The psychology of poverty

Following on yesterday's discussion of poverty and the US underclass, I went back this morning to find an instructive 1996 essay by Robert D. Kaplan, from the Atlantic Monthly. Titled "The Coming Anarchy," it was much discussed at the time. In it, he predicts a future of sprawling and ungovernable Third World cities, civil wars and environmental despoiliation. There is a comparative discussion of West Africa and Turkey -- places he'd visited recently in preparing the essay. Take a look at these lengthy passages. Kaplan begins with an interview with an unnamed minister in a west African government, who speaks bleakly of the unraveling of society -- the "revenge of the poor," or anarchy at the hands of the children of parents least able to raise children in modern conditions -- which is to say, with the massive global demographic migration of rural people to cities, is urban life disconnected from traditional moral and social structures:

“You see,” my friend the Minister told me, “in the villages of Africa it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process.”

“In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa,” he continued, “there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another.”

The Minister here is describing a culture psychologically and sociologically broken by the demands of modernity. Their religious and cultural beliefs are not strong enough to hold their society together. In Kaplan's subsequent book, also titled "The Coming Anarchy," he discusses this in much greater detail, including the way masculine and feminine roles add to the anarchy in west Africa. I find the Minister's observation that Islam and Christianity are both lightly held in his country to be telling: if religious faith is only a thin veneer over a deep culture whose values are fundamentally antagonistic to that faith's teachings, the faith will be of little use in personal and social transformation. This is something to think about with regard to America's poor.

It's also worth considering the content of the particular faith, or form of faith, embraced by a people. It's not a simple cause-and-effect dynamic, to be sure. In the modern period, the Christianity of northern Europe -- Protestantism -- was significantly different from the Catholic Christianity of southern Europe. And this had social effects. You could make an argument that the pre-existing social and cultural values of the northern European societies made over Christianity as much as Christianity made over them. Fair enough. The point is, there are variations within religions that will have personal and social effects. Remember the conversation I posted here not long ago, with my Mexican immigrant friend Maria? She left her village Catholicism because, to paraphrase her, it offered her fatalism and nothing more than consolation for her suffering; the Pentecostalism she embraced offered her a religious vision that gave her the hope and the spiritual wherewithal to overcome her poverty. I don't wish to start an argument over which is better, Catholicism or Pentecostalism, and on what criteria one should make that judgment. I only want to point out that not only does religion itself have sociological effects, the particularity of the religion's content does too, as well as the degree to which it is taken seriously by individuals and society.

The essay continues with Kaplan in Turkey (in the book version, incidentally, he spends time on the way in a poor part of Egypt, and comes to respect the way the fiercely held Islam of the Egyptian people has enabled them to endure generations of privation and suffering without succumbing to the anarchy that has engulfed west Africa):

Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the Turkish capital, exude visual drama. Altindag, or “Golden Mountain,” is a pyramid of dreams, fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and painfully toward heaven–the heaven of wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in the city. Nowhere else on the planet have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man’s striving, with gaps in house walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onions growing on verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons that I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away from the African one. [snip] Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler’s checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home–order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.

Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.

My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Slums–in the sociological sense–do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

Understand what Kaplan is saying here: all those Turkish slum dwellers lack is opportunity. They have the internal and social cohesion to make a real go of it if offered a chance. Their poverty has not impoverished them spiritually, morally or culturally. In the 11 years since this essay appeared, Turkey has begun to emerge as a major regional player, and the strong religious values of these urbanizing masses has resulted in a major shift in Turkish politics. Turkey is moving ahead. The children who grow up in the gecekondus will likely spend their elder years in the nice middle-class houses of their grandchildren.

The point I'm trying to get at is that we should step back and look at the matter sociologically. It's not to say that the west Africans are "bad" people and the east Africans of Egypt are "good" people, or that the Turks are "good" or "better." The point, rather, is to look at how deep cultural beliefs and patterns (which include religion) affect material and social development -- and to learn from it. Having a set of strongly-held moral beliefs that reward self-discipline, thrift and socially beneficial conduct is not sufficient to guarantee material and social progress; after all, there can be all kinds of barriers put in one's way. But for people not born into privilege -- that is, most of the world -- it is necessary.