Moral Dilemma: Personal Poverty or International Social Justice?

[Gabriela]

Maybe this should go in the Debate Table. I dunno. I hope it won't wind up there, but here goes:

I've always (since I've been a Catholic) felt this conflict between trying to live a simpler, poorer life and trying to ensure that I don't support companies that abuse their employees or the planet. At home, I try to buy from local farmers rather than megachain grocery stores, and I'm careful not to buy brands of personal care products that use environment-unfriendly ingredients. I like to find clothes and shoes that were manufactured in places that don't use the modern equivalent of slave labor. Etc.

But I've noticed that many religious communities just shop at WalMart, because that's the cheapest, "simplest" option, and they see it as a way of living holy poverty. Of course, much of what's in WalMart is not ethically produced. So... dilemma.

The more you look behind the scenes of this problem, the harder the problem gets: What makes items cheap and so amenable to a poor, simple lifestyle is the outsourcing to other nations where labor laws are lax or non-existent, the (over)use of materials that taxes the environment, etc. But to do "real social justice", we'd all have to buy at local boutique shops and the like, which stock the most expensive stuff, because these days, ethical stuff is expensive.

So, what do you do? Buy "luxurious" because that's what's ethical, or buy unethical because that's what's "poor"?

Edited November 11, 2015 by Gabriela

[Sponsa-Christi]

I definitely appreciate your concern here, and I've considered these questions myself at different points. I don't have any answers, but a few thoughts:

1. Economics can be really, really complicated, and it's hard to determine direct cause and effect in advance. For example, I one read about an anti-child labor advocate who argued that while boycotts of specific brands can be helpful in some cases, in general simply shutting down factories was not the right way to go about ending child labor, because many of the children who had been employed in factories might then find themselves in even worse situations. Likewise, it's not a simple matter of "evil robots running big factory farms vs. virtuous families who grow local produce." It's good to support local businesses, but at the same time even big corporations employ people with families to support, etc. 

2. I think in some ways, evangelical poverty is more about attitudes and intentions rather than line-by-line price comparisons. E.g., all else being equal, buying the functional clothing you need without trying to be excessive or flashy is I think a more central consideration than whether you buy cheaper items from big-box stores vs. expensive but quality items from a local source. 

3. When one is actually poor, you shop where you can! I think the reason that a lot of religious go to stores like Wal-Mart is not because they are deliberately trying to buy cheaper things to make a statement, but rather because they do need to run their convents on a shoestring. I think the virtue there is not shopping at discount stores per se, but rather that they are choosing to spend themselves in God's service for little material pay. 

[beatitude]

I don't view goods that were mass-produced in sweatshops as cheap. They carry the same cost as ethically produced items - it's just that the price is paid by the pain and suffering of another human being, instead of my money. So I don't think buying cheap stuff that you know was made in unjust conditions is living poverty; it's just helping to inflict destitution on someone else. Secondly, if you focus too much on getting all your things as cheaply as you can, there is a risk that poverty just becomes a money-saving exercise instead of being a generous and openhearted way of life.

I know that there are many people (including religious) who honestly can't afford to shop in places other than Wal-Mart. But there are also many who could afford to make different choices, but they don't. Taking a vow of holy poverty is unfortunately not a guarantee that you will live it. This reminds me of what the late Fr Benedict Groeschel wrote in one of his books: "In my life, I've known dumb Jesuits, confused Dominicans, proud Capuchins, rich Franciscans, and Salesians who can't stand small children. I've known merciless Sisters of Mercy and uncharitable Missionaries of Charity and foolish Daughters of Wisdom. I am, regrettably, a Franciscan of the Renewal who has a long way to go before becoming renewed." There are plenty of people who profess poverty but do not live it, or at least not as fully as they could. I don't think there is any deliberate cruelty or malice in it: most of us are so used to being able to buy what we want whenever we want it that we take the things on the supermarket shelves for granted, without pausing to consider how they got there at that price and what life is like for the workers. It's not even on our radar.

