Is an act philanthropic if it means that you merely have discretionary use of funds not your own? What credit or blame, if any, carries over from a collective act to the individual's participation—especially central participation—in it?

If the government uses my taxes to pay for grants of food for starving Ethiopians, have I somehow participated in a charitable act? This is the other side of the argument of the good bishop who is withholding a share of his tax payments from the IRS to detach himself from arms expenditures by the government. The argument against the bishop is that he can't designate his taxes the way he might earmark a gift; the government may apply all the taxes the bishop does pay to armaments and apply none of it to welfare. That is the argument against my claiming a share in the aid to starving Ethiopians and denying a share of the military help to warring Salvadorans.

Is the voluntary dimension of collective giving by governments, corporations, and churches symbolic? Something that I read in an essay by a British theologian prompted this very awkward and troublesome question: "Does a Christian meet his Christian obligations to his fellow man by paying taxes in a welfare state?" (To phrase the question differently: Does a corporate employee share in the giving of his or her corporation in such a way that he or she can not only claim "I gave at the office," but even claim that "the office gave for me?")

Is it important? Americans allocate several hundred billions of tax dollars to welfare programs that include substantial sums for widows, orphans, and strangers as in ancient times, and for old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and other benefits of the modern era. If one expends 40%, say, of his or her gross income in taxes, and some substantial share of that is used for the poor, needy, and disabled (including some of those in other countries), why should one voluntarily give even more?

Answer: The requirements of compassion and community go far beyond what we are willing to tax ourselves for.

Must charity be coerced? In its simplest form, it says that the needs that we have sought to meet by voluntary giving in the past exceed what voluntary giving will ever produce. However we organize ourselves to raise money from private contributions, the demands of just economic distribution go far beyond what our voluntary efforts will generate.

The secular—that is, long-term—trend appears to be to shift the responsibility for the material needs of the poor from voluntary charity to public welfare. Compassion becomes bureaucratized.

The more recent trends would also indicate that efforts to improve the quality of life—the dimension of community are also shifting from the private to the public sector, from voluntary to obligatory support of the arts, the humanities, the sciences, even to economically driven activities like engineering and technology.

The Works of Mercy

I speak with no authority about the work of St. Thomas Aquinas—but I greatly admire his work and find it useful in thinking about philanthropy. The volume on charity in the Summa Theologiae includes a "question" on almsgiving, and introduces a perspective that spells out what is meant by being personally and directly engaged in philanthropic work. The Roman Catholic tradition divides almsgiving into corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and makes convenient lists of them that Aquinas reduces to a few words. (It is worth comparing this list with those from the Organizing Committee Report mentioned in the "Introduction.")

The corporal works of mercy "are summed up," Thomas writes, "in the verse, Visito, poto, cibo, redimo, tego, colligo, condo [visit, give drink, feed, rescue, clothe, gather, bury]."

"Then," St. Thomas continues, "there are the seven kinds of spiritual almsgiving that are usually listed: instructing the ignorant, giving advice to those in doubt, consoling the sorrowful, reproving sinners, forgiving offenses, putting up with people who are burdensome and hard to get on with, and finally, praying for all." (Consule, solare, castiga, remitte, fer, ora, with the word consule covering both advice and instruction.)

The spiritual works of mercy cannot be wholesaled. We may be able to increase the amount and improve the distribution of corporal alms, but not the spiritual ones. Not, at least, if our purpose is to awaken and develop the moral imagination.

• Trevor Farrell is an 11-year-old from suburban Philadelphia who provides help to the homeless and derelict "street people" as part of a "family ministry." (New York Times)

• Since 1970 Lola Martin has run a program to provide volunteer tutors (whom she has trained) to help adults who cannot read or write. Lola Martin is herself legally blind. She has worked without public money, contributing from her own savings and raising money by selling cakes and crocheted dolls. Faced with loss of her storefront reading center, she said, "I was doing so good. I'm not ready to give up. I can't. There are too many people out there who need me." (Newsday)

• A volunteer at the Bowery Residents Committee center is himself a former derelict and alcoholic. "I've never felt so needed ... since working here I've never felt so useful. I help people here as much as I can, but I help myself tenfold." (New York Times)

There is in such statements a reflection of experience that cannot be derived authentically as well as vicariously, merely from reading about it or observing it. Voluntary service is clearly critical to the philanthropic understanding.

Those who are personally involved speak to us with the authority of their witness; it may be the closest we can get to sharing the suffering we seek to alleviate.

We can attend to misfortune but we may also have to judge it: Not all sufferers are innocent.

