The Good Society

There are thus, it seems to me, more and less enlightened forms of democracy and of capitalism. People in the United States who call themselves "Republicans" and "conservatives" speak with no special authority about capitalism; people who call themselves "Democrats" and "liberals" speak with no special authority about democracy. There is no liberal or conservative creed to which we can blindly commit ourselves. There is, instead, the continuing struggle to balance the claims of the individual with the claims of the society.

The balance is never finally and fully realized, and therefore some of us should always be pushing for change, while some of us should always be resisting it. If either group wins a final victory, we're lost.

Voluntary action for the public good is, in my opinion, the principal instrument we have to achieve balance, to correct failure, to explore opportunities. In that sense, Jane Addams is as important to my philosophy as Andrew Carnegie is.

In the contemporary usage that has become increasingly popular, the United States is best understood as a society that has three sectors. Although they are not sharply defined and often overlap and interact, it is possible to argue (as I do, again and again, in this book) that government constitutes one such sector, the private economic marketplace a second sector, and voluntary action for the public good -- the domain of good works -- constitutes the third sector.

There is one important aspect of this overview that Carnegie does not address in his essay. Carnegie was not a religious man, at least in the sense of being attentive to the claims of organized religion. He did seem to defer to some higher power when he said that he considered himself chosen for a special role in life, and that he was the steward rather than the owner of his wealth.

My philosophy includes a much larger place for religious insights and values than Carnegie's did. organized religion, in my opinion, has been the principal bearer of the philanthropic tradition in American life. Despite protestations that American society is becoming "multicultural," almost 85 percent of Americans still call themselves Christian. Christian charity and Christian ethics seem to have a more stable foundation than the shifting sands of Christian doctrine. The vast majority of those who call themselves Christians accept the general claims of voluntary giving and voluntary service. Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians seem to be far more generous and committed to those practices than do the adherents of "mainline" denominations. Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and others are committed to the tithe and seem to take the commitment seriously. In this as in most other areas of their cultural life, Native Americans struggle to preserve an ancient tradition of extraordinary sensitivity.

Jews continue to outperform most other religions in terms of narrowing the gap between what they say about charity and what they do about it. Muslims and Buddhists and other nonwestern religions grow more rapidly than immigration would suggest. Americans who think of themselves as agnostics or whose Christian commitment has evaporated are often in search of some other faith. As a people, we seem unlikely to accept an ascetic rationalism or stoic fatalism in place of a personal God. As many philosophers have argued, there is a strong case for a secular ethics; my own ethical position, in contrast, is inseparable from my religious beliefs. I am unwilling to abandon my religious faith for any human philosophy or ideology or for reliance on statistical probabilities. My philosophy of philanthropy, then, in contrast to that of Andrew Carnegie, assumes with Pascal that "the heart has its reasons that the reason will never know." 

Surplus Wealth

In the political and economic system of democratic capitalism it is possible to acquire wealth far in excess of what one needs to survive. In fact, as Carnegie pointed out, a by-product of the capitalist system is that it also produces fortunes vastly greater than could otherwise be justified. (The world's greatest fortunes are still those controlled by absolute monarchs or their criminal equivalents.)

Under capitalism, it is routinely possible to acquire wealth in excess of what one might reasonably spend on oneself and one's family. From the small number of the very wealthy whose fortunes are measured in the billions; one can drop down the list to those whose net worth is measured at a million or two, or even less.

These are the people I refer to here as "the affluent." To be affluent, by my definition, is to live as comfortably -- if not as ostentatiously -- as one wants; to take care of one's obligations to one's family; to give, say, four or five percent of one's disposable household income to charity every year -- and to have something substantial left over. Excluded from the Forbes 400 there are several hundred more people with fortunes in the tens of millions, and beyond those, thousands more, and beyond those, hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or two who have "something substantial left over."

Every American community has such people. Such people exist even in difficult economic times, for the hardships in a capitalistic system are not evenly distributed. Some people are getting rich while other people are getting poor. We tend to be more conscious in hard times of those in economic distress than we are of those who continue on untouched. The media thrive on scandalous reports of the rich indulging themselves while others go hungry and homeless. It becomes fashionable for the wealthy (for corporation executives, especially) to concur in how hard times are, how little money there is to go around, how earnings are down and profits are off while the demands increase. News reports stress the fall-off in contributions, a poor-mouthing that is picked up by fund raisers who join the chorus about how bad things are, how hard it is to raise money.