Currently I live on a fairly small PhD stipend. I buy most of my things second-hand, from eBay or from shops like Oxfam, as if they're not from an ethical company this is much less harmful than buying them new and it is good basic stewardship, preventing waste. It is also a very good antidote to pride, especially where clothes are concerned - I want shiny new things! Buying second-hand is a nice prompt to pray for the item's previous owner, as well. (Because of this, I find poverty to be like one of those Russian dolls. When you start practising it, there is always something new to discover inside, whether a pride antidote or an impulse to prayer or something else entirely. Or maybe a better analogy would be unlocking new levels on a video game.  ) If I really need something new, I save until I have the money to buy it from an ethical supplier. Saving up for something makes me appreciate the item more, whatever it is. Where I live, ethical stuff is pricier than Wal-Mart equivalents, but still not boutique-level pricey. You could have a look for ethical products on the Internet and see if you can find anything more affordable than it is in your area.

Finally, since I began my year of not buying things unless absolutely necessary, I have realised that when the year is up I will still go on asking myself, "Do I really need this?" before I buy anything. The answer is usually 'no'. Once you start asking yourself that, you realise that you need less than you thought.

[Gabriela]

I don't view goods that were mass-produced in sweatshops as cheap. They carry the same cost as ethically produced items - it's just that the price is paid by the pain and suffering of another human being, instead of my money. So I don't think buying cheap stuff that you know was made in unjust conditions is living poverty; it's just helping to inflict destitution on someone else. Secondly, if you focus too much on getting all your things as cheaply as you can, there is a risk that poverty just becomes a money-saving exercise instead of being a generous and openhearted way of life.

This is really beautiful and sums up a lot of my concerns much better than I did!

[Anomaly]

Real poor is saving up to shop at Walmart. 

Frugal is Goodwill, Salvation Army, St V DePaul, and other second hand places.   Then there are garage sales.  Food banks for food. 

Though the employees at Walmart would rather keep their job.  They're more likely to be affected by your boycott than one of the W heirs.  

[CatherineM]

I get around a lot of this by not buying much. I'm poor. I buy for poor people. 

[Peace]

Are all Christians called to be (materially) poor? I am not exactly the Wolf of Wall Street, but I have a nice place. I have a nice car. I buy nice things. I have fun and go on nice vacations with the money that I make. Is that wrong? I also donate an amount to church and some charities that I am comfortable with, and I think I have been generous as far as helping my family out too. But I can't say I have ever really felt a calling to be materially poor.

[Era Might]

I don't think your personal actions are "social justice." They don't change social structures. Which is not to say you shouldn't do what you see is right, but might help resolve your dilemma if you don't look at it as social justice, but solidarity, which is not measured by legalistic yardsticks but by love and intent.

Edited November 11, 2015 by Era Might

[xSilverPhinx]

We don't have Walmart in Brazil, where I live, but we do have other chain supermarkets that belong to the same group. If only my budget would allow me to buy from other places and more ethically.  

I definitely appreciate your concern here, and I've considered these questions myself at different points. I don't have any answers, but a few thoughts:

1. Economics can be really, really complicated, and it's hard to determine direct cause and effect in advance. For example, I one read about an anti-child labor advocate who argued that while boycotts of specific brands can be helpful in some cases, in general simply shutting down factories was not the right way to go about ending child labor, because many of the children who had been employed in factories might then find themselves in even worse situations. Likewise, it's not a simple matter of "evil robots running big factory farms vs. virtuous families who grow local produce." It's good to support local businesses, but at the same time even big corporations employ people with families to support, etc. 

That's a good point. 

When I was visiting Egypt many years ago with my family I entered a carpet factory where they employed children. I don't know how much they made, but they were there to help their families, which were very poor and also depended on them as well. It's a tricky situation for sure. Simply not buying from these places or banning these children from working to help their families means there's less food on the table and would not tackle the root of the problem.  

