The Future of Music Policy Summit January 10 - 11, 2001 - Washington, DC

ANNALS OF PHILANTHROPY: CAN CHARITY BE A SUBSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE?: Milton Goldin Talks To Author David Wagner

In What's Love Got to Do with It?, David Wagner concerns himself with the How and Why of our situation.

MILTON GOLDIN: You write that charity cannot be a substitute for social justice and that thus far in American history, fanfare for charity has obscured this basic understanding. Are these fair (if over- simplified) statements of your positions?

DAVID WAGNER: Yes, absolutely. In America, charity, like motherhood and apple pie, tends to serve as a feel- good nostrum. Of course, this does not mean that giving and volunteering in any particular instance is the wrong thing to do, but that as overall social activities they are vastly overrated.

GOLDIN: Do you think that at various points in American history, for example, during the Gilded Age, which was marked by labor strife as well as by conspicuous consumption, social justice could have predominated over charity?

WAGNER: Some communities rejected steel magnate Andrew Carnegie's offer of a free library and other gifts. Activist movements, such as the Socialist Party, received a good percentage of the vote. Muckrakers and clerics spoke about philanthropy as being a bribe on the part of the rich to overcome their sins. That memory has greatly, I think, been eroded, and fairly intentionally.

But the fact remains that Carnegie and other industrialists of his time wanted to turn "dirty" money into "clean" money through foundations and other charitable ventures.

GOLDIN: The Social Gospel movement, which originated in Britain during the mid-19th century (where it was known as Christian Socialism) flowered in America following Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth writings. The movement decried Carnegie and Rockefeller-style philanthropy. Social Gospel proponents were, to a large extent, Protestant clerics. How is that a century later, Marvin Olasky almost totally eradicates memory of the Social Gospel's existence?

WAGNER: The Gospel of Wealth and the Social Gospel were announced at a time of crisis in American churches. In some denominations, there were serious declines in attendance. The churches intentionally took a rhetorical and to some extent concrete interest in the poor and immigrant classes for the first time, in an effort to ward off radical alternatives.

GOLDIN: You devote considerable space to a case against Christian Symbolism, which you define, in large part, as a device mainly useful in separating the "deserving" poor from the "undeserving" poor: That is, the poor who conform in order to get some measure of help from those who will not or cannot conform and stand condemned on that account. (This distinction was codified in public statute via Colonial poor laws.) But isn't this duplicity on the part of establishments suggestive of a fault in human nature as much as faults in Christianity? After all, this kind of cynicism and hypocrisy are apparent in other religions and cultures. Jewish philanthropy in America offers a depressing number of instances in which giving served as a means to protect one group (mainly, Jews of Western and Central European heritage) from another group(overwhelmingly, Jews of Eastern European heritage).

WAGNER: I think we all have a tendency to dichotomize and to see people as either good or evil. But it is difficult to generalize. Catholicism contains conservative, liberal, and even revolutionary components, such as the Catholic Worker and "liberation theology" movements. The Christian distribution of alms was probably more re-distributory in actually demanding in some cases a steep price from the nobility and other rich than it was after the rise of capitalism.

This is a very complex question and one can deconstruct what one means by human nature. I've been doing a lot of research on indigenous peoples not only in North America but throughout the world. As modern Americans we assume not only a capitalist system but a system of hierarchy around certain features in our lives. But things are very different elsewhere in the world, particularly in how social welfare is perceived..

GOLDIN: Where and how would you correct inequities in America's welfare system, without reference to charity, if you had opportunities to do so?

WAGNER: In my book, I use, as examples of what could be done, societies that are far more progressive than what we have in the United States. That is not to say that they are ideal; currently, many are cutting back on various social welfare programs. But for Americans, it's hard to see, given the absence of social movements, how we can move from political parties that we have now to something very different, to something far more egalitarian.

In America when you talk about programs that aid the poor you immediately raise all sorts of prejudices and red flags. But at least we could have some broad universal programs, as in Europe, for national health care, family allowances, and other programs which would guarantee a basic income.

GOLDIN: If President Bush does not present an image of a dynamic leader when and if the economy falters, could that provoke social readjustment?

WAGNER: It's very difficult to predict. I don't think that anyone could have predicted a few years ago that you would see movements today featuring crowds waving anti-capitalist signs. It is extremely difficult to predict how quickly things may change, and great regional differences complicate the picture.

For example, Maine borders on Canada. There's a tremendous appeal to the social welfare measures put into practice by our neighbor. Polls in Maine show overwhelming numbers of people including physicians in favor of national health care.

GOLDIN: Why did Clinton betray earlier generations of Democratic social reformers on the welfare issue with such alacrity, and what accounts for the lack of protest from activists?

WAGNER: Clinton originally ran with the idea of ending welfare. People tend to forget that Clinton embraced that rhetoric in 1992 because the Democratic leadership was very clear that it wanted to disassociate itself from the old liberalism. And this was just one of the several issues on which he took a reactionary position; on his way to the White House, with respect to capital punishment, he executed a mentally-retarded man. So I think "welfare reform" was a very conscious political strategy on the part of the Democrats. And I think that many people of my generation, former activists, have reached points in their lives in which the willingness to support movements that would be radical is just not there.

