What is Philanthropy?

"Francis of Assisi” by Cimabue

Eleemosynary refers to the philanthropic impulse and it derives from the Latin word for alms. But what is the nature of philanthropy? The philanthropists you see in the paper are usually wealthy people whose very public activities in giving relatively small percentages of their earnings to charity constitute a form of image building and public relations and oftentimes the giving can actually be related to dispelling negative associations created by their business affairs. For instance recently the Coca Cola company sponsored a campaign calling attention to obesity. Of course Coke is one of the biggest offenders as a substance when it comes to weight gain.  An article in The Wall Street Journal, "Charitable Gifts From Wealthy Koch Brothers Often Prompt Partisan Reactions" (WSJ, 8/3/14) shows how gifts to medical and cultural institutions can varnish an industrialist’s reactionary image. El Chapo, known for the violence he used to dominate the Mexican drug trade, is beloved as a Robin Hood type character by many of the poor mountain people who now protect him. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett two of the wealthiest men in the world are notoriously philanthropic. In 201l, they created The Giving Pledge which encourages the richest people on the planet to give away most of their money. But when you have over 60 billion dollars and you pledge to give away 99% of it (which is what Buffet did), that still leaves you with over $600 million to live on—not exactly chump change. On the other side of the fence Franciscan monks, who probably start with very little, take a vow of poverty in which they give away everything. Larissa MacFarquhar deals with the subject of extreme altruism of this kind in recently published book Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help and there are some geneticists who believe such altruism is actually naturally selective. In an essay/review of David Sloan Wilson’s Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, “The Biology of Being Good  to Others,” (The New York Review of Books,” 3/19/15) H. Allen Orr writes: “This view was popularized in l976 by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. But the real breakthrough came in the l960’s with W.D. Hamilton’s theory of kin selection. Hamilton saw mathematically that a gene that encourages an organism to act altruistically can actually increase in numbers from one generation to the next by natural selection if those who benefit from the altruism tend to be relatives of the altruist. The reason is that, as kin, these beneficiaries of altruistic behavior often also carry the gene for altruism." But there’s a big difference between willingly choosing penury and remaining wealthy enough to take advantage of a foolhardy Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. FEC) which allows the rich to control politics. Further most philanthropy is biased. You only give to what you’re interested in. If you’re tired of the abuses of vegetarians, you might want to “free the vegetables:” if you’re an animal lover you’ll give to “save the whales.” But with the exception of the few who take a vow of poverty or attempt to reign in their own desires, some philanthropy can also turn out to have selfish motives.

The Real Thing

“Shylock and Jessica” by Maurycy Gottlieb (1876)

Most people think the title of The Merchant of Venice refers to Shylock, who is the most prominent character in Shakespeare’s play. But the title page plainly identifies Antonio as “a merchant of Venice" and Shylock simply as “a Jew." This is, in some way, odd since Shylock is the one that Bassanio goes to when he needs the money. Antonio, who is the shipping business, doesn’t have the dough. And therein lies the germ of at least one of the many conflicts the play illuminates. Shylock cannot be a real merchant since being a Jew he would have been excluded from many of the activities of the merchant class, of which Antonio is a member.  He's condemned to the shadows of commerce, marginalized and made to feel as if any pretensions he might have to respectability were manifestations of a false self. Indeed Antonio looks down on Shylock for being a moneylender. And Shylock is in turn  contemptuous of the Janus-faced individual who has no qualms about seeking help from someone he vilifies to others. Clearly Shylock is as much a merchant as Antonio. Only he’s in what we now call finance. To take the racial element out of the mix, Shylock is a Venetian Warren Buffett while Antonio is the owner of one of the companies that would potentially comprise a proto-Berkshire Hathaway. Shylock wants his pound of flesh, but if he weren’t suffering from loss aversion, a neuropsychological issue by which people make decisions that are emotionally rather than rationally driven, he might be willing to take a piece of Antonio’s action rather than his flesh when his adversary's chickens (aka boats) come home to roost. Of course, for all the mixture of scholasticism and biblical scholarship that the play exudes (with its caskets, rings and bond), reason is hardly what’s at work. In one of the most brilliant though not oft quoted passages, Shylock explains his seemingly “motiveless malignity” (to quote Coleridge’s famous lines about Iago) thusly, “So I can give no reason, nor I will not/ More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing/I bear Antonio, that I follow thus/A loosing suit against him.” And later he declaims, “You have among you many a purchased slave/Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules/You use in abject and in slavish parts…Shall I say to you/ ‘let them be free and marry them to your heirs/ Why sweat they under burdens?’…The pound of flesh which I demand of him/ Is dearly bought, ’tis mine, and I will have it.” Even though he's offered three times the amount of the loan, Shylock still refuses to allow it to be paid off. So he's hardly a Shylock, for what he’s afraid of losing is not his money, rather the possibility of vengeance against the person who "hates our sacred nation...my bargains and my well-won thrift/Which he calls interest” and who called him a “misbeliever, cutthroat dog/And spet upon my Jewish gabardine.” When Portnoy’s Complaint was published Philip Roth was criticized for his portrayal of a Jew who masturbated into a piece of liver. Shakespeare, of course, was not Jewish, but the criticism over the ages has been similar. The English critic John Gross wrote a book called Shylock: A Legend and its Legacy about how Shakespeare’s character was used for Nazi propaganda. We live in particularly litigious times where multivalent literary creations run afoul of identity politics. Clearly Shylock’s humanity needs no apology. However, let’s play the devil’s advocate and make one. What would Shylock be today? Perhaps he’d be one of those money managers who refuse to invest in companies that produce fossil based fuels? After all, besides defaming Jews, Antonio's plainly a colonialist. Imagine the degree to which indigenous populations must have been exploited for the sake of the wealth merchants like him sought to accrue?

