Compassion, Neoliberal Style

By all accounts, homelessness in California is a humanitarian crisis as well as a shameful example of deliberate political inaction. Deaths of those living on the streets are occurring at the rate of three a day and expected to increase even more next year as the result of the paralysis of the political class, beholden as they are to the needs of their ultra-wealthy donors and "not in my back yard" (Nimby) constituents.

The New York Times is on the case - but not by espousing the need for more public housing and affordable rents. Instead, the Paper of Record is running a concern-trolling piece about "compassion fatigue."  It seems that both ordinary Californians and burnt-out social workers are suffering an epidemic of "secondary trauma" just by having to  deal with and look at homeless people.

It all started with a letter from a Chicago reader named Ayanna, who asked the Times:

What detaches a person so far from human suffering/poverty/homelessness that they see people who are stricken with one or all three as a public nuisance?We can’t depend on the altruism of the wealthy to help solve the housing crisis. Housing policies must be equitable, inclusive and be pushed forth with the belief that shelter is a human right.”

But rather than contact local, state and federal officials to press them on why the housing crisis has gotten so out of hand, the Times asked a homelessness researcher from the University of Southern California about why ordinary people aren't more compassionate toward the homeless.

Well, according to Professor Benjamin Henwood, people are just sick and tired of witnessing misery. So if you, too, feel disgusted at the sight of homeless people, you need to be easier on yourself. You can help the homeless and develop empathy simply by taking a little time every day to think about them and try not stigmatize them so much. At the same time you should indulge in a little self-care and learn not to beat yourself up for having such callous feelings about people you see living on the streets.

As Henwood said:

While there’s not a lot of research on how best to address it, there are plenty of best practices that in different ways emphasize being kind to yourself. Of course, there may also be collective compassion fatigue, which can occur when the public is invested in trying to help address homelessness but don’t see the problem getting better.

"Best practices" in the neoliberal buzzword that obfuscates how policies and programs ostensibly designed to help the poor usually end up benefiting the rich investors in privatized programs that used to be under the sole purview of public agencies. Poverty is not a crisis, it is a business.  For example, it might be "best practices" for the wealthy donor class to suggest that slightly more privileged California residents put up homeless people in their backyards for a spell to qualify for a temporary property tax break or small stipend. It would not, however, be "best practiccs" to tax the wealthy in order to build a million subsidized housing units to permanently shelter the chronically unhoused.

So if the problem of homelessness rears its ugly head and offends the eyes of a country full of eyewitnesses, another "best practice" is to ever so subtly put the onus on the homeless people themselves. The Times interview with Henwood continues:

Q -We are often quick to reach into our pockets when disaster hits, like after an earthquake or wildfire, but do you think people are more reluctant to pitch in when it comes to helping the homeless?

 A- Homelessness is instead attributed to poor decision making or the fault of the person experiencing homelessness who we conclude are somehow to blame and not deserving of help or relief.

Notice the use of the passive voice. Henwood doesn't say who, exactly, blames the poor for their own plights. But he does passive-aggressively put the discredited message out there. The planting of a tainted theory with the caveat that it's tainted is still a plant.  Could it be that he doesn't want to bite the hands that fund his research at wealth-soaked USC? If he went so far as to clamor for  a wealth tax to build housing for the homeless, it might damage his research funding as much as it might damage the career trajectory of the Times reporter who limits her own inquiries to middle class attitudes about the homeless as a way to avoid directly addressing this humanitarian catastrophe. As I previously wrote in a piece about godzillionaire Bill Gates's method of helping the poor, our ruling class would rather spend their money studying problems than see any little smidgen of their excess cash going into the pockets of the poor. Therefore, the powerful are very fond of glibly ascribing the poverty caused by private equity and obscene wealth inequality to the drug addiction and mental illness of their targets. 

In other words, it's a way of stereotyping homeless people. Even well-meaning researchers send the message that a person is living on the streets for no other reason than addiction or mental illness. They never address the distinct  possibility that the drugs and the mental problems are the direct results of evictions and job losses caused by the financial meltdown of 2008, with fully 94 percent of all the recovered wealth going directly to the top one percent. They never talk about taxing the rich.

Another common liberal trope is to paint the slightly better off, but still- struggling general public as ignorant bigots, further relieving politicians and their deep pocketed donors of any and all culpability. It's the same trope that allows them to blast Donald Trump for the cruel rhetoric that accompanies his cruel policies as they themselves utter all the right liberal platitudes while doing absolutely nothing to rectify dire situations.

 Another word for this "best practice" is virtue-signaling.

It's the tired old ploy that just allowed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other centrist Democrats to wring their hands over Trump's food stamp cuts - without introducing any legislation to help the up to a million poor people now facing the loss of meals and home heating assistance.

The Times article about compassion fatigue syndrome hopelessly and cynically concludes with this smarmy little bit of stigma-fighting as a substitute for what the rest of the world is doing - striking, marching, rioting - to fight the cruelties of neoliberal capitalism.

What can we do to combat the stigma?

We haven’t studied and don’t know a lot about fighting stigma related to homelessness. In other fields we’ve looked at stigma related to, for example, serious mental illness and found that there are several approaches including disseminating information (e.g. people with serious mental illness are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crimes) and exposing the public to people who have disclosed having a mental illness.

These can be targeted anti-stigma campaigns or part of a much larger media campaign. More recently, there have been media campaigns that appear to be addressing stigma related to homelessness, but it isn’t clear whether the message “anyone can become homeless” impacts stigma since while this may be true, we also know that certain groups, including African-Americans, are more likely to become homeless in the United States.