The virtues of conspicuous giving: how self-righteous, empty-headed celebrities promote private charity.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns

ON FEBRUARY 6, Madonna will help save Africa by attending the opening of the planet's largest Gucci store. The party she's hosting is expected to raise approximately $2 million for children who will never get to visit even the planet's smallest Gucci store. Paris Hilton is planning to go on a fact-finding mission to Rwanda, just as soon as she completes her fact-finding mission to determine where Rwanda is. Everywhere you look, celebrities are staring from billboards and bus shelters with sultry benevolence, imploring us to buy globally engaged T-shirts and humanitarian cell phones.

This may be the age of doing good by buying goodies, with glossy magazines like Benefit that celebrate "the lifestyle of giving" via fashion spreads and celebrity profiles, but can we really have our Godiva layer cake with hazelnut ganache and donate it to sub-Saharan AIDS babies too?

Not everyone is swallowing the organic, socially conscious, celebrity-endorsed Kool-Aid. Naomi Klein, whose book No Logo presented Gap T-shirts as the cause of global inequity, not the solution, decries the "Bono-ization" of activism, wherein consumers effect change by buying Project (RED) T-shirts from the Gap and swaying gently at huge benefit concerts. Chronicle of Philanthropy Editor Stacy Palmer recently told The New York Times "there needs to be greater skepticism about celebrity involvement [in philanthropy] than I see in the media right now." Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank frets that "too much of today's charity is about gratifying the giver, rather than helping the needy."

A nation of needy pundits and bloggers might beg to differ: There is no greater gift to those eager to bash fatuous Hollywood actorvism than Gwyneth Paltrow in beads and March Madness face paint gazing indigenously at the camera and declaring, "I AM AFRICAN." But what, really, is so terrible about a movie star who lives in a $5.4 million Hamptons mansion (and at least three other multimillion-dollar homes) expressing solidarity with poverty-stricken Africans through the transformative power of world-class hair styling, raising awareness for the Keep a Child Alive charitable campaign in the process?

In 2006 charitable contributions in the U.S. totaled $295 billion, an all-time high, according to the philanthropy report Giving USA. More than 80 million Americans volunteer each year, with the services they provide valued at more than $200 billion. Purpose-driven evangelicals have a lot to do...