but let’s make sure that “more” is aimed at the real source of American poverty — our depravity.

UPDATE:  This post — along with a much shorter post on NRO — have triggered quite an interesting discussion.  I unpack some of the theological issues surrounding “depravity” (including the obvious point that we’re all sinful and depraved) here.

Sadder, But Wiser–Part II

Not World’s Apart

Macsyna King has broken her silence.  Ian Wishart has confirmed that the pre-pub embargo has ended, and that we are free to “discuss away” as he put it.  Below is a collage of thoughts about the underclass and King’s role in it.

We know it exists, this underclass.  We know that it is strong, vibrant and growing.  It has all the malign life force of an aggressive cancer.  To be sure, most of us know it in theoretical, not experiential terms.  That does not make our knowledge necessarily wrong or inaccurate.  In fact, King’s account of her life from her parents right down to the present day will confirm just about every understanding of this terrible vortex.

A Necessary Evil

Poverty is A Requirement of Modern Life

Our Lord said that we would always have the poor with us.  We never imagined how those words would be twisted and perverted by modern Unbelief.  The prevailing narrative of state exacted redistribution of property to achieve equality (or as near to it as possible) requires that the poor be always with us–for propaganda purposes.  We repeat, the seize-and-redistribute property brigade requires a narrative where the poor perpetually exist.  How else could you justify perpetually increasing exactions of other people’s property and assets?  How else could you maintain the politics of guilt and pity?

One of our favorites in New Zealand is the inequality approach.

>Klingon Cloaking Devices

>Unmasked by Boat People

It was inevitable.  Sooner or later a boat filled with desperate people would set out from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, whatever, for New Zealand.  We have been “protected” to date only by an accident of geography–New Zealand’s relative distance.  Australia has faced the problem for decades.

A group of Sri Lankan poor (allegedly Tamils previously caught up in the former civil war) have boarded a boat large enough to make it all the way here.  They have been declaring their intent to sail to New Zealand to seek asylum.  The Prime Minister has made dark hints that he has received intelligence briefings that leave him in no doubt that New Zealand was the intended destination.  Others have accused him of overreacting.  We believe Mr Key in this instance.

The Commentariat is having conniptions.

>Hopeless and Helpless

>Urban Tragedy

The implicit promise of Unbelief’s humanism is that all human problems are solvable, by man. There is nothing that Unbelieving man, applying his power and glory to our human problems, cannot achieve. The future looks unbelievably bright. Except that it isn’t.

It needs to be said repeatedly that messianic idealism led directly to World War I. Then the vengeance exacted by the Allies facilitated not a little the rise of Fascism in Germany. Idolatrous humanism has lurched from one deadly disaster to another.

But sometimes humanism takes a more honest look at what is happening on the ground. Bill Moyers in a piece entitled The Straight Dope interviews David Simon, the creator/author of The Wire. The gritty HBO series takes realistic look at life amongst the underclasses in Baltimore.

What Charles Dickens learned walking the streets and alleys of Victorian London, Simon saw and heard over twelve years as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He turned his experiences first into a book and the NBC television series Homicide, then the HBO series The Corner. Next, with Ed Burns, a real-life cop turned teacher, he created The Wire. Simon’s meticulous and brutally honest storytelling made Baltimore a metaphor for America’s urban tragedy. During its five seasons, The Wire held up a mirror to an America most of us never see, where drugs, mayhem, and corruption routinely betray the promise of “ life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is so ingrained in our political DNA.

Simon’s exposure to the underclasses in Baltimore, and the way the system malfunctions amidst them, has enabled him to understand and portray the complexity of mess–a complexity that does not tolerate easy, facile solutions.  There are no top-down, Big Society solutions any more.  The only hope is bottom-up, soul-by-soul, family-by-family.  But, despite its pretensions to deity, humanism cannot redeem the sin-enslaved, human heart.

Simon himself appears to cling to the hope that Marx or neo-Marxism is closer to the truth: that a man’s fate is determined by the economic structures that surround him. 

Bill Moyers: I was struck by something that you said. You were wrestling with this one big existential question. You talked about drug addicts who would come out of detox and then try to steel-jaw themselves through their neighborhood. And then they’d come face-to-face with the question—which is…?
David Simon: “What am I doing here?” You know, a guy coming out of addiction at thirty, thirty-five, because it often takes to that age, he often got into addiction with a string of problems, some of which were interpersonal and personal, and some of which were systemic. These really are the excess people in America. Our economy doesn’t need them—we don’t need 10 or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones who are undereducated, who have been ill-served by the inner-city school system, who have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy, we pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it. They understand that the only viable economic base in their neighborhoods is this multibillion-dollar drug trade.

The implication is that if society were to change its economic structures, the ghetto would cease to exist. The only viable “free” market operating amongst the underclass is the illicit drug market–and that has been artificially created by prohibitionist public policy.

Bill Moyers: I did a documentary about the South Bronx called The Fire Next Door and what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.
David Simon: Absolutely. In some ways it’s the most destructive form of welfare that we’ve established, the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It’s basically like opening up a Bethlehem Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, “You guys are all steelworkers.” Just say no? That’s our answer to that? And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it did.

It is the unintended consequences which rack secular humanism.  You either do it God’s way or not.  If not, the consequences of the solutions will end up far worse than the original problems.  Simon claims that the war on drugs is lost–it’s just that no-one will admit it.  He also pines for an economic system that would deliver more jobs–hoping that if there were just more jobs around, the underclass would not need the drug trade to survive. Really.  Humanism cannot but cling to its superficial verities and hopes–even when it knows the complexities and has seen the systemic evils.  Somehow, these are not seen as the fruit of what is in the heart of man.  There remains some other, external cause.  Change the system.  It will be different this time.

