Values in Conflict 

It is in this context that one should reflect on the statements of the Organizing Committee Report that shaped the role and work of Independent Sector when it came into being almost five years ago. It wasn't the Organizing Committee's goal to stir discussion and controversy; its goal was to express common purpose:

Without denying the endless diversity and pluralism of the sector, the Committee felt strongly impelled to identify and state certain values which any such organization should seek to foster including:

• Commitment beyond self

• Worth and dignity of the individual

• Individual responsibility

• Tolerance

• Freedom

• Justice

• Responsibilities of citizenship

To "enhance" these values, the Committee said, Independent Sector might "expand the diversity of personal options"; it would most certainly reflect the tradition of voluntary association, and it would be "a seedbed for new ideas, new art forms, etc.," and a setting for experimentation. Collectively, the sector produces alternatives to government action; it also "reduces powerlessness and helps promote empowerment" and gives people generally a greater voice in public affairs. Functioning well, the sector makes for more "enlightened" voters, who will in turn be more demanding of government performance and more responsible about allocating scarce resources.

The result combines the views of John D. Rockefeller and Herbert Marcuse; that is, it combines values that are often incompatible and always difficult to balance.

There are a couple of possibilities for the future of Independent Sector that come to mind under the circumstances: Leave things as they are, with profound differences of philosophy glossed over in a spirit of cooperation, and let Independent Sector as an organization concentrate on specific tasks of research or public education; or, make Independent Sector a continuing seminar on the issues that arise out of values that often conflict. Some will argue that doing the second will prevent us from doing the first, and that we will bog down in debate while someone else decides the future of philanthropy. Some will argue that focusing on the first and ignoring the second almost guarantees the wasting away of the real values of philanthropy and their replacement by values as expressed by tax policy.

My bias is clearly in favor of organized inquiry into the values, principles, and purposes of philanthropy, as well as efforts to better understand how our system works. The future of philanthropy depends on its self-renewal, in John Gardner's sense of that term. Self-renewal does not come about by rote repetition of past practice; it comes about by giving new life to ideas gone stale or ideas never really quite understood in the first place. It accepts that the good things in life are often the source of distress and confusion:

Conflict of goods is the heart of our problems. Love clashes with honor, order with freedom, art with friendship, justice with prudence, kindness with honesty—and not just in the rare, melodramatic cases of major decisions, but in the constant, quiet grind of everyday living. Somehow we

manage to balance their claims by bargain, compromise, sublimation, partial combination, and sacrifice. (Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, p. 191)

For example, the Organizing Committee applauds innovation and experimentation in the arts. At what cost? How does one reconcile the conflict between a commitment to the music of Mozart and a commitment to the music of John Cage? We choose between them, of course, but we can also solve such problems by allocating money for both.

"We must always remember," wrote Rockefeller, "that there is not enough money for the work of human uplift and that there never can be. How vitally important it is, therefore, that the expenditure should go as far as possible and be used with the greatest intelligence!" (P. 100). Yet earlier in the same chapter, Rockefeller said that "we can well afford to ask the ablest men to devote more of their time, thought, and money to the public well-being. I am not so presumptuous as to define exactly what this betterment work should consist of" (p. 90).

The philanthropic tradition is pluralistic. In this sense, philanthropy shares the character of the marketplace. It is assumed that not only does no single source have all the answers, no single source is even interested in all the questions.

It is a commonplace to speak of the United States as "a pluralistic society," but what we mean by it is different from the way it is used by others. A Polish writer's recent discussion of pluralism dealt only in terms of the decentralization of government; the positive contributions of the private and nonprofit sectors don't seem to occur to him as expressions of a healthy plurality of competing and cooperating values and interests.

Some who advocate our kind of pluralism see virtue in alternatives to almost everything. Our conception of politics is broader than government.

The main postulates of pluralism are these: (a) Society consists, essentially of a variety of groups organized around what they perceive to be their particular "interests." (b) In order to promote and defend their interests, groups use their resources to influence public officials and politicians, hoping thereby to shape public laws, decisions, and policies. (c) Conflict and competition among groups is restrained by a tacit consensus among the groups that they will observe the "rules of the game" as embodied in the relevant constitutional and public laws. (d) If group politics is to be kept within socially desirable limits, public officials and group leaders must accept a "politics of negotiation" in which bargaining and compromise are the primary forms of political action and the substantive determinants of public policies. (Sheldon S. Wolin, "The American Pluralist Conception of Politics," p. 227)

The author goes on to say that "toleration is the value that seems more appropriate [than compromise] as the primary value" of pluralism. Pluralism in the modern world grew first out of a claim for religious toleration, but John Locke "lumped conscience and property under the same rubric" and gave rights to economic association that were originally sought for spiritual association. Adam Smith then argued that competition among small churches would have the same benefits as competition among small businesses: "The unseen hand could be made to work for the cause of political order as well as for economic well-being."

Wolin is not at all sanguine about the future of an American society dominated by political pluralism.

