"If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child
and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited,
but because history has granted you little capacity in this area. I'm of the
view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited
on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you
don't." - Me
Wrote this in my previous post, and perhaps it needed either more explanation or another post. So here's another post, and its own set of arguments.
In this post I'll try to argue why you shouldn't give to charity. I don't give to charities. The rational thing is always of course to see whether your opinion or behaviour is good enough for someone else to accept (you lucky person). I'll take the third-world-oriented charities as my example.
I'll grant that if I gave money or clothes to a third-world appeal charity that some good would come of it for somebody in need. That in itself makes it very difficult to disagree with the work of charities. The logic is simple enough for even me to grasp - put in A, get result B, where A is affordable, and B is good. You'd think that you'd have to go out of your way as an asshole to find arguments not to follow this simple logic, especially given that we live in a materialistic world in which the only thing you generally stand to lose is the rate of growth of your DVD collection. So you can either get that Hitchcock DVD that wasn't included in your box set (which you purchased anyway becuase it contained many of the classics you wanted, just not this one), or you can provide fresh water, clothing, or education, to somewhere far away where the people will never enjoy what you take for granted. And in fact, your materialistic way of life seems to have been responsible for the downfall of third-world countries anyhow - the capitalistic hunger of the post-WWII era furnished you with cheap fuel and technology and a responsibility to the now-starving populations left in its wake.
Yes, I'll stand to go against this. Fool that I am. Of course it doesn't matter that I do so here, it's just nice to write stuff down so that next time some Christian do-gooder comes to my door my mind won't go blank while they storm off down the drive bemoaning my self-centred barbarism. Not that I intend to win any arguments or anything, it just would be nice to see their anger have something to be angry at, because they're not used to resistance.
I'll make a list of presuppositions, or whatever they are, precepts probably:
1 - I am politically unfree
I won't offer any explanation of this - if you can't think like this then, well, what can I say? Good luck!
2 - I'm not responsible for third-world debt, starvation of resources, lack of food and medicines, infrastructure etc.
This is the same statement that might be made by someone who is right-wing, who says 'I was born in this country with advantages that I will enjoy, and nobody has the right to tell me that I shouldn't have those advantages. Look, no hands!'. For me it's a bare fact that I'm not responsible. I'm also not secondarily resoponsible, through the economical or political system that I live in, due to the last statement - becuase I understand how un-free I am with regard to them. Of course I can make myself responsible by making all sorts of 'green choices', and there are plenty to tick off, but that's another (but I guess related) issue. If I want to help someone it's because I understand that they are suffering, and that's really all.
3 - I don't live a blessed existence
Typically, the west sees itself as living in peace and freedom, in which citizens choose careers and live otherwise at leisure. It sees itself as refined when in fact it is brutish; it sees itself as resourceful when in fact it is wasteful; it sees itself as powerful when in fact we are weak; it sees itself as full of luxury when in fact it is full of tat; it sees itself as happy when in fact it is miserable. Things is really, really bad, man. And even in those areas in which I can say that I are living well at the expense of others, I have to know that this makes my life bad also - not because I can't ignore it, but because of its effect on me. The happy man can never be the oppressor. What would, for example, an alien species think of my inability to act at the suffering of others? Surely they will see me as singularly imprisoned within a worthless and a hopeless life, in just a truly miserable condition that may not exist across a million other worlds. Anything else wouldn't really make sense. Oh, and privilege? Shopped in a supermarket recently? You haven't seen privilege until you've seen the cheap look on that middle-aged hag's face as she finds a broken ready meal in the reduced section, before she ghosts away into the crisps aisle with her underdressed and likely abused daughter. Certainly you can say that someone who is starving is suffering much more than I am, that's true, but you can't use the image of me on my throne as motivation: it just isn't like that.
And on the subject of crisps, I recall the picture of a woman in the London riots of last year making off with a multipack bag of crisps from her local pound shop. I mean, if you had unlimited freedom to take whatever you want, what would you take? Some took TVs and so on, for sure, but she took her crisps. How bad must you feel spending one measly pound on bland, underfilled junk food, to feel liberated in stealing them? (it's possible she didn't feel bad buying them ever, but just lacked imagination. I simply prefer the former, though both serve my argument).
