I don’t like giving money to poor people. I do give money to the poor, but I don’t like doing it. I don’t like having the power to choose who does and who doesn’t get my spare change. That’s not the sort of power I want. If it were up to me, of course, no one would be poor. But as it stands, unfortunately, I don’t have enough change in my pocket to make that happen.

Charity might seem like a great thing but, really, it’s a sign of confusion over how to deal with poverty. It's not a solution to social inequality, it's a symptom of it. If we want - as a country, as a society - to seriously address the massive problem of poverty - so digustingly apparent in Vancouver - we should realize that relying on the whims of individual and corporate donations isn’t going to work.

Dealing with poverty has to be more systematic than charity: a conscious, public act by government (which is, after all, about maintaining social welfare), not an optional and "praise-worthy" act of a private benefactor.

In our slowly dying age of Globalization and economics-as-a-religion-for-our-political-leaders, charity has made a comeback from its Victorian days as a misguided force for dealing with poverty. Canadian philosopher-historian John Ralston Saul puts it simply: “for reasons of dignity and realism, charity should not and cannot fulfill the needs of a society’s poor, nor can it get the mass of those affected out of poverty.”

Yet still there persists the attitude that the poor are lazy and deserve neglect and ridicule. We’ve likely all heard someone, old or young, shamelessly mock a homeless person, telling them, “Get a job, you lazy bum.” The opposite attitude, you could say, is just as disgraceful: feeling warm and fuzzy, and proud about yourself for giving away a bit of money you don't really need. Spare change makes for cheap karma.

An interesting view on the evolution of charity comes from Ivan Illich (the excommunicated priest I posted about a couple weeks ago), who saw modern Western civilization as a perversion or corruption of Christianity. He pointed to how charity, as practiced by early Christians, was a highly personal act, not something that could be politically organized as a means to combat poverty. Charity, according to Illich, originally was (and ought to be, I take him to mean) about compassion for an individual human face, instead of a distant, abstract social tool.

For early Christians, Illich said, “it was customary…to have an extra mattress, a bit of candle, and some dry bread in case the Lord Jesus should knock at the door in the form of a stranger with a roof". The Church, however, in its attempt to make this Christian practice into law, removed the deeply personal element of charity – the face-to-faceness of it – and institutionalized charity into a social service provided by poorhouses and not people. “By assigning the duty to behave in this way to an institution…Christians would lose the habit of reserving a bed and having a piece of bread ready in every home.”

So, Illich argued, what started as an interpersonal relationship based on compassion, turned into a public institution, which then removed the need for people to act charitably to other people. That is, if there is a poorhouse down the road, why bother helping out someone who asks? Charity, in this sense, has turned into the opposite of itself: a perversion or corruption of the original. Or, in Illich’s words: “The personal freedom to choose who will be my other has been transformed into the use of power and money to provide a service.”

Today we see charity as noble means to fill in the gaps of poverty that isn’t taken care of by the state. But the state barely combats poverty as it is, so the gaps are far too deep for charity to possibly fill. Public funding and taxing the private sector is the only truly effective way to do it. With our over-capitalist ideology, however, we continue to demean the poor by reserving for ourselves the power over them to dole out what we deem them worthy of, and leave the business sector under-taxed to the point where giant piles of wealth are amassed and then squandered. This is what corporate bonuses, rather than corporate taxes, amount to.

Despite the fact that charity has moved from the personal level to the institutional one, as Illich emphasized, the sense of obligation did not move with it. Instead of seeing society's obligation to help the poor on a collective level, we focus instead on the woefully insufficient, temporary gestures of either giving out some of our chump change (making us feel good about ourselves), or the equally self-congratulatory and media-friendly public-relations maneuver of corporate charity.

Writing in an era similar to ours - the Victorian age I mentioned earlier, where there was a big gap between the rich and poor, and a smug, condescending, social-Darwinsim-like attitude towards the poor - Oscar Wilde said, “We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best among the poor are never grateful (his emphasis). They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so…Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table.”

Or to boil it down ever further, here’s August Strindberg: “All charity is humiliation.”

I keep using the term "Western" as though the problem were the same in Europe as in North America. It's not. Canada is probably the worst western nation when it comes to dealing with poverty and homelessness. Why is that?

In May 2008 John Ralston Saul, quoted above, gave the keynote address at the Inaugural Symposium of The Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars (CAIS) at Simon Fraser University's downtown Harbour Center Campus. Saul's talk was on the public role of the intellectual. In it he said, not without some moral outrage, that the lack of action in Canada on combatting homelessness is "an embarrassment beyond belief and a human tragedy."

Our appalling amount of homelessness, Saul made clear, is a uniquely Canadian failure, and a big part of that failure is the lack of action of the intellectual class. "The job of the scholar and the intellectual," Saul argued to an audience of scholars and intellectuals, "is to watch out for society, to think, to be heard to think, to be seen to think and therefore to act in public.”

When it comes to poverty, Saul asked, Where are the Canadian intellectuals? Why are they not on the public stage, writing articles, holding rallies, putting pressure on the government? The implied answer?: They're distracted from their social duty by their narrow, professional interests. They lack the courage. They've simply failed.

A parallel point in Saul's talk was the decline of globalization and the accompanying lack of public discourse by intellectuals on what should replace it. Without this public discussion, he warned, we're likely to fall victim to another blind, ideological system, like globalism, which in turn will hinder our ability to act.

Charity is a feature of globalization simply because in a free-market system most economic matters are taken out of the hands of goverment - the public sector - leaving economic inequalities to be taken care of by the completely inadequate (precisely because it's optional) funds from the private sector, whether individual or corporate. Businesses (because of their primary focus on competition and profit) and ordinary people (because of their own financial worries) can hardly be relied on to take care of the poor. Even philanthropy, of the Bill and Melinda Gates variety, is too shoddy a patchwork to cover the gross economic disparities between Have and Have-nots.

Like I said, I hate giving money to the poor. Not because I myself am a half-starved student (though that, too), but because in a society as wealthy as ours I shouldn't have to give to the poor in the first place. Putting a human face on charity, in the sense Ivan Illich talked about, can, I think, be translated on to social welfare. If we imagine the poor as fellow human beings, fellow sufferers worthy of the most basic kind of economic equality, we can also imagine and enact social policies that deal with the problem, rather than treating the poor like a statistical phenomenon, worthy only of more studies, surveys, and commisions.

We don't need to "study" the problem of poverty and homelessness any more. And we don't need to build "emergency shelters". That's like putting a band-aid on a gushing wound. What we do need is affordable housing and social immersion - a healthy mixing of the well-off and not-so-well-off - rather than social ostrasization and what amounts to segregation. Living together - rich and poor, in the same neighbourhoods, the same buildings - would help each side see the other's human face, and we might not feel so unjustly proud - or arrogantly snobby - when, in those terrible and needless situations, we have to some help someone less fortunate than us.