The Business of Giving

No, this is not a rant against capitalism and how the modern industry of charity is its accomplice, a sort of a safety valve, like the pressure relief valve that is necessary to keep the system from crashing.

This line of critique is put forward rather vehemently by none other than the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek in a 10-minute RSA animate (Zizek on Charity) titled First as Tragedy, then as Farce uploaded in 2010. Although Zizek successfully reveals the nexus between capitalism and charity, it is more of a description rather than an analysis. Furthermore, one cannot wholesale reduce charity to be an arm of capitalism, albeit there are definite connections. Finally, although the critique of capitalism, by the self-proclaimed neo-communist, is spot on in many places, he too acknowledges that the modern liberal capitalist structures, both economic and political, have indeed benefitted more humans than any other form of economic-political ideology in the history of the human race.

But this is not the line of enquiry I wish to pursue – mine is of a much more humble nature. I am interested in interrogating and analysing the very ‘act of giving’ and hopefully discover a few insights in the process of this interrogation.

First, everyone gives! Yes, everyone gives, and it is not restricted to the philanthropists and the religious. All we have to do is look at our credit card statements or our monthly expense lists. We will very quickly find out that we have given out a lot, sometimes more than we should have, leaving us in the bright red. Giving constitutes the primordial ontology of humans, to use a Heideggerian phrase. But all that is meant by this fancy phrase is that to be human is to give, in other words, humans are givers by constitution and giving is an intrinsic component of being human.

Secondly, if giving is a basic constituent of being human, then, why is there all this fuss about charity and capitalism? Yes, there is space for legitimate fussing here, I suppose, because although giving is a condition for being human, there are different forms of giving. In my view, the quarrel is here! Let’s get back to our credit-debit card statements and our monthly expense lists. We have already established that all humans give and these expenses are our immediate evidence. Now, what we need to do is look at the ‘particulars’ against the amounts we have given. The question that needs to be raised here is - to what have we given? I think it might be a useful exercise to analyse the particulars of our giving and maybe even categorize them. I think here I can make a bold assertion – irrespective of the particulars towards which we have given, all our giving can be traced to a person who benefits through our giving. The easiest to trace is the entry on buying that wretched iPad, which I am still trying to learn how to use – of course, I am the beneficiary of that giving, that is very simple and straightforward. Similarly, it won’t take too long to put a beneficiary against each of the particulars. Suddenly, we will have a list of people to whom we have given through the whole month by spending on different particulars. Now we begin to get a different understanding of our expenses, they are actually our giving to different people. We can play interesting games with these figures and names of beneficiaries now. For instance, we can rank these ‘individual beneficiaries’ in a descending order (highest to lowest), and one can safely speculate that the top ten in that list are the people we really love and care about. We can do other interesting things with these figures, for example, even among the top ten, we can find out the proportions of our giving to each of them. All we have to do is to add the amounts of the ten persons and take individual percentages of that whole. We might be surprised to see the difference in the proportions of our giving even among the top ten we love and cherish. Perhaps we might want to do this exercise privately, lest the numbers get us into trouble.

Thirdly, to take this line of enquiry further in a very ‘everyday’ view of life, we can ask another question, slightly different, about the top ten. How much of our giving to the top ten do we consider as an investment? What I mean is, what returns do we anticipate even as we give? Maybe an immediate answer would be, ‘No! Of course not, we don’t expect any returns!’. That is understandable, but let’s be honest and a bit ruthless about it, the iPad I bought could have been for pleasure or for business, but in both cases, it was meant to give me returns – entertainment or profits respectively or at least some sort of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ value! Now, you could say, that of course this is common sense! Who would spend any money without thinking about any returns? Whether we spend money on or give to our family, other loved ones, or even ourselves, we do it with the knowledge of returns – in other words, giving and expectation of returns go hand in hand. It would appear foolish to spend or give without thinking through or at least knowing the value that giving would generate! The interesting bit here is that it is not intuitive to associate ‘acts of giving’ with knowledge of returns, at least in an intentional manner. Perhaps this is not really so interesting and rather a naïve view in our modern economically driven world!

Fourthly, let’s explore a little more the relationship between ‘knowledge of returns’ and ‘acts of giving’. Does our knowledge of returns condition our acts of giving? Does knowledge of sure returns influence positively our giving? What happens to our giving when returns fail? The mother of all questions could be – would we give when we have sure knowledge that there will be no returns? This seems to be an absurd situation! Why would I give when I know there is no return? In our everyday living we would call that foolish spending and we are taught from childhood to be wise with our money, to spend carefully, in other words, make sure there are returns. What does knowledge of returns entail? Knowledge is not an innocent accumulation of facts rather it is a knowing of a process, a process which when invested in, brings about a desired result.  In our case, the stimulus of giving would initiate a whole range of actions all of which work together in a coordinated way to produce the desired result. This knowledge is powerful knowledge. It controls the process so that desired results are obtained. Within the charity industry, millions are spent to ensure that desired results are obtained. The language often used is that of transparency, accountability, sustainability et al. Thus, giving becomes controlled giving. If this is what giving is, then the question one could ask is, is it giving at all?

Finally, this brings us to the issue of giving and acts of giving, particularly about giving without expectation of results, without control over the processes that are initiated through our acts of giving. I am already squirming at this thought, how can I give without any control, without asking for any knowledge of what is going to happen to my hard earned money. How can I trust even as I give? Paradoxically, although we are talking about giving, these thoughts reflect that what is at stake is ‘me’ and I use the language of ‘responsible giving’ to keep ‘myself’ in the centre of the act of giving – if this be the case, then how is it really a giving? This is to question the foundational structures of what we understand by giving and its relationship to returns and knowledge. Imagine giving in ignorance, complete ignorance of what is going to happen with our giving. Giving cheerfully, because there is joy in giving. Letting go of all controls and the need for knowledge and returns – enjoying and basking in the very act of giving rather than what giving accomplishes. Of course we do not let go of our cognitive and intellectual abilities in performing these acts of giving. When it comes to giving, I do not want to treat any one as stupid, I am sure none of us are. But it is more than being an intellectual it is about having the wisdom to recognize in the presence of the other, our very being in the world, how we should be and how we should give. It is being sensitive to the world in which we live, the sheer reality of the world around us. Of course there is indeed a place for knowledge and even the idea of returns that inform us in our acts of giving, but giving that is front-loaded not by these other subsidiary processes, but rather by giving itself.

I am sure this is a rather inadequate analysis of the act of giving, and I have more questions now than I had before I began writing these thoughts down. Hopefully, this will merely provide us an opportunity to begin a conversation, on actions of giving which fundamentally define our very posture in this world.

P.S. I recently read a quote that stimulated this piece, and here it is – ‘But when you do your giving, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing’.