[Dialogue] Bill Moyers on philanthropy

[Harry Wainwright]

Colleagues, I hope you find this helpful. Peace, Harry 
  _____  




Published on Tuesday, October 25, 2005 by TomPaine.com
<http://www.tompaine.com>  

Finding Justice In Charity 

by Bill Moyers 

Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host the PBS program "NOW
With Bill Moyers. <http://www.pbs.org/hplink/redir/now> "This piece is
adapted from a speech Moyers presented to a wealth and giving forum on Oct.
24, 2005. Moyers also serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media
and Democracy. 

I was pleased to be asked to join you today. I take hope from the presence
in one room of so many people who are committed to using their means to make
it possible for so many other people to do good things.

Some people I know love money for its own sake. Some I know love power for
its own sake. Sometimes they are the same people.

But over the years, I have found that the people of means who are the
happiest and most deeply satisfied are those who use their money to empower
others. They feel more than lucky; they feel blessed.

It's not easy giving money away. I found that out during my 13 years on the
board of the Rockefeller Foundation and over the past 14 years as president
of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation (now the Schumann Center for
Media and Democracy) where I have been working with a family who decided to
spend down their assets in their lifetime and asked my help in doing so. In
that role, I've wound up working with and advising a score of other
foundations. But I've also been on the other side of philanthropy. As a
public broadcaster, I've had to raise every penny for every production I
mount on PBS - millions of dollars over the past 30 years, much of it from
foundations. I have had a window on the world of philanthropy that enables
me to see both sides - supply and demand. I know first-hand the hazards,
limitations and frustrations of the field.

For one thing, when you make a mistake, people are loath to tell you. Unlike
investing, where the market delivers quick verdicts on mistakes, or
business, where bad decisions cannot go long undetected, the feedback loop
in philanthropy rarely turns up irrefutable evidence that you blew one. I
have long wished to talk to the great British economist Walter Bagehot, who
once wrote that "the most melancholy of human reflection, perhaps, is that
on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more
harm than good." I'd like to know where he came down on the matter.

Of course, there are people who don't see us as benevolent after all. Back
in the first Gilded Age, one aroused critic described philanthropy as "the
Nero of modern times," fiddling, so to speak, while Rome burned. And in his
Life of Johnson, Boswell quotes his companion and mentor as saying that
human benevolence is so mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive
that 'to act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings." I
often quote this one to remind my colleagues and myself that if we give away
money to be loved or even appreciated, we are longing for what can never be
purchased - unless we buy a dog.

The hardest thing about philanthropy, I believe, is the effort to reconcile
its profound inner tensions. It's a curious thing: Americans worship wealth;
just about everybody wants to be rich. But as Michael Lerner, a leading
philanthropic adviser, reminds us, people who inherit great wealth often
suffer an agony as difficult as what afflicts those who struggle with the
more common conditions of life. The angst can be particularly exquisite in
our culture, he says, because those who suffer from wealth can find almost
no sympathy outside the direct circle of family or peers. Let's face it,
this is a deeply contested activity that can even put you in a relationship
of psychic toxicity with those you want to help. I am not at all surprised
that John D. Rockefeller thought it was harder to give money away than to
earn it.

But when you get it right - when you have squared your expectations and your
reach and know as only you can know that what you have done matters - it can
be sweet.

John Wesley got it right. If you have made a passage of faith similar to
mine, you will recognize the name. In the 18th century, in Britain, with his
brother Charles, John Wesley founded the Methodist movement that gave rise
to benevolent impulses and institutions that survive to this day. In my
seminary days, one of the wisest of my own mentors, a professor of social
ethics named T.B. Maston, believed that we Baptists had a lot to learn from
our Methodist kin. So he suggested that I read John Wesley's Journal . It's
a remarkable account of a discerning man who lived almost the whole of that
tumultuous and transformative century. People were flocking from the rural
areas to the cities as agriculture gave way to industrialization. The cities
choked on crime, disease and pollution. The poor were crushed under debt and
often found their only escape in alcohol and drugs. The five percent of the
population at the top controlled nearly one third of the national income and
did what elites often do - they spent their money walling themselves off
from the lived experience of ordinary people.

