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A couple of months ago @Goodguy left the following comment here:
I tried to initiate a discussion about this without success, with my argument being that single men „policing/controlling” the sexual decisions of single women (I'm including „slut-shaming” in this category) has actually only been a social reality in the minds of feminist culture warriors. It was never implemented as a tool of women's „oppression” anywhere. To the extent that such „policing” existed (if we want to call it that), it was mainly done by other women, mainly due to the simple and understood fact that it's such policing that serves the long-term sexual interests of women as a whole. And the men that did engage in this were mostly fathers with daughters, not single men in the current sense of the word. (One can argue that in traditional patriarchal communities it was normal for single men to band together and remove outsider single men through threats or force; I guess this may count as indirect policing, which isn't saying much.)
I'm open to reading any counterarguments but anyway, this is not the subject I want to address here. I think Goodguy touched on something rather important which didn't occur to me at first, namely that society used to have a different attitude regarding this issue before it became modern. There actually used to be a group of men who were basically deputized by society to morally shame women in certain contexts despite being technically single (as I alluded to this above): priests and monks. (And this doesn't just apply to Christendom.) They were also voluntarily celibate, which is another category that disappeared with the rise of modernity. (The cultural memory of this lingers on though, otherwise the people who came up with the „incel” label would simply have called themselves celibate.)
As I was pondering this issue, it also occurred to me that secularization meant that Western societies did lose something significant not just in this respect but others as well. It appears to me that secular society and the churches/denominations used to exist in a symbiosis with the terms never being openly stated. It's well-known that Christianity used to be in a culturally hegemonic/privileged position. But it's also true that the churches basically volunteered to take care of those social groups that nobody else wanted to look after because they're socially a pain in the neck:
singles who can't or won't get married (see: priests, monks, nuns)
generally adults lacking social skills to such an extent that they become shut-ins without outside assistance
sick/diseased people unable to pay for treatment
children sired by men who can't or won't become husbands and providers
poor people that are so helpless and lacking in agency that they die from poverty without the charity of others
children of married couples too poor to pay for any schooling
I think atheists and people hostile to religion in general emotionally get hung up on the former and lose sight of the latter. Some of them who did not lose sight of it came up with the doctrine of eugenics as a solution, but we know what reputation that has today. Instead we expect the state to pick up the slack and look after all these unfortunate groups, which only results in a multitude of horror stories about police departments, child protective services etc. being a useless bunch of uncaring buffoons.
I wonder what the rationalist point of view on all of this is.
The history of religious charities is not exactly immaculate either. The reality is that if you give people power over the desperate, some of them will abuse it.
However, it's also not really correct to say that responsibility transferred from church to state. In some places (especially Catholic countries) the church and state provision of aid were heavily enmeshed. However, you also had things like the English poor laws, which were secular, state-provided relief (of a sort) for the desperately poor. More commonly than either, people in the described categories simply went without aid if they weren't situated within a community they had strong ties to. The social support systems of the past were quite narrowly applicable (almshouses were for people who nowadays we'd consider 'homeless'), don't generalize to modern contexts very well (relatively few people live in small agrarian communities, and even those have been radically transformed from pre-industrial forms), and in some cases have no modern analogs.
I am not exactly a rationalist, but I am generally unimpressed by romanticization of the past. I am likewise skeptical of the desire to reserve a privileged spot for religion in the functioning of society. It is true than in some cases religious organizations did provide certain social services, but I don't seem much reason to think they were uniquely capable in that respect.
The benefit of having charities handle it is that it never is forced to become an entitlement. You can put requirements that ultimately help the person get out of the traps they are in. Governments, at least in modern democratic nations really can’t do that. In modern states, you are entitled to things like food, housing and health services, simply because you live in the country (and in the 21st century, you don’t even have to be here legally). So a person can be perfectly able bodied and collect welfare benefits for basically a lifetime, without having to get a job or do any community service, or go to school. You just go on welfare, and so long as you draw breath, you get a check. People can be generations deep in welfare as well. A charity can say “no, if you want to keep getting help from us, you have to do something productive. You either get a job, or if you truly can’t, you can volunteer with the charity. Your kids have to attend school. You can’t be on drugs.”
Government welfare schemes do do all those things. Unless you are too disabled to work, I am not aware of any countries where you are officially allowed to live for more than a few months as a welfare bum, or more than a few years as a welfare mother. (Unless you count able-bodied retirees in their 60's and 70's as welfare bums, which I do but a supermajority of the electorate don't). In every country I have looked at,
The US has no cash or cash-equivalent welfare at all for able-bodied, childless paupers. In the UK assistance is gated by a fortnightly interview where you have to show receipts for your job search. I don't know much about Continental Europe, but the generous benefits in those countries are limited to people who have already paid into the system. I do know that Italy has no means-tested benefit for people without a contribution history and explicitly expects them to sponge off their parents.
The problem is that chivvying the undeserving poor into work doesn't work well at the best of times, and doesn't work at all when done by large centralised bureaucracies. Victorian England was already rich enough that you couldn't whip effort out of idlers without paying the man with the whip more than the value extracted - the workhouses cost more than just paying people outdoor relief, and were deliberately and consciously maintained as an expensive tool of social control similar to the prisons. Conventional wisdom among British Jobcentre workers is that the signing on process is completely useless for genuinely unemployed people and the only reason for retaining it is that it preferentially inconveniences people with a cash-in-hand job to supplement their benefits.
The other problem is that when you go looking for people who could get a job with ordinary effort but choose not to, you don't find as many as you expect. You find single mothers who can't fit the available jobs around their childcare arrangements, you find disabled people who haven't managed to get a diagnosis through the bureaucracy, you find people who don't have a diagnosable disability but are clearly unemployable basket cases, you find people living in unemployment blackspots without the resources to move, and you find people who had a job when the economy was better and will get another job when the economy improves.
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