> I believe it's a matter of perspective. It depends a lot on the relative
> emphasis one gives to the personal versus the social, or the individual
> versus the collective. Caring for other people or animals in distress is, I
> believe, a very personal thing. If you intrude the social or collective
> into it, it becomes "depersonalized". If the collective then funds it, it
> becomes even more so. Rules get written around what you can do, who should
> be involved, and how much of it is allowable.
>
But if you are not able to do these personal things, but you would
like them to be performed, than you should be able to rely on some
agency you created with others and you control. Depending on church
and charity - random luck - for the funding of this is not practical.
The problem in Russia is not that people "forgot how to care",
but that they haven't got the means to care. Same as in the UK,
if mental patiens are "released to the community" without the funding
of future specialist care for them, a new layer of the destitute is
created.
Social organisations shouldn't "impose" their rules, their working
should be determined by the direct users. This way they are not the
dark forces alienated from the people that you are describing.
I was nor aware of the generous social provisions in Brazil even in
principle. How is the specialist healthcare, education etc. is funded
for those church groups? Do they cover all the people that need help?
My information is somewhat different.
Eva
> Look at it this way: what is important is how people behave toward one
> another because they want to, not because the market or the government or
> the church, or whoever, has laid down rules and proscriptions. Because
> there are many things that we have to transact at arms length, we must have
> a market, an economy, and a public sector. But these things should not be
> needed for transactions that are directly interpersonal and done out of
> compassion - like caring for a sick relative or a new born child. I see the
> market or the government as something that is superimposed onto our lives,
> something that is necessary but which should not dominate us. I don't see
> it as something into which we should subsume our ability to be compassionate.
>
> When I was in Russia a couple of years ago, I saw a society in disarray.
> The state had lifted the burden of caring for sick relatives from people for
> seventy years. But the state had collapsed and the burden had been put back
> onto a people who no longer knew how to carry it.
>
> When I was in Brazil last November, I encountered a rather different
> situation, one in which the state had everything on the books - free medical
> care, welfare, free education - but was unable to deliver any of these
> things effectively. No one bothered to try to access most of the services
> that were supposed to exist simply because they weren't there in practice.
> Because they never had been able rely on the state, the people of the slums
> had created their own local support networks, often centered around a church.
>
> I would not want the state to value the time and energy that I have put into
> raising my children and to put it into some form of revised national
> accounts. As long as I have not abused my children, what I have done with
> them and for them is my business, not the state's. On the other hand, I do
> want the state to value the time I have spent in my arm's length
> contributions to the social collective via the market because that is
> important to the shared welfare of the collective.
>
> Ed Weick
>
>
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