Why does giving money to homeless people make rich people uncomfortable?
Yesterday around midnight, a fairly well-dressed, bespectacled man pushing a bicycle named Dan stopped me and my friend Michaela outside my apartment. “Hello, sir,” he said. “How are you doing? …I just wanted to explain to you my situation. I’m homeless, and I sleep out on the Midway near the heating ducts. Because it’s raining tonight it’s real damp, and I need some money to sleep at a place indoors.”
After chatting amicably for fifteen minutes and finding out his “place” was a friend of a cousin who let Dan sleep at his apartment on 60th and Champagne for $15, I agreed to give him a dollar — but I wanted to follow him to where he was going, since I was curious.
“I really don’t feel comfortable taking you folks over there. It’s a dangerous place, a bad place, and you all look like good folks.”
Later, Michaela and I were chatting when I asked, “Why do you think he wouldn’t let us follow him?”
Michaela sighed. “I think he was lying. I don’t think he was going somewhere, he was just getting money. This homeless woman I always give money to – Sharon – she always lies.”
After Dan refused to take us where he was going, Dan pressured me to give me another dollar. “You see, it’s $15 — $1 isn’t enough.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I feel uncomfortable with the way you’re pressuring me and I don’t want to give more.”
“Only one more dollar,” was Dan’s retort.
Why is it that we’re so fine with spending money on the most frivolous things – nice coffee, faster checkout at hotels, baubles and postcards – but when it comes to homeless people suddenly another dollar is a dollar too dear?
I’m not asking this question rhetorically, or moralistically. I gave him the extra dollar, but I didn’t feel generous or morally good – I felt torn about it. It wasn’t the loss of the dollar that made me feel torn, since I’m fortunate to be rich enough to not have to worry about a dollar too much – no. I felt morally torn. I didn’t know whether I was doing the right thing. But why?
I think it boils down to this: It feels wrong for Dan to pressure me for another dollar like that. I had no obligation to, but he was making me uncomfortable, trying to make me feel bad, like I was doing something wrong, to get me to give him another dollar. Truth is, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But something is wrong. In some cosmetic balance of things, it is eminently unjust that I be so much better off than him, so much richer, with a home, mainly due to background. Yet he, too, was doing something unjust by putting that kind of pressure on me to do something I wasn’t obliged to do. But was he really doing something unjust? Isn’t it, in some way, just, as it is acting against the unjust forces that placed him in the position of being homeless and me in the position of being homed?
In the intersection between rich and poor, right and wrong gets murky and clouded. How could it not? I’m still not sure what was right and what was wrong. What if Dan lied? Does that make a difference? What if Dan was doing drugs?
“I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink, none of that,” Dan told us reassuringly. “Don’t worry — UChicago students spend so much money on drugs that it’s ridiculous for us to judge you for whether you do drugs or not,” Michaela retorted.
Why does giving money to homeless people make rich people uncomfortable?
You live in a capitalistic society that, out of a self-sustaining interest, promotes property as a “fundamental right.” The dominant narrative is that you have a right to what you currently possess. You typically only give up what you possess in exchange for other possessions (services I guess can be considered a *relatively temporary* “possession”), and this is justified because you’re voluntarily “trading” your right to one possession for a right to another. If you lose possessions in some other manner, it’s likely you’ll feel uncomfortable because it goes against this narrative that you’ve been indoctrinated into. For example, you would probably feel pretty bad getting robbed or losing your possessions by natural disaster.
When someone asks you to donate money to them, it is not usually considered an exchange of possessions. Perhaps you could view the visceral, verbal request or the “amicable fifteen minutes of talking” or the predictable gratitude afterwards that the beggar provides as a “service” (which, again, I guess can be considered a possession). However, I don’t really think that’s right, and I especially don’t really think that’s how most people view the process of donating money. Well, I guess it probably is true for some people. I guess some people might think of donating money as an exchange of a possession (money) for the servicing of letting you feel good (perhaps aided through some physical expression of gratitude by the beggar). I’m going to ignore these people though. Most people I think (hope) do it because they just genuinely believe it’s a good thing to do. They’re not just doing it to buy themselves happiness.
