The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It

Chapter 1: From St. Augustine to Bill and Melinda Gates Let’s start with a game. Fill in the blanks: [Name] is [number] years old. A [heartwarming detail] with [endearing physical feature], [Name] suffers from [ailment]. Every day, [Name] struggles to [activity], and has to travel [distance] just to get [item]. Yet with just [small dollar amount], [Name] could get the [item] they need. For just [cents] per [unit of time], you could save [Name]’s life. This story is familiar because it’s the formula for many fundraising appeals. I know this formula because designing fundraising campaigns is one of the things I do for a living. The details may change from Bolivia to Uganda, from hunger to malaria, from a young child to a devoted mother, but the structure—the beats—remain the same. The formulaic charitable appeals are not about actual people, full human beings with complicated lives, possessing both strengths and weaknesses. Quite the opposite: the idea is to turn human beings into ciphers, uncomplicated representations of desperation and vulnerability. In turn, this flattened suffering gets broken down into a magic number, the minimum financial increment that can turn every potential donor into a lifesaving hero. The point of these appeals is not to share a person’s full story, or explain the many reasons why they endure poverty and disease. The point is to show the exchange rate for generosity. At first glance, it’s hard to criticize this approach. The ability to save a life is the highest ethical stakes, something anyone would want to do if given the opportunity—especially if it’s relatively easy and convenient to do so. Who cares if the fundraising formula is a predictable, or its content a bit melodramatic, if it works? What kind of galaxy-brain grinch would get upset about prose style, if in the end it convinced people to give when they otherwise wouldn’t? Spoiler: that would be me. I’m that galaxy-brain grinch. Deciding where and when to give money often seems like a utilitarian challenge: where will this money go farthest? How can each dollar achieve the maximum positive change in another person’s life? (A frequent companion: “How do I know the person asking really needs the money?”) Making these calculations reduces people to their suffering, and the minimum price of alleviating it. This approach objectifies others and prevents us from perceiving their intelligence, power, and complexity. Philanthropy translates to “love of humanity,” but what do we mean by “humanity”? Is it physical life-and-death existence, or our larger capacities for imagination, creativity, cooperation, and excellence? Ancient Greek used two terms for “life”—“zoe,” which refers to biological existence, and “bios,” which defined life more broadly, in a way we might recognize as “quality of life.” In the ancient context, the purpose of social structures was to elevate a “bare life” into a “good life,” a state of flourishing that depended on physical survival, but aimed for a quality of life far beyond sustenance, into the actual opportunities people had to excel, create, and enjoy life with others. What happened under Augustine, and has intensified in the contemporary world, is a narrowing view of what constitutes “life” to just survival. There is something quietly sinister about a definition of humanity that looks only at life-and-death stakes. Why do we sustain others? Many of the reasons reveal a view of other people as sources of benefit to us, in exchange for our donations. We give to show our sensitivity to extreme abjection and need, which makes us feel morally superior, to feel like we have the power to “make a difference,” by giving someone the food or shelter or medicine they desperately need. The more philanthropy focuses on human life—their zoe—the more likely it is to erase people’s humanity. So why do we think of philanthropy, and define humanity, in terms of desperation and survival? Why does that remain so appealing? The explanation starts with Augustine, back in the fifth century, and runs all the way to the heavyweights of contemporary philanthropy, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Saint Augustine (354-430 AD) was not just the most prolific and influential philosopher of early Christianity, he was also a theatrical dynamo—a one-man show that ran multiple times a day. Augustine made congregants feel like he was speaking directly to them, that he felt their pain, and bared his own soul in return. Augustine would “place himself in the midst of his congregation,” “react with immense sensitivity to their emotions,” and in so doing, “as the sermon progressed, to sweep them into his own way of feeling.” Audiences responded with shouting, crying, and breaking into applause. Augustine’s gifts as a speaker and performer were vital to his larger task: convincing people in the ancient world to embrace Christianity, and with it, a worldview that strongly contradicted the values of classical Greek and Roman societies. One of the major contrasts between the ancient pagan and Christian values systems was their respective rationales for charitable giving, particularly the different ways they viewed poverty and illness as the responsibility of the collective, or the individual. Ancient Greece (300 BC-300 CE) and the Roman empire (27 BC-476 CE) had a system of giving for public benefit, called “civic eugertism.” Eugertism was the private sponsorship of a city’s public spaces, gatherings, and