The Myth of Selfless Giving
Jason Evans posted an interesting piece today about the problem of giving to receive, based in part on a current NPR story about conscientious capitalism in efforts like The Red Campaign. He quotes Harvard professor Richard Weissbourd from the story, who laments,
“I do feel like, as a country, we have lost a sense of morality for its own sake,” says Harvard professor and psychologist Richard Weissbourd, who teaches about moral development. “You should just be generous to be generous. You should do what’s right because it’s right, not because of what you get back.”
I protested a bit in Jason’s comments, saying there’s no such thing as selfless giving, and he asked for a deeper explanation of my position, so…
A Commerce of Kinship
There’s an inherent expectation for a return in every act of generosity – and it’s a good thing too. Self-interest is what keeps us connected in kinship. The problem is when I try to coerce the act of generosity away from the blind faith inherent in giving toward a transcendent ego (of which I am a part), and turn it instead into a quid-pro-quo transaction that directly pays me back in some way. For the Pharisees in Matthew 6 the direct repayment was status or reputation. The same could possibly be said for those who buy Red products. Conscientious capitalism usually turns on the immediate repayment of an enhanced reputation or image. This is when generosity turns into pure commodity.
It’s true that Jesus condemned selfish giving in Matt 6, but he appealed to self-interested giving. If purely selfless giving was what Jesus wanted, then he wouldn’t have appealed to us by promising a “reward” for virtuous giving (Matt 6 verses 4,6,14,18, and 20). The difference is Jesus appeals to a reward that we cannot coerce or control, because it’s a delayed reward that is from God by faith through the Kingdom.
The purpose of giving is not to “Do what’s right because it’s right” (an astonishingly simplistic statement for a Harvard professor). That’s altruistic fundamentalism. (He may as well have said, “We should give because the Bible says so.”) The entire purpose of giving is to create bonds of gratitude, loyalty, and love between people. That kind of kinship is impossible without an expectation for some kind of reciprocity.
For example, you wouldn’t keep loving your wife if she ceased to love you back (at least, if she was still capable of doing so). You might hold out for a while, but the truth is, as a general rule we simply can’t remain connected to people who don’t reciprocate. This is true in all human relationships including marriage, friendship, and yes, even parent-child relationship (once they reach a certain age). Love, like all gifts, must be moved back and forth, or around the group, in order to grow. Otherwise, it dies. We tend to deny this because we intuitively understand that to capitalize on the reciprocal nature of giving would corrupt it – usually by becoming a means of coercion. And that’s true. But it doesn’t change the fact that, deep down, we really do give partly in order to receive – even if we willfully blind ourselves to this fact in order to avoid the temptation of abusing that very power.
Still, just because we tend to blind ourselves to it doesn’t meant there’s no commerce in giving. But rather than a commerce of power or cash, true gifts move in a commerce of kinship. That’s what gifts are for.
The Commodification of Gifts
With market-based commerce, we convert resources into commodities and trade them for cash so we can avoid creating kinship bonds with people. Cash creates boundaries, or allows them to remain intact, precisely because it eliminates all reciprocal debts. That’s not altogether a bad thing. After all, we can’t be connected in kinship to very many people. We couldn’t function in a society where every human interaction created a loyalty debt. The problem in a marketplace society like ours is when we try to commodify things that are inherently gift-oriented. (A gift is not just something we give away, it’s something we first receive. Specifically, it’s anything we receive that is dependent on something uncontrollable and external for it’s production – what we often call “inspiration,” or “wisdom,” or “love” or “God” – and can’t be directly quantified or duplicated without destroying it’s spirit.) This includes art, music, teaching, affection, compassion, etc. The effort to quantify and commodify these “gifts” in our culture has resulted in a crisis for the people most associated with them. This is why artists, teachers, ministers, and musicians stereotypically struggle for acceptance and prosperity in a market society, and those who do “make it” are often accused of “selling out.” Why? Because “making it” in a market society generally means selling commodities, and the very act of turning your gift into a commodity tends to destroy it because commodities, by definition, cannot remain dependent on an uncontrollable external source for production. Selfish giving seeks to turn gifts into commodities (or mask commodities as gifts) in order to control their repayment.
