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Deborah Stone, The Samaritan’s Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor? (Nation Books, 2008)

In her latest book, The Samaritan’s Dilemma, Deborah Stone makes an impassioned call to political leaders: cultivate altruism as the highest virtue of democracy. Chronicling what she sees as the collapse of American Democracy—from the golden age of the New Deal and the Great Society programs to the opprobrium of the Reagan years—Stone sets out to demonstrate how the conservative antipathy to government in general, and its venomous distaste for welfare in particular, have fomented the dominant public philosophy that help is harmful.

She opens with a pithy vignette. A man in her home town of Henniker, New Hampshire, where Stone is a Research Professor of Government at Dartmouth, made headlines for standing at an intersection holding a sign that read “Hungry.” Concerned residents brought the matter to the attention of the town selectman, who at the next meeting advised the townspeople, “The best way to avoid the problem is not to give out free food.” Sixty years ago, she says, the vagrant would have been jailed and fed. Thirty years ago, a local official might have helped him sign up for food stamps or welfare.

Stone traces this sea change in popular attitude to the Reagan administration. In her view, during these years, conservatives began translating their ideology into policy by funding think tanks and research papers that gave a scientific gloss to conservative ideology. “Most famously,” she writes, “the Manhattan Institute bankrolled political scientist Charles Murray to write Losing Ground which used graphs, statistics, and imaginary characters to ‘prove’ that government help for the needy destroys their ambition.”

Anchoring her case on the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, in which Jesus instructs that compassion should be for all people, Stone dissects what she calls “seven bad arguments against help.” Conservatives who genuflect at the altar of self-reliance have stubbornly maintained that entrepreneurship has done more for this country than goodwill, that helping people renders them helpless, and, famously, that government is not the solution to our problems – it is the problem.

Stone’s greatest success is the swift manner in which she disarms the conventional wisdom that help is pernicious: “To believe that help is harmful, you have to think of it as something people can do without. You have to have already decided that they don’t really need it. And that is the big deception, the invidious moral claim at the heart of conservative logic.”

By turns reportage, memoir, and theory, The Samaritan’s Dilemma plucks ordinary tales that bear the discord between public policy and the individual’s instinct towards altruism. We meet a host of single mothers who are forced by the welfare system to choose paid work over caring for their families; a doctor mandated by Medicare to stay within budget and thus sacrifice the best interests of his patients; a home care worker who feels guilty about buying groceries for a debilitated client because Medicare rules prohibit nurses from giving any kind of care outside the prescribed plan. Sadly, the book’s strength is also its weakness—in sum, it’s a catalogue of mundane anecdotes, listed ad nauseam and to minimal effect.

For almost two-thirds of its length, The Samaritan’s Dilemma drags on and on with these ordinary tales. They are told in such number only to inculcate their normalcy, and to bolster Stone’s uncomplicated thesis: the trickle-down effect of conservative policy has been to poison our common sense and nurture our distaste for goodwill. Stone lacks the authorial spark necessary to sustain such redundancy in theme and delivery. Sadly, her text sinks under the weight of repetitious clichés on the constitution of good citizens and good neighbors. In a book that could have managed at half its length, Stone devotes little more than a page to hard-boiled, practical prescriptions for a retooling of government policy. In parts, her voice is woefully dry and clinical, in others, overly preachy and sentimental. The effect of her whiny style is to distance readers who she could have won over with the strength of her arguments or who, as in my case, arrived at the text already sympathetic to them.