by Wendy Lesser
First published in 1854, Walden was written at a time when philanthropy still meant something very close to its Greek roots. The first examples given in the OED, from the early seventeenth century, show the word being used strictly in the sense of “love of one’s fellow man” (or, by extension, love of God to man) and the beneficent acts attached thereunto. This meaning persisted to the middle of the nineteenth century (an 1849 quote, from Wilberforce, refers piously to “the lessons of universal Philanthropy”). But by the late nineteenth century the word had taken on a less spiritual and more pecuniary meaning. “A great philanthropist has astonished the world by giving it large sums of money during his lifetime,” runs an 1875 entry in the OED; Harper’s Magazine in 1884 referred to “the head of a great hospital and many philanthropies.” This is the sense the word has for us today: it has moved away from a personal and occasionally religious form of giving to a more purely financial one.
If one wanted to speak about giving money during the seventeenth, eighteenth, or early nineteenth century, one used instead the word alms—or, occasionally, charity. Alms derives from eleemosynary, a word which got its most famous outing (I would venture to say that many people know it only from this context) in the first sentence of Fielding’s Tom Jones: “An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.” The novelist’s mistrust of philanthropy had thus begun by 1749, a good century before Dickens. And the ambivalent feelings attached to charitable giving did not appear only in fiction. Samuel Johnson, in his 1773 Dictionary, defined alms straightforwardly enough as “What is given gratuitously in relief of the poor.” But he went on to illustrate the word by offering the sentence, “The poor beggar hath a just demand of alms from the rich man; who is guilty of fraud, injustice, and oppression, if he does not afford relief according to his abilities”—which kind of takes the gratuitousness out of “gratuitously.” Dr. Johnson also remarked, with his typically digressive sense of the truly interesting, that the word alms “has no singular.” One cannot give an alm, only alms—again the subliminal sense of obligation and extension (one quarter is not enough …).
In fact, all the words associated with philanthropic giving seem afflicted with comparable grammatical eccentricities. Philanthropy itself has no verb form (to philanthropize? to philanthrape?), despite the fact that it currently denotes an action. Perhaps that omission came about partly through its origins as a purely spiritual or attitudinal virtue: Johnson defines it as “love of mankind; good nature,” both of which can be possessed without necessarily being demonstrated. Benefactor (to which Johnson gives the secondary definition “he that contributes to some public charity”) also has no verb form, only another noun—benevolence—to represent the action rather than the actor. In Johnson’s time benevolence had the primary meaning we give it now (“Disposition to do good” is the way he puts it), but it also had the subsidiary meaning of a kind of tax, which had been devised by Edward IV and abolished by Richard III. Benevolence, in other words, has gone the opposite direction from its fellow philanthropic words: it once meant money and now means only love.
Charity, like philanthropy, is a word which used to point toward love and now points toward money. (Note that the Spanish and Italian word caro and its English equivalent dear still gesture simultaneously in both directions.) In Dr. Johnson’s period the word teetered in the balance: Johnson’s first three definitions of charity are all allied with the old meanings of philanthropy (goodwill, universal love, and so on), while definitions four and five (“liberality to the poor” and “alms”) tend toward our modern interpretation of philanthropic activity. Charity in the singular can still occasionally retain a religious overtone, a sense of disinterested tenderness, but the plural form has been eaten up by the business of public giving. Roget’s Thesaurus evades the problem by giving only the adjectival form, charitable, thus restricting the meaning to spiritual values (kind, generous, Christian, and so forth). Oddly enough, my 1958 edition of Roget, billed on the cover as “up-to-date” and “newly written,” similarly restricts the meaning of philanthropy (“altruism, humanity … good will to men”); that is, this supposedly revised edition ignores the financial meanings that have seeped into the word since 1852, when Mr. Roget first published his listings. These meanings have by now so completely flooded the word philanthropy that it has for us an inherent tone of hypocrisy: its philology suggests a personally expressed love for humanity, but its present practice mainly involves relatively impersonal monuments to vast fortunes of celebrated donors. These days a philanthropist is much more likely to act out of desire for reflected self-love than out of a disinterested love of humankind. (Thoreau would have me question, though, the extent to which the word disinterested could ever apply to philanthropy, even in his day and earlier.)
