It will not surprise you that I have come to a further conclusion: The future of the free, open, and democratic society is directly linked to the vitality of the philanthropic tradition. That is the point of this essay -and perhaps the most important point of this book and of my professional life. Another way of putting it is to say that the United States must remain a three-sector society. In another variation on the theme I have tried to argue that there is no hope for the new democracies of eastern Europe (or anywhere else) to achieve freedom and openness as well as political democracy unless they discover a means of creating a constitutionally protected third sector of voluntary action for the public good.

Those rhetorical flourishes might be more comprehensible if I were to offer some specifics. The key word in this discussion is the word "advocacy," a word that seems to have replaced "reform" as the defining term for social change. Advocates in the United States are thus the leaders of the civil rights movement, or of the women's movement, or of the pro-choice movement, or of the environmental movement. Advocacy implies action that often goes beyond traditional debate and rhetoric and courtroom eloquence. Advocacy now calls to mind marches, banners, demonstrations, interrupted traffic and occupied buildings and people hanging limp while being dragged somewhere by the police or the army. It also calls to mind bad language and rude behavior all in the service of good causes. Advocacy has called into play the free press and free speech, rights of assembly, and on many issues, the separation of church and state.

Advocacy symbolizes the exhilarating struggle for freedom or the repellant excesses of people who never seem to have anything good to say about what the majority holds most dear. Advocacy spawns its own opposition, of course; the more extreme the advocacy, the more extreme the opposition. And so we have had the continuing spectacle of neo-Nazi skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan and their rights protected by the American Civil Liberties Union. The techniques of using the media to exaggerate the importance of rigged confrontations are so effective that discourse has suffered and freedom has been abused as often as it has been advanced (and usually by the same people). The media seem ever less able or determined to be the guardians of public discourse.

Brian O'Connell, president of Independent Sector, believes that advocacy is the most important and most fundamental activity of voluntary action. As president of Independent Sector, which provides an umbrella sheltering the most oddly compatible organizations, Brian is catholic in his philanthropic friendships. The word advocacy means for Brian something much larger than its fashionable activist expression. The essential claim of any voluntary association is to be an advocate for something -- the right to make its claim on the public's attention and resources. To be an advocate, whether for the arts or for poor children or for animals or free enterprise, is the breath of life of the voluntary association.

Another way to think about this question is in terms of the First Amendment, which is expressed in this short paragraph:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peacably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Those words are as evocative for me of what philanthropy is all about as is Matthew 25:35-37 of what charity is all about: "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."

These words should begin to suggest to us what compassion means; the words from the Constitution should suggest what community means. Beneath the poetic surface of each short passage is an uneasy awareness, if we let it surface, of the difficulty we face in taking them to heart. Every time we laud the First Amendment Nazis and Klansmen should remind us of our ambivalence toward free speech and assembly. In our time the possibility of taking a stranger into our home is so mired in fear and suspicion that few of us have ever truly opened our homes to people in such need. Most of us would follow the Levites and cross the road, hoping that a Good Samaritan was coming along behind us.

More comfortably, we are reminded that strangers have many other options in our society, although in the last decade those options have diminished drastically as the population of strangers has grown. The moral force of the claim on our charity is not sufficient, because we are as individuals too weak or too timid or simply, blissfully, unaware. Homelessness comes into our lives indirectly, through the images of television and newspaper or through the voices of advocates.

Many of their advocates argue that the homeless should not have to depend on the unreliable reception they will receive if they show up on our doorstep, hungry, thirsty, ragged, dirty, and desperate. These advocates argue that it is demeaning for the homeless to have to beg for our questionable mercy; it is the whole nation's responsibility to see to it that the homeless find shelter -- not simply temporary shelter for stranded travelers who have run out of money but permanent, "decent", "adequate" housing for them and their children. The advocates may then argue that adequate housing can only be provided by the Government, paid for by taxes that you and I will not be able to refuse to pay. The rich young man may be able to deny the Lord's invitation and walk away; he won't be permitted to escape the IRS. The appeal for charity of the homeless, growing out of the moral claim of Matthew 25, is followed by a petition to the Government for the redress of someone else's grievances, growing out of the First Amendment. Is it possible that we would have had the latter without the former?