So those three precepts (if that's what they are!) might exasperate you, or leave you wanting more defence of them or whatever, but you can probably see that the usual logic of philanthropic giving may not hold with me here. First of all, to be a philanthropist you have to be rich, and whilst I might be rich in that I have Pounds and not Roubles in my pockets, I'm not rich in the control and exercise of my faculties, which we all have taken away from us via education and social conditioning (so now, if there was someone reading, I've finally lost you. Whatever, your mom is fat). Nobody I know behaves appropriately, nor anyone I've ever heard of outside of books and films. For example, that Denzil Washington film where he goes nuts trying to get treatment for his ill son, is completely believable and yet doesn't ever happen in real life. Another example - a nurse killed a man's wife by giving her an epidural incorrectly, and (I think! I hope I'm not pasting together two anecdotes!) he appeared on a news-like programme reading the form letter he got from the hospital and etc. why didn't he go nuts? Why don't we go nuts? If there's a panic about paedophiles (and there should be), just organize and hunt them down! People sometimes know where a paedo lives - why not off him? For goodness sake. Are there problems that are less real than they could be because of the media? Probably, but my point is that for all the times the media is accused of scaremongering or starting a panic, what happens? Nothing! If only something ever happened, then we could talk.
Secondly, pity is worthless. When people watch the telly and it's charity night and they go 'oh the poor children' or whatever, they completely misunderstand not only the position of the children, but their own position. A suffering child deserves respect, not pity, and of course that goes for anyone, and that respect can then give birth to appropriate action (in principle). But your lack of respect springs from a misunderstanding about your own self - you do not have the power to designate pity, since you suffer the same way I do, you just don't know it. You need to know that you're not free, that you give to the telly fundraiser as a symptom of unfreedom, not as a hero, nor even as a prelude to more meaningful action (as lifestylers might say).
And this brings me to a larger point. What you might call a physiological approach to charity - it makes you feel better. You buy the disease and then you buy the cure. The disease is guilt and pity and the cure is buying blankets. Many arguments against charity show how it is a false economy, and others point out that wholesale politico-socio-economic change is necessary to stop untold millions starving to death in the near future. Both of these arguments are interesting and correct, but need to be utilised somehow rather than simply 'taken note of', which never leads to anything. They can be useful if I first of all describe how I feel when I spend my extra pounds on 'the poor children' - that basically I feel like I've saved them, or at least as many as is in my power, from further suffering, at least for now. It's a bit like eating a meal: you feel full for a while, and then when the hunger strikes (or is induced), you have to eat again. The issue for me is that my stomach is bigger than most people's (physically as well as metaphorically true, I assure you dear reader). I don't anticipate the good feeling, and it doesn't happen for me, so far as I have knowledge. And knowledge can't just be un-known: I don't want to feel happy or well about the fact that people are suffering and I can do very little to nothing about it by giving £3 a month or whatever it is.
So, if that's my argument, very roughly, I'll need to criticise charity. Usually people are unable to believe in social critique becaue their imagination is only able to conjure up the notion of a barely concealed conspiracy, which they then reject out of hand. In saying that charity isn't a correct view, of course, it's really a world away from conspiracy that I'm speaking of. There is a dedicated, honest and caring photographer, with a caring, honest and dedicated journalist, somewhere out there in the third-world doing a job they believe is about the furthering of human life. They find the suffering, record it, and transmit it to their media bosses, who package it for me to consume, in the hope that I will give. The message, believed in from the source of the transmission to its eventual end, is one of humanitarianism, of damning judgement, and often of desperation.
Yet it isn't that I'm not free enough, like I have 10 beans when really I should have 50, and all I need to do is collect more beans vouchers and send them off before they expire (sorry). If there is a difference between the kind of freedom implied by charitable giving and the kind of freedom constrained to feel bad and capable of ending starvation (as I assert somewhat blankly), then it's not only unhelpful or lacking but simply incorrect to describe the appearance of the emaciated child in the usual way. 'Simply incorrect' probably needs a stronger and longer explication, as it's capable of doing a lot of work. In any case, this difference in kind is probably at the heart of what I'm saying, and why giving to charity isn't just a 'stopgap' measure that should be taken (i.e. to help someone right now) whilst the world sorts itself out (or until I feel capable to sort it out). The pain of need - pleasure of giving logic detracts from the meaning of suffering, not just from my pocket or my DVD collection.
