The generous of the earth

War, mass murder, fanaticism, bigotry, racism, hatred, environmental devastation: these are depressing times we are living through.

However, scratch beneath the surface of the headlines and beyond the escalating news cycle of violence and you can find human beauty even in the most wretched of places at the most wretched of times.

This was driven home to me by what seems to be a startling statistical finding. Iraqis are the most likely people in the world to help a stranger, according to the World Giving Index(WGI).

Let that sink in for a moment. This is a country that was ‘shocked and awed’ by the United States and Britain into almost total state collapse, endured years of civil war, is supposedly prey to sectarian and ethnic hatred and is at the mercy of rival militias and warlords.

Against such a backdrop and in a world where the relative trickle of refugees into Europe is causing continent-wide panic, you would expect people to fear strangers, to suspect that a passer-by in apparent need is actually part of an ambush or a ploy, to keep what little they have for themselves and their nearest and dearest.

Despite this, four out of five Iraqis report having helped a stranger in the past month. How is this possible?

Part of the reason may be cultural. Arab societies possess elaborate and nuanced social codes demanding often excessive generosity and hospitality to visitors and strangers.

But culture is only part of the story. Necessity, after all, is the mother of generosity. There is a universal human tendency to respond to need and the needy - and a sense of guilt when we do not.

In places such as Iraq, where the ranks of those in need are enormous, the ranks of those willing to help them also grow, though they can never keep up with the runaway demand.

Conflict and war zones bring out both the worst in humans and the best. This, to my mind, was symbolically embodied in a single recent incident in Iraq. An ISIL suicide bomber was on his way to take the lives of many innocent worshippers in Balad.

Najih Shaker al-Baldawi intercepted the suicide bomber and hugged him tight, not out of affection for him but out of love for the strangers flocking to a local shrine.

By preventing the mass murderer from entering the shrine and by taking much of the initial impact of the blast, al-Baldawi committed perhaps the supreme act of generosity: he gave his life to save dozens of others by reducing the carnage.

And despite Europe’s current – partly unjustified – reputation for selfish individualism, wartime Europe was replete with stories of similarly self-sacrificing generosity and solidarity, from the suicidal heroics of World War I trenches to the death-defying resistance to Nazi occupation in World War II and the sheltering of fugitive Jews destined for Adolf Hitler’s death camps.

Religion also seems to play a role in generosity. When it comes to the frequency of giving money, Myanmar and Thailand top the World Giving Index. Experts attribute this to the Buddhist practice of Sangha Dana, which encourages people to make donations.

But one must not overestimate the role of religion or assume that secular societies are less giving than pious ones.

In the example above, Myanmar was assumed to be the most generous country because a higher percentage of its citizens had given money over the preceding month. But we know nothing of the amounts given and how they relate to income.

So it is entirely possible that in another country where people give away large sums to charity but do so only once or twice a year, citizens would donate a larger proportion of their incomes yet appear less generous on the World Giving Index.

For example, research has repeatedly found Americans to be the most generous charitable donors in the world as a percentage of income, giving away around 2 percent of the gross domestic product.

However, this does not make the US the most generous country in the world. Like in developing countries with low taxes and huge income disparities, the visible poverty all around forces wealthy people of conscience to give.

In more egalitarian societies, that need is less because of the disguised or invisible forms of collective generosity that do not appear in the index or statistics on charitable donations.

In high-taxation societies with a generous social safety net, “giving” is a legal duty, not an individual choice.This shows how generosity comes in many shapes and sizes, from the individual to the collective.

This article has been excerpted from:‘The generous of the earth’.

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com