It is hardly an exaggeration to say that “the poor” did not exist in classical antiquity. The concept did not exist. As Peter Brown has shown us, the urban grandees of Greece and Rome whose names adorn countless monuments which record the thanks of a grateful citizenry were not acting from motives that we would now recognize as charitable. Even those who did not simply hoard their grain in the hope that it could be sold at a massive profit on the eve of a famine—the persons whose acts appear almost suspiciously benificent—were operating within a civic framework that did not distinguish “the poor” as a distinct group of persons, much less one to whom a special duty was owed. Rather, the great-souled man who offered a donation of foodstuffs or took upon himself the construction of public works did so as an expression of filial duty to the city and its political community. Likewise, those on the receiving end of this largesse were not conceived of as a special “disadvantaged” class. This was true even of those who suffered from hunger or disease; they were simply citizens, to whom these benefits accrued by virtue of their membership in the political community as a matter of course. Such transfers of wealth were appreciated in much the same way that we understand the decision of a quarterback (even one who cares about his rushing stats) to accept a loss of yards during a kneel-down. It was simply good civic sportsmanship.

This is not to suggest that the persons whom most of us would now recognize as “the poor” were absent from this world. The cities of the ancient Mediterranean teemed with starving anonymous lives: immigrants, refugees, and other non-citizens huddled in back alleys or crowded around the gates. To the rest of the community their plight was not a matter of public or private concern; it simply did not occur to the authorities that the masses of indigent or crippled non-citizens had any claim upon their resources. As far as the political community was concerned, they scarcely existed. Irrelevant and almost invisible, their miserable condition lacked, among other things, the heroic dimension that might otherwise have commended it to the aesthetic attention of their neighbors, in precisely the same sense that the body of a Jewish criminal nailed to a piece of wood was neither beautiful nor tragic but a spectacle worthy of contempt.

It was the bishops who later emerged as the “guardians” of the poor, the persons of whom Our Lord had spoken so solicitously and against whose suffering the prophets had thundered. The successors of the Apostles inaugurated what Brown has called a “social revolution,” a re-imagining of the most basic nature of our obligations. This duty, once articulated, impressed itself forcefully upon the moral imaginations of all inhabitants of the Roman Empire, such that even Julian the Apostate could chide the pagan clergy for failing to live up to the high standard of virtuous giving set by his Christian and Jewish subjects. We are still living in the world made possible by this revolution.

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Who are “the poor” in the United States today? The phrase itself hardly exists in contemporary English. I cannot remember the last time it was used in the New York Times. When mainstream journalists employ it at all, it tends to be a joke, or at least what looks like one. (A recent article in the Wall Street Journal decries proposed limits on credit card interest rates under the headline “How to Shrink Credit for the Poor.”) Whether we like to admit it or not, most of us, regardless of our political views, regard “the poor”—for centuries perhaps the single most stable, least time-bound idiom in Scripture and theology—as an archaism. The sense that it is anachronistic is, I think, unavoidable; it has a formal quality—one probably not unconnected with the esteem that the poor were once afforded—that sits uneasily alongside the mostly abstract, bureaucratic language of, say, a statement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. We feel somehow that the poor cannot actually exist alongside exhortations to “learn about poverty, get inspired by how communities are responding, and take action with others.”

Why do we feel this way? One reason that “the poor” has lost something of its idiomatic force is that for most of us it summons up facile (and, I think, telling) mental images which we recognize as hopelessly out of date: medieval peasants, Blake’s chimney sweep, a television film of Oliver Twist, Depression-era tramps, L.B.J. posing with the coal miners.

It would be wrong to say that these kinds of images—of what one might call the “phenomonological” or even the “picturesque” poor—do not correspond to the experience of anyone living in the United States today. But the number of Americans who work in (say) meat-packing plants is comparatively small, and they are in no sense representative of what most journalists and academics mean when they talk about “poverty” in the United States, which is the closest we come to talking about “the poor.” The transition from a class of persons to a generalized condition is, or should be, telling; we also talk about “food insecurity,” as if it were a psychological disorder, rather than “the hungry.”

