culture

The modern nonprofit model began with that baron of the Gilded Age Andrew Carnegie’s desire to change capitalism in order to “save it”—after accumulating vast amounts of personal wealth and witnessing labor strikes and violence toward “captains of industry” and their businesses. Carnegie believed inequality was an inevitable result of industrial progress but that traditional charity would not close the gap because indiscriminate handouts would only encourage lazy, drunk, and unworthy people to persist in their ways. Then, as now, the “undeserving poor” were assumed to be all people who are able-bodied yet unemployed: people who seemingly did not want to work or made poor choices that prohibit them from doing so. Rather than use his immense personal wealth to alleviate suffering, Carnegie urged his fellow millionaires to benefit the community by “[placing] within its reach the ladders on which the aspiring can rise,” inventing the notion of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps without acknowledging that some people do not even have boots.

Heralded by many as the father of modern philanthropy, Carnegie’s ideals actually further exacerbated the gap between equality of condition and equality of opportunity. The foundations begun by Carnegie and his contemporaries were to be used as vehicles for the “public good.” But that public good would no longer be defined by the public itself or won through direct action. According to Peter Dobkin Hall, it would instead be determined by elites, academic experts, professional bodies, businesses, and government entities; they studied conditions, generated and dispersed their findings to citizens with influence, and drummed up public awareness to bring social change—a model not very different from the one employed by nonprofits and their funders today.

A brief history of the nonprofit.

Friendly reminder that the actual vehicles for public good and social change are supposed to be, a) the democratically accountable government, and b) small grassroots social organisations. Not giant multinationals established as tax dodges by billionaires.

We were talking about the habit of being critical—discussing a person we both knew who was caustically critical (and often entertainingly insulting) about everything. She said she didn’t quite approve of that attitude, because it was so safe.

I was surprised by that word, and asked her what she meant, and she said—more or less—that hating or criticizing everything was safe because it meant you never have to take a stand. Liking something means you are opening yourself up; if nothing is good enough for you it’s another way of saying you’re superior to everything. Very smug, very snug. Being insulting and critical, admittedly a position of attack when face-to-face, is, psychologically, actually a position of retreat.

Mike Johnston on safety.

The real problem, the kind of thing that would make De Niro in Casino groan, “Amateur night!”, starts when people imagine that they can stop immoral behavior by policing immoral characters, phrases, or scenes in literature.

They’re looking for the wrong thing. They’re sniffing for depictions of immorality, when they should be scanning the silences, the evasions.

There’s a very naïve theory of language at work here, roughly: “if people speak nicely, they’ll act nicely” — with the fatuous corollary, “If people mention bad things, they must like bad things.”

The simplest refutation of that is two words: Victorian Britain.

Victorian Britain carried out several of the biggest genocides in human history. It was also a high point of virtuous literature.

Because they were smart about language. They didn’t rant about the evil of their victims or gloat about massacring them, at least not in their public writings. They wrote virtuous novels, virtuous poems. And left a body count which may well end up the biggest in world history.

Gary Brecher on fictional morality.

[W]e are trained to recognize the reactions of those who are not white men to white men as some sort of useful path to power. We are told, in lots of ways, that people who are not white men get to play certain kinds of cards — race and gender cards — to get ahead, whereas white men just … get ahead. White male power is so assumed as to be wholly indistinguishable from what we simply recognize as “power,” and with it, the whispered implication that those with authority have somehow earned that authority fairly and squarely, while those who challenge authority and its abuses are wily manipulators.

Rebecca Traister on power plays.