Culture of Poverty: Getting Worse

A culture is a living thing: it has about itself a dynamism, a contagious energy, an impulse to increase itself. This is true also of a bad culture. And so, the cultures of poverty in our society today have just such negative evangelistic vigor. Things get worse: more crime, less education, increasing deaths of despair (drugs, suicide, etc.) and violence, higher abortion rates, less stable families, decreasing incomes, bad health care, and ad infinitum. It seems to be even worse in white than in black communities. A lot of literature is tracking the drastic decline in lower class white communities. Life expectancy, for example, is declining substantially among low income whites. This hasn't happened since a hundred years ago when the Spanish Flu colluded with World War I.

Why are things getting worse (in every way) for the bottom rung, even as things get better (economically speaking) for the top rung? Over the last 50 years, since 1970, we see these:

- Sexual liberation: the uprooting of sex from marriage, fidelity and fecundity. Male promiscuity leaves women alone with children. Abandonment by the father is, unquestionably, the leading cause of poverty. And this plight has, strangely, hit the bottom of society the hardest. At the top, elite liberal thought has led the crusade for sexual license but the rich seem to intuitively sense that their economic security lies in stable marriages and families and so they prudently limit their freedoms.

- Deconstruction of Masculinity: broader social developments, notably militant feminism,  have collaborated with father-abandonment to destroy traditional "rites of passage" which guide a young man on his journey into mature manliness. Women do not require such structures. Men absolutely do! Indeed, the very idea of "virility" has been vacated of meaning as the Cultural Revolution has destroyed the iconic beauty of bipolar sexuality and left us with a sterile, futile androgyny.

- Global Economy: cosmic changes in our own and the world's economy have deprived us of the many low-skill, well-paid blue collar jobs in industry that fueled the prosperous post-war economy. With this: decline in union power, heightened insecurity of lower working classes, huge chasm between the "winners" and "losers, " decrease in "manly" physical jobs along with increase in "womanly" jobs in service, education, health and related areas. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

- Destruction of Intermediate Institutions: the isolation and atomization of the individual at the mercy of gigantic/merciless federal government and international corporations has accompanied the gradual but irrepressible destruction of mediating institutions of family, church, neighborhood, and voluntary organizations of all sorts. We have seen the entire demise of any wholesome subsidiarity. Yuval Levin writes about the loss of faith in institutions in a noteworthy recent book: A Time to Build. The communities that bond us together and systematically train us in character have been systemically destroyed and left us dependent upon the non-personality of mega-state and uber-company.

- Social Engineering: has had at best dubious, at worst disastrous results. The War on Poverty created a culture of dependency and entitlement, emasculating the men and depriving them of their sense of agency and autonomy. The War on Drugs imprisoned, unintentionally, a critical mass of black men and further stripped those communities of masculine presence. The good intentions of state intervention vacated communities, black and white, of the masculine energy, confidence and identity which is the root cause of prosperity, cultural and economic.

- Technology, Meritocracy and Bureaucracy: the amplification of technology and bureaucracy results in a hierarchical world where the smart, connected, energetic and competent are richly rewarded while others are disenfranchised, marginalized and held in contempt. Simultaneously, the simple, hands-on tasks that are the lifeblood of the lower working class and the underclass (repair work, maintenance) are disdained so that the poor are deprived of the ordinary, "convivial" agency that has always belonged to them.

- Narrative of Victimization: to finalize and seal the demasculinization at the heart of the culture of poverty  there is the "victim narrative" which tells the young man (black or white) that he is a powerless, passive and pathetic victim of a hostile system that despises, represses and threatens his very existence. This tells him that he is incapable of providing faithfully for woman and child because he is himself deprived, marginalized, threatened and castrated by an overpowering system. This absolutely destructive narrative of hysteria is at the heart of Black Lives Matter and mirrored on the paranoid Trumpian right by fear of foreigners, simmering but impotent resentment of the elites, and an interior feeling of masculine inferiority.

Is there any hope? No! There is no earthly hope!  I see no grounds for optimism! The Republican Party of Trump is incompetent, incoherent, bound by fear/resentment, viciously polarizing, and entirely beholden to a narcissistic maniac. The Democratic Party is worse: a party without a moral center; a party of abortion, sexual freedom, dependency, resentment, privilege. The Church in America is entirely stripped of moral authority in the wake of the priest scandals. Our bishops are confused, enfeebled, and themselves empty of spiritual authority. All the mediating institutions have been ravaged and left desolate. We are like Israel in exile: no temple, no Jerusalem, no priesthood, nothing but homelessness and slavery.

But with God there is always Hope, especially when ALL is hopeless. Our faith starts with the 12-stepper's first step: we are powerless! We are powerless over the cultures of poverty. We are powerless over a society and economy in free-fall! We are powerless over two political parties which lack a moral soul! But God is all-powerful. And He has allowed this civilizational collapse in order to show forth his mercy and glory. And so we work the Benedict Option and collaborate with the many splendid operations of divine grace that envelop us. And we pray.

I am praying for my party. I have never really prayed for sports teams or political parties. But I am praying for the Republican Party. I am asking God that Trump be decimated in the election: that he not get a single electoral vote...or near to that. So that that party as now constituted be entirely destroyed. I pray that the party hold the senate so that the Democrats cannot wreck the havoc they intend on the powerless, the family, and religious liberty. I am praying that a new Republican Party emerge that proposes a coherent, authentic moral conservatism along with an economic populism that patiently, realistically addresses the woes of the underclass and the lower working classes...black, white, brown and all the marvelous colors.