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Shalom is the biblical ideal for human well-being or flourishing.
Postman reminds us that the “first science storytellers, Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler and Newton for example—did not think of their story as a replacement for the great Judeo-Christian narrative, but as an extension of it” (1997, 31).
Figure 4-1: Christian views of the poor. (Developed from Mouw 1989, 20-34)
Time is the basic resource of the household, according to Friedmann, not money. The household allocates the time of individual members to different tasks, areas of life, and domains of social practice in order to live. “poor households…rely heavily on non-market relations both for securing their livelihood and pursuing their life goals” (Friedmann 1992, 45). The poor cannot rely on money to satisfy their needs. This often makes poor households invisible to economic research.
The poor are no more lazy, fatalistic, improvident, stupid, or arrogant than anyone else. All people suffer from these problems, poor and non-poor alike. But only the non-poor can afford to indulge in these behaviors. “People so close to the edge cannot afford laziness or stupidity. They have to work and work hard, whenever and however they can. Many of the lazy and stupid poor are dead” (Chambers 1983, 107).
The poor are often women, and the poverty of women is both a special concern and a special opportunity. These UN statistics are now widely known: women perform two-thirds of the world's work, earn one-tenth of the world's income, are two-thirds of the world's illiterate, and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property (Williams and Mwau 1994, 100).
The majority of the household are women, the very young, and the very old.
Why?
Spiritual poverty: With apologies to Chambers, I add this category in the interest of the holistic Christian perspective we are trying to develop.
First, they are subject to social conventions such as dowry, bride price, feast days, weddings, and funerals. While these are examples of the importance of celebration and ritual, these social requirements may also deplete the assets of the poor by creating a permanent demand for moneylenders, whose usurious rates ensure permanent poverty. We must note that religious leaders often collude at this point by making such conventions part of religious life.
Fourth, there are unproductive expenditures for things like drink, drugs, unproductive assets (like radios, shoes, or clothes), and poor business investments. Finally, there is the exploitation that takes advantage of vulnerability. Exorbitant interest rates, trickery, coercion, intimidation, and blackmail are used by the powerful (often the non-poor in poor communities) to take what little a poor household has—its assets and even its labor.
Second, robbery. Local police, politicians, and landowners use deception, blackmail, and violence to rob the poor who, in turn, lack recourse to justice, “since they do not know the law, cannot afford legal help and fear to offend the patrons on whom they depend” (1983, 133).
One important feature is missing from Chambers's analysis of poverty: the impact of spiritual poverty. Each of the elements of his poverty trap has a spiritual dimension.
Friedmann focuses on the powerlessness of the poor and defines poverty as lack of access to social power.
Friedmann's understanding of poverty alludes to, but does not develop the spiritual dimension of life. There is no explanation for why social systems exclude the poor and become self-serving. A spiritual dimension is needed to account for the fact that social institutions frequently frustrate even the best and most noble intentions of the people who inhabit and lead them. Without a theology of principalities and powers, it is unclear why good people cannot make social institutions do what they were set up to do. Furthermore, there is no means to account for the destructive behaviors and poor
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Jayakumar Christian, a long-time Indian practitioner and World Vision colleague, codified his development experience in his Ph.D. thesis (1994) at Fuller Theological Seminary and his important book God of the Empty Handed (1999). Christian builds on Chambers and Friedmann while adding a spiritual dimension to his understanding poverty.
Citing the “eternal yesterday”' as the justification for influencing the “eternal tomorrow” of the poor. “It has always been this way.”
Salvian, in the fifth century, wrote: “They [the poor] give themselves to the upper classes in return for care and protection. They make themselves captives of the rich, as it were, passing over into their jurisdiction and dependence” (in oden 1986, 151). It took forty years to get the experience of Egyptian slavery out of the collective mind of Israel before Israel could be come a people and a nation. This is an expression of what Christian calls the marred identity of the poor (more on this shortly).
In another example of a worldview supporting oppressive social relationships, members of the Brahmin caste are taught by their Hindu tradition that they were made from the head of God and so are supposed to rule. The harijan are taught that they were made from the lower parts of god and thus are inferior by nature. This is not just a problem for a Hindu context. Every culture, including those of the West, has beliefs that disempower people, discourage change, and label oppressive relationships as sacrosanct and ordained.
As Christian stated in a telephone interview in 1997, “Poverty is the world telling the poor that they are god-forsaken.” Figure 4-8: The disempowering themes in the Hindu belief system. (Adapted from Christian 1994, 241)
Sitting at a campfire in the Kalahari Desert, I heard a San woman say, in response to hearing the news that the Son of God had died for her sins, that she could believe that God would let his Son die for a white man, and that maybe she could believe that God might let his Son die for a black man, but she could never accept the idea that God would let his Son die for a San woman. This is spiritual and psychological poverty of the deepest kind, the root of fatalism.
One final note. Christian's framework also provides a way of understanding what John Dilulio of Princeton University calls “moral poverty.” In his studies of violent youth in American inner cities, Dilulio describes “the super-predators,” teenagers who will kill without thought or remorse simply because they are inconvenienced. Dilulio says that moral poverty is what you get when people grow up without loving, capable, responsible parents who teach you right from wrong…who habituate you to feel joy at other's joy, pain at other's pain, happiness when you do right, remorse when you do wrong….
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When the poor accept their marred identity and their distorted sense of vocation as normative and immutable, their poverty is complete. As one's freedom diminishes, so does one's hope. The absence of freedom and hope erodes the human spirit. This is permanent unless this issue is addressed and the poor are helped to recover their identity as children of God, made in God's image.