Henry James wrote his final novel, The Golden Bowl, just as philanthropy was shifting from its largely attitudinal to its more financial connotation, and his philanthropist, Adam Verver, is parked squarely in the center of that shift. A “simple,” “innocent” American businessman who has somehow managed to accumulate gigantic sums of money (James, no idiot, must have been aware of the irony), Verver goes around Europe collecting “fine” things—old, beautiful, artistic things—for a projected museum to be located in his rough American hometown (shades of J. P. Morgan). Two of the things he collects are an extremely handsome, nobly born Italian son-in-law and a young, beautiful American wife. Both of these purchases—Prince Amerigo and Charlotte—are well aware of the extent to which good money has been paid for them, and they feel correspondingly and somewhat oppressively obliged. The Prince becomes especially conscious of the unremittingness of his situation during a dinner party in which he occasionally catches his father-in-law’s eye:
This gaze rested at its ease, but it neither lingered nor penetrated, and was, to the Prince’s fancy, much of the same order as any glance directed, for due attention, from the same quarter, to the figure of a check received in the course of business and about to be enclosed to a banker. It made sure of the amount—and just so, from time to time, the amount of the Prince was made sure. He was being thus, in renewed installments, perpetually paid in; he already reposed in the bank as a value, but subject, in this comfortable way, to repeated, to infinite endorsement.
Charlotte, always the quicker of the two to formulate things in words, has confided to the Prince, several pages earlier, a similar realization about her own situation:
“I’ve got so much, by my marriage”—for she had never for a moment concealed from him how “much” she felt it and was finding it—“that I should deserve no charity if I stinted my return. Not to do that, to give back on the contrary all one can, are just one’s decency and one’s honour and one’s virtue. These things, henceforth, if you’re interested to know, are my rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images set up on the wall. O yes, since I’m not a brute,” she had wound up, “you shall see me as I am!” Which was therefore as he had seen her—dealing always, from month to month, from day to day and from one occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office.
The language of James’s paragraph encompasses all the different senses of philanthropy, even extending to the religious (“the absolute little gods”). And lest we forget that the “charity” Charlotte speaks of involves both love and money, we get James’s constant reminder of the compression of the two, in the form of the Prince’s frequent address to her, “cara mia.” Charlotte is both expensive and beloved—very “dear.”
What is disturbing about The Golden Bowl (aside from all the other, perhaps more obviously anxiety-producing elements, like the love affair between Verver’s son-in-law and Verver’s wife) is the way the two kinds of philanthropy—love for the nearest representatives of humanity and gift-giving on a vast impersonal scale—both turn out to be riddled with ego. Verver’s acqu
isitiveness seems appropriate on neither front: money seems a sufficient but not, finally, satisfactory way of acquiring either a spouse or an artistic heritage. Yet James doesn’t let us rest with condemning Adam Verver. When you read The Golden Bowl you begin to feel that all love partakes of ownership and all philanthropy of self-glorification. The very possibility and even the value of “disinterestedness” come under fire, especially since the most disinterested character in the novel, Fanny Assingham, is the person largely responsible for landing her friends in their distressing situation. We come back in the end to a viewpoint very much like Thoreau’s, but one in which the ante is greatly raised by the move from the isolation of a bean field to the necessarily complex relations of a social world. One can remain innocent of the failures and excesses of philanthropy only by remaining entirely apart from society, as Thoreau does; but James won’t let his characters off that hook, and most of us can’t get off it either.
These days very few of us encounter philanthropists in the flesh, except in the sense I began with, as small alms-givers. For the most part our experiences with modern philanthropy are experiences with philanthropic organizations. (The latest version of the OED reflects this transition by recording the word philanthropoid, first used in 1949 and defined as “a professional philanthropist, a worker for a charitable or grant-awarding institution.”) As a consultant and a project director, I have been on both the giving and receiving ends of these transactions—have been, so to speak, both philanthro-poid and philanthropee. Of the two, I found receiving far less painful.
I don’t know what things were like in the salad days of organizational philanthropy (or even when those salad days might have been—I would guess the 1950s). But since 1981, when I entered the picture, philanthropy has become more and more of a business. A foundation may still be handing out “free” money, but it wants to make sure it’s getting some kind of bang for its buck. It “evaluates” competing requests; it “measures benefit” (even, sometimes, on a crude cost-per-person basis); and it demands “accountability” from its recipients. These recipients, too, now tend to be organizations rather than individuals. Nobody, for instance, gives money directly to a poor person any more (except, under duress, on the street). Instead, a wealthy organization transfers funds to a “service” organization, which in turn sees that something is done for the poor. The process works similarly when the beneficiaries are medical, educational, arts, or environmental agencies rather than just organizations serving the poor: in such cases the philanthropic justification has to do with “improving the quality of life” rather than strictly spreading the wealth.
Severing the tie between the individual donor and the individual recipient has had both good and bad effects. On the negative side, there is something ludicrous, if not downright offensive, about having a group that serves meals to the homeless (or carries out some other obviously philanthropic service) fill out quarterly reports describing the cost-benefit ratio of the operation. This is Hard Times Gradgrindism at its worst. On the other hand, the presence of an intervening organization certainly reduces the degree of forelock-tugging required by the philanthropic relationship. If they don’t directly confront their benefactors, the poor needn’t act, or even feel, particularly grateful, and that itself is a great boon.
