Thread

This summer I traveled to New York, and what struck me was the pervasive homelessness — dozens of people sleeping in street tents or even on bare asphalt.

Seeing this, I believe every person who is doing good themselves must think about how they could help. But given the scale of the problem, the question quickly transforms into: "Can I help at all? Whatever I do would be a drop in the ocean."

A night tent in the niche of a luxury boutique. So sadly descriptive of Manhattan.

Let us first consult the Bible for an answer.

The Widow's Offering (Mark 12:41–44)

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything — all she had to live on."

Jesus clearly teaches that the significance of one's action lies not in its effect on the material world. But isn't something missing here? If a loved one needed an expensive treatment for a serious illness, wouldn't you prefer a large donation from a wealthy person over a few cents from a widow? Isn't it even a bit self-serving of the widow to assume she has done well by her soul, when she has barely helped anyone? This contraversy is what bothers me, and it is what this post is about.

Let us first try to reconcile pragmatic and spiritual reasoning through the categorical imperative:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

We can apply this idea to our case by saying that even though a single widow's donation is of little practical use, we would wish to live in a world where every individual, no matter how wealthy, does donate; hence the widow's act of donating is morally correct and imperative. But why do we want a world where every widow donates? The implicit logic is that even if a single donation is minute, there are many widows, so the total volume they donate is not negligible — it becomes materially important to society. Unfortunately, statistics — one of the symbols of our rationalist era, and so an adversary of spirituality in the symbolic realm — has something to say against this.

According to statistics on charitable organizations [1], [2], approximately 75% of all donations are below $100, yet these donations contribute less than 7% of the total amount given. In other words, we could hand every widow's coins back to her and little would change at the macro scale — the Kantian approach fails to bridge morality and pragmatism.

Another interesting insight statistics offers is that large and small donors view "doing good" differently. According to the Stanford Social Innovation Review [3]:

Large donors are more focused on health and education while small donors are more focused on human service organizations.

Donor size also seemed to be a strong predictor of where the money goes. Overall, results suggested that institutional donors tended to contribute the largest proportion of funds to education and health nonprofits, while individual donors were most likely to contribute to human service nonprofits (e.g., youth and family services, housing, food pantries, job support, recreation).

I'd place this within a rational-versus-emotional dichotomy. The emotional response is immediate and short-term: if you see an image of a hungry child in Africa, your instinct is to give them food. That's how most donors think, and what most donors consider "good." But if you only give food, the next generation of children will still face famine. You see where this leads.

This brings to mind a controversial remark by Winston Churchill, who accused the people of Bengal of "breeding like rabbits," implying they bore responsibility for the Bengal famine of 1943. At first, this seems extremely cynical, even inhuman. Yet I believe the phrasing stems from how Churchill saw the world, not from a corrupted heart. Why? Because to Churchill, the Bengal famine was nothing more than two numbers: the volume of food supply the UK could provide, and the total population of Bengal. The famine was simply the mismatch between the two. The irritation in the quote, I'd argue, comes from an inability to resolve the catastrophe coupled with an inclination to resolve it.

All in all, on this grand battlefield of emotions and rationality, it's so easy to lose a sense of what "good" even means. For instance, there's a common belief that capital is inherently immoral. Yet Bill Gates spends approximately $24.6 million per day on charity — probably more than most of us will donate in our entire lives. Who, then, is the hypocrite?