Alternative view of poverty

"If the multigenerational poor are to make the leap out of poverty, it will require a new kind of thinking--reflection." So opined Earl Shorris, the author of the 1968 novel The Boots of the Virgin, about the antihero Sol Feldman, a Jewish bullfighter of little talent known professionally as El Sol de Michigan.

Shorris, however, is not primarily known as a fiction writer. He was a social critic who wrote tirelessly  against the tendency in Western culture to slide toward plutocracy and materialism. He advocated alleviation of poverty, not through skills-for-jobs training programs, but through the introduction of a Humanities-heavy curriculum to the poor, the unemployed, low-wage workers, ex-convicts and addicts.

Shorris is the founder of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, the core of which is overseen by Bard college these days. The curriculum offers the disadvantaged a 10-month curriculum of philosophy, history, art, literature and logic.

In 1997, while researching a book, Shorris interviewed inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, in Westchester County, N.Y. He solicited opinions on why poor people were poor. An inmate told him it was because they lacked "the moral life of downtown," meaning an absence of exposure to "plays, museums, concerts, lectures."

Shorris cites this as an epiphanic moment in his life. Poverty, he argued, was an absence of reflection and beauty, not an absence of money. He compared the experience of the poor with the experience of people chained to the walls of Plato's allegorical cave (in Plato's Allegory of the Cave). Stuck in a cave, Plato's cave-dwellers see shadows on the walls, and assume that is all there is in the world.