Why redistribution can help the wealthy

Philanthrophy, according to reports of a conference in Dublin last week, is the next big thing. "Philantrophic Tiger might be next," declared the Irish Times headline over a report of remarks by Kingsley Atkins, president of the Worldwide Ireland Funds. The Tánaiste expressed similar sentiments to the gathering of 250 representatives of Irish charities looking for ways to coax cash from Celtic Tigers.

Ireland, she said, has the potential to build on its wealth-creation by becoming more generous. Kingsley Atkins praised the Government for initiatives offering tax incentives for charitable donations and extending the scope of the non-profit sector. It would be easy to predict what most media commentators would have to say to this, and less easy to dismiss their scepticism out of hand. The safest response might be a cynical snort followed by, for example, a pointed account of our record on international development aid. But this, however righteous, would be unhelpful, because of the merest sliver of possibility that Kingsley Atkins and Ms Harney have touched on something important.

We are new to prosperity and so our notions of wealth tend to be confined to zero-sum equations. After a decade of the Celtic Tiger, the economic opposition – politicians, clerics and commentators of the left – still offers an analysis of the economy based on a simple carve-up of the cake, even though this is of diminishing usefulness in an increasingly complex context. Partly because our conventional notions about wealth distribution and societal equity have their roots in narrow interpretations of Christianity and, more especially, a particular strain of socialism, our ideas about the circulation of resources remain based on a poverty model.

I have chiefly in mind the influence of a woolly, left-wing thinking adopted as a badge of identity and moral superiority by westerners when young, and often never shaken off, regardless of personal circumstances. Many such people now occupy positions in political organisations and the media, or in other areas where their ideas remain unaffected by their own growing prosperity. Because crude left-wing rhetoric has become unfashionable, many of their pronouncements are couched less in the jargon of Marxism than, bizarrely, in the prescriptions of Christianity. They, rather than priests and bishops, remind us of our duty to the poor, of Christ's injunction to love our neighbour. But in purportedly demonstrating that a Christian society is in breach of its own principles, what the left-winger is precisely demanding is that that Christians live completely by their own ideals or cease articulating them altogether. He would invariably prefer the latter outcome. Suspecting, however, that his demands are unlikely to be met, he settles for the warm glow arising from the felt moral superiority of his position.

The culture arising from such influences is hugely deficient in understanding the true psychology of prosperity or in finding practical ways of appropriating its subterranean sentiments. One of its effects is to conceal the degree to which economic disparities in society are the source, even in wealthy individuals, of guilt, sadness, loneliness and feelings of powerlessness in the face of an unjust world. Concerns about the plight of "those less fortunate" tend to be placed, on average, midway down (or up) the scale of concerns of the average adult – most others tending to be selfish concerns, like financial security or personal popularity. Crude left-wing ideas contribute hugely to the sum of such counter-productive sentiment, offering nothing feasible in the way of solution. Other than through a philantrophy verging on recklessness, there is no way of satisfying the conventional leftist demand for an egalitarian Big Bang and thus quieting the pseudo-leftist accusation as it bears down on the prosperous individual. Much of standard economic theory is unhelpful also, because it focuses excessively on human behaviours attributable to rational self-interest. What this ignores is not so much unselfishness (a moot concept), but the complex ways in which helping others offers a way to feel better. Virtue yields psychic income and this offers a whole new way of seeing the issue of redistribution.

A radically different vision may be located behind the pious front of conventional Christianity. In one of his lengthy interviews with the author Peter Seewald, published in 1997 as Salt of the Earth, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger used a striking image of the paradox of human prosperity. He referred to the nearby vineyards of Frascati, whose vines bear fruit only if they are pruned once a year.

"If the courage to prune is lacking," he said, "only leaves still grow". He was, naturally, speaking about matters much wider than prosperity – about human desire, the quest for happiness, and the pursuit of material security. Because we are "built for love", observed the man who would become pope, the refusal to help others is the very ruination of man, for it is "precisely his submitting himself to a claim and allowing himself to be pruned that enables him to mature and bear fruit". I cannot imagine the Tánaiste saying such a thing, but I have decided it is what she secretly meant.