---
title: "The symbolic power of charity, w/ Jon Dean"
date: "2020-12-08T09:50:27+00:00"
modified: "2020-12-08T09:50:27+00:00"
url: "https://rationalists.org.uk/articles/the-symbolic-power-of-charity-w-jon-dean/"
post_id: 7103
---

# The symbolic power of charity, w/ Jon Dean

Society praises those who give, but the ‘good glow’ benefits the giver. In this third episode of our podcast [*With Reason*](/podcast), sociologist Jon Dean unpicks how charity operates in the real world, from the wave of Covid-19 volunteering to the new fear of ‘humblebragging’. Can effective altruism help us out of this tangled mess?

For those interested in charity, philanthropy and how to be truly virtuous. Featuring reflection on the Poppy Appeal, the NHS, Donald Trump and more.

*Host: Niki Seth-Smith Co-host: Samira Shackle Producer: Alice Bloch*  
*Music: Danosongs*

**Podcast listeners can get a year’s subscription to *New Humanist* magazine for just £13.50. Head to [newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe](/supportus) and enter the code WITHREASON**

**Transcript:**
---------------

**Niki Seth-Smith:**

Hello and welcome to *With Reason* from *New Humanist* magazine and the Rationalist Association with me, Niki Seth-Smith –

**Samira Shackle:**

And me, Samira Shackle.

**NSS:**

This is the place where we meet writers, researchers and academics whose work and ideas deserve to be talked about, but challenged a bit sometimes too, of course,

**SS:**

It’s the place to come for bright thinking in turbulent times and for a healthy dose of critical conversation. So far this series we’ve had anthropologist Joe Webster, reflecting on faith, fraternity and hatred. And we’ve spoken to Kate Devlin, an expert in social and cultural artificial intelligence, about the future of sex tech and intimacy. But in this episode of *With Reason*, we’re talking about charity and virtue.

**NSS:**

Our guest today is Jon Dean, who teaches politics and sociology at Sheffield Hallam University. He’s written a book called *The Good Glow: Charity and the Symbolic Power of Doing Good*. And he’s interested in how charity actually works in the social world. Things like what giving does for the giver, how altruism isn’t always what it seems, and how charity symbols can be weaponized for political ends. Now, charity is a pretty slippery term. So when we caught up with Jon, we asked what he actually means by the word: is he talking about charitable organizations or more personal acts of giving?

**Jon Dean:**

So, I’m talking about both the ability of charities as organizations that seek to help people out in need, and how they take advantage of the fact that in society, we often have a greater respect for them as organizations – above organizations that are seeking to make a profit. But also individual charity acts such as volunteering, mutual aid, philanthropy on a large scale. Also, charitable giving on a small scale. I think all of that is imbued with a certain amount of symbolic goodness.

**NSS:**

So when you’re talking about reputation and status, is that what you mean by symbolic power? Is it something more complex than that?

**JD:**

We have a tendency to think of both charitable acts and people who are charitable, as good. We all want to live in a world where people do things for other people, where they take time out of their day, to help others – or when they put their hand in their pocket, and help someone else in need. But because charity has this automatic respect, this generalized sense of goodness, we see people trying to take advantage of that. We see a lot of, for example, richer philanthropists – Donald Trump and his family being a very good example of this – trying to undertake what Anand Giridharadas calls “reputation laundering”, that if they’re mired in some scandal, for instance, they’ll give some money to charity as a quick way of avoiding negative headlines. But on a more day to day level, I see it in my own life and the lives of the students that I teach, who are all encouraged to do volunteering, both to build skills, but also because volunteering on a CV is an automatic assumption of goodness, bad people don’t do voluntary work. And it’s trying to unpick how that good glow is operationalized and used by people ordinarily every day.

**NSS:**

And the “good glow” – I think that’s sort of riffing off this idea of the warm glow, as a concept used by economists to describe that sense of emotional reward that you get from giving to others. But I think there are other benefits to giving, aren’t there? Can you give a couple of anecdotes or examples from your book?

