Varieties
of Philanthropic Experience
From the
book, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action for the Public Good, by
Robert L. Payton
CONTINUED - PART
2 OF 6
Some philosophers now find
employment as "ethicists" on the staffs of hospitals or an
occasional business corporation. Some abandon philosophy for other, more
practical and profitable occupations.
Almost everything about the work
of philosophers must be subsidized. How? By whom? Philosophers, whether
in the narrow professional sense of the term or more broadly considered,
are the ones who advise us about the Good, the Beautiful, the True;
about compassion, justice, and community. Do we have enough
philosophers? Is their work as good as it ought to be? Are they working
on the right problems?
The foundation with which I was
associated considers these to be relevant and important questions, even
though the corporation that supports the foundation is almost entirely
engaged in the production of energy resources. Why should such a company
make contributions to support the work of philosophers?
I raise the question here as a
means of focusing on how things are paid for in American society,
obscure things like philosophy as well as obvious things like health.
The questions are usually segmented into questions of how money is
raised, and by whom, and by whom it is given, and for what purposes.
Philanthropic activity that thinks about health while ignoring
philosophy, that thinks about science but not about religion, will lead
us into the temptation of believing that only our bodies are important.
Two Values
"Words are tools that break
in the hand."
We can press words too hard, misapply them, let them lose their shape and utility. Trying to write about philanthropy makes painfully clear how many of our problems stem from an inadequate, often rusted and even broken vocabulary. It would be timely to find a word that could replace philanthropy, much as philanthropy replaced charity. Awkward coinages like "voluntaryism" are unlikely to catch on; others like pluralism, leave too much out.
Until a better word is found,
philanthropy will have to do. It is a protean word, like society or
religion. There are two central ideas embraced by it in its
present usage: compassion and community. Compassion is
another of the many terms we have employed to get around the hopeless
ambiguity of the word love. It implies an understanding,
sympathetic concern for another who is in some way in distress or need,
and who cannot cope with the situation alone, without help.
Community relates
to the things that bring us and hold us together. The emphasis is on
mutuality and sharing, common values that override or discipline our
self-interest and competitiveness; a healthy community not only permits
but encourages vigorous individual development within a few powerful
constraints.
Compassion,
then, has a strong emotional quality; it is not thoughtless, but it is
not calculating, either. Community has a more rational tone, more
reflective; it can be emotional—with a vengeance—but it
implies organization, plan, prudence, calculation.
Given that warning, one might
accept an interpretation that attributes the dimension of compassion in
the philanthropic tradition to origins among the Jews and Christians of
the ancient Near East, and the origins of the dimension of community to
the Greeks and Romans of the classical period.
As a tradition in the Western
world that emerged out of the cultures of the ancient Near East and the
Mediterranean region, the philanthropic tradition is very old. It is
difficult for us to think in terms of decades, much less centuries and
millennia. It would be as easy to overestimate as to underestimate the
importance of this fact: The philanthropic tradition is older than
democracy, older than Christianity, older than formal education, perhaps
as much as 2,000 years older than the oldest university.
The Philanthropic Dialectic
There is tension, even conflict, within philanthropy. We often say that philanthropy expresses a concern for others, but the two notions of self and other are inseparable. As the Mishnah asks:
If I am not for
myself who is for me?
and being for mine
own self what am I?
and if not now, when?
Philanthropy, in my view, occurs at the juncture of economics and religion; it may appear at the juncture of politics and religion as well. "A fence about riches is alms," according to the Mishnah: The philanthropic is a restraint on self-interest, selfishness, acquisitiveness, greed. The philanthropic is also a bridle on power; it introduces compassion into community, but--and this has become increasingly important in the modern era--it is also a goad to the public conscience.
Kenneth Boulding has been an important contributor for me in trying to think about philanthropy. The original title of his principal book on the subject is The Economy of Love and Fear. There is a dialectical tension between the two.
Boulding's notions of
"love" and "fear" are revealing of our values. The
late 1960s and early 1970s were filled with dramatic evidence of
philanthropic acts motivated by fear. There is, in fact, a long history
of arguments for helping the poor (more recently including the foreign
poor) based on fear: If you don't feed them now, the angry mobs will
rise up and destroy you.
Why do we make gifts to others?
