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I’ve been reading the debate downthread about how Christianity and a more tradcon approach (defined I think largely as a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘focus on improving your community rather than enacting political change’) stack up in a globalised, highly urban environment. I find the conversation very interesting but short on concrete detail. For example, ‘people do not enjoy being told to sit up straight and eat their vegetables’, and ‘You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.’. I have considerable sympathy for both of these statements! But they strike me as being a bit too abstract to tease out real-life disagreement, so I thought I would post an example of what seems to me to be a concrete, modernist/globalist adjacent problem that’s been troubling me for some time and get peoples’ thoughts on it.
I grew up in central London, and my parents still live there, on a fairly busy street. There is approximately one beggar every ten metres. It is strongly suspected locally that these positions are managed by organised crime - they are almost all foreign, burly, and articulate, to the extent that it makes you very suspicious as to why they can’t get a real job if they wish to. Each of these people expects at least a pound from you as you pass by, which means that even a trip to the grocery will cost you £5-£10, about as much as the groceries.
What is the appropriate, Christian, response to this situation? Off the top of my head:
Pay them. However, if you are giving money to every beggar you see in central London, you had better have a really stupendous salary. Moreover, because the beggars are now highly mobile, both nationally and internationally, the number of beggars is fully capable of expanding to the limits of your collective generosity. (This is the modernism/globalism angle.)
Don’t pay them. This feels straightforwardly unChristian. If memory serves, Jesus pretty much said, ‘take the coat off your back and give it to the coatless man over there.’ You can square it to yourself by pointing out that they’re probably predators, which they are, but they’re still more desperate than you are.
Don’t pay them, but feel guilty about it / donate to charity / tithe. I think these are basically 2 with extra steps. I sympathise with Scott’s view that tithing is basically a down payment on the limitless stuff you actually owe, but it still seems to fall short of genuinely Christlike behaviour.
In short, how does Christian charity hold up when the modern world is capable of delivering infinite suffering to your door? (This mirrors our immigration debate to some extent.) Apologies if people don’t find this helpful but I was interested to get your opinions.
What would Jesus do? Jesus would probably sit down and talk to them. Get to know them, understand them, befriend them. Go to their house, meet their family. And then help them out of whatever situation they are in that led them to where they are on the street. It doesn't matter whether they're genuinely homeless or a con artist or part of a gang: Jesus hung out with criminals and con-artist tax collectors all the time. If they are con artists, then maybe they need more psychological and moral help than financial help, but they still need help. In some sense Jesus was an effective altruist, meaning actually help people at the root cause of their issues, not just superficial symptoms.
I don't think most Christians are up to this task. I'm probably not, though I'm not a very good Christian in practice. It would take significant time out of your life, especially as building a relationship with people takes many repeated interactions, which would wreak havoc on your busy schedule, probably put you at personal safety risk getting close to dangerous people, and probably require you to spend a decent amount of cash too. But it's probably the actually correct Christian thing to do.
But I think any weaker more realistically implementable Christian responses should be approximations of this. Fix the root cause of the issue, help these people effectively, however they actually need to be helped to get them out of a position where they feel like they need to beg. And if you think they're con men who don't really need financial assistance then figure out how to help them in a way that doesn't enable their behavior.
One way I genuinely think would help them is reinstiuting whipping as a punishment for vagrancy (which is a crime in the UK, but not punished). Many of these beggars (street beggars in London aren't particularly bad, it's the ones on the tube where you can't even get away from them that grind my gears) can definitely find real jobs, especially with our current job market, and those who are so far gone they can't do that almost certainly qualify for a bunch of government help programs that they just have to ask for. The threat of getting lashed works as a very effective method to concentrate the mind on getting out of such a situation.
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What if the root cause of the issue is the fact that people are generous/feel guilty and hence easily preyed upon by opportunists?
I struggle to intuit the tone of this comment, but even if it is facetious, I see it as a pithy portal to profundity. I believe in long term social dynamics and think that the world works something like this parable:
One day there is a religious revival and the Church of Universal Love grows big. Young people flock to its message of unconditional kindness and charity. They marry and have children. Thirty years on those children are the new crop of adults. They are unconditionally kind and full of charity; it was how they were brought up. And thirty years on a new grift culture emerges to take advantage of them.
