Respect in a World of Inequality by Richard Sennett

Author:Richard Sennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2003-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them…. When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret….20

But Arendt is not making a crude argument like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, that “benevolence is the twin of pride.” What she wants to challenge is the Christian desire to transform oneself through giving.

In the desert of the world as the Christian feels it—so sterile, so empty—compassion fills up an absence in the self. Becoming a good person is in this sense reflexive and self-involved; without compassion, we are nothing, vacuous. Augustine himself says, “I have become a question to myself.”21 Developing one’s capacity to give helps answer the question of what’s potentially inside. Of course, in our sinful state, giving combats greed, but in the Sermon on the Mount, and throughout Matthew’s Gospel, the act of giving appears as something more, the act which makes it possible to explore becoming a different sort of person. Measuring how much one’s gift is worth to others is both venal and beside the point.

The practical direction in which Arendt is heading is clear: no modern welfare state should operate on Christian principles of this sort. The purpose of welfare is to do the recipient good; the feelings of the caregiver should be irrelevant. It’s one reason why Arendt, when I came to know her as an elderly philosopher, spoke so acidly about her former profession; she thought social workers were a tribe bent on self-therapy, and they couldn’t answer the question “Why are you helping me?” without giving that self-involvement away. The best kind of social welfare, she imagined, would be an accounting transaction involving no subjective relations.

Whether an accurate account or not, Arendt’s reaction to St. Augustine should make us pause to define a basic principle for any secular welfare state: caregiving without compassion. What could this mean?

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