Poverty

Our global village has a population of about 5.5 billion people in 190 countries. Poverty is without doubt one of the most persistent and universal tragedies of our post-World War II world order. We need to ask ourselves, though, why poverty is such a major problem in two-thirds of our world and a minor (yet growing) problem in the one-third of the world we call the First, or developed (overdeveloped), part of the world. The food and technology do exist to provide the basic needs for the ever-growing population on this fragile earth, our island home, yet the problem of organization and distribution continues to plague us.

A Global Problem

More than 1 billion people live in a state of absolute poverty—the situation in which people stumble from moment to moment searching for adequate food, nutrition, shelter and clothing. Another billion live in a state of relative poverty—in which basic human needs are inadequately met and a subsistence standard of living is rarely realized. Almost 40 percent of the people on this planet live in a constant state of absolute or relative poverty. This is increasingly becoming a nagging problem in the First World also.

Forty thousand children a day die of hunger-related causes, and many others linger on, barely meeting minimal standards for physical growth and development. More hard facts could be used to highlight the immense inequities and disparities in our world order, but a merely descriptive overview of the reality of the dilemma does not deal with the deeper question of why poverty exists in such ominous dimensions. Jacques Attali points to this question when he says, “Above all, the marginalization and misery of 3 billion men, women, and children in Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia, especially India and China, hangs heavily over the promise of sustained prosperity and freedom in the privileged North” (p. 13).

The “privileged North” is also facing the grim reality of growing poverty as the distant Third World is making itself felt in the First World. Studies on the growing emergence of poverty in the First World highlight how a hard-core Third World is moving from the outskirts, across the boundary and into the center of the First World. Poverty in the United States is certainly on the rise. Zbigniew Brzezinski in his fine book Out of Control describes this reality:

with the shameful total of 32.7 percent of all black Americans living below the poverty line—one of every three!—but with also 11.3 percent of white Americans similarly afflicted, combining for a total of 35.7 million Americans (including several million helplessly homeless) living in conditions unworthy of the peerless global power. (p. 105)

As a human problem and not merely a Third World dilemma, the poverty question urgently bids us to respond. But our response will probably turn on how we interpret the reasons or causes of poverty. There historically have been three distinct, yet overlapping, means of dealing with poverty.

Approaching the Problem

The first response to poverty or human suffering is the emergency “deal with the symptoms” mentality. Huge amounts of food and other supplies are poured into a disaster-stricken area, and those giving believe this Band-Aid approach will, temporarily, deal with the problem. We must not minimize the importance of this approach to dealing with the plight of the poor. It is positively supported by many scriptural exhortations (Proverbs 19:7; Matthew 25:37-40). But we must be careful we do not allow this to become the permanent way of counteracting the problem. Philanthropy, works of mercy and charity have their important place, but if we do not ask why the poor are poor, we might, in the long run, further contribute to the problem. Ironically, charity may hinder a long-term solution to the problem of poverty in any Third World country by destroying local initiatives or local agriculture. It also may cause a chronic dependency on foreign aid that will not easily be broken.

The second, and more insightful, approach to dealing with poverty is the notion of development. But development is a sort of protean word that needs constantly to be brought before the dock. Much significant damage has been done in the name of development. Megaprojects employing inappropriate technology might give the First World a sense of being compassionate, but the consequences have often been disastrous in the Third World. There are complex reasons for this, but we must always be wary of the language of development. At the same time we must recognize there are good development projects that build solid and sustainable infrastructures within a community. At its best the idea of development builds on the notion that aid might enable the starving to eat, but if you teach people how to fish rather than giving them the fish, they will, in the long run, be quite capable of being self-sufficient. This is neighbor love (Matthew 22:39) at its best.

The third approach to the question of poverty raises the issue of justice, which also is a scriptural mandate (Psalm 82:3; Micah 6:8). But this approach calls into question the limitation of aid and development. The First World tends to pride itself on its aid and development packages, but probing deeper, we might discover that while this “comfortable compassion” eases some guilt, it increases the plight of the wretched of the earth. In the long run the world order we inhabit is dominated by powerful interest groups and states, and even though we might patiently teach the poor how to be more efficient with the newest fishing techniques, all the best development theory and projects will come to nil if the water is polluted or the rich want the land. This raises for us, in a rather stark and compelling way, the justice-power question and forces us to see that we cannot sidestep the issue of politics when we deal with poverty.