I'm not advocating for child labour here. I just wanted to mention that in some places of the world 'childhood' and 'adolescence' as ages for development, play and learning are recent phenomena. For many people living in the third world, where many of the multinational factories are located, the right to childhood and schooling just isn't a reality.  

[beatitude]

Real poor is saving up to shop at Walmart. 

Frugal is Goodwill, Salvation Army, St V DePaul, and other second hand places.   Then there are garage sales.  Food banks for food. 

Though the employees at Walmart would rather keep their job.  They're more likely to be affected by your boycott than one of the W heirs.  

If you can afford to buy your own food, it is not an act of poverty to go to a food bank and take resources that someone else really needs. That's just posturing. I think Gabriela was talking about poverty in the spiritual sense, as an evangelical counsel, and not what it objectively means to live below the poverty line.

In this climate, one way to persuade companies to be more ethical is to create an incentive for them to be. Several companies have already recognised that there is a market for Fair Trade and environmentally friendly goods, even notorious chains like Primark. Mostly they try to weasel out of their obligations, but they recognise that there is a customer demand and they are trying to appease those customers. Arguing that not buying from Wal-Mart will only hurt the employees seems like a cop-out to me ("I'm sure these exploited people would rather have that job than nothing at all, and those garment-makers who burned to death in Bangladesh would only have died in the sewer if they hadn't died crammed like sardines into an unsafe factory, so I'll buy whatever I want - it's not like I can do anything.") It's also not very logical - people deciding to shop elsewhere is apparently powerful enough to cause loss of livelihood among employees, yet not powerful enough to cause a shift in company policy? Making different consumer choices is not the only action we need to take on this, but it's still a part. I find the argument about low-paid employees disconcerting for another reason, because you could say it about people trapped in many unethical industries - the arms trade, for example. I won't be supporting that any time soon, and it feels like blackmail to suggest that we should stop pressuring people to abandon their investments in the trade because it might make some poor guy working on a weapons assembly line lose his job. If people do lose their jobs en masse because of such actions, that's the time when we open up our houses and help to support them through, in addition to advocating for a just political answer. But we need to make it clear to these companies that there is no excuse for exploitation, especially not when it kills people.
 

Are all Christians called to be (materially) poor? I am not exactly the Wolf of Wall Street, but I have a nice place. I have a nice car. I buy nice things. I have fun and go on nice vacations with the money that I make. Is that wrong? I also donate an amount to church and some charities that I am comfortable with, and I think I have been generous as far as helping my family out too. But I can't say I have ever really felt a calling to be materially poor.

I recommend Jim Forest's The Ladder of the Beatitudes for a very good and thorough discussion of poverty in the lives of Christians. His basic criteria for holy poverty are detachment (do you cling to your stuff?) and availability (do you give from your treasure, or, like the rich people in last Sunday's Gospel, just donate what you have left over?).

For me St Teresa of Avila illustrates it well: she was materially poor, but on one occasion when she was a guest in someone else's home, she ate the rich meal they put in front of her with enjoyment and without regret. When someone rebuked her for it, she said, "There is a time for penance and a time for partridges." If she had pushed away the partridge that her hosts had given her, that would have been the extravagant act; she would have been showing off. Part of poverty means being at home and humble in the situation in which you find yourself, which includes being able to enjoy the present moment - it's not a sin to enjoy good things. Holy poverty is not the same as destitution. However, we often use this reasoning as an excuse to be self-indulgent. "I'm not called to be St Francis, and it's OK to have nice things, so I'll buy this and this." This is like the way we sometimes excuse our sins with "Nobody's perfect." Not everyone is called to be St Francis, true, but we're all called to imitate Christ and each of us is challenged to find our own way of imitating him in his poverty. Often that will be difficult and demanding. If our Christian lives are too comfy, it's probably a sign that we're doing it wrong - it's not possible to follow Jesus without leaving some things behind.

