For a long time I have felt that the message of the gospels, as played out in contemporary culture, has been incomplete. Pastoral messages and public policy emanating from our Judeo-Christian traditions place value and virtue on helping the poor as commanded. Well and good.
Over centuries churches have been at the forefront of responding to human suffering, providing a healthy buffer between governments and the people. Churches uphold traditions of relieving suffering and helping the needy. Righteous helping the poor and suffering are duly recognized in awards and publicity for their efforts.
Such a good job has been done in Australia, that concern for needy suffering has been factored into social policy to become a right, an entitlement to be expected, even demanded, without too much thought for the taxpayer who must stump up in ever increasing taxes paid to cover ever increasing largesse for ever increasing demand and the ever increasing bureaucracy to administer it.
Demonstrable expression of virtue overreach is readily found in NDIS, Aboriginal, Aged Care, Net Zero, health services, where scams and fraud flourish, dissipating the worth of hard-earned contributions. Taxpayers are willing to contribute to fellow travelers experiencing hardship. Reluctance and resentment grow when help becomes a bottomless pit of neediness without end or gratitude.
Which is where my interpretation of gospel diverges a little from contemporary pastoral message, policy and practice. My understanding derives from the two crucial aspects of Jesus’ life: his suffering and death on the cross, followed by his resurrection. Suffering is well understood in responses to needy; resurrection theology and practice hardly feature.
Too little theology and emphasis is placed on the resurrection message, in which all are invited to rise above suffering, to use blessings endowed to affect transformation into a higher level of consciousness. To become responsible, resilient, perhaps even contributory.
In Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus is a core doctrine, celebrated at Easter, signifying for believers victory over sin and death.
Further, encouragement to undergo a decisive moral transformation in symbolic resurrection features in the Christian messages: brought from death to life (John 5:21–24); born again (John 3:1–15); and granted eternal life (John 3:16).
Renewal of creation involves a resurrected humanity characterized by the new covenant’s promised Spirit, so Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 15:45–49.
Whether one is a believer or not, wisdom of the message has relevance today.
Too much is never enough
Learnings from practical experience growing up in a large, chaotic family, raising children and forty years’ exposure to education, show the necessity of dealing in facts, however unpleasant, and posing reasonable expectations if one is to get on with life productively. Indulgence may satisfy immediate demands, yet merely kicks the can down the road, imposing responsibilities on others that ultimately become unsustainable. Reckoning, when it comes, invariably is much worse than having dealt with unpleasantness at origins.
Based on such understandings I developed the Maturity Model for confident decision making, which appears in my book, Becoming: the ordinary person’s roadmap to life’s big decisions. The model balances choice, responsibility and expectations in healthy tension, relying on facts.
Policies and programs funded to help alleviate suffering gain approval when dealing with explicit need. Art of bureaucracy is never to solve the problem: solving would end the ride, the funding and the jobs. Recipients are readily complicit: keeping the gravy train unaudited and expanding fosters indolence.
How else could Alice Springs town camps show no improvement fifty years after Germaine Greer protested their dissolute existence and following investment of $billions? Or the starving, dysfunctional in Africa of my childhood be no better off today, 60 years on? Similarly, NDIS expands at a rate greater than population growth and inflation, now costing more than Defence of the nation. Recruitment for NDIS flourishes while Defence struggles attracting willing contenders .
Problems arise when doing good indulges stupidity and greed; we just get more of it. Like spoilt children, the more given, the greater the demands (of others). Which leads to my concept of more emphasis needing to be placed on resurrection theology to balance dominant messages attending suffering. Resurrection would imply an expectation that, with the benefit of help, recipients would “pick up their bed and walk” in so far as they are able, which is a concept vastly different from indulgence of merely helping the needy. Those working to resurrect humanity by challenging expectations should be seen every bit as virtuous as helpers: in their ability to demonstrate consideration for contributors as well as recipient needy.
Finding a balance
Wisdom of discernment is essential to knowing the difference between offering service/charity with meaningful benefit for the recipient, and self-righteous indulgence in conspicuous compassion. Best would be to offer immediate relief, together with options for future solutions that present the recipient with expectations to claim agency over their own life and choices.
Self and recipient indulgence carries significant actual and opportunity costs to be paid by taxpayers harried by ATO bureaucrats without experience of working in the real world or running a business.
Shame the ballooning bureaucracy cannot apply the same energy to auditing welfare programs or inserting into the programs implicit and explicit expectations of clients and service providers: (a) gratitude to the taxpayers for the benefits they receive; and (b) a commitment to raise themselves up, to resurrect their humanity, to transform to one of self-reliance and individual responsibility, as far as physical and mentally able.
From listening to service providers, as well as from observation, it seems that once a label and a package have been granted, entitlement is for life, without any expectation from the recipient, family or service provider to complement taxpayer largesse, to add value that could be transformative, to raise them up.
Absence of performance expectations appears to be common across Aboriginal, NDIS and Aged Care creating packages and programs that are an end in themselves, rather than encouragement to self-reliance. Humanitarians exploiting need to demonstrate their own virtue add to capture by government, increasing potential for socialism and incremental loss of freedom.
Psychologist and world-renowned author Jordan Peterson reminds all of us to take responsibility. Not by government diktat, not through the use of force, but by a voluntary choice exercised for the sake of not only our family and our community but that of our own soul.
Satirist, author and co-host of the podcast Triggernometry, Konstantin Kisin, believes the fact we can do that is the beauty of our civilisation. A civilization under constant attack.
All the more reason to celebrate a country and civilisation that demonstrates respect and provision for individual needs, in the hope we will all be transformed. Not left behind, raised up by individual responsibility and initiative.