Bill Moyers: After all these years do you have the answer?
David Simon: Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it as fast as I could into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the urban equivalent of FDR’s CCC—the Civilian Conservation Corps—if it was New Deal–type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome. The drug war is war on the underclass now. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning.
Bill Moyers: There’s very little the police can do.
David Simon: You talk honestly with some of the veteran and smarter detectives in Baltimore, the guys who have given their career to the drug war, including, for example, Ed Burns, who was a drug warrior for twenty years, and they’ll tell you, this war’s lost. This is all over but the shouting and the tragedy and the waste. And yet there isn’t a political leader with the stomach to really assess it for what it is.
Bill Moyers: So whose lives are less and less necessary in America today?
David Simon: Certainly the underclass. There’s a reason they are the underclass. We’re in an era when you don’t need as much mass labor; we are not a manufacturing base. People who built stuff, their lives had some meaning and value because the factories were open. You don’t need them anymore. Unions and working people are completely abandoned by this economic culture, and, you know, that’s heartbreaking to me.

The last great white hope: education.  If we just poured all that money into education of the underclass, we would begin to claw ourselves out.  Question:  education requires a fundamental aspect of mind on the part of the student or trainee–a willingness to forego satiation and consumption now for some future (probably long time ahead) benefit.  It requires hope and faith.  What makes the humanist so sure that folk in the underclasses actually have such hope, faith, and willingness to self-sacrifice and self-deny?  

Without a supernatural, divinely wrought fundamental change of heart such willingness to sacrifice is unlikely.  Simon is far more realistic than most.  But not nearly realistic enough.

The story is told  that Charles Spurgeon, the eminent nineteenth-century London preacher was interviewing a lady–a maid–who wanted to profess her faith and join the Church. Spurgeon pressed the household serving woman for evidence that Christ had changed her.  She blushed and said, “Well, now I sweep under the mats.”  A little thing perhaps–but it contains the very world of Christ’s redeeming work.  Or the needed perspective is illustrated by the account of the lad near Sandfields (Dr Lloyd-Jones’s first pastorate) who was telling his teacher about the fine meal he had just enjoyed at home–gravy, potatoes, meat, cabbage, even rice pudding.  How come, the teacher wanted to know?  The boy’s father had recently been converted–and whereas he had previously spent his wages on drink in the local pub, he was now bringing them home for his family. Small things, but a world of difference.(Iain Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899-1939http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0851513530&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982), p.220f.

Simon’s focus has been on the systemic nature of vice and evil in underclass society, the malfunction of civil authorities, the education system, the politicians, and the police.  It is not any one person’s fault.  It is the system.  Most people in the system mean well, but the system corrupts them all. He is looking for systemic change, from the top down.  He gives us his profession of faith: “I am very cynical about institutions and their willingness to address themselves to reform. I am not cynical when it comes to individuals and people.”  He lacks the perspicacity, or perhaps courage, to face up to the reality that systemic change will merely result in replacing one malfunctioning system with another.  As Jeremiah declaims: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.  Who can know it.”  (Jeremiah 17:10)  Evil lies in the heart of man, and the system is but an extension of sinfulness.  Change man, one soul at a time, and in time systemic evils wane.  This is the rock that breaks the idolatry of humanism into a thousand shards.

But Simon, the modern humanist, sees things in the exact reverse.  Folk are fundamentally good; the system is corrupt and perverts them.  If we could only change the system, the basic goodness and decency in human beings would emerge from underground, blinking in the light.  This is his false religion talking.  But in the end, from his perspective, he knows there is no hope of the system ever changing.  Not really. 

Bill Moyers: But I don’t think these good individuals you talk about—the individual who stands up and says, “I’m not going to lie anymore”—I don’t think individuals know how to crack that system, how to change that system. Because, as you say, the system is self-perpetuating.
David Simon: And beautifully moneyed. I don’t think we can. And so I don’t think it’s going to get better. Listen, I don’t like talking this way. I would be happy to find out that The Wire was hyperbolic and ridiculous, and that the “American Century” is still to come. I don’t believe it, but I’d love to believe it, because I live in Baltimore and I’m an American. I want to sit in my house and see the game on Saturday along with everybody else. But I just don’t see a lot of evidence of it.

His false religion ignores universal human depravity.  Evil is deflected away from where it truly belongs–from man, the sinner to the corrupt “system”–leaving him without hope.  He has seen enough of the system to know close up and first hand that it is too pervasive, too powerful, too smothering. But the Truth remains: “if any man is in Christ he is a new creation: the old has passed away; behold, all things have become new”  (II Corinthians 5:17).    But as long as Simon clings to his naive humanism, he will never have ears to hear this–which is his, and our only real hope.

When humanists are sufficiently naive, superficial, and blindly stupid to attempt to wreak changes in “the system” to “make things right”, then the damage is likely to become ingloriously monumental.  Think the Somme–lest we forget.
 

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>The Need for a Sense of Smell

Money, Love, Desire – Wealth and the Christian
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, May 06, 2011

I recall one place where N.T. Wright said that the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher were “evil.” As a good portion of the Western world is now in the process of running out of money, this set up an interesting train of thought.

Is it “evil” to be broke, to run out of money? Presumably not, because it was for the sake of such broke people that Wright was taking his stand against the likes of the Iron Lady. But that means it is not evil for a whole nation to wind up neck deep in the poverty bouillon. Right? With me so far?

Now if it is not a sin to be poor, how could it be a sin to anticipate that you are going to be poor? Or is it only a sin if you, like Thatcher, take steps to prevent it?

