The Problem With Philanthropy

Today forty US billionaires pledged at least 50% of their wealth to charity. The list includes some instantly recognisable names, they are not only some of the biggest names in business but also in culture. A magnanimous, caring, elite who choose, without any compulsion, to use their talents, and the wealth it has helped them to accrue, entirely in the service of others. This is surely the ultimate demonstration of modern humane capitalism. Capitalism works, so the argument goes, because people want the best for themselves but also for others. It is both right and natural to simply let them do so. Trying to force them or staking some claim to what they do not want to give will simply be counter-productive, both economically and socially, as well as being totally unnecessary. This is how inequality corrects itself at the end of history. Except it doesn't work that way...

The problem is not, as some cynical voices might note, that this group represents only around 10% of US billionaires, or that for most/all of them their remaining wealth still far exceeds what the vast majority of people will earn in a lifetime, that many of these pledges will only be fulfilled after they die, or even the suspicion that they are in fact just buying honour, acclaim and a place in history for themselves - not really caring if they actually help anyone or not. No, no, these are just the easy targets. The real problem is that they aren't achieving what we, or they, think that they are. Ask your average billionaire philanthropist why they do it and my guess would be that the answer is something to do with 'I want to make a difference'. I'm not going to dispute this, it seems pretty likely.

The really pertinent question is not about sincerity but about knowledge. Namely, how do you know what kind of difference to make? The aim should of course be to do good, but good doesn't come with a ready definition, so we all do it for ourselves, and we all do it differently. Fortunately there is a method for resolving this, for quite a while now people have usually called it democracy, though people have also said the social contract, government by consent, the general will, its all the same stuff - a binding collective choice, a common aim and a shared means to achieve it. Philanthropy on the other hand requires that the rich individual decides exactly where the money goes, that is the whole point. Of course they will take advice, but they do not have to. They have to act within the law, but at the very least they have hobson's choice - they can simply choose not to give instead. They are the only ones who make the choice. So we have a kind of catch twenty-two, if they make a difference then we are entrusting them with the power to decide what is a good worthy cause, even if we disagree - so we have a kind of oligarchy, and if they don't then they are pointlessly squandering their wealth, which we (and they) obviously don't want. The only thing I can conclude whenever I see Bill Gates or Warren Buffet signing over a check for anything, even if i happen to agree, is that philanthropy is either useless or downright anti-democratic, either way it scarcely deserves the praise heaped on those who practise it regularly.

A Question Of Purpose

I sometimes think that a big part of finding a reason for life is a just matter of finding a job the right size for us. A task that fits us as people, something to do with the time, a purpose. Preferences differ - some like a task that is exclusively their own, something only they are working on. Others pick a task that must be cooperative, impossible to do alone. In either case they will either want to see it finished in a their lifetime, or long after, or even not at all - like the perpetual maintenance of a garden, why should we need our great works to end? It sounds so simple doesn't it, even if you disagree? There is just so much to do, and any given person is usually such a capable animal - given the chance. With such a choice, who could fail to find what they were looking for?

And yet it doesn't seem to work that way, at least for some of us. It isn't that we don't see the problems, or care about the solutions - we might even have some idea about what they are, but they seem to be on a different scale and the wrong shape for us to interact with them. But perhaps this is just a combination of those old excuses about one man/woman not being able to make a difference and that detestably aloof attitude that some problems are just beneath your efforts to solve them, draped in a pseudo-philosophical smokescreen. I'm not honest or introspective enough to know which.

A Few Good Men, Well.. Just Two Actually

I finally got round to watching Nick Robinson's documentary on the formation of the coalition agreement over five days last may. It's worth reflecting on what a remarkable achievement that really was.As ever it's the biggest events, the ones that define everything that comes after them - if only because they form part of the filter we use to see the world, that we forget were not always going to happen. This is probably because we don't just see the future differently but also the past. It's a worrying thought, the idea that we can't look back with certainty, and it's one of the reasons I decided to start writing a blog (although I'm keenly aware that this only goes some way to alleviating the problem). But anyway, in this case, it seems that we can make a case for the events of those days in may being, if not obvious and inevitable, more likely than many at the time thought (including myself).