**JD:**

Yeah, sure. So the warm glow is this long standing economic theory that tries to explain why people continue to give. Economically, giving doesn’t make much sense: you’re losing what you’ve got for no reward. But the warm glow suggests that people feel good about giving, they get that good sense of buzz: yes, I’ve done something nice for someone else. And that is quite habitual, or addictive. And we find that giving actually stimulates very similar elements of the brain that drugs and sex and fun do. So there is a sense that you can get slightly addicted to giving. But giving also benefits you in various other ways. You get good access to social networks. Generally, people who volunteer more, live longer, they’re less lonely, they’re more healthy, they’re happier. And there’s a slight two-way relationship with that. People who give more are likely to live longer, and people who live longer are likely to give more – but generally people who do more for charity are happier. But then as I say, there is that slightly nefarious element to charity as well, when people try and take advantage, even looking beyond people who are famous or politicians who might have something that they want to distract attention from.

**SS:**

Giving can help the giver in other ways too, right? So it can boost a person’s reputation on a much smaller scale, as well. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that. If there are any examples of where people might get that sort of reputational boost; people who are not in the public eye necessarily.

**JD:**

I speak to a lot of young people about their experiences and perceptions of charity online. And they’re increasingly using their Facebook feeds and their Twitter feeds to advertise about fundraising that they’re doing. Or if they’ve had a relative pass away from cancer, they’re doing a fun run, they’re doing a bike ride. And they see that obviously, social media now is the best way to get your message, your fundraising call out to a lot of people. But at the same time, they are worried that they’re presenting themselves as better than their friends, that somehow they’re using their social media feeds – that we know are to a certain extent full of fakery, and distortion. They’re using the charitable imperative and the fact that charity makes you look better than someone who isn’t charitable, to slightly distinguish themselves. And this is brought home in things like humble bragging, which are boasts disguised as moans; “I’m so tired from working at the homeless shelter all night”, those sort of standard staples of social media that make people groan. And it is great if someone works at homeless shelter all night, no one would want to live in a world where people weren’t doing that sort of activity. But you know how social media enables you to slightly manipulate it and slightly adjust it in order to get a double benefit both that warm internal glow, but also that wider social reputational glow.

**NSS:**

It does seem like these terms like “humblebrag” that you mentioned, and “virtue signaling” have becomes more common. Would you say that is generational then, that attitude to being concerned about the performance of charity? Or is that also older generations?

**JD:**

So there’s less opportunity, I think, to be what we might call performative about all these elements of your life – social media has incredibly expanded our ability to cultivate our personalities in certain ways. And therefore, people are more bothered about how they look, I think discussion of things like humble bragging and virtue signaling though, come with, I think it’s fair to say a more judgy society. Kant said that we have a mania for spying on the morals of others. We are quite a judgy people. I think a lot of the time, we have a tendency to look at other people and say, would we be doing that? And is that the right way to live one’s life? The use of virtue signaling as an insult – the fact that somebody’s only giving to charity in order so that they can look good, or that someone’s only clapping for the NHS in order to look good in some way, is a term that I think speaks to a sort of quite worried, quite overly reflexively aware society. But at the same time, there are a lot of very useful critiques of virtue signaling as an insult – that actually it’s just a insult that’s used when one of your political opponents does something that you don’t like. It’s an easy way to dismiss and sort of weaponize someone’s goodness against them.

**SS:**

You’re talking about “clap for carers” and the conversation around that. And it seems like this year, public attention has been on charity in the UK in a way that it perhaps hasn’t been in other years because of Covid-19. One example that springs to mind, for me, is Captain Tom Moore, the hundred year old ex-army officer who famously raised £30 million pounds for NHS charities together by walking laps around his garden. And I wondered, as a researcher, what’s most interesting for you about observing phenomena such as that?

