Re-Thinking Charity & Restoring Dignity
The rise of the welfare state and expert-led, scientific management of poor people undermined agency, dismantled families, and broke down the natural communities that enable people to flourish.
This is the forward I wrote for Ismael Hernandez new book Rethinking Charity: Restoring Dignity to Poverty Relief. The book is published by the Acton Institute — you can order a copy here and read amore about Ismael’s work and training at the Freedom & Virtue Review edited by
Forward to Re-Thinking Charity
In our desire to help those in need, we can often turn poor people into objects of charity, pity, or compassion instead of seeing people as the protagonists of their own development and flourishing. Ismael Hernandez has been a consistent voice and reminder that we must never lose sight of the agency, potential, and creative capacity of each person no matter their circumstances. His life and work are examples of true charity and solidarity – that is, seeking the good of the other and helping to create the conditions for human and social flourishing. Over the last decades a shift has taken place from charity to humanitarianism. It is a subtle shift, but the impact is profound.
As distinct from charity, which takes into account long-term flourishing, humanitarianism focuses primarily on providing material comfort. As Hernandez explains, this has led to cultures of dependency on state relief that robs people and communities of their self-reliance.
A backdrop to Hernandez’s book is a long debate over two competing visions of how to address poverty in the United States. One is associational, community-led, and decentralized, rooted in mutual aid and enterprise. The other sees large-scale, government-led social programs as the necessary means to solve such a pressing problem.
The dominant model of poverty alleviation over the last century has been this large-scale, expert led, government-centered approach. In a sense, this was understandable. Inspired by the achievements of the physical sciences, the industrial revolution, and management ideas of people like Fredrick Taylor, and especially the impressive technical and social engineering accomplishments that led to military victory in World War II, the idea was: we’ve won the war, now let’s apply all that energy, money, and technical expertise to end poverty. This vision came to full fruition in the 1960s with the Great Society, the War on Poverty, urban renewal, massive housing projects, and a multiplicity of government welfare programs to assist those in need.
Despite great optimism, this scientific approach to the management of people—specifically poor people—led to the breakdown of natural communities and relationships that enable people to flourish. Poverty became more concentrated in certain areas, creating a kind of multiplier effect for existing cultural and social weaknesses. To be sure, we cannot blame federal government programs for all the social ills of our time; but the social engineering of people, combined with regulations and policies that undermined local organizations and weakened family ties, led to a breakdown of relationships in poor communities and what Seth Kaplan has called “fragile neighborhoods.”[1] As Hernandez writes:
The legacy of the Great Society was not the elimination of poverty but the institutionalization of welfare and the definitive federalization of poverty alleviation efforts. Long gone was the initial residualist conception of welfare, whereby helping those in need was a function primarily of families, churches, and private charities. The institutional conception, where the nation-state provides a broad range of social services and economic protections, was here to stay.[2]
Urban Renewal
A prime example of this was the combination of new highway construction, urban renewal, housing projects, and welfare regulations that discouraged marriage and saving. There were communities—poor no doubt, but filled with neighborhoods, families, shops, churches, schools, and community life—that were leveled to make room for new highway construction or other urban renewal projects. The area known as “Black Bottom” in Detroit is just one example of a vibrant community that was destroyed as a part of transportation policy and urban renewal. Displaced people were often moved into high density towers in park projects inspired by modernist architects and planners like Le Corbusier. Examples include Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green in Chicago, the infamous Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis, the Forrest Houses in the Bronx, and Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects in Detroit. Many have since been demolished. These housing projects became centers of crime, drugs, and other social pathologies. And if that was not enough, housing and welfare benefits were often tied to income and a woman’s marital status. If a woman saved too much, she could lose her benefits. Social workers would visit to make sure there was no man in the house. This incentivized the breakdown of marriage which is a prime predictor of poverty. These programs concentrated the poor into isolated communities, and compromised family cohesion which had an especially negative impact on poor African Americans.
It is often said that these were unintended consequences of well-intended social planners. Perhaps. But a better description is they were unpredicted consequences, because they were based on reductionist and mechanistic theories and models of the social planners that ignored the complexity and nature of human society and relationships.