The reason for this seems chiefly to be personal rather than political (to use that word 'political' in a sense that means, if we are being honest 'ideological'). Of course this might be a reflection of Nick Robinson's remarkable ability to perceive the human terrain of a political battle, if he has a fault it would be overplaying it's significance from time to time, but on this occasion it really does seem the best, if not only, explanation. It Hopefully also explains the pictures (right and below to the left) because I speak, of course, when I say personal of the extraordinary relationship between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. It would be too much of a stretch to say that they make the coalition work, as it would of any government (single or multi party), but they do seem to have made it happen. The reason is as simple as, and I think Nick Robinson has said as much, trust. Trust is that basis of all other relationships, which are at least partially defined by the level of trust required. As such it is also incredibly hard to build from scratch, the higher the stakes the more this is true.

So how did they do it? How did the eerie premonition on my right (the London 2012 mascots) turn to reality so quickly, allowing adversaries to become friends? The short answer is that they didn't and it didn't, and that is because thinking about it that way it really would have been impossible, if you follow me. This situation wasn't created overnight, election night or otherwise. The truth, if you will take my word for it, is that trust comes from common experience - that's why even adversarial politics works best when those involved have similar spheres of experience. When Thomas Hobbes theorised that free men under no law but nature would inevitably conflict it was becuase there could be no trust, and this was because his epistemological view committed him to the idea that there could be no genuine common experience. I would guess that most people do think that common experience is possible, if not I can offer a little in the way of proof, but I doubt this will be needed. Cameron and Clegg have common experience by the bucket-load, They are both affluent, privately educated young men (born less than a year apart), one studied at Oxford and the other at Cambridge. They entered parliament only 4 years apart and for both the 2010 election was their first as leader. Politically importantly they both won the leadership of their respective parties by being bold, with a mandate for change. Need I go on? Without wanting to overplay the obligatory marriage metaphors the phrase 'made for each other' occurs. Of course this has all been said, better, but it never hurts to labour a good and important point, lest we forget that it might have been otherwise!

Why Should We Want Srong Individuals?

I posted yesterday about how pathetic we seem to feel individuals are that they need such optimal conditions to bloom. Of course the biggest underlying assumption was that we should feel that strong individualism is something that we want to preserve. Then I remembered something I had written about this before, something about Alighiero Boetti. Boetti was part of the artistic avant-garde movement that emerged during 1960s radicalism in Italy. If he was right then I was wrong to worry about the sheepishness of modern individualism - it might actually be a good thing.

Boetti felt that self-expression, far from being in opposition to capitalism, was actually driving it forward by its obsession with creation. My personal favourite way of thinking about his argument is by looking at ‘the American dream’ – and it’s relevant to Boetti because his work really starts to get going from the time when it was turning a little sour in the mid to late 1960s. The dream is a lifestyle full of individualism, which for lack of a better definition right now means a life of free choices from as wide a range as possible. Your Job, your relationships, where you live, how you live and ultimately (perhaps a little grandiose) the kind of person you want to be are all theoretically, but also importantly under law, down to Individuals. The American dream is also one full of objects. Left off that last list are your choice of house, car, furniture, clothes, pet, TV, newspaper and all the other half-utilitarian half-symbolic fixtures of a modern life are all down to yours truly.

Radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s is defined by the emphatic rejection of the latter list. Their idea, rarely significantly changed since then, is that any objects bought and sold in the market are not in fact about the individual needs and desires of those who buy them but are actually about the profit of the few who sell them. Capitalism, on this view, is in fact held up by the ideological domination of politics, education, work and family relationships and ultimately the psychological life of citizens. One slogan of the New Left at that time that I think expresses this nicely, ‘There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed’. That really is another story (a totally fascinating one) but the point is that Boetti went much further.

The real problem, so he thought, lay in the requirement, both social and psychological, to choose anything at all. This is because in the self expression that comes from those choices we are holding ourselves and others up to unrealistic standards of the degree of control and insight in our creations. In other words we believe that the world really can be shaped by the plans of inspired individuals. The upshot of this is that not only do the objects that were previously thought to free us become grotesque limitations, as the new left thought, but so do our attempts to control and shape our own lives. Living your life to some kind of narrative, to have a plan, to ‘know what you want from life’ is in fact a prison.

