John Frohnmayer - More Than Giving
keynote address at the November 19th, 2009 GRANTMAKERS of Oregon and Southwest Washington Annual Meeting
“Government safety net” is an oxymoron that joins the ranks of jumbo shrimp, deliberate speed and military justice. This flight from social responsibility means that those in the business of private philanthropy—individuals and foundations—are called upon to fill gaps that would suck up all of their resources many times over. The seminal question, however, is why give at all? Oscar Wilde described philanthropy as the refuge of people who simply wish to annoy their fellow creatures.
Three justifications deserve consideration, each from a radically different perspective. First, Cicero in the 1st century BCE: “This is our special duty, that if anyone specially needs our help, we should give him such help to the utmost of our power.” He doesn’t say why and perhaps that is because it was obvious. In Rome you were a citizen or you didn’t exist. Citizenship conveyed identity and with it came certain rights and responsibilities. Helping others was part of your duty for the privilege of being a Roman.
The second definition, my favorite, comes from the adventure writer Jack London: “Philanthropy is the bone shared with the dog when you are as hungry as the dog.” This isn’t top down giving. It is neighbor to neighbor. It is giving that hurts. It is informal societies of the homeless, of soldiers in the trenches, of churches in the ghetto. It is immediate, compelling and effective, but seldom institutional. The spirit of this philanthropy is captured in Michael Shaara’s brilliant historical novel about the Civil War, The Killer Angels. Col. Lawrence Chamberlain is directed to take charge of 120 deserters just before the battle of Gettysburg. He can shoot them, guard them with his paltry regiment of less than 300 or persuade them to rejoin the fight. What he says to persuade them is that in the end, what we are fighting for, is each other.
British politician and Israel advocate Herbert L. Samuel articulated the third description: “Philanthropy is that which deals with the symptoms rather than the cause.” With the best intentions, much of our philanthropy fails because our society, our government and our culture are badly out of whack. All of us have read and many have studied W.B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
It is like inviting the grim reaper to a birthday party. Ugly, yes, but consider these examples of why, ninety years later, what Yeats said is true. In November of 2009 forty two Representatives, equally Republican and Democrat, submitted statements for the Congressional Record about the pending health care reform bill. All of them were written by lobbyists for the huge biotech firm Gentech. Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey apologized saying he didn’t know where the statement he made came from. Some excuse. Gentech brazenly responded that what it had done was nothing new, and a reasonable person can only conclude that Congress has been bought.
While we call what is going on in Congress a healthcare debate, it is at best a modest insurance reform, the expected outcome of which is that everyone will be forced to buy health insurance; in short, a bonanza for private insurance companies. Seventy percent of Americans polled would prefer a single payer government system and it isn’t even on the table.
Look at the United States tax code. It is 78,000 pages of special benefits for those who have political clout. It is the world’s most political document, according to David Cay Johnston in his book Perfectly Legal, and the rewards go to the super rich, or the ones he calls the “political donor class.” Billionaire Warren Buffett pays at a lower tax rate than his secretary. Wages have stayed flat for 20 years, the super-rich get to defer income, and wages earners are much more likely to be audited than the self employed. It is a book well worth reading, but take your beta blockers first.
Wars. They are easy to get into and next to impossible to get out of. What Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught us is that we mess around, mess around, lose lives, spend trillions, squander international leadership and ultimately just leave. Wars do not solve problems, they create them; or as Norman Mailer so indelicately put it: “Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of the clap.” We are in the hands of the military industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned in 1958, except now it is the military, industrial, security complex and its appetite is insatiable.
Last example: stuff. Seventy percent of our economy is based on consumer spending. The only way to get the economy out of the toilet is to ramp up buying so we have more stuff overflowing into the landfill and polluting the planet. Stuff doesn’t satisfy us economically or spiritually and it doesn’t even make us happy for more than a moment.
This is the charred landscape in which those engaged in philanthropy are trying to make a difference. How can they avoid merely dealing with the symptoms, in Herbert Samuel’s words? Here are four more impediments to confront—hurdles to jump—gnats to swat—before we can even address the question. Human kind is a flawed species. Reinhold Niebuhr, the towering twentieth century theologian in his book The Nature and Destiny of Man, describes us as capable of horrific cruelty and selfless charity, and for every situation it is a struggle which of our bipolar personalities will show up.