I will give an example from my personal life: a while back I received a prize for research, quite a substantial cash prize, worth over a quarter of my yearly studentship. I decided to save it for after my PhD. Occasionally I would daydream about what I would do with the money. I had sensible plans for most of it, but I thought it would stretch to a short holiday as well, somewhere I'd never been. I was looking forward to it, and there is nothing wrong with that. But then a friend got into trouble. His elderly mum had been diagnosed with cancer. They have no other relatives in the country where they live and she needed him to help her. He's self-employed and if he doesn't work he can't pay his rent and bills. He was impulsive in the past and is in a lot of debt, so he had no savings to cover time away from work. It was very clear to me what I had to do. A person who was really objectively poor would have had no means to help them. I had that sum sitting in the bank, so I couldn't be considered poor in the material sense - for me the choice to embrace poverty was in sacrificing my own plans and wants in order to look after someone whose need was greater. Poverty also means recognising that what you own is not your own; it is a loan from God. You are the custodian. How are you using what he has entrusted you with? After the initial pang of disappointment, I started to feel that I was only passing on to my friend and his mother what was rightfully theirs - the right to have time together without worry when she was very sick. I don't think of that as my prize or my money any more. It's hard to keep this attitude. You have to work at it constantly. But I think this is the hallmark of holy poverty, as opposed to making sure you only spend X amount each month and you don't live in anything bigger than a shed.

[NadaTeTurbe]

Thank you for asking these questions, Gabriela. The answers are very interesting. 

Two little reflexions : 

There's a religious community in my city. There's a lot of problems with it, but what bother me is that they seems to be very rich (the "shepherd" of the community always have very nice phone, the laypeople members of the community are whealthy, etc...) but still, they get their food from a food bank and receive the CMU - a sum of monney from the governement, who is normally for very poor people. It really bother me, specially the food bank. They have explained to me that it is because of poverty. Still, I feel like they are taking from the real poors - people who really need a food bank to eat. 

Secondly, I've seen in my city a lot of things done to make organic food accessible to poorest. It's really a positive evolution. 

[Gabriela]

If you can afford to buy your own food, it is not an act of poverty to go to a food bank and take resources that someone else really needs. That's just posturing. I think Gabriela was talking about poverty in the spiritual sense, as an evangelical counsel, and not what it objectively means to live below the poverty line.

Exactly. Let me just clarify: I don't judge anyone who shops at WalMart because they can't afford to shop elsewhere. Objective, material poverty is a completely different thing from what I'm talking about. As beatitude points out, I'm talking about spiritual poverty.

Essentially, what I'm asking is: Is it more important to embrace spiritual poverty (and so sacrifice things we consider necessities, but which are really luxuries) or to embrace "social justice" (or solidarity, as Era Might puts it better). Because they seem to be in conflict these days.

I agree, @NadaTeTurbe, that the answers have been very interesting so far. Thank you all for contributing!

[Peace]

I recommend Jim Forest's The Ladder of the Beatitudes for a very good and thorough discussion of poverty in the lives of Christians. His basic criteria for holy poverty are detachment (do you cling to your stuff?) and availability (do you give from your treasure, or, like the rich people in last Sunday's Gospel, just donate what you have left over?).

For me St Teresa of Avila illustrates it well: she was materially poor, but on one occasion when she was a guest in someone else's home, she ate the rich meal they put in front of her with enjoyment and without regret. When someone rebuked her for it, she said, "There is a time for penance and a time for partridges." If she had pushed away the partridge that her hosts had given her, that would have been the extravagant act; she would have been showing off. Part of poverty means being at home and humble in the situation in which you find yourself, which includes being able to enjoy the present moment - it's not a sin to enjoy good things. Holy poverty is not the same as destitution. However, we often use this reasoning as an excuse to be self-indulgent. "I'm not called to be St Francis, and it's OK to have nice things, so I'll buy this and this." This is like the way we sometimes excuse our sins with "Nobody's perfect." Not everyone is called to be St Francis, true, but we're all called to imitate Christ and each of us is challenged to find our own way of imitating him in his poverty. Often that will be difficult and demanding. If our Christian lives are too comfy, it's probably a sign that we're doing it wrong - it's not possible to follow Jesus without leaving some things behind.