Not John Wesley. The best-known evangelist of his time - the Billy Graham of
his day - was so popular the offerings poured in, making him a well-to-do
man. But Wesley put himself on a budget of 30 pounds a year and gave the
rest of it away - over the course of his lifetime, he gave away nearly all
of what he earned. "If I leave behind me ten pounds," he wrote, "you and all
mankind [can] bear witness against me, that I have lived and died a thief
and a robber." In one of his most famous sermons, he spoke on the Biblical
passage that says "the love of money is the root of all evil" - but he had
in mind "not the thing itself:"

The fault does not lie in the money, but in them that use it...In the hands
of [God's] children, it is food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty,
raiment for the naked. It gives to the traveler and the stranger where to
lay his head. By it we may supply the place of a husband to the widow, and
of a father to the fatherless. It may be a defense for the oppressed, a
means of health to the sick, of ease to them that are in pain; it may be as
eyes to the blind, as feet to the lame; yea, a lifter up from the gates of
death."

I don't think philanthropy has had a more compelling mandate than John
Wesley's. It was his inspiration to see that while charity may be good for
the soul, justice is the salvation of society. Social justice became his
great passion, the moral purpose of his calling.

Eliot Rosewater got it right. He's the multimillionaire protagonist in Kurt
Vonnegut's satiric novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before
Swine. As Vonnegut put it, "A sum of money is a leading character in this
tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading
character in a tale about bees." Read the book if you haven't, but be sure
to wrap it in plain brown paper, because in can be quite subversive, as I
discovered when I gave copies to some fellow trustees of the Rockefeller
Foundation back in the late '60s.

Eliot Rosewater is not your typical buttoned-down philanthropoid. He is the
heir to the fabulous Rosewater fortune - the 14 largest in the nation,
created, Vonnegut tells us, during the Civil War "through cowardice and
knavery." He decides to leave the life of an international playboy to go
home to his native Indiana - to the town of Rosewater, no less - to take
over the family foundation. There he undergoes a transformation, becomes a
volunteer fireman, throws open the office to all comers, and simply asks
those who show up, "How can we help you?" He even runs ads in the local
paper that say "Don't kill yourself, call the Rosewater Foundation." When
they do call, he answers the phone himself. The town fathers are alarmed, to
put it mildly, when they realize Eliot Rosewater intends to give all the
money away to poor people - many of them poor dirty people. They decide they
must stop him, and the only way they can do so is to prove him insane, which
they set out to do. I won't spoil the story for you, but I will tell it's a
witty and wise book. One reviewer said that "Kurt Vonnegut managed to write
a book about money and love without the ugly word versus between them" (and
in doing so) shows that "money and love can exist together." Although the
story does not end with the promise of a perfect world, its message - as
other readers will tell you on Marek Vit's Kurt Vonnegut Corner
<http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/rosewater.html?200519>  - is worth
hearing today: That if we can't change the world, we can at least help it,
and that while "we may not be able to undo the harm that has been done, we
can certainly love, simply because they are people, those who have been made
useless by our past stupidity and greed, our previous crimes against our
brothers. And if that seems insane, then the better the world for such
folly."

Rachel Naomi Remen got it right. You may have heard of Rachel. She's a
physician, teaches community medicine at the University of California in San
Francisco, and co-founded (with Michael Lerner) Commonweal, the center for
cancer patients in northern California. Several years ago, I featured her
work in a series for PBS called "Healing And The Mind" - about the impact of
emotions on our health. In her recent book, My Grandfather's Blessings ,
Rachel writes about how one day she came into an unexpected legacy of
$20,000 on the condition that she give it away in any way she saw best. Even
for so modest an amount of money, she found herself on a steep learning
curve, learning that "giving away money can be demanding and even lonely."
She had developed a therapist's eye for growth in people, but "had never
before noticed the places where things were trying to move forward in the
culture, groups of people or individuals whose vision, if nurtured, could
lead to a better world. She writes:

I suppose that I never saw them because I did not think I personally had the
means to be of help to them and so they had nothing to do with me. You might
never notice plants struggling to grow around you, either, until some one
hands you a full watering can. But I could see them now. They were
everywhere.

She was still trying to figure out what to do with the money when one
evening she and a friend went out to eat at a local restaurant. At the very
next table two men were dining so close she couldn't help overhearing them.
One was telling the other about a program he and some of his
Spanish-speaking colleagues had been running as volunteers, providing
support groups for poor families who had lost children to illness, accident
or violence. More than a hundred couples had been helped to preserve
marriages torn open by grief and blame and to parent their remaining
children. But now many of the city's hospitals had merged or gone out of
business or been taken over by organizations that had no interest in
supporting such a program. For lack of money, it was about to close.

