The deaths this year within a week of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa caused comparisons to be made between them.
In truth, although both women had high public profiles in what we call charitable activity, the manner of their engagement in such work made them utterly different, to such an extent as to suggest that they were from two different eras.
Princess Diana was a creature of the media age. She clearly thought a great deal about the fact that people were watching her. Every aspect of the way she looked, dressed and behaved in public was the consequence of this awareness.
Mother Teresa, by contrast, gave the impression of someone who was unaware she was being watched. Much of her life was as public as Princess Diana's, but she appeared to make no concessions to the watching world. Not only did she not acknowledge cameras, but her personality suggested that she had never looked in a mirror.
People who met Mother Teresa often reported how struck they were by what they called her "holiness". I could never hear this other than as an empty cliche. But, learning of her death within a week of Princess Diana's, I had an insight that what people were talking about was not what I regarded as her piety, but her sense of indifference to the watching world.
We think the similarity between Mother Teresas and Princess Di was that both "cared", but actually what distinguished Mother Teresa not merely from Princess Di, but from most of us, was that she didn't care at all. She did what she did despite, not because of, the eyes of the world. This way of behaving is almost extinct. The Gospel notion of doing good deeds in secret is virtually impossible. In a world of telethons, flag days, coffee mornings and sponsored fasts, charity has become a matter of doing good deeds in public. It is, of course, possible to slip money into an envelope and send it to the St Vincent de Paul, but our culture urges us more and more to do good works which have ulterior motives and are therefore less satisfying to the soul. This changes utterly the meaning and function of charity. An instant analysis might declare that it makes it impossible to locate a charitable impulse with pure motives, but this would miss the point. All charity is essentially selfish.
The old chestnut about it being better to give than to receive is not an empty platitude; it is a straightforward statement of fact. By giving, we get back a range of emotional and psychological benefits which cannot be purchased in any other way.
Perhaps there is no such thing as pure altruism, in the sense of an act that is entirely motivated by thoughts of others. The nature of charity, as indeed the nature of all social exchange, is essentially to do with the aspect of each one of us that is unavoidably social, and therefore dependent on the health of the wider world.
We all breathe the same air. We all take from the world and give back to it. The quality of what we receive, therefore, is dependent on the quality of what is provided by the collective effort. Other than by succumbing to psychosis, we cannot continue to receive from the world while failing to give back, without experiencing negative feelings such as guilt, alienation and shame.
Charity is therefore a way of mitigating these feelings in ourselves. If you want to put the issue in an economic perspective, charity is the means by which we buy back peace of mind, by which we square the moral circle and allow ourselves to live in a world which outrages us metaphysically by virtue of its manifest inhumanity and our own individual inability to rectify this. If I give a pound to a beggar in the street, I walk on with an increased sense of moral superiority and well-being, the better able to walk into a shop and buy an expensive book, CD or item of clothing. I have, for the moment, a clear conscience.
This places the transaction between myself and the beggar in a different light. Our self-serving culture perceives the incident as an act of pure philanthropy: one party who contributes nothing in receipt of a hand-out from another who has no obligation to give.
But if we take into account the existential, psychological and emotional levels of human interaction, the transaction is much more interesting. By giving the beggar a pound I am, in fact, buying from him a degree of peace of mind. A beggar may be part of what we call the flotsam and jetsam of society, but, standing on the footpath, he is a highly sophisticated functionary in our economic life.
He might as well be carrying a box of objects called "Guilt-relievers" and dispensing them to his alleged benefactors. This indeed is precisely the function of the stickers and other badges which charities give out on flag days.
I WOULD say that the wilful blindness of our society to the two-way nature of such transactions allows us all to get away much more lightly than is good for us. Even for a comparatively wealthy person, a pound given to a beggar can buy a great deal of conscience-quieting.
But for all the immediate sense of smugness, charity doesn't really work for the giver any better than drink. If the motive is suspect - and especially so when the donation is made ostentatiously - it doesn't purchase the correct commodity. We can fool our heads, but not our guts. Our feeling of well-being remains superficial, and the hole in the psyche gets bigger.
What we withhold from the beggar must be spent a hundredfold in filling it. If we give money for show, we purchase not relief of conscience, but public admiration. For the pound I throw into the upturned cap, I get the admiration of a passing nun, but not peace of mind.
The sticker I buy from the woman with the collection tin allows me to walk around with the air of someone who cares, but I cannot also expect it to still my conscience.
If the marketplace was functioning correctly, the degree of relief obtainable through charitable donations would be commensurate with the cost of other forms of conscience-deadening, and we would feel the need to give as much to beggars as we spend on, for example, drugs and drink. Indeed, were we to give our excess money away instead of drinking it, it is likely that we would all feel a great deal better.
But the crude understanding we have of our psychological make-up and market forces leads us to the wrong from of selfishness, which is why in the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger there is a parallel growth of both poverty and drunkenness, and why this becomes more visible at Christmas. Maybe it's time for a new indicator of collective well-being - a measure of Gross National Guilt, or GNG.