As the modern state continues on in a frenzy of spending (a practice bound to land on the less fortunate and defenseless eventually), it is perilously easy for tenderhearted Christians to advance the cause of economic illiteracy, and all in the name of Jesus. And even though it is part of their qualifications for high ecclesiastical office, such illiteracy is not limited to bishops.

But when we get to the level of “thou shalt nots” and “thus saith the Lords,” we had better be sure we are correct. Otherwise, we will be like the printers of the early “wicked Bible,” who accidentally left the “not” out of the seventh commandment. Yesterday, I saw one of those wicked Bibles on display at the Cambridge University Library. If such a mistake were to be made today with regard to the eighth commandment, there are too many church officials who would not call it wicked, but would rather hail the arrival of a more compassionate economic policy.

In contrast to this ganglion of self-deception, the Tea Party protests have done a great deal of good, at least thus far. We have seen streets filling up with citizens concerned about massive pillage, theft, dishonesty, and fraud. But some Christians may have stayed home because that kind of thing might ruin their testimony and all — who knows where taking a stand against dishonesty might lead? Perhaps to denominational headquarters and mission agencies, and it is therefore best to let sleeping dogs lie.

It is interesting to me to note that association with Tea Party types, some of whom are libertarian pagans, is morally problematic for some Christians. A continued and much closer association with the statist pagans who mail out the entitlement checks presents no apparent problem at all. This is because the statist pagans have a big pile of swag that they dispense hither and yon, much of it to Christians whose sense for self-justifying rationalization is much better than their sense of smell.

>Money, Greed, and God–Part V

>A Pie That Can Limitlessly Expand

In this series of posts on Money, Greed and God, we come to the fourth Myth. We suspect this myth is probably the most pervasive of all. Its widespread currency explains why so many people are guilty about being well-off and why they believe the government should redistribute wealth to help the poor. Richards calls this the Materialist Myth—that wealth is finite, uncreated, and can only be transferred between people.http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0061900575&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr It can neither be increased nor diminished. In other words, like matter, wealth can neither be created nor destroyed—hence its denomination as the Materialist Myth.

Now a moment’s critical reflection will expose how stupid this myth actually is. Consider an agricultural subsistence society which lives from hand to mouth. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume this society has only ten families. Only two families are able to produce sufficient food so that they can feed themselves comfortably throughout the whole year, even in the winter. Eight families are going hungry in the winter.

The Materialist Myth assumes that all the food which could possibly be produced has already been produced at all times. Therefore, those who have a comfortable amount of food have too much; their food needs to be redistributed so that the rest of the eight families get more and escape starvation in the winter. We may also call this the Fixed Pie Size Myth.

But if you don’t fall into the error of the Materialist Myth your first response—and the only sustainable response—would be to help the other eight families to produce more food than they are currently doing. Clearly, this can be done. More crops can be grown, more animals can be farmed, because like humans both animals and crops multiply. The resource is not finite, but can be creatively expanded. The earth can be tended in such a ways that it buds and brings forth. Richards tells the story this way:

From the Middle Ages until the present, stone and wood implements were gradually replaced by metal plows and wheeled carts pulled by oxen and then horses. Technology such as seed drills, reapers, steam power, tractors, and combines transformed farming, so that fewer people could produce more with less land. Everything from pest control to better cultivation made farms even more fecund. Farms sprang up in areas that were previously arid. And yet, as recently as 1900, four fifths of the world’s population still lived on farms.

By the 1970’s, though, only half the world’s population was farming. That’s the worldwide average, however. In much of the world, people still engage in primitive subsistence farming, as they have for centuries. That means they grow just enough to feed themselves, if they’re lucky. In the United States and other societies with solid private-property laws and high technology, however, a much smaller percentage of people make their livelihood by farming. One 1.9 percent of the American population now lives on farms, and yet they produce enough not only to feed the American population but to export abroad. In principle, the state of California could now grow enough to feed the planet. We have reached a unique moment in history. (Richards,p. 99)

A negative example, where wealth has been destroyed in our lifetimes, is Zimbabwe. That country’s farms once feed most of Africa. But under dictator Mugabe, property laws have been eroded, and farms confiscated. The upshot: Zimbabweans could not survive now without millions and millions of tons of wheat and corn being given in aid.

The myth that wealth is neither created, nor destroyed, but is finite (and therefore poverty needs to be tackled by redistribution from the wealthy to the poor) is usually connected to the pie metaphor. Wealth is seen as a pie of fixed, finite dimensions which is divided up amongst the people of the world. If someone takes a big piece, less is available for others.

Think of the pie. It’s a physical object; it has a pieish size and shape. It can’t shrink much, and it certainly can’t grow. We don’t know where it came from. It’s just there on the kitchen counter getting cold. All we can do is divvy it up and eat it.

But that’s not how wealth works in a market economy. Wealth isn’t just three: it’s not a physical object. No one can simply divide it up at will; and above all, the total amount of wealth can grow over time. It hasn’t stayed he same. (Richards, p.86).

And we may also add, the total amount of wealth can shrink over time (as the case of Zimbabwe demonstrates).

The key thing to understand is that wealth, although it involves matter and materials (such as gold, silver, diamonds, corn) it is itself immaterial. After all, since value is subjective, the entire worth of all that we own is only what someone else is prepared to pay for it, should we decide to sell it. Consider the case of a business—an unprofitable business—with no employees, but owning a patent on a design for a revolutionary alternative fuel motor vehicle. It’s fixed assets consist of a couple of sheets of paper, detailing the design. Its intangible assets include a legally enforceable patent on the design. The owner of the business, lacking capital to take it any further, decides to sell. Toyota buys the business and its patent for $5 billion dollars. (Note, this value and this transaction could not be reified without strong, enforceable personal property rights.)

