I’ve been having this little narrative in my head over my time here, trying to distinguish between compassion and effectiveness. It is triggered every time I’m asked for money. What provides a quick improvement does not always help in the long term. Worse, sometimes it’s damaging, counterproductive.
A good friend, Colleen, wrote a fantastic rant about part of this dilemma recently, The Burden of Charity. It rang so true to me here, that it deserves its own Cashewman post. Some quotes:
“I have often railed against charity, more since I have seen it here. People don’t need charity. They don’t need your pity and self-righteous help. No one, be they in a foreign context or in your own backyard, needs your quick fix solutions and answers to problems you don’t understand.
Good intentions are NOT enough.”
“Yes, quick fixes and technical solutions are sexy. They are easy to see, easy to understand, easy to feel good about. But they are not the solution that is needed, assuming we could/should ever find a good solution to a messy and complex problem.”
“How do you avoid this? The only way I know is to admit that you and I DO NOT KNOW the answer, to admit your own faults and failures, to recognise success in others, to ask more questions than you ever thought possible. WHY? Because if we don’t do this, we will continue to make the same mistakes that we have made for the past 40+ years, we will continue to waste everyone’s time and money, and we seriously risk undoing all the good work that might have been done over those same past 40+ years.”
She provides a great example. Please read it. She’s dead right.
B
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Hi Brendan,
Another provocative post. This has me thinking of a question that keeps rattling around in the ole noggin. Can we successfully pull people out of poverty when our society (i.e., mainly the United States), a small proportion of the world’s population, is using a disproportionate amount of resources?
With this I think about Colleen’s ending: admit that you and I DO NOT KNOW the answer, admit your own faults and failures, and recognise success in others Western, industrialized society is far from perfect, but sometimes I feel like that is the assumption going in. “We have wealth and prosperity through industrialization, so let’s spread it.” What do we still have to learn?
On another topic, I have been thinking a lot about how I can be more effective “in my own back yard.” The Extreme Affordability class has open my eyes to a lot of new things, and let me meet a lot of cool people doing awesome things, like yourself, but what if all of this time and energy was applied to changing the lives of people less than half-a-mile away, just on the other side of the highway from Stanford. People who may not have the same opportunities as those of us lucky enough to go to Stanford, but are still part of my community. Maybe another way to put it is, how can I apply what I am learning (or trying to) about effective change/prosperity in the developing world to those in my community who continue to exist in poverty?
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It was obviously a powerful post, since it caught my attention through the fog of myewb, and I wasn’t the only one.
Especially thought-provoking are her… solutions? Problem-avoidance techniques? I especially like ask more questions than you ever thought possible. This is interesting because, a) I’ve only discovered questions (real, unfettered curiosity questions) as my prime learning tactic in the last few years, and b) can constant questions (as opposed to constant questioning–not the same, in my opinion) actually solve a problem?
I have no idea. But I love wondering.
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