Pretty Sentimental, But I Buy It

 

The charity involved is Samaritan's Purse. But this is not advertising for it. They do not identify it.

Caritas and Typhoon Odette

 

Some of the devastation from Typhoon Odette, near our home.

More on the primary virtue, charity.

Many people suppose they have done their bit by paying their taxes and chipping in, in return perhaps for a tax deduction, to some major charity.

This is not what Christian charity is about. To begin with, it is impersonal—you are feeling nothing for the people you help. You do not and need not see them. You are more or less paying to make them go away.  As with Dives ad Lazarus, the point is not to end poverty. That can never happen. The point is the beggar at your door. The point is to hug a leper.

In my experience, the big charities are also a scam. They do not exist to help the poor. They are there to help the rich—to salve their conscience, in the first place. To give them good employment, in the second.

More signs of damage o the main highway nearby.

Their business model relies on advertising. Advertising and PR is everything. Some significant portion of the money you put in just goes to drumming up more money. The better-known the charity, as a rule, the more they have been spending on advertising and PR. The honest charity that conserves the money for the poor simply cannot compete, and probably goes out of business.

Much of the rest of your donation will go to salaries for executives, who will be living quite well. The charities must compete for talent, after all, against other businesses and government. 

Expensive drinking water.

Then there are the usual expenses of running any organization: office space, equipment, legal and accounting services and supplies. Lots of good employment for professionals.

The rest goes to “programs.” But this still does not mean it goes to those in need. It pays the salaries of the local officials, their overhead, the well=-paid professionals they may hire. How much really benefits those in need?

Getting to the coast for washing water.

There is little accountability in charities. There are no market forces—beggars can’t be choosers, and the destitute have no social leverage. People tend not to ask tough questions—after all, charities are good guys, right? How dare you try to do them harm? So even for the money that gets down to the local level, and is not needed for salaries and overhead… the typical official on the spot has little incentive but his own conscience to actually go out and do anything. If he did, too aggressively, he would probably be hounded out by his colleagues for not going along with the game and shaming them. They will do enough for the next photo op, then motor home. That’s about it. Worse, the front-line positions are certain to attract some people who like to bully.

My own family is trapped in Cebu, Philippines. Cebu was hit dead on December 16 by Typhoon Odette / Rai, at category four. Many people there are without shelter, most seem to have lost their roofs. There is no electricity, no water, no signal, no communications. For some days the food markets were closed. Now food or drinking water is just extremely expensive, markups of 1000%, in a very poor country, and gasoline is hard to find in order to make it to the markets. Not that many own a private car—but the tricycles and jeepneys are often not running. 

Sister-in-law Judy, struck by a motorcycle while walking to work. (There were no jeepneys.) She's back home now.

Cebu is not remote or hard to get to—it is the second or third largest city in the Philippines. And it is right on the water, with a good port, even if infrastructure is damaged. Nevertheless, my wife reports that no charities or NGOs have shown up yet, as of January 2. Neither has the federal government, the military or national guard. The destitute are left to fend for themselves. She is in a position to know, too. Her sister-in-law, now sheltering with her, works in the local baranguay office—the local government. They have heard nothing.

Filipinos are familiar with the experience. Nobody is there. They have to help one another.

This is probably almost as true in Canada. I have some experience, having worked with the mentally ill in Toronto. If you phone the office of one of the big charities, they are never in. If you leave a message, they do not call back. If you get an appointment, they often do not show up. If they show up, they will fill in some paperwork in your presence, and suggest you go elsewhere. Rarely, they will offer your some random service that you do not need and is actually cheaper on the open market. It seems structured to benefit some professional in need of business, rather than anyone in need.

Damage in Danao, just up the coast from Cebu.

The secret, if you really want to help people, is to have some personal contact on the ground—the equivalent of Lazarus at your door. Failing that, it is to go through a church. 

To begin with, the churches already have an organization in place, right down to the neighbourhood level. None of your donation need go for administration or advertising or flying people in from afar who do not know the local situation. Next, the churches and their personnel can at least be reasonably hoped to be acting out of conscience, and therefore motivated to do as charity suggests. They can often deploy volunteer labour. And they even have some market incentive to actually give the money to the poor. For a secular charity, giving anything to the poor beyond a photo op is a dead loss. Churches, however, are in competition for adherents in each locality. Help those in need, and they may start attending services. They may also start contributing to the collection plate, or volunteering at the church.

Damage in Consolacion, Cebu suburb.

When I was working with the mentally ill, the charities that were actually on the ground and helping, as I recall, were the local parishes of the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, the Franciscans, a local consortium of Quaker, Baptist, Anglican, and Catholic churches, evangelical groups like the Scott Mission, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Non-Christian groups seem to do similar work, but only within their own faith communities.  The famous secular charities were invisible. Government seemed to be good only for cutting welfare cheques, or what used to be called “family benefits.” Not that this was trivial—but it was the one thing not lost in the bureaucratic fog. Making me think a flat guaranteed minimum income might be the best approach there. Otherwise, it is revelatory how absent government and the big charities were, with all their financial resources, in comparison to these religious groups, working with so little.