Now, the question is this: Is the business owner less or more wealthy after the sale? Did he become wealthy overnight? No and no. Assuming the price was at fair value, the business owner’s wealth stayed the same after the sale as it was before. It is just that the form of his wealth changed. Even after the sale, his wealth remained as immaterial as before—it just consisted of a rather long number in a bank account balance. Richards summarizes:

For centuries, economists thought the economic value of a good or service was something we can touch or see—either something in the matter itself or in the amount of labor it took to produce it. Instead, economic value is about how we value goods and services. In a competitive market, prices are packages that contain information about how much a good or service is valued, and how scarce it is. At the very heart of economics, then, is a reality that exists not in material objectives but in our individual and collective minds. (Richards, p.94)

Wealth, then, is something that exists first in the mind and heart of human beings. It’s a judgment of value and worth. That’s why Jesus parable about the kingdom has meaning. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field; which a man found and hid; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field.” (Matthew 13: 44)

Richards has an excellent couple of sections in this chapter linking these obvious realities through to the divine revelation of Creation. In creating the world, God reveals Himself from the outset as having a work-week. After He had created man, He delegated the task of further creation and development to him.

God is king over the heavens and the earth, and appoints us to have dominion as kings and queens over his creation. He creates simply by calling things into existence. He then commands us to create according to our power, to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” . . . (T)he key point is that our creativity comes from God. It doesn’t compete with him. As Creator, God has made us with the awesome power and responsibility to create.

These chapters of Genesis aren’t economic texts, but they still cast light on the most important truth of economics: not only do we create wealth, but, in the right circumstances, we create more and more wealth. Wealth, rightly applied, begets more wealth. (Richards, p.97,98)

The problem, then, is not the extreme disparity between the wealthy and the millions in abject poverty. The problem is poverty, period. The challenge is to work out how the millions and millions of people that live in abject poverty can be enabled to become wealth creators in their own right. In other words, to deal with the problem of poverty in the world, we need to see more wealth generated—by the poor themselves.

>Abortion and Racism

>Cry the Beloved Country

There is a new billboard campaign in the US which draws lines of connection between racism and abortion. It hyperbolically asserts that abortion is so disproportionately high amongst black women in Georgia that black children risk becoming an endangered species. The new campaign has drawn the attention of the NY Times and the LA Times.

The statistical data on how abortion is disproportionately decimating black America is disturbing. In her 2006 book The Politics of Abortion sociologist Anne Hendershott writes that “the statistics on race and abortion are indeed a concern for anyone who cares about the African American community.”

According to the Guttmacher Institute, more than 43 percent of all African American pregnancies end in abortion. Since 1973, the number of abortions by African American women has totaled nearly twelve million. Every day in the United States, more than 1,500 African American women choose to end their pregnancy through abortion. Although African Americans represent only 12 percent of the American population, they account for more than 35 percent of all abortions. As a result, the abortion rate (the number of abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 per year) for African American women is 2.9 times that of white women. Put another way, for every 1,000 African American women, 32 have abortion, as compared with 11 for every 1,000 white women. Comparing the number of abortions per 1,000 live births by race, we find that the abortion/birth ration for white women is 184 abortions per 1,000 live births; for African American women, it is 543 abortions per 1,000 births. (pp. 31-32)

(Hat Tip: Justin Taylor)

It is clear that historically the eugenicists targeted blacks in the United States. Regardless of the predominant intent now, the actual effect is clear: blacks are killing their children off far more than other racial groups.

We believe this will have far more to do with an underclass mentality that consigns people to poverty, living for the moment, family breakdown, social disintegration, and self-gratification. Race has nothing to do with it. In other words, the causal link is as follows: blacks in the United States are disproportionately represented amongst the socio-economic underclass and therefore disproportionately abort their own children.

But welfare policies and provision of abortion services only make the matter far, far worse. They serve to lock-in the attitudes and world-view of the underclass. The underclass is characterised above all else by an attitude of living for the present and an absence of future orientation. Abortion is an act of ultimate self-gratification, and a denial of one’s duty to live for the sake of the future.

>How Did It Come to This?

>Medical “Researchers” Plumb New Lows

There is a scene in the movie trilogy, Lord of the Rings where Theoden, the venerable king of Rohan has taken refuge in Helm’s Deep with the remnants of his army, awaiting the onslaught of the forces of Isengard. As he and his people face annihilation, he wonders out loud, “How did it come to this?”

It seems that the longer the liberal-academic-media complex holds society in its thrall, the more ignorant and foolish academics become. How did it come to this?

Recently The Lancet carried a piece on Global Warming. Now The Lancet used to be a pretty prestigious medical journal, often at the forefront of medical research. This particular article was based on a report by medical researchers from the University College of London. These Wormtongues (to continue with Tolkien motifs) for the liberal-academic-media complex were at pains to tell us that global warming constitutes the biggest threat to human health in this century. They want their august voices to be added to the siren calls to reduce carbon emissions.

A major new report from doctors at University College, London, and medical journal The Lancet claims that climate change “is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” Their solution means permanent recession, more famine and more disease.

Killer heatwaves, insect-borne “tropical” diseases, flooding and hurricanes will affect billions over the next 100 years as global temperatures soar, they say. With this report published last Thursday, doctors are adding their powerful voice to calls for deep cuts in carbon emissions to stabilize global temperatures.

The “scientists” are predicting a widespread outbreak of malaria as a result of rising temperatures.