Part of it was an error, part was hubris and failure to listen to critics. These planners were, in the words of anthropologist James C. Scott, “seeing like a state.” They focused on “formal order,” looking at society from the outside and missed the layers of complexity, relationships, tradition, and informal order. He writes in Seeing Like a State
“These rather extreme instances of massive, state-imposed social engineering illustrate, I think, a larger point about formally organized social action. In each case, the necessarily thin, schematic mode of social organization and production animating the planning was inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social order. By themselves, the simplified rules can never generate a functioning community, city, or economy. [3]
Another important contribution of Rethinking Charity is the combination of theory and practice. Hernandez pays special attention to theory and the proper mental models of how to think about poverty. This is not simply an academic debate. Theory impacts practice. The proper vision of the human person as a unique, unrepeatable individual with a social nature, born into a family and community; the proper role of government; the importance of local communities and charities; economic incentives; the proper division of social responsibilities are ideas that—whether you get them right or wrong—have real world consequences. Hernandez is not simply a theoretician. He has spent years helping people in a variety of situations and has seen first-hand the results of how good or bad theory helps or harms real people, families, and communities.
Solidarity and Subsidiarity
Two key themes in Hernandez work are the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.
Solidarity and subsidiarity are often presented as opposing principles where solidarity is viewed as responsibility of the state while subsidiarity is the practice of local, smaller scale activity. But this is incorrect. They are mutually reinforcing principles. Every part of society, from the largest state to the individual, has responsibilities of solidarity and subsidiarity. These duties come from the nature and function of the particular group or community. Solidarity is the inspiration for the practice of subsidiarity, and subsidiarity is the arena where solidarity is lived out and grows.
Solidarity is social charity. It is Christian love played out in society where we treat our neighbors as ourselves. Indeed, the state has a role in promoting solidarity, but it is through the practice of subsidiarity that solidarity is primarily lived out. One way to understand subsidiarity is the division of social responsibility. Those closest to the problem should handle it. The federal government has specific responsibilities that a local township does not. A local township has responsibilities that a church or community organization does not. The church has responsibilities that the family does not, and the family has responsibilities that the church or the state cannot claim. There are times when smaller associations need assistance. This should always be temporary and with the goal of reestablishing independence. It is a breakdown of subsidiarity when a larger association takes to itself the rights of another. Hernandez quotes a famous passage from Quadragesimo Anno:
Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.[4]
It is essential to note that subsidiarity is not the devolution of power. Families do not receive their authority from the state but have authority and responsibility that derive from their nature and function. Similarly, while it is true that those closest to the problem are generally the most efficient at handing it, efficiency alone is not the determining value. An inefficient family or community center is better for the common good than a hyper-efficient, distant bureaucratic approach that undermines natural communities.
Subsidiarity as a Guide for Practice
These theories may sound academic, but they have profound practical impact. As Hernandez stresses, solidarity cannot be outsourced to someone else. Neither can self-reliance. A community grows in solidarity when it works together to solve problems and create the conditions for flourishing. Analyzing our work through this lens can be very instructive from the family to the federal government. This has special relevance and practical application for working with people in poverty. Every charity, government agency, church, and non-profit should be asking whether their projects align with the principle of subsidiarity and respect human agency.
Are we doing for someone what they can and should be doing for themselves?
Are we helping people become self-reliant, or creating the conditions for dependency?
Does our work or service usurp the role of someone else who should be the main person helping our client?
Who are the most important relationships in the life of the person we are trying to help? Are we engaging with those people or perhaps standing in their way?
If we are running an after-school program tutoring children, how involved are the parents or the extended family of the child?
Are the fathers invited to participate? Are there programs that might involve and benefit the whole family?
If we are building homes in a poor area, are we hiring or at least involving people in the neighborhood?
Using the principle of subsidiarity as a guide can help avoid weakening social solidarity and harming the common good by alienating people from their friends, families, neighbors and others who have the potential for the most long-term positive impact.
I am grateful to Ismael for his work and insight over the years on effective compassion, self-reliance, mutual aid, and the entrepreneurial spirit. I have learned a great deal from him, and he has been an inspiration to the PovertyCure initiative and the formation of the Acton Institute’s Center for Social Flourishing which promotes local, participatory, and enterprise solutions to material and social poverty, the principle of subsidiarity, and encourages and supports locally-led institutions and enterprise solutions to poverty.
Rethinking Charity is essential reading for anyone who wants to help people create prosperity, opportunity, as well as human and social flourishing in their own families and communities.
[1] See Seth D. Caplan, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023).
[2] Ismael Hernandez, Rethinking Charity: Restoring Dignity to Poverty Relief (Grand Rapids: Acton Institute, 2024), 115.
[3] See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 310.
[4] Pius XI, encyclical letter Quadragesimo Anno (May 15, 1931), §79.