Subhuman or Inhumane? Leading Contemporary American Approaches to Social Policy

A simple contrast occurred to me while reading this excellent article about the Speenhamland system in anticipation of the upcoming Regional Convivium of the Davenant Institute ("Private Property and Christian Charity"). Full disclosure: I will be presenting "Civil Justice and Social Righteousness: Relief for the Poor and Debtors."

Much of the contemporary debate about what to do about poverty in America falls into one of two broad categories. What passes for the Right in America--and with more or fewer exceptions for the "truly needy"--has coopted Thomas Malthus. Relief for the poor, unless carefully limited to those who cannot work, is a subsidy for laziness and profligate procreation. Supplementing this Malthusian vision with contemporary neo-classical economics reduces most humans to an unreflective mass of irrational, preference-maximizing animals. In a word, a subhuman anthropology.

While simultaneously rattling around this, that, or the other Oppression, the social program of Progressive Left is inhumane. Combining government mandated propaganda masquerading as education with corporate micromanagement of employees and cancel culture, we see an effort to create a brave new world in which, it turns out, the new boss mirrors the old boss. Progressive anthropology cabins the human person into an object of manipulation to be "freed" of the prejudices of the past into a world in which poverty is reduced to lack of material resources to which the solution is transfers of wealth from oppressors to the Oppressed (with a healthy chunk sliding into the pockets of the political-management class along the way).

Although not publicly foregrounded, I suspect that the subhuman anthropology of the Right will continue to frame public discussions of social policy, at least at the unconscious level. Notwithstanding the intellectual domination of the Progressives in the academy, programs of wealth transfers are a hard sell in a democracy where most of whose citizens perceive themselves to be members of the middle class.