More AnnaSophinspiration (charity)

Thankfully, I haven't done any more stalking since the last post about Ms Robb. But one of the things that her site got me interested in was the idea of CHARITY.

AnnaSophia visited India to bring aid and Western generosity to the impoverished and hopelessly poorly treated Dalits of India. Read her account here (pdf). No really, read it. It's very good and thought provoking, and even manages, just about, to transcend the blandness of the normal "Westener visits [3rd world country] to bring aid and comes away realising that poor people are a lot nicer than rich people" idea (even though this is the theme).

So thats all well and good. The Indians have a joyous few days and AnnaSophia and pals come away spiritually fortified. Many of the poor kids might even, as a result of the visit, manage to break out of their horrific caste. But empirically, even if every kid she visits is able to have a decent quality of life from then on, you've still only helped less than o.1% of all the affected people.

Charity to me seems futile. But there's always a nasty conflict in my mind, revolving round the issue of what is the best thing to do if you want to get rid of misery in the world. Part of me knows that simple giving can never eliminate poverty while we live in this robustly capitalistic (i.e. animalistic) world. If you give to one poor person, you achieve nothing, because wealth is relative. Someone else will merely slip beneathe the average poverty line. The poor will always exist, even if they have millions, because they will be relatively worse off than those with more. So your stuck with having to change the system, which is famously impossible. I personally believe that given enough time, mankid will naturally evolve to be genuinely egalitarian, but certainly not for a few thousand years.

Then there's the other part of me that says, "fuck off, these people are DYING ON THE STREETS, don't you social theorise at me! Any help they can get should be administered immediately, and conventional charities, preferably on a much larger scale, are the best means of doing this, even if it achieves very little overall."

No, says the first part of me, we need political action, starting with leaders who aren't handicapped by caring about only their own electorate.

What? says the second, How can you say that when you know that this is extremely unlikely to happen, and while you're prancing around with your revolution, people are dying on the streets?

Who should I listen to?

The other conundrum is whether, if I chose to give money to charity, I should seek to be personally successful in order to give more, if I know that being personally successful involves, at least to start with, keeping as much money (and time) as I can for myself. I just don't know. More thought required.