Yes. Hot climates kill people, as do cold climates. But how has it come to pass that academics such as these are so ignorant of the history of their own profession? How has so much knowledge been lost or forgotten? How can they be so stupid? We find ourselves shaking our heads along with Theoden.

Paul Reiter, an expert on insect-borne diseases and contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said “there is no evidence that climate has played any role” in malaria. Reiter points out that malaria was endemic in Britain until the second half of the 19th century, when improved agricultural practices, drainage and housing caused a spontaneous decline of the disease because mosquitoes had fewer opportunities to bite people . . .

Malaria used to be a problem in Britain. Economic development, access to more capital, better houses, and better farming practices got rid of it as a problem. Threatening us all with plagues because temperatures are supposed to rise is nothing more than alarmist poppycock. Yet these people are serious–and they are taken seriously by the liberal-academic-media complex. They are little more than snake oil hucksters standing on a bully pulpit.

The report also claims global warming will lead to more deaths from heatwaves as the sick and elderly struggle with high temperatures. But Bill Keatinge, an expert on human physiology at London University, has shown that deaths do increase in the first few days of a heatwave but most of the victims were likely to die shortly anyway. The data show that average mortality actually decreases during the later stages of heatwaves.

Moreover, humans have developed a range of ways of coping with high temperatures, from adaptation to siestas to air conditioning. Ask the Tuareg nomads of North Africa.

In fact, cold weather is far more harmful because of the increased risk of respiratory infections, heart attacks and strokes. Britain, for example, with a temperate climate, has only 1,000 heat-related deaths every year, compared with 20,000 cold-related.

Whaaat! Global warming is likely to result in better health. How embarrassing.

But when we get to the real vectors of killing diseases, the intellectual larceny of the doctors becomes more manifest. They studiously ignore the link between economic growth and better health outcomes. Apparently, that’s just filthy lucre, beneath the dignity of higher mortals like the good doctors to consider. They also ignore the link between restricting carbon emissions and the permanent global recession that would result. You can almost see the twitching nostrils as they turn away from the malodour of such an inconvenient truth.

But truth it be.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions, however, would be very bad for human health.

According to calculations by Lombard Street Research in the UK, any global treaty that would stabilize the climate at today’s temperatures would cost a total of ￡8 trillion (US$12.4 trillion) — 45 percent of the world’s current annual economic output, causing permanent economic depression.

Economic growth is an absolute pre-requisite for improved health. One study has shown that if economic growth in the developing world had been a mere 1.5 percent higher in the 1980s, at least 500,000 child deaths could have been prevented.

This is because much of the disease burden in developing countries is a direct result of poverty. Diarrhea, chest infections from burning wood and dung indoors, water-borne infections and malnutrition are the biggest killers of children, killing millions regardless of any changes in the climate.

How could so-called educated people, trained to think within the scientific method, have become so ignorant of the causes of disease and the link with poverty? Ah, but writing about such realities probably will not get you published in Lancet. Not getting published is career limiting, after all. One has to give the liberal-academic-media complex what it wants if one is to get another notch on the CV.

Britain eliminated malaria as a side-effect of increasing prosperity: glass windows, separate barns for cattle and better land management, depriving the mosquito of feeding and breeding opportunities. It is no coincidence that malaria is currently confined to the poorest parts of the world, because they are the least able to afford such improvements.

The doctors’ call for cutting carbon emissions would be a betrayal of the sick in the world’s poorest regions, because it would undermine the one mechanism — economic growth — that allows people to move beyond the primitive living conditions that encourage disease.

Prosperity also removes the doctors’ apocalyptic vision of social turmoil and mass migration as millions flee flood or drought: growth allows adaptation and protection. If doctors are concerned about the effect of climate on health, they should not advocate hobbling the global economy and preventing the poor from getting richer.

The astonishment remains. How could such educated and trained professional scientists be so wilfully dumb? All they have done is defamed a noble and vitally important profession. They, and Lancet, have demonstrated that the medical profession is rapidly devolving back to a form of blood-letting as the universal cure for human distempers.

How could it have come to this? There are no doubt many reasons and causes. But one thing we are very sure of: such wilful ignorance is evidence of a Divine curse. Athens is being given up to live under the curse of its own lies.

>ChnMind 2.13 The Kingdom and Property

>Pagan Principles Have Infected the Church Through the Portal of Property

We have argued that the constitutional documents of Jerusalem place the primary responsibility for welfare for both family and extended family firmly upon the shoulders of the Family itself. We have also argued that the State has no place at all to play in welfare, except indirectly, through restricting what it takes in taxation and through protecting the property rights of the Family. In fact, as we shall see in future essays, the State is explicitly forbidden by the constitution of the Kingdom of God to have any regard at all for the socio-economic situation of its people at all.

To the extent that modern Athens everywhere, not only disregards this divine prohibition, but is deliberately and relentlessly built upon the diametrically opposite principle—that is, that the State is the primary organ of welfare and that it must make the socio-economic condition of citizens its primary regard and concern—only serves to highlight just how far modern Athens has progressed in its rebellion against the Living God.

Since the Family is primarily responsible for social welfare, it follows that the heads of households must give themselves to ensure that all family members work diligently and effectively to achieve financial and material independence, so that they are not dependant upon welfare and charity from others. This is repeatedly insisted upon in the Scriptures. Hard work, diligence, thrift, and self-reliance are required. This is so fundamental that if anyone shows himself or herself unwilling to exert effort in these ways, they are to be allowed to starve—that is, no-one has a responsibility to take care of or extend welfare to them. This underscores more powerfully than anything else the importance of needing to strive to take care of oneself, and one’s dependants, to the very best of one’s ability.

