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Saturday, December 11, 2004
The Circle Of Care
I came of age in the Sixties, a time when America was gradually being turned upside down. And that having been said, I'll spare you any soliloquy about the Sixties. It's the upside-down part that matters.
I don't recall exactly when I learned about the duty of charity toward the less fortunate, but it was probably in my Catholic grammar school. The nuns were quite insistent about the obligation to help one's fellow man, when he was in genuine need. Every classroom had a "poor box," filled by contributions from the students. Its contents were periodically totaled and used for some charitable undertaking -- and I don't mean buying a color television for a family that didn't yet have one, or dragging a "homeless" man into a government-run shelter; I mean providing food or clothing for a struggling family that hadn't quite managed to make ends meet that month. Blauvelt parish, a blue-collar sector of Rockland County, New York, always had a few such.
A lot of things come to mind about that poor box and its uses, but none so strongly as this: no one ever suggested that the money be sent far away, to people none of us knew personally. It was to be employed right there, in Blauvelt parish, among the people we knew. This was so obvious, so fundamental to the concept of charity, that the contrary idea was never considered.
"Charity" derives from the Latin word "caritas," the concern for others that springs from personal connection. A related word of Greek derivation is "sympathy," the ability to "feel with" another person. These are not relations one can truly have with faceless and nameless strangers at a distance.
True charity requires proximity, for at least two reasons. First, the necessary personal connection, the sense that one is helping one's own, fails at any great remove. Second, human fallibility and weakness guarantee that, just as some will fail to prosper on their own, others will fail to employ charity properly; indeed, to receive money from others sometimes makes one's troubles worse. When this occurs, the giver must give no further, for other measures -- criticism, instruction, discipline -- are clearly indicated. With any separation between the benefactor and his beneficiary, it becomes impossible to know whether help helps in fact, or only in theory and intention.
Compare this ancient, common-sense approach to charity, preserved and perpetuated by all the great religious institutions of Man, to the modern concept. Today, our media would have us believe that charity is about voting for tax-funded, government-administered programs to redistribute our income to others we don't know. Some of the supposed beneficiaries are in far places where America and Americans are routinely vilified for their prosperity and derided for their generosity. Whatever rules modern charity observes are determined and enforced by salaried bureaucrats who pay no costs for any mistake. Volunteers and private institutions that attempt to take a role are tolerated, but distrusted. The apostles of modern charity would prefer that all of it be under the watchful eye of government monitors, to insure that no misleading messages about the importance of sobriety, continence, or self-reliance are packaged with the gifts.
Obviously, there's been some change to the concept. I'd like to leave aside the political implications of this change for a moment and concentrate on the inversion of the circle of care.
If proximity was regarded as the most important of the requirements of the old concept, it is considered no better than optional under the new one, and quite possibly a detriment. If personal concern, for both the bodies and the souls of others of one's direct acquaintance, was the fuel for the charity of old, the motive power of the new charity is rules: rules that direct the bureaucrat to shower largesse without regard for its actual effects, and rules that punish the citizen brutally if he attempts to avoid "contributing."
The new concept of charity first rose over the old one in the late Sixties, when the American welfare state began its explosive growth. In the years since then, we've seen many other things explode as well: crime, vice, filth in the streets, and social pathologies such as fatherlessness and illegitimacy whose effects have eclipsed even the darkest predictions.
Meanwhile, law-abiding, self-supporting Americans of the cities, they who are mulcted for the funds that support the new charity, have been drawing in upon themselves, isolating themselves as best they can from the madness that surges around them. Their circles of care have contracted to hold only themselves and their immediate families.
Count Leo Tolstoy once spent a night wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, giving to the poor whom he encountered until his pockets were empty and his energy was spent. At the end of his sojourn, those to whom he'd given were a little better off for a short time, but he knew and admitted that he'd made no lasting difference in their lives, that as soon as they'd exhausted the night's benison, the darkness would return. He concluded that one should act with love toward those whom God has placed in his path, rather than to ride forth and scatter his substance widely and without regard for efficacy.
Who are the needy whom God has placed in our path? Are they not our family
members, neighbors and friends? Is it not these whom our circle of care should
encompass?
Comments
I have to dispute some of your assertions here. I will certainly concede that all of the problems you describe with government “charity” (redistribution of wealth at gunpoint is robbery, not charity, and even with the irony quotes it still makes me nauseous to use that word to describe it) are both real and fundamentally structural. I do not concede, however, that the structural problem is distance, rather than the “political implications” that you’ve chosen not to address in this essay.
I will even accept that our _first_ charitable duty is to those near to us...certainly I would not choose to send money to Sri Lanka or care packages to Iraq if my recently-laid-off cousin still wasn’t able to keep the heat on for his wife and daughter.
But I do not accept that it is either misplaced or uncharitable to express concern for the well-being of people one does not personally know, or to put resources to use to advance that well-being to the best of one’s ability.
Do the young men and women serving in Iraq deserve the reminders that their country remembers them? To my mind, their very presence there is proof they do, but some may differ and I have no evidence stronger than that to offer in defense of the notion. Will a check to the American Red Cross for the tsunami victims ultimately help or harm? Well, the evidence of 40 years of government policy shows that money doesn’t always help...but I trust the Red Cross to spend it more responsibly than any government would, and feel safe in assuming that it will be a net benefit.
And I do consider both to be part of my duty of charity.
The key difference between such gifts and government welfare and aid spending is that I have the capacity and authority to evaluate my choices, and after evaluating to give only where and how much I’m convinced would be helpful (not to mention being able to give only as much as I can _afford_ to give after tending to those nearer charitable needs about which we agree).
Posted by Matt on 01/01/2005 at 05:41 PM
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