Still, even though it doesn’t seem to be an exchange of possessions, donating money to the homeless seems to differ from the situation of a natural disaster or burglary. I think it’s probably because donating money is relatively more voluntary than suffering from a crime/natural disaster. Why would you consent then to something that makes you uncomfortable or at least strongly consider consenting to it (and remember I’m assuming you’re not a person who views donating money as an exchange for being happy)?
Maybe it’s because, for a moment, you’re talking to someone that got screwed by the western capitalist narrative. (Your) Privilege is a result of you benefitting from that narrative, his lack of privilege is a result of being screwed by that narrative. For a moment, your two lives intersect, and he gives you a visceral glimpse of what it’s like to live on the other side. You don’t voluntarily consent to giving up your possession because he has a possession that you want. You voluntarily consent to giving up your possession because, for a moment, he cracks your western capitalist indoctrination (WCI). It’s your WCI that makes you believe in property rights which makes you believe that you only give up those property rights for other property rights. If that WCI is cracked, that logical order falls apart and the inhibition to give away property for nothing goes away and hence you donate the money. But he’s just momentarily cracked an indoctrination that’s shaped you for your whole life. That’s going to be uncomfortable.
Hi stranger! Thanks for commenting. This blog would be a pretty boring place if nobody did.
You’re spot on about me being a person that is not viewing this encounter transactionally. I didn’t get some moral “glow” from giving this man two dollars — in fact, I felt weirdly torn about it for hours afterwards. Honestly, if I had it my way, I’d choose to never have encountered this homeless guy in the first place, as I suspect most (relatively) rich people do. But I never viewed this whole encounter through the lens of property exchange, though obviously that way of thinking is ingrained in my (and really, everyone’s) day-to-day lives.
Obviously, a lot of the discomfort stems from the fact that for a brief moment, the vague, ambiguous “unfairness” of the world – and more specifically, extreme inequality between the “privileged” (ugh, hate how that’s become a political word) and the not – suddenly comes into sharp, visceral focus. Maybe all of the discomfort does. But I suspect that part of the discomfort also stems from the fact that in any other situation – i.e. one in which I’d be interacting with someone on an equal level of “privilege” as me – I would not feel uncomfortable at all about categorically rejecting such a person’s pleas as being unethical. In other words, because that person would be a) begging for money for nothing and b) quite probably lying in order to get what he or she wants, I would considered that categorically bad and reject it, unless another good reason surfaced for which I would feel comfortable with fulfilling the request.
I know you’ll probably say that line, “begging for money for nothing” reflects a “WCI”, but really, more fundamentally, it’s about the basic concept of equality as fairness – the concept that what is fair is what is equal. “Something for nothing” seems to be an inequality, and therefore, unfair, and therefore, unjust and wrong, regardless of whether this is within a capitalistic framework or under a different one.
But really, my real point was that though in the moment, there appears to be this small personal unfairness playing out, when there’s such a grander – yet impersonal – unfairness going on (i.e. systematic inequality, my relative privilege, his poverty), does this personal unfairness cancel out the grander, impersonal unfairness?
The whole moral system and framework under which we operate normally when we interact with people of relatively equal socioeconomic stature – i.e. fairness (again, pointing out this is true even in non-WCI contexts, though I totally welcome criticism of this) – totally falls apart when we break out of our little worlds of equal stature. I believe most people don’t know how to handle this and it feels simply uncomfortable, and that’s why so many rich people are unwilling to donate to the homeless, despite the fact that the homeless could use the money much more than they, and despite the fact that a lot of the inequality between the rich and the homeless is not due to individual merit, but simply circumstance – which I’d argue is cosmetically unfair.
Sorry if that was overly convoluted or pedantic. Let me know if you need clarification.