Generosity

As we get started in the New Year, I'd like to share with you a perspective on giving that comes from two inputs during the holidays.

The first input comes from a wonderful article by New York Times art critic Holland Carter in the newspaper's art section for Friday, December 22, 2006. He was writing about the various art exhibitions available in New York museums, and prefaced his catalog with a quote from Tolstoy and a reflection on the meaning of philanthropy. He wrote:
"What's ours? 'With one hand I take thousands of rubles from the poor, and with the other I hand back a few kopecks,' wrote Tolstoy late in his life, when he was in despair about how life worked and how he, rich and famous, master of servants and serfs, had lived it. In the end he wanted nothing. He wanted to give back everything, give everything away….
"Generosity means different things to different people… For them giving may be pleasurable, but it is never optional. In a world with unfathomable disparities in fortune, generosity is simply justice."

To me this is the one of the simplest and most profound "cases for support" I have ever seen. Whether your cause is kidney disease or cancer, feeding the homeless or camp for the kids, art in the schools or the gift of a collection, indigent care or a new hospital wing, education for those less fortunate or scholarships for study abroad, the simple reason any donor would give, that is, "the case for support," ultimately comes down to the fact that "generosity is simply justice."

The second input is a reflection derived from Cotter's "disparities in fortune" theme. I have had the privilege to meet and work with many people, at home and abroad, throughout my lifetime in both the business and nonprofit worlds. My reading has augmented this experience with much richer panoply of characters from ages past and places around the globe. One thing comes crystal clear: humanity has two sides to its nature. On one side, we are capable of the basest immorality, ignorance, superstition, greed, injustice and inhumanity to our fellows. On the other side, we are equally capable of incredible kindness, creativity, justice, invention, productivity and technical advancement. Let's take a look at these two aspects of our nature.

On the one hand, if we consider that true "progress" for our race might be defined as gaining the ability to reinforce and enhance our better nature while subduing the worst, then I would suggest that we have not progressed very far in the last 10,000 years or so. We have, indeed, generated much knowledge about ourselves and our world, and have enhanced our technology and tool-making incredibly.

But the human being in the Jericho of today in not far advanced from his/her predecessor of 8,000 BC; the militants of Iraq and Iran today are only further advanced technologically from the conquerors of Persia, Babylon and Mesopotamia of biblical times, but they are just as wonton in their destruction and greed and desire for killing and revenge. We fare no better as a race whether we are in the United States or China, whether in Kabul, Nairobi or Paris when it comes to giving our better side ascendancy.

What we seem to lack, as a race, is the ability to gain some solid control over our baser nature that would allow our essential goodness and creativity to advance and become dominant. We seemingly have not been able to develop an effective mechanism of exerting and enforcing that kind of internal control and self-discipline that can become a shield against greed, avarice and envy.

For many centuries we have sought to repress and impose order on the human character from outside, by the artifice of religion. Whether we look at Christianity, Islam, Judaism or Hinduism, these religions have given us rules and regulations, myths and liturgies that are palliatives for life's unanswered questions. But they have also brought us dire threats from religion's version of mob rule, like jail, torture, death and hell-in-an-after-life if anyone didn't believe just like everyone else. Religion has only succeeded, then, in providing more stages on which our baser nature is declaimed with ever greater violence.

Many individual journeys to the contrary, as a race of human beings we have succeed, under religion's influence, only in confusing our internal spiritual development with the external practices of religious "faith" or "belief" as defined by "leaders" who themselves are principally motivated by greed, avarice and envy. It seems we still conform all too readily to the cultural, regional or family/clan greed, envy, avarice of the mob, and have not lessened the stranglehold of our baser nature so that we more naturally strive for qualities like peace and justice.

So war continues to be the ultimate way to settle disputes; greed determines when and where we invest, and in what; we harbor and seek revenge for slights and wrongs over generations; and envy moves us to accomplish great technological progress at our neighbor's/brother's loss.

Now, what about the other side? More this afternoon…