Moreover, truth is illusive, selective and impermanent and therefore, we must constantly reexamine and test it. Carl Sagan, in one of his last lectures was describing nine potentially earth-destroying phenomenon (the worst being nuclear war). In the question period a man contended that volcanic eruptions have caused depletion of the ozone layer. Sagan destroyed him with a barrage of scientific facts, and then asked: “Have you been listening to Rush Limbaugh?” He had. These days we are entitled not only to our own opinion, but to our own set of facts.
Next, neuroscience tells us that emotion mugs reason. Every time. Look at the MRIs, the PET scans, the infrared spectrometry and the old lizard brain is doing a number on our reason. We are experts at fooling ourselves.
Finally, success and failure are handmaidens of each other and we can never be quite sure which we have achieved. A film from some years ago entitled The Man Who Skied Down Everest ends with the skier, trailing a giant parachute falling and sliding to the edge of a precipice. He asks: “did I succeed or did I fail”.
So, charging boldly into the cannon’s mouth, here is a modest prescription for charitable giving in four horse-sized pills. First, be proactive. If foundations and other grant givers simply wait for the applications to come over the transom, they can only be reactive. That is a world away from having a plan, charting a course, identifying where their efforts can be transformative.
Second, find a way to restore justice. Wars, the tax code and the other symptoms I mentioned reflect that democracy is just for the few, the rich and the well placed. And that is no democracy. Taxation, for example, is at the core of a democratic system, but only if it is perceived as fair. Taxes should be an accepted part of the social contract, but when the government is the enemy or taxes are to be avoided at all costs, then there is no contract, social or otherwise.
The Iraq war has been a disaster on multiple levels, but the end of American innocence is one salutary by-product. We Americans have always loved innocence. That’s why Christmas and the Baby Jesus outshine the more significant Christian message of Easter. That’s why manifest destiny has always trumped the rights—the humanity- of the Native. That’s why relocation camps, racial profiling, and indeed, slavery have not prevented us from being the champion of liberty. We have an infinite ability to re-virginize ourselves. Reinhold Niebuhr again: “We can be innocent or we can be virtuous, but we cannot be both.” Virtue requires involvement and self-evaluation and while much in the world of ethics is cloudy, this much I know is true: there is no such thing as an innocent torturer.
What has bound us together as a society in the past is a sense of optimism—that no matter how badly we screw up, things will turn out alright because we are exceptional. Along with our failed innocence, I hope our brainless optimism has also departed, so that we recognize we are perfectly capable of squandering the greatness of the American experience.
That brings us to restoring as sense of individual responsibility. Years ago, Sports Illustrated did an article on Oregon as a state with a different sense of self. An example used was a down and outer, slumped against a building on Burnside in Portland, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. When he finished, he staggered to his feet, crossed the sidewalk and deposited the bag in the trash can. Individual responsibility can be small, or cosmic, but without it, philanthropy simply bounces off.
Philanthropy has to be a contract rather than a gift. There must be a quid pro quo—a response required. And we must restore knowledge, a reverence, a dedication to our founding documents of equality, fairness and due process. To do this we must effectively teach jurisprudence (the philosophy of law), the humanities and history. We can not expect a just society to arise in a vacuum any more than we can expect to maintain a democracy when its fundamental principles are lost on eighty percent of the populace. We need our best and brightest thinkers to create a new paradigm, not by twitter, but by tough-minded appraisal of the multiple failures of our society, starting with the way our elections are financed and our education is delivered.
Finally, philanthropy must find a way to identify and encourage the velocity of individual action. The way most grant givers are constructed (and the tax code plays a major role here), they couldn’t give to Mother Theresa, if they even knew she existed. Inspired, charismatic individuals can make changes that are beyond the reach of groups, or as Steve Allen put it: “A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.”
All of this may sound airy-fairy, theoretical, or naïve, but who the hell else will address these issues if not philanthropy? The charge is a modest one: to change the course of human history. Here are the words of the American poet, Sam Hazo:
I wish you what I wish myself;
Hard questions, and the nights to answer them;
And grace of disappointment;
And the right to seem the fool for justice.
That’s enough. Fools might ask for more
Heroes have died for less.