Boulding speaks of gifts without return, gifts that may bring
satisfaction but no compensating material benefit. He calls them
"one-way transfers of exchangeables." With the poetry that
Boulding has always brought to economics (and everything else he writes
about), he describes the two basic motivations as love and fear.
But there are other kinds of
fear that motivate philanthropic behavior: fear of divine retribution,
fear of loss of self-esteem, fear of not "living on" in your
works after your death.
Love is an accepted
philanthropic motivation; fear probably isn't; greed never is.
An act of compassion might prompt gratitude; an act of fear is likely to
inspire contempt. Some philanthropic acts seem to rise out of both
emotions.
What is the place of guilt in
our philanthropic behavior? It is certainly a powerful motivator for
many people, as is the desire to have our works survive us. To what
extent are we expressing guilt not about our own behavior, but for that
of earlier generations?
Are other psychological forces
at work-sublimation, for example?
Memories of one's own past needs
might prompt sympathy for the needs of another later on. How others
responded to you yesterday may inspire or deflate your inclination to
respond to others tomorrow.
Similar arguments appear in
philanthropic service to the Third World. If we help underdeveloped
countries to educate themselves, they will be able to develop
economically; if they develop economically, they will provide markets
for our goods and we will buy more of theirs.
Some will then assume, though
not out loud: "and then they will owe us something for helping
them." Foreign aid is a way of buying allies, according to such a
rationale; it often becomes an exchange of food for military bases.
Does the present generation in
Western Europe "owe" the present generation in the United
States for the Marshall Plan? Does one generation inherit the moral
credit or guilt for the acts of an earlier generation? Do they inherit
gratitude and resentment?
Can gratitude and friendship be
bought? If so, why aren't we more popular? Is it because we've used our
philanthropic resources for political purposes? People look at what we
do and conclude that we are like the Water-man, in John Bunyan's The
Pilgrim's Progress, looking one way and rowing another. Has the
mixture of political, economic, and philanthropic motives simply won us
a reputation for hypocrisy? Do we act from a sense of compassion and a
concern for world community, or from fear and greed?
One-way transfers are not all
philanthropic, but all philanthropic transfers are one-way.
Throughout the other chapters of
Part I there is direct or indirect reference to the trade off between
"mercy" and, 'righteousness," between compassion and
justice. I won't expand on it here, except to offer a reminder that
mercy and justice prompt very different responses: The anger of
righteous indignation often overwhelms the tender concern of sympathy;
mercy without justice may merely perpetuate the need for alms. Implicit
in this dialectical tension are the struggles of the Roman Catholic
Church in Latin America, to cite but one current example.
There seems to be an inexorable
movement from the voluntary to the obligatory. It can be traced in the
ancient books of the Jews, from a divine mandate to help the poor and
defenseless to a precisely specified set of instructions about how much
to give. (I would argue—although there is not room for it here—that
the roots of the philanthropic tradition are religious; a distinguished
anthropologist tells me that religion is not necessary to explain
philanthropic behavior. I think there is an important issue involved,
and not just a semantic dispute.)
Can an act mandated by God be
thought of as "voluntary"? Is a charitable gift that responds
to social pressure to be thought of as "voluntary"? Can a
voluntary sector dominated by paid professionals be thought of as
"voluntary"? These questions weaken a bit what might otherwise
be thought to be a comfortable generalization about philanthropy: All
philanthropic giving is private and voluntary.
Those questions seem to lead to
some troubling conclusions: that state philanthropy is a
contradiction in terms, for example. Such questions also seem to imply
the conclusion that corporate philanthropy is a contradiction in
terms as well. (Some people like to contend that corporate philanthropy
is a tax on shareholders and employees, a tax imposed without giving
them a right to decline to participate.) The critics of the idea of
"public altruism" make their case on the grounds of the
missing voluntary dimension in mobilizing the resources in the first
place. If the funds are not voluntarily given, but collected, their
transfer to someone else is not voluntary, therefore not philanthropic.[1] The state and the
corporation are thus seen to be agents in giving away "other
people's money," yours and mine, as taxpayers and shareholders, as
employees of government and of corporations. The purpose of the gift is
not determining, in other words; it is the voluntary initiative that
makes the gift possible that makes it philanthropic.
[1] A friend of mine recalled Robert Sherrill's line that "military justice is to justice as military music is to music." Does this, he asks, provide a parallel to corporate philanthropy? Is corporate philanthropy to real philanthropy as corporate advertising is to literature? [back to text]