This article was originally published on Sep. 6, 2023 on Medium.com publication Rome.
Or is it a solution?
There’s a strong presumption among those who charitably give money to good causes that their money will help solve some deep seated problem — hunger, disease, poverty, addiction, bad governance. The list is long, as long as the ills society has contrived since we descended from the trees. Even if the money is a spit in the ocean, given time and the cooperation of others, the hope is that it will eventually contribute toward a solution.
Jared Diamond in his seminal book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” doesn’t pronounce on the topic of charity. But I extrapolated from his writing some thoughts toward that topic, specifically from his discussion of the evolution of human groupings. In his chapter titled From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy, Diamond traces our successful abandonment of the trees to our ability to form groups that advantaged us against all the predators we had to share space with in the savannas.
It started with Bands of individuals, who over centuries of nomadic settlement patterns and hunter-gatherer economies, gradually coalesced into Tribes, then Chiefdoms, and then States. Presumably now with the advent of superstates, such as the European Union, the Russian Federation, and the British Commonwealth we are still evolving our social and political groupings.
For all intents and purposes we should include here the United States as a superstate. The US is a sometimes cooperative, but increasingly fractious grouping of entities we legitimize as separate States, each with its own political and social agenda. The superstate construct shows every sign of not having yet reached a stable enough configuration that we could write it with a capital S. Maybe in another 50 years?
You might infer from Diamond’s cautionary chapter title that the State configuration is associated with thieving. And actually he does make that assertion. There are all too many examples of heads of state, economic bigshots, religious figures, and celebrity icons who are all richer than you and me. In the democratic-capitalist system of the United States, this includes our national politicians (a millionaires club) and our CEO’s (more and more a billionaires club).
We see the effect of the American version of kleptocracy in the ever widening wealth gap between the fabled 0.01 percent, who Diamond would all call kleptocrats, and the 99.99 percent of the rest. The upper 0.01 percent, about 24,000 people, control more than 17 percent of American wealth. The bottom half of Americans, more than 150,000,000 people, have 2 percent of the wealth. America is the poster child of a kleptocracy. Does that wealth disparity constitute a borderline obscenity or is it a camel-can’t-pass-through-the-needle obscenity?
The point I’m leading up to is that no matter what degree of obscenity it is, it’s the reason why we have charity promoted as a virtuous counter to the deadly sin of greed. In the 1987 movie Wall Street, the protagonist Gordon Gecko defends greed as the culmination of evolutionary fitness. We wouldn’t be who we have become without the 1.0 percent pushing and shoving their camels through the needle’s eye.
But as Diamond mentioned, deep in our primate brain we have some lingering egalitarian genes that express themselves to constrain our greed. We presumably incorporated them into our genome during the millennia of our our Band days in the African savannas. I bet even the 1.0 percent believe that not everyone can be greedy all the time. That would lead to an unrelenting cock fight. A no-win situation for everyone. I speculate that those egalitarian genes are what sustain our charitable practices today. Without them we’d all be consumed by uncontrolled gimme, gimme, gimme.
There’s much bad to be said about wealth disparity, but it does have the quasi virtue of giving people opportunities to engage in charitable giving.
And we give not just to our own people, but to a lot of others around the world that our own greed keeps impoverished. Further, we seem to export greed itself. The American brand of kleptocracy is as popular as ice cream among would be kleptocrats around the world. There are billionaires already in even desperately poor countries around the world.
I wonder. Just how effective is charitable giving? Does it actually help in closing the wealth gap? Do the small, immediate effects of giving ratchet up over time to lessen the need, even it they don’t solve the ultimate problem? And how do prospective donors decide on where to place their donations? What do donors get from the giving? Do they get anything at all if the gift fails to make any difference?
These and other questions recently made up the talking points of a discussion group here in my small town in West Virginia. We are a progressive, not conservative group politically and socially, so there is a lot of preaching to the choir, though it wasn’t always so. We used to have conservatives in the group, but they got tired of being beat up all the time and permanently bailed a few years ago.
This group of 25 or so individuals, almost all retirees, gets together weekly to talk, to share background and personal experience, and to reflect. People almost always come with firm positions on the issue of the day, but listen respectfully and attentively to others. I think everyone believes that the talking is productive, meaning that it raises our sap and feeds our synaptic networks. It seems sometimes that conversations do ponder possible solutions (it’s not all griping) and suggest actionable ideas. The truth, however, is that with some few exceptions we just nurture ourselves and brush off the doing part to the rest of the world.
Recently we discussed charity, starting off by recognizing that many religious traditions have dictates associated with giving, for example the practice of tithing. Many of these practices assume and even require the existence of the poor, and the religions establish in their canons the moral necessity of practicing charity to be in good standing. Hence, the rich man and the camel proverb.
It’s interesting that Diamond predicates religion itself as a form of kleptocracy, so maybe the charity religions requiring of their adherents is self-serving. Think gothic cathedrals, the Taj Mahal, the Great Mosque in Mecca, the Borobudur temple, the Egyptian pyramids and consider who paid for them.
If this is so, then we as donors can be played by those with their pious hands out. In the group we talked about whether this is something that the kleptocrats do deliberately. Do they make us feel guilt about not caring enough for the very people who they push into poverty? Are banks, for example, acting in good faith by putting up donation jars for their customers for the United Way campaign? Or are they deflecting their own responsibility to provide for their poor customers? Are these the same banks that have redlined their home loan portfolios, for instance?
In my own small county we have four active food pantries and we’re the wealthiest county per capita in the state. Why is that? Does the necessity of our food banks, all of which operate as official charities accepting tax deductible donations, count as a something we should be proud of or ashamed of? Are they stepping stones to eliminating poverty in our community or they here to stay? The organizers don’t see the need fading. Just the opposite. They’re probably here for long haul.
I believe this pivot between pride and shame is really irrelevant to the pragmatics of charity. Even if the food pantries do solve the local hunger problem eventually, some other problem will emerge that will still require our checks and spare change. If this somewhat cynical prediction holds, then should we ignore the illusive and problematic long term effects of charitable giving and just feel good about the act of giving? See it as affirming our better natures? Let it become a habit that exercises from time to time our latent hunter-gather sensibilities? Can sharing really be its own reward?
Here’s an example. Our local Catholic church acts as a charitable conduit for a program to increase educational opportunities for girls in northern Cameroon, the poorest part of a poor African country. The charity taps a handful of girls each year and sends them south to a Protestant run boarding school. The girls are predominantly Muslim. The charity pays the tuition and living expenses for these girls for the years they attend, all the way through high school. Most of the girls don’t make it that far though. The needs of their families take precedence and they leave the program. Only one girl over the life of the program has so far made it into college.
So by any success measure the program looks pretty ineffectual, but its small cadre of American advocates rejects any pessimism over the poor statistics and they chug along, touting its worthiness. They’re seeing the solid, good intentions of the program as reason enough to keep it going. And keeping it going seems to be more problematic each year. Several years ago Boko Haram started kidnapping girls in northern Cameroon and the advancing Sahara is increasing drought. If Haram doesn’t get you, famine will.
When I give to the program, I try to ignore my misgivings, suppressing the feeling that it’s a lost cause. It’s enough, I reason, that educating a few girls can counter the opinion that girls are expendable in a poor country in Africa. Meanwhile here at home it perpetuates and strengthens a culture of sharing in a poor state in America. Win-win.