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.