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Weekly UpdatesWhen Warren Buffett announced his multi-billion dollar bequest to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation during the summer of 2006, he explained his generous if unconventional, act of charity by claiming that "if your goal is to return the money to society by attacking truly major problems that don't have a commensurate funding base--what could you find that's better than turning to a couple of people who are young, who are ungodly bright...."
American philanthropy's romance with the "ungodly bright" has a long, if not always noble, pedigree. After all, the first large foundations--Carnegie, Rockefeller, Russell Sage--were established during, and fully reflected the predilections of America's progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century. The progressives were persuaded that, just as disease was rapidly being conquered by modern science and medicine, so "social pathogens"--the ultimate source of our social ills-could be tracked down and eradicated once and for all, given new sciences of human behavior like sociology, psychology, and public administration.
But this would require that the management of human affairs be taken out of the hands of the benighted many and put into the care of the enlightened few, trained and credentialed in the new social sciences. Not coincidentally, this was precisely the direction history itself wished to take.
As their name suggests, progressives were convinced that history was the story of inexorable progress from the selfish individualism and parochial localism of the past to a new era of social-minded brotherhood. But only the ungodly bright avant-garde had the historical and scientific insight to break with the parochial allegiances of the past, and persuade or compel the many to follow them into a more promising, socially conscious, collective future.
The first large foundations eagerly bought into progressivism's view that new, professionally-trained elites were trailblazers into a brighter future. And so they invested massively in the rationalization, standardization, and modernization of old professions like law, education, and medicine. To bring a new order and discipline to public affairs, they also funded the development of new professions like social work and public administration.
These updated old and new professions would find their home in the modern research university--another favorite funding target for Carnegie and Rockefeller--where genuinely objective research could be conducted free from the distorting pressures of politics and markets, and where the next generation of elites would be trained.
Even the way these foundations organized themselves--existing in perpetuity, with highly abstract statements of purpose--reflected an abiding faith in the progressive accumulation of intelligence in the hands of the few. As long-time Rockefeller Foundation President Raymond Fosdick noted, only open-ended, perpetual giving was able to accommodate the optimistic conviction that "the dead hand should be removed from charitable bequests," leaving grant-making decisions entirely "in the hands of living men," because "the wisdom of living men will always exceed the wisdom of any man, however wise, who has long since been dead."
This overarching faith in the new sciences of society lies behind one of the most frequently repeated justifications for modern philanthropy, uttered first by John D. Rockefeller himself: "The best philanthropy is constantly in search for finalities--a search for cause, an attempt to cure the evils at their source."
The old, discredited approach of charity, in this view, responded too emotionally and directly to the immediate problems of individuals before them. It did not use its head. It lacked the steely, detached scientific knowledge to see through the bewildering, distracting, superficial manifestations of social ailments, down to the final, root causes of those ailments, which we now had the power to cure once and for all.
But only the ungodly bright few are able properly to exercise scientific discipline. Quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fosdick made this link explicit: "If notwithstanding the apparent confusion and welter of our life, we are able to Fred a steadiness of purpose and quiet dominating intelligence, it is largely because of [those] who have been trained to a considerable extent in the scientific method."
It might seem today that we no longer look to social science with such naive, utopian expectations. Nevertheless, the language and practice of modern American philanthropy still reflect an abiding faith in the ungodly bright to lead us into a new, more rational world.
Hence, foundations invariably describe themselves as innovators and experimenters, relentlessly pursuing "social change" through new and imaginative projects that will conclusively reveal the hidden workings of underlying social forces.
Their programs are designed according to cutting-edge academic theories about social behavior and carried out by staff with impressive professional credentials. Foundations know that they are tapping into root causes because their programs produce concrete outcomes analyzable by sophisticated scientific metrics.
Philanthropy is peculiarly positioned to play this pioneering role in social change, it is often argued, because it is mercifully insulated from market forces, political demands, and other bothersome pressures of the everyday world, and so can come at public problems from a uniquely objective, detached point of view. In other words, foundations still provide a perch from which the ungodly bright can steer social change in a progressive direction.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Warren Buffett should have surveyed the perplexing variety of charitable needs and projects competing for his attention, and concluded that it was better to "attack truly major problems" by turning his fortune over to the intelligent few. For all the changes the 20th century wrought, its philanthropy closed the century as it began, with leadership by the ungodly bright still regarded as the only progressive and enlightened path for grantmaking.
After a full century of insisting that their peculiar value to society is the ability to get to root causes of, and decisively solve, social problems, how have foundations performed? For a field so insistent that its grantees show demonstrable outcomes, philanthropy in fact has precious little to show.
One hundred years ago, at a time when the federal government's presence in social policy was insignificant, foundations did in fact play a major role in establishing the institutions and professional structures of medicine and public health. There was considerable pay-off when it came to combating diseases like yellow fever and hook worm.
Later, scientific developments in agriculture supported by the large American foundations produced the "Green Revolution," saving millions from starvation. But when it comes to social--not medical or agricultural--problems, the record of philanthropy is abysmal.
Here, philanthropy has largely tinkered around the edges of the delivery systems of the social welfare state, fine tuning this program, replicating that one, and rearranging existing services into new combinations. That might be commendable work, but it's hardly how philanthropy justifies itself. It claims rather that the ungodly bright deserve the privileged position of grant-making leadership because they don't tinker, but rather cut directly to the source of significant social problems, grasp their cause, and solve them once and for all--just as hookworm was decisively eradicated in large parts of the South.
And this is precisely where philanthropy has such a feeble record. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to name a single social problem--even an insignificant one--the roots of which philanthropy has laid bare and solved.
But once the ungodly bright steel themselves sufficiently to see sufferers not as unique individuals, but rather as insubstantial manifestations of underlying pathologies, it becomes easy to pursue solutions that at first ignore, and finally violate, innate human dignity. Indeed, the bright might well conclude that the most merciful way to alleviate suffering is to prevent anyone from becoming a sufferer in the first place--by cutting off suffering at its genuine root.
What might a new approach to philanthropy look like? It would start by challenging the central premise of 20th century philanthropy that the ungodly bright are somehow better equipped to solve society's problems than are everyday citizens. The notion that citizens themselves could and should play a central role in solving their own problems is, of course, reflected in Alexis de Tocqueville's understanding of American democracy. The great danger of the new age of democracy, in his view, was that citizens would become too absorbed with narrow, materialistic pursuits to pay attention to public affairs, and would be willing to turn over their affairs to management by bright, benevolent elites.
That might result in a smoothly operating and efficient social service delivery system. But it would also mean an ominous concentration of power in a few hands, as well as a gradual impoverishment of the spirit or soul of the democratic citizen, as he lost the capacity or the desire to engage with--and to be 8 enlarged by--vigorous encounters with other citizens of differing back grounds and opinions.
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Curiously, American foundations today frequently fund studies and conferences anxiously pondering precisely this problem of citizen disengagement and the decline of the democratic spirit in America. But they seldom look critically at their own practices, to consider whether their clear preference for public management by the ungodly bright might not in itself convey a dispiriting message to democratic citizens, and feed the cycle of disengagement.
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