BEHIND ST. PAUL'S 'AFFECTIONAL PREFERENCE' VOTE

...In fact, Laud petitioned against hanging, drawing, and quartering...

...and the same reappraisers are viewing with a cold eye the way the penal system has developed under the persuasions of the same ideas as those that have influenced the policies of welfare...

...Much of this is an old story...

...I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest...

...There is, however, one matter about which I think they might have had Something to say...

...Michael's College, University of Toronto and the author of Images of Authority, The Night Battle, and, most recently, On the Idea of a University...

...I cannot commend it...

...It isn't surprising that undergraduates should feel themselves members of an external proletariat, and take appropriate action, if the members of the faculty themselves take their position to be that of employees of a large corporation...

...I began to read The Punishment Response* in the expectation that Professor Newman's book would provide at least a useful historical account of the successive and sometimes competing theories and practices of punishment...

...are so large in their scope that it is never quite certain just what in a given situation is recommended or rejected...

...It is badly written (we have "mitigates against" and other solecisms), most of the social anthropology cited is of the armchair kind, Frazer, Durkheim, and others, strange works with such titles as Curious Punishments and Bygone Punishments are cited as though they were scientific authorities, and the standard of historical scholarship is poor...

...The continuity from the invention of double-entry bookkeeping to electronic devices for the storage and retrieval of information is clear...

...comes the strong belief that where a part of the body is sick or corrupt there must be medicaments and surgical procedures appropriate to the condition in question...

...Nevertheless, the dilemma of the welfare official is a real one...

...Everywhere the accident of skin pigmentation makes the young more defenseless, the poor more fixed in their condition, the sick and the old more cut off from a reasonable share in social life...

...i story...

...It seems to follow from this that in the same way poverty and desert are linked...

...the ready availability of contraceptives, with abortion as a backup service and sterilization as an option, has injured the family and encouraged the growth, with catastrophic consequences for children, of a new model of marriage, namely, serial monogamy, the contract being easily terminable at the will of either party...

...Some may find it disturbing to recall that most educated people used to believe that, except for such activities as the raising of armies, the carrying of private correspondence, and the supervision of traffic by sea, public intervention in social and economic matters was mischievous...

...Gaylin's treatment's of the family may strike the reader as too sunny, too one-sided...

...All our literature, from the Greeks down to the social encyclicals of Leo XIII, urges upon us the propriety of this analogy...

...This is brought out by Steven Marcus's poignant account, in Doing Good, of the transition in England from the old system of poor relief to the Poor Law established by the Act of 1834, and of the great famine of the 1840s in Ireland...

...The sense we may have of deepening chaos comes from our feeling that suffering and disorder are more wanton, less excusable, than they once were, for we surely have within our power the means of remedying them...

...Stern sharp punishments swiftly imposed upon those who wantonly harm property and persons would have produced a safer and happier community than the one in which we now live...

...Has the time now come when we find ourselves driven to the point of decriminalizing all the drugs of addiction now legally proscribed—but widely consumed, at the center of a very large amount of violence and robbery, commodities of an infamous trade whose principal agents are rarely caught and punished—has the time now come when we should simply make these drugs available to adults over the counter...

...Certainly, at the level of the university, the fashion of litigating over matters of discipline, examination marks, and so on, is a sign of the breaking down of the university as a self-governing institution of which the undergraduate body is a part...

...This generalization is applied by David Rothman and his fellow contributors to the drift of American social policy since the New Deal, or even earlier...

...Nassau Senior, Marcus reminds us, feared "that the famine . . . would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good...

...171, $8.95...

...Some of the middle-class rancor aaginst poor and incompetent people comes from that feeling, very deep in all Protestant communities (of course, Catholics may often be infected by it), that worldly prosperity is the sign of divine approval, poverty a punishment for sin...

...male and female homosexuals have some out of their closets and joined the coalition of the rebellious...

...He is the custodian of the public purse and is accountable for what is taken from it...

...I >etween ten that youth for there is but getting ing the an...