Ravi Jayakaran, an Indian expert in the use of the Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) methodology and a former colleague of Robert Chambers, describes poverty as a lack of the freedom to grow (1996, 14).
Echoing Luke 2:52, Jayakaran pictures the poor wrapped in a series of restrictions and limitations in four areas of life: physical, mental, social, and spiritual (see Figure 4-10). Figure 4-10: Poverty as a lack of freedom to grow. (After Jayakaran 1996, 14)
Jayakaran adds to our understanding of poverty in two important ways. First, he locates the causes of poverty in people, not in concepts or abstractions. This is important and is frequently forgotten. It is easy to blame greed, systems, the market, corruption, and culture, but these are abstractions and cannot be directly changed. People—the poor and the non-poor—have to change.
We have looked at poverty as deficit, as entanglement, as lack of access to social power, as diminished personal agency, as disempowerment and as lack of freedom to grow.
We can conclude that poverty is a complicated social issue involving all areas of life—physical, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual.
Having said this, I add a word of caution. I doubt there is or ever will be a unified theory of poverty.
The simple chart in Figure 4-11 illustrates the point. Figure 4-11: How cause shapes response.
If care is not taken to understand our unwitting biases, our understanding of the causes of poverty tends to be an outworking of our place in the social system, our education, our culture, and our personality.
There has been a recent addition to the physical causes of poverty offered by Jared Diamond, a physiologist with a background in linguistics, archeology, and ecology (Diamond 1997). Diamond looks not just at the biology of humans, but at the biology that surrounds humans. He is looking for an alternative to the kind of social Darwinism that explains the world map of development by implying that some ethnic groups are better than others. Diamond argues that geography, the quality of land, climate, and native plant species; guns and capital, which allow exploration and domination; and germs,
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“There are large-scale social practices and a whole system of social roles, often firmly approved by the members of society generally that cause or perpetuate injustice and misery” (Wolterstorff 1983, 24).
As an example, the Voices of the Poor study learned that the poor identified lack of physical safety and security (overt violence) as a major factor in their poverty.
In other words, the rituals, explanatory narratives, art, the media, and social institutions act together in communicating the nature of social roles and the correct behavior that accompanies them. For example, the billboard advertising sugar in Brazil has a smiling white woman holding a bag of sugar against a backdrop of picturesque sugarcane fields with people of color working in them. The underlying message about roles and function is clear.
(see Figure 4-14). Figure 4-14: The dynamics of oppression and marred identity. (Synthesis of Christian and Cudd)
Some of the causes of poverty have to do with the mental condition of the poor. At the simplest level it is obvious that poverty is caused in part by lack of knowledge and technical information. Poor nutrition during important early childhood years means permanent diminished capacity for learning. The existence of debilitated mental states as the result of poor nutrition, illness, alcohol, or drugs also creates and sustains poverty. But we need to go deeper in understanding the mental causes of poverty.
“Han can be described as internalized collective memory of victims generated by patriarchal tyranny, racial discrimination, economic exploitation, ethnic cleansing, massacre, foreign occupation, state-sponsored terrorism and unjust war” (Park 2004, 15). Han and marred identity seem deeply related.
Examining the causes of poverty in an area development program, the view of the community differed considerably from the view of World Vision staff (see Figure 4-15). Figure 4-15: Community vs. staff views.
In every case the community blamed itself for its poverty, having internalized the very descriptors of the poor that Chambers warns development workers to avoid (Chambers 1983, 107).
Janoff-Bulman argues that human beings, at least in the West, make three assumptions about themselves. First, we are good, capable, and moral; we have worth or value (1992, 11). Second, the world is more good than bad, and other people are basically good, kind, helpful, and caring; the world is or is supposed to be benevolent (1992, 6). Finally, people tend to get what they deserve, so they will act accordingly; the world is basically just (1992, 9).
“learned helplessness”
I have already pointed out how Chambers, Friedmann, and Prilleltensky largely ignore the impact of the spiritual world, shamans, and witchcraft and their very significant contribution to making and keeping people poor.
Jayakaran actually names the spiritual as a cause of poverty. This is the reason I have adopted his framework for this section on the causes of poverty.
So, what can we say about poverty and its causes at the end of this review of major contributors to the conversation? First, poverty is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. There are no simple answers. Second, understanding poverty requires that we be multidisciplinary; we need the tools of anthropology, sociology, social and community psychology, spiritual discernment, and theology, all nicely integrated. Third, the works of Chambers, Friedmann, Prilleltensky, Christian, and Jayakaran need to be seen as complementary views, each adding something to the other.
This is the point of departure: Poverty is a result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable.
For the Christian, the biblical story provides an unambiguous answer. Sin is what distorts these relationships. Sin is the root of deception, distortion, and domination. When God is on the sidelines or written out of our story, we do not treat each other well.
The non-poor are socialized into their dominant role through mythic stories, narratives, symbols, and rituals that make their position of power make sense, even seem ethically defensible.
A partial list of Wink's delusional assumptions includes: • The need to prevent social chaos requires that some should dominate others. • Men are better at being dominant than women; some races are more naturally suited to dominate others. • A valued end justifies any means. • Violence is redemptive; it is the only language enemies understand. • Ruling or managing is the most important social function. • Rulers and managers are entitled to extra privileges and wealth. • Those with the greatest military strength, the most advanced technology, the biggest markets, and the most wealth
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Man cannot live without bread. But, man must not live by this essential bread alone. Bread-alone, shelter-alone, clothing-alone, income-alone, all these alones damage man's quality of life.
The idea of too much or too little being two sides of the same problem reminds us of Proverbs 30:8-9: Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, “Who is the LORD?” Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.