**JD:**

The fact that people latched on to that as a fundraising effort, and not the multiple other fundraising efforts that were going on, I think says something about what we value as a society. I think Tom Moore as an army veteran, as a pensioner doing something for the NHS – those are all sort of untouchable public touchstones in modern British life. And so then drawing the NHS, old age and being a veteran together means that the public latch onto it and it becomes uncriticiseable. Actually, there is a wider debate to be had about the proper place of charity. In British society, the NHS, for instance, should it need a charity that needs £30 million of funding to pay for those added extras? Or is that a perfectly legitimate way for the National Health Service to be run? And what counts as an added extra and what counts as core medical funding? The NHS has always had a charitable component In fact, it came together from the collection of charitable hospitals that were providing a very disparate service. So this larger debate that is between right and left about what is the correct place for charity in the makeup and delivery of our welfare services, is something that I think that Coronavirus has brought out. There’s been a report that’s come out that’s talked about how maybe the government’s efforts to organize volunteering – and you know, there were 750,000 people who signed up to be volunteers, but actually haven’t done very much – has meant far less during the pandemic, than the mutual aid and community groups that cropped up. And maybe that local, closer, more informal networks of charity are more important to people than these big, large scale movements sometimes.

**NSS:**

And so you make the point in the book that actually this is a field that’s, as you’re describing, is incredibly complex, but has been largely untouched by modern sociologists. Why do you think this is? And do you think this maybe more cynical, or at least attitude of greater examination towards these trends will cause something of a new look at the field?

**JD:**

So I think charity as a concept has been relatively untouched by sociologists. Often, we try and look at charities trying to understand through the prism almost of private businesses: how do they work? How do they recruit? How do they manage their volunteers? How do they fundraise? Those technical questions of management and organization. But we don’t often reflect on this wider concept of charity. And how is it unequally experienced? Why are boards overwhelmingly old, male and white? How do we encourage that level of diversity of thought and of background into the charity sector? And then this fundamental question of: is charity always good. Just because something is a charity doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Charities don’t always behave very well, they don’t always uphold rigorous ethical standards, they don’t always argue for the most important wider case. There’s this larger argument that all charities should be working to make themselves unemployed, or from the left, actually, a lot of what charities are doing should be delivered by central government through taxation, rather than through sporadic, potentially short term funding from philanthropy and giving.

**NSS:**

And that’s an argument that’s been put by the left, I think, when it comes to the Royal British Legion, that there should be more state support for veterans and their families. That’s an example that you go into in quite a lot of depth in the book, the poppy appeal. And the fact that you know, when it comes to every November, people buy and wear red poppy in public, and it’s increasingly the case that that can sometimes feel like it’s not a voluntary gesture. So you go into the idea of poppy fascism. And so maybe you might want to just explain what poppy fascism is, and why this issue has become so fraught.

**JD:**

So every year the Royal British Legion sells plastic and paper poppies to raise money for veterans as an act, also of remembrance of people who’ve died, particularly, and served in the First and Second World Wars. And it’s a amazing campaign. It’s raised billions over the years and the work of the Royal British Legion is incredibly important from providing loneliness services, to providing mental health services to representing disabled veterans at benefits, tribunals – things that you would argue they shouldn’t having to be go through really. But the untouchable nature of large elements of the military, and our cultural history of World Wars One and Two, means that every year there is this poppy fascism clash between people who challenge others who don’t want to wear the poppy, and it becomes quite a fraught cultural touchstone around which we argue, and that seems to be absolutely devoiding the poppy, which is a fundraising and remembrance tool, of its purpose. I think a lot of people – the Nigel Farages of this world, to be explicit, are weaponizing the poppy in quite a dangerous and nasty way. Something that the British Legion are quite clear is a personal choice to wear – and yet we end up having a battle about should you or shouldn’t you wear one, rather than our veterans being properly treated. I spoke to a fundraiser for instance, who said around that time, if he’s going to a meeting and not wearing a poppy he’d rather be late than show up not wearing a poppy, because to do so would risk his business, risk offending. someone.