If the society as a whole faces a future of lessening expectations, scarcer resources, and painful decisions, it will be no easy task to persuade highly organized groups to accept the so-called "hard choices." Why should they, when for over 200 years they have been encouraged to practice a politics based on each group seeking its own advantage and, above all, to do so while mindful of the cynical knowledge that all hard choices are not equally hard for all groups or classes, that unequal power of some groups makes it inevitable that the choices will be framed to reflect that power? (P. 258)

Wolin cites political scientists who formerly advanced the pluralist tradition who now believe that "we need ... an authority above the selfish squabbles of interest groups ..."—powerful enough to keep the most powerful interest groups in line.

Pluralism has also discredited the idea that, except for national defense, there are no common values that, as a collectivity, we can develop and share. There are only common means we can use to further individual, group, organizational, and class ends.

Two comments: First, the philanthropic tradition offers common values that we can and do develop and share. Second, the common means we can call upon make it possible to develop the common values.

American pluralism also seems to me to be more complex than Wolin describes it. His main emphasis is on economic interest groups contending for political influence. The pluralism of the independent sector is not simply the innocuous and marginal sibling of a powerful system of interest groups. Some of the most effective interest groups seem to represent no economic interest at all, at least in the usual sense. When they are most convincing, their persuasive power derives from a position that seems to rise above narrow economic self-interest. The independent sector is more important in its influence, because of the persuasiveness of its moral position, than the discussions and analyses of political scientists and economists would lead us to believe.

The independent sector provides abundant illustration of the indirect economic and political power of not-for-profit organizations. The "powerless" in our society prove to have power, influence, and effectiveness greater than our stereotyped conceptions of them permit.

Insiders and Outsiders [Top]

It is worth concluding this chapter with comment on the protocols of admission to the places of influence in the independent sector.

For Independent Sector itself, I understand, some of the most sensitive issues are those of membership. The question of membership raises questions of sectoral balance—how many donors and how many donees—but it also raises all those difficult questions of what constitutes the public interest. The admission of one organization will nullify the possibility of another organization seeking membership. The independent sector organizations that are most strongly ideological are at times like the discordant membership of international organizations. They devote great energy to trying to exclude their opponents from the hall. In more parochial terms, it is like the informal organization of ethnic rivalry: "I wouldn't be caught dead being a member of anything he belongs to" (or any of the variations on that theme).

Apart from the formalities of membership in this particular organization, I wish I knew more about how new ideas emerge and new voices are heard. My impression is that we need to know much more about the processes of social reform: who first perceives a need, who begins to articulate the problem, how organizations form and gain support, how alliances are made, how influence begins to be commanded—or how it is pre-empted or co-opted by other leaders, already established.

Some minority leaders, for example, now take the position, as I understand it, that it is government that is most responsive to their needs. The philanthropic community has itself become an Establishment, locked into dominant organizations that have no interest in sharing their power, influence, or resources.

Other critics argue that the Establishment has abandoned the historic commitment to the poor for an indulgent emphasis on the avocational interests of the rich. There has been a shift from assistance to the poor (a responsibility abandoned to the government) to support for the arts and other cultural interest that are beyond the enjoyment of the poor.

How do the outsiders gain acceptance? Which outsiders?

The process today is probably not different in principle from the past. The dramatic changes are found in the sophistication of the means used to gain attention and influence. "Consciousness raising" is a way of life in a pluralistic democracy like ours. (There is, however, a law of emotional gravity that works here, too: What goes up must come down. Raising consciousness is not the same as keeping it there.) Each new agenda item tends to diminish or even to eliminate an item that had won a place on the earlier agenda.

Who decides who will be replaced? Which insiders must go?

It is in the independent sector that the voices that shape social policy are first heard. That has long been the case—it was clergymen and female volunteers and "people of means and influence" who led the fight against slavery and child labor and for decent treatment of the mentally ill and lepers. More recently, it has been in the independent sector that the conservation movement was transformed into the environmental movement. The environmental movement has had enormous economic impact, often on precisely those economic interest groups within business and labor who saw their interests affected adversely. Ask the tobacco industry about the power of the independent sector; ask the liquor industry.

My personal inference from all this is that not-for-profit organizations have begun to form coalitions around shared values that are beginning to replace the traditional political parties. Independent Sector as a "trans-ideological" organization will soon find itself confronted by ideological competitors. The independent sector may in fact become a competition between two powerful sets of ideas such as those exemplified by the Moral Majority and People for the American Way. The power of the appeal around social philosophies may well prove to be more powerful than that of "interests" as political scientists have defined them in the past. Democrats and Republicans are scattered along with independents and the adherents of minor parties all across those two organizations. People are more likely to vote their single-issue ideological coalition than their political affiliation.

One of the fundamental institutions within the independent sector is the church, and lively debate has recently emerged about the proper demarcation between the jurisdictions of the church and of the state.

Few if any among the single-issue organizations are likely to yield their claims to priority because their priorities threaten the philanthropic system as a whole. It is not in the character of single-issue organizations to accept martyrdom for their ideas in behalf of a common good: Martyrdom is fine, but only in behalf of the idea that they believe to be central.

The most serious threat to the independent sector may, then, prove to be not its weakness, but its strength; not its irrelevance, but its centrality; not its prudent compromise and toleration, but its diffuse but fearful force of conviction.