...These are overlapping categories...

...There was a time when reputable publishers had learned readers a part of whose task it was to check for obvious mistakes...

...Among the dependent we find the un*Willard Gaylin, Ira Glasser, Steven Marcus, and David Rothman, Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence, New York: Pantheon Books, pp...

...It is certain that much goes on that is a disgrace to a civilized community...

...Those who read much contemporary writing will have noticed that many publishers evidently don't employ such readers, either because it is too expensive or perhaps (terrible thought) because such readers can't be had...

...but such platitudes...

...Lew is par excellence a family drama...

...The force of his case seems to vary a bit fom one social service to another...

...To the philanthropic impulse is joined a suspicion of those to whom good is being done...

...Respectful and grateful poor people are all very well...

...We are moved by this analogy because deep in our tradition is the thought that crime is a social disease, a sign of the pathology of the political body, that the sufferings of the poor are the sufferings of the social organism to which we belong...

...This is why the commendable attitude of the recipients of these services is a suspicious vigilance...

...What is new about our own day seems to be this...

...Willard Gaylin shows us that dependency is a constant feature of human life from the womb to the bed of death...

...This has, he argues, been overlooked in the era of welfare...

...for there is nothing' in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting...

...Paternalism is not in our time the name of a Vktue...

...Pope Innocent IV, we are told, "gave the Inquisitors and their families the power to absolve each other" —this must surely be a missing episode of The Ingoldsby Legends, with illustrations by Cruickshank...

...Caring—that is, the protective, parental, tender aspects of loving —is a part of relationship among peers, child to parent, friend to friend, lover to lover, person to animal...

...Glasser takes as his moral guide, foolishly neglected in the modern period, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, understood as founded upon the assumption that the primary concern of the wise drafter of laws and of the individual citizen in a free society is to limit the insatiable appetite for power of elected and appointed persons...

...The second novelty is that we not only live in a period which has consciously rejected, as we suppose for good reasons, the theory and practice of laissez faire, but we also live in a time when, through technological change, the public authorities have powers of a kind never known before...

...Such a policy change ought to commend itself to conservatives...

...The linkages between being cared for and caring for others are crucial to remember...

...women's liberation has desacralized the hearth and corrupted the language...

...Such a reversal of policy would be a return to the laissez-faire practice of the nineteenth century, when a number of well-known characters, real and fictional, purchased their supplies of laudanum and cocaine from the corner pharmacy...

...Swiftness of communications, the capacity to store information, ingenuity in designing bureaucratic styles of work and large institutions that swiftly acquire strong interests in their own aggrandizement, the use of drugs and electric shock therapy to make the intractable and disturbed docile, these are new, some of them strange consequences of what Max Weber thought of as the application of rationality to the life of society...

...The drug scene is so pervasive in American social life that public policy in relation to the trade in and the consumption of a great many drugs now illegal is a matter of high importance...

...The parent-child aspect of caring is only the essential paradigm whose presence is necessary for the diffusion of this human quality into the other relational aspects of life...

...On the other hand, it isn't clear to me that it is wise, except in cases of extreme abuse, to treat questions of discipline in school and university as matters where confrontation in the courts is an appropriate procedure...

...In Dickens's phrase, noted by Marcus, "we have made a pursuing Fury of the Good Samaritan...

...The decline of authority in state, school, and family is evident...

...and with the reception of the analogy j. M. Cameron is University Professor at St...

...They are concerned with the actual as distinct from the formal relations between the welfare agencies and all those who are dependent upon the public authorities, these latter conceived as standing in loco parent is...

...None of the readers of Conan Doyle thought Sherlock Holmes a degenerate, a corrupter of youth...

...and it is through adversarial postures that he thinks we may humanize our society and in7 My 1978: 440 crease liberty for the unfortunate...

...bacterial pneumonia is no longer a killer...

...s of public alarmingly in our soiny of those ; the ready tives, with service and has injured the growth, uences for >f marriage, the contract the will of nale homoheir closets f the rebelas desacralrupted the one should iged greatly irs...