I’m perfectly willing to admit that I have no idea how to live a life like that, even if I wanted to, and it was perhaps for that reason that Boetti was a conceptual artist and not a philosopher. A major tool of his experiments was chance and randomness. He would send letters to his friends with deliberately wrong addresses using random combinations of stamps which would circle the postal system and occasionally return- at which point he would exhibit them. Even stranger though was where he eventually found a society that he thought expressed his thesis best – Afghanistan. He set up a Hotel there in 1971.

Afghanistan was a country free of created objects...

"Afghan homes, for example, are empty: no furniture therefore no objects commonly placed on furniture. There are only a few carpets and mattresses on which people lie down, drink, smoke and eat. I also like the fact that Afghans wear the same clothes at day and at night. Nothing has been added to the landscape. Rocks are moved and used to build cube houses. The resistance with which Afghans oppose our civilisation has always amazed me." - Alighiero Boetti

Leaving aside that the situation he found was at least in part due to simply poverty, the idea that something about the Afghan way of life is intrinsically resistant to grand inspired political narratives and large scale transformative schemes, for the same reason as their rejection of conventional object creation, certainly puts a new spin on the ‘progress’ we are attempting to bring to that country now.

At any rate Afghanistan had a hand in the creation of his series of works called ‘Mappa’. Mappa were a series of embroidered maps of the world. The landmass of each country was covered by that countries current flag. The significance of this was that although he commissioned the work all of its features were, in actuality, totally beyond his control. The work was carried out by multiple afghan craftswomen and the design was down in essence to the geopolitics that formed the shape and colour (because of the flags) of the landmasses (which in turn are a feature of geology).

"For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing." - Alighiero e Boetti, 1974

Excuses, Excuses...

‘I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.’ — Marilyn Monroe.

If that is not the best excuse I have ever heard not to even try to change yourself then the better ones are so good that I haven’t even noticed them yet, and they still look like good reasons. I came across this psychological hook of a phrase, once again, on Facebook - and when I say came across what I mean is it was thrust at me by the news feed. I suspect it won’t be the last time I see it and it isn't hard to see why. What it speaks to is the idea that people can absolve themselves of the fully confessed negative aspects of their life and personality so long as they can find enough things that they think are good to weigh them out. In other words, a total abdication of responsibility.

This attitude is widespread and easy to recognise, bring up something critical about someone and more often than not the defence will include a statement about some good or righteous act that they have done, no disputation of the negatives, just a simple ‘but also...’. You will hear that same justifying argument from glib battlefield generals of the ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ school, or from terrorist groups (just look at the RAF in post war Germany), and religious apologists who go on endlessly about charity work. What we often forget to ask is how on earth these things are relevant. Are they connected in some necessary way? Is collateral damage somehow compulsory in even just war?  Does glorious revolution simply mean horrific violence? Do we have to tolerate the odd holy war if we want the YMCA? It would be a brave man who answers yes to all of these. Not that he would be necessarily wrong, and Friedrich Nietzsche did indeed argue for something similar to this. Certainly however I don't think that this is what people mean when they thoughtlessly blurt out the quote that started this thought.

Moreover, even if they do, they crucially differ from Nietzsche in motivation. People use this as a reason not to try, so long as they are good enough, and this is surely misguided - because the only way to really find out whether you can't have the good without the bad is to actually try. Easy example; before I wrote this I thought that in a literal sense you couldn't make an omelette without making eggs, and it turns out I was wrong!

Flimsy Individuals

If you dislike capitalism then it is a fair enough bet that your analysis of the problem has something to do individualism. Everyone knows this sort of argument, it's been around forever, and shows no signs of disappearing in the near future. Here is one I lifted of someone's formspring page...

'It can feel hard to justify passion about expression in a society that openly disregards the individual and works more towards it's self-created idea of economic greatness, and the individual stops being a remarkable mind with ideas and feelings and becomes a pawn in a machine, going through the motions and appreciating very little of the already tiny amount of what is really real.'

