Beneficence

Words Matter

The biggest lesson I'm taking from my initial foray into blogspace is that we have a lot of work to do to find a language in which to discuss the social and political issues surrounding philanthropy and its role in a free society. Even that little phrase "free society," I've learned is loaded!

In an earlier comment, Gerry accuses me of positivism! A move that had me apoplectic, since positivist I ain't! How, I wondered, did he draw that conclusion?! Which leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that the politicization of language is even worse than I thought.

Samuel Gregg in his recent book On Ordered Liberty begins with this quotation from Hayek:

If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations. What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction; the arguments do not move in a context familiar to us; and they rarely give direct answers to the questions we are asking. (The Constitution of Liberty, 1)

Phil and I have found common ground in our love of literature, particularly Milton's Areopagitica, but to expand this conversation to include others unfamiliar with this context, we have our work cut out for us! I'm looking forward to continuing the conversations.

SpaceShip One!

Hearty thanks to Burt Rutan, Mike Melvill, Paul Allen and the whole team that made today's space flight of SpaceShip One a success! I'm like a little kid again, watching men land on the moon! It's so wonderful to witness and to vicariously experience the elation the SpaceShip One team must feel today. Gives us a moment to bask in the realm of possibilities and to remember what people can do when they work together for creative purposes! Three cheers for the spirit of private enterprise--with very tangible public benefits today in the form of a burst of uplifted morale!

Ideas Have Consequences

GiftHub points me to Wealth Bondage--only link if you dare--where the Happy Tutor has been dancing paddle in hand over our recent exchanges. For my two cents, The Happy Tutor at least has the frankness to acknowledge the little dead end where the "progressive" intelligentsia wound up when they followed the Continentals. And he refers to the European continent, not the Continental Soldiers who helped America declare itself free from the travesty of European politics in the 16th-18th c. Of course, the Tutor is given to satire, and sometime one has to check to see whether there is irony at work as well.

Funny how the Tutor seems to have this image of the "Right" as some sort of strategically cunning conspiracy to overtake the "culture creating organs" of our society. It's revealing to learn that his kind feel as "left out" of the culture-making conversation as do the conservative "remnant."

In reality, it was no departure from Progressive tradition to follow the philosophers and politicians of Europe. The origins of the social sciences and indeed Progressivism itself were largely brought to American shores by those Northeastern and Midwestern Protestants who took their graduate educations in the universities of Germany, observing with admiration the Kaiser's uniformed police and those trains running on time. Oh, hail, Efficiency and a respectable job as a civil servant of the State. Returning home, they poured the flame of their Social Gospel over their newfound icy confidence in the well-ordered State and the competence of professional bureaucrats and voila! we get the Federal income tax, the explosion of the corporate welfare state, scientific philanthropy, and, probably the best of the lot, a general clean-up of local politics.

After two world wars showcasing German efficiency and nationalism, the intellectuals of Europe traipsed off into their seminars to make peace with power and its discontents. Not having learned the one-two punch of those European blend cocktails, many American liberals followed and wound up deconstructing themselves to the point of irrelevancy. It would be laughable, had they not at the same time captured so many of the institutions through which American youth take a right of passage.

So, yes, "conservatives" have been intent on reclaiming the universities, but I don't think any of us believes we've even begun to succeed. Our battle cry was hewn from that title of Richard Weaver, "Ideas have Consequences," reinforced by Hayek's little essay called "the Intellectuals and Socialism." It's interesting to consider Hayek at length, and I hope the Tutor and his pals will take the time to consider how in earnest we classical liberals--what Hayek calls "true liberals" in what follows--have been about the hope of freedom.

The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. The intellectual revival of liberalism is already under way in many parts of the world. Will it be in time?

It is truly ideas--what we as individuals believe about the way the world works--that make human action of various kinds possible. Tutored or untutored, we each have a theology, an anthropology, a sociology, an economic view that shape how we believe we can and should act in the world. I suspect progressive and conservative alike, we all have more to fear from Madison Ave and what it teaches Americans to believe than we do from one another.

Oh, just another little thought. Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen reports some recent findings about religion and economics. Among these: "For the most part religious belief (as opposed to participation) is not correlated with economic growth. Belief in hell is positively correlated with growth, however." That seems an interesting little point to ponder in relation to this conversation about ideas--and the probable influence those Continental philosophers have had on our willingness to believe in and talk about Hell. Many of the conservatives I know still treat it as a fact. I wonder whether the same can be said of such as the Happy Tutor, whose fetish with bondage seems to import a bit of Hell to earth... but that's a thought for another post.

