Coldplay gives more than You!

Let’s face it—in terms of helping people in need, giving money is the easiest thing to do. It only takes a couple of minutes to write or check, or better yet, swipe a card so those poor struggling banks can take a cut also. In the end there is no real sacrifice involved—the giver doesn’t really suffer. Slavoj Zizek states that “a sacrifice, in order to work and to be efficient, must be in a way ‘meaningless,’ a gesture of ‘irrational,’ useless expenditure or ritual…[that] can restore the immediate faith that will deliver us and heal us of our modern spiritual malaise.” Now it would seem that the cold, rational way of picking and choosing whom among the needy to give money to does seem to be a symptom of rational, “enlightened” capitalism. But really how are we to proceed with such a gesture, or does that type of gesture perpetuate the system that creates such problems and horrors in the first place? Is giving to charity any different than buying stock in General Electric? After all, how does giving to charity strike at the root cause of the problem? Isn’t it simply a painkiller given to relieve of ache of a hangover?

Maybe the issue is that we have two issues compounded here? I would like to think that most people would like to see the causes of poverty, injustice, ecological disaster, racism, sexism, etc. removed. But the problem is that the issues and even the system that caused those problems appears harder to change than it is to relieve the symptom. After all, doesn’t the doctor give you a magic pill first and then give you a battery of tests? The problem is you feel better and then the results come in! Does that mean we should allow people to suffer before we deal with the underlying social structures that are the true cause of the suffering?

Maybe here is where the artist comes in. Doesn’t the artist occupy one of the places in society that can address both the symptom and the cause? The artist can be visible in both roles. Look at the good musicians did in New Orleans after the man-made disaster caused the city to flood after Katrina. Because of the way our lives are structured, we don’t know what our neighbor, that “bearer of a monstrous Otherness,” believes. (Is that because we don’t know what we believe?) Thus the possibility of coming together to either relieve a symptom or remove the cause is impossible! (Isn’t that one of the genius moves of capitalist ideology?) However, in their very visibility, artists can act as surrogates for that missing piece of social life. They can act as a point de caption for us, thus maybe their giving, as selfish as it could be, becomes for us a selfless act. So when Coldplay gives over $1.5 million to a charity that helps kids who have make mistakes and found themselves in situations with serious ramifications they should be seen in a positive light. They give more than their money, which is more than we do.

I need to end this post; I need to write a check to WWF and listen to the new Radiohead song.

(Zizek quotes from The Parallax View, MIT Press, 2006)