Seeing that a couple of people (Leopold Kwok and Phil KO Graham) have nominated me to take part in the #icebucketchallenge and the impassioned debates going around, I will offer my response here. I won’t be taking part in the Ice Bucket challenge nor will I donate money to any charities as part of the forfeit. I will explain my reasons below but firstly, let me assure you that I am not claiming any moral high ground nor am I condemning others involved in this challenge, although I may come across that way! I see myself as someone reflecting on and struggling with the same issues that I have written below. I don’t claim to know all the answers and I certainly have blind spots. However, I have sought to be as objective and reflective in my evaluation, given the limited time that I currently have (I am on leave at the moment!). One of the recurring thing that people say about the viral campaign is that it is successful. Obviously if all we care about is how much money gets donated at the end, then surely it is a bonus that people get entertained and feel good about themselves along the way? However, I feel very uncomfortable with this kind of thinking. One of the reasons is to do with the medium and mechanism of the ice bucket challenge. For me the problem lies in the social media/ internet, which is the medium of this campaign. Meaninglessness and Irrelevance The entertaining yet trivial ice bucket challenge through social media easily masks us from the severity and pain of reality of what is really going on. It has definitely raised awareness however for many people, the awareness raised is not for the cause but for themselves among their followers. The Internet and social media overload us endlessly with information from the serious to the trivial, a constant stream of personal soundbites. We become desensitised and voyeuristic, with no commitment to maintain relationships. In his examination of the distinction between “image” (visual reality) and “word” (truth), French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul argued that the image tends to ʻhumiliate the wordʼ because the word is overshadowed and controlled by literal pictures. Our focus is taken by these “images” and we tend to browse and skim, which hinders our reflection and analysis of the “word”. (His ideas can be applied to TV’s image-based standard of truth, but I am applying them to the internet and the ice bucket viral videos) The ice bucket challenge easily erases the brutality of what the cause is about by saturating us with something that is meaningless and has no relevance to the actual issue. So much for awareness! Awareness Furthermore, from some of the comments expressed and from my observation of our current culture, we seem to have elevated the value of awareness. Awareness that does not lead to action is meaningless. Each day we are made aware of so many needs and pain in the world and we can still remain apathetic. By action I don’t mean reading snippets of information about ALS or other similar charities or react to being nominated to take part in a challenge and give some money to a charity. Very few of the videos have expressed any substantive information about the disease or the charity. I do wonder how much time people actually spent reading about the disease and the charity’s work compared to the time they took to prepare their bags of ice (or tubs). By action I mean personally life-changing, consistent, personally involved and a relational connection with those involved kind of action. (I will explain later why I think this kind of action is important) I have participated in many challenges, fundraising and donations in the past and I see how short I fall from actually caring about the issue concerned and go way beyond mere awareness. So I am not claiming any moral high ground here. Rather I see how pitiful we are in our altruism and how much further we need to go to be truly neighbourly. So ask yourselves now if you have participated in the ice bucket challenge and made aware of whatever charity you have given to, “what have you decided to do next with your awareness?” Self-Promotion, Utilitarianism and Consumeristic Culture The impressive $94 million raised so far from the ALS challenge is not an indication of the success of the viral campaign or the generosity of our generation. Rather it is an overwhelming indication of our self-promoting, self-glorifying, self-congratulating, entertainment-centric and narcissistic culture. You may think I sound harsh but I have observed a disturbing level of one-upmanship among those participating in the ice bucket challenge - a bigger bucket, more ice, a crane to throw ice off it, a garden swimming pool, a classy way to do the challenge, and the list goes on. You may not have gone this extreme, but how many times have you checked how many people have liked and commented on your video? Once again, I am guilty of this kind of narcissistic behaviour on social media on many occasions. Therefore, I am not showing my condemnation. Rather I am critiquing our collective sad state of affair. Ask yourselves, Why are people donating to ALS and other charities as a result of the ice bucket challenge? Why now and not before and most likely not in the future? Why don’t we see the same level of enthusiasm and donation level in other campaigns without a viral ice bucket video? (As a contrast, ALS raised over $94m in one month from existing donors and 2.1 million new donors. Global Poverty Project’s Live Below the Line campaign