This is anecdotal, so anyone can make of it what they choose. I have worked with charitable organizations, and with the financial situations of a broad range of people, and, embarrassment of embarrassments, I have found that usually the less people have, the more generous they are in every way. I have spent many an hour in front of stores raising money for charity. Some toothless hillbilly with five children wearing second-hand clothes will dig deep and give you one of the two $10 bills she has in her purse. The lady in the Humvee and the $200 hairdo will climb the wall of the store to avoid someone holding out a tin cup. That’s not always true, but it’s true more often than not. I have seen poor people keep their disabled, elderly parents, aunts, grandparents in their homes at great effort to themselves, whereas your well-to-do are more concerned with preserving assets and getting grandma into the BEST nursing home, consistent, of course, with preservation of capital. If you want volunteers for blood drives or a cancer walk, call the plant manager of the poultry plant, not the CEO of the software company. I know this is a big generalization, and will not hold universally true. But it seems to hold true most of the time. If you’re down on your luck and need help, ask a poor person, not a rich one.
I’m not sure why this seems to be true, but I have an idea. A person who is always struggling to make ends meet has a stronger basis for empathy than one who is insulated from all adversity and unpleasantness. Personal security, I think, is addictive; more so than is money, even. The more security we have, the more we want.
I don’t know that I would buy the notion that political conservatism makes one generous, even though I am conservative politically myself. I do think that certain kinds of “conservatives”, regardless of financial status, partake of that sense of personal insecurity which many of the poor seem to have. Frankly put, people who are fairly traditionalist in their religious beliefs also tend to more insecure in their beliefs about their salvation prospects. Some would call this an excessive preoccupation with sin and judgment. Some would call it a well-formed conscience. If you’re feeling rather insecure about your salvation, you’re more likely to feel an obligation to be charitable as an individual (and go to Mass and Confession) than you are if you think you probably have a free pass to heaven. Generally speaking, the toothless hillbilly woman is going to be a religious fundamentalist. At least that’s true around here. She, and the traditionalist Catholic very keenly feel themselves sinners liable to judgment. Such people, I think, really are attuned to attitudes of empathy. To such people, the government is kind of irrelevant at best when it comes to dealing with your own personal convictions concerning charity. Sometimes the government is seen as the worst solution to social problems, because it sometimes acts in ways that moral traditionalists find unacceptable.
Not all political liberals are “religious liberals”. Not at all. But I think there is some tendency on the part of some to believe that social and religious issues can best be resolved by “changing the rules of the game” by altering the organizations governing them.
Anyway, that’s my take on it. I’m not inclined to think there is anything inherently charitable about political conservatism or political liberalism, either one. I do think, though, that people with more traditional religious values tend to be both more generous and more politically conservative. The political conservatism of such people has more to do with distrust of government as an instrument of moral good than it does with fiscal policies per se. As with poor people (who, around here anyway, are intensely conservative politically, paradoxically enough) I think those who feel personally insecure, whether financially or morally, are more likely, in general, to be empathetic than those who really believe one has built or can build a paradise on earth.
