We Honor What We Destroy

Giving to worthy causes should make me feel good, so why doesn't it? Non-profit organizations raise issues that arouse my sympathy and concern—supporting one law, opposing another; ending war, poverty, genocide, hatred; saving extinct species; preserving wilderness; freeing political prisoners; defending free speech; promoting love; instilling hope; fostering community; building affordable housing; supporting cultural institutions, public television and radio.... Commercials and direct mail assure me that I can make a vital difference by contributing to a cause. Yet, the philanthropies present the situation in such dire terms that I find it hard to believe that my paltry contribution can make the slightest difference. Clearly something is not working. Giving money ought to at the very least give me the sense that I am doing something constructive and worthwhile, but it doesn't.

To some extent, eleemosynary appeals breed a sense of futility by design. Giving becomes like eating, providing temporary satisfaction that soon relapses to hunger and craving. This is due to the genius of charitable organizations. They cultivate a feeling of inadequacy in do-gooders and well-wishers they solicit so that they can make the same pitch next year. They perpetuate themselves by reminding me that the challenges are greater than ever and that the work is never done. Perfectability is not as I always believed an end but an infinite process.

However, much of my ambivalence toward charitable giving is prompted by the nature of the causes themselves, something intrinsic, a ghostliness or self-defeating paradox at their core. My intuition prods me that the causes have been lost and that my contribution is purely symbolic, a token of mourning and guilt, rather than a constructive act. While the charitable organizations purport to improve the future, they dwell on errors of the past. They encourage action but focus on atonement. They claim to save and protect but they lament what is lost. As Aristotle once said, "Even God cannot change the past." And if God can't do it, how can my donation?

No doubt, all good causes are founded and funded not on optimism but on guilt. Do we believe that we can make things better or fix what we’ve broken, or do we give money in the same spirit as relatives who bring flowers to a grave and have a picnic with the deceased, or strangers who place teddy bears and candles at a murder scene to express regret for those events which cannot be remedied?

As a species we have an atavistic habit of offering sacrifices for what we want and for what we have subjugated and destroyed. We indulge nostalgia for what we have forced into hiding and pay homage to what we fear and despise. Once we establish a fund to save this or promote that you can be sure that this and that have already disappeared. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, extinction brands it with eternal longing.

Each year I receive appeals for money from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the same people who run the Bronx Zoo. There is a guilt-paradox in this: the jailers and purveyors of wild beasts in civilization as entertainment crusade for more wild territory for the beasts they have not yet encarcerated for our approval. Are they sincerely trying to save the animals for their own sake or for the legacy of future zoos? I like making faces at the gorillas as much as the next zoo patron and often indulge in the pathetic fallacy that we are having a meaningful social exchange but I cannot couch these regressive tendencies in a misguided liberal notion that the gorilla is having as much fun as I am.

Despite these reservations, saving wildlife and wild habitats seems worthwhile by any moral metric. Yet, the dire situation the Society asks its members to address is depicted as so hopeless and grim that no monetary sum would seem adequate to rectify it, or to expiate the guilt our species should feel for driving other animals into extinction.

In the spirit of remorse, we continue to beatify what we destroy. The savage becomes noble only when he has been conquered. Saturday morning TV programs, extending from morning to afternoon, admonish an audience of bug-eyed tikes to read books. We support conservation while driving SUVs that could do battle with prehistoric mastadons. We fund cancer research while creating the conditions in which cancer occurs. And we exercise our right to vote in record numbers to preserve and honor our democracy while our government wire-taps our phones, secretly tape our movements, and monitors our cash transactions when they are deemed suspiciously large--undermining many of the rights on which our democracy is based.

Symbolism is a beautiful thing.