...Free enterprise and the lightest possible public intervention in social policy would, they conjecture, have had better results than the intervention of massive state and federal bureaucracies in matters of health, welfare and crime...

...Some paradox in our nature leads us, once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion...

...On the whole, though the picture is less black-and-white than Marcus suggests, intervention to relieve the famine was miserably deficient, in part because the common English attitude to Irish matters was disfigured by hatred and contempt, in part because it was believed by the reigning social scientists that public intervention would do harm...

...There is also the possibility that the social body, like the individual human body, has its own defenses and its own unconscious strategy for meeting attacks...

...He argues that simply by calling pensions, welfare distribution, education, health care and so on, social services we disguise from ourselves the fact that they are as much a part of the machinery of the state as the' police and the FBI, the armed forces and the legislatures...

...My dear, they really prefer to be with their own people...

...David Rothman in his contribution to Doing Good* sends us back to an essay by the late Lionel Trilling on "Manners, Morals and the Novel," an essay comparable in its penetration and sureness of judgment to his better-known piece on the Kinsey Report...

...Very often this is the repeated contention of Doing Good—such achievements, formally directed to tempering the distresses of society, become organizations of social power directed against the poor and despised of our society...

...To this I am tempted to add, as an instance of an unforeseen consequence of a social policy that seemed and still on the whole seems sound, the rise of all the varieties of "Black Consciousness" movements, sad mirror images of the prejudices of white suburbia...

...and (perhaps one should add) the weather has changed greatly for the worse in recent years...

...and in matters such as these there are neither simple answers nor simple solutions...

...Intervention by the public motivated in part by the social evils, an intervention certainly motivated in part by the received analogy between the human and political bodies, is an old practice, as we see from the history of sumptuary laws, laws against restraint of trade, laws to regulate wages and prices, to stop enclosures, to license or to put down brothels, to regulate the movement of population...

...Such were the 7 July 1978: 438 ve had betrvention of tl bureauc1th, welfare punishments e who wanid persons er and hapne in which of authority i is evident...

...What (of course, among many things) distinguishes our own day from these earlier periods is the strong feeling among reformers that the public authorities dispose of resources that could put an end to many of the gross evils of social life...

...men are poor, or without work, through their own fault...

...First, the organization of the modern welfare State represents an intellectual counter-movement to an earlier orthodoxy...

...and we can degrade them by not caring for them...

...A reconsideration of social policy is bound to raise questions about the penal system...

...What, though, of the sturdy rogues, the frightening armies of the undeserving poor...

...323, $5.95...

...We have of course always noted the big platitudes: Acton on power, "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return" (Auden in this case but the sentiment is that of all the wise), "Covenants without the sword are but words," "The best form of defense is attack," and so on...

...and even the great pox and the clap, though their incidence is perhaps more diffused than it was thirty or forty years ago, are tamed if not destroyed...

...Gaylin argues that society is irremediably familial and that it is through our recognition of this that we can come to wise social policies, the other contributors to Doing Good seem to think that the model of the State as family may turn out to be mischievous...

...the petition was granted and he was beheaded...

...The reference is to Lea, a perfectly good authority, but Newman has misread him...

...The most hilarious piece of misinformation is: "during the reign of Henry II Usury was forbidden to Protestants, so the Jews did a roaring business...

...and the poet who put this complaint into the shepherd's mouth also linked disorder in the state and family with chaos in the heavens...

...It is as we learn, or fail to learn, in this primal situation how to care for others that the full sense of the dependency of each upon all and all upon gach is grasped, not of course intellectually, or not necessarily so, but in feeling and behavior...

...My guess is that much violence, much organized crime, much police corruption, would vanish with the decriminalizing of drugs and their consumption...

...In what is certainly the most controversial piece of writing in the book, Ira Glasser's "Prisoners of Benevolence," it is argued that it is Safer for those who are the objects of public benevolence to treat whatever authorities they encounter as adversaries who will screw them if they are given the opportunity...