In the mid-17th century, Jeremy Taylor attempted to elaborate on the lists of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy:

According to thy ability give to all men that need: and, in equal needs, give first to good men, and then to bad men; and if the needs be unequal do so too; provided that the need of the poorest be not violent or extreme: but if an evil man be in extreme necessity, he is to be relieved rather than a good man who can tarry longer, and may subsist without it.... The best objects of charity are poor housekeepers, that labour hard, and are burdened with many children; or Gentlemen fallen into sad poverty, especially if by innocent misfortune ... persecuted persons, widows, and fatherless children, putting them to honest trades or schools of learning ... And search into the needs of numerous and meaner families: for there are many persons that have nothing left but misery and modesty. (P. 236)

Noel Timms, in his Social Work Values, discusses acceptance, self-determination, and respect for persons as positive values in social work, and identifies manipulation and paternalism as examples of "disvalues." The positive values are inseparable from personal contact; the disvalues thrive on the impersonal. It is only on the basis of personal involvement and understanding that we can make judgments of "desert," judgments of who should come first, judgments of when our help will be helpful and when it might undermine a tentative effort of someone to stand on his or her own feet.

Charles Loch and his fellow-Victorians are roughly treated in the literature, and "friendly visiting" became the target of scorn of authors like Charles Dickens. Yet in those days volunteers—presumably "delicate and sensitive ladies"—went into neighborhoods that even paid professionals are reluctant to enter these days. As many writers have pointed out (such as Kathleen McCarthy in her book, Noblesse Oblige), professionals replacing volunteers removed the necessity of direct contact between the rich and the poor, between the haves and have nots, the comfortable and the distressed.

To what extent do the personal needs of donors for self-esteem affect the integrity of the relationship with recipients? The resentment of "bureaucrats" makes it clear that relationships free of the germs of emotion are empty in part because of their antiseptic quality. Where can we turn for an appropriate perspective?

I am an admirer of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. One of the intriguing ideas in it is that of the "impartial spectator"—the notion that we should conduct ourselves as if there were an impartial spectator, fully informed, observing us. Our self-respect should be based not on how other men actually judge us, but how they would judge us were they to be in the position of the impartial spectator.

To what extent are these intimate personal connections appropriate to the dispassionate work of philanthropy? They seem unavoidable in charitable relationships that grow out of hardship and call for sympathetic understanding. How well do they apply to the philanthropic relationship—in the arts, say, or in education? The impartial spectator idea works there, too, but we have less of an understanding of the protocol. Our expectations of ourselves and of those with whom we deal are less well established.

For that reason, some applicants behave as supplicants, and some grantmakers affect the airs of patrons.

Methods of Philanthropy

There is a "norm of reciprocity" that governs our lives. A personal gift, once accepted, is likely to lead to an effort to return the favor. Some cultures have built elaborate structures of relationships around such gifts. More familiar to us is the tradition of mutual aid, the voluntary associations in which people contribute as a form of group insurance against the needs of members—assuming some equity of distribution, but not insisting on it.

If I help you with a loan when you're in distress, you not only have an obligation to repay me, you take on an obligation to make a loan to me should our circumstances be reversed. Carried further: If you don't ever need the loan from me, perhaps another will; my assistance to you is expected to serve as a model for your assistance to others later on. Pass it on is one of the philanthropic commonplaces of our culture.

Who knows where it will end? A scientist, I'm told, has written an article asking, when does an experiment end? A literary critic has asked, when does a poem end? When does a teaching" end? When does a good deed end?

Self-help is another commonplace: "God helps those who help themselves" is trite for good reason. It is the central value of a culture that puts a premium on individualism. If these things ring true:

First, there is the ultimate moral principle of the supreme and intrinsic value of the individual human being....

Distinct from the first idea is a second: the notion of individual self-development....

The third element of individualism might be called the idea of self-direction, or autonomy....

The fourth unit idea is the notion of privacy, of a private existence within a public world. (Steven Lukes, "Types of Individualism.")

If these things incur your assent and agreement, then self-help is obviously a central factor in your understanding of philanthropy. It is, as Maimonides put it in the 12th century, and as Rockefeller echoed early in the 20th, the highest form of charity to help someone become self-supporting and self-sustaining. It is the core idea of the effort to achieve equality of opportunity; the assumption is that one is owed no more—has no right or just claim to more—than a chance to help himself or herself.

There is an important implication in the emphasis on self-help: The least worthy condition in life is that of dependence on others.[2] Adulthood is the time of freedom to stand alone, liberated from dependency. "Liberation" in "liberation movements" is liberation from political or economic oppression in order to achieve a level of self-sufficiency.

[2] There are said to be mendicant religious orders in the East whose dependence on alms helps their benefactors gain entrance to heaven. [back to text]