Abstract
In this chapter, we directly engage the issue of ethics and a culture that justifies cruelty to its own members, the homeless, by exploring the cultural conditions that facilitate such processes. By critically examining social trends of a society, we question how a modern society can construct a marginalized population as invisible and disposable. We explore the larger socio-cultural context that contributes to the complexity of homelessness in the United States. Rather than focusing on problems of individual factors or social structures, we examine the issue of homelessness from the perspective of cultural phenomenology (i.e., the cultural conditions that facilitate such structures). In the midst of wealth, a narcissistic understanding and focus on the Self and the desire to generate a context-free explanation of the marginalized facilitate the social reality of the new homelessness. As social scientists developed various theories to justify and even legitimize the suffering of the homeless, these “theories” and “scientific explanations” cannot escape our primordial obligation as fellow human beings, the embodiment of ethics: What is at stake is our humanity.
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Notes
- 1.
All procedures and data reported here have been approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Oklahoma. Details of research methods and participants have been reported elsewhere (Hsieh, 2016; Terui & Hsieh, in press). The narratives were excerpts of interviews with people who rely on a local homeless shelter for resources to cope with everyday challenges. The excerpts were chosen as they best reflect and embody the central themes of our arguments in each section. The participants have been given pseudonyms that starts with H (e.g., Helen and Hank).
- 2.
While the term “homeless” implies a unified definition of the population (i.e., those without homes), the reality of the homeless are far more complicated (Lee, Tyler, & Wright, 2010). For example, researchers have argued that how “home” is defined and understood may create differences in whether one is considered homeless or not (Gowan, 2010; Somerville, 1992; Tipple & Speak, 2005). Tipple and Speak (2005, p. 350) noted, “[T]he margin between homeless and inadequately housed is much more vague and can be set very low, excluding squatters, or very high, including all who are not owners or renters of formally approved dwellings.” As a result, estimates of the prevalence of homelessness often vary significantly due to differences in how homelessness is defined. As a result, rather than discussing the issue of homelessness at a global level, which is complicated by the varied definitions of homelessness, we have limited our discussion to the homelessness in the United States.
- 3.
It is important not to simplify such understanding as an East vs. West dichotomy. Such consequence is not a simple result of “Westernization” either. Rather, this world emerges in response to the increasing fragmentation of our construction of the Self, our cultural consciousness.
- 4.
With the rise of Nazism, the endowed chair was unceremoniously eliminated after Pearson’s death in 1936. Galton and Pearson founded the journal Biometrika thus promoting the reduction of human behavior to biological precursors, especially correlating intelligence scores with much more complex phenomena such as income and criminality.
- 5.
- 6.
But these “cabins” were not what one might think of as a nice little lakeside abode. Rather the Earl of Devon, writing for a Royal Commission in 1845 described the living conditions of the Irish peasants thus: “It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [the Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure … in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water … their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather … a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury … and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property” (Devon quoted by Woodham-Smith, 1962/1992, p. 24).
- 7.
Rooted in such ideologically charged “pseudo-science” (and statistical confusion) is the unfounded proposition that a particular form of competition as understood by a specific culture at a specific time is universal, a matter of natural law, and that inherent intelligence is reducible to racial membership (see the Nobel Prize-winning economist Heckman’s (1995) systematic dismantling of the statistical mess that is The Bell Curve’s argument).
- 8.
Conrad and Muccino (2006) wrote a screenplay entitled The Pursuit of Happyness depicting the rags-to-riches story of Chris Gardner. The film, starring Will Smith as Gardner, a homeless salesman, captures the irony of modern economic reality, underscored by the purposeful misspelling of happiness as “happyness.” What is wrong with the story, as with the spelling, is that, like all Horatio Alger stories of the American Dream, it functions to camouflage the truth that most never make it out of rags. In fact, they die still owing money. As LeRoy came to understand, in post-Vietnam America upward mobility has increasingly become a violated expectation.
- 9.
We use periscope in this context to mean a slice of the sacred. The word technically means a cut-and-paste piece of a sacred text. A homeless person, any human is a fragment of the sacred, worthy of respect. A child is more valuable than the rarest Bible. Burn the sutras because the sacred is all around us.
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Kramer, E., Hsieh, E. (2019). Gaze as Embodied Ethics: Homelessness, the Other, and Humanity. In: Dutta, M.J., Zapata, D.B. (eds) Communicating for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2005-7_3
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