Charity is not charitable. It is the false goodness of doing good for strangers. You don’t know strangers, so you don’t have to be responsible for them after you buy them with your donation.
The distance of giving at a distance is a kind of selfishness. Part of you gives so that you feel better than your recipient. Then you brag to others about your generosity. You raise their praise so that they can salute the flagpole of your kindness.
Where is personal responsibility? Why should I give to homeless people when they have failed to keep something as fundamental as their homes? Must I bear their missed responsibility?
Saintliness is doing good warmly for close friends. It is not necessarily the transference of funds from your pocket to his but a shake of the hand, a pat on the back, a complement when it is unexpected. It is not charity. It is friendship.
Charity implies obligation and self-congratulation. It is giving with strings attached. It is a balloon that flies and is punctured by a tree branch of self-interest. Phony is as phony does.
Back in the sixties I wanted to do something to stop the Vietnam war. I went to a grungy office in the village and saw a bunch of nasty, ragged hippies hanging around. I wanted to be good but the protestors were so ugly and nasty that I didn’t want to be associated with them. There was not a kind bone in their bodies. The anti-war crowd hated the soldiers who were dying for us in the rice paddies. They boasted about their goodness while they cursed our brothers’ bones.
They felt that they were the peace makers. They were the fakers. Their goodness was a pose. Like an Obama speech. Full of sound and fury, signifying hypocrisy.
David Lawrence