Rachel says that by now she was eavesdropping shamelessly. She heard the
second fellow ask the first one - whose name was Steve - "How much do you
need to keep things going?" Steve answered sadly, "A great deal of money.
More than we could ever raise." "How much is it?" his friend asked again.
"Four thousand dollars," Steve replied. At this, Rachel Remen reached across
the few feet separating the tables, touched the man lightly on the arm, and
said: "You got it, Steve." And reaching into her purse for her checkbook,
she filled it out on the spot.

Without this admittedly modest opportunity, Rachel says, "I doubt that I
would have responded to the conversation at the next table or even heard it.
I knew [now] that I had something of value to give [and once I gave it away]
an odd thing has happened.. I still notice the growing edge of things and I
still respond to it. I give away my time, my skills, my network of friends,
my life experience. You do not need money to be a philanthropist. We all
have assets. You can befriend life with your bare hands."

This seems to me philanthropy at its most basic - to spot people at the
"growing edge of things" - people whose vision, if nurtured, could lead to a
better world - and give them the means to do more than they could do with
just their bare hands.

It's what the Schumann brothers - Robert and Ford - were doing when they
asked me to join them in 1991. We had become acquainted when their
foundation underwrote some of my work on PBS. We discovered a mutual
obsession about the state of democracy, including a belief that the fate of
our country is bound up in the quality and integrity of news and
information. Over the years, many of our grants have gone to alternative
media - to independent journalism and non-commercial public radio and
television. Commercial media had made its peace with the little lies and
fantasies that are the byproducts of the merchandising process. From that
Faustian bargain has come a steady gusher of the nonsense, violence and
trivia that today are the opiate of democracy. As the late scholar Cleanth
Brooks wrote, on every front we are being assaulted by "the bastard muses:"

*	Propaganda, which pleads, sometimes unscrupulously, for a special
cause at the expense of the total truth;
*	Sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by
and in excess of the occasion;
*	Pornography, which focuses on one powerful drive at the expense of
the total human personality.

Day and night, the media pipe these images into our culture and
consciousness, bombarding us with mass-produced and mass-consumed carnage
masquerading as amusement. We can no more escape their effects by turning
off our own television or radio than we can escape the effect of automobile
emissions in the neighborhood by leaving our own car in the garage. This
coarsening of popular culture and public discourse has created a society
where vulgarity, banality and brutality are profitable commodities for
corporations but at a great cost to democracy. The philosopher Leo Strauss
once told his students that the Greek word for vulgarity - apeirokalia -
means "the lack of experience in things beautiful." It would perhaps have
come as no surprise to Strauss, as it came as no surprise to me, to read a
few years ago that 50 million children in America are afflicted with a
sickness for which our society has no name - the writer simply called it
"intellectual poverty." Another version of "the lack of experience in things
beautiful." The educator Herbert Kohl warned us: If television does not
provide time for the consideration of people and events in depth, we may end
up training another generation of TV adults who know what kind of toilet
paper to buy, who know how to argue and humiliate others, but who are
thoroughly incapable of the social and political literacy necessary to
preserve and extend democracy. His plea fell on the deaf hears of the media
tycoons who decide so much of what we see, read and hear. But you and I can
do something about that by putting money in the hands of creative spirits -
producers, writers, journalists and filmmakers and editors who share Henry
David Thoreau's conviction that "to affect the quality of the day is the
highest of the arts."

At the Schumann Foundation, we have also helped people without means buy a
turn at the megaphone. You are no doubt familiar with the critic A. J.
Liebling's remark that freedom of the press in America is guaranteed only to
those who own one. Well, it's also true that freedom of speech is guaranteed
only if you can afford it. There's a wonderful New Yorker cartoon of the
newly crowned king who summons his courtiers to his throne and announces, "I
want only three things during my reign: Wisdom, humility, and media
exposure." It's not enough today to be wise and virtuous; wisdom and virtue
don't guarantee you a hearing. "Out of sight, out of mind is the old adage.
Out of media, out of mind is now the rule." In America today, you have to
buy your way into the public square.