These are often not the same things. “The poor” in the United States today are not, generally speaking, hungry. Around a third of Americans are considered overweight; nearly half are obese. If we break this down along class lines, the heaviest Americans tend to be the ones with the lowest incomes. The wealthiest Americans, by contrast, are the likeliest to be thin; indeed, there is probably no correlation stronger in contemporary sociology than the one between a below-average B.M.I. and one’s class background. One is almost tempted to say that what Our Lady prophesied in the Magnificat has been fulfilled not in some future eschatological sense but here and now, as a mere description of socioeconomic markers—the hungry have indeed been filled to the point of bursting with ultra-processed foods, while the rich have voluntarily absented themselves from the table.

What I have said doubtless sounds pointlessly harsh, but I think it is worth drawing attention to this and other seeming incongruities between our stock mental images of “the poor” and these sorts of statistics (which are much closer to the experience most of us have of poverty in this country). They help to explain why Dilexi te, Pope Leo’s recent apostolic exhortation dedicated to the poor, elicited groans from some American Catholics. This was wrong but, I think, almost understandable. Talk about “the poor” (at least in the United States and Western Europe) often suggests an air of unreality, of play-acting, not unlike gibberish about synodality. (For reasons that will become clear, I wish Dilexi te had said more about how “the acceleration of technological and social change in the past two centuries, with all its contradictions and conflicts, not only had an impact on the lives of the poor but also became the object of debate and reflection on their part.”)

I think we must insist on the reality of “the poor,” and not just in a global sense or as a way of thinking about immigration. This is not simply because for pious reasons I would like to hold on to the established conceptual vocabulary of the Christian religion (to say nothing of its moral precepts), but because after a moment’s reflection the answer to the question of whether the poor still exist in large numbers in a country as wealthy as ours seems to me obvious, perhaps even absurdly so.

Let us return for a moment to late antiquity. The first Christians inherited the idea of “the poor” as both a legible category of persons and the object of a solemn obligation from the Old Testament. The language of Scripture presupposes a world in which hunger, thirst, hard labor, the harshness of the elements, and the threat of violent death were familiar evils which particularly oppressed a class of persons known as the poor. Just as the starving and often diseased masses seem to have been invisible to solid Roman citizens, so, it seems to me, are the poor in the United States difficult for most of us to recognize, at least if we expect them to resemble what I have above referred to as the “picturesque” poor.

(Can we reasonably expect this? Do the poor owe us a coherent iconography of their suffering? I think they do not.)

America has not abolished the poor. Our inability to recognize them in our midst is, perhaps, largely an epistemic problem, but its consequences should we persist in this failure will be as grave as those foretold in Proverbs: “Whoso stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard.”

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The poor have always been a favorite of the statistician, and as an ersatz social pathologist I am no exception. Here are some numbers, courtesy of the National Institutes of Health, Pew Research, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and so on:

• American children ages eight and older spend an average of seven and a half hours per day in front of screens; for children under the age of eight, the figures suggest two and a half hours, which seems suspiciously low when you consider that a fourth of children in that age range have their own smartphones.
• Sixty percent of American children under the age of two regularly watch videos on YouTube; by age five, the figure increases to eighty-four percent.
• Seventy-one percent of all teenagers watch pornography at least once a week; more than half say that this viewing involved images “depicting what appears to be rape, choking, or someone in pain.”
• The decline in outdoor play breaks down neatly along class lines. As many as forty-six percent of children between the ages of three and five whose parents have, at most, a high school education play outside for less than an hour per weekday; for those who have dropped out of college or earned an associate’s degree, the figure is similar. Among children whose parents have earned four-year degrees, it falls to thirty-four percent.
• Thirty-seven percent of American children are either overweight or obese; about one in thirteen children is considered “severely” obese, which is a clinical way of describing three-year-olds who weigh as much as fifty-five pounds. In relative terms, severe obesity has become six hundred percent more common than it was half a century ago.

