Largesse and egalitarian hypocrites

Bono has campaigned internationally for the forgiveness of Third World debt. He believes there is a fundamental inequity in the distribution of the world's resources and he has lent his celebrity as a rock star to campaign on behalf of the dispossessed.

Bono is spectacularly rich. He is rich because of the number of records U2 has sold worldwide. No doubt Bono gives some of his wealth to help the dispossessed of the world, but no doubt he retains a huge amount of it. How could he both believe that there is a huge inequity in the distribution of the world's resources, not himself dispose of the greater proportion of his wealth to assist the dispossessed, and apparently be quite untroubled by this contradiction?

Bono is not the only rich egalitarian who is not even a little bit troubled by the contradiction between their professed beliefs and their personal behaviour. For starters, there is myself. I am certainly not in the same wealth bracket as Bono but I earn a multiple of the average industrial wage, I profess egalitarian beliefs and I give only a small fraction of it to redistributive causes because I have to pay income tax.

There are lots of other rich egalitarians around. Dick Spring is an egalitarian (well, sort of) and the realisation that he was a rich egalitarian at the Eircom a.g.m. recently caused a mixture of mirth and anger. A few columnists who inhabit this page are rich egalitarians. There are egalitarians even in the Sunday Independent, well, there's one anyway.

There are several rich egalitarians in the Labour Party apart from Dick Spring (he is still in the Labour Party, isn't he?), including Ruairi Quinn, who has done very nicely indeed as have many of the other horny-handed sons of toil on the Labour benches (Tom O'Higgins is the author of that phrase.)Proinsias De Rossa is well on the pig's back and a predecessor of his in Europe, Des Geraghty, eased from a Euro pig's back to a SIPTU pig's back, without a hitch. The universities are full of rich egalitarians. There are a few in RTE, though none that I can think of at the moment apart from myself.

NOW the question is how is it that us rich egalitarians are so rich, how is it that we do not distribute our goods to the poor, as our egalitarian principles would dictate we should? This is the topic of one of the essays in a book by the very clever Canadian political philosopher, Gerry Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You are so Rich? He was at UCD with several other rich egalitarians last week, including myself, and we engaged in prolonged hand-wringing on Friday evening, until the champagne ran out (no, that's not fair, it wasn't champagne.)

We rich egalitarians are nothing if not ingenious. The reasons we advance for the conflict between what we do and what we say are various. We start with the one to do with changing the structure of society - fighting the system. It is not individual acts of charity that matter but changing the system that will make us all equal or at least more equal.

Then we have the "drop in the ocean" argument: that any one of us giving even a large share of our wealth to the poor would be no more than a drop in the ocean and therefore not worth the bother. There is the argument: why should I be the only one to give over my wealth if others are not required to do so too? There is also the claim that by retaining wealth we egalitarians are enabled to do things for egalitarianism that otherwise we would be unable to do. Not a bad catalogue of excuses, don't you think?

The fighting the system argument doesn't really amount to much. Why, while waiting for the system to change, should we not make a contribution to alleviating injustice, even if it is only a drop in the ocean? One of the features of rich egalitarians I know is they do give something to charities (not much and certainly nothing like the half of our income which, at a minimum, our concept of justice would demand). They (we) find it hard to justify giving nothing at all.

What is the reason for this? Why would they (we) give a fraction of a drop in the ocean and yet claim there was no point in giving a drop in the ocean? If a fraction of a drop in the ocean makes a difference, why not give it; if it does not make a difference, why give anything at all?

As for the argument that I am unwilling to give over a significant proportion of my wealth unless other rich people do so, what's that about? How would it sound if 150 years ago in the southern states of America I said although I recognised the injustice of slavery I was unwilling to liberate my slaves unless other slave owners did likewise? What has what other people do got to do with what I should do?

THE most pernicious of the arguments is the one about keeping the wealth to do good for egalitarianism. It is self-regarding, precious, and worse. Some of us see no reason not to scoff at the self-deception of others who claim that their lofty and subverted lifestyle enabled them to ponder serenely on the state of the nation to the benefit of everyone.

There really is just one explanation for the tight-fistedness of us rich egalitarians and it is moral weakness: we are unable to live up to the moral standards we set for society. Sure, we are willing - or some of us are - to support taxation policies which would take a substantial proportion of our income from us but we will not or cannot do that voluntarily.

We are hypocrites, that's what. When we hear or talk of other hypocrites or people we regard as hypocrites - for instance, priests who have sexual relations with women, or politicians who ask the country to tighten its belt while letting it all hang out for themselves - we might pause to remember that we too are hypocrites.

Cohen quotes the English philosopher, J. L. Austin who memorably said: "We often succumb to temptation with calm, even with finesse."

vbrowne@irish-times.ie