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| ISBN-13: | 9780253003157 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/13/2008 |
| Series: | Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 303 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
We Make a Life by What We Give
By Richard B. Gunderman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2008 Richard B. GundermanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35076-3
CHAPTER 1
IMAGINING PHILANTHROPY
What is our image of philanthropy? This question is worth pondering because our philanthropic practice is powerfully informed by our philanthropic aspirations. A rich image can open up possibilities for philanthropic excellence, enhancing the lives of both givers and recipients. By contrast, defective images tend to promote poor philanthropic strategies — strategies that, far from enriching human lives, may actually impoverish them. No one pretends that the perfect image of philanthropy ever lies ready at hand. Philanthropy must grow, develop, and adapt along with the changing human context in which it is embedded. Yet bringing it to fullest fruition in our own place and time is an essential mission for each generation.
What kind of philanthropy can we imagine? The answer depends in part on what we understand philanthropy to be. The very meaning of the term is open to question.
• Does philanthropy refer strictly to large transfers of wealth? Or may giving take other equally legitimate forms, such as gifts of time and talent?
• Who does it? Is philanthropy strictly the province of non-profit foundations and their agents? Or is it also accessible to non-professionals?
• Who are its targets? Is philanthropy always directed to the public good? Or can it focus on private individuals as well?
• Does motive matter? Can we use taxes or shame to compel giving? Or must we give spontaneously of our own free will?
• Who benefits? Should philanthropic activity be devoted solely to the interests of the beneficiary? Or is there an opportunity to consider the welfare of the donor?
• How do we measure philanthropic performance? Is the ultimate criterion the monetary value of each bequest? Or do important aspects of philanthropy resist appraisal in dollars and cents?
By addressing these questions, we can challenge and stimulate our imagination as people committed to giving.
Context
How we answer such defining philanthropic questions hinges on the contexts in which we pose them. In philanthropy, as in every field of life, context always exerts an immense influence on the meaning of ideas. Consider each of the following riddles.
• I live above a star, and yet never burn
I have eleven neighbors, and yet none of them turn
I am visited in sequence, first, last, or in between
PRS are my initials, now tell me what I mean
• A beggar's brother died, but the man who died had no brother. How can this be?
• What English word is most frequently pronounced incorrectly?
Each of these verbal puzzles represents an instance of what perceptual psychologists call a figure-ground problem. Our visual assessment of a figure's size, hue, shape, and motion depend in large part on the background against which it is projected. Simply by changing the background, we can make the large appear small, the dark appear light, the straight appear curved, and the static appear moving.
Before we can solve such verbal puzzles, we need to examine carefully the mental backdrops against which we project them. Recognizing the biases and limitations of our initial assumptions is key, because they often lead us astray. To find a solution, we must try different backgrounds or relational frameworks until we find one that puts all the pieces together in a coherent and often unexpected way. Consider these examples: The star that never burns is the asterisk on a telephone keypad. The man who died had no brother because the beggar was a woman. And the word that is most frequently pronounced incorrectly is "incorrectly." As these solutions suggest, context may not be everything, but it counts for a great deal.
Similar psychological principles are at work in our philanthropic understanding. What are the challenges and opportunities facing philanthropy? It is natural that our perspectives vary depending on the backdrops against which we perceive them. What works well in one context may fail in another. Systems designed to meet basic needs for food and shelter may not perform well at delivering education, and systems designed to deliver education may not perform well at meeting needs for food and shelter. No matter how badly we want to help, a failure to grasp the meaning of fundamental philanthropic concepts is likely to undermine our efforts. If, for example, we misconceive the needs and aspirations of givers and receivers, even our best philanthropic intentions will often go awry.
Consider an example, the Clinton-era federal policy that imposed lifetime limits on welfare benefits eligibility. What were we attempting to accomplish? Was our aim to promote the dignity of welfare recipients by encouraging them to become more self-sufficient? Did we seek to discourage sloth by preventing capable people from subsisting on the dole? Or did we simply intend to reduce the tax burden borne by working people, without reference to the welfare of recipients? In this case as in every other, our results reflect our rationale. Did we succeed at challenging dependent people to begin supporting themselves? Did we consign mentally and physically disabled people to homelessness and perhaps even starvation? Or did we achieve both?
