(7) Why Poverty Exists: With Help From Oscar Wilde - 3
Oscar Wilde
This is the seventh blog post in a series looking at why poverty exists and if we need it.
Jack London
I want to start this post with an extract from The People of the Abyss by Jack London. It appears on page 20 of my edition under the heading -
“SELF-NEGLECT”
“Yesterday Dr. Wynn Westcott held an inquest at Shoreditch, respecting the death of Elizabeth Crews, aged 77 years, of 32 East Street, Holborn, who died on Wednesday last. Alice Mathieson stated that she was landlady of the house where deceased lived.”
“Witness last saw her alive on the previous Monday. She lived quite alone. Mr. Francis Birch, relieving officer for the Holborn district, stated that deceased had occupied the room in question for thirty-five years.”
“When witness was called, on the 1st, he found the old woman in a terrible state, and the ambulance and coachman had to be disinfected after the removal.”
“Dr. Chase Fennell said death was due to blood-poisoning from bed-sores, due to self-neglect and filthy surroundings, and the jury returned a verdict to that effect.”
“The most startling thing about this little incident of a woman’s death is the smug complacency with which the officials looked upon it and rendered judgment.”
“That an old woman of seventy-seven years of age should die of SELF-NEGLECT is the most optimistic way possible of looking at it. It was the old dead woman’s fault that she died, and having located the responsibility, society goes contentedly on about its own affairs.”
In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde wrote:
“Under Socialism, all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags . . .”
There is a but for Oscar, and for him, it is a big but:
“For the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism.”
And Oscar believes we will end up worse off:
“If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. “
The extract from The People of the Abyss might persuade some that if it prevented hundreds of thousands of our fellow creatures from dying the death that Elizabeth Crews met with in her 77th year, then maybe sacrificing a little individualism could be a price worth paying.
Of course I am still determined to find out why we would have to sacrifice any individualism simply to eradicate poverty.
Indeed, to achieve “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for all, individualism—being free to make your own choices—has to be a given.
Ronald Reagan was one of many US presidents to champion individualism in the free world.
On December 23 1988, The New York Times wrote:
“In an interview broadcast tonight, President Reagan dismissed the idea that his Administration bears any responsibility for the problem of homelessness, and he said ‘there are always going to be people’ who live in the streets by choice.”
''They make it their own choice for staying out there,'' Mr. Reagan said in a farewell interview with David Brinkley of ABC News. ‘There are shelters in virtually every city, and shelters here, and those people still prefer out there on the grates or the lawn to going into one of those shelters.’”
The New York Times said:
“Experts on the homeless agree with the President that many of them suffer from mental impairment, as well as drug addiction, alcoholism, and other personal problems that prevent them from functioning effectively and taking care of themselves.”
“But a growing number of homeless people are healthy, and more than 20 per cent hold full- or part-time jobs, according to the United States Conference of Mayors. For many, the fundamental problem is economic: housing costs that have risen beyond the means of people with menial jobs.”
For me—and I realise that opinions on this kind of subject are subjective—something is a little out of whack.
In the richest country in the world, a country that puts a man on the moon, is this the best that can be done with this problem?
A problem where people who “suffer from mental impairment, as well as drug addiction, alcoholism, and other personal problems that prevent them from functioning effectively and taking care of themselves” are left with the freedom to sleep on the streets?
Is this what John Hancock and his 55 pals signed up for on August 2, 1776, in the Pennsylvania State House.?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, “certain unalienable rights” may have been endowed, but quite a few people aren’t able to enjoy them.
“Mental health disorders account for several of the top causes of disability in established market economies, such as the U.S., worldwide, and include: major depression (also called clinical depression), manic depression (also called bipolar disorder), schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
“An estimated 26% of Americans aged 18 and older -- about 1 in 4 adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”
Maybe freedom of choice in our free world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe true and universal individualism isn’t getting the oxygen that Oscar wanted for it.
And Oscar seemed to be aware that individualism in “established market economies” is not always fine and dandy. He said:
“Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of a fine or wonderful type and that the poor, if they have not culture and charm, have still many virtues.”
Yes, Oscar Wilde was a deep thinker.
I’m going to come back to him because I want to know why we have not been able to follow his sensible advice:
“The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty would be impossible.”