V
Wrote this in my previous post, and perhaps it needed either more explanation or another post. So here's another post, and its own set of arguments.
In this post I'll try to argue why you shouldn't give to charity. I don't give to charities. The rational thing is always of course to see whether your opinion or behaviour is good enough for someone else to accept (you lucky person). I'll take the third-world-oriented charities as my example.
I'll grant that if I gave money or clothes to a third-world appeal charity that some good would come of it for somebody in need. That in itself makes it very difficult to disagree with the work of charities. The logic is simple enough for even me to grasp - put in A, get result B, where A is affordable, and B is good. You'd think that you'd have to go out of your way as an asshole to find arguments not to follow this simple logic, especially given that we live in a materialistic world in which the only thing you generally stand to lose is the rate of growth of your DVD collection. So you can either get that Hitchcock DVD that wasn't included in your box set (which you purchased anyway becuase it contained many of the classics you wanted, just not this one), or you can provide fresh water, clothing, or education, to somewhere far away where the people will never enjoy what you take for granted. And in fact, your materialistic way of life seems to have been responsible for the downfall of third-world countries anyhow - the capitalistic hunger of the post-WWII era furnished you with cheap fuel and technology and a responsibility to the now-starving populations left in its wake.
Yes, I'll stand to go against this. Fool that I am. Of course it doesn't matter that I do so here, it's just nice to write stuff down so that next time some Christian do-gooder comes to my door my mind won't go blank while they storm off down the drive bemoaning my self-centred barbarism. Not that I intend to win any arguments or anything, it just would be nice to see their anger have something to be angry at, because they're not used to resistance.
I'll make a list of presuppositions, or whatever they are, precepts probably:
1 - I am politically unfree
I won't offer any explanation of this - if you can't think like this then, well, what can I say? Good luck!
2 - I'm not responsible for third-world debt, starvation of resources, lack of food and medicines, infrastructure etc.
This is the same statement that might be made by someone who is right-wing, who says 'I was born in this country with advantages that I will enjoy, and nobody has the right to tell me that I shouldn't have those advantages. Look, no hands!'. For me it's a bare fact that I'm not responsible. I'm also not secondarily resoponsible, through the economical or political system that I live in, due to the last statement - becuase I understand how un-free I am with regard to them. Of course I can make myself responsible by making all sorts of 'green choices', and there are plenty to tick off, but that's another (but I guess related) issue. If I want to help someone it's because I understand that they are suffering, and that's really all.
3 - I don't live a blessed existence
Typically, the west sees itself as living in peace and freedom, in which citizens choose careers and live otherwise at leisure. It sees itself as refined when in fact it is brutish; it sees itself as resourceful when in fact it is wasteful; it sees itself as powerful when in fact we are weak; it sees itself as full of luxury when in fact it is full of tat; it sees itself as happy when in fact it is miserable. Things is really, really bad, man. And even in those areas in which I can say that I are living well at the expense of others, I have to know that this makes my life bad also - not because I can't ignore it, but because of its effect on me. The happy man can never be the oppressor. What would, for example, an alien species think of my inability to act at the suffering of others? Surely they will see me as singularly imprisoned within a worthless and a hopeless life, in just a truly miserable condition that may not exist across a million other worlds. Anything else wouldn't really make sense. Oh, and privilege? Shopped in a supermarket recently? You haven't seen privilege until you've seen the cheap look on that middle-aged hag's face as she finds a broken ready meal in the reduced section, before she ghosts away into the crisps aisle with her underdressed and likely abused daughter. Certainly you can say that someone who is starving is suffering much more than I am, that's true, but you can't use the image of me on my throne as motivation: it just isn't like that.