Resources
One of the gravest misapprehensions afoot in contemporary philanthropy, analogous to a huge optical illusion, concerns the nature of our philanthropic resources. What is the context in which we perceive the means available to philanthropists and philanthropic organizations? In many cases, we tend to construe our philanthropic endowment strictly in terms of material property. We define the poor by proprietary insufficiency, the gap that separates their financial standing from an arbitrary minimum standard. We see people as poor, in other words, simply because they lack purchasing power. They cannot purchase sufficient food, clothing, and shelter. If only they had more money, we suppose, their lives would be transformed. Yet is money the whole story? Is it the philanthropic story's most important character?
Economic accounts of philanthropy are attractive for several reasons. First, they appear to provide valid and reliable measures of philanthropic need. If we want to understand people's life circumstances, and especially their need for philanthropic intervention, we need only measure their income or material wealth. Moreover, we need not invest a great deal of time and effort acquainting ourselves with particular individuals, families, and communities. Instead, we can simply peruse their financial standing. Finally, when a deficiency is identified, the remedy is simple — we "top them up" to the critical threshold. When the problem is defined as a financial shortfall, the solution, naturally, is an infusion of money. What does philanthropy ask of us? Above all, that we write checks.
How reliable is the link between the ease with which something can be measured and its intrinsic importance? Are the things that are easiest to quantify also the ones we most need to know? We can precisely calculate a person's net worth, but to what extent can we render human needs and opportunities commensurable with wealth? If we suppose that our only dart is money, it is no surprise that our targets turn out to be commodities.
Yet what if human life offers important philanthropic targets that money cannot penetrate? Some people manage to live relatively full lives with limited resources, while some wealthy people find themselves continually racked by want. Perhaps material sufficiency, even material prosperity, is no panacea. To be sure, few reasonable people would choose poverty over wealth. Yet an aversion to scarcity does not imply a devotion to excess. Plenty of people knowingly forgo additional wealth for the sake of other goods they rightly esteem more highly.
There is simply no guarantee that we can solve life's important problems by spending more money on them. Material goods are a necessary condition for crafting a full human life, but they are not sufficient. No matter how precisely we target our gifts, for example, we cannot pay someone to care — genuinely care — for someone else. The vehicle of wealth can take us only so far along the road to human enrichment. We should begin seeking other means of conveyance long before we reach that point.
It is important to distinguish between tangible resources and intangible resources. Tangible resources can be touched with the hand, and include groceries, houses, clothing, medicines, and recreational equipment. Intangible resources are untouchable, and include knowledge, skills, relationships, and dreams. Pondering this distinction, we soon realize that the value of our intangible resources vastly exceeds that of our tangible resources.
Philanthropic organizations' annual budgets and investments are measured in dollars. Yet philanthropic excellence requires other endowments to which a dollar value is difficult to assign. The income of foundation program officers is relatively easy to determine. Yet it is considerably more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to determine the value of what those individuals know and can do. We can measure how much a foundation pays each year to provide continuing education to its employees, but it is considerably more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to place a dollar value on the quality of their learning. People who read Charles Dickens's Hard Times or John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath are not in any sense materially enriched by the experience. Yet some gain invaluable insight into the human significance of poverty.
Knowledge
Our inventory of philanthropic assets cannot be restricted to funds, equipment, and the physical plant. We must expand our field of view to include other resources, such as our self-image. Our philanthropic potential cannot be fully encompassed in terms of what we have. We also need to take into account who we are, both individually and as members of organizations and communities. And who we are is constituted to a large degree by what we know.
Socrates' most famous philosophical maxim was "know thyself," a principle that applies no less urgently to philanthropy than to philosophy. The first order of business in helping people is not to get them more property, but to get to know them. To this formulation of the philanthropic mission Socrates might add, "And help them get to know themselves." Ultimately, poverty is not the greatest peril. Ignorance is.
We make a mistake when we pin our aspirations on handling money more efficiently. Efficiency at allocating funds is no guarantee of generating and sharing knowledge effectively. Knowledge is the key. Without knowledge, how effectively and efficiently can we allocate money? We can be financial wizards, but human dolts.
Consider the remarkable transformation that knowledge can effect in even the most tangible material resources. What we have can be completely transformed by what we learn. What happened to the value of whale oil when we discovered the energy of subterranean petroleum deposits? Who could have predicted that the bark of pacific yew trees would turn out to play an important role in the treatment of breast cancer, or that grains of beach sand would one day provide the silicon backbone of artificial intelligence? "Raw materials" we trample underfoot may take on great value when catalyzed by human imagination.
We need to focus less on counting what we have and more on finding what we can create. Except for the most basic necessities of life, the things we require are not simply given to us. They are the products of human creativity. Only by combining and recombining them in our imaginations can we discover what they are capable of becoming. This principle applies to raw materials such as oil and silicon, but even more to intangible assets such as science, language, freedom, and literature. In the realm of the intangible, calculation cannot hold a candle to imagination.
