studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. She writes for Philonomist.
Picture © Cyril Druesne
Dear reader,
When the richest man in the world decides to give 10 million euros to a food charity on the verge of bankruptcy, one might have expected him to be praised – after all, the Restos du Coeur association provides 35% of all food aid in France. But instead, Bernard Arnault – CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company – met with public outcry. If it was a publicity stunt, it hardly worked out in his favour.
On social media, another figure soon started circulating: 0.0048% – that’s the ratio between the amount Arnault gave and the billionaire’s private fortune, which amounts to more than 200 billion euros. “It’s as if a minimum wage worker made a press release to announce he was going to give 5 or 10 euros to the Restos du coeur! Ridiculous!” one Instagram account commented. “Or, there are also taxes,” read another post on LinkedIn.
You almost feel sorry for the richest man in the world: isn’t LVMH the country’s leading recruiter (15,000 people hired in 2022)? Does it not pay half of its taxes in France, while the country only represents 10% of its sales? At first glance, the multinational’s contributions seem fair.
Poor Bernard! Has society really become ruthless? One thing seems certain: the ultra-rich are being used as scapegoats. And no redemption seems possible, so intolerant have we become of any compensation mechanism. It’s as if moral recognition could only be obtained on condition of consistency. A similar logic underlies accusations of greenwashing: when a company produces an obscene amount of carbon emissions, it doesn’t matter how many trees it plants in order to compensate.
‘Our allergy to the philanthropy of the super-wealthy points to an increasingly significant principle: that of decency’
The cause of this puritanism is clear: the level of economic inequality today. In 2021, 5% of the richest households possessed 34% of all assets, the 1% held 15%, while 14% of the population lived below the poverty line. In fact, our allergy to the philanthropy of the super-wealthy points to an increasingly significant principle: that of decency. We can summarise it as follows: the beneficiaries of an unfair system oughtn’t be allowed to extend their hand to those they have starved. Instead, they should have the decency to accept their tarnished reputation. That is to say, the stigma of being seen as the cause-of-all-evil is the price to pay for their fortune. As a result, the super-wealthy are now ostracised from the field of ethics, banished from the rank of benefactors. No salvation is possible.
This is where we start to see a discrepancy between public opinion and today’s food aid system. Currently, the latter is sustained by NGOs – the French state doesn’t hand out free meals. And for the French 19th century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, famous for his observations on the early days of democracy in America, this would be a very good thing. In his Memoir on Pauperism (1835), he tries to show that social cohesion and standards of living improve when such aid falls on the shoulders of associations of citizens, rather than the state. For him, charity is a noble thing. But as soon as the poorer classes, instead of begging, start to assert a right, both their morality and their standard of living deteriorate: they lose their “spirit of foresight and thrift,” Tocqueville says. He adds that a “legal charity” – that is to say, one that is state-run – would be humiliating, since it would be based on a “recognised inferiority”. This type of argument most likely underpins the French model of aid: if the state is unofficially nurturing, via its subsidies to associations and the tax exemptions on donations, it must be so neither officially, nor completely.
But since Tocqueville’s America, things have changed. Associations no longer have any money. In fact the day after the Restos du Coeur’s call for help, the Red Cross did the same. And the problem of poverty has merged with that of extreme wealth. Where Tocqueville insists on the need to maintain an embodied relationship between the charitable rich and the begging poor, today this connection feels indecent. Where Tocqueville thinks that we must avoid “depersonalising” solidarity via anonymous public allocations, today we’re refusing to let demonstrative private donations obscure the real cause of inequality. And finally, where Tocqueville considers that a right to security would be humiliating, since it would be based on a “recognised inferiority”, the right to help others now constitutes a “recognised superiority”, thus humiliating those who assert it. The downside of being ultra-rich? No longer being able to give!
Athénaïs Gagey
Picture © iStockphoto