And on the subject of crisps, I recall the picture of a woman in the London riots of last year making off with a multipack bag of crisps from her local pound shop. I mean, if you had unlimited freedom to take whatever you want, what would you take? Some took TVs and so on, for sure, but she took her crisps. How bad must you feel spending one measly pound on bland, underfilled junk food, to feel liberated in stealing them? (it's possible she didn't feel bad buying them ever, but just lacked imagination. I simply prefer the former, though both serve my argument).
So those three precepts (if that's what they are!) might exasperate you, or leave you wanting more defence of them or whatever, but you can probably see that the usual logic of philanthropic giving may not hold with me here. First of all, to be a philanthropist you have to be rich, and whilst I might be rich in that I have Pounds and not Roubles in my pockets, I'm not rich in the control and exercise of my faculties, which we all have taken away from us via education and social conditioning (so now, if there was someone reading, I've finally lost you. Whatever, your mom is fat). Nobody I know behaves appropriately, nor anyone I've ever heard of outside of books and films. For example, that Denzil Washington film where he goes nuts trying to get treatment for his ill son, is completely believable and yet doesn't ever happen in real life. Another example - a nurse killed a man's wife by giving her an epidural incorrectly, and (I think! I hope I'm not pasting together two anecdotes!) he appeared on a news-like programme reading the form letter he got from the hospital and etc. why didn't he go nuts? Why don't we go nuts? If there's a panic about paedophiles (and there should be), just organize and hunt them down! People sometimes know where a paedo lives - why not off him? For goodness sake. Are there problems that are less real than they could be because of the media? Probably, but my point is that for all the times the media is accused of scaremongering or starting a panic, what happens? Nothing! If only something ever happened, then we could talk.
Secondly, pity is worthless. When people watch the telly and it's charity night and they go 'oh the poor children' or whatever, they completely misunderstand not only the position of the children, but their own position. A suffering child deserves respect, not pity, and of course that goes for anyone, and that respect can then give birth to appropriate action (in principle). But your lack of respect springs from a misunderstanding about your own self - you do not have the power to designate pity, since you suffer the same way I do, you just don't know it. You need to know that you're not free, that you give to the telly fundraiser as a symptom of unfreedom, not as a hero, nor even as a prelude to more meaningful action (as lifestylers might say).
And this brings me to a larger point. What you might call a physiological approach to charity - it makes you feel better. You buy the disease and then you buy the cure. The disease is guilt and pity and the cure is buying blankets. Many arguments against charity show how it is a false economy, and others point out that wholesale politico-socio-economic change is necessary to stop untold millions starving to death in the near future. Both of these arguments are interesting and correct, but need to be utilised somehow rather than simply 'taken note of', which never leads to anything. They can be useful if I first of all describe how I feel when I spend my extra pounds on 'the poor children' - that basically I feel like I've saved them, or at least as many as is in my power, from further suffering, at least for now. It's a bit like eating a meal: you feel full for a while, and then when the hunger strikes (or is induced), you have to eat again. The issue for me is that my stomach is bigger than most people's (physically as well as metaphorically true, I assure you dear reader). I don't anticipate the good feeling, and it doesn't happen for me, so far as I have knowledge. And knowledge can't just be un-known: I don't want to feel happy or well about the fact that people are suffering and I can do very little to nothing about it by giving £3 a month or whatever it is.
So the most direct answer I suppose I have for not
giving to charity is that I don't want to learn to fool myself into
forgetting what a dire situation I'm really in. I feel the urgency of
action, and I feel the paralysis that comes from living where and how
I do, and something has to give. That tension has to be
maintained for the sake of whatever might be posssible. I have to
feel terrible about suffering and not swallow the charity pill,
because it's something I'm going through, as a suffering person among
suffering people, and it's something that has to end.
The less subjective part of my argument says that as philanthropy is both politically and ethically backward (politically because our economic values create starvation, not what we do with our free cash, and ethically because giving requires the exercise of arbitrary power, which we must not count on), you could say that charity is no solution to the problems of the third-world because it assumes that reasonings that belong in the past (philanthropy is very victorian) can solve problems that require better reasoning in the future.
The less subjective part of my argument says that as philanthropy is both politically and ethically backward (politically because our economic values create starvation, not what we do with our free cash, and ethically because giving requires the exercise of arbitrary power, which we must not count on), you could say that charity is no solution to the problems of the third-world because it assumes that reasonings that belong in the past (philanthropy is very victorian) can solve problems that require better reasoning in the future.