But there is a very important constitutional corollary to this injunction to become self-supporting and independent: one of the most important reasons why we need to work hard to ensure self-support and self-reliance is that we then might have the resources and be able to help others who are less blessed and who, at least for a time, cannot make their way without help. These responsibilities and duties are repeatedly placed firmly upon the head of every household in the Scriptures.

We have also seen that these duties extend not just to the current generation, but thought and provision is also to be made for our children and grandchildren. In order to carry out these duties, it is necessary for the Family to amass and transmit capital down through generations. The modern Athenian State has set itself up as the greatest enemy and obstacle to this duty. It has put in place a phalanx of measures to strip capital away from the Family into its own coffers in order to carry out its own designs to be the primary dispenser of welfare. These measures include progressive taxation rates, high levels of taxation over all, capital gains taxes, and various estate tax measures to prevent wealth being left in trust to children and grandchildren. Once more we see the modern Athenian State being built upon principles of Unbelief and pagan values—forcing Christian citizens to comply with its ungodly, unjust, and rebellious actions.

Now this does not unduly alarm the citizens of Jerusalem. The Scriptures are very clear that this is to be expected. But He Who is with us is greater than he who is in the world. The Kingdom of God is coming despite the best exertions and endeavours of Unbelief. Every nation is going to be discipled and made obedient to the King of all kings. As the number of citizens in Jerusalem increase, and as they take up their God-given, constitutional responsibilities for family based welfare, the Athenian State, with its unjust dictats and institutions will eventually decay and wither away.

In the meantime, it is vitally important that Believers clearly understand their duties and responsibilities. Every Christian family must conform as much as possible to the stipulations and requirements of the Family as laid out in Jerusalem’s constitutional documents. In order to do this, it is essential that we “clear the decks” so to speak of those pagan and idolatrous ideas which have historically insinuated themselves into Jerusalem, and done so much damage.

We would argue that the most debilitating influence has come from the syncretising of the Christian faith with pagan values and ideas. This attempt to blend two absolutely contradictory positions has poisoned and enervated the City of Belief for centuries. With great sadness we must acknowledge that much of Christendom to this point has reflected an attempt to build a superstructure of Christian faith upon a pagan foundation. It has failed—as it always will. If the foundation is not correct, the building will eventually collapse.

One central pagan idea which has been allowed to influence Jerusalem as a poison clutched to the heart is belief that the world of matter (the physical world) is intrinsically evil or unreal or devalued and that the immaterial world (spirit, ideas, invisible beings) is intrinsically good or real or better. You can still find this pagan view expressed everywhere within Jerusalem today, often unwittingly. This is decidedly and emphatically not the world-view of the Scriptures. This is vitally important, and if we do not get this right, we will get most other things wrong.

So, in a few brief paragraphs, let us attempt to present the biblical and truthful world-view once and for all.

Firstly, the absolute and fundamental disjunction and separation in reality is not between matter and spirit. It is between God and the creation. God dwells in unapproachable light. Everything else that exists has both come into existence and utterly depends for its continuing existence upon God. He alone is eternal, infinite, and unchangeable. All else is temporal, finite, and changeable.

Secondly, while the created order has both material and immaterial aspects and realms, these are not set against each other as if one realm were intrinsically superior or better than the other. Rather, the Scriptures make abundantly clear over and over that within the realms of the material and immaterial there are both good and evil influences. Thus in the heavenly spirit realm, there are both demons and angels—good and evil beings. In the world of matter, in our world, there are both the Righteous and the Unrighteous. There are evil men and there are justified men made perfect in Christ.

Thus, matter is not intrinsically evil. The temporal world, the world of the body, is not inferior or unspiritual or of lesser importance. It cannot be, because everything originally created by God was declared good, very good. Rather, the temporal world has been degraded because of sin; it has been subjected to slavery to evil because of rebellion against God. However, the Christ has entered into our temporal world, taken it upon Himself, and has cleansed it upon the Cross, rising again to commence a divine work of purification. In this purification, the last enemy that will abolished and vanquished will be death. The Devil and his demons and his human devotees and followers will be cast into the Lake of Fire.

But in the meantime, God’s people are to strive and work as obedient servants to redeem all of God’s creation, both the material and immaterial aspects. Thus, we are to redeem and purify the body as well as the mind; the family as well as the individual soul; the wider creation as well as our spirits. We are to do this in an utterly spiritual manner—that is, with all our work in all the realms of our God-given responsibility being subject to and empowered by the Holy Spirit of the Creator God.

In this scriptural frame of redemption of the entire realm of creation under Christ Jesus we must insist that wealth and capital, amassed by the Family, subject to the Spirit of God and the injunctions and laws of Jerusalem’s constitution—such wealth is holy, just and good. It is a holy thing!

Now, those citizens of Jerusalem who remain infected with pagan thinking might find this a bit shocking. It is true there has been a long and ignoble tradition in Christendom to see wealth as worldly, intrinsically evil, and to be avoided at all costs. Spirituality has been seen as a call to live in poverty or degradation, at worst, or at best to see wealth as a necessary but intrinsic evil—a sort of compromise with evil as long as we live in the material world. But, says this ignoble tradition, one day, we will escape out of it. These views are infused with a pagan essence—they are more satanic than Christian.

But there are some very important issues here. If we do not get the doctrine of the spirituality of matter right; if we do not get the Bible’s teaching on the importance of Family wealth and capital clear, we will consign Christian families and Jerusalem as a whole to a truncated and under resourced existence. But because “nature abhors a vacuum”, the Devil will ensure that someone or something else will take over those realms and duties which families neglect—and so his great tool, the modern Athenian secular, Unbelieving State has arisen as a perpetual enemy to the biblical Family. In part this is our own fault, for we—the citizens of Jerusalem—have nursed pagan and unbiblical concepts in our bosom for centuries. We have insisted and persisted in reading the Scriptures with the coloured glassed of paganism, interpreting them in a pagan manner.