Unfortunately, eve some of the religious groups have since gone “woke.” This means they stop spending on the poor, and start spending it on “advocacy”: on salaries for rich bureaucrats. Being “woke” is always an alibi for not helping the poor. “It’s up to the rich to do it.” And the speaker is never themselves rich enough to qualify.

Meanwhile, charity give to the Catholic Church now risks being hijacked to pay lawyers’ salaries, or to pay compensation claims to victims of homosexual predatory priests, or the supposed victims of the residential schools. You may consider some of these expenditures worthy, but your contribution is liable not to be going to hurricane victims or refugees or the homeless or mentally ill.

Conclusion: you probably have to do it yourself. Get personally involved in a local religious charity and get to know the people who need help. For cases abroad, get to know people who have emigrated from that country, and still have contacts there. They can advise on how to help; and can put a human face on it. Which you need to make it meaningful.

Unconditional Love

 

Xerxes proposes that there are two competing images of God: for some, God is “unconditional love.” For others, he is a “ruthless judge.”

This is a neat example of the fallacy of the false alterative: it implies that, if you do not believe God is unconditional love, you believe he is ruthless. You are therefore driven to accept that he is unconditional love.

Yet he clearly is not, if by “unconditional love” you mean that he sets no conditions. He does from the very beginning, with not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God’s love is expressed as a series of covenants: he has obligations, man has obligations, and if man does not meet his obligations, punishment can be swift and severe.

Caritas or agape, divine love, does not mean overlooking faults and flaws; any more than married love does. It means keeping contracts, and at all times wanting the best for the other. It also implies respecting the other’s moral agency. A “love” that demands nothing of the other does not. That would be seeing the other as an object. It is the sort of love one might have for a good steak. It is a form of hate.

This is why the Bible says “One who spares the rod hates his son, but one who loves him is careful to discipline him.”

So is God a “ruthless judge”? The flaw here is in seeing justice as in opposition to love or mercy. Perfect justice is the ultimate mercy.

The Simple Law of Love

A Wall Street Journal article speculated on a Third Great Awakening as a result of this virus.

Yet if God sent this virus as a means to shake and wake, I fear He has more work to do.

It’s incredibly simple, really. The meaning of life is to seek the truth, the good, and the beautiful.

But most people avoid or deny the truth, have little sensitivity to beauty and deny there is such a thing as the good.

All that is arbitrary, “culturally conditioned.” Truth is just a matter of opinion. Evil just a matter of a “misunderstanding.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I have written here before of the simplicity of truth.

The good is even simpler.

It is love.

Jesus gave it as “Love God with your whole heart and your whole mind; and love your neighbour as yourself.” St. Augustine shortened it to “love, and do what you will.”

Love means you seek the best for the other. Just as you would for yourself.

It is simple enough to grasp that anyone who pretends not to get it must surely be lying.

They get it; they do not want to do it.

The Case for Agape

An early Christian love-feast. They call it "communion."

My leftist friend Xerxes has come out, resolutely, in his latest column, against agape, caritas, charity: the prime Christian virtue.

This seems shocking to me. Especially since he is nominally a Christian. But perhaps here we have the key to much of our current political and social turmoil. For lack of charity seems to have a lot to do with it. Charity requires, and in civil terms is, tolerance. People at large, at least on the left, seem no longer to understand the need for tolerance.

Xerxes prefers philios, friendship:

“Friendships are … more than the dispassionate, almost cerebral, association often lauded as ‘agape.’”

And he knows what he is saying. He defines philios accurately enough:

“we value and respect each other. We could and would trust each other with our possessions, our children, our loves and our losses.”

Moreover, his scorn for agape reveals an accurate understanding of what it means:

“’Agape’ implies that somehow I care about nameless refugees fleeing Somalia. Or flood victims in Iran. Or opioid junkies in downtown alleys.”

He does not care for Somalis, or Iranians, or junkies, and sees no reason why he should.

If all this sounds wrong to you, if you do care, it is because you are a Christian.

Having lived for long in non-Christian cultures, it is starkly evident to me that this caring for the stranger or even the supposed adversary is exactly what distinguishes Christian morality from any other. Take away Christian ethics, and it is far from instinctive.

In Confucianism, moral obligations are based on five defined human relationships: wife and husband; parent and child; friend and friend; ruler and ruled; and older sibling and younger sibling. If someone you encounter does not fit into one of those five relationships, you simply have no moral obligations to them whatsoever.

This is what makes China what is sometimes called a “low-trust” society. Put simply, you cannot trust anyone outside your family. This is why. A China-based YouTube vlogger whom I follow recently lamented that there are no “Good Samaritans” in China—get in trouble on your own, and there is no one who will help. And there is an obvious reason why this is so: they have not heard the parable of the Good Samaritan.

This leads to strikingly different moral judgements in practice. There is one example in a standard Confucian text, I recall, of a ruler who saw an ox being led to the slaughter for a blood sacrifice. Moved, he demanded the ox be spared. Instead, another ox was selected, out of his sight.

