The recently passed holiday season, along with being a time spent with family and friends, was also a time of giving. Although the petty materialist character of our society is most apparent around Christmas, it is also when altruistic and humble features reach their peak. While compassion for the less well-to-do is an admirable quality to possess, charity giving is perhaps not the best way to put it into action.
In 1891 Pope Leo XIII published a letter on “The Condition of the Working Classes,” in which he wrote: “The whole process of production as well as trade in every kind of goods has been brought almost entirely under the power of a few, so that a very few rich and exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers.”
He identified the structure of the economic system as the fundamental problem. It allowed the few, who were rich, to exploit the many, who were poor. As a solution to the problem, he did not suggest that the economic system should be restructured, but instead offered that the problem could be left for “Christian charity” to deal with.
We understand today that it was not charity that overturned the awful “condition of the working classes” of Europe and North America. Union rights, labour laws, the minimum wage, the eight-hour workday, social security programs, etc. are responsible for the general improvement of living standards among the common people of the developed world.
Also commenting on the poverty of the masses in industrial societies, a short while after the Pope wrote his letter, Oscar Wilde observed that “Charity creates a multitude of sins.” The foremost sin, in his mind, was that it distracts us from solving the problems it seeks to address. Wilde’s observation applies to the problem of poverty as it exists today, in the developed as well as the developing worlds, just as much as they did in his day.
Christmas-time giving, or for that matter charity at any other time, is not an adequate means of addressing poverty. It is, rather, a way to feel good about ourselves and ignoring the actual nature of the problems.
For all of money that goes to Sub-Saharan Africa as aid, for example, a whole lot more comes out in the form of debt servicing and capital flight. In the end Africa functions as a net creditor to the world, not a burden in the way that it is often portrayed. Putting effort into understanding why this circumstance exists, what our contribution to its perpetuation is, and what can be done to change the structures which produce it, is the right approach to try to create change.
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.” Dr. King declared, “It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
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