Our next post on the Christian Mind will deal with those passages of Jerusalem’s constitution which historically have been interpreted in a pagan manner, and which have been misused to claim that the Scriptures forbid the diligent husbanding of wealth and capital, or at least, if not forbid, imply that it is a second-grade, and worldly, unspiritual concern. This we believe is one of the great battlefields between the Unbelief and the Spirit of God in our day.

>ChnMind 2.12 Family Wealth

>The Family Has a Duty to Amass Capital

We have argued that within the Kingdom of God, the Lord has stipulated three fundamental institutions: the Family, the Church, and the State. Each has its specific duties and responsibilities laid out by the Lord Jesus Christ. Each must answer to Him. Each must respect and honour the others as they respectively seek to carry out their Christ-commanded duties. Each must fear to intrude or interfere in the other institutions, or seek to break out of the God-set bounds. Within the Kingdom, the constitutional documents prohibit such destructive behaviour on the part of the Family, the Church, and the State.

As the Spirit of God builds up the City of Belief; as more and more communities come under its sway, these basic institutions and the protections and prohibitions surrounding each will come to be reflected in a particular society’s laws, conventions, covenants, contracts, and creeds.

We have argued that the primary role of the family is to bear and transmit the faith of the Covenant down through the generations. It is the duty of parents to raise their children to walk after the Lord, even as they have done. The duty to teach, admonish, train, discipline, instruct, and raise children to maturity is absolutely fundamental to the Family’s duties before God. Neither State nor Church can interfere, suborn, or intrude. State and Church have a duty to help and encourage and respect the Family as it goes about this task—but not second guess, or undermine, or replace.

If the State were to say, “We will educate your children. We will run a universal state education system to ensure that all your children can read and write, and learn about civics and other interesting things” it would be acting unconstitutionally, and would be violating its God-given place. In short, it would be acting in a treasonous manner.

We have also argued that a second fundamental role of the Family is to be the primary institution of welfare. The Family must care for its own; it must feed, clothe, and shelter. It turns out that there are four concentric rings of Family welfare responsibility.

In this regard its first sphere of welfare responsibility is to wife and children. But it also has to consider the wider family—particularly those family members who are destitute or afflicted—such as any widowed or orphaned or who have fallen upon hard times. This is the second ring of welfare responsibility.

The third sphere is fellow Christian brethren. We are commanded especially to do good to those who are of the household of faith. So, as we encounter fellow-believers who are in need, the Family has a duty to reach out and provide assistance.

The fourth sphere is any person we encounter who needs our help. This is the point of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Thus in Galatians 6:9,10 we are commanded to do good especially to those of the household of faith, but not exclusively. Paul commands that we also do good to all men. The person we encounter in need is the fourth sphere of Family welfare responsibility.

The Church also has a role and responsibility in welfare. We have seen that it is to play a back-up role, helping out when all other Family resources have been expended. The Church’s role is to ensure that no-one falls through the cracks. The State, however, as we shall see later, is explicitly forbidden by God from engaging in the duties and responsibilities of welfare. Its only responsibility towards the poor and indigent is to make sure its judgments and its laws do not discriminate towards the poor—either positively or negatively. Justice must be blind and show no favoritism.

Now there are some wise and beneficial consequences—intended consequences—that flow from Jerusalem’s insistence upon the Family as the primary welfare institution. Firstly, the Scriptures are completely realistic about the sinful tendency of human being towards laziness and bludging and theft. The Proverbs are full or scathing criticism and warnings about the sluggard. Family based welfare is always personal welfare: it knows the individuals, the persons, their lifestyles, their attitudes. It knows whether family members are deserving of help, or whether they are just lazy and bludging. Families know whether any family members are unwilling to work and help themselves. The Family is by far and above the best institution to insist upon accountability on the part of those who are needy.

Secondly, a Family based welfare institution strengthens the family as an institution. As the covenant community expects and requires families to take care of their own, the Family as an institution is respected, honoured, and built up. If one is needy, to be related to a particular family is vital; family ties become far more important. Family connections become valued.

Thirdly, Family based welfare is far more likely to occur within the bounds of natural love and affection—which is to say, it will be up-building and encouraging and not impersonal and degrading. Moreover, it will obligate welfare recipients far more effectively and powerfully to be thankful, and show thankfulness by getting off welfare as quickly as possible, so that, in turn, the former welfare recipients can extend care to others.

Finally, levels of welfare support are automatically self-regulating. There is no artificial bureaucratic “standard” of poverty. There is no artificial poverty line which determines that one should receive welfare or not. The standard is relative to the living standards of each individual family.

But this begs a significant question: How will families get the resources they need in order to extend loving welfare to wider family members? An obvious answer is that within Jerusalem the State is not the rapacious monster that it is within Athens. In that City the government has become a remorseless tyrant, demanding more and more of the wealth and income of the Family, extracting it by the force of unjust laws. In Jerusalem, whilst government itself is deep and pervasive, the role of the State is much reduced. Families are left with much more income and capital to deploy in family welfare.

