 | | | | by Patrick West |
'Tis the season for the bequeathing of ostentatious gifts, boastful Christmas cards and shamelessly self-congratulatory round robins.
| At this time of year, there is the assumption that the more presents and cards one sends out, preferably very large and expensive ones, the more one proves one's generous and caring disposition. Contrarily, those friends and kin who furnish us with lame and cheap offerings, or who can't even be bothered to send any Yuletide greetings, face social death: their fate is to be forever labelled as parsimonious, lazy tight-arses. After all, everyone knows it's good to give. Innit?
| Well, no. It's good to be seen to give. Contrary to accepted wisdom, those who donate gifts are not always being altruistic, but are often being self-centred. To send a gift can often be an egocentric gesture that serves only the benefactor, who either seeks to climb up the social ladder by sucking up to his betters, or wants to demonstrate in a supercilious fashion his or her superiority over the lower orders. So, this Christmas, don't give any presents, and don't send any cards.
| To post cards and send presents is no mere, harmless indulgence. They are invariably dispatched by social inferiors seeking to curry favour with their superiors. To send a card to near-strangers who one seeks to impress, or gain employment from, is the sign of a sad, sad, subservient. We've all done it. And it is a practice well-known to anthropologists, as K Polany's The Great Transformation (1944) observed. He noted how the giving of presents to the central figure of authority was a way to placate that central figure of authority, who in due course retained that gift in storage to dispose of on special occasions at his own whim. The giving of alms acts as a way to cement one's status at the bottom of society's pecking order.
| On the other hand, those at the top are wont to send fantastically ostentatious gifts to display their wealth and power in order to humiliate their social inferiors. As the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss argued in his book The Gift (1925), gift-bearing is often a competitive and strategic gesture, in which to present larger presents serves to make explicit one's social superiority.
| Having examined tribes in the north-west coast of America, Mauss concluded that the act of gift-giving is mostly driven by the will to power, to display one's status. I remember all too well my vulgarian Irish-American cousin showering me and my Dublin family with microwave ovens and 50-dollar bills in the early 1980s, much to the annoyance and humbled chagrin of the recipients.
| A variant of this tactic is those ghastly round robin letters in which families communicate to their peers what a wonderful year they've had, how their son got in to Oxford, how their daughter unravelled the mystery of the theory of perpetual motion, or how granddad became head of the Russian Orthodox church. These round robins are merely a means of one-upmanship. They never say, 'Johnny developed a crack problem, Samantha is now on the game and Benji joined Hamas and blew himself up in a suicide bomb attack!'.
| | | To be seen as ‘uncaring’ is one of today’s biggest taboos |
| As Polany, Mauss and other twentieth-century anthropologists and sociologists, including Claude Levi-Strauss and Georg Simmel, argued, the donation of presents, and the unspoken assumption that such gestures must be reciprocated, is a common ritual among backward societies. The gift is designed to solidify bonds in small, tribal communities. In them, counter-gifts and decidedly non-altruistic presents are compulsory, because they stimulate the production of goods in a society in which the exchange of goods by monetary means has not been invented.
| The cult of bequeathing gifts and reciprocal counter-gifts is a sign of a culture that has failed to evolve from a pre-agricultural, pre-modern and pre-monetary status quo ante. While many bemoan that today's penchant for ostentatious gift-offering is a modern phenomenon, a symptom of the malaise of advanced capitalism, the opposite is actually the case: to shower one's social inferiors and superiors with presents is a sign of a primitive society that attributes mystical significance to inanimate objects.
| In the twenty-first century we like to pride ourselves on our individualism, our capacity to employ reason and 'choice', yet the culture of present-giving illustrates how we have yet to move on from our conformist, primitive origins. Not to give a gift, is, as anthropologists would say, taboo. And to be seen as 'uncaring' is one of today's biggest taboos. If you are not seen giving mum a large plasma screen television, or dad an iPod, or little nephew Timmy a 51 per cent share in News Corp, then you are regarded, frankly, as a complete bastard.
| Today we are compelled to be seen to care. Those charity Christmas cards that conspicuously bear the name of one's chosen good cause on the back cover provide a similar service for the card-sender (even if, according to a recent report, only three to five per cent of profits from charity cards sold by John Lewis, Harrods and WH Smith are actually handed over to charities).
| There is nothing 'caring' about giving a gift. It is often an ego-driving exercise designed to fulfil one's own desires. Many people will this year hand over presents to you because they are too timid not to, because they are meek and ambitious, because they want to convey the fact that they are better than you, or because they are challenging you to give a counter-gift that is even better.
| The most sincere and honest counter-tactic to peers bearing gifts? Send them absolutely nothing in return.
| Patrick West is the author of Conspicuous Compassion (Civitas, 2004).
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