The Confucian text praised him for his tender feelings.

To a Christian, this distinction is nonsensical. How is it better to kill the ox you do not know?

So too with Aristotle. There is no obligation of caritas. Aristotle argues for morality in strictly practical terms: if you want to be treated well by someone later, do them a favour. If you expect to be honoured by the state, do things for the state. Everything is quid pro quo. If someone cannot plausibly do something for you, it follows that there is no point in treating them well or decently.

Even Islam: one has defined responsibilities to fellow Muslims, who are your “brothers.” One has some responsibility to deal decently with fellow monotheists, although they are not to be accorded equality. But as for an “unbeliever,” or an “evildoer,” God hates them, and so should you. This explains not just the current problem with Muslim terrorism, but, for example, why slavery was a basic part of Islam until recently.

Even Judaism: it is based on the fundamental tribal premise that one ethnicity is set apart from all others, and one does not bear the same moral obligations to “the nations” that one does to a fellow Jew. In the Old Testament, the distinction can get pretty harsh.

My grandmother told me, as a teenager interested in Eastern religions, that the core of the Christian message, that distinguished it from other religions, was Love.

I quietly scoffed at the time.

She was right. She meant agape, and it really is uniquely Christian.

The three Theological Virtues, according to Raphael. Caritas, Agape, is in the centre.

The New Testament itself states “God is agape.” 1 John 4: 8, 16. And Jesus calls us expressly to “agape” as the first and essential commandment.

“But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him. ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?’ Jesus said to him, ‘”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the first and great commandment. A second likewise is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.’”

The word translated into English here as “love” is, in the Greek, “agape.” In Greek, it is distinct from philios, eros, or storge, each of which might also be translated as “love.”

That’s about as unequivocal and authoritative as a statement can be in Christian terms.

In wanting to throw out agape in favour of philios, “brotherly love,” Xerxes implies that philios is a stronger sort of love, and so morally superior. And this sounds like something I have heard before: leftists today seem to scoff at the idea of tolerance. It is not enough to tolerate gay marriage, for example, or transgenderism. It is not enough to let Indians (First Nations) choose to remain Indians, or immigrant Muslims to remain Muslim. Instead, you must actively endorse and celebrate each position, assert its moral goodness.

But this is not a higher form of love at all. To see philios as the ideal form of love, to be extended to all, is about as sensible as seeing eros as the ideal form of love, to be extended for all. Universal love then means having sex with all comers. After all, don’t we love anyone we have sex with?

Actually, doesn’t that sound familiar? That was more or less the universal position of the left until quite recently. Leading directly to so many of our current social problems. It still is the creed of large portions of the left, even though it often conflicts with the new doctrine of philios.

The underlying problem is perhaps that the left has rejected Christian charity, and now thrashes about for mad alternatives.

As Xerxes rightly says, philios describes someone you “value and respect.” Someone you “could and would trust with your possessions, your children, your loves and your losses.”

And Xerxes generously wants to extend this love even to all animals.

But, as Xerxes is intellectually honest enough to admit, philios automatically implies contempt for some other party: for opioid junkies in East Vancouver, for Somalis in Somalia, or for some other group. You cannot distinguish friends without designating someone else an enemy.

Now, obviously, you cannot in fact trust “your possessions, your children, your loves and your losses” to any random person or animal. You cannot in fact trust them to Nazis, embezzlers, pedophiles, abusers, let alone grizzly bears, tigers, wolves, sharks, and cancer viruses.

So what actually happens when you drop agape and see only philios?

That means no love for enemies, or those you consider your inferiors, or of no value to you, or those you do not know.

In a word, intolerance. It is now okay to punch anyone you think is a Nazi, or castrate suspected pedophiles, or blacklist anyone with whom you politically disagree, and so forth. Which is just what we are now seeing on the left.

Jesus spoke directly against such limits to love:

“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? If you only greet your friends, what more do you do than others? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same?“ (Matthew 5: 46.7).

Agape always desires the best for the other, whereas philios, like eros, ultimately desires the best for oneself, and for another only as a means to an end. As Kant would point out, it is not really moral at all. Agape requires treating the other as an end in themselves. And philios, unlike agape, is conditional and transitory. Friends fall out.

This is where we are headed, as we reject traditional Christian values. The fact that this virtue of agape is absent in any other moral system you might mention demonstrates that it is not self-evident, not spontaneous, and so will be easily lost if Christianity is dispensed with. As it is already gone for Xerxes. As it seems it is already gone for much or most of the modern left.

And this is bad news not just for junkies and for starving Somalis. In political and social terms, agape translates as tolerance. Agape is the foundation of our belief in human equality, and in human rights. Liberal democracy and our rule of law, or experience of peace, order, and good government, exists and endures because agape requires this assumption of us: that everyone else, even people we do not know personally, even our current enemies, has basic rights, is loved by God, and deserves fair play. And it is not just me who thinks so. John Locke thought so too, and John Locke is the philosophical founder of that system.

Kick out the foundation, and more likely sooner than later, the edifice cannot stand.

Welcome to the postmodern 21st century.