Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -C.S. Lewis
All charity is NOT good charity
In large part people give uncritically. There is a general public belief that any and all charity must be good charity. Any growth in money injected into development or increment toward more development agencies working toward the ‘end of poverty’ is generally accepted as a necessarily positive step for the future of mankind. This is a difficult myth to disprove to the mass of people that, in whatever capacity, participate in charitable organizations. There is a lot at stake for these participants. People desperately want to believe in the good of Western nations. Even more so they want to believe in the good in themselves. And so it goes, people anxiously cling to a model self-image that they have been trained to aspire to, one that best serves their interest.
Charity and self-interest
There is a hegemonic narrative in our society that clearly defines for us the people we ought to be. Charity is one of the most prominent characteristics of the good human within this narrative. Because helping others has been structured into our society’s expectations of one another, the act of helping itself becomes an act to satisfy these expectations. People undertake acts of charity, in other words, to illicit a specific response from their audience. This audience could be made up of friends, family members, employers, etc. Each charitable act is an investment. It is a currency that can be traded in for a more positive image from an audience that grants the charitable an increment of upward mobility in a particular system. This is most evident in the job market which looks very favourably on those that have committed themselves to charitable acts such as volunteer work. To help others is often the most surreptitious means of helping ourselves.
The mask of charity
Charity perpetuates a narrative where the privileged classes are the saviours of the hopelessly poor. How many times in our lives have we been exposed to images of Westerners nobly grasping on to the child of some poverty stricken family in the global south? Each image contains a message. It reaffirms the superiority of the West. It conceals the truth that we are the robber barons. Our privilege is a direct result of the detriment of billions of people we will never see and thousands we see everyday but choose to ignore. Most are out of sight and out of mind. But when we do take notice, any guilt, embarrassment, or unease is quickly erased with an arrogant decision to give, to help, to be charitable toward those that we assess are in need. We pat ourselves on the back so that we never have to look at the deeper cause and effect relationship between our privilege and others' despair.
Charity will never solve poverty; it will only serve to mask the social structures responsible for its creation. Charity does not address the root causes of the distribution of access to resources. It can only ever scratch the surface of the structures of inequality contained within global capitalism. Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy once said of the ngo industry: “it doles out in aid what people ought to have by right”. It waters down people’s anger at a system that does not work for their interest. It prevents the mass revolutionary change required to restructure the system upon more equitable terms. Charity, aid, development, call it what you will but the truth is that it functions in order to maintain order in a system of mass inequality. And until we are able to see it for what it truly is, the charity of moral busybodies will keep the robber barons at the master’s post.
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