Most partnerships eventually hit the rocks. But Christmas and charity will always stay together. It’s the only truly serial monogamous relationship I know. Every Christmas, our otherwise semi-dormant charity genes burst into life. Compassion towards the poor and the needy becomes a dominant social concern.
During my adolescence, I regularly devoted my Christmas to working for charity. As chairperson of Hackney Citizens’ Rights, an organisation I helped establish, I would organise parties for pensioners living on their own. Or help transform the local church into a temporary Christmas shelter for the homeless. Sometimes, I would help out at the Salvation Army soup kitchen in Whitechapel, east London.
My fellow volunteers were a mixed bunch – middle-aged, middle-class women, devout churchgoing men, journalists from the local paper, retired civil servants, students and social activists. They were all nice, mild-mannered people. But the moment they encountered the “needy”, they turned into domineering matrons, camp commandants and lords and ladies to the manor born. They tried very hard; and the hardest work of all was relating to those who received charity. To be needy was to be somehow defective – and the dependency status of those in need triggered in these would-be do-gooders the urge to talk down to the poor as if they were children.
That’s why I gave up my Christmas charity activities. I couldn’t stand the way my fellow volunteers treated the poor as though they were a lumpen mass. It was obvious from their smug and Lady Bountiful attitudes that my fellow charity workers were moved more by their own virtue than by the plight of the poor.
I was also bothered by the temporary nature of this seasonal charity spirit: do the homeless only need shelter during Christmas? What happens to the old and lonely during the rest of the year?
It seems to me that Christmas is the season of free market compassion. If the mystery of the market place is a hidden hand that supposedly makes everything turn out right, then charity at Christmas is the invisible force that relieves our social conscience for the whole year. By being nice to our fellow human beings during these few days, we show the world that we care.
Most people do not think that charity should be an unconditional activity. They see it as a product, an integral part of consumption. And like all products, charity is a source of identity. We like our charity optimised as a consumer choice.
Charity Christmas cards, for example, are an institution that says something about who we are. Are you a Christian Aid or a Unicef person? A World Wildlife Funder or Lifeboater? Or do you actually send off money for the hand- and foot-painted cards that plop through the letter box? Would you like your favourite charity appended to your credit card, so that every time you spend you also give to charity? Do you choose the design or the cause first?
But it is not enough to share our worldly goods with a good cause. We also have to pass our world-view to our friends. So we buy our Christmas presents from the merchandising catalogues operated by charities and causes. Colombian coffee grown by co-operatives from the Oxfam catalogue, or pencil sets from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, or Christmas decorations from Barnardo’s. Or, as the Hawkshead catalogue puts it, buy a new jacket and “send us your old jacket so we can send it to a good cause”. You can buy your way to a charitable nirvana; and through personal consumption you can give everyone a great Christmas!
All this benign enterprise and obnoxious merchandising reduces charity to glossy images. But when charity is marketed with slick precision, embodied in designer accessories and turned into opportunities for having fun (charity balls, charity dinners, charitable pop concerts), it is saying far more about the giver than about the legitimate claims of the recipients. This is charity for the “me” generation.
But there is nothing new in all this. In western society, charity has always been synonymous with patronage. Medieval Europe relied on obligation and patronage to hold society together. All those rebellious peasants, turbulent barons and precarious lords and masters were bound together in a fixed order of power relations defined as mutual obligations. To be poor and needy, therefore, was somehow to have broken your obligation to society. It was to step outside the neat and comfortable ordering of who got what.
The long march of progress changed many things – but the poor and the needy have doggedly remained with us. As Bernard Shaw noted, there were deserving and undeserving poor. The deserving poor populate the background of nice 19th- century novels, receiving visits and patronage from nice ladies. The undeserving poor – tramps, vagabonds and gypsies – also populate nice 19th-century novels, importuning their betters for unwarranted charity. It was the task of organised charity to contain them and head off any trouble.
Charity is still tied to patronage, but it now comes with a set of signs and symbols that enhance the image of the patron. A visible currency of medieval life was building monuments to charity as a testament to power. Today, we use charity as a visible sign of public relations. The royals, for instance, patronise charities and seek their legitimacy through charitable works. Obnoxious pop stars use charity to enhance their image. And, as always, charity is a suitable occupation for middle-class ladies with time on their hands.
Charity has never been about the needs of the needy or the legitimate rights of the poor. It has never been about our obligations, for that could become the basis for their rights. It has always been about our discretionary power.
That is why charitable causes are not for me. I don’t think selling flags outside Asda and asking people to walk around bearing evidence that they have participated in patronage is helping the poor. I do not want to be associated with good causes that want to impress me with a list of “personalities” as their patrons. I have no intention of purchasing goods that show I care. I am not interested in charities that need to make me feel good about parting with my cash. And I do not want to have fun in the pretence that the less fortunate will have more to eat from my hedonism and conspicuous consumption. I do not need patronage; and I am pretty secure in my identity.
The only charity I am interested in is the one that recognises that the poor and the needy have rights. Rights to improve their lives. Rights on my time and money. Rights to see charity as an obligation, a social responsibility, not a badge of identity or an expression of power and patronage.
Instead, I will stick stubbornly to an Urdu proverb I learnt as a boy: “Do your charity and throw it in the river.”
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