These statistics could be multiplied endlessly. I wish I had made them up.

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The poor in America are not picturesque, at least not by the standards of hitherto existing societies, but they are, I think, still more or less recognizable. American poverty is technological. By this I do not mean that it is simply a question of the use and abuse of technology. Rather, I mean that contemporary poverty is technological in the sense that the structural conditions that have given rise to it, perpetuate it, and make it both difficult to reconcile with our previous definitions and to succor are the result of large-scale changes which technology—and more specifically the subsuming of virtually every aspect of human existence into digital communication platforms—has made possible. “Technological” here means the internet and smartphones and social media and streaming video; but it also means industrial agriculture and the chemicalization of food, the post-Carter destruction of the old post-war consensus on the mixed economy, financialization, the automobile and the corresponding disfiguration of the built environment to accommodate its reign of terror, de-industrialization, offshoring, the advancement of so-called scientific management, algorithmic advertising, the gig economy, credentialism, cheap credit, birth control, fossil fuels, shoddy textiles, safetyism and the de facto policing powers given to C.P.S., the quasi-professionalization of youth sports, the death of reading: all the interlocking pieces of that puzzle we call “neoliberalism” which has left us with an enormous number of Americans whose labor has no obvious intelligible end except the servicing of systems of exploitation that do not require them except as end users—and who are probably only one presidential cycle away from being bought off permanently with a basic income scheme (a final act of managerial pseudo-mercy, the voice of Cain). They have nothing to offer except their bodies to the symbiotic duopoly of the junk food manufacturers and the pharmaceutical industry; their wallets to payday lenders, credit card companies, rent-to-own stores, algorithmically imposed late fees, sports gambling apps; and their attention spans to literally trillions of hours of video “content” purveyed for the benefit of advertisers who will bid upon their every glance.

If this sounds like a wide-ranging definition of the technological poor, it is because “technological” is only one of the possible adjectives I could have used. Poverty is not only technological; it is also aesthetic. Poverty is disposability. It is an incuriosity about the world which is permanent, and the permanent loss of one’s capacity for emotions such as awe and terror. The poor are robbed of beauty; they are robbed of the ability to recognize and to appreciate it. Wonder is stolen from them, and the boredom that was once available even to the indigent. Technological poverty is spiritual poverty, not least because it destroys the conditions that tend to make prayer possible.

Unlike the picturesque, the technologically poor do not experience their poverty as such. Once upon a time when a hungry boy saw a well-fed one he might have envied him. Today he may not even see him. A seven-year-old boy spends five or more hours a day at school interacting with a laptop or tablet device before going home to waste time in front of the “smart” T.V. or a phone or a video game console. In a few years he will become one of the forty percent of Americans who suffer from prediabetes. By age twelve at the latest he will become addicted to online pornography. In adulthood he will be on insulin (his doctor will recommend an app for monitoring his blood sugar; a pharmaceutical company will bill insurance). He will take other medications. He may get a job. He may father a child. He will not kick the porn habit. He will watch four thousand hours of YouTube. He will not think of himself as poor. No one will tell him that he is. One day he will see a man who is looking at a bird. Will he envy him?

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Having a new definition of the poor only gets us so far. It is one thing to say that Our Lord did not speak falsely when He told His Apostles that the poor would be with them always. What about our duty to them? Here I am willing to cheat. I will simply assert that it still exists. One should not expect otherwise. Political and economic conditions change, but they cannot (as Newman once put it) “reverse our Lord’s declarations about poverty and riches.” But I will go further. I will insist that our duty to the technological poor is not exhausted merely by noticing them or by almsgiving. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that our duty toward the poor is still the most important of all political questions.