The Vision Thing

Bill Schambra comments on the NCRP's examination of the success of "conservative" philanthropy and delineates some concerns shared by conservatives and progressives in regard to "establishment" philanthropy.

He doesn't tackle the accusations that conservatism and corporate gigantism are happy bedfellows, mutually fueling some massive power takeover, but his observation, quoted below, does make this accusation look rather farfetched, given the comparative giving power of "conservative" and "establishment" foundations:

While conservative grantmakers might be tempted to bask in this lavish praise, doing so would miss the point of these reports. Their real purpose is to shame liberal foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur—each one of which annually disburses more than the 79 foundations NCRP studied combined—into adopting the techniques described. NCRP and its allies assume that if one could just attach effective conservative methods to liberal purposes—that is, if one made grants for general operating support over many years to groups marshaled behind a coherent liberal vision—the result would be a progressive movement in America every bit as powerful as the one nurtured by conservative foundations.

emphasis mine

Munnecke on Copenhagen

Tom Munnecke has an interesting post that raises issues of problem framing, expert evaluation, and perverse incentive structures in relation to the well-intentioned efforts of the Copenhagen Consensue to define the most pressing world problems. We need to hear more from Tom and his colleagues at Giving Space on these important and largely ignored issues.

Wirearchy

I like the concept of "wirearchy" defined by Jon Husband

The working definition of wirearchy is:

An n-way dynamic flow of power and authority, based on transparency, knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

There is much more of interest at Wirearchy, including a great read on self-organizing parties!

I've GOT to learn how to use one of those aggregators so I can keep up with things out there!! Suggestions on the best--read that easiest for a blog neophyte?!

Remembering Reagan

For those following the multitude of reflections on Ronald Reagan's life and times--or not--two recent essays with particular focus on Reagan's much maligned social policy may be of interest.

Bill Schambra reminds us that Reagan challenged the progressive confidence in government as the primary arbiter of social policy and site of national unity:

In “Let the People Rule,” a remarkable but largely forgotten speech delivered to the Executive Club of Chicago in September, 1975, he argued that big government was harmful not only because it dampened individual initiative. It also weakened the local, voluntary institutions within which citizens had traditionally managed their own affairs, according to their own moral and spiritual principles. And so he called for:

An end to giantism, for a return to the human scale – the scale that human beings can understand and cope with; the scale of the local fraternal lodge, the church congregation, the block club, the farm bureau. . . . It is activity on a small, human scale that creates the fabric of community. . . . The human scale nurtures standards of right behavior, a prevailing ethic of what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable

In the June 10, 04 issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Les Lenkowsky argues that "Ronald Reagan Helped Philanthropy, Despite How Much Nonprofit World Objected to His Policies." Lenkowsky concludes that

At a time of increased questioning of how the nonprofit world works, and proposals for new government regulations (or perhaps even worse, new public-private partnerships), Mr. Reagan's legacy of confidence in the ability of philanthropists and other private organizations, if left to their own devices, to improve American life is as relevant today as it was two decades ago.

Nonprofit Blogs

What's a Blog, and Why Should Nonprofits Care? by Zafar S. Shah. I found this look at the potential usefulness of blogs to not for profit organizations worth the read. Turns out I actually know the work of Wayne Jennings and the IALA , one of the blogs cited! This is encouraging to me, as I believe that the folks pursuing learning alternatives are imagining the schools of the future. They are the visionaries and early adapters who realize that todays schools are largely remnants of the industrial age, ill-suited to the challenges and opportunities of an increasingly digital, global knowledge economy.

Dark Satanic Mills

Ahh, here we go on from Milton to Blake! A fitting transition, I think, since the lines Phil cites in his comment to a previous post actually come from Blake's Milton, rather than from his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

By the way, I have a lovely videotape of my then 2 year old son Rafe reciting the first verse of one of Blake's Songs of Experience:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I'm curious why Phil reads the Songs as a social commentary, rather than what Blake states they are--"shewing the two contrary states of the human soul." (Yes, there are those poor little chimney sweeps, who strangely are actually worse off in the songs of innocence than in the songs of experience.)

I think it must be because our cultural life has never truly recovered from the impact of the romantics of the industrial age--Marx, Engels, and a few others thrown in there with the poet Blake--who believed that industrial capitalism and life in the dark, Satanic mills was contorting the human soul. Though I believe wholeheartedly that Blake's artistic critiques have more depth of reality and persistent insight in them than the entire corpus of Marx and all his followers.