Ironically enough, philanthropy works best, in the sense of being most painless and least embarrassing to the participating parties, in the area where it is least needed: that is, the arts. Over the years artists and philanthropies have tried to portray arts grants as in some way equivalent, if not identical in nature, to grants that benefit those in dire need. But the brute fact is that art doesn’t need philanthropy. The artist, as a poverty-stricken consumptive, may need a handout; that’s a different matter, and in that case he qualifies as a poor person, not as an artist. But art itself is something that will either generate and survive or not, regardless of foundation grants. It may be a lot easier for people to see the art if philanthropies support art museums and symphony orchestras and theater companies and literary magazines; but that support will not in itself guarantee the production of good art. I’m not saying that artists don’t work for money: Great Expectations and The Golden Bowl might never have been produced if their authors hadn’t been able to make a living as writers. But I sincerely doubt that a nineteenth-century MacArthur award, if granted to either Dickens or James, would have led to anything greater than those two novels. The rallying cry of most foundations is that they want to “make a difference”; but in the area of the arts, the flat truth is that they often don’t.
Philanthropic organizations have a sneaking suspicion of this fact. In order to squelch the uncomfortable realization, they often tack on some requirement for “public benefit” in their grants to artists: the writer must give a reading at a public school, the dancer must perform in a women’s prison, and so forth. These requirements imply a belief that pure support of art is not an appropriate function of philanthropy. Such rules also suggest that the artist is somehow outside the bounds of public obligation, and needs to be brought into the fold. But the “public benefit” clause is a foolish way to do this, for the artist—if he can be compromised at all—will already have been compromised by the mere acceptance of the philanthropist’s money. That, rather than any spurious public appearances, is what marks his signature on the social contract. Like Pip taking the convict’s money, the artist irreversibly acknowledges his bond with society simply by accepting the grant. Depending on his personality, he will then proceed to honor the bond or bite the hand that feeds him. Neither response will determine the quality of the art he produces, and neither will ultimately be caused by his having been given a grant. The renegade artist will be a renegade with or without philanthropic support, and the conformist will be likewise.
On some level artists suspect all this, which is why they are so irritating for foundation people to deal with. They accept philanthropic support as their unnecessary but nonetheless demanded due; they feel the philanthropies should be grateful for the opportunity to assist them. In this belief history supports them: we can now see that Leonardo da Vinci’s and Michelangelo’s patrons got a lot more from their artists, in terms of public recognition and spiritual glorification, than those artists ever took from them. And, as James suggested, more recent philanthropists like the fictional Adam Verver and the very real J. P. Morgan actually collected art for the fun of it—to redound to their own material and aesthetic credit—rather than out of the kind of self-sacrificing “love of mankind” that motivated do-gooders like Jane Addams.
Because there is no real bond of obligation or gratitude incurred on either side, philanthropy to the arts is somehow cleaner and clearer than other kinds of giving. This is not at all to say that it is better: I would be sorry indeed if my words were used as an excuse to transfer millions of dollars from Head Start programs and Meals-on-Wheels to the coffers of art museums and opera companies. But giving to the arts lacks some of the inherent inconsistencies that Thoreau discerned in philanthropy. Arts giving, unlike other kinds, doesn’t inevitably set up a high/low status relationship between the two participants in the event. And arts giving, because it really doesn’t involve a felt response to human need, cleanly severs the bond between philanthropy and its Greek roots. This kind of giving isn’t about love; it’s purely about money. That may sound brutal, but it is in fact less disturbing than the curious mixture that remains in the other philanthropic fields.
Back in the Reagan/Bush era, there was a television commercial for United Way that took various forms, each one showing some grateful recipient of United Way funds acting in a heartwarming manner. At the end of the commercial the recipient would look out at the anonymous TV audience and say, “I don’t know you, but I love you.” This is the opposite of the clean break: this is the “phil” in philanthropy taken literally, but with the direction of the love reversed. Here it’s the receiver, and not the giver, who feels impersonal love of his fellow man. And the love is
not a disinterested feeling, but a coerced and coercive combination of gratitude and pleading. “Thanks for helping me, and could you please help me some more?” is what that commercial really meant. If that is love, then my tortured giving-up of a few coins to a street person is generosity.
OUT OF ACADEMIA
or much of the 1980s I wavered among three possible careers. One was the job I happened to be doing at the time to bring in the bulk of my income: consulting to nonprofit organizations, primarily to foundations. Though this work was relatively lucrative (relative to the other two careers, I mean), my distaste for bureaucratic paperwork, arm’s-length administration, and the general office environment made it unlikely that I would stick to it for very long. The second career was that of writer and editor—a job I was effectively doing full time from 1980 onward, but one that produced a negative cash flow until at least 1990. (And even when the cash flow was positive, it wasn’t very positive. I remember going to the dentist in 1987, shortly after my first book was published, and having the hygienist chattily say, “So I gather you’ve sold a book since you were last here!” I informed her, through a mouthful of fingers, that “sold” was hardly the appropriate verb for the amount of money that had changed hands in the transaction.) The third career was academia.