services. Under eugertism, the well-to-do gave to benefit those with less, but not because other people were in extreme need. The ancient nobility addressed the basic needs of poor citizens through large-scale projects, presented as magnificent gifts to the whole community rather than specific mercies for the needy. When benefactors built utilities, funded libraries, or sponsored banquets, the idea was that “the poor might derive equal, or almost equal, benefit along with the rich.” The emotional register was one of glory, offering examples of excellence and generosity to all. This included building infrastructure for basic utilities like water and sewage systems. Tiberius Claudius Atticus gave sixteen million sesterces to subsidize the building of an aqueduct for Troy. Pliny’s (23-79 CE) gifts to his hometown of Como included a library, subsidies for a school, and a bequest for public bathhouses and an annual banquet. (My grandfather has joked about donating a urinal to his synagogue to be named in his honor. Imagine his excitement at learning that such a gift would follow a grand classical tradition!) When it came to basic needs like food, ancient Rome and other cities across the empire took a similarly pragmatic and systematic approach: the annona civica was a public grant for a monthly portion of bread, meat, oil, and other items, which could be claimed by the plebian citizens of Rome. Roman emperors and the urban prefects (roughly equivalent to mayors) saw the provision of food for all citizens as a responsibility of office, a way to demonstrate their fitness to rule.[v] Donating, therefore, was not about meeting urgent needs, but rather financing big projects that could elevate everyone’s quality of life. Christianity transformed poverty into a special concern, attaching a symbolic importance to poor and sick people. Christian notions of charity focused specifically on the poor, fragmenting them from the broader public. One example of this cleavage, between civic duty to care for all and religious duty to care for the poor in particular, happened in King Theoderic’s celebration of his thirtieth year of rule, in 500 CE. Theoderic’s celebration included a triumphal procession, games in the Circus, and gifts of grain and public works. In the chronicle of these events, Theoderic’s gifts are directed to “the populus Romanus and the pauperes”—meaning the people of Rome and the poor residents of the city, who now sat apart in their own category. The big difference between the Roman system and the Christian one is that, under Christianity, giving is rewarded through salvation, which is provided by God, rather than honor, which is granted by other human beings. Historian Peter Brown points out that the bishops of Rome did not replace the annona, the public dole, with a system for feeding people with regularity to replace the state apparatus. Instead, the conditions of poverty, sickness, and disability became opportunities for the rich to demonstrate their goodness—and to gain reward for themselves. The reasons for, and ways of, being generous to others matter. In classical societies, the poor were not invisible—they simply were not singled out, nor was their suffering fetishized. Rather than isolating the needs of people living with poverty, sickness, or disability for specific interventions, ancient Greece and Rome enveloped them into efforts that would have a universal benefit. This approach reflects an important assumption: that helping people survive was a basic duty, and that such assistance was the right of citizens. Christianity, on the other hand, emphasized the vulnerability of people in poverty. The enduring influence of this approach can be seen in figures like Mother Teresa, who described “the poorest of the poor” as “the means of expressing our love for God." Such comments prompted Christopher Hitchens to note how some Christian giving ethics often render “helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill [into] the raw material for demonstrations of compassion,” while “the true address … is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor.” Remember the opening “story”? The three strategies of persuasion that Augustine and his colleagues used are the template for those fundraising letter formulas: Describe the suffering of others in visceral, melodramatic detail, to provoke shame, outrage, sympathy. Remind people that giving towards this suffering will be not just good but effective, the power of their every coin. Underscore that gifts to alleviate this suffering are a great return on investment for the donor. When Augustine (and contemporaries like Pope Leo I and Saint John Chrysostom) focused on the needs of poor people, it was not to humble the rich. The aim was to titillate the sympathies of potential donors in a way that also appealed to their self-interest. Such portrayals titillated the sympathies of potential donors, and transformed that emotional provocation into self-interested analysis. The pain of poverty, illness, or disability became a perverse utility: helping others survive was a priority because it credited the soul of the donor in the afterlife. Under that new incentive, poor people represented a better bang for the richer person’s buck. Charity became a form of investment for the donor’s eventual benefit. This is where early Christianity and 21st-century mega-philanthropy overlap the most: helping poor people survive—and nothing more—becomes the means to a richer person’s ends.