Because my wife is a great cook, our kitchen cupboard holds many
different condiments, not least among them a bottle of coarse sea
salt “harvested by hand, unrefined, from the pollution-free isle of
Noirmoutier, off the Atlantic Coast of France.” It’s good salt, and
I salute the fifth-century Benedictine monks who made gathering it
possible by draining wetlands into salt marshes, but sprinkling it
on buttered pinto beans doesn’t make me feel as though I’ve been to
Noirmoutier, any more than using Santa Maria-style seasoning makes
me think I’ve pointed the car in that direction lately.
Odd as the analogy may sound, that’s why the dumbing-down of
charity worries me. Catholic theology makes a distinction between
bodily or “corporal” works of mercy like feeding the hungry, and
spiritual works of mercy like consoling someone else. To those
noble categories of long usage, Internet entrepreneurs have
apparently grafted a third option: the “virtual” work of mercy.
That’s when you as a computer user send microcash to some organized
charity simply by clicking an onscreen button or viewing an ad.
Any frequent visitor to web portal sites like Yahoo or Microsoft
Network (MSN) has seen the encroachment of the “feel-good click.”
MSN headlines recently cajoled viewers to “Help Refugee Children”
by using Microsoft’s new “Live Search.” That promotion launched
January 17, with an announcement that all searches done from a
designated portal would trigger a donation from Microsoft to an
organization called ninemillion.org, which is sponsored by the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. A Reuters report
estimated the sum involved as $0.01 per search, with a minimum of
$100,000 and a maximum of $250,000 (assuming 250 million searches).
The promotion ran through the end of March, and was not original to
Microsoft. If you missed that window of opportunity, Microsoft
still lets you send instant messages that generate kickbacks to the
Sierra Club. And all of that was just a warm-up for the hoopla over
the recent “Live Earth” concerts.
A website called www.charityclickdonation.com lists charities that
receive donations from advertisers when you click on particular
links. Grant a company you don’t know permission for a visual
drive-by, and its accountants or accounting software will chuck a
penny or two in the direction of a charity you do know.
The easy charity mentality can feed an unwarranted sense of
victimhood. For example, Bob Keating of the Open Directory Project
(ODP) says his company is “fighting the good fight against the
encroachment of the profit motive into what is rightfully an
editorial process.” ODP is undersized (3.8 million sites in its Web
search catalog compared to about 4 billion in the Google catalog),
but this is one case where the roguish thing to do might be to root
for Goliath over David. Why wouldn’t an intelligent algorithm be as
valid a search tool as a recent college graduate whom ODP pays to
catalog some portion of the web?
Is this nostalgia from a guy prone to such sentiment? Yes, but
there are other reasons why under-the-radar charity is something to
grouse about.
First, the “feel-good click” blurs the line between charity and
commerce. I have no quarrel with “socially responsible”
long-distance telephone service like Working Assets (on the left
side of the political spectrum) or the Sienna Group (for people who
think that George Soros and his ilk are rich enough), because those
things are instances of putting your money where your mouth is.
Green initiatives, co-ops, and credit unions deserve applause,
too.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation has turned breast cancer research
into such a high-profile cause that you’d never know that lung
cancer kills more American women annually, but at least if you
“walk for the cure” and wheedle pledges from your friends, you’re
actually doing something. Clicking through an ad to send a penny to
Greenpeace doesn’t even rise to the level of consciousness for most
of us. Talk about cheap grace! Martin Luther once railed against
the medieval Catholic Church for the practice of selling
indulgences, and now many merchants are doing precisely what
corrupt monks were told to stop doing. Exhibit A would have to be
Al Gore and his carbon offsets.
Investigations by the Financial Times (London) and a
few other outlets found that “Companies and individuals rushing to
go green have been spending millions on ‘carbon credit’ projects
that yield few if any environmental benefits.” Right-wingers at the
Washington Times responded to that news by chortling that
“Our blogs are posted on carbon-neutral Web servers, using
certified organic computer personnel and biodegradable pixels.” At
least one Australian company augmented its product line with carbon
offsets for dogs and cats. National Geographic reports
that “For 35 Australian dollars (about 27 U.S. dollars), customers
of Sydney-based Easy Being Green can offset a year’s worth of
carbon emissions linked to their dogs, from trips to the vet to,
yes, breaking wind.”
The carbon offset boondoggle shows a second reason we should be
wary of easy charity: because its rapid growth provides cover for
other nefariousness. Did you know, for example, that Planned
Parenthood operates off millions of dollars in tax money? In 2004
and 2005, Planned Parenthood received $551 million in governmental
funding. Title X of the Public Health Service Act covers overhead
expenses that the country’s leading abortion provider would
otherwise have to pay for itself, which means that devout Christian
taxpayers in the U.S. help to fund the abortions they oppose.
Author Sam Harris is fond of declaring that mainstream
Christianity provides cover for kooks, but his “gimme shelter”
thesis applies more to easy charity than to religion. If clicking
through an ad is a good deed, we’re only a step away from
suggesting that it’s just chumps who rise at dawn to volunteer in
soup kitchens.
But feel-good clicks are Pavlovian gimmicks better suited to
mice or monkeys. Real charity depends on interaction with other
people; people whom you have to love if you do not want them to
resent your help. Better to help the homebound senior next door
with her grocery shopping, or overtip the bartender at your local
watering hole, than pat yourself on the back for a
conscience-raising song download or a “charity click.”
Patrick O’Hannigan is a writer in North
Carolina.
