Charity shows the best side of human nature, and this is a charitable nation. There are almost two million charities, and Americans voluntarily contribute $400 billion a year to them. The local TV news is full of charitable events — runs, games and competitions in support of one local cause or another. Sometimes it’s a relief to switch over from the national news, just to see people doing something good for a change, instead of something greedy or violent.
Charity is good; there’s no question about it. The Bible, the Torah, and the Koran all highly recommend it. Religion and charity are intimately connected, perhaps because it often takes religion to make us think of others, especially the poor.
It would be naïve to imagine that the motives for charity are always entirely pure. “Every charitable act is a stepping stone towards heaven,” declared the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, giving the game away a bit. “Charity covers a multitude of sins,” promised St. Peter. In Islam charity is said to be taken into account in the next life.
Charity itself has changed in modern times. It used to be a personal thing, like the acts of Good King Wenceslas or Scrooge. When Ebenezer Scrooge had his change of heart, he didn’t set about improving wages and conditions for clerical workers, he just adopted Bob Cratchit and his family as his personal charity, which was the old-fashioned way. It still is in some poorer countries where families may, in a sense, ‘adopt’ their local beggar and give only to him, or her.
These days, we see personal charity as patronizing and even embarrassing. Yet I think we lost something when charity became, like everything else in the world, a big bureaucratic system. We don’t give charity, we give to a charity – meaning an organization set up to do charitable works. This way, we don’t have to confront sick children or starving stray cats directly. We can just send the money and feel good about it.
There seems to be a charitable organization for everything, from Doctors Without Borders to the protection of wild camels. We would like to support them all, and the feeling is mutual. In April, I started counting the charity appeals that came into our mailbox because it seemed that almost every one of those two million charities had our name and address. I counted a hundred and two in two months, and this is not Elon Musk’s address. It’s too much, an impossible overload of good causes, although I suppose all this unsolicited mail does help to support the USPS, which needs help as much as any charity.
Apart from the financial impossibility of supporting so many good causes, we have to remember that it’s a wicked world out there. All charities should be honest and well-meaning, but they’re not. Some of them are essentially scams, spending most of the money they raise on salaries and expenses. That’s the other side of human nature.
Like most people, we support the few charities we can, which are an eclectic mix of human and animal causes. But even by mentioning this, I am violating the first rule of charity, which is to give quietly. To quote Henry Ward Beecher again: “Do not give, as many rich men do, like a hen that lays her egg and then cackles.” Charity is like love: the less said, the better.
