Why we need a societal rethink on charity, not mawkish celebrities making us feel bad on a Friday night

The unsettling mix of celebrity and charity always leaves a rather sour note in my mouth. There is nothing more galling than a bossy celebrity telling the considerably less well off to “dig deep” in some mawkish television extravaganza where the uneasy bed fellows of comedy and tragedy lie cheek by jowl. The philanthropic efforts of the well known and powerful inevitably confers more benefits on the giver than the receiver, and Friday night’s wall-to-wall charity orgy Stand Up to Cancer was one such well-intentioned abomination, where a promising young footballer who may well have had his whole future curtailed by a disease of abject pain, misery and humiliation, remained chirpy and upbeat in the presence of the messianic David Beckham, who offered up a moment’s hope and a sprinkle of star dust, as if that was going magic away his cancer. Where Davina McCall, no stranger to the strenuous charity effort herself, particularly when it is accompanied by cameras capturing every grimace, and a heroine’s return on the Jonathon Ross Show where she relived her pains for the benefits of less ambitious audience members, whose squeezed incomes she now sought to extract through gusty emotional blackmail. Where a languid Kate Moss, who’s single-handedly propped up the tobacco industry for decades,  driveled incoherently at queen of mean Naomi Campbell, attempting to draw attention to her adorable, wide eyed grief, rather than the voxpop from a lady who was, we were told, already dead, while Noel Gallagher goggled wordlessly in a misplaced stab at comedy on the celebrity version of the usually bang-on Googlebox. Where Jamie Oliver made an agonising, baking inspired hash up of Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” while she looked on disapprovingly – their time,  no doubt freely given,  was, after all worth so much more than what most of us can afford to give.

Tugging the heartstrings of the least well off, charitable extravaganzas of this sort, with their misleading totalisers, and larking, self-serving celebrities momentarily galvanise a viewing public into indiscriminate giving with little thought to the where the funds are actually going, while inevitably, over the long run, anesthetising us against suffering that most of us can only fail to imagine.

Much like charitable fundraisers at the opposite end of the social spectrum, this sort of charity does more to console the donator than to raise standards for the needy, and leaves a vacuum at the heart of global social policy, where charities – many of which are disparate, disorganised and inefficient – displaces a societal duty to the needy, where we all contribute a proportion of our means to support those who, for whatever reason, need additional care.

Most people know that giving spare change to a homeless person isn’t really helping them; it’s just assuaging our own guilt and fobbing them off, often entrenching them further in their problems. For one, it encourages them to hang around, occasionally making a nuisance of themselves outside bars and cafes, relying on the drunk generosity of groups outside pubs, or allowing diners to pay them to go away. We know they will probably not spend the money wisely (though who among us can always claim to do that?) and that society has a responsibility to take care of those who slip through the cracks in a more  top down, less ad hoc way, in the form of hostels, mental health and addiction services, food banks and,  more to prevent people from needing these services in the first place.  We know there are career beggars may rake it in from well meaning tourists, but that doesn’t stop us from occasionally feeling indulgently empathetic,  chucking a couple of quid at a more engaging, or upsetting beggar. It’s human nature to want to help – but only when we feel like it. As a society, it’s just not good enough.

Yet the more we’re hounded by charity, the more apathetic we feel, as we avoid yet another chugger waving a clipboard with an entitled sense of do-good at us when we’re trying to take a lunch break for our own financial enslavement. Charity is but a sticking plaster on suffering that ensures society fails in its basic duty of care to all people in need, by relying on voluntary handouts rather than well-funded and efficiently run state care that guarantees provision to everyone who needs it, whoever they are and wherever they are from.

Just as tipping removes the need for hospitality bosses to pay living wages to their staff, and rewards the consumer with reduced prices with a side of optional guilt, charity enables society to turn a blind eye to suffering unless it is ambushed  into optional service charges that the hapless diner fears benefits proprietors over staff.

Unfortunately, it is a reality that social care is shockingly unequal throughout the world, and charity has played a role in remedying, but also reinforcing the status quo of power and need around the world, enabling less well off governments rely on handouts in a self-fulfilling cycle of poverty, population growth and poor health care that destablises already shaky support systems still further.

But it is interesting that, in a truly global emergency, perhaps the first real global emergency, where the sick in Africa threaten to wreak genuine havoc on the rest of the planet, and its more established powers, more through the potential for economic destabilisation with global consequences, rather than a genuine possibility of a worldwide epidemic, it is billionaires such as Bill and Melinda Gates and and Mark Zuckerberg who have led the way in philanthropic efforts while governments around the world have fumbled and bumbled as the disease spreads ever closer like the coming zombie apocalypse. Unthinkable sums have already been spent trying to curtail an epidemic that should have been nipped in the bud at an outbreak, yet still many governments around the world, already reeling from war, economic sanctions, weird weather and their own financial miscalculations, may yet regret failing to step in in a united effort to curb the global fallout from a crisis that started elsewhere.

We can and should not rely on charity and philanthropy to step in where governments can’t or won’t. Society’s financiers and rule makers have a duty to also be its conscious, although most financial institutions seems by their very nature to be lacking in moral judgement. But it is a failure of society – indeed humanity –  not to place the burden of suffering on the shoulders on the many. I don’t claim to be an expert on international monetary policy, but it seems to me that aid should not be topped up by the rich dispensing good will as and when they see fit whilst simultaneously preying on the good will of the poor.  It is up to all of us accept that scaled taxation for the reasonably and shockingly well off, rather than indiscriminate giving, might well create the sort of karmic benevolence that makes life genuinely better for everyone.

One person’s suffering, wherever it happens in the  world, will eventually affect everyone else, like a butterfly wing stirring a hurricane. But the chances of the world having the united foresight to recognise this and take united action  is as likely as effective international efforts against Ebola preventing an international  failure of compassion so profound that many of us willingly turn our backs on the sick from the contagious spread of fear.

So before you smugly swim the channel, and extract goodwill gestures from cash-strapped strangers, or become a dame for talking for ten minutes about rape victims in war torn Africa, or text a fiver when your tear ducts have been jerked by an emotive soundbite, consider that wider social provision on a universal scale would mean an unnoticeable sacrifice from the many to create more holistic, joined up care for everybody else. Like an ocean composed of raindrops, the benefits of an international welfare fund, whose contributions could be calibrated on gross domestic product, distributed according to necessity, would  do much to rebalance economic power and ripple out to create a tsunami of aid where it is most needed, which by alleviating suffering all over the world, would benefit everyone. It would foster a shared sense of responsibility and purpose conferred much more widely than the glow of smug endeavour from the most able to give, and apathetic, reluctant handouts from the rest of us. Of course this would require us to recognise the basic humanity of people irrespective of their social and geopolitical status but then, as a species, or perhaps just as a society,  we’re simply not evolved enough for this.