When even a sober technocrat like Mitch Daniels joins the chorus of crisis, we begin the year with a sense of foreboding. And when you look at the attempts of philanthropy to engage the existential issues that imperil humanity, unless it overperforms mightily it is hard to be optimistic about its prospects, even if all the biggest actors in philanthropy unite to push for the solutions we need. And even so, it is hard not to be a bit concerned about the scale of solutions that we need and what might go wrong in trying to put them in place.
If we don’t get big systems right, we are in trouble. The problem with systems is that they can go awry. The global markets we build to generate wealth also lead to immiseration. The coordinating power of governments to transform landscapes and facilitate the biggest endeavors can also lead to the horrific extermination of multitudes. Granted, much of philanthropy is preparing to advance the best and prevent the worst of our systems, and it is much too soon to declare defeat. Yet we must also consider, as Mitch Daniels does, that we may not be able to prevent a major crisis. What then for philanthropy?
If we do face a major social and economic crisis, there will be opportunities for more personal and intimate acts of kindness to give us hope. However partial, biased, unsystematic, and far from the levers of power and wealth, it is what we will need to restore ourselves and prepare for new possibilities.
This struck me during the holiday break as I visited what used to be the sleepy city of my youth. The public housing project across from my mother’s home in Vienna, Austria, recently placed a plaque on its façade to memorialize a prominent Jewish home that stood there before the Nazis seized the property in 1938 and drove out the Blauhorn family. Vienna is known as a pioneer in effective public housing, and I have walked past this building most years since 1978, but only just saw the modest plaque that was affixed to the exterior after the Covid pandemic. (This is not the only public improvement that has a less than happy origin story.)
The Leopold Museum in Vienna has an exhibit that displays a scrolling list of all the towering intellects and artists who fled or were killed by the Nazis. Physics, economics, architecture, psychology, music: pick your field and there was a luminary in Vienna in the early twentieth century. What is also remarkable is that they were embedded in networks of support and personal acquaintance that enabled their work, funded by wealthy families like the Blauhorns. The philanthropy supporting the energetic creativity of the period was more like patronage rather than the big bets, strategic philanthropy or the impact-intensive deliberations that characterize contemporary philanthropic discourse. At the time, systemic approaches were primarily the domain of an embattled state.
In the Sigmund Freud Museum, a display about daughter Anna Freud’s work on youth included a school she founded, which the Nazis closed. The description included the comment that the “National Socialists dismissively described the nursery as an ‘American Philanthropic Mission.’” How serious can something be when it is only supported by philanthropy? In an era enamored by the systematic application of coercion, the answer was obvious. The early twentieth century rhymes with our times, increasingly in sinister ways.
Today, we see more authoritarians devoted to pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with increased doses of coercion. As the Blauhorns saw, even impressive wealth is no match for a state that decides to push its plans, unimpeded by the rights of anyone who can be coerced. And when vast wealth can be upended, we see the fragility of the scientific, artistic, educational, and humanitarian activities that depend on the wealth of others and the tolerance of the state.
What is personal is fragile, but it is sometimes the only defense we have against contempt at scale. Think of Anne Frank and the failed attempt of the young family employee to protect Anne from capture and death. On the other hand, a recent documentary, Sevap/Mitzvah, tells the story of a Jewish family saved by a Muslim family in Sarajevo in 1941, returning the favor during the siege of Sarajevo in the early nineties. Personal ties will struggle to have systemic effects, but they can have their triumphs.
My worry is that some deeply personal issues will become less personal and more systemic and sweeping. The evolution of modernity took humanity beyond patronage networks to systems in which our actions and circumstances were depersonalized to do away with bias and special favors based on our individual connections to those with authority or privilege.
However, at its logical extreme, depersonalization can also lead to the kind of dehumanization we witnessed in the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. In the service of the collective, led by a brutal elite, all the personal and particular ties of kin and shared local experience were erased and homogenized. As messy uniqueness weakened, adversaries were no longer distinctive persons – each unique soul came to represent either one who was in good standing, or one considered depraved and dispensable. The depersonalization that leads to forms of well-regulated modern living can also lead to wholesale dehumanization.
It is nonsensical to argue for or against one or the other. We are inescapably embedded in both personal and impersonal networks. And their relationships to each other are nuanced. Consider, for example, the various patrons and friends who supported Frederick Douglass, the iconic advocate for African-American civil rights who escaped the impersonal system of slavery. Indeed, the combination of stories about his personal experiences in bondage with more formal arguments about the wretched institution itself contributed to the transformative power of his writing and speaking.
Finally, consider an ingenious board game, Train, that inspired a fictional video game called “Solution” in a recent bestseller. In the game, players compete to move railway passengers to their destination only to realize at the end that they are participating in the Holocaust. It is a brilliant illustration of what can happen when we pursue ever better performance of systems without knowing the persons involved or the ultimate purpose of helping people get to a destination. The neglect of personal connection to those who shape our world can lead to contempt for others, but also ourselves.
Personal philanthropy can be partial, unsystematic, suboptimal, inequitable, and subject to the whims of individuals and the random happenings of relationships. It can also be transformative and transcendent, and a virtue that inheres in the most exalted human experiences. Certainly, it is never worthy of contempt. Perhaps this is a sliver of hope we can carry into the troubles to come.