Giving Back?

Some bad linguistic creations are innocent and fairly accidental  – the work of poor folks whose  language is not English but some dialect of Bureaucratese or Educanto, and who cannot translate well.  Others, such as the substitution of “Native American” for “Indian”, are neither but rather were made and promoted to serve a political purpose.  (Throughout the world, a native of a country is any person who was born there, as distinguished from an immigrant.  The implication of making only Indians natives of America is that everyone else is a guilty interloper, and that Indians deserve privileges as victims.)  “Giving back” is one of those.

The notion of giving back implies an obligation to return something one has taken and a need to make amends or even atonement.  It implies that  a person’s success is somehow a gift from or a loss to society requiring repayment.  An honest person’s  reaction to a plea to give back should be  that he doesn’t  need to give anything back because he never took anything that did not belong to him, and that the money he made from working was earned in by offering  people goods and services they wanted and were willing to pay for.

There are people who do need to give back. They are called thieves and con artists, and it is quite appropriate to make them  perform restitution.   The rest of us do not and should not let anyone convince us we do. People should give when and to whom they like, freely and because they want to, not because of guilt or some nonexistent responsibility. And they should never accept anyone calling their generosity giving back. 

Giving Back 2

Various writers have  emphasized the indifference or even hostility of many conservatives and business people to intellectual, linguistic,  and ideological notions and nuances as one reason for their frequent inability  to cope with attacks from the left. In recent times it has become common to hear the maladroit Republicans labeled the stupid party (often versus the Democrats as the evil party) partially for similar reasons by people who generally wish them  well.

A minor, though not trivial, example comes from the widespread use and acceptance of the loaded  term “giving back” which I have griped about before. TV is full of commercials bragging piously  about how some business or another and its employees give back to somebody. Local news programs regularly serve up fulsome features about someone giving back to one community or another.  Philanthropists often refer to their generosity in the same way.

Yet the notion of giving something back has the connotation of returning something to its rightful owners, and in this context implies that whatever is being given  is owed in some sense to the people  it is being given to and perhaps was acquired at their expense or even taken from them unfairly.  This has fairly obvious political implications, but as far as I can tell conservatives, business people, and Republicans who blather along with the rest about giving back haven’t noticed. They should know better.

The right way to respond to a solicitation or demand for giving back  is to reply that you never took anything that did not belong to you and so feel no need to give it  back to anyone. Giving out of generosity is a fine  thing.  “Giving back” concedes things which should not be conceded.

We’ll be doing some charitable giving  this Christmas season, but we dang sure won’t be doing any giving back.  Others should follow suit.

Giving Back

Every so often people write articles about  trite, over used, syrupy, or simply annoying words or phrases they would like to see fall into disuse. I would like to nominate “giving back” as in “giving back to the community” or “giving back to his fans” or “giving back to the people of _________”   for dishonorable retirement, not only because it has become such a hackneyed phase and one so often uttered with such mush mouthed piety,  but also because of the assumptions behind its use.  

When one hears talk about giving back or the need to give back to the community, there is usually an at least implied sense of some sort of obligation or even of some level of guilt to be assuaged. Yet a person who came by his success honestly and fairly  has no such obligation and should feel no such guilt. He  would be quite right to reply to a claim that he is obligated to give something back by simply stating that no he isn’t, because he never took anything  that did not belong to him. In fact a person who acquires wealth honestly by selling his goods and/or services has already given back every time he did so by giving the people he sold to something they valued enough to pay him for it. There is no obligation beyond that. Giving charitably to people or organizations that he wants to help or support is a fine thing for a successful person to do - “giving”,  without the “back” and its implications of guilt and obligation. That is the clean way to do it.

Of course there are people who are obligated to give something back. They are the  thieves and con artists of the world, and their form of giving back has a precise name. It is called restitution. The rest of us should do our giving freely, because we want to, not because of any obligation or a need to appease someone.