Of course the irony of this has always been, for the last 5 or 6 decades at the very least, that the other side (you know, the ones who write books about the road to serfdom, the enemies of the open society and how there are two concepts of liberty) have always made exactly the same claim about the alternatives. Look again at the quote above, swap out 'economic greatness' for 'socialist utopia' and it could be the opposite argument, just as eloquently put, now given in support of Margaret Thatcher's 'vision' in the 1975 conference speech of...

'A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master - these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free economy... and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.'

The obvious initial response it that this can only mean one thing, someone is wrong (well that was mine anyway). I'm not discounting that possibility, but I'm also not going to get into it now because I don't have the space, or the patience, or inclination, or the first clue about how to conclusively do so. So what am I trying to say? This is of course the old totalitarian horseshoe theory. Leaving aside it's academic merits it is a masterpiece of cold war politics. Bending the political spectrum to show that communists and fascists are basically pretty similar, smearing the soviets, and with the happy side effect of demonstrating maximum freedomee goodness consists in a happy blend of left and right wing politics, a middle of the road, mediocre, middle class western polity - in other words. But the difference is that for both sides now the thing attacked now is not Marxist-Lenninism, it's democratic socialism - just look to Obama's troubles with the tea party, and it's not a capitalism that even comes close to recognising William Sumner's famous remark that 'the drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be' - just look at David Cameron's progressive conservatism.

So now the question raised by these critiques seems to be not what kind of thing is bad for individuals but, rather, what on earth is not heavy enough (left or right) that it crushes all individualism? Apparently we can now only dare to express ourselves under the absolute prime conditions now. The slightest hint of disapproval or malice towards us causes people to simply give up and go with the whatever we perceive to be what we ought to do, communist or capitalist, no matter how much we dislike it? Just a little depressing...

Liberals, Power and Poetic Analogies

Friedrich Nietzsche used to say that he tried to express in one page what most people couldn't manage in an entire book. The obvious advantage to this style being that most people are far more likely to get to the end of your page than to the end of your book. Today it seems that a sentence is a more appropriate length for a complete reading, how else can we possibly explain the tremendous popularity of Twitter. Although in general i would add my voice to the 'If 135 characters is enough to express yourself, you shouldn't bother' brigade I'm making an exception today for a comment by Simon Titley, the editor of Liberator (aka 'Liberal Democrats' grassroots trouble-makers' - Michael Crick). He writes that the liberal democrats mood, reflecting on the coalition that they have found themselves in, 'resembles that of first-time clients in a high-class brothel; feeling gratified but somewhat soiled, and unsure who's been screwing whom'. No amount of characters can express the brilliance of this statement. As a pure statement of analogy for Liberal Democrat feeling it is fantastic enough, but better than that it speaks to something about power in a general sense (something that I'm sure Nietzsche, as the supreme theorist of power, would have certainly approved of).

The Liberals have found themselves experiencing the kind of  power thrill that they must surely have always discounted as a real possibility, even if they would have never admitted it. No explanation should be needed of why they should, must and do relish this chance. But for them, Lord Acton's party - who have always held more or less to his most famous remark, they have become their own mythical antagonist. A good liberal never acts, even for the good, until they know that their power to do so is exercised legitimately. Many would say however, and I would add my voice to them, that this can seem almost impossible in government. Socialists and conservatives can make their excuses- most commonly that the means can be justified by the ends in the former, and that ultimately government cannot rule much at all out in the latter. For liberals though this must surely generate what Titley describes as the 'soiled' feeling, what I would call guilt.

Perhaps though I'm being grandiose and over-philosophical, it wouldn't be the first time, and instead of all this talk of brothels and Nietzsche a simpler analogical explanation will do. Reshaping the the world according to our own vision is a thrill that anyone who has ever succeeded at some kind of DIY task will recognise. But the problem with putting up those shelves yourself is that you will always notice, more than anyone else, the corner that you accidentally chipped off with the claw hammer. Maybe in the end it's the disappointments in the results, perhaps an even more inevitable side effect of government, that will eat at Lib Dem consciences. This will probably relate to the Tory measures they have to put through, but it might be as much at their own bit of the coalition agreement- they will have higher hopes for it after all. I wish the coalition well, not least because they haven't yet raised my tuition fee's but these unavoidable strains must surely spell trouble.