Payton Papers - The Varieties of Philanthropic Experience

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.

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.

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:

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 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]