Giving, goodness, and Internet-scale altruism
Must all good works be optimized for publicity & efficacy?
“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.
“Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
~Matthew 6:1–4
We live in a world that seems to celebrate giving. We read a steady stream of puff pieces about our rich idols donating their billions to nonprofits and NGOs that maximize ROI—the greatest number of people helped for the least cost.
This is an Internet-shaped approach to doing good: scale is all that matters. Sure, people might benefit from a tool more specialized or less complex than Microsoft Word depending on their specific job—but they’ll all use Word, because even though it’s a bad program, everyone can more or less make it work for their purposes.
Today’s tycoons of philanthropy are mostly billionaire software-startup founders, or their ex-wives. What they have in common is this scale-oriented mindset that they bring to their philanthropy.
This is the “change the world” mindset, applied on a scale never before possible. Both the vast sums of wealth made possible by a global Internet market and the vast impact possible when that wealth is distributed are unprecedented in human history.
But is this the best we can do? Is it the pinnacle of philanthropy to give billions, in an attempt to influence the lives of billions?
How does Jesus’s teaching about giving map onto our world?
Well, certainly most of this mass-philanthropy is not done in secret—it’s broadcast as widely as possible. That’s part of the point: to people who believe that the point is to “change the world,” Jesus’s teaching seems foolish. After all, by broadcasting your own giving, you can help encourage others to give!
Moreover, there’s a certain coercive element how these billions are given: we’ve all seen the meteoric rise of “effective altruism” (EA) as the framework we all ought to use to select charities that merit our money. The foundation of EA is the same sort of measure-everything, act-at-scale mindset that characterizes our Internet age. Charities only deserve our giving if they have measurable impact on a huge number of people for low cost.
Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House contains a delightful character, Mrs. Jellyby, a woman obsessed with doing good for tribal peoples who live on the other side of the world. Dickens call her work “telescopic philanthropy”—looking as far away as possible to find people deserving of charity.
We can’t help but view Mrs. Jellyby with scorn, despite her tireless devotion to her philanthropy, because as she devotes herself to her faraway tribe, she utterly neglects her sick and hungry family.
Although most of the people who use effective altruistic methods are undoubtedly good people, it’s striking just how much like Mrs. Jellyby our Internet-tycoon philanthropists are: sadly, they’re in the news just as often for their broken relationships and failed marriages and outright fraud as for their giving; one can’t help but feel like the giving is an attempt at atonement, if not an outright cover-up.
One might begin to wonder if Internet-scale action isn’t so good for us.
Consider a different model, from just before the our Internet age:
The poet W. H. Auden took this teaching of Jesus very seriously. Auden, though he was a revered poet, was by no means wealthy. Nevertheless, being famous and respected, he could certainly have lived larger than he did. (Indeed, he was somewhat notorious for living nearer to squalor than opulence.)
In an essay entitled “The Secret Auden,” Edward Mendelson recounts a story in which Auden burst into the office of an employer, demanding partial payment for a work in progress. He made himself an unpleasant nuisance, refusing to leave until he was paid. It was only discovered later that he had immediately signed that check over to Dorothy Day, whose homeless shelter was in urgent need of costly repairs.
Mendelson makes a remarkable summary of Auden’s position relative to the change-the-world mindset of his day and ours:
By refusing to claim moral or personal authority, Auden placed himself firmly on one side of an argument that pervades the modern intellectual climate but is seldom explicitly stated, an argument about the nature of evil and those who commit it.
On one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, “I am a good person,” who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive. […]
In an age when writers as different as Hemingway and Eliot encouraged their public to admire them as heroic explorers of the mind and spirit, Auden preferred to err in the opposite direction, by presenting himself as less than he was.
These paragraphs perfectly encapsulate just how relevant Jesus’s teaching is to our own day, when we are constantly tempted to leverage our Internet-enabled superpowers to exert change over the world on a scale never before imagined.
One reason the virtue Charity is depicted as it is in the painting above, as a woman breastfeeding children, is that charity must start at the most intimate level in our lives, with those nearest to us. Jesus cautions us that unless we start by changing our own hearts, we are certain to go astry. Our lives are messy, complicated, and always in danger of breaking down.
There’s no effective altruism model for how to raise your kids, or how to be a better, more loving spouse, or how to deal with an overbearing colleague, or how to become more aware of your own faults so that you can work to overcome them.
But if we don’t start here, everything else is just missing the point. After all, as Jesus asks several chapters later, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?”