...But here the nature of the university has been forgotten...

...Trilling's point is that in the field of social policy good intentions, especially those sustained by moral passion, ought to be scrutinized with some suspicion and that among the effects of any intervention in the processes of society will be many, and these perhaps the most important, that were not and could not have been foreseen...

...In all the opulent societies today there are attempts at a reappraisal (of course, not "agonizing"—this would be to fool ourselves with melodrama) of social policies designed to help dependent persons and groups...

...consent to minimum rules of public order is withdrawn by alarmingly large numbers of people in our society, most obviously by many of those between, say, 14 and 25...

...If this is right, the consequences for the penal system and the machinery of the social services would indeed be great...

...It is a mark of many Protestant sects in the United States, and of the evangelical temper generally, that godliness and profit are believed to go together...

...my experience, however, teaches me that while conservatives may be in favor of free trade in handguns and rifles, they blench at the thought of free trade in hashish or cocaine...

...It is after all within the theater of the family that we first try out the roles of Macbeth and Othello and Hamlet...

...Our fundamental problem is well put by Steven Marcus: "we can degrade people by caring for them...

...and that the petition was de* Graeme Newman, The Punishment Response, Lippincott, pp...

...cared-for young, the very poor, the irredeemably feckless, the indigent sick, the mad, the old...

...Dr...

...It seems evident that the policy of giving young criminals indeterminate sentences, to be lifted or continued as social workers may decide, also presupposes a benevolent authority acting as an enlightened parent...

...This is how the evils that attended Prohibtion were met...

...To check these we give the bureaucracies that administer public funds quasi-police powers to catch the cheaters—sudden intrusions upon the suspect household, midnight visits to see if a single mother on welfare has a man in her bed, all the acts of surveillance that snatch away from those whose judgments of themselves are in any case not good the last rags of dignity...

...and there is one, as it were, supercategory, that of the black...

...It is plainly very strong in the case of the aged in nursing homes...

...such, too, were on the whole the comments of the author of Piers Plowman in the fourteenth century...

...We are moved by the analogy of the successful cure of bodily ailments: smallpox has vanished, scarlet fever, diphtheria (many young physicians have never seen a case of these diseases...

...The authors of Doing Good are rightly concerned—this is the point of the coming together of a psychoanalyst, a lawyer, a scholar learned in imaginative literature and a historian—with principles rather than practice, or with practice only as illustration...

...and iplaint into linked disamily with h were the responses, more stoical in temper and more salted with irony than moral comment in our own day, of an observer at the end of the bloody years of reformation and counter-reformation in England (I don't mean that these are necessarily Shakespeare's own judgments, but that he utters what would have been taken as commonplace by the common man...

...and the remarks of Thucydides and Plato on the Athens of the Peloponnesian War and the years that followed k belonged to the same family of observations...

...there is always, then, a question whether cutting or a drug is needed or, instead, whatever the equivalent of a good rest in bed may be...

...nied...

...Newman tells us: "By 1890 dead babies were still a common sight in the streets and dunghills of London...

...No doubt there is some malicious joy among conservatives who have always been wary of the principles of operation of the welfare state...

...Quite different are those memorable but easily repressed remarks that go against what seem the plain imperatives of the hour...

...We may hope to come through such frightful suffering to the lucid joys, music, the dance, the everlasting spring and never-withering flowers, and the resurrection from the dead, that await us at the end of The Winter's Tale, but not easily and certainly not completely on the planet Earth...

...and while Dr...

...The close relations of early childhood (or, in cases of horrible neglect, their absence), relations above all between mother and child, relations of touching, fondling, speaking and singing, are decisive for the temper of human life in adolescence and adulthood...

...Perhaps they are ripping off the system, doing well at the expense of the sober and hard-working, eating junk food and drinking pop in front of color teleCommonweal: 439 vision sets while others scrimp to keep the ten-year old Chewy rolling and fix their children's teeth...

...He tells us that Laud petitioned to be beheaded rather than hanged...