Kelly Johnson, from Fear of Beggars:
“Even in the relief of common beggars we shall find that we are more frequently influenced by the desire of getting rid of the importunities of a disgusting object than by the pleasure of relieving it. We wish that it had not fallen in our way, rather than rejoice in the opportunity given us of assisting a fellow creature. We feel a painful emotion at the sight of so much apparent misery; but the pittance we give does not relieve it. We know that it is totally inadequate to produce any essential effect. We know, besides, that we shall be addressed in the same manner at the corner of the next street; and we know that we are liable to the grossest impositions. We hurry therefore sometimes by them and shut our ears to their importunate demands.” (Thomas Malthus)
Beggars do a reasonable thing: needing something and seeing someone one who might have it, they ask for it. Put that way, the act is simple enough. Yet Malthus' description of the encounter remains a distressingly accurate account of how many people react when faced with beggars. Beggars alarm and disturb us. Like Malthus, the clergyman and economist, we find ourselves unable to act well, and can only try to remove ourselves from the offensive situation as quickly as possible.
A case in point: what happens when, walking through Grand Central Station, I see a man holding a sign that reads, "I am at your mercy"? My normal perception of myself as reasonably just and kind is thrown into Protean contortions. If he is "at my mercy," then what am I? Am I the ruthless victor in a war of all against all? Am I nobility strolling through a world of misery, barely aware of the suffering that makes my life possible? Am I a sucker, the target of a scam that is working only too well, or an enabler, funding a soul's self-destruction? Am I, in fact, in some kind of danger? Or are the beggar and I both flotsam in an economic system which throws some of us on a sunny shore and drowns others, and against which resistance only increases the danger for all of us? I would gladly spot a friend some cash, perhaps a great deal of cash, but what will I do with the intimacy of this request from a stranger? Anyway, who says he is at my mercy, and not at our mercy? What about all the other people passing by without responding?
The cumulative effect of all this uncertainty about self and society is anxiety, confusion, and avoidance. Shopping malls provide merchants and shoppers a sphere free of this moral complexity, and laws controlling the location and behavior of beggars have been championed and denounced across the U.S., from California to Vermont and Florida, over the past decades. In 1988, Mayor Koch [of New York City] set off a storm of debate when he urged New Yorkers not to give to beggars on the grounds that giving only encouraged beggars and attracted more to the same behavior. Refusing to give would force the beggars to seek more acceptable ways to get their living. Koch added that those who were troubled in conscience by refusing a beggar should see their priest.
People have a visceral reaction to beggars, and not merely to stench or disfigurement, but to begging itself. Although most people recognize [in theory] that all of us are in some respects dependent upon each other, the sight of a stranger asking for help outside the public order of rights and the private affection of the family shakes us. Uncertainty about the beggar's honesty and civility, concern that giving alms to one somehow makes things worse for others (or may lead to endless demands), and knowledge that the pittance given is ineffective and may be only a sop to appease the giver's conscience, have together undermined, without destroying, the traditional image of almsgiving as virtuous. The anxiety remains.
Ethicists, as often as anyone else, get trapped at traffic lights where beggars hold up signs, yet whether to give to beggars does not figure as a significant problem in contemporary works on economic ethics. Why the silence?
Beggars implicitly raise questions about the nature and limits of property rights; the efficacy and virtue of almsgiving; the uses of social control and surveillance to differentiate needy from greedy beggars; the possibility of genuine altruism; the material meaning of `dignity'; the moral importance of productivity; the distinction between public and private behaviors; the working of justice among strangers; and the relationships of system and person or intention and effect. Beggars stand in an untidy corner of ethics. The presence of beggars raises questions that societies would sometimes prefer not to address.
The role of beggars in challenging the invisibility of poverty, disregard for the poor, and the nature of property rights is real. The phrase "the fear of beggars" has meaning from two directions. On the one hand, beggars have fears: not only of cold, hunger, and sickness, but also of being alone, of being beaten, of losing those last few precious belongings, of being stripped of any possibility of self-determination. But there are also many fears from the other side, from those who meet beggars on our streets: fears that the beggar might turn violent; that neither giving nor refusing will be morally satisfactory; that behind one beggar stand a thousand others, whose needs will overwhelm any generosity; that the beggar sees an alarming truth about humanity, about me: that had things gone differently, that beggar could have been any one of us.
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Kelly Johnson. The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics (Eerdmans Ekklesia Series), Kindle Edition.
See also: Overcoming the Fear of Beggars | Catholic Moral Theology
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