When, more than two millennia after Xenophon, 20,000 poor people from every continent were invited by the World Bank, whose mission it is to end poverty, to explain what they needed more than anything else, they made clear that ‘money was not the answer.’ Isolation mattered more. ‘It is neither leprosy nor poverty that kills the leper, but loneliness,’ said a Ghanaian. ‘When you are poor, no-one wants to speak to you, everyone is sorry for you, no-one wants to drink with you,’ complained a Bulgarian. The stigma of poverty brought shame, so that one was unable to participate fully in social life, and one dared not attend weddings or feasts. ‘Everyone is on their own; we do not visit friends as we used to; people are hostile and alone,’ said a Russian. ‘Poverty is like living in a jail, waiting to be free,’ said a Jamaican. Emerging from the obscurity of destitution, said an Egyptian, risked ‘endangering one’s honour or safety or future’. The police, said a Brazilian, only make one’s loneliness worse, robbing and humiliating those who call for help. Widows, in some places, suffered even worse as outcasts. Governments were corrupt. The ‘bottom poor’, least touched by aid programmes, complained of being regarded with ‘a mixture of pity, fear, disgust and hatred’.
The World Bank concluded that ending corruption, violence, ineffective government and powerlessness was the answer. But these are scourges as ancient and as resistant as poverty itself, and not likely to be eliminated in any foreseeable future. So the Bank adopted a different solution, proposing that instead of trying to change the world, it would try to change people: the poor should be given the ‘capabilities’ to lead a decent life, through education, skills training and job creation, enabling them to make their own choices, ‘control and consciously direct their living conditions’ and ‘participate in the social and economic life of their communities’. But this solution is still one imposed from above.
Those who are mindful of the surprises of history and the unpredictability of individuals may be tempted to explore another option at a more intimate level. Since governments cannot propagate benevolence, and since education does not necessarily produce people capable of making sensible choices, or even agreement as to what is sensible, they may prefer to listen more closely to what the poor told the World Bank about isolation, which afflicts not just the poor but in varying degrees the vast majority of humanity. Each escape from isolation, whether by the poor or not, involves the forging of a relationship of two people appreciating and valuing each other, which neither laws nor money can bring about. Without such intimate bonds, finding homes for the homeless and jobs for the jobless only goes halfway towards making them resilient enough against the knocks of life. Haimabati Sen’s relationships were reciprocal, between an adult and a child, a mother and an orphan, who each had something to give that the other did not have. But when two people begin to appreciate each other and together create something out of their friendship that did not exist before, the result can no more be foreseen than the character of a new baby. Individuals are used to taking the risk of loving a stranger, which powerful international organisations are not. Only they see that it is not only those who receive the fewest monetary rewards who need to be rescued from isolation; people loaded with wealth or the accolades of fame can be even more isolated.
A beggar holding out his hand in a Paris street, ignored by the crowds hurrying past him, said the worst part of his ordeal was that it made him wonder whether he really was alive, since no-one seemed able to see him. Most people, and not just the destitute, might also say that the world is unaware of their existence. The humanitarian response to the homeless is that they should not be seen, that no-one should be homeless on the streets. But what the destitute have to say is infinitely precious because it is about life stripped of hypocrisy, the truth about the fragility of the foundations of civilisation. Nothing is more arbitrary than the value placed on different forms of experience and knowledge.
The spontaneous human response to the suffering of others used to be more personal, when the poor were not as segregated as they are today. More recently, many charities have come to be run like corporations by professionals on business principles, paralleling and complementing what governments do, aiming to increase prosperity and justice, and justifying themselves by demonstrating tangible results, efficiently attained. Meanwhile, the poor donate a larger proportion of their wealth to good causes than the rich, and the homeless are sometimes the most generous of all. So there is room for new experiments in philanthropy, to respond to isolation, to introduce more reciprocity in giving and receiving, and to invent original ways of living rather than merely patching the holes in existing ones.
Haimabati Sen is a muse to me because she reveals how it is possible to advance beyond the long debate about the so-called culture of poverty and the supposed resignation of the poor, their acceptance of their destiny and their sense of helplessness. She was certainly frequently overcome by a feeling of helplessness and resignation – ‘I must accept my fate,’ she kept on saying – but she was also an indomitable fighter against all the traditions that oppressed her as a poor person and as a woman. Joining the Brahmo religion (a reformed version of Hinduism that rejected the subordination of women) did not satisfy her; she recognised that even its enlightened leaders could not succeed in entirely eliminating old habits. No institution could live up to her demands. Her message was not ‘women unite’, because she accepted that many women, for different reasons, made other choices. Instead, her achievement was to show how building one-to-one relationships of sympathy, understanding, trust and gratitude could gradually create a life that was rich in non-material terms, and how this could spread beyond family and neighbours to embrace a wider circle of affections. Far from being a distraction from the struggle for the improvement of material conditions and social justice, it is the source of the courage needed to persevere, because human warmth can often melt helplessness away.
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What could the rich tell the poor?