raised nearly $4m in 2014’s 5 days challenge from 20,000 people world-wide.) Has ALS or similar charities so caught the compassion of people or is it because people simply could not resist the attention they might receive from posting a video online and the attraction and need to belong to something that everyone else is in? Some have reflected that if it wasn’t for such “stupid, wasteful, narcissistic video” people wouldn’t have been introduced to the concept of giving or charities wouldn’t have received so much donation. So to debate about this misses the point. I beg to differ. There is no dispute that the video has brought about an impressive amount of donation. However, this shouldn’t stop us from reflecting and critiquing the means to which this “success” has come about. The “beneficial” result or consequence is not a justification of our motives behind and means of our actions. We can’t simply look at the result and then determine that our action is moral and ethical. This is what is known as utilitarianism and I am not an utilitarian. It saddens me that we aim so low and believe that if we want people to give or learn to give, we have to make them feel good about themselves, entertain them and bait them into giving. This self-centred, self-interested way of thinking about others and the world around us is the toxic script of our contemporary capitalistic society. We have a distorted view of our God-given humanness and we fail to reflect the image of God. Others become instrument to be used, consumed and exploited, as a means of realising our identity and our will. Everything is a commodity that can be bought or sold for gain, including ourselves. The ice bucket challenge and the associated cause(s), though impressive and important, have been used to connect our private world to the public world. The money donated is merely a small price to pay for self-promotion and entertainment in the biggest TV show in human history, i.e., the internet. Likewise, we feel content if we are being used by charities as commodities to raise funds. At the end of the day, everyone is happy. However, by treating one another as commodities, we devalue ourselves. Sadly, this is culture that we are all living in. In postmodernity, everything is disposable. Today’s challenge is tomorrow’s cache. Detachment from others One last issue I have with campaigns like the Ice bucket challenge is that we can be so easily detached from the suffering people involved. The same goes with most ethical movements like Fairtrade (dont get me wrong, I am not saying Fairtrade is bad). In the book “Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire,” theologian William Cavanaugh describes the hallmarks of our globalised consumeristic world as detachment from our products, their production and their producers. In other words, with the product in our hands, we don’t know or couldn’t realistically know or care who made it or how it was made. When the connection is reduced to the bare encounter between the consumer and the product, the connection to other people falls away. The point here is that with campaigns like the Ice Bucket challenge or even Movember, we may believe we are connected to something or someone but in fact, we are not in any significant way connected to the charities involved nor the sufferers. We have no deep attachment or commitment to them. Certainly things don’t need to be that way. However, when so much energy is devoted to participation and the mechanisms are set up in such a way that going further to build deeper attachment can be difficult. This detachment in the Ice Bucket challenge is exacerbated by the sheer disconnection between the challenge and the actual disease. Some fundraising and awareness campaigns are much better at making that connection, as they allow the participant to experience what someone (a person in poverty, or disabled person) might have to go through, e.g., #Tearfund’s Water Challenge or #GlobalPovertyProject’s Live Below the Line campaign. Neighbourliness I can’t comment on the effectiveness of charitable donations or aid as I am not well-informed on this topic. However, I do think financial aid and donation are one of the ways we can easily and tangibly participate in. Working out a “greatest need” is unhelpful and unrealistic. This is not simply because there will also be a greater need. This is like asking “who is my neighbour?” and set a limit to our mercy and compassion to others. This is not to ignore our limitations as human beings. Rather this is to help us rethink how we should extend our neighbourly love to others, even to strangers. Jesus presented a kind of neighbour love that truly takes up the victim’s perspective. It orientates towards the centre of the other and shows a compassion that knows no boundaries. The care of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 offers not a model of moral obligation but of exaggerated action grounded in compassion that risks much more than could ever be required or expected. Furthermore, in Isaiah 58, the care of the wounded, the hungry and the poor and the liberation of the oppressed is a deeply relational act. As good as financial giving is, I am reflecting on how I can go beyond a detached, remote way of “helping” the needy, spend ourselves (Isaiah 58:10 is a communal act) and be more and more personally invested in those who need a neighbour.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 21:32:09 +0000
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