Surely the industrial age was one of tremendous social change, turmoil, and dislocation that we have yet fully to understand. Historians, along with Dickens, still tell us of the bleak houses of the working poor and the predations of the greedy capitalists. We are in need of more good revisionist scholarship to balance the scales that judge capitalism so precipitously. I, for one, don't want to live as the subject of the landed aristocracy of Augustan Britain nor as a cog in the Administrative Wheel of state socialism.

I often wonder what it is that the modern progressive, who enshrines material progress and translates moral progress as the transvaluation of values, would have us undo between the industrial age and our own? Mustn't we in truth accept and strive to understand the industrial age as that which gave rise to the world which is ours, somehow, despite the tensions of human experience and art to which Phil rightly points us--

The end result of the poems taken together is a third state, existing in the dialectical tension between the first two. Blake called that state, "achieved innocence." That would be my goal. Not to applaud the small, often self-serving and hypocritical blessings of largess, charity, faith based initiatives, thousand points of light, and Bill Bennett style moralizing, nor to merely to provide an ironic or satiric counterpoint, but to include both in a single vision, in which we still affirm the small blessings and do our best to light that one candle.

I do not suggest that we have to fall in love with the industrial age and wish to return there as if to some idyllic shore, but rather to recognize what the coming of industrial capitalism called forth from the spirit of our own ancestors--the energy of innovation and enterprise that allowed for material progress, the expanded social conscience (borne on the back of both labor and leisure) that allowed us to imagine a wider scope for human dignity and liberty. As Blake called it forth, Awake! Albion, Awake!

Blake's work on Milton is indeed a work of prophecy, and his allusion to the dark Satanic Mills, turns in the next verse to the industrialism of his own zeal to bring the new Jerusalem to life on Albion's shores. The tools of this industry, however, are those of the artist and prophet waging a "mental fight," armed with a bow of burning gold, arrows of desire, a spear to unfold the clouds, and carried forth in a Chariot of Fire. The tools of the faithful prophet choosing to call upon the Lamb, not the nihilism of the social and political reformers who in seeking the Good of All would reduce all to the valence of atoms spinning in the void of some historical determinism.

Blake toys obliquely with the odd conundrum of our freedom to choose and its resultant responsibility. In Jerusalem he writes:

Let the Indefinite be explored, and let every Man be Judged

By his own Work. Let all Indefinites be thrown into Demonstrations,

To be pounded to dust & melted in the Furnaces of Affliction.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars:

General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer,

For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars

And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.

And again strangely relevant to our musings here are these lines from Milton:

He [the idiot Questioner] smiles with condescension, he talks of Benevolence and Virtue,

And those who act with Benevolence and Virtue they murder time on time.

I wonder what this observation of Blake as Milton has to do with the Song of Experience he titles The Clod and the Pebble, and what these competing views of love itself have to do with our beliefs about beneficence and philanthropy and our "doings good"...

"Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
but for another give its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

Friendly Debate

Philanthropoid kindly, yet with reservations, summarizes the exchange Phil and I have begun.

I hope to assure her/him?--I am not sure why there is a trend toward anonymous blogging and I couldn't find a name--that my intentions in this exchange are quite friendly and not particularly political, except as these conversation might improve life in our "polis."

Philanthropid wonders what Austrian economics is--and that's critical to understand, though I am not now nor ever have been an economist.

My own appreciation of the Austrian economists' interpretive perspective came when I read a remarkable essay by the Austrian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek. The essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society , fundamentally changed the way I understood the working of the world. Perhaps some of you will take the time to read and likewise find an anchor.

It's a rich perspective and much more substantial than what can be caricatured by the merely political label "libertarian."

Rick Stroup, a friend of mine with significant interests in the issues of free markets and environmentalism summarized in an interesting and more concise way the point that I aimed to make in my replies to Gerry Gleason's earlier comments

[Liberty has a consequentialist need] for the presence of what I think of as the voluntary sector--especially in the form of Burke's "little platoons"--that promote true understanding and cooperation in place of the increasingly divisive polarized politics of factions seeking benefits through government, for themselves and their personal sacred causes. Seeking the same from the voluntary sector causes only good and noble things to happen, even though some actions are futile. Free and responsible individuals, even when ignorant, are seldom in a position to do serious evil.

Thanks, Rick, for allowing me to quote you here! Those are the themes I want to explore more here once people are willing to listen beyond their suspicion that I have little red horns and a tail or am suffering from self-delusions. And that's why we began with Milton, who asks us merely to try to persuade rather than coerce one another--and believe that other people are reasonable, can be informed, and are worth engaging in civil discourse for it's own sake.