By Asanti M.
To recount the history of the human struggle against hunger is to see a true virtue birthed from necessity in its most basic form. From time immemorial cooperation precluded death; community cemented life; and collaboration rose as the principal weapon against hunger. To stave off the constant assault on our mortality, collective structures arose from collective needs. Both calculated and spontaneous efforts set in motion the systematic destruction of our innate enemy and laid the foundation for a solidarity rooted in a visceral understanding of the human condition. Rather than eliminate hunger, contemporary modes of societal organization produce social structures that justify material dispossession. Collaboration has been abandoned for competition, and hunger is given space to thrive beyond the immediate consequences of climate or natural disasters. The sympathy that surrounds the suffering fades into a background colored with the constant tragedies that make up the white noise of modern life.
Here in the States, there are countless organizations that endeavor to feed the hungry, yet every day a child starves. The tireless efforts of the charitable grant little solace to a mother whose labor can’t support her child nor to a father whose determinations fall short of supplying even the bare necessities. This struggle isn’t unique to the innocent but oppresses the “blameworthy” all the same. People deemed guilty by our systems are forced to navigate a world entirely unsympathetic to their plight. Despite the commonality of their condition, we see the suffering separated into two distinct categories: on one hand we have the fetishization of the hungry that abstracts their social position to maintain the image of an idealized victim; while on the other, we witness their unabated condemnation as inept failures or criminals on the margins of society. Each rendition subtracts from their humanity and masks the innately human battle against hunger. The “innocent” are allotted systematically constrained charity while the others are left to face an unforgiving material and social degradation.
It’s not difficult to understand the sympathy that stirs the charitable. Their imagination brings the extremity of the idealized victim to the forefront of their mind: the emaciated frames, the protruding ribs, the sunken cheeks. They aptly discern what an all-consuming force the fiend we call Hunger can be, and, with heart in hand, they motion to alleviate the suffering of its victims. Their sympathy materializes in both simple and elaborate structures of food distribution, supplementing the diets of millions and temporarily subduing the otherwise relentless pains of starvation. The admirable solution posited by the sympathetic addresses the immediate needs of the hungry but does so under the unabated pretense of a deeply entrenched meritocratic framework that constricts its application. As the hungry toil, the meritocratic ethic that asserts: an individual deserves neither reward nor punishment from factors beyond their control, casts a moral fog over our deeply disturbing distribution of wealth. Hunger, death, and destitution become accepted as viable individual outcomes, rather than deeply opposed as communal ails. The elimination of hunger ceases to be one of the fundamental cornerstones of organized society and gives way to the social inversion that elevates the accumulation of individual wealth above collective humanity.
The meritocratic ideal operates as an ostensibly unbiased sorting mechanism leaving the supposed listless to languish while the prudent rise to pinnacle of their aspirations. In our case, the ideal that exists in the national consciousness never escapes the imagination; all manner of happenstance, prejudice, or generic biases that color the human psyche render our “meritocracy” nominally absurd and functionally inept. Nevertheless, the mockery goes to serve as a retroactive justification for the languid position of the hungry, consequently molding the contours of the discussions surrounding their humanity. Conversations and solutions alike are fixed on optimizing the performance of the poor, while utterly disregarding the simple fact that our nation decorates landfills with several billions of pounds of wasted food every month. Wealthy institutions harp on charity, the unidirectional and placid rendition of mutual aid, but rarely engage in the opposition required to dismantle the sorting system itself. Our make-believe meritocracy shrouds the public imagination and replaces any concept of common humanity with fictitious barriers used to justify the vast disparities inherent to our current system. Any talk of universal dignity by the charitable is reduced to platitudinal posturing when the systems that place profit over the abolition of hunger go unquestioned.
The moral logic that permeates our nominally meritocratic society seamlessly accomplishes the impossible task of nullifying history and rendering structural social context irrelevant. The mirage of potential upward social mobility acts as the comforting illusion that instills hope against the foreboding backdrop of uncertainty. Blind individual perseverance is brutely applied as the universal answer to all societal ails and erodes the need for any deeper use of contextual evaluation. Wealth becomes proof of productivity and productivity rises to the status of virtue. Conversely, any outward semblance of economic strife, if not refuted as transient, becomes evidence of personal failure. The excess of the wealthy in the face of poverty doesn’t spur moral condemnation because meritocratically the excess is evidence of the assumed judicious character of the well-off. The impoverished, on the other hand, can bear no such virtue, evidenced by their very condition. There’s no need to understand the complex sociopolitical realities that produce poverty and hunger, because hunger itself ceases to be a collective social issue framed by laws, polices, history and the like. But rather reduces to the sole burden of the individual, in which the failure to provide or produce equates to the moral failure ascribed to poverty.
The moral judgment befalling the impoverished is only allowed redemption through the accumulation of status and wealth in the free market. By extension, the public’s measure of our own dignity degrades into a measure of our market value disregarding any innate human essence or even our societal contributions. Arbitrations of the market, buffered by charity, define the dynamic in which hunger is justified while the rules created by the free market masquerade as the only path forward, cementing isolation and competition as a seemingly natural default. The imposition of this isolating ethos shreds the collective call to abolish hunger into millions of fragmented families struggling to toil their way through an inherently dehumanizing system. Any motion towards solidarity becomes a tortured struggle that opposes the fundamental assumptions that form the bedrock of a fractured society. In a nation where the market determines humanity and a feigned meritocracy casts a veil over its manufactured borders between our brothers and sisters, the claim that “not a soul should starve if there is enough food to be had” seems the crazed cry of a radical.