If we are fortunate in our circumstances, Anti-Poverty Week invites us to look beyond, at another less advantaged world. It also invites us to reflect on our own attitudes. In writing on poverty there is often tension between a hard-edged realism and spiritual or romantic fascination. The tension suggests that neither attitude is sufficient.
The fascination is fostered by many religious traditions in which the poor are blessed, and by a string of writers who have discovered a paradoxical value in poverty. Dostoevsky, Gorky, Steinbeck, Orwell and McCourt come to mind. If we are fascinated by poverty we may be tempted to soften its edges, to see it as ennobling and not as an indictment of the society that tolerates it. We become unrealistic.
When we look realistically at poverty we see the hunger, insecurity, deprivation of what society takes to be the normal things of life, humiliation and destructive ways of escaping that constitute the reality of poverty.
We also see the effects that these conditions can have on people: the stress they place on relationships, the disruption of education, the isolation, despair, addiction, physical and mental ill health, abusive relationships, exposure to violence and to the criminal justice system, and the lack of connection with society, which are often associated with poverty.
This analytical focus on poverty and its effects has its own temptation. It may lead us to see the poor as objects. Their human reality is defined by their experience of poverty. Whether they are the objects of our scorn or of our pity, they are still objects.
This objectification can be seen in the treatment of people caught in or fallen into poverty in the media. Almost invariably they are pictured with glum, sad faces, usually turned away from the camera. They are The Poor whose condition needs to be changed for them. They can then become the object of planning and condign intervention.
The proper starting point for reflecting on poverty must be the lives of people who are poor. Like other human beings, people who live in poverty are defined by their relationships with family, friends, to home, to food and shelter, neighbourhood, to school, to work, to play and to society. Their poverty limits their opportunity to build these relationships.
When we begin with people who are poor, we see them as defined, not by their poverty but by their humanity. We see them as people who will often