The Politics of Hunger

The politics of hunger—how and why the other half dies in our world order—exposes the politics of our world order, issues such as war and the way we select, screen and censor information. The 1991 Gulf War is a classic case in point. Because Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran and the United Arab Emirates have 60 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, the issue of the control of oil is an essential one. The Secretary of Defense at the time of the war, Richard Cheney, said, “The USA and our major partners cannot afford to have those resources controlled by someone who is fundamentally hostile to our interests” (O’Brien, p. 144).

The peerless global power dispatched 500,000 troops, spent $50 billion within weeks, left an estimated 200,000 Iraqis dead and destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq. At the present time, more than 1 million Iraqi children are seriously malnourished and more than 100,000 are seriously ill; many of them may die. Why were we so concerned and why did we act so quickly after Iraq invaded Kuwait when we said nothing when Turkey brutalized the Kurds (the largest people group in the world without a homeland), the Chinese slaughtered the Tibetans, the Indonesians liquidated the East Timorese, Acheh and other ethnic people, and the Guatemalans reduced the Mayans to servile status?

The language of liberation and human rights means little if it is selectively applied to serve our imperial interests. Kuwait had a highly questionable human rights record before the Gulf War. The First World cared little about how Kuwait treated the Palestinians or other migrant workers in Kuwait as long as the flow of oil remained safe and secure. I have raised the question of the Gulf War because it brings into focus the limitations of aid and development when major issues of power are at stake. Oil is a substantive power nexus; hence when power and justice collide, the sword is quick to assault justice and silence the pen. The poor are the predictable victims of power that is not hedged in by love and justice. And it is these poor who cry, How long, oh Lord, how long?

“I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth” (Rev. 6:8). There is little doubt that the pale horse whose name is death rides across large parts of the landscape of the earth. More than a fourth of the world is covered by this horse and its First-World riders. Poverty is the desperate child that pleads before this ravenous warlord. Aid promises some temporary relief; development, in a limited way, keeps the rider at a distance for some. Justice insists we challenge the pale horse and the sickle the rider carries. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice. Those who long for justice realize that the dysfunctional relationship between power and poverty is at the center of our dilemma, and power, by its very nature, resists in subtle and implicit ways being removed from its sable throne.

Facing Poverty

Conor Cruise O’Brien observes that it is natural for people in the advanced world not to face poverty at all: “Yet when flinching from reality becomes habitual in the life of an individual, he is found to be insane” (p. 141). Expounding this habitual flinching, O’Brien continues:

The advanced world may well be like, and feel like, a closed and guarded palace, in a city gripped by the plague. . . . The traditional ethic will require larger and larger doses of its traditional built-in antidotes—the forces of hypocrisy and cultivated inattention combined with a certain minimum of alms. (p. 141)

O’Brien has identified some of the major issues in the First World as we face the poverty question. Our hypocrisy allows us to blame the poor for their poverty while we play a significant role in creating and maintaining the poverty. Our hypocrisy regarding the Gulf War is a classic case. We studiously cultivate a mindset of inattention when it comes to asking the deeper questions of why poverty exists while indulgently cultivating a lifestyle of inflated wants and conspicuous consumption. We do not like to be seen as a callous people, so we comfortably assuage our guilt (if and when it is a problem) by helping in ways that do not help.

Poverty is a real and pressing reality for many in our feudal world order. We need to ask ourselves why the poor are poor and attempt to work on solutions to this problem. Aid, development and justice approaches, if combined, offer a means to deal with the poverty dilemma. At the same time the First World needs to face some built-in defense mechanisms and means of denial. We need to ask ourselves how and why we, as individuals and as a people, flinch from suffering and poverty. We must examine how we use hypocrisy, “cultivated inattention” and “a certain minimum of alms” to avoid facing the tougher and more rigorous questions that the poor would ask of us and that we, before God, must ask of ourselves. Otherwise we short-circuit the full liberation inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth, who said,

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)

» See also: Consumerism

» See also: Justice

» See also: Politics

» See also: Power

» See also: Principalities and Powers

» See also: Simpler Lifestyle

» See also: Stewardship

» See also: Wealth

References and Resources

J. Attali, Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order (New York: Times Books, 1991); Z. Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1993); C. Elliott, Comfortable Compassion: Poverty, Power and the Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987); P. Harrison, Inside the Third World (London: Penguin, 1990); F. M. Lappé and J. Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); C. C. O’Brien, On the Eve of the Millennium (Toronto: Anansi, 1994).

—Ron Dart