Sixty years on from the religious revival sees another new crop of adults. They look at their parents with dismay: how can intelligent people so lack street smarts? Why do they fall for every scam and grift? I picture @RococoBasilica as one of this second generation, looking back on sixty years of history and noticing the earlier parts of the causal chain leading to the rise of grift culture.
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This is true because it has the word "maybe" in there. Without the "maybe" it's not necessarily true.
Aside from that, it sounds very familiar. You're basically saying "The correct action is to do all you can to help beggars, even at great cost to your life, but nobody's going to do that, so help as many as you can".
It's familiar because it's exactly the same thing that the EA people are saying. You really should help a whole bunch of people who need malaria nets or whatever--as many as possible, even at great cost to your life. But everyone's going to fall short of that requirement, so at least help a lot of them. The only real difference is that your Christianity is demanding that they help the ones they run across, while EA demands that they help the ones that let you maximize what help you can do.
I'm neither a Christian nor an EA, and my response is "'Help the people in front of you' is a heuristic that's good most of the time, but sometimes it can be gamed, either deliberately or by accident. I don't really have an obligation to help people just because they are in front of me. I also don't have an obligation to ignore the possibility of con artists."
(I would also try to figure out if my tax dollars help, or attempt to help, enough people that I no longer have an obligation anyway.)
I don't think the Christian response necessarily demands helping people in front of you more than distant people. Part of the whole point of missionaries is that people farther away are easier to help with greater magnitude per effort, so go out there and help them.
In many ways, Christianity and EA are highly compatible. Both believe that you should do things that actually help people, not just meaningless platitudes or virtue signalling.
The main distinction is that Christians believe in souls, and that everyone is doomed to hell unless they are saved by Jesus, and therefore convincing someone to accept Jesus and thus saving their soul is the ultimate good that you can do for them, and all of the material assistance pales in comparison except in so far as it helps convince people that Jesus is good.
Partially stemming from this but independently of metaphysical souls, Christianity also has more of an emphasis on internal change as a form of good. Sort of a teach a man to fish versus give a man a fish sort of thing. If you build schools and teach people better farming techniques, then they can feed themselves. If you teach people to love each other and cooperate instead of hating each other, crime rates will go down. If you love an alcoholic homeless person and teach them to love themselves, you might convince them to turn their life around, give up alcohol and seek stable employment. No amount of mere financial assistance is going to make someone mentally and spiritually healthy, or prevent them from physically destroying their own health, it requires human interactions, which you can only do in person.
Which EA is generally aware of and takes into account as well. It's just a matter of emphasis.
But this entire scenario is "there are so many beggars in front of you that you can't hlp them all without seriously harming yourself; what do you do?" To which the answer is "you really should be seriously harming yourself, but if you can't, help as many of the beggars as you can.".
I think this implies having to help people in front of you. The answer certainly wasn't "you have to help as many people as you can, but you might end up giving no help to these particular beggars at all since the world is so big"
Not exactly. The true authentic Christian response would be to help all the people at any cost to yourself, in which case physical proximity is not really relevant. The pragmatic response to having a selfish human brain is to help people when you can convince yourself to do so, which will tend to be when there is a high help to cost ratio, or when the direct feedback is strong enough that it actually feels meaningful. People near you are more physically accessible, and more psychologically responsive, so will be easier to directly help than people far away, so physical proximity is relevant.
But physical proximity can change. If someone lives in LA and, rather than stay and dedicate their life to helping the beggars who live there, decides to become a missionary in African and help poor people there, then they are in some sense choosing not to help the LA beggars. Or at least, choosing not to help them as much as they otherwise could.
So yeah, you do have to help the people in front of you. But you do not have to prioritize them to the exclusion of people far away from you, and you do not have to refuse to move to a different location which will change who's in front of you. It's okay to send money to a distant charity even if that diminishes the amount of money you have for people nearby. But part of the helping people you do should probably be non-monetary, in which case it almost has to be for people near you.
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