Here's an example of what I mean: Some years ago, people in the Ohio Valley
of West Virginia woke up to the news that one of the largest pulp mills in
America using chlorine dioxide bleach was going to land in their front
yards. The operation would need 10,000 trees a day and would threaten three
national forests as well as the region's drinking water. The deal had
already been struck behind closed doors, the polluters and the politicians
were in cahoots, and it looked like the public would be shut out altogether.
But some outraged citizens decided to fight back. They organized the Ohio
Valley Environmental Coalition to try and stop the plant. They had all the
elements in place for a grassroots campaign: a dedicated volunteer base,
strong leadership, and sound scientific and legal research supporting their
position. But they didn't have a megaphone. Without a megaphone, the press
could ignore them and the general public would remain unaware of them. So
the Schumann Foundation provided them a grant and some counsel on how to use
it. With some of the money, they bought newspaper, radio and billboard ads
urging the public to turn out for vigils and protests. They produced a video
that was shown on local public television and then distributed to civic,
school and religious organizations. And they spent a few bucks on rallies,
including a costume and horse for "Paul Revere" to show up at the governor's
mansion - on the anniversary, by the way, of the original Paul Revere's
ride. Attendance at their rallies went from 100 to 1,000. And they won the
fight: The developer gave up and canceled plans to build the plant.

Another example: A dozen years ago, the Disney Corporation decided to build
a sprawling amusement park in northern Virginia near the site of the first
Battle of Bull Run. The fact that he intended to turn a piece of America's
hallowed ground into a circus, parking lots and traffic jams meant nothing
to the Disney CEO, Michael Eisner: "I sat through many history classes where
I read some of this [history] stuff," he said, "and I didn't learn
anything." We thought it was time he learned something about history. So
Schumann put up the money and a coalition of historians - C. Vann Woodward,
David McCullough, Shelby Foote, John Hope Franklin, Arthur Schlesinger,
Doris Kearns Goodwin - began running ads to rally the public to the cause.
One ad teased: "Mr. Eisner, maybe you didn't learn anything from history,
but that doesn't give you the right to desecrate it." As more ads followed,
Disney saw that it faced a determined and skilled opposition and folded. The
last word belonged to Vann Woodward, who said: "Sometimes a few people can
win great battles with words."

But someone had to buy the megaphone.

Our other main focus at the Schumann Foundation has been on money in
politics. It became obvious to our board that issues of great concern to
society - jobs, health, education, the environment - were all held hostage
to the power of organized economic interests that could buy the
representation they wanted in state legislatures and Congress. Many of our
grantees were citizens at the grassroots standing up to polluters, like
those folks in Ohio. But even when they had their facts down, even when they
had the support of their neighbors, even when they could claim the high
moral ground, once they went to the state legislature or Congress to codify
their success, they discovered the government had been bought right out from
under them. Voters may pull the levers in the voting booth, but behind
closed doors, monied interests are pulling the strings.

So we threw ourselves into the fight to level the playing field. We funded
investigative journalism to expose the corrupting power of money in
politics. We funded legal strategies to challenge it. And we funded public
information campaigns to mobilize against it. Polls we commissioned found
that the majority of Americans want a different system, one where private
money cannot buy public policy. The best alternative we've seen is called
"Clean Money," under which qualified candidates who agree to abide by
spending limits and refuse private donations can receive enough money from a
public fund to compete against candidates who are privately financed. Just
about every time voters have had a chance to pass "clean money" financing of
state elections, they have done so - in states as disparate as independent
Maine, liberal Massachusetts and conservative Arizona. Arizona especially
has become the most promising laboratory for opening politics to regular
people with clean money. After all, the late Barry Goldwater had warned his
native state to tame the power of money. Our republic is at stake, he said:
"Electors must believe their vote counts. Elected officials must owe their
allegiance to the people, not to their own wealth or to the wealth of
interest groups who speak only for the selfish fringes of the whole
community."

Goldwater was right: If we are to keep our democracy we have to take down
the "For Sale" sign that hangs in the corridors of power. Otherwise, we'll
be living in a country where winners take all and it won't be a healthy,
safe, or fun place to be, even if you have the coffers of King Midas.

My Schumann colleagues and I believe equitable access to opportunity is the
core of the American promise - that every citizen is meant to be politically
equal and that each of us has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of
democracy, Americans made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone
deserves a second chance, debtors - especially the relatively poor - were
protected by state law against their rich creditors. Government encouraged
Americans to own their own piece of land and even supported squatters'
rights. Equal access, long a hope, began to become reality in this country
for millions of us. Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by
the Depression and were poor all their lives, I went to good public schools.
My brother made it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first car
with a borrowed loan of $450, I drove to a state university on free public
highways and rested in public parks. Like millions of others, I was heir to
a growing public legacy that shaped America as a shared project and became
the central engine of our national experience.

Until now.