This is usually what we’re referring to when we denigrate certain gifts from certain people because “they have strings attached.” We mean that they’re trying to control us or the gift – or both. But just because good givers have relinquished control doesn’t mean gifts bear no obligation. All gifts bear a burden of reciprocity. In this sense, there’s no such thing as a gift with no strings attached. The greater the gift, the greater the burden. It is these burdens of loyalty and gratitude that bind us together.
Selfless Giving Is Arrogant Giving
But the idea of selfless giving is really just the negative version of the same marketplace dynamics as selfish giving. When I refuse to be invested reciprocally in the gift I give away I’m preserving the boundaries between myself and the recipient because in doing so I must also refuse any kind of return. This is the inherent problem with Modern charity and altruism; it tends toward a one way movement of gifts that don’t allow the equality of relationships that come from true reciprocity.
So, selfish giving is coercive giving because it seeks to gain power for the giver. Yet selfless giving is arrogant giving because it denies all interdependence, saying to the recipient, “Here is my generosity. I have no interest in it, and I will never need anything from you whatsoever.” This converts the gift into a kind of negative commodity, thereby denying the very purpose of the gift – which destroys it. Self-interested giving, on the other hand, is humble giving because it acknowledges that I need the return of the gift someday in whatever form it may come (and it usually comes in another form).
Still, there’s a problem.
Faith and the Transcendent Ego
As I mentioned earlier, the self-interest inherent in all human giving runs the very serious risk of becoming selfish giving. Most of us deal with this dilemma by denying the self-interest involved in giving. We either lie to ourselves about the return we get from giving, or we render it inconsequential by acknowledging only a negligible return – like the “good feeling.” We readily admit to feeling good about giving because good feelings are cheap, can’t be converted to cash, and can’t really be used to hurt anyone.
But, while this denial can protect the integrity of giving it also short-circuits the power of giving by relegating it to the realm of an unattainable virtue. Nobody can be truly selfless, so insisting that our gifts remain selfless demotivated those who acknowledge their own self-interest and neuters the gifts of those who willfully blind themselves to it.
The solution is to expand the reciprocity of giving beyond the realm of the two people involved. This is accomplished in two steps:
- Increasing the size of the giving group, making “reciprocity” a group dynamic, and,
- Directing our giving and expectation for reward toward a transcendent ego.
In so doing, we eliminate the quid-pro-quo of typical reciprocity while still appealing to the powerful human motive of self-interest; we eliminate the corrupting possibility of acting for direct repayment; and we create new social bonds among a wider group of people because this kind of gift-economy requires the expansion of the group. This is exactly what Jesus does in Matthew Chapter 6 when he condemns any expectation for direct repayment in giving and, instead, redirects people’s generosity toward God (the transcendent ego) with a new hope of “reward” from the Kingdom of Heaven. He doesn’t eliminate self-interest, he appeals to it and redefines the self in broader, communal, Kingdom terms.
This kind of giving requires faith, because when we give to the group we delay our reward and relinquish control of the gift. We trust God to be not only the source of all gifts, but also the mediator of all reciprocity. Instead of lying to ourselves about a reward, we gratefully acknowledge its power and let go of its control, becoming blind not to the personal benefits of giving, but to the source and timing of the gifts return. We wait patiently while the gift moves around the group, growing with every stop, until one day it returns to us when we need it. In so doing, we humbly acknowledge our own dependence at both ends – our dependent on God and on the group – while letting go of the illusion of power and independence.
JC-
This is darn near brilliant! I say 'darn near' because now I need to read it again to comprehend whether it actually is brilliant or simply very good!
Hope we can connect sometime soon……thirsty?
CJ