OF ALL THE RICH PEOPLE WHOSE money-making exploits make them heroes to MBA students as theologians once nourished themselves on the lives of saints, one captain of industry stands out as having seemingly done most to implement the precepts of Adam Smith. While Haimabati Sen was on the brink of starvation, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) was in the process of becoming one of the richest men who ever lived. He began even poorer than she, and left school at the age of twelve. But instead of relying on his poor relatives, he used his wit, charm, geniality, memory and energy to rise rapidly from being an errand boy to enter each of the new industries that were transforming the world: telegraph, railways, bridge building, iron and steel, quickly proving to his employers that he was as clever as they, and a little bit quicker.
In each case, he spotted the most promising opportunities at just the right moment and formed partnerships with people who could best help him achieve highly ambitious goals. By the age of thirty-three, he was worth seventy-five million dollars in today’s money.
He then made a resolution: ‘Beyond this, never earn, make no effort to increase fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes.’ Until then, he said, he had had only one ‘idol’, to amass wealth. But this was ‘one of the worst species of idolatry. No idol is more debasing than the worship of money.’ ‘To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery.’ He resolved to make money only in the mornings, and devote the rest of the day to ‘instruction and reading systematically’. At the age of thirty-five he would retire, ‘settle in Oxford and get a thorough education, making the acquaintance of literary men’, and then devote himself to writing, public affairs and the ‘improvement of the poorer classes’.
To a business acquaintance who prided himself on always being in his office at seven in the morning, he said, ‘You must be a lazy man if it takes you ten hours to do a day’s work. What I do is to get good men, and I never gi
ve them orders. My directions seldom go beyond suggestions. Here in the morning I get reports from them. Within an hour I have disposed of everything, sent out all my suggestions, the day’s work is done and I am ready to go out and enjoy myself.’ He never went to Oxford, which would doubtless have disappointed him, but instead he travelled all over the world. He meditated on Indians ‘on the verge of starvation’ and found it ‘pitiable’ that a wealthy Chinese man should be ‘driving in his carriage alone’ unaccompanied by a woman, for women were ‘the fountain of all that is best in life. In life, without her, there is nothing.’ The work ethic was ruining life. ‘I hope Americans will find some day more time for play.’
But play and socialising were not enough. ‘In company, Mr Carnegie indulges in music and delights in humorous stories and when solicited by friends he sings a good song, or gives a recitation with dramatic effect.’ He showered his guests with ‘every variety of wholesome entertainment’, including dancing, cards and parlour games.
But he never became a playboy. ‘At this period of my life I was all at sea. No creed, no system reached me. All was chaos. I had outgrown the old and had found no substitute.’ Then he read Herbert Spencer, and progress became his religion. From Spencer he acquired the conviction that progress was a law of nature, not an accident but a necessity, and that moral and material progress went hand in hand: industrialisation was a higher state of civilisation that would make humanity not only wealthier but also more moral. It was sad that many workers earned starvation wages, but that was inevitable in the period of ‘transition’ towards universal well-being. ‘All is well since all grows better became my motto, my true source of comfort.’ There was no conceivable end to ‘man’s march to perfection’. Spencer became his master, ‘the great thinker of our age’, providing him with a justification for his wealth and the assurance that his success was leading inexorably to the improvement of all humans. He wrote a book explaining how Triumphant Democracy (1886) had made America the best place on earth. He presented himself as the ‘workers’ friend’, a millionaire socialist, preaching cooperation and profit-sharing between employers and employed; he claimed to understand both, because he had been a worker himself in his youth.
The Gospel of Wealth (1901) summarised his thinking and was designed to establish his reputation as the philosopher of a new age led by business achievement. The gap between rich and poor was ‘inevitable’. But individuals with a ‘talent for organisation and management’ who accumulated vast fortunes must realise that this wealth was not the product of their efforts; it was the joint product of the community. So they must administer their wealth for the good of the community. He resolved to give away all his money in his own lifetime. ‘The man who dies rich dies disgraced.’ Becoming extremely rich required no apology, because it enabled him to use his vast resources, and his ‘wisdom, experience and ability to administer’ in the service of his ‘poorer brethren’, ‘doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves’. He would not leave anything to his heirs, because poverty had been the spur to his own energy: ‘Poverty is the only school capable of producing the supremely great, the genius.’ The more millionaires there were, the more society would advance, and the trouble with countries like China and India which were poorer than America was that they had too few millionaires. It was the duty of a millionaire ‘to increase his revenues’, so that he could continue to use them for the benefit of the poor.
Carnegie devoted most of the second half of his life to making dazzling philanthropic gifts. He built or helped 1,689 public libraries in the U.S., 660 in the U.K., 607 elsewhere, seeing self-education as the key to progress, because that was how he had become what he was, able to recite from memory whole pages of Shakespeare and Burns. He spurned the elite universities and gave donations instead to small technical colleges that could help poor workers acquire practical skills, and to the Scottish universities that were traditionally open to people from modest backgrounds. The Carnegie Institution in Washington, dedicated to scientific research, expressed his faith in technical progress. A Hero Fund rewarded civilians, instead of soldiers, for bravery in ordinary life, and a pension fund expressed appreciation of modest teachers. Carnegie’s home towns, Pittsburgh and Dumfermline, were glorified with public buildings and parks. And finally the Carnegie Endowment for Peace was set up to stop what he hated most, which was war.
