By Corey Dolgon 

Editor’s Note: Following Mitchell’s Complacency in Civic Engagement post from Monday, this provocative piece also comes out of comments at the 2013 Conference of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement. 

Looking at Naked People: Pornography and the Non-Profit World

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I know it when I see it,” in reference to obscenity. He was arguing that the 1st and 14th Amendments mandated that obscenity laws had to be limited themselves to criminalizing only “hard-core pornography.” I attended a panel discussion today a few months ago where representatives from banks and corporations shared insights with non-profits on how to better “ask” for money from them. It was surely obscene.

There’s nothing quite like being told by bankers and corporate suits that the best way to raise cash from their “charitable” arms is by running your non-profit “like a business.” I’ve never been a big believer in the possibility of non-profits making substantive or fundamental social change in the world. Too many (especially the big ones like United Way) sap resources that could be better spent given directly to poor and low-income people. The redistribution of resources would be more effectively accomplished with direct subsidies or by increasing the quantity and quality of collectively consumed resources (education, health care, etc.) than by setting up large bureaucratic organizations to determine who the deserving and undeserving poor are. In fact, these days, non-profits seem to be stressing the public relations function that “giving” has for the wealthy more than the impact their work has on the social problems they address. Giving is more for the givers—probably always has been. That may not be obscene, but it’s certainly perverse.

But to watch non-profits get lessons from businesses on how to better beg for increasingly sparse resources to address problems caused primarily by the increased avarice of (and inequality brought on by) banks and corporations to begin with—now that’s obscene. In fact, it is a pornographic process rife with perverse irony. On the one hand, corporate greed, profit-driven social and economic policies, corporate and commercial hegemony are all responsible for much of the poverty and social dysfunction that non-profits try to address. Whether it’s tax policies that redistribute money from the poor to the rich or the corporate abuse of the planet, having these same institutions condescend to us and suggest we need to do a better job of managing our non-profits to be more efficient and effecting is insulting and degrading.

On the other hand, the assumption that somehow the corporate sector IS more effective and efficient, while always a dubious and ideologically drenched proposition, ought to seem farcical by now. After all, how effective and efficient has the financial sector been, the auto industry, the energy industry, etc., etc.? From Enron to Lehman Brothers, we have watched corporations and banks destroy the world’s economy. Somehow, they have managed to swindle us again during attempts at economic recovery. And now they want us to take notes from their “charity” wing on how to be more effective and efficient. We would be better off learning from them how to rob, cheat and steal.

But the real acts of public fornication followed these statements as most in the room (I have no personal excuse except the explanation that I was very late to the party and felt more like a deer caught in the headlights) responded by trying to craft their individual agency’s “ask” in a way they hoped the suited folks up front might like. Instead, I would like to propose that the only honest reaction to such perversity is for those of us in the non-profit world to explain to the emperors and their minion that they are naked. Their words represent raw cruelty and terror; their “charity” represents social masturbation; their philanthropic values and pretense is pornographic exploitation; their advice is satanic sophistry.  To continue in silence should not be protected speech—it is obscene. To tell people they are naked—we are all naked—may be the only decent course to follow.

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Corey Dolgon is Director of Community-Based Learning and Professor of Sociology at Stonehill College. An accomplished singer, Dolgon performs “singing lectures” on the role of folksongs in labor organizing and other social movements. Dolgon is the author of 3 books, including Living Sociology: Social Problems, Service Learning, and Civic Engagement. He has also written numerous articles and book reviews which have appeared in anthologies, journals, and magazines.

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