I just don't think there was enough of a constituency that cared for poor people to affect Clinton. I think that strategies employed by nonprofit advocacy groups were probably not very successful in their attempts to appeal to middle and upper class people. Of course, there are people of conscience, but in this instance not a sufficient number to change the course of politics. There would have to be much more of a movement among poor and working class people to do that.

GOLDIN: More and more, foundations on the left as well as on the right see themselves as players in spin doctor advocacy productions. Large numbers of people are employed by these agencies, and symbiotic relationships exist. Bluntly put, could left and right exist without each other?

WAGNER: That's well put. Obviously individuals need to find work and individuals need to find work that they find rewarding, like being a teacher or a social worker. Looking at the development you suggest, I think that, like the whole idea of alternate philanthropy or idea of social investing, this represents a sort of contradiction of the '60s generation, the generation that defined itself as activist. The generation that found itself twenty and thirty years later as members of the middle class and in some cases the upper class. And that really did not know what to do with guilt. I suppose that that's good for collecting money. But I don't think the foundation people or many other middle class baby boomers have in mind anything seriously radical to change the system -- maybe a few, but not the vast majority.

GOLDIN: What I find disturbing, and I've worked with a fair number of people who have ties to conservative and liberal think tanks, is how much the thinking in both camps is exactly the same. The idea is, How can we stop the bastards on the other side? But this attitude leaves me and several million people in the cold. Neither left nor right have monopolies on good ideas.

WAGNER: Self-perpetuation is the name of the game. For givers, it sounds good. Let's give to children, let's give to the elderly. Much of the money raised is used for operations and perpetuation of an agency. I live in a relatively small city, Portland, Maine, in which we have something like 300 nonprofits competing with one another. It's simply ridiculous. Even if it was hospitals or 300 different institutions treating wounds or something, we should be aghast at the sheer number.

And there's an extreme self-righteousness about the situation. If one were to say, Maybe your organization should consolidate with others so that we would have twenty really good organizations instead of 300 mediocre ones, you would be hammered out of the room.

You mentioned human nature, earlier. We are all caught up proving our righteousness. I don't think that corruption in nonprofits plays a large role, although certainly that does exist. The shining light of glory is the major culprit. If there are criticisms made or different ways of looking at things, you are going to encounter extreme defensiveness because of this belief that whatever is required to be a nonprofit makes the agency and the individuals within sacrosanct and of course that's much of what I am criticizing in my book.

GOLDIN: You make a point of describing your own experiences with the poor as a means to develop a perspective on , for example, "compassionate conservatism". Could you have written this book without these experiences?

WAGNER: I do a great deal of reading and thinking about social issues. But I think that having experience is essential to understanding these issues. I did a participant observation study with homeless people in the Northeast entitled "Checkerboard Square." I have also worked with indigenous people. I think this gives one, at an emotional level, a very different perspective about life. That's hard to put into words, but evaluating how people at the bottom of society and how people at different levels of society see the world is very important to me. Also, for evaluating differences between views of the poor and views of even the most benevolent social agencies -- not to speak of a sort of disconnect between recipients and groups active on their behalf.

GOLDIN: Despite the relatively large number of reporters hired by newspapers to track charity and philanthropy and academics employed by think tanks and universities to read and write about charity and philanthropy, all we seem to read are instructions how to set up tax-shelters, the nobility of some billionaires, mountains of statistics, and discussions in unreadable English. What do you make of writing about philanthropy, today?

WAGNER: I think a few critics and a few academics do good work, but they are a small minority and very often they don't get much press. The other thing that I've noticed, and I'm sure that this is an experience many other people have had, is to get called upon by papers as an "expert" and then to have less than a sentence in a huge article that doesn't reflect your points. I don't want to say that this is always intentional, but I think that it is not entirely accidental, either.

Additionally, there is no question but that the anti-intellectualism always part of American life has deepened with our technology obsession. People get their ideas from television and the Internet. I've had the experience of people reading things that I've written and which I know they don't understand and then complementing me. And it's kind of an odd feeling. I'm not by nature a person who likes to fight with people but you go away scratching your head.

Can one write muckraking journalism and still retain a job? Hopefully there are some outlets, somewhere, but they are getting fewer and fewer.

I talk a little in my book about the cliche, "don't bite the hand that feeds you". We have a very affluent philanthropist in Maine who has bought up much of downtown Portland and has used some of that to assist the poor. And she is presented by the media as an heroine. The difficulty in this is that in talking to some of the poorer people, it is difficult for them to be critical because you are getting a tidbit and you are poor and desperate and you see this person's name everywhere. That's not the first person you criticize. Even though 90% of her activities are self- serving, if you understand what I'm saying.

I think that's the whole point of philanthropy and the nonprofit and volunteer thing. It is designed to make people, particularly at the bottom of society, forget who gets what and who profits.

Milton Goldin is President of The Milton Goldin Company, Fund Raising Counsel, and a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS). He is author of Why They Give: American Jews and Their Philanthropies and The Music Merchants.