Optimism was one of Carnegie’s greatest strengths. But when the Great War of 1914 broke out, he was shattered. His appearance was transformed, he suddenly seemed ten years older and he stopped talking. Had the 350 million dollars he had given away, the equivalent of hundreds of billions today, been in vain? He was plagued by the feeling that his business achievements did not quite give him what he most wanted. It was not a feeling of guilt.
His autobiography showed that he was not troubled by the contradictions in his career. His mastery of every business and financial skill enabled him to create the most technically advanced steelworks in the world, but he had not shared the profits as fairly as he pretended. In the years 1892–9, for example, the value of what he manufactured increased by 226 per cent but the workers’ wages fell by 67 per cent. Repeatedly rejecting the workers’ demand for an eight-hour day, he had insisted on a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, at less than one and a half dollars a day for many. But he defended this on the ground that what the workers wanted more than higher wages was steady employment. ‘There are higher uses for surplus wealth than adding petty sums to the earnings of the masses. Trifling sums given to each every week or every month – and the sums would be trifling indeed – would be frittered away, nine times out of ten, in things which pertain to the body and not to the spirit, upon richer food and drink, better clothing, more extravagant living, which are beneficial neither to rich or poor. These are things external and of the flesh, they do not minister to the higher divine part of man.’ He claimed to know better than they did what to do with money; he had his own interpretation of what cooperation and sharing with the workers meant. In public he claimed not to be personally responsible for the veritable war his company waged to annihilate the trade unions, a war in which it brought in a gun-carrying private army to physically fight them. His instructions to his subordinates were always ruthless: unions and strikers should be met by a simple tactic: no negotiation, close the factory down, let the strikers starve and then take back only those who accepted his terms. Despite his tact and brilliance at putting a favourable gloss on his actions, he did not escape blame. The nationwide outcry at the deaths of several workers in his battle against the unions destroyed his reputation in the working class. To replace recalcitrant workers who resisted him, he brought in poor East European immigrants ready to accept any wage at all. He modernised by substituting cheap for skilled labour. Homestead, the town in which his main steelworks was situated, henceforth carried the same sinister meaning as Peterloo. Nowhere in America, said the novelist Theodore Dreiser after a visit, is the vast gap dividing the rich and the poor so evident, with Carnegie’s splendid white library in the affluent suburb, far from the grey, sordid, sad slums.
Carnegie, the son of a Chartist rebel who had fought the rich in Scotland, liked to portray himself as just an ordinary worker made good, but as the principal owner of a huge company he had quickly lost touch with the ordinary worker, who became an abstract entity, and no longer a particular individual whom he personally knew. His bonhomie, his cheerful, conciliatory, tactful or manipulative manner concealed the fact that the managers who helped him grow his empire were also only superficially his friends, friends when he needed them, with business ultimately triumphing over friendship in a crisis. Only rarely did they tell him what they thought to his face. His most senior collaborator, however, losing his temper, did once write to him: ‘I had become tired of your business methods, your absurd newspaper interviews and personal remarks and unwarranted interference in matters you knew nothing about. It has been your custom for years when any of your partners disag
reed with you to say they were unwell and needed a change . . . I warn you . . .’
Carnegie pined for friendship, or more accurately for friends who would appreciate him as he thought he deserved to be appreciated, not as a business success, but as a wise man of experience to whose advice all those in power, in every domain, should listen. He did not marry till he was over fifty, after the death of his mother, with whom he lived till then, and from whom he received adoration, but he also hungered for praise from the powerful and the famous. Making friends in high places was an art in which he excelled, for he knew how to flatter to the extremes of sycophancy, entertain guests with lavish luxury, but also with excellent conversation, because he was unusually knowledgeable, personally amusing and good company. Almost everybody of note in literature, politics and the arts, in America and Europe, was invited to endless parties in his many palatial residences. He was constantly writing to newspapers, giving interviews and making speeches to every kind of meeting. Six successive presidents of the U.S., whom he prided himself on ‘knowing intimately’, were bombarded with advice from him. They treated him as an equal, and not just because he was a contributor to Republican election funds. All these powerful people wanted the same thing as he did, which was appreciation and flattery from those who mattered. It did not mean that they listened to one another on subjects on which they disagreed. President Theodore Roosevelt treated his advice on foreign policy with apparent respect, and they exchanged much correspondence with many assurances of friendship and high esteem, but privately Roosevelt said that he thought Carnegie’s ideas were ‘absurd’ and ‘washy’. He ‘had tried to like Carnegie,’ he was reported as saying, ‘but it is pretty difficult. There is no type of man for whom I feel a more contemptuous abhorrence than for the one who makes a God of mere money-making and at the same time is always yelling out that kind of utterly stupid condemnation of war . . . [from] hopelessly twisted ideals . . . Unrighteous war is a hideous evil, but I am not sure that it is worse evil than business unrighteousness.’ President Taft was equally hypocritical, publicly attentive but privately mocking Carnegie’s philanthropy as ‘the plans he had for making himself poor’.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 7