Women and squirrels

My opinion exactly.

Charity

In the last post I called charity, in the alms-giving sense, a grievance. I almost qualified it with "to an inflamed soul," but with men if the soul is not at least a little inflamed it is crushed. The offenses of charity are many, for both the giver and the object of it, though it is the object of charity who suffers most.

To be compelled by circumstances to accept a gift is a wound to pride, painful when it cuts into swollen ego, but a fatal poison to an honest sense of private honor. Charity demands gratitude, an elusive sensation that when spontaneous is a form of joy but that when forced cannibalizes joy in life. Charity makes one man more human at the expense of another, who is an object; apart from the injury to pride, the object is reduced in status before his family and the world. Charity is alien, often absurdly so, being given from the giver's interests and resources, so that the object's very world is made to seem strange and small. (Stevenson mentions a similar effect on the steerage passengers from the polite attentions of first class passengers on the steamship.) Charity imposes a debt, and debts weigh heavily on serious souls: "pay it forward" is a cheery high-energy American sort of thing to say, but that need to repay is a burden, and one that the object of charity cannot always set down.

It is then much easier to hate and resent the charitable man and to carry his gifts as grievances, or to despise him and consider his gifts only a partial payment on what is owed. Still, there is want in the world, and almost as much as that, man needs to give. So Jesus said,

Take heed that ye do not do your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have the glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand known what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thy openly.

It may be that his reason for saying so was only to protect the purity of man's relationship with God as embodied in temple offerings, but that description sounds to me like a wonderfully precise solution to the problem of charity. Its foremost advantage is that God is the center and object of the gift. Christianity at its best has interpreted charity to individuals in this way, which greatly relieves the strain on the recipient. God, not he, is the object of charity; the difference in status between giver and recipient is obscured by the infinitely higher reference point of God. The gift is given in secret, so much so that the giver should almost keep it secret from himself; the recipient need not then lose status in the eyes of the world, and ideally not in the eyes of the giver either, who is enjoined not to dwell on his gift. Moreover the gift is a discharge of duty, and if it puts the recipient in debt, he may pay it off in holiness of life or in prayers; gratitude too is owing only to God and demonstrable in worship. That the prayers may be nonsense directed at nothing does not prevent them from relieving the recipient's obligations.

I think in practical terms that the best charity is to someone whose needs you know well. It did not really need an economic study, but there is a marvelous paper called "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas," showing that gifts destroy increasing amounts of value as the relationship between giver and recipient grows more distant. As an economics paper it is concerned with the material loss, but anyone who has ever gotten a severely mistaken gift knows there is an additional loss in the form of feelings of alienation and isolation. For instance, my grandparents once gave me a book by Bill O'Reilly. I was a little happier not knowing they liked him, and especially not knowing they thought I would like him. Of course that is a trivial example, but it is a serious problem for relationships so distant they are merely notional, as when Americans show up at a Mexican orphanage to paint it. I went with a church youth group to do just that. It was painfully evident that we should have left our food with them and gone back on the first day. God only knows if they ever forgave us for our sleekness and our barbecues.

The very worst charity, so much so that it is simply a wicked act, is giving money to modern-day beggars. Starting from that point, you can pretty much work out all that I just wrote.

The best I have seen written about charity is in accounts of Maimonides' "Laws of Gifts to the Poor," though I have not read any Maimonides myself. I am pretty sure I just gave an amateurish version of what he wrote, but there is no helping the fact that no matter how hard you think something through, someone got there first and did it better.

What I would like to see is a solution to the problem of charity that does not require God. I suspect none exists, with mutual aid societies a partial answer.

Inaugural poem

Elizabeth Alexander's poem could hardly have been worse, except by being longer. The response to it explains how poetry has become a personal hobby, like knitting. In Samuel Johnson's day, a poem that bad would be mocked savagely; today, the expected response is to ignore the poem itself in favor of congratulating the poet for the sincerity of her emotion. It is like complimenting the knitter on the color of the yarn. Well, poetry used to aspire to more than keeping you warm. It is not just the lack of any meter or rhyme, though that loss hurts, but the wandering diction and vague thoughts that make it such a bad poem.