The Woodstock of Capitalism

Capitalism encourages individual initiative. Socialism and Communism squelch it. By responding to the profit motive, productivity is increased as is innovation. By comparison economies predicated on the collectivity are less expansive. When the Soviet Union and China opened their economies to free enterprise they experienced huge growth spurts. However, while a free society may lead to the growth of private enterprise and mercantilism, it requires a kind of regulation that is not necessary in the already regulated economy which Marx termed “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Individuals as Thomas Hobbes would have agreed have to be protected against each other or self-will will run riot. That’s why it’s almost disconcerting to read that one of the great capitalistic juggernauts of all times, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is run totally on trust. Thomas Hobbes would have been shocked to read the headline of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s recent Dealbook, “Berkshire’s Radical Strategy: Trust” (NYT, 5/5/14) In the piece Charlie Munger, the vice chairman of Berkshire, is cited on the occasion of the company’s annual meeting, which Sorkin describes being “known as  'Woodstock for Capitalists.'” “By standards of the rest of the world, we overtrust,” Sorkin quotes Munger as saying. “So far it has worked very well for us.” Sorkin offers another Munger quote from 2007 thusly: “A lot of people think if you just had more process and more compliance—checks and double checks and so forth—you could create a better result in the world. Well, Berkshire has had practically no process. We had hardly any internal auditing until they forced it on us. We just try to operate in a seamless web of deserved trust and be careful whom we trust.” Herbert Spencer, who was responsible for the term “survival of the fittest," turned Darwin’s natural selection into a capitalist concept which rendered a dog eat dog view of human existence. But Munger obviously puts much stock in altruism which in the Berkshire model can also be naturally selective. If there had been a stock called Altruism, it would hit the ceiling every time Berkshire held one of its Woodstocks.

What is an Affair?

Affair is an odd word. In French "les affaires" are business (the business section of Air France is called “Affaires”) and in English the real distinction lies in either attending to (a matter) or going to one (a celebration) or having one (a sexual relationship that sometimes illicit). Attending an affair is innocuous enough unless in the course of attending you meet someone with whom you have an affair. Then there is the meaning of the word which has to do with intrigue. The Profumo affair was a famous British scandal involving a member of parliament and “a model" (Christine Keeler), but affair didn’t refer to the hanky panky necessarily, but to the compromising of the politician because of the fact that Keeler was sleeping with the Russian spy Yevgeny Ivanov (which sounds curiously similar to what Warren Buffett once said about derivatives, “It’s not just whom you sleep with, but also whom they are sleeping with." Similarly we might today speak of the Snowden affair. Using affair in connection with Snowden doesn’t connote anything sexual and indeed it’s unlikely that Snowden had much in the way of sex during the weeks when he inhabited the transit section of the Moscow airport--though Snowden might have fallen in love with someone en route between Hong Kong where he was staying and say Caracas or Quito which were two destinations he’d been heading towards before the Russians granted him temporary asylum. But how did affair come to be used in connection with sex outside of marriage? That’s the question. The Free On Line Dictionary gives 8 definitions of affair and only the eighth (“A romantic and sexual relationship, sometimes one of brief duration, between two people who are not married to each other”) has anything to do with sex. 

Citizen Bezos

The Times ran a piece about the acquisition of The Washington Post by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The price was $250,000,000. “The purchase price of $250 million is a pittance for a man who ranked 19^th on the Forbes Magazine list of billionaires, with an estimated fortune of more than $25 billion (“A Mogul Gets a Landmark in the Capital,” NYT, 8/6/13), the Times noted. Communication makes for strange bedfellows. The Washington Post was once the proud fiefdom of the Graham family, whose prominence like that of the Sulzberger clan derived from the creation of a great journalistic enterprise. Now The Washington Post is a mere plaything for one of the most prominent of the new generation of super magnates who have landed on earth from cyberspace. Star Wars has overtaken the Fourth Estate. Just when everyone is thinking the newspaper business has become moribund, it becomes apparent that the seemingly arcane world of print journalism still catches the eye of modern moguls, who possesse a level of wealth never dreamt of even by Citizen Kane, aka William Randolph Hearst. Warren Buffett is another billionaire who dabbles in newsprint (and in the same price range as Bezos, his holdings valued at approximately $344,000,000 too). On a lesser scale the Han Solos of high finance like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have snared small though prestigious catches like The New Republic. How long before The NewYork Times and prestigious Conde Nast publications like The New Yorker become the trophy wives of billionaires?