I will give an example from my personal life: a while back I received a prize for research, quite a substantial cash prize, worth over a quarter of my yearly studentship. I decided to save it for after my PhD. Occasionally I would daydream about what I would do with the money. I had sensible plans for most of it, but I thought it would stretch to a short holiday as well, somewhere I'd never been. I was looking forward to it, and there is nothing wrong with that. But then a friend got into trouble. His elderly mum had been diagnosed with cancer. They have no other relatives in the country where they live and she needed him to help her. He's self-employed and if he doesn't work he can't pay his rent and bills. He was impulsive in the past and is in a lot of debt, so he had no savings to cover time away from work. It was very clear to me what I had to do. A person who was really objectively poor would have had no means to help them. I had that sum sitting in the bank, so I couldn't be considered poor in the material sense - for me the choice to embrace poverty was in sacrificing my own plans and wants in order to look after someone whose need was greater. Poverty also means recognising that what you own is not your own; it is a loan from God. You are the custodian. How are you using what he has entrusted you with? After the initial pang of disappointment, I started to feel that I was only passing on to my friend and his mother what was rightfully theirs - the right to have time together without worry when she was very sick. I don't think of that as my prize or my money any more. It's hard to keep this attitude. You have to work at it constantly. But I think this is the hallmark of holy poverty, as opposed to making sure you only spend X amount each month and you don't live in anything bigger than a shed.

Thank you. This was helpful.

[Era Might]

Are all Christians called to be (materially) poor? I am not exactly the Wolf of Wall Street, but I have a nice place. I have a nice car. I buy nice things. I have fun and go on nice vacations with the money that I make. Is that wrong? I also donate an amount to church and some charities that I am comfortable with, and I think I have been generous as far as helping my family out too. But I can't say I have ever really felt a calling to be materially poor.

I would change the question around, not whether it's wrong, but whether it's boring. I'd be curious to know what "nice place" means to you. The writer Walker Percy referred to the city he chose to live in, in Louisiana, as a "pleasant nonplace," a suburb where he was not quite misplaced but also not hopelessly placed, a nonplace where he could tread water in life. That idea of "place" was something he wrote about, how in American culture we easily become anyone anywhere and no one nowhere. Vacations are a strange thing too, we vacate ourselves for a week or so in order to have an experience planned for us by others, kind of like going to the movies, seeing life acted out by others validates our existence.

So, that's a long way of suggesting that your question is not really a spiritual or moral question...you're more or less asking whether your culture, your being-in-the world, is worthwhile, whether to give it up would be a real loss to your existence or just a sacrifice for those who do not share in your economic and social reality. IOW, do your things and your car and your vacations say anything about you? If an archaeologist were digging around the ruins of your life in 10,000 years, would they learn anything from the fact that you owned a make and model of a car that millions of other people owned, or that you had a brief trip to the pyramids of Egypt and took a selfie in front of the Golden Gate Bridge? Does that reveal anything about YOU? idk...

[tinytherese]

Are all Christians called to be (materially) poor? I am not exactly the Wolf of Wall Street, but I have a nice place. I have a nice car. I buy nice things. I have fun and go on nice vacations with the money that I make. Is that wrong? I also donate an amount to church and some charities that I am comfortable with, and I think I have been generous as far as helping my family out too. But I can't say I have ever really felt a calling to be materially poor.

http://jimmyakin.com/2012/08/what-is-the-best-way-to-help-the-poor.html