Tragedy, farce, and Ouroboros
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon RSAnimate, a series of absolutely wonderful shorts by the Royal Society of the Arts.
Perhaps the most interesting of the bunch was a talk by Slovenian philosophical heavy-weight Slavoj Zizek, echoing Oscar Wilde’s ‘Soul of Man Under Socialism’, entitled ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’.
The thesis of Zizek’s essay is essentially that business has subsumed (some would say co-opted) charitable donation, by bundling its cost into the things we consume. A dollar spent at Tim’s sends Canadian kids to camp, and if you instead want to send help elsewhere, a dollar spent on fair-trade coffee represents more money for farmers in Brazil or Ethopia or Indonesia than they would otherwise get for their labours.
But where some might consider this to be an advancement, our favourite dour Slovenian, echoing Wilde, has another opinion – that it is immoral to use private property to address the ills arising from the institution of private property.
I’m not there yet. I might say it’s fitting. But nevertheless, I can only agree with the thesis that our true goal should be to build a society not in which the symptoms of poverty are addressed, but in which poverty is impossible.
Utopianism, right? Well:
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” – Wilde
Suck on that, Gloomy McPractical.
I do understand the concern that continuing to alleviate the symptoms delays the societal realization that causes can be addressed, even as my pragmatic side insists that what little we can do is better than doing nothing. But I have long thought that the ultimate goal of any charity should be to make itself obsolete. When enough men have been taught to fish, it’s time to eat one’s own tail or else move one’s expertise to another cause.
Business is big on what they’re currently calling root cause analysis, which is quite simply the pursuit of an underlying problem rather than the many things that go wrong because of it. Effective charity thinks that way as well. So must each and every one of us.
Jason said,
March 12, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Dear Abbey,
I would rebut Mr. Zizek; while private property owners are the cause of the many ills, they also generate more wealth and prosperity than common property owners (i.e. the government). If social welfare has taught us one thing, it is that the more access you provide, the more unsustainable it becomes, and the greater the drag it is on private property owners who can more efficiently and effectively use resources. So, what’s more immoral, a government who increasingly takes my money with no accounting of the effect on poverty, or the coffee company who at least tells me where my money is going and what it is achieving? Methinks the former.
marcinwrona said,
March 13, 2011 at 1:07 pm
While I don’t disagree entirely, bear in mind that theoretically government is more accountable to us, not less – if a government is using our money to ends that we don’t approve of, we have democratic means of changing that.
I say theoretically, because between gerrymandering, divisive politics and propaganda, our democracy is a shaky, frequently unhealthy thing.
I’d also dispute that social welfare has taught us anything close to what you’re saying it’s taught us. It may have taught us that in Canada (and esp. the US) because we’ve never approached the issue in good faith, but there are many healthy economies with far stronger welfare protections (France, Germany, Scandinavia) that in fact bank on same to drive sectors of the economy. It’s easy to take a risk in Sweden to bring something new to market, because you know there’s a net to catch you if you fall, and you know the government will pay for daycare. Consequently, it’s become something of a high-tech mecca. (It has, of course, had its budget crises as well, but where some – i.e. Schulichite propagandists :p – hold that up as a sign of inevitable societal collapse because such fits with their expectations, a more measured view is that these have been simply the result of the standard economic cycles that hit all of us).