…
Yet as is so often the case with social problems, the precise nature and location of the alleged injustice, inequity, and indifference to suffering become unclear when things are looked at close up rather than through the lens of generalizations, either ethical (“no one in an affluent society should be homeless”) or statistical (“homelessness rises in times of unemployment”).
In the first place, it is far from evident that our society in the abstract is indifferent to homelessness. Indeed, homelessness is the source of employment for not negligible numbers of the middle classes. The poor, wrote a sixteenth-century German bishop, are a gold mine; and so, it turns out, are the homeless.
For example, in one hostel for the homeless that I visited, located in a rather grand but disused and deconsecrated Victorian church, I discovered that there were 91 residents and 41 staff members, only a handful of whom had any direct contact with the objects of their ministrations.
The homeless slept in dormitories in which there was no privacy whatever. There was a rank smell that every doctor recognizes (but never records in the medical notes) as the smell of homelessness. And then, passing along a corridor and through a door with a combination lock to prevent untoward intrusions, one suddenly entered another world: the sanitized, air-conditioned (and airtight) world of the bureaucracy of compassion.
The number of offices, all computerized, was astonishing. The staff, dressed in smart casual clothes, were absorbed in their tasks, earnestly peering into their computer screens, printing documents, and rushing off for urgent consultations with one another. The amount of activity was impressive, the sense of purpose evident; it took some effort to recall the residents I had encountered as I entered the hostel, scattered in what had been the churchyard, who were swaying if upright and snoring if horizontal, surrounded by empty cans and plastic bottles of 9 percent alcohol cider (which permits the highest alcohol-to-dollar ratio available in England at the moment). Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and the hostel administrators made pie charts while the residents drank themselves into oblivion.
…
It is difficult for most of us to accept that this way of life, so unattractive on the surface, is freely chosen. Surely, we think, there must be something wrong with those who choose to live like this. Surely they must be suffering from some disease or mental abnormality that accounts for their choice, and therefore we should pity them. Or else, as the social workers who arrive periodically in the hostels believe, all who lodge there are by definition the victims of misfortune not of their own making and quite beyond their control. Society, as represented by social workers, must therefore rescue them. Accordingly, the social workers select a few of the longest-standing residents for what they call rehabilitation, meaning rehousing, complete with grants of several hundred dollars to buy those consumer durables the lack of which nowadays is accounted poverty. The results are not hard to imagine: a month later, the rent of the apartment remains unpaid and the grant has been spent, but not on refrigerators or microwave ovens. Some of the most experienced among the homeless have been rehabilitated three or four times, securing them brief but glorious periods of extreme popularity in the pub at taxpayers’ expense.
To say, however, that a choice is a free one is not to endorse it as good or wise. There is no doubt that these men live entirely parasitically, contributing nothing to the general good and presuming upon society’s tolerance of them. When hungry, they have only to appear at a hostel kitchen; when ill, at a hospital. They are profoundly antisocial.
And to say that their choice is a free one is not to deny that it is without influences from outside. A significant part of the social context of these homeless men is a society prepared to demand nothing of them. It is, in fact, prepared to subsidize them to drink themselves into oblivion, even to death. And all of them, without exception, consider it part of the natural and immutable order of things that society should do so; they all, without exception, call collecting their social security “getting paid.”
These gentlemen of the road are being joined in their homelessness by increasing numbers of young people, fleeing their disastrous homes, where illegitimacy, a succession of abusive stepfathers, and a complete absence of authority is the norm. We are constantly told by those liberals whose nostrums of the past have contributed so richly to this wretched situation that society (by which is meant government) should do yet more for such pitiable people. But is not homelessness, at least in modern-day society, a special instance of a law first enunciated by a British medical colleague of mine, namely, that misery increases to meet the means available for its alleviation? And does not antisocial behavior increase in proportion to the excuses that intellectuals make for it?
