We used to believe that poverty was a prison, but now it seems to be more like an airport. Airports tell you you are an outsider in a mass of insiders, but in a sense are defined by their state of constant flux: nearly everyone you meet is passing through. Poverty, according to a survey published last week in the UK, is a little like that, writes John Waters.
A pamphlet issued by a British government think-tank suggests that lifelong poverty is exceptional, that being born poor does not mean you will stay poor for life, and that the idea of an underclass is a social policy fallacy. These are new and radical ideas, but they become interesting because the think-tank, Catalyst, is not a right-wing quango but an "old Labour" body chaired by the former deputy leader of the Labour Party and implacable opponent of Blairism, Roy Hattersley. The Catalyst pamphlet, Poverty and the Welfare State: Dispelling the Myths, examines the evidence of British poverty between 1996 and 1999 and claims that 60 per cent of the British population spent at least one year in poverty as currently defined. The report asserts: "Poverty is generally an experience for part of people's lives, not for all of it".
The report was widely reported in the UK but hardly at all here, although its findings will broadly translate in this society. One implication is that our inclination to see poverty as a moral question may no longer be useful. The rhetoric of what has been somewhat snidely dubbed "the poverty industry" would suggest that the poor are a discrete and clearly identifiable social grouping, concerning whose circumstances the rest of society should feel guilt and shame on account of experiencing comparative good fortune.
The tone of those who criticise society for its failure to address its own poverty - i.e. charity organisations, church groups, certain media analysts and left-wing politicians - is that of the fundamentalist preacher informed by the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle. This is true even of left-wing journalists who live in big houses and drive big motor cars.
We used to imagine that such moralistic hectoring was essential to promoting some semblance of social solidarity. But if most of us have already been poor and are in some danger of being so again, the notion of an objectified sector of society towards which we are obliged to show sympathy and support is overtaken by the idea that, in addressing what we term poverty, we need to abandon patronising notions of altruism and obligation and perceive this as a technical issue of enlightened self-interest.
At least in the context of a modern, essentially market-driven economy, poverty may have but a passing relevance to morality. The proper distribution of resources is a matter of efficiency, and may indeed be inhibited by the emphasis on what we term compassion.
It is strange indeed that the three most visible sources of the current moralistic approach to poverty - religious institutions, the media and various left-wing groupings - all owe the power of their argument to an essentiallly Christian view of money and wealth, which employs rhetorically inspired guilt as the mainspring of its operation. This philosphical model takes as gospel the idea of a limited cake, and assumes that if one slice is larger then others must be correspondingly smaller. But this has less relevance in a market economy in which the moving frontier of wealth-creation sets no barriers or limits on the bounds of personal enrichment.
Indeed, current ideas about poverty may be dividing those with wealth from those without even more than does their actual economic estrangement. For one thing, the established concept of poverty, estimated on the basis of comparing the relative wealth of an individual with the average wealth in society, is rapidly being discredited.
This definition gives a new meaning to the notion that the poor will always be with us, for if you calculate poverty by comparison with average income and possessions, there will always be a proportion with that average. This does not mean they are necessarly suffering from anything remotely definable as poverty.
This suggests that the Christian metaphor of the camel and the eye of the needle may require updating, since it derives from a time when the divisions between rich and poor were indeed fixed and fairly unbuckable. In ancient societies, riches were generally inherited and came without effort. Likewise, poverty was a life sentence. The poor were therefore, if only by virtue of seeking consolation, far more likely than the rich to focus on the hereafter as the solution to their condition.
Today the converse may be true: the poor, by virtue of the opportunity that exists to escape their condition, are much less likely to turn to God, at least until they have first tried money; whereas the rich, having discovered that wealth has not addressed their essential unhappiness, have a better chance of seeing the light.
It is a bit of an irony also that, to the extent that inherited or lifelong poverty continues to be a problem for some, it generally occurs in a particular type of urban context, the irony arising from the fact that the urban is the, so to speak, traditional repository of left-wing values. Perhaps some who accuse society in general are seeking to conceal the poverty of their own thinking?