What would a political response to the plight of the technological poor look like? The answer is not obvious. Many of the solutions that sound most practical are doubtless incompatible with the American constitution. It is one thing to ban addictive additives in junk food or proscribe the use of cell phones on school premises (or even make their possession by persons under the age of eighteen or twenty-one illegal); it is another to (say) mandate walking for an hour a day, especially for millions of people who, for all the reasons I have described above, are not sufficiently in command of their leisure time. (An actual political response would look like some combination of the New Deal, a revivified Christian democracy, and the French sewing machine riot of 1831. I am pessimistic about the conditions for an actual political response.)

Let’s try to make it easier. (Can we?) In the past it was always easy to find someone willing to argue that the poor were the chief authors of their own misery, that with greater application and a renewed sense of self-discipline, they could simply claw their way out of the Great Depression. But a political response to technological poverty cannot look like this; it must not take the form of snobbery or cheap “lifestyle” advice. It cannot mean nodding along with me while mumbling about “parental responsibility,” as if the problems I have referred to above were simply a series of unsightly bad habits. (As I write this, some parents are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to send children to proudly Luddite schools either directly by enrollment in private institutions or by carefully selecting their ZIP codes; meanwhile, in rural America there are school districts larger than the state of Rhode Island where no such institution exists.)

I have so far written several thousand words about the poor without saying much of anything about the rich. Who are they? (Who are we?) The rich are the objects of the bitterest curses in Scripture. If being poor today means more or less what I have suggested it does, it follows that those who are not subject to the conditions I have described constitute the rich. This should invite a certain amount of reflection, especially from those who are parents of small children.

In one of his bravura passages, Chesterton describes a young girl whose hair inspires him to revolt:

I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization.

Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

If he were writing this passage today, the author of What’s Wrong With the World would probably begin with the little girl’s hazel eyes. A girl should have eyes with which she is able to see birch trees and nuthatches and grey skies and rivers and drops of rain and the pages of very long books which demand to be read slowly on winter afternoons; because she should be able to see all these things, she should have eyes which are capable of resting on the same object for more than thirty seconds without being distracted by an electronic device; because she should not be the slave of these devices, she must have parents and teachers who are not themselves enslaved to them; because there should not be enslavement to digital technology, there must be a political and economic order which rests upon the creation rather than the extraction of value—the value of real things, not random integers multiplying on a screen somewhere, which requires the blowing up of everyone’s powers of attention and the disappearance not only of contemplation and leisure but of all the unremarkable hum-drum activities like walking and thinking and being bored that these more exalted tasks require; because there is no such economic and political order, there shall be a revolution.

The syllogism is somewhat less neat, but the call for revolution is, I think, equally justified. Yet somehow Chesterton’s boisterous defiance seems unsuited to the plight of the technological poor. His thunderous rhapsody belongs to an age in which the poor and their oppressors were more clearly distinct and the deprivations visited upon the former more in keeping with the historic legibility of poverty and (one suspects) less spiritually disfiguring. The girl with the hazel eyes is not an “urchin”; she has probably never walked further than a quarter of a mile in her life, and she has never done so unsupervised. She should not, of course, be hunched over in front of an iPhone on the couch; she should be rapturous, a laughing, breathing icon of eternal truths with which she is probably unacquainted.

When I see a girl like her, I do not see a child whose parents should have followed the digital “success sequence” outlined by the American Academy of Pediatrics, but one of the needy turned aside at the gate by persons whose identity is, strictly speaking, as unclear to me as their risk of damnation is certain: “They are waxen fat, they shine: yea, they overpass the deeds of the wicked.” My outrage is not important here, except insofar as it frees me from the burden of having to engage in unseemly recriminations. It also allows me somehow to trust that the same God Who made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them, Who keeps the truth and executes judgement for those who suffer wrong and gives food to the hungry, will also free those who are fettered by chains of habit, give sight to those blinded by false lights, and lift up those who are cast down by the weight of what is unreal.