I was talking with a friend today about Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead. Anyone read it? It's length is well worth the thoughts it stirs up. The topic for the night was this: charity vs. self-sufficency. When I give $5 to the woman standing at the stoplight under the viaduct is it the right thing to do? Am I fueling her life with the wrong kind of sustainance? Does it matter what type of sustainance I offer? Is the offering of anything really just the offering of a crutch, a guised gift of almost certain continued dependance? A kind of fish vs. teaching to fish type of scenerio? Is my giving her the money truly for her benefit or is it also for me...to cool the boiling guilt, to add another point on the grand tally of kindness, to make others look at me and in turn have their own guilt rupture? The problem is, the answer to all of these questions is yes. I don't really believe we humans operate in pure alturism very often. Our charity is often pockmarked with our own shortcomings. This idea is troublesome at face value. Is charity as we know it really just a self-serving mask? Should we seek to offer others and ourselves self-sufficency above all else? Is charity in its earthly forms a hinderance to self-sufficency? Which is the highest of virtues, golden self-sufficency...or imperfect charity? The more these ideas and theories burrow themselves into my thoughts, the more I become a champion of impure charity over self-sufficency. The gifts we offer to one another, in all their immaterial and material forms, barnacled and scarred with our humaness, but also sparkling with threads of good, are what bind us. They make us real to each other. They open our eyes to the God in all that surrounds us. I know this, when I act on impulses of kindness I feel alive in the moment. When I do not, I sense a loss.
5 comments:
I read the Fountainhead in high school. I planned to enter an Ayn Rand essay contest to win a scholarship. I never wrote the essay. Her ideas, while provocative, just didn't gel with me. There is a continuum: co-dependence:interdependence:dependence. As people living in an imperfect world, we need each other. We need love, we need human contact, we need acknowledgement, and sometimes we need physical assistance. If you dispute the need for love and contact, just check out the research Harry Harlow did in the 1960s--research that grew out of the reality that children in orphanages in the 1950s died because no one was there to love them, to touch them, to hold them, to cuddle them (good but disturbing book = Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum).
These needs have nothing to do with self-sufficiency, they have to do with our humanity. We live in a disconnected society. We no longer know the names of the 100 people who live in our village. We can't assess the actual needs of the thousands of people in our communities. We can only reach out and offer love, contact, acknowledgement, and, yes, maybe even physical assistance. These are no more a crutch than food, water or air.
Between yours and Jessie's post I am starting to feel the static in my own brain. You guys are so smart.
I haven't read the book (I'm sure you could have guessed that) but I'd love to talk to you about it-- really interesting!
Last three lines are so good I'm putting you in my thought book smartie! Your post and Eva's mom's post inspires me to read the Fountainhead. Thanks for the suggestion. Miss you and what comes out of your mouth—especially all the funnies. Maybe someday we'll live on the same side of the U.S. again! Love you.
Ah, this post reminds me how much I miss talking to you Lys!
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