**SS:**

Leading on from that, we wondered that if during the poppy appeal or other points in the year, whether you get asked by your friends or family about for advice about what they should or shouldn’t give to charity, and if you have criteria that you might use for making decisions. So, you know, thinking about which charities to donate to, or how best to kind of interact with the charities that you are donating to, I mean, what do you do? What do you advise people to do?

**JD:**

I think that’s an area where it’s best not to give advice. But I do wish generally that people looked into the causes that they gave to a bit more. We have that automatic tendency to if someone shakes a bucket in front of us, or if someone we know, asks us to give to a cause, we tend to, or if there’s a spare change, collecting tin on a counter, we might put some in there. It’s important to know where the money you’re giving is going to and being acutely aware of how that charity is spending its money. Some people take that to the nth degree. There’s a movement called the effective altruists movement who say that we should only be giving to causes that spend their money in the purest way – that spends their money with the least amount going on overheads and the most lives saved. But that does end up guilt tripping people quite a lot. And actually, on an individual level, I find again, that punishing people for the decisions that they’re emotionally connected to is quite problematic. Governments and their international aid budgets and wealthy philanthropists investing billions of dollars or pounds should be the ones spending their money in the most careful, most sensible, most logical way that does the most good, if that can ever truly be measured.

**NSS:**

You’re listening to *With Reason* from *New Humanist* magazine and the Rationalist Association with me Niki Seth-Smith,

**SS:**

And me, Samira Shackle. And today we’re joined by the sociologist Jon Dean, who’s talking to us about *The Good Glow*, his study of charity and the symbolic power of doing or appearing to do good.

**NSS:**

So far, we’ve talked to Jon about how giving can benefit the giver – they might even live longer, apparently. And we also talked about this idea of virtue signaling.

**SS:**

Yeah, it’s a really interesting conversation. And coming up, we will chat about effective altruism. But first, we asked Jon what he means when he writes that charity has become an unwitting pawn in extending the social structures that make everything worse. Here’s what he had to say.

**JD:**

People often forget that the charity sector is as riven by inequalities and unfairnesses and injustices as any other section of society. I think people sometimes think of the charity sector as distinct and separate, because it’s this wonderful place where kind people come together to do nice things for other people. And that does happen. But at the same time, there is large scales of racism in the sector, as revealed by the Charity So White campaign. There’s large scales of sexism in fundraising, and the charity sector is misused by people as a way to further their own interest. Donald Trump, for instance, is someone who’s used his charitable giving as a way to further his own business interests. There’s a famous story at the opening of an orphanage in New York for children with AIDS, that, just as they were about to start the sort of celebration ribbon cutting event, he walked in, sat on the platform and soaked up all the applause and all the warmth from the crowd and the children singing. He hadn’t given a penny to that organization, the guy who’d actually funded the charity was stuck in the audience and the charity spent ages trying to repair its relationship with him. Trump knew that to go there, to be on the platform, to look like he’d given, to look beneficent, and benevolent and caring is worth more to him in terms of presentation and social access to various networks than actually doing the giving in the first place.

**SS:**

So when we talk about Donald Trump, what kind of scale are we talking about? How much has he pledged to give to charitable causes? Or how much is he actually given?

**JD:**

So the place to look for this is David Fahrenthold’s reporting in the Washington Post, which he won a Pulitzer Prize for. So between 2011 and 2015, Trump claimed he’d given over $102 million to charity, but actually, it turned out that little to none of that came from his own pocket. Instead, he was donating three rounds of golf at his courses and lifts in his plane, and donations from the Donald J. Trump Foundation that actually had been donated by other people. So he’s one of those people who promises a lot, I think, and then just doesn’t see the need to deliver. The promise is the thing that gets in the headlines, and actually, the delivery later on is less imporant. And this came about again, during the Notre Dame fire in in Paris that destroyed the cathedral. There were a lot of promises at the start from the very wealthy individuals of French high society. But actually, it took a long time for a lot of those donations to come through. And actually, it was the smaller individual donations of, of ordinary people that were funding the initial relief for the cathedral.

**SS:**

It seems like the decisions about whether to give and what to give are really fraught with dilemmas, and one strategy for that is effective altruism. So could you just tell us a little bit about it?

