To give or not to give? That’s begging the question

I’m sick of being coerced into kindness.

I’m quite kind by nature, but I turn surly if it’s made into a no-choice obligation.

Like people who send me fake fauna for Christmas. If anybody out there was planning to send me a bloody goat, just don’t. That’s all there is to it. Don’t. Helen Keogh, CEO of World Vision Ireland, is on the radio all the time being winningly persuasive about the thrill gift recipients can be afforded by getting a card saying they’ve had a bag of locally-sourced weed-resistant corn (with or without the fox and the goose) sent on their behalf to some family in Ethiopia. Similarly (but more irritatingly) those Bóthar animals keep explaining to each other how they fertilise the soil with their droppings, which is SUCH fun to contemplate.

I’m sure the charities do wonderfully well and that many recipients are chuffed out of their skin to have vicariously dispatched a ram to Rwanda. I’m the exception. If I’m sending a ram to Rwanda, I want it to be by personal impulse, not imputed virtue.

The truly daft thing is that this coercive charity angle is the one most frequently used to persuade people to go on reality TV programmes. They ring you up to invite you to spend a week up a pole somewhere, eating cockroaches in Sauce Manure, surrounded by re-cycled, rehabilitated, re-constituted semi-celebs up the same or adjoining poles, and when you say you’d rather be trapped in a lift with Attila the Nun, they explain all the money you could get for charity.

In other words, they’re not going to pay you at all. They’re going to humiliate you, freeze you, keep your loved ones away from you, feed you deep-fried frogspawn — and it’s all justified by the fact that the money is going to charity.

Whence comes this notion that the bizarre, boring or cruel is justified if at the end of it, money has been raised for the deserving? There’s way too much of it about, at the moment, and it’s beginning to erode the opportunity for impulse giving, because it takes up all the available money.

Impulse giving is one of those traits that divides people as surely as does preference for dogs over cats. One half of the world hands out money to anybody who asks, be it the box-rattler at the entrance to the supermarket or the one-legged seller of The Big Issues.

The other half takes a prissy negative attitude to people who beg, suggesting that if you give them money they’ll just keep at it.

I’ve never managed to get my head around the concept that if I DON’T give money to a one-legged magazine seller drawn from the new Irish, she’ll smack her forehead with the hand she doesn’t depend on for the crutch and go: “You know what? I should go work for Morgan Grenfell.” Impulse giving also doesn’t fit with the current fashion for Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR.

For several months after CSR became a topic of worthy discourse, I was mystified. I thought they were all talking about Crime Scene Investigation. Time to get the ears syringed, I hear you say. Can’t afford it, right now. A cupped hand behind the ear and a request for another iteration is all I can afford.

CSR is the tedious application of form-filling to what used to be called charity. Or patronage. Or sponsorship.

Now there IS a point to it. Not necessarily an obvious point. It’s the third time you’re invited by a firm of lawyers to an evening of chamber music and mime when you kind of work out that maybe the manager’s partner’s daughter is a mime artist.

CSR sets out to prevent all that self-serving stuff and help organisations make rational choices reflective of their inner values, so that nobody suddenly takes a mad vagary to fund the reconstruction of an eighteenth century cesspit. Any gift has to fit into a three year plan.

Which rather subverts the message of the Good Samaritan, who not only responded without any over-arching strategy, not only rescued the head-the-ball who got mugged, but also gave money to an innkeeper without laying down any conditions. He didn’t say: “The food you give head-the-ball has to be locally sourced and organic.” He certainly didn’t say: “Don’t let him spend any of this money I’m giving you on drink or cigarettes.” He just reacted. He just responded with instinctive generosity.

No offence to CSR, but let’s not abolish instinctive generosity. Although Brian Cowen might limit the scope of it, if he gets vicious in Wednesday’s budget.