Wall Street Journal - July 13, 1999
THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF POVERTY
By Lawrence E. Harrison, a senior fellow at Harvard University's Academy for International and Area Studies. His most recent book is "The Pan-American Dream" (Basic Books, 1996). . . .
The course of human progress demonstrates that some cultures produce greater good for greater numbers than others. Both at home and in the Third World, the antipoverty agenda must address values and attitudes, as difficult and as painful as it may be. The process will be slow, but it offers hope that the War on Poverty can, in due course, be won. ------------------------------------
Doug,
Why do you post this shit?
God, over and over we read the same crap, cranked out by the ton from the whitewing capital uber alles clones. Why can't they at least be more inventive. This is the figging nineties.
Its always 'about values' and the 'moral crisis', and never about institutional capitalism and its neoliberal political lackeys--running dog butt apologists and their lick-spittle policies that make it all come out that way--no, couldn't be that simple. It has to be some mysterious cultural thing--sleepy latin fatalism, the angry and criminal left-overs of slavery, or some other personal and individually accountable problem. Obviously, the solution is always the same--change the people, not the system--hell we all know the system works fine, it's the people who are fucked up.
Well, 'as difficult and as painful as it may be' I would suggest we address Mr. Harrison's bloody crisis of values with a gun. But, hey, that's my seething hostility, violent temper, YY psycho-sexual aggression genetics, and slow witted, white trash self speaking. Must be the Irish Catholic ner'do'well branch of the family tree who drank, fought, and fucked their lives away into oblivion. Oh, yeah, and they beat their kids too.
The more reasonable English and Welsh Protestant branch whose lives were just as short, but who had a lot less fun living--those hard working believers speak in entirely different terms.
Imagine that capitalism as the totality of a socio-economic system acts as a selectivity filter, extracting from a broad selection of cultural traditions and skills available--only those that will suit its immediate ends--the maximization of profit. Skewed income levels and poverty then appear as by-products of this selection process and represent those traditions and skills that are determined to be of a lesser or of no utility to such a system. Alternatively, certain skills and labor are essential, but are required in such large quantities, that the only way to keep profits going up requires that this work be continually degraded--hence the rising sea of low income labor at the bottom.
So, ideological propagandists like Mr. Harrison, then construct moral arguments as to why certain traditions and skills are worth less, and attach words like worthless, unskilled, fatal, criminal, violent, mean, lazy, and stupid where ever deemed appropriate. Meanwhile, under the same rubric, whatever such a system is currently rewarding is obviously a proven good in cash and so given over to words like skilled, intelligent, smart, capable, productive, efficient, worthwhile, and valuable.
There are endless nuances of this basic idea, but they all come down to the same thing. We could for example detail out the consequences of feed back loops which re-enforce, augment, and then exacerbate the existing system and its processes.
Chuck Grimes