**JD:**

So the effective altruism movement is a growing movement pushed by the philosopher Peter Singer, and figures like William McCaskill that basically argues that it is immoral to not give to charity, if you have spare money, if you can afford to buy things that you do not need – that extra coat that extra DVD – it is immoral to be not giving it away. We should all be giving out a lot more at least 10% of our income. And for those of us with decent incomes, especially in the West, a lot more than that. But they also argue that when you give your money away, you should be giving it to the most effective causes. And by effective, they reduce that to what per dollar saves the most lives of children, particularly thinking about malaria and blindness in Sub Saharan Africa, saying that is the place where your dollar can do the most good: $3,000 approximately to save a life. Therefore, if you give away $3,000 a year, you shouldn’t be giving it to the donkey sanctuary. And when you read around altruism, effective altruism, you go, there’s a lot to this, we should be probably giving more money away. And we should be giving to the things that are probably more important and having more of an impact. What I dislike about effective altruism is its shaming characteristic. Bill Gates, for instance, is a big fan. But he himself hasn’t spent all of his money. Well, he spent his money in quite an ideological way at times that fits with his personal peccadilloes and preferences. Some people in effective altruism have joked about thinking about dead child currency, oh, you buy that nice handbag, that’s one dead child, you buy that house that has that extra bathroom, that’s two dead children. And that’s again, a very judgy, almost nasty, almost demonizing way to think about it. Whereas if I’m giving away an ordinary amount of money for a single person on their own, that is different to a billionaire giving a billion pounds away, who should probably be thinking in a much more effective way than the ordinary person on the street, who it is not unreasonable for them to be driven by emotion.

**NSS:**

It does seem that rationally we can all get behind Peter Singer’s “do the most good we can”. But as you explain in great depth in the book, giving often comes from the heart. Is there a way to get ordinary people to give in a more reasonable manner? Or is that something that’s just unpractical?

**JD:**

So the big place where this debate comes up is about homelessness. And this question of: should you give to homeless people who are requesting money on the street? Or should you give to homelessness charities? And the official advice, the traditional advice that the charity sector and the police and the Councils will put out is give to charities who can use their money collectively, to put it towards proper services like beds for the night and a guaranteed standard of food for everybody, rather than you just giving £10 to one person who asks for it in Sheffield city centre. And that I think makes a lot of sense. However, the person in front of you in the city centre is a human being who’s going to have some emotional connection to you. Whereas the charity is a more bureaucratic, more faceless organization that yes, might spend your money more effectively. But I don’t always think that it’s particularly useful to judge people for giving to that smaller, more emotionally driven, cause. This is why I always recommend that people look at charities’ websites, if you can get a good grasp of how much money they’re bringing in, how much money they’re spending, what they’re spending it on, what their core charitable objectives are, that will enable you to see right could my £10 go further.

**NSS:**

Given these challenges and getting ordinary people and citizens to adopt an effective altruism approach, there’s an argument that we should be looking at the government; that raising taxes, particularly for the rich and relying less on charities and more on the state has a better chance of getting those funds to be allocated in a targeted manner, and based on evidence. I think that’s an argument that you make in the book. But I guess the question with that is, how is that – the evidence itself might be contested?

**JD:**

So we would always want governments to make policy decisions based on evidence. But we we know, that doesn’t happen very often, this debate about whether services should be delivered by charities or if, let’s say, there’s a befriending service for lonely old people in Leeds, and it’s currently run as a charity, and people donate to it and people volunteer for it and befriend old people and give them phone calls. Tackling loneliness in older people is incredibly important thing. Should that be paid for out of generalized taxation? Should we raise taxes to have that as a central service? Or is it a service delivered better if it’s done by volunteers from an independent organization that isn’t trying to get good government headlines, or wrapped up in wider government bureaucracy? There’s this huge question over the extent of the state, and what services should be core state responsibilities and what should be just nice add-ons that people can give to if they wish. But then should that be delivered by local councils, by the NHS? Or should that be delivered by charities who are subcontracted? And then if charities end up subcontracted, do we end up privatizing them, and do Serco come in and then subcontract to charities? That is those three debates ended up on top of each other somewhat. One is about the size of the state. One is about the role of charities, and one is about the mixed delivery of welfare services. And everyone slowing down to ask the question, what do we actually want it to be, never really happens.