Alexander is deaf to all sense of words; how else can this highly unfortunate evocation of the chicken crossing the road be explained?

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

Yes, others did say that: they were chickens.

John Derbyshire and the Asia Times complained about these lines especially:

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

I might have an explanation for the wretched confusion in the last line. One of the difficulties for racial activists in the U.S. is that nearly everyone wants to help and to see disadvantaged people get on, which I think is what she means by love here, but most people expect that in return the people who are helped will stop feeling so aggrieved. Since in African-American studies existential grievance exceeds honest affection for black American and African history, Alexander as a professor of African-American Studies would intuitively feel that grievance is not a negative term and that love might threaten it.

It is of course also a mistake to think that someone with a grievance will be happier and less aggrieved after being helped. Charity itself is a grievance.

Over-correction

Being attached to correct usage has many advantages, earning respect, delighting listeners with pure speech, educating the ignorant, and attracting lots of chicks. It is not all good, though, since rebarbative cavilers watch closely for errors. In that spirit, I was entertained this morning by a van painted with the slogan, "Completely custom-made furniture upholstery is our business, but design is our forté." The correct pronunciation is only one syllable, but the two syllable pronunciation is so common that it is not worth minding. What delighted me was that the slogan-writer went the extra step of marking the second syllable the way it might be written if the two-syllable pronunciation were correct.

Prickly

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a funny article arguing that Mexico is misrepresented in the U.S. press as the land of burritos and drug gang beheadings, when it should really be seen as the home of a lively literary tradition. The writer is especially impressed by the Guadalajara book fair, which does sound pretty neat. That a big city could support eight daily papers is also impressive; I wish Seattle could do the same. The article, though, is funny for its prickly pride about literacy as a corrective for the impression created by thousands of savage drug murders in the last year and the breakdown of law in large stretches of Mexico. Who could seriously think that reporting on social chaos and a terrifying rise in murder, rather than on a book fair, is unfair and biased?

Also, the writer tries to make the U.S. look relatively illiterate; the U.S. is certainly unlettered, but the writer might be a little less puffed up if she took a look at the U.S. literacy rate (99%) and the Mexican literacy rate (91.7%). Given how little Americans do with their ability to read, it may well be the case that the U.S. could benefit from Mexico's cultural example, but the writer's attitude of mixed condescension and wounded pride is just silly.

The state of life

Dalrymple is the best, sometimes for no reason other than the poetry he quotes. Concluding his essay on relativism in social standards, he writes

Unfortunately, the solipsistic pursuit of happiness by people who live in close proximity to one another can, indeed often does, result in conflict. And thus it is that we come to create a hostile environment for ourselves:

for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

That is from "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold; it has the more famous lines about the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the sea of faith. Everyone has heard the phrase "darkling plain" but I at least had not read the poem before. The poem seems to struggle a little as a whole, but these lines are powerful and deeply moving.

The quoted passage omits a line and a half, "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" The omitted text clearly links the poem to the topos of Catullus 5, which has the beautiful lines "nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux / nox est perpetua una dormienda": when our brief light has once set, our night is one unending sleeping.

So da mihi basia mille, milia multa: let's kiss, a thousand, many thousand times. I would have thought pop music, being mostly about love, would use so potent an idea often, but the closest song I know of is Crowded House in "It's Only Natural":

Ice will melt, water will boil
You and I can shake off this mortal coil
It's bigger than us
You don't have to worry about it.
...
It's only natural
That I should want to be there with you.
It's only natural
That you should feel the same way too.

Arnold and Catullus have by far the better of the idea, though. They tell their lovers, you do have to worry about the clash of armies on the darkling plain; it will tear up and lay claim to your life. You will sleep one unending sleep, your day will end. Life has no beauty, no truth, no faith, no eternity, but what you choose to make with me.

Eloise and Abelard

The deficient technology of the 12th century meant Eloise and Abelard had to conduct their correspondence by letters. In the modern day, though, they would use online cartoons.