When tangible resources dominate our perspective, we tend to project philanthropy against a fixed-sum view of human affairs. In a fixed-sum system, the total extent of a desirable outcome is unalterable. A familiar analogy is that of a pie. The pie has a predetermined size, and no matter how we divide it, the total quantity of filling and crust cannot increase. To enlarge one person's slice of pie requires that we reduce someone else's.
When we see philanthropy as part of a fixed-sum system, we perceive its mission in terms of redistribution. On this account, the philanthropist is a redistributor, transferring wealth or other goods from people who have to people who do not. The essential virtue of philanthropy becomes fairness, the pursuit of a more equitable distribution of resources. From a redistributive point of view, philanthropy cannot enrich the world. It cannot augment the total amount of goods available to us. It can, however, help to reduce the unevenness with which goods are distributed.
There are good reasons to question the adequacy of a strictly redistributive account of philanthropy. It manifests limitations even accounting for wealth and material goods, let alone intangible resources. A gift that enables a disadvantaged person to get an education may augment that person's slice, but at the same time enlarge the pie for everyone else. The same may be said even for investments in food, housing, and healthcare. A deficiency of such goods constrains the achievement of human potential.
Generation
Redistribution has a role to play in philanthropy's mission. But it does not play the most important role. More important than redistributing wealth is creating wealth. Instead of merely topping up our tanks, temporarily relieving the burden of want, philanthropy should strive to make us more productive. Lao-Tse said, "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." Such productivity could manifest itself in at least two ways. In the first and most obvious sense, philanthropy could help recipients provide for themselves and their families. Creating a job enables people to satisfy their own needs, lessening their dependence on others.
Second, by helping ourselves, we become empowered to lend a hand to others. Philanthropy should not foster dependency. It should foster giving, by encouraging recipients to become philanthropists in their own right. Investing philanthropically in others engages us more deeply in our communities. It enables us to mature as both human beings and citizens. As Aristotle indicates in his Nicomachean Ethics, to lead fully human lives, we need opportunities to activate generosity.
The distinction between distribution and generation is a telling one. The word "distribution" derives from the Latin root tribuere, which in turn derives from the root tribus, the source of our word "tribute." For millennia, tribute was associated with taxation, a levy paid by one nation to another, or by vassals to lords. It denoted any forced payment or contribution, including those associated with bribery and extortion. By contrast, the word "generation" is derived from the Latin root generare, which means to beget or produce. The title of the Bible's Book of Genesis is derived from this source, as is our word "generosity."
The distinction between distribution and generation is analogous to the distinction between payment and donation. On the one hand, we pay because we must, and on the other hand, we give because we can, from choice. A payment implies no concern for the welfare of the person to whom it is given. A gift implies concern for the recipient. If we did not care about the beneficiary, we would not offer the gift. Genuine generosity aims not merely to gratify recipients, but to help them become more fertile. Enlightened parents better serve their children's interests by providing them with a first-rate education than by hoarding every penny in hopes of someday leaving them the largest possible inheritance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We Make a Life by What We Give by Richard B. Gunderman. Copyright © 2008 Richard B. Gunderman. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface viiAcknowledgments ix
Imagining Philanthropy 1
The Golden Rule 13
Four Gifts 19
The Potential to Share 30
The Good Samaritan 37
Egoism, Altruism, and Service 45
Doing Well by Doing Good 51
Idealists and Realists 57
What Are We Part of? 63
The Seven Deadly Sins 73
Materialist Philanthropy 78
Whoever Has Will Receive More 89
Hoarding and Sharing 99
Lessons from the Least 108
Lower and Higher 114
Who Is Expendable? 125
How Much and How Well? 132
Are We Hospitable? 140
Rules and Aspirations 155
Suffering 164
Treasure in Earthen Vessels 174
Ethics and Metaphysics 191
Suggested Readings 199
What People are Saying About This
"Gunderman is as important a humanistic voice in the discussion of philanthropy as I know of. He writes like an angel; he works out of a rich Aristotelian tradition; his views are balanced, clear, and persuasive."
Gunderman is as important a humanistic voice in the discussion of philanthropy as I know of. He writes like an angel; he works out of a rich Aristotelian tradition; his views are balanced, clear, and persuasive.
Gunderman is as important a humanistic voice in the discussion of philanthropy as I know of. He writes like an angel; he works out of a rich Aristotelian tradition; his views are balanced, clear, and persuasive.