A profound transformation is occurring in America. Inequality is greater
than it's been since 1929. Forty years ago, the gap in terms of wealth
between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Now it's
more than 75-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an
issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that's not
the case. Middle-class and working people have to run harder and harder just
to stay even, and our social stratification has become alarming. Just this
week, the conservative journalist David Brooks, quoted in Time, points out
that if you come from a family earning over $96,000 a year, your odds of
getting a bachelor's degree by age 24 are one in three. If you come from a
family earning under $36,000, it's one in 17.

Time is no Marxist rag. Neither is The Economist, which is considered by
many to be the most principled and ablest defender of capitalism in the
world. Earlier this year, The Economist produced a sobering analysis of what
is happening to the old notion that any American can get to the top. A
growing body of evidence led the editors to conclude that with income
inequality reaching levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility
not increasing at anything like the same pace as inequality, "The United
States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." Let me
repeat that: "The United States risks calcifying into a European-style
class-based society." That alarm echoed a report last year by the American
Political Science Association, which found that "increasing inequalities
threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward
real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed."

Our political class seems indifferent to these warnings. Indifferent to the
fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any
other industrial nation. Indifferent to the fact that millions of workers
are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did 20 years
ago. Indifferent to the fact that while we have the most advanced medical
care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans - eight out of 10 of them in
working families - are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

There's a book I wish we could make required reading for every member of
Congress: Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail
or Succeed
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670033375/commondreams-20/ref=nosim
>  . The Pulitzer Prize winner tells us that one of the main factors in the
decline of earlier societies was the insulation of elites. Mayans on the
Yucatan Peninsula, for example, suffered as environmental degradation -
deforestation, soil erosion and poor water management - diminished food
supplies. Chronic warfare made matters worse as more and more people fought
over less and less land and resources. Although Mayan kings could see their
forests vanishing and their hills eroding, "They were able to insulate
themselves from problems afflicting the rest of society. By extracting
wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was
slowly starving." Too late, the elites realized they could not reverse the
deteriorating environment, and they became casualties of their own
privilege.

Any society, Diamond warns, contains a built-in blueprint for failure if
people at the top insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions
and from an awareness of the commonplace experiences of life. He goes on to
describe an America where elites cocoon themselves "in gated communities,
guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink
bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to
private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police
force, the municipal water supply, Society Security, and public schools." At
the end of this road is a state of nature - a war of all against all -
"where the strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."

Here is one of the great moral issues of democracy - and it's one you have
the means to address. I applaud you for wrestling with the challenge of
wealth, for coming together to explore how people of means can engage life's
realities and the perils to democracy instead of denying or running from
them. And I am honored that you asked me to join you. As I thought about
this occasion, I remembered my introductory course in anthropology taught by
Gilbert McAllister at the University of Texas half a century ago. I can see
"Dr. Mac" right now, in my mind's eye, recounting the years he had spent
among the Apaches as a young graduate student. They had taught him the
meaning of reciprocity. In the Apache tongue, he said, the word for
grandfather and the word for grandson are one and the same, indicating the
bond between the generations, linked to one another in an embrace of mutual
obligation. With that he was off, expounding on the conviction that through
the ages human beings have advanced more through collaboration than
competition. For all the chest-thumping about rugged individuals and
self-made men, he said, an ethic of cooperation inspired the social
compromise that is the basis of civilization. Civilization, after all, is
but a thin layer of civility stretched across the passions of the human
heart. "Live and let live" is not enough to sustain a civilization; we have
to move toward an active commitment of "live and help live."

My own father used to reminisce about growing up on the Red River, between
Oklahoma and Texas. He was 14 when his own father died during the flu
epidemic in 1918. Neighbors washed my grandfather's body, neighbors dug his
grave and neighbors laid him in the earth. Through the years, my father was
one of several men in our church who took turns sitting beside the corpse of
a departed friend or fellow congregant. He often drew the midnight shift and
would go directly from his vigil to his job. Shortly before his own death,
as we sat talking on the front porch, I asked him: "Why did you sit up all
night when you had to drive your truck all the next day?" He seemed
surprised by the question, as if it had never occurred to him, and then,
without hesitation, he answered: "Because it was the thing we did."

The thing we did!

There, I suggest, in the commonplace philosophy of an ordinary man, is the
antidote to the cynicism that grips our embattled and endangered democracy.

There is "the growing edge of things" that awaits your resources, and mine;
your bare hands, and mine.

Democracy is the thing we do together, if it is to be done at all. 

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