"Poverty is like war. It is like being at the Front. All manner of wild, strange, reckless moods, all manner of stoical endurances, all manner of monstrous outrages and crazy distractions heighten with pity and terror, and sometimes with untold relief, the passing of the days. There ought to be in every nation a great public cenotaph to The Unknown Poor Man; for, since what we call our commercial civilisation connives at poverty, implies poverty, pays for itself with poverty, your poor man, employed or unemployed, does as much as any great industrial magnate to keep the machine going. He is, so to speak, the living excrement of the machine.
… But to any sensitive person who is not in want of the primal necessities of life, the thought of the sufferings—caused simply and solely by lack of money—that surround us on every side, must often present itself with appalling clearness. One of the least satisfactory of all excuses for hardening one’s heart against people poorer than oneself is the excuse that the State or the Church will look after such derelicts, or that some great charitable institution will take up the case. This excuse is an utterly hollow and conventional one.
When you encounter a poor man, under-fed and under-clothed, whether it be in town or country, you—a lucky human animal—are meeting him—an unlucky human animal. All other considerations are flimsy, irrelevant, hypocritical. You, well-fed and well-dressed, meet suddenly, on this Robinson-Crusoe-Island, him, ill-fed and ill-dressed. Automatically your selfishness calls up about twenty reasons why you should disregard his appeal, or, if he has made none, why you should not, out of a blue sky, give him a 'quarter.' He is really a miser. His appearance is a masquerade. He will only spend your money on drink. You are pauperising the populace. You are discouraging self-help. There is always the Salvation Army.
It is surprising how rapidly these arguments rush into your mind. And then a yet more specious reason against putting your hand into your pocket will leap up. "What good does it do? It is only a moment’s satisfaction to the man. It is not enough even to get him a night’s lodging." Well, make it enough, then ! Give him fifty cents instead of a quarter.
But what nonsense this is about its being only a moment’s relief! Suppose—which is by no means impossible—that your beggar really craves desperately the 'cup of coffee' about which he is so obsequiously murmuring. Who are you, to despise as 'nothing' the ratification of an intense, natural, human desire? Sensation is sensation. Happiness is happiness. A moment of delicious well-being is very often a revelation of eternity. What do you know, you despiser of momentary pleasure, of the metaphysic of Time?
He begs for a cup of coffee. You refuse him the price of this, thinking in your mind, 'He will spend it on drink. But what if he does? 'He will spend it on drink?' Has it ever occurred to you to think what this 'God’s Earth,' as the optimistic poets love to call it, really looks like from the viewpoint of a ' down-and-out' ?..."
The real situation is simple enough. Walking about on the surface of this planet are two sensitive human animals. Both have bodies that require 'coffee' or
whatever it may be that corresponds to coffee.
It is a monstrous impertinence when one of two mysterious perambulatory skeletons, clothed in skin and cloth, arrogates to itself the right to question the proper conviction of the other that it knows what it wants and what is good for it!...
Suppose it be you, gentle reader, that is now face to face with this luckless bum. Two conscious minds, two palpable bodies, two organic centres of quivering sensibility! It has taken some thousands of millions of cosmic years to produce you both, out of whirling agglomerations of gaseous nebul…
As a sagacious man, you have used the world as it is to your own advantage ; but as a philosopher you have the power of detaching yourself from these too-human illusions. You have the power of seeing nothing but the evolutionary miracle of a real living specimen of Homo sapiens, standing before you, a specimen of the incredible miracle of human consciousness at this moment gazing round in astonishment and in protest at a universe composed of so few things that minister to its enjoyment.
Let us suppose the philosophy in you overcomes for a while that natural and necessary hardening of your heart, without which—unless you are trying to be a saint—you cannot live your life. You give him fifty cents, let us say, and when you have left him you imagine as well as you can what follows. You imagine his entering an eating-house, humble enough to have a stove, or a fire of some sort, at which he can sit while his cup of coffee and his bacon-and-eggs are preparing…"
John Cowper Powys, In Defence of Sensuality
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