GIVING: IS THERE A CHOICE?
12/19/06
In his discussion “On Giving” (The New York Times Magazine, 12/15/06, p.58), Professor Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton, advanced a number of reasons why we give, or should give. From the Kantian standpoint, charity is like a logical or mathematical proposition, a self-evident and categorical duty. For Utilitarians, it is win-win: you feel good doing good for other people. He also does a sort of rights-and-obligations fairness calculus: citing Warren Buffett’s declaration that he “couldn’t have done it in Bangladesh,” Singer explains that Buffett’s financial master strokes depended on the American infrastructure, which in turn owed its vigor to wealth America had ripped off, starting with free real estate from Native Americans (via genocide) and free labor from enslaved Africans (which plunged African societies into a freefall from which they haven’t yet recovered) and extending at present across the globe, so that giving -or especially American giving- was actually a paltry compensation for past and continuing misdeeds.
Probably keeping faith with the current trend of devaluing religion, which a troupe of evangelical atheists is championing (see my earlier blogs), Singer doesn’t mention the injunction to be charitable of any religious leader, even if, when stripped of its religious packaging, it happens to be unobjectionable on perfectly rational grounds.
One such, for example, the Teacher’s recommendation to “Render onto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” would have served better as both necessary and sufficient cause to give than those Singer reviewed. If this recommendation were subjected to even the most cursory examination, it would readily be seen that none of us is rationally entitled to withhold anything from a free flow of giving.
Think about it. What can we as individuals legitimately claim as ours personally and exclusively? Our birth? Shelter and nurturance? Language? The ability to think and the modes of thought? The store of science and technology? Our agencies as economic or political actors? Our power and riches? Any enjoyment –taste, sight, touch, smell? Sex, or the other people we require for its enjoyment? Our deaths? Not one! Aside from the music, even Elvis couldn’t claim a proprietary interest in those fried peanut butter-jelly-and-banana sandwiches, even if you can’t think of anyone else who would want to make or eat them. Communal or social categories and arrangements underwrite them all, down to “frying” and “overripe bananas!” At birth, we insert the plug and gain access to our four million years of accumulated primate experience, and at our deaths, when the plug is pulled, hopefully, by dint of having acted in concert with the billions of our contemporaries, we would have left the energy enhanced rather than depleted for the users who will succeed us. It’s all Caesar’s, and no self-respecting court of law would sanction our making private property of any of it.
Well, the Teacher did go on to say what’s left over belongs to God, and we should give that back to Her/Him/It too. And here also, thinking about this, we can proceed rationally and philosophically and without relying overly on the customary religious sentiments. Turns out, you see, that for Caesar as for Lord Bertrand Russell, the universe is “just there,” of inexplicable origin, and so far scientists and accountants can credit only about .0001 of it -tentatively- to Caesar’s account. “What’s left over” is a good 99.999 percent: and the more we learn about the latter, the greater the likelihood that Caesar’s share gets more diminished and uncertain than increased (see my earlier blogs on “Science and Religion Slugging It Out.).
Where that leaves us, and what our relationship to that staggering 99.999 percent surplus is, I’ll save for later blogs. Meanwhile, giving doesn’t seem to be a choice, if not giving is theft, plain and simple.
Coincidentally, and especially when they are not driven by religious passion, but are behaving themselves as rationalists and philosophers, Muslims set great store by this matter of “rendering onto Caesar,” and it is the reason why they get so sore on the topic of “Muslim lands.” In a visionary article he wrote in 1956, Professor Ernest Gellner, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, identified the umma as a thought of social-organization-of-the-future, the next major milestone in human evolution. Umma is organic, indivisible, indissoluble and inalienable, common inheritance as much as common responsibility, giving and taking as seamless and one. Uneasy rest the heads of the oil-rich sheikhs and princes of the realm, who hold it in trust, as Muslims may periodically grow fretful about its custodianship.
Elsewhere in his article, Professor Singer performed an invaluable service by discussing the Millenium Development Goals, set by the United Nations Millenium Summit in 2000. The goals were to halve poverty, hunger, disease, sex disparity, infant mortality, maternal mortality, the spread of HIV/AIDS and the lack of drinkable water by 2015. The Columbia University economist, Jeffrey Sachs, has estimated that the annual cost of meeting these goals would be $121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion by 2015.
Singer then reviewed the incomes of America’s rich and superrich. He cites figures provided by Thomas Pikerty and Emmanuel Saez, economists at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris-Jourdan, and The University of California, Berkeley, based on U.S. tax data for 2004.
14,400 Americans, or 0.01 percent of U.S. taxpayers, occupy the top bracket. They earn an average of $12,775,000, with total earnings of $184 billion. The rest of the top 0.1 percent comprises 129,600 taxpayers, earning an average of over $2 million. The top 0.5 percent comprises 575,900 taxpayers, with an average of $623,000. In the top 1.0, 719,900 taxpayers earn an average of $327,000.
If these individuals were to give away annually from one-third to one-fifth of their wealth, a yearly kitty of some $404 billion could be amassed –without a single donor having to give up any of her/his dozens of automobiles, private jets and luxury homes dispersed throughout the trendy world, let alone touching her/his bottom line.
In fact, without sacrificing the least of their comforts, the top 1.0 percent of American taxpayers could take one country a day –and completely eradicate poverty, hunger, disease, etc for every man, woman, child and beast, as well as lack of access to education, meaningful lives and the rest. New Orleans and the rest of impoverished America today; Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago tomorrow; Lesotho, the Central African Republic, Congo, Zimbabwe the day after; Indonesia, Bangladesh, North Korea the next; and so on. We’d have “Heaven on Earth” in less than 365 days!
What does it tell us that this is not happening? Professor Singer concludes his article with the implication that, despite our vociferous and sustained self-reports, self-advertisements and self-congratulations to the contrary, Americans are the stingiest of any citizens of the developed, industrialized world. Our foreign aid is tricked out to return 99 cents of every aid dollar to U.S. farmers, businessmen and bureaucrats, and the remaining penny so depresses economic activity in the recipients’ countries that black holes of need are created for future generations. And of course, give us a Guantánamo or an Abu Ghraib, and we’ll take your sight, your hearing, your medicines, your food, your drinking water and in the end the rest of your tattered life –all the while making a home movie of it all, for sale to the “reality” buffs back home!
