Compassion gone mad. - Review - book review

Public Interest, Spring, 2001 by Eric Cohen

Mac Donald chronicles the birth of this radicalism in the universities, the foundations, and at the New York Times--the three major myth-making institutions in American society. In 1912, the Times began its now famous annual "Hundred Neediest Gases" campaign to raise money for what the paper then called "the uttermost dregs of the city's poor." The appeal asked for specific amounts of money to help specific individuals--usually widows and orphans--who were considered the most destitute and deserving. The appeal was unabashedly moral and judgmental: "Because the Christmas spirit is strong within you, do not give to the professional beggars on the streets, unworthy, all of them, and often criminals." (Imagine that sentence today in the New York Times!) The foundations, led by the greatest philanthropist of his age, Andrew Carnegie, took the same moral approach: Help those who want to help themselves; do not give "indiscriminately"; do not shield individuals from the consequences of their own self-destructive be havior; do not make charity a public entitlement.

Over time, however, the philosophy of charity changed. In the 1940s, psychology replaced morality as the basis for the "Neediest Cases" appeal. Illegitimacy and juvenile delinquency became the products of "repressive childhoods" rather than individual moral failings. The distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor was abandoned. Widows and orphans were overshadowed by stories of family disintegration, which became progressively worse decade after decade.

By the 1960s, confrontation and entitlement had replaced gratitude and moral sentiment as the guiding spirit of the new "War on Poverty," which began as a series of Ford Foundation initiatives before becoming a permanent federal program. As social dysfunction worsened throughout the 1960s and 1970s--with skyrocketing levels of violence, drugs, and illegitimacy--the emphasis on personal responsibility declined. Instead, leading social theorists and foundation activists put the blame on "social and economic forces" and other "structural problems" that needed government solutions. And paradoxically, as the last remnants of institutional and legal racism against blacks came down, large segments of the civil-rights movement became more radical and militant. The noble goal of integration gave way to "race pride" and "community empowerment"; peaceful protest gave way to riots in the streets; the long, hard struggle to force America to live up to its own ideals gave way to a reckless attack on the ideals and institut ions themselves.

In time, this radicalism domesticated itself into a political ideology, the second great myth of progressive social policy, which Mac Donald aptly calls "compassion gone mad." Mac Donald's great service in these essays is to provide firsthand portraits of this madness and its consequences. She visits the education schools to find future teachers role-playing "how to usurp the power structure" and learning that grammar is repressive. She goes to the Smithsonian to find that history has been rewritten to depict America and the West as singularly evil and oppressive, and Africa, Native Americans, and the East as singularly good and tolerant. She visits homeless shelters and social welfare agencies that leave vagabonds on the streets because "it would be wrong to coerce them to come inside." She goes to the courtrooms to discover that therapists now rule, and that their diagnoses of "mental illness" for drug use, violent crime, and all manner of social deviance are accepted as fact. She travels to the leading pub lic health schools to find studies claiming that Ronald Reagan's military buildup is the primary cause of AIDS and that sexual promiscuity is a "sanctuary from racial hatred" and an "authentic voice" that should not be "silenced" by abstinence. In every institution, she traces the irrationality and social upheaval to its root--the false ideas of liberation and liberal compassion energetically imposed by elites and government agencies.