**NSS:**

On balance, would you be in favor of a larger welfare state and more aid directed to charitable causes or, or aid causes?

**JD:**

Separating out those two issues, I think, certainly, especially since 2008, the amount that we’re spending on our welfare state has reduced too much. We’re aiming for one of the lowest percentages in Europe. And we should be tackling that. There’s lots of both obvious and hidden need that needs tackling. But I think I’m more in favor of, yes, a lot of times that service being delivered by charities, – funded by government, but delivered by charities – who are often more original in their thinking than state bureaucracies, more adaptive to local environments, and know local people, because they’re embedded. So I think, arguments for a bigger state, but also more decentralization of both places where the charity sector could play a role.

**SS:**

As the world confronts the Covid-19 pandemic, and we’re seeing economic crises around the globe, there might also be the chance to reshape society in different ways. I wonder what the key questions and discussions around charity are that you see emerging in the 2020s.

**JD:**

What I would like to see is – something that’s come out of this is how important community and mutual aid is to people when their backs are up against the wall. The amount of roads, for instance, really, really small areas, a road that suddenly has a WhatsApp group, that suddenly doing Food Bank collections, that suddenly helping each other out, suddenly becomes much more important to people. We’ve become so individualized, so atomized, so separate from each other, that actually re-instigating that sort of mutual aid community element, of which I think the charity sector is very well placed to play a role, is probably the thing that we could most hopefully move towards. People want to do more for each other. We always say people want to do volunteering, but they don’t have time – family commitments, poor childcare, means their ability to get involved in local good causes and local cultural activities is diminished. The increase of working from home that might be taking place and arguments increasingly for four-day weeks, I think are both places where suddenly you’ll get a reinvigoration of community life. If people suddenly have more time to devote to other people, they generally take that baton up. It’s just everything is stretched so thin at the minute that there’s no opportunity for that to happen. So, I think that’s my hope for the next decade.

**NSS:**

Before you go, this is where we look at the *New Humanist* archive for a piece that you might want to reflect on or maybe totally disagree with. So, you’ve been reading a piece from 1972 by Jeremy Sandford called *Charities and the Pious Fraud*. This is from decades ago, but it’s talking actually about many of the same issues they are interested in. And Sandford argues that what he refers to as the pious fraud, bending the truth in pursuit of raising charitable funds, is something of an age-old tradition. Does this idea of the pious fraud resonate with you?

**JD:**

So I was really happy you asked me to read this article, because a lot of the debates that Sandford talks about in 1972 are still quite current. I often get accused of being cynical about charity, by people in the sector. Sandford is far more cynical than I am. He’s incredibly angry about pretty much every practice that goes on in the sector. What he’s arguing is that there are lots of ways in which the charity sector is trying to manipulate the general population, lots of ways in which they’re trying to get people to give in ways that aren’t 100% true. Some of the things he picks out are using an actor, a child actor to play a deprived child in an advert in 1972. He might be arguing that that’s unreasonable that that’s not real. But actually, I think that’s just good child protection practice. We wouldn’t ask a real service beneficiary of a homeless charity or an anti-poverty charity, who was a child to pose in an advert, and most homeless organizations, for instance, use actors in their adverts and state on the advert that they’re an actor. He also argues that charities are lying or manipulating how many people are homeless at the moment – that they don’t have robust figures. And so therefore, they’re using whatever figure works best for them. Well, we now do have pretty good statistics on how many people are homeless, and it’s a horrendously high number. It’s actually I think, the charity sector has professionalized in a way since then, that those things that he either says are fraudulent are still going on, but for good reason, or that the sector has professionalized its behavior in some ways.