So, if that's my argument, very roughly, I'll need to criticise charity. Usually people are unable to believe in social critique becaue their imagination is only able to conjure up the notion of a barely concealed conspiracy, which they then reject out of hand. In saying that charity isn't a correct view, of course, it's really a world away from conspiracy that I'm speaking of. There is a dedicated, honest and caring photographer, with a caring, honest and dedicated journalist, somewhere out there in the third-world doing a job they believe is about the furthering of human life. They find the suffering, record it, and transmit it to their media bosses, who package it for me to consume, in the hope that I will give. The message, believed in from the source of the transmission to its eventual end, is one of humanitarianism, of damning judgement, and often of desperation.
This notwithstanding, if, when the TV turns itself on (don't they?) and makes me feel afraid for someone's life, there should have to be a very good reason to take that as a positive. By convention we grant this positivity immediately: it's good to show suffering because it's good to give, and the suffering should therefore not be done in silence. I would have it, on the contrary, that for the duration of time in which I'm incapable of acting suitably (that is, acting toward ending poverty etc.), the encounter with immediate suffering is counterproductive - as I've mentioned earlier, it's paralysing, and an extension of violence.
I'll identify therefore the anguish felt at others' suffering not as a motivation for charity but as a symptom of unfreedom. But given that I am not free to change the situation of third-world countries, what happens to the freedom I believe myself to have when I give charitably? For there isn't a mere logic at work here, but a whole... what you possibly might refer to as a social apparatus or something... that places images of starving and sick children on television. Charity is big business, and my perceived freedom for philanthropic action is a huge part of this machine. That's the real meaning of my charitable giving, and it doesn't line up with ending suffering.
You could interject: perhaps it is the case that I'm not yet free enough, educated enough, to react appropriately to the message. Maybe the right thing to do is to give relief as part of my emotional response to the imagery, to carry on, learn, and someday 'get it'. Even if I'm politically in a cage, as I claim, surely that's something relative, and that there are more of less autonomous, more or less educated and therefore more or less free individuals within society, even if society itself acts to constrain them. On this view, the message of humanitarianism can still fully explain what is going on when starving children shake at the end of my living room.
I'll identify therefore the anguish felt at others' suffering not as a motivation for charity but as a symptom of unfreedom. But given that I am not free to change the situation of third-world countries, what happens to the freedom I believe myself to have when I give charitably? For there isn't a mere logic at work here, but a whole... what you possibly might refer to as a social apparatus or something... that places images of starving and sick children on television. Charity is big business, and my perceived freedom for philanthropic action is a huge part of this machine. That's the real meaning of my charitable giving, and it doesn't line up with ending suffering.
You could interject: perhaps it is the case that I'm not yet free enough, educated enough, to react appropriately to the message. Maybe the right thing to do is to give relief as part of my emotional response to the imagery, to carry on, learn, and someday 'get it'. Even if I'm politically in a cage, as I claim, surely that's something relative, and that there are more of less autonomous, more or less educated and therefore more or less free individuals within society, even if society itself acts to constrain them. On this view, the message of humanitarianism can still fully explain what is going on when starving children shake at the end of my living room.
Yet it isn't that I'm not free enough, like I have 10 beans when really I should have 50, and all I need to do is collect more beans vouchers and send them off before they expire (sorry). If there is a difference between the kind of freedom implied by charitable giving and the kind of freedom constrained to feel bad and capable of ending starvation (as I assert somewhat blankly), then it's not only unhelpful or lacking but simply incorrect to describe the appearance of the emaciated child in the usual way. 'Simply incorrect' probably needs a stronger and longer explication, as it's capable of doing a lot of work. In any case, this difference in kind is probably at the heart of what I'm saying, and why giving to charity isn't just a 'stopgap' measure that should be taken (i.e. to help someone right now) whilst the world sorts itself out (or until I feel capable to sort it out). The pain of need - pleasure of giving logic detracts from the meaning of suffering, not just from my pocket or my DVD collection.
V
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