What Will Katrina Teach Us?

Recall this vignette from a recent editorial on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

Every one of these people who stayed behind through his own unwillingness to manage his own life is a villain in this story. Not only did these people endanger their own lives and the lives of their children, but--by overburdening or even deliberately obstructing rescue operations--they got in the way of the rescue of those who actually needed and deserved to be rescued.

When the hurricane had passed, these non-producers were still in the city, and then they complained--with belligerence more appalling than their suffering--that no one was feeding and sheltering them anymore. TV news reporters lamented the "intolerable" conditions for the refugees at the Louisiana Convention Center, and seemed blind to what their own cameras were showing: big, strong men and women, standing around in the streets amidst their own garbage, taking no initiative, waiting for a bus. For me, a scene that symbolizes the whole situation took place when one of the many obese women yelled accusingly into a reporter's microphone: "I haven't eaten in five days!"

And now, consider this portrait of life among the government-supported poor.

The "grim reality" of the ... underclass is not one of material want-to the contrary, it is given food, clothing, shelter, and medical care by a gigantic welfare state, and it "enjoys amenities and comforts that would have made a Roman emperor or an absolute monarch gasp." The grimness of its existence is spiritual: "the mental, cultural, emotional, and spiritual impoverishment of the Western underclass is the greatest of any large group of people I have ever encountered anywhere," Dalrymple writes. He has witnessed this misery firsthand through his work at an underclass hospital and prison, in which he has heard from his patients a constant stream of stories of the wretched lives of the underclass: "Day after day I hear of the same violence, the same neglect and abuse of children, the same broken relationships, the same victimization by crime, the same nihilism, the same dumb despair," he writes.

The lifestyle of the underclass is one devoid of meaning and purpose. Its members have no hopes, no aspirations, no goals beyond the satisfaction of the whim of the moment. They live in self-induced squalor, their publicly funded apartment buildings soaked in urine, the lawns of their state-provided houses drowned in litter. The law-abiding among them live in perpetual fear of rampant crime, to which the police are largely indifferent. Women flit from one abusive lover to the next, conceiving litters of illegitimate children along the way. Teenagers who have gone through twelve years of schooling are almost completely illiterate and cannot do the simplest arithmetic. The few students who try hard in school are either discouraged by their teachers or beaten by their peers. Worst of all, these horrors are accepted by the majority of the underclass with total resignation, as if there were no other-or better-way to live.

This is not a description of life in the projects of New Orleans, although I am sure it would have been remarkably similar. No. This passage is from an Alex Epstein review -- written six years ago -- of Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, about life in the British ghetto.

That book describes the outlook which gives rise to the culturally impoverished lives of the poor. Those who hold this outlook are not being helped to do anything by government subsidies -- except escape the ultimate consequences of their chronic dereliction, as so well put recently by Robert Tracinski.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

And so it may be doubly ironic that in a Sky News article today the following quote appears.

Constitutional Affairs Minister [Harriet] Harman said: "We don't want to get into a situation like America, but if you look at the figures, we are already looking like America - in London, poor, young and black people don't register to vote."

Ministers fear the failure of many to register is evidence of their disengagement from civic society - in the same way the poor of New Orleans had no power to improve their position.

My dear Ms. Harman. you are already there. The low voter registration figures are certainly a symptom of a lack of engagement with civic society. However, why would those who needn't work to live feel the need to become engaged? The problem is much deeper than that and will not be solved by merely registering the poor to vote, presumably so they can elect a government that will increase the dole.

Is the wrong lesson is being learned from the aftermath of Katrina on both sides of the Atlantic? It's hard to tell. At least in Britain, with multiculturalism under attack since the July bombings, the need for assimilation of the poor is being discussed openly.

[Trevor] Phillips will tell Manchester Council for Community Relations in a speech on Thursday: "We are a society which, almost without noticing it, is becoming more divided by race and religion. Our ordinary schools ... are becoming more exclusive and our universities are starting to become colour-coded with virtual "whites keep out" signs in some urban institutions."

I have not seen integration of the poor with the larger society discussed openly here by any politicians, quite to the contrary actually. But many of the poor victims of Katrina seem to have been integrated with larger society by default so far. Is America doing the right thing in practice, but by accident, while the Brits are closer to having a real political debate about race "and" poverty?

-- CAV