But there’s this fundamental problem that charities have, that they need to raise money, and maybe their individuals aren’t very suited to asking for money, is an interesting one. The fundraising profession has become incredibly professionalizing, do MAs in fundraising. But sometimes charities do have to present the worst picture of something to get people to give. Most academic studies suggest that people give to the most extreme image, that when charities generally try nice images and nice messages, and look how much good we’ve done, the public don’t give as much. One recent study has shown that may not be the case. But in general, the evidence points one way: that you have to exaggerate. People make up their minds about something very quickly. Therefore, you need to grab them with attention grabbing, approaches and images. And I don’t think that’s fraudulent. And I don’t think that’s pious, I think that’s just reality.

**SS:**

Jon Dean, author of *The Good Glow: Charity and the Symbolic Power of Doing Good*. Niki, what struck you most about talking to Jon?

**NSS:**

So I was interested in how very critical he was about guilt tripping, and the idea that we shouldn’t punish people for making decisions that we’re emotionally connected to. And the fact basically, that we can’t avoid the fact that it’s emotional when we give. And that made me think of that familiar quandary, which I remember really engaging with, maybe even as a teenager, about people begging on the streets. I’ve always been torn about that. Because sometimes people can have quite meaningful relationships with homeless people, that brings that level of personal relationship and trust and dignity. But then again, we’re continually told that we shouldn’t give directly to individuals and we should give to homelessness charities instead. I mean, have you confronted that issue?

**SS:**

Yeah, definitely. It’s something that I think about a lot. I think it feels quite present, certainly in London in the last few years, with just so many more rough sleepers, and also rising in tandem, quite aggressive messaging, like if you’re sitting on the tube, and you have these messages saying “do not give money to beggars”, and so on. I find that quite troubling. It was interesting to hear Jon talk about that. And the idea that we don’t all necessarily need to be or need to aspire to be effective altruists. And that sometimes, being driven by that emotion isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

**NSS:**

I guess in terms of what people naturally do, or that they become emotionally invested in. He also mentions that report that the British government encouraged a lot of volunteering during the pandemic, and apparently 750,000 people signed up to be volunteers, but he said they didn’t end up actually doing very much. And we’ve seen that in contrast, informal neighborhood mutual aid and community groups have been far more effective. So it does seem in a way, like Covid-19 has taught us some kind of lesson about a local, an informal voluntary work, but I don’t know where that might lead us or what we might take from that.

**SS:**

There’s so much more we could talk about. That’s all for now, though. If you enjoyed this episode, why not make the rather charitable act of texting a friend to recommend it right now? Because the more listeners we have, the more episodes we’ll be able to make in the future. We really appreciate your support.

**NSS:**

Next week we’re with Minna Salami, author of *Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone*. Read more about Minna and all of our guests at [newhumanist.org.uk/withreason](/podcast) where you can also find transcripts and reading lists for every episode of this podcast. *With Reason* was produced by Alice Bloch and hosted by Samira Shackle and me Niki Seth-Smith. Thanks for listening. Bye.

Further reading:
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Jon Dean (2020) ‘[The Good Glow: Charity and the Symbolic Power of Doing Good](https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%98The+Good+Glow%3A+Charity+and+the+Symbolic+Power+of+Doing+Good%E2%80%99&oq=%E2%80%98The+Good+Glow%3A+Charity+and+the+Symbolic+Power+of+Doing+Good%E2%80%99&aqs=chrome..69i57.291j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)’.  
David A. Fahrenthold (2016) [‘Trump boasts about his philanthropy. But his giving falls short of his words’.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-boasts-of-his-philanthropy-but-his-giving-falls-short-of-his-words/2016/10/29/b3c03106-9ac7-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html)  
Anand Giridharadas (2018) ‘[Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World’](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37506348-winners-take-all)  
William MacAskill (2015) [‘Doing Good Better’](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/)  
Peter Singer (2015) ‘[The Most Good You Can Do’](https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/blog/the-most-good-you-can-do/)