As part of my ongoing self-examination, I’m trying to be more mindful of how I interact with others. Some of that has to do with assertiveness and avoiding snark, but a big part that I haven’t paid enough attention to is “random acts of kindness”. Most religions and moral philosophies value “charity”, yet I think we have developed a twisted definition of the word.
The first definition on Dictionary.com is:
1. Generous actions or donations to aid the poor, ill, or helpless: to devote one’s life to charity.
In an old HackJournal article, I described charity as:
The quality of giving aid to those less fortunate than oneself. It does not necessarily mean that a charitable character must beggar himself to feed the poor. It does mean that the sight of starving children or sick people motivates the character to want to help them.
I think though, that both of these definitions miss the point. The distinction, as I now see it, lies in the area of motivation. Many people give to the poor or engage in other “charity” (henceforth “doling“) out of a sense of guilt. Again from Dictionary.com:
2. A feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc., whether real or imagined.
In other words, a lot of the “charity” out there is actually doling that is intended to assuage the dole-giver’s sense that they have done something wrong. Doling is intended to benefit to giver as much, if not more than, the recipient. To my mind, doling is not charity.
The purpose of charity, true charity, is to benefit the recipient, not to assuage the giver’s sense of moral or social iniquity. The giver of charity wants the recipient to be happier, nothing more, nothing less. Sure, if the giver sees the person becoming happier, that can be rewarding, but the best charity is accomplished without advertising the fact, i.e.- the giver never gets to see the person’s response.
For example: A restaurant patron overhears a waitress talking to someone about how good the diner’s chocolate cake is and how she wants to have a piece on her break. The patron then sees the tired and overworked waitress sadly carrying the next-to-last slice of chocolate cake to another table. A charitable patron might inquire of another server as to whether or not that was the last slice, and if so, ask to purchase it in a to-go container with instructions that it be confidentially given to the waitress after the patron had left.
I can hear the critiques now: “But where are the poor people?!”
Charity has nothing to do with poverty. It has to do with someone needing to feel cared about. It has to do with making a harsh and unforgiving world more human and magical. It has to do with keeping our eyes and ears and other senses open for those critical moments when a little goes a long way.
Benjamin Franklin and Robert Heinlein, both “notorious” fiscal conservatives, were also widely known for this kind of charity. Indeed Franklin is often credited with codifying the concept of pay it forward, and Heinlein is responsible (if rarely credited) for popularizing it. Both men were known to enjoin the recipients of charity to “pay it forward” when alerting the beneficiary was unavoidable. The point of this, as Franklin wrote, was “doing a deal of good with a little money.”
The other point of so enjoining the recipient was to avoid personalizing gratitude. The point of true charity is to increase the total “Happiness Quotient” in the world through a small, but meaningful act of kindness to someone who has no reason to expect it or to feel that such a gift is owed to them. Dole to those who feel entitled to it helps no one, rather it entraps both giver and recipient in a miasma of guilt and shame from which there is no ready escape.
I used to be heavily involved in the Boy Scouts of America, though I parted ways with them in the early 1990s over some of top-down decisions which I felt abrogated their responsibilities to the children they served. That said, I think that one particular facet of their program that I feel is important for all of us to live- their slogan “Do a Good Turn Daily”. To paraphrase the 9th Edition of the Boy Scout Handbook:
The Scout Slogan does not mean you are to do one just good turn during the day and then stop. It means looking for chances to help others throughout each and every day, then helping quietly, without boasting. Doing good turns should become an automatic, normal part of your life. Remember always that a good turn is an extra act of kindness. It is not just something you do because it is good manners.
Ideally, I would say, it is also something that forces us out of our comfort zones. It is easy to hand a beggar a couple of bucks and drive away. Doing that may assuage our guilt, but it is not charity. It does not help the beggar feel more like a human being. Nor does it do anything to discourage swindlers who have no need of receiving said dole.
Imagine, from a homeless person’s standpoint, the difference between these two scenarios:
- Someone drives slowly up to the beggar, rolls down their window a crack, and extends two dollars gingerly out the gap, never exposing their fingers or making eye contact.
- Someone who parks their car, walks over to the beggar, looks them in the eye and says, “Are you hungry? I can buy you food at that store over there. Would that help?”
To be honest, I’ve done both. More often still, I’ve just driven by. Sometimes, I’ve made the excuse that I don’t have the money to help, or that I’m running late and don’t have the time. Other times, I’ve rationalized that the beggar was really a scoundrel who was trying to make an easy buck. At some time or another, they’ve all been true.
The key is in knowing the difference between when it’s an excuse and when there is a valid reason not to step in. I’ll admit that I’m not very good at this, but I’m starting to recognize that there are two different emotions that I’m likely to feel regarding a possible charity case- guilt and compassion.
Guilt we’ve already defined, and as Ohky Siminé Forest discusses in Dreaming the Council Ways, it is a destructive force:
There is a difference between recognizing a mistake in a constructive way and allowing internalized guilt to kill any clarity of judgement or mental sanity. It took me a long time to understand that most Western actions and reactions are based on guilt, remorse, and fear of self, impeding a discovery of the profound realm of the never-ending power of true feeling and the legitimate freedom of soaring spirit.
Compassion, on the other hand, is all about the other person. Again from Dictionary.com:
1. A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.
From the Latin passio (“suffering” or possibly “I suffer”) and the prefix com (“with”), compassion means to “suffer with”. Therefore, true compassion is about acknowledging the other person’s pain (physical, psychological, spiritual, etc.), valuing that pain as strongly as your own, and working to help them feel better.
Is this not a better reason for charity than to lick our own wounds while resenting the unfortunate whose suffering reminded us of our own shortcomings?
Clearly, there is a subtle, nearly razor’s edge distinction between the two in the moment of action or inaction. It can be hard for us to distinguish in the moment whether we are feeling guilt or compassion, and therefore acting out of true charity or just doling. I am beginning, slowly and with great difficulty, to differentiate between the two, in part by relying on an enigmatic Push that I can sometimes recognize by its cold implacability.
With guilt, the thoughts might be intrusive and perseverative, but they are generally about me. I’m starting to recognize the guilty thoughts by their story-like qualities, often with an ending in which I’m thanked profusely and feel better, heroic even.
On the contrary, the compassionate Push often makes me scared to act. There is no story, no heroic narrative. I feel unsure, irresponsible even. I do not think about how acting charitably will make me feel better. No, instead I wonder whether I’m going to unintentionally creep out the recipient (“Oh, no, I’ve got a stalker!”). I worry about how I will explain to my wife that I spent $10 buying food for a complete stranger.
How sick is a society when it becomes more acceptable to send $20 to a faceless “charity” organization than to walk up to a homeless person and kindly offer to buy them lunch (for about $10)?
Luckily, Kara (my wife) is better than my culturally-ingrained fear of her reaction. She’s usually pretty understanding when I do something like that, but my acculturation is strong. I “learned” the horrible, twisted lie that charity is a thing for organizations and governments, when in fact it is really just about people being nice to each other.
And so, appropriating both the Scout Motto and Scout Slogan, I enjoin myself to “Be Prepared” to “Do a Good Turn Daily” (or more often). Perhaps, if enough of us do just that, we will stop being a society of fear and start being a society of human beings again.