But this is only a partial answer to the question. The fact is that every family must see itself (and be told, if it fails to see) as deeply obligated to work hard, and amass capital so that it might help the weak. Paul’s final address to the Ephesian Church sets it out:

I have coveted no-one’s silver or gold or clothes. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my own needs and to the men who were with me. In everything I showed you that by working hard in this manner you must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He Himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
Acts 20:33—35

The reason each person is to work hard is that they have so many other people to take care of. And if anyone thinks that this is not true in their particular case, they are simply ignorant of Scripture. But more than that, the Scriptures make it very clear that we have a duty to lay up an inheritance, not only for our children, but also for our grandchildren.

In Proverbs 13:22 we read: “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” The context makes it clear that it is capital that is being spoken of, not the inheritance of a godly tradition, or an example, or a testimony of faith—vital though such things are. The parallelism to the statement above says, “And the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.” Clearly the text is speaking of an actual monetary inheritance, or an inheritance of riches, wealth, and capital.

In modern Athens, the State has become the uber-parent. The State has acted in rebellion against God, and has sought to take over Family duties and responsibilities, such as education and welfare. The State has become both Teacher and Provider. In order to fund this it must rip families to pieces—and the key tool to do this is steep, progressive, insatiable taxation.

The Family in Athens has been disenthroned and now lies disembowelled. Stripped of its wealth, its members look to the State as their real family. They give little or no thought to their responsibilities to wider family members: if they fall on hard times, they are pointed to the nearest Department of Social Welfare office. They give little or no thought to laying up an inheritance for their children. Still less they could not even imagine their responsibilities to their grandchildren. In Athens the Family has turned upon itself to aide and abet its own destruction. The basic ethic of Family in Athens has become: “Get all you can! Can all you get! Poison the rest.” The children are on their own. And the children grow up to disown their parents.

In Athens, the Family has become little more than a transient boarding house.

In Jerusalem the Family once again is honoured and feared. It is expected and required to be the primary institution of welfare for all men. To that end, and so that the Family will have the resources to do its job, the heads of households are to work exceedingly hard, save diligently, and provide for dependants. But, more, each household must strive to lay up an inheritance for the next generations—both children and grandchildren.

In receiving that inheritance, generations in their turn are to regard such gifts as a sacred trust. Money passed down is money to be passed on. It can be used for a time to generate income to support those in need. But each generation must strive to add to the capital received, and pass still more on to the servants and stewards who will come after.

>Meditation on Text of the Week

>As Having Nothing, Yet Possessing All Things . . .

God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen, the things which are not that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God.
I Corinthians 1: 27—29

Human pride, the vaunting of self, boasting, arrogant railing, the arrogation of power—these things characterise Athens and have done so since the time of its founding upon the earth. The Kingdom of God has a radically different currency. It addresses itself to what the world regards as the foolish, the weak, and base. It comes to the nothings and the nobodies. God’s Kingdom addresses the wretched of the earth. God’s choice falls amongst the weak.

There is a reason for this. Pride and human boasting have no place before God. Therefore God despises the proud, but gives grace to the humble. And the humble respond by expressing amazement at God’s goodness to them, acknowledging they were utterly unworthy of such mercy. So David, in II Samuel 7: 18, when reflecting on all of God’s mercies to him and his family, says, “Who am I, and what is my house, that Thou has brought me thus far?”

Our sister, Mary expresses the same sentiment when she says, “For He has regard for the humble state of His bondslave; for behold, from this time on all generations will count me blessed.” Then, in the rest of the Magnificat she confesses that what has happened to her is typical of, and no different from, God’s dealings with His people throughout the generations, for:

He has done mighty deeds with His arm;
He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones,
And has exalted those who were humble,
He has filled the hungry with good things;
And sent away the rich empty-handed.
He has given help to Israel His servant,
In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and his offspring forever.
Luke 1: 51—55

It is a sad travesty of biblical truth that Unbelievers have sought to gloss this and other passages of Holy Writ with a marxist patina. They turn poverty and degradation into a virtue that merits or earns God’s attention. They so distort the truth that they turn poverty into a cause for pride and vainglory. But Mary has it right: He rejects those who are proud in their hearts. This is why cultures and societies which have been indoctrinated with socialist concepts are amongst the coldest and hardest mission fields in the world. In such societies, even the poorest believes he has rights before which heaven and earth must bow.

If the poor and the hungry are bitter and arrogant in their degradation; if they dare to think in terms of their merits and their worthiness, that their situation is unjust, that they deserve better, and how unfair things are for them, they are every bit as arrogant as he who sits upon a gilded throne and spouts his superiority, disdaining others.

But amongst the truly poor this is not normally the case. Amongst the truly degraded their circumstances have usually made them wretched in heart. They hope for nothing, even as they long for wholeness and life. They are far beyond being concerned about their rights and their dues. Their deprivation and lowliness makes such talk ludicrous and incongruous to them. Oftentimes it is accompanied by a deep consciousness of personal sin, of personal unworthiness and guilt. They are too lowly to think good of themselves.

Our Lord expressed it this way: “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 1: 17) The wealthy, the great, the rich, and the comfortable most often have no needs; they regard themselves as healthy. Our Lord condemned all such by saying He did not come for such as these. They already have their reward in this life.

He came instead for those who, deeply conscious of their needs, would call out to Him for help. As someone once said, the doorway to the Kingdom of Heaven is very low. All who enter must do so on their hands and knees. For all others, the doorway is beneath their dignity and held in contempt. God is beneath their dignity: He too is held in contempt. Thus Michal despised her husband as he danced before the ark. He had shamed her. David, however, sought to portray his lowliness and the worthlessness of his house before God.

It is not by accident that the Gospel in our days is spreading rapidly in the poorer countries of the Southern Hemisphere: in Latin America, Africa, and South East Asia. Neither is it accidental that the post Christian West considers itself too noble and sophisticated for God. It pleases God that it should be so, and thus it is deliberate.