Some citizens have, on the basis of a largely unexamined ethical claim arising out of religious tradition, come together to intervene in the lives of the homeless for this benefit and demanded that Government intercede to bring an end to the current crisis of homelessness. That is, advocates for the homeless organize themselves -- without being asked -- to intervene as patrons in the lives of other citizens without any formal mandate from anyone to do so.

That case, and a hundred others, reveals the "gnarled roots" (the metaphor is John Simon's) of traditions; religious and secular values; and religious, secular, and public institutions brought into play by this deceptively benign and innocent notion of voluntary action for the public good.

For example, there is, as far as I know, no secular counterpart to the ethical claim of that Biblical passage; no similarly powerful shared symbol of charitable obligation that we might turn to as a better ground than the rights and obligations of the basic human need for shelter. The American Civil Liberties Union (whom I have not consulted on the matter) may see itself as the unsleeping guardian whose duty it is to keep angels and other threatening religious apparitions out of public places such as homeless shelters that receive public funds. ACLU's advocacy at times seems to put separation of church and state ahead of other things, including freedom of speech. Whatever else it is, the ACLU is not the poetic moral voice of the homeless that we can all rally around when the vote comes to increase taxes to solve the problem of homelessness with public revenues.

Two other examples of advocacy:

First, to pick a more arbitrary example, the case of ethnic Serbians, now U. S. citizens, concerned about the welfare of relatives in Yugoslavia. (The example applies to all ethnic groups, other than native Americans, I suppose.) Serbians organize and form an association to publicize the plight of their ethnic group half a world away. To the extent that the Serbian interest is confined to the well-being of Serbians in Yugoslavia and Serbian-Americans alone, the association would fall under the category of mutual aid. You and I may have no link by blood or marriage to ethnic Serbians, in the U. S. or in Yugoslavia or anywhere else. Why should we care about their problem? What right do Serbians have to lay claim on ethnic Welshmen or orthodox Jews or third-generation California Chinese?

The logic of philanthropy drives the Serbians to relate their case to a mission, an urgent social need of great importance to all of us. The philanthropic appeal of the Serbians -- and of the Welsh, the Jews, the Chinese, and of all the other uncountable ways we have found to point out the crucial differences that ultimately divide us -- must be to the pluralist tradition, the e pluribus unum that in this case gives precedence to the pluribus over the unum. How does pluralism serve unity? The wealthy Chinese-American Mr. Li, whose family has prospered in California for three generations, shares with the Serbian-American Mr. Catargiu a concern for the rights of ethnic Serbs if and only if those same rights apply to ethnic Chinese -- and by implication, to all others. The mission transcends the self-interest; if it doesn't, it is smaller and has a weaker claim on us. The case to provide support to Serbs simply in order to aid their fight against Croatians (or for the British to fight the Irish or for the Irish to fight the Irish), is harder to make in terms of the public good.

I urge you to think a great deal about advocacy for ethnic groups. Ethnic groups represent the most powerful destabilizing force in the world today (the observation came to me from Donald Horowitz) and they best illuminate the Federalist concern about faction. Many Americans of my generation had lost a strong sense of ethnic identity and naively concluded that ethnicity was weakening elsewhere. We now know that in most parts of the world it is the defining term of life, the dimension of group life as strong or stronger than the survival of the self. The primacy of ethnicity is welcomed by some and feared by others as the defining characteristic of the new American order.

Ethnicity is like an artichoke, Aristide Zolberg told me at lunch one day; it is necessary to peal back its leaves to find which element -- language, religion, culture -- has greatest claim. American racism and Iranian religious fundamentalism and Basque chauvinism are reminders of the terrible destructive power that ethnic "voluntary associations" sometimes exhibit. When they make claims on us we must insist on asking them to explain their mission: how does their claim serve the larger public good?

The compassionate concern for ethnic groups under oppression (the paradigm case that I remember from my childhood was the suffering of the Armenians under the Turks) is captured in Matthew 25 and in the Old Testament concern for the stranger or the unjustly imprisoned. Compassionate concern for the politically or spiritually oppressed is protected by implication in the First Amendment in freedom of speech and assembly and in the separation of church and state. It is a concern more eloquently expressed in the western tradition in the prophets of the Old Testament than in Plato's Republic. That is, I see in compassionate assistance to the stranger a strong religious premise for the secular protection offered by the government.