BENEVOLENCE

Abstract

. . .Although it is normal for parents to love their children, it is not normal for society to love the socially helpless. Who loves the aged, the mentally ill, or the troubled children of the poor? Who loves welfare recipients or the residents of public housing? Abstractly, perhaps, society adopts a superficially charitable attitude toward these groups. But if one looks at what society does, and not at what it says, there is little love reflected. The record of public charity is an unloving record of punishment, degradation, humiliation, intrusion, and incarceration. If parents treated their children the way society treats the helpless, they would be cited for neglect and child abuse. The power of "lovability," which normally saves the child from disaster, has no precise social analogue. The varieties of social dependence, described in Dickens' novels and intrinsic to the modern American welfare state, have therefore resulted in profound violations of individual liberty. These violations were not explicitly anticipated by those who wrote our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Dependence upon the institutions of caring establishes-for millions of people-a condition of fragility against encroachments of power, and benevolence is the mask that hides it. It is not that benevolence is itself mischievous or cynically to he regarded with mistrust. It is not benevolence we should abandon, but rather the naive faith that benevolence can mitigate the mischievousness of power so feared by those who wrote our Bill of Rights. We have traditionally been seduced into supposing that because they represented charity, service professionals could speak for the best interests of their clients.