MR. CARNEGIE'S CHALLENGE

"The Gospel of Wealth" has been called "the most famous document in the history of American philanthropy. It is the best statement of a comprehensive philosophy of philanthropy that I have read. That it was written by one of the wealthiest men in the world, a largely self-educated immigrant, makes it more astonishing. For several years I have lectured from it, on it, and about it. In the course of seminars about it I have found that it still has the strength to generate strong reactions.

Carnegie is most commonly lumped with other of the billionaires of his time as a financial opportunist, an egomaniac, and a robber baron. Such has been the case since his essay was first published in 1889. The essay, published under the title "Wealth," was condemned as a celebration of a system that built great fortunes on the misery and exploitation of the worker. Carnegie was proclaiming the "good news" of what others considered to be dehumanizing oppression.

Although his particular target was John D. Rockefeller Sr., the Congregationalist preacher Washington Gladden's famous essays on "tainted money" can be used to balance Carnegie's philosophy. Rather than praise the system for improving the lot of the average worker, Gladden condemned it for producing men of wealth who became so at the expense of the people who worked for them. Rather than praise the philanthropy of the wealthy, Gladden scorned their "ill-gotten gains" as irrevocably tainted with the blood of the oppressed. The common interpretation was that rich men made large gifts to buy respectability in the short run and admission to heaven in the long run.

I set all that passionate debate to one side and try to look at "The Gospel of Wealth" as a framework for discussion. seen in that light, the essay becomes a challenge to each of Carnegie's modern day critics and admirers: a challenge to write our own summary philosophy of philanthropy.

To do so requires three elements: a statement about the political and economic system that best advances the good society; a statement about how one should dispose of surplus wealth; and a statement about the best opportunities for philanthropy.

I would add a fourth element, less visible in Carnegie's essay but of great importance to his role as a philanthropist, on the principles and strategies of voluntary giving.

I

My version is perhaps better called a "gospel of affluence" than a "gospel of wealth." Fifty years ago it would have been called a gospel of "prosperity," a word whose rhetorical effectiveness died on the lips of Herbert Hoover.

Andrew Carnegie wrote for the small number of people of vast fortunes; those who today would be written about in Forbes' list of the 400 wealthiest people in America.

I write for a much larger number of people, Americans whose assets make them "well-off" rather than "rich," but people who could, if they wanted, make a substantial gift out of capital.

Carnegie believed that the best economic system the world had devised is what he called "individualism" and what we would call "capitalism." Carnegie believed that capitalism, despite its faults, benefited more people than any other system. The collapse of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the weakening of the European welfare state seems to have resulted in sudden and worldwide acceptance of Carnegie's basic philosophy. For all its faults -- and Carnegie was candid about some of them -- capitalism works better for more people than any other economic system.

Carnegie, born in Scotland, was a great admirer of democracy and preferred it over the conception of monarchy that was its principal rival. Democracy, for all its faults, works better for more people than any other political system. In Carnegie's view of the way things work, economic democracy in the form of the free marketplace and political democracy in the form of representative government provide the world with the best model of the good society that humanity has thus far invented.

I agree with Carnegie. I would also agree that we should follow his lead but be more candid than he was about the failures and weaknesses of this "democratic capitalism" that has long characterized the United States and that seems now -- perhaps with different leadership -- about to dominate the world. Carnegie's generation became so caught up in its self-confidence about capitalism and industrialization that it permitted terrible sins against humanity under the banner of imperialism. The wages of that sin were paid in the blood of oppressed Africans and in the blood of the young Europeans and Americans who died in the first World War.

A generation ago the United States was awash in a similar self-confidence. The enlightened self-interest of benign international leadership following World War II was followed by the loss of leadership and two decades of moral confusion. More recently the tide has turned again, and the United States seems once again able to claim a leadership role.

From the vantage point of any single observer, the world is such a vast spectacle that no one of has the ability to more than propose a rhetorical order upon it. That is why Carnegie was doing; that what I will be trying to do; that is Mr. Carnegie's challenge. If we are wiser than he, then we should offer our own more advanced version of the good society and the good life.