SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is a podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rod Davis, and this week it's just me, it's no interview. Um got some more lined up, but I thought I'd take the opportunity of a break in the interview recording schedule to do one of our occasional deep dive episodes. Um and this week we are looking at the question of gratitude, thanks, and recognition and what role they play within philanthropy. Um I should say up front, uh some apologies that uh I'm struck down with a fairly unpleasant cold, but because I'm so committed to the uh the cause of philanthropy podcasting, I've managed to soldier on nonetheless. Um my hope is that this will make me sound a little bit like Tom Waits uh talking about very niche philanthropy issues, um, but it may just uh make me sound more like a plague victim, so apologies if that's the case. So, in terms of what we're talking about, as I say, the what I want to talk about is the role that sort of gratitude, thanks, and recognition play when it comes to philanthropy, both sort of historically and today, and what sort of issues that raises. Um, this is something I've been thinking about for a while, um, and it's prompted, as you'll see, by a couple of uh the philanthropisms episodes that we've done so far. Um, particularly the thing that really kind of got me thinking was the conversation I had with Emma Saunders Hastings um not that long ago. We discussed there the whole question of whether or not uh it was necessary for the recipients of philanthropic gifts to show thanks or gratitude for those gifts, and whether it was sort of problematic or had uh problematic implications if they did. And Emma's take on that was essentially, um, as you can see in a book, that it is, and this is sort of part of the problem when it comes to philanthropic paternalism. And I guess, you know, I I think there are valid arguments for for that, as we'll see shortly. But I wondered whether also there are kind of questions about whether there are arguments in favour of the idea that we should show thanks or gratitude for for gifts, what that tells us about the nature of those gifts and the nature of philanthropy itself, what form the recognition and thanks takes, and whether this is something that potentially throws up different issues, and whether we can get to a balance where we recognise some of the challenges that might come with demanding or expecting uh thanks or recognition for gifts, and the sort of positive side of uh it being an important part of the human connection that's often at the heart of giving and pragmatically something that kind of gets people giving and keeps them giving. So, without further ado, let's uh let's kick off. So, the the first question, I guess, really is to look um at why it might be that some people might argue that we don't need to express gratitude for a gift. Um, I sort of take it as an obvious starting point that most people would think the natural thing to do if somebody gives you a large sum of money or volunteers time for you uh is to say thank you. And that if you don't do that, that is sort of a failure on your part um to do something that uh demand uh that politeness demands or sort of basic human decency demands. But I think particularly when we're talking about philanthropy in the sense of giving by those who have larger amounts, so sort of elite philanthropy or big money philanthropy, there's a pretty sort of long history of people arguing that actually we need to get away from the idea that uh gratitude or thanks is something that should be part of that relationship. One reason for this goes to a big question about the the nature of the relationship between charity and justice. Um so this is something that we've discussed on the podcast before, uh particularly in the episode on the philosophy of philanthropy, where you'll you'll see if you listen back to that that this is a kind of debate with a long history and you know quite a sort of complex one, but one where many uh sort of great minds and writers have chipped in over the years. Um the basic point here is that there's a question about what the nature of charity is and how that relates to justice. So, on one conception, charity is something which is voluntary, it's sort of freely given, and the appropriate response therefore is one of thanks and gratitude. But then the flip side of that is other people would argue that some of what needs to be done to address the problems in society, particularly around poverty, is more a matter of justice. And uh claims of justice are very different in that those who are on the receiving end of them have a right to them, so they can demand them, and there's no particular reason why they should express gratitude for them because they are being given those resources uh as a matter of right. And what you think the nature of this sort of basic rationale for philanthropy in particular contexts is will dictate, I think, what you think the appropriate role of um uh of gratitude is. If you think that charity is fundamentally and inherently about gifts and people voluntarily choosing to give away resources that they're under no particular compunction to do, then it seems quite natural to expect that those who receive the gifts might be grateful for it because that person's kind of gone above and beyond uh what they're what's expected of them. If, on the other hand, your argument is that actually we should understand philanthropy or philanthropic gifts at least in part as duties of justice, then there's less of a compunction, and perhaps no compunction at all, upon the recipients to be particularly grateful. They can just say, Well, yes, I'm glad that you got around to giving me something that was mine as a as a matter of right. There's a good quote from Oscar Wilde actually that kind of encapsulates this shift in thinking from his book in eighteen ninety one The Soul of Man Under Socialism. So he says we're often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They're quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannize over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board and are beginning to know it. Um so this obviously goes to the whole idea that we should be shifting from a mindset of kind of uh generosity and the expectation of large S from the wealthier way of addressing problems to one where we see there being more of a claim uh of justice that they should uh redistribute the assets that they have within society. Now, if if this is the thing that kind of gives rise to um a particular uh view that gratitude is not a particularly necessary element of philanthropy, I think this one thing we need to notice is that it's this doesn't necessarily apply to all potential examples of philanthropy. I think often the kind of archetypal example of philanthropy as a means of addressing inequality or poverty is used as the basis for the arguments, and there it seems very natural. But if, as I do, you think that there is a wider sphere of potential causes and types of organizations that could be the appropriate beneficiaries of philanthropy, um, then for some of those I'm not sure the arguments quite hold