The ethnographies of Oscar Lewis paint a bleak picture of lower-class life. The thousands of pages of published interviews in books like Five Families, The Children of Sanchez, Four Men, and La Vida show a relentless trainwreck of impulsive sex, unplanned pregnancy, child neglect, child abuse, drug addiction, drunkenness, degenerate gambling, intra-family violence, near-random violence, parasitism, and gross financial mismanagement. The picture is so bleak that I struggle to believe Lewis’ subjects are representative of any human subculture. But if his subjects are representative, it’s hard to imagine how a thoughtful person could look upon their “culture of poverty” with anything but horror.
Yet in the rare moments where Lewis stops letting his subjects speak for themselves, he is far from horrified. From the Introduction* to La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty – San Juan and New York:
Middle-class people — and this would certainly include most social scientists — tend to concentrate on the negative aspects of the culture of poverty. They tend to associate negative valences to such traits as present-time orientation and concrete versus abstract orientation. I do not intend to idealize or romanticize the culture of poverty. As someone has said, “It is easier to praise poverty than to live in it”; yet some of the positive aspects that may flow from these traits must not be overlooked. Living in the present may develop a capacity for spontaneity, for the enjoyment of the sensual, for the indulgence of impulse, which is often blunted in the middle-class, future-oriented man. Perhaps it is this reality of the moment that the existentialist writers are so desperately trying to recapture but that the culture of poverty experiences as natural, everyday phenomena. The frequent use of violence certainly provides a ready outlet for hostility so that people in the culture of poverty suffer less from repression than does the middle class.
Yes, Lewis even finds something positive to say about “the frequent use of violence.” Sure, the victim gets a savage beating, often leading in his narratives to permanent disability. But on the other hand, the perpetrator eases his “repression”! Frankly, if social scientists are going to “overlook” anything, this dubious “positive aspect” of violent crime should be near the top of the list.
Why would Lewis makes such bizarre claims? The only plausible explanation is the painful psychological tension between his scrupulous empiricism and his fervent Marxism.
A typical Marxist would have searched the world’s slums for heroes to interview, but Lewis had too much integrity for such trickery. An apolitical ethnographer would have followed Lewis’ methods, but drawn the obvious conclusions that (a) his subjects’ culture is plain evil, (b) since the subjects refuse many opportunities to exit this culture, they’re evil too. The most sympathetic thing you can reasonably say is, “I feel so sorry for the innocent children in these families.”
Intellectually, however, Lewis was stuck between a rock and a hard place. So he showed his readers the trainwreck in gory detail, then tried to convince us that trainwrecks have “positive aspects” that “must not be overlooked.” A crazy route, to be sure. But the day you admit that personal irresponsibility is the leading cause of adult poverty – and parental irresponsibility the leading cause of child poverty – you have left the church of Marxism.
* You can read the Introduction online; go here, then scroll down to Chapter 7.
READER COMMENTS
Seth
Feb 21 2019 at 3:18pm
I think the most sympathetic thing you can say is that many (if not most) of these troubled adults were _once_ “innocent children in these families.” Dysfunction is likely to be conveyed — through learning by example, neglect, and genetic inheritance — over centuries.
Fazal Majid
Feb 21 2019 at 5:22pm
The cult of the noble savage predates Marxism by at least a century. The main positive point of the culture of poverty is generosity, which has been confirmed by empirical studies.
Mark Z
Feb 21 2019 at 7:38pm
Do you mind if I ask what studies you’re referring to? I’m not asking out of disbelief, as it seems perfectly plausible that poverty would be correlated with a less miserly disposition. But it’s also the case that a billionaire could safely donate 90% of his wealth to charity without affecting his standard of living at all, which may explain why many do so. It makes me wonder if there’s a point of minimum generosity somewhere in between.
John Alcorn
Feb 21 2019 at 5:40pm
Shouldn’t ethnographers describe behavior and culture, in neutral language, and leave moral judgment to the reader? After all, an ethnographer’s specific expertise is empirical, not moral. True, it’s hard to disentangle description and moral judgment entirely, insofar as language about behavior and culture has moral overtones. Nonetheless, an ethnographer’s benchmark should be to enable readers to understand a culture.
Mark Z
Feb 21 2019 at 7:34pm
The radically subjectivist position might actually agree with Lewis, and regard the decision of how much to weight future consumption vs. present consumption as inevitably a tradeoff, and people who weight present-consumption much more – those in the culture of poverty – are simply making a tradeoff, with certain sacrifices and certain benefits.
The problem with Lewis, it seems, is that, when it comes to judging the merits of different cultures, he’s happy to be a subjectivist (I’m perhaps being charitable, he may just idolize the poor); but when it comes to judging the economic disparities perpetuated by differences in decision-making and making policy recommendations (redistribution), he’s a paternalist again. Consistency requires that we either accept that these people are making the wrong choices, and embrace paternalism, which may justify redistribution, but would also justify paternalistic coercion, e.g. legally drug use, alcohol, sexual promiscuity, etc. Alternatively, if one embraces subjectivism that tells us to ‘live and let live’ then one abandons the basis for redistribution: how can we justify redistributing from wealthy bourgeois people to ‘living in the moment’ poor people when we can’t definitively say the former are better off than the latter, but rather that each is merely making tradeoffs based on subjective preferences?
Jason
Feb 22 2019 at 11:09am
“…so that people in the culture of poverty suffer less from repression than does the middle class.”
You seem to have missed the comparative in this latter clause. Whether Lewis is attempting to gloss over his fervent Marxist proclivities in the face of ‘wanton personal and parental irresponsibility’ – the clichéd retort of the responsible class – sort of misses the point don’t you think?
To put it another way, the culture of poverty also harbors more honesty in its practice than most others; certainly more so than the middle class. Is this a positive? I don’t know, but the proclivity to conceal, suppress, obscure and deceive among the congregants of capitalism is anything but praiseworthy.
Mark Z
Feb 24 2019 at 8:17pm
“To put it another way, the culture of poverty also harbors more honesty in its practice than most others.”
Does it really? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s correct to equate repression (essentially, delayed gratification) with dishonesty or deception. I think the tendency to view the poor as somehow more honest and straightforward and the well-off as deceptive is a result of middle/upper class idolization of poverty. I don’t think anyone I’ve ever known that went from poor to middle class has shared this sanguine attitude of the culture of poverty relative to the middle class.
Jay
Feb 24 2019 at 6:05pm
since the subjects refuse many opportunities to exit this culture, they’re evil too.
I find this quite a bit harder to believe. In general, these aren’t talented people who can reasonably expect to succeed at school and move up in life. If you don’t have an IQ of at least 83, you can’t even join the military. That’s about 10% of the overall population, and almost half of the black population. When you’re talking about people who are too dumb for infantry*, there aren’t a lot of paths forward.
*Note: Infantry is tough, dangerous, and sometimes necessary. This does not change the fact that it’s also very simple (deliberately so).
Floccina
Feb 26 2019 at 9:58am
I am frequently surprised at how well people with IQ’s below 80 can take care of themselves. It’s more the aggressive and undisciplined that are problematic. Yes there are more aggressive and undisciplined among the low IQ but it is not the majority.
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