Don’t Feel Guilty About Celebrating While People Starve

Particularly around Christmas time, appeals to our charitable nature rise to prominence, with many good charities and causes increasing our awareness of those less fortunate than ourselves.  We are reminded that the season is a time for giving not only to those we love and cherish but to strangers in dire need of aid, whether it is the want of food, clean water, health care and well-being or other basic essentials for living that most take so much for granted.

Most of us are all-too familiar with heart-breaking images of starving African families, with fly-ridden children no more than pathetic, helpless little clutches of bones, gazing desperately back out at us, pleading for a release from their living hell.  That we still witness such shocking and tragic suffering in the 21st Century rightly offends our humanistic senses of justice and compassion.  So too do events closer to home, of cruelty and neglect to children, to animals.  It is a hard heart that flips the channel when the terrible plights of such needy are brought so starkly to our attention in commercial breaks during one of our favourite warm, fuzzy Christmas films, or some novelty countdown of tacky Christmas songs on MTV or some such.  So it is right that we feel compassion and it is right to donate to these most worthy and necessary of causes.

Sometimes, though, I can’t help the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I’m being made to feel a significant pinch of guilt for the dreadful suffering of others.  I can’t help the feeling that someone is trying to play on the wrong emotion.  “Look at these in hopeless circumstances who need your help and compare it with your own life of relative prosperity and bliss” some campaigners seem to be saying, trying to shame us into giving.  At first impulse it seems a powerful and apposite tactic.  But think past charities’ beneficiaries for a few moments and it strikes me as being cynical, cold and manipulative.  Just plain wrong.

Prosperity, I’d argue, is not something to be ashamed or guilty about; humble, maybe, but the very opposite of embarrassed and contrite.  After all, if the aim of charitable giving is so others less fortunate than ourselves gain an increase in well-being in some way large or small, and this is self-evidently a good thing, then surely it follows that we should celebrate – not criticise – or own relatively luxurious lives.  We are where we’re trying to get the needy to be: in a better place.  The last thing we should be doing is feeling in any way negative about it.  

So prosperity can – and should be – cherished and enjoyed while we have it ourselves; it does not preclude feeling compassion for others less fortunate, it isn‘t hypocritical for us to indulge in our privileges.  We should just be careful that we don’t forget the needy and that our consideration for them isn’t abused; we shouldn’t feel – or be made to feel – ashamed or guilty or culpable.  Let our altruism be spread through joy as well as concern.  But let us do this with humility and a clear conscience, so the act of giving doesn’t just benefit those who need our help, it also lights a little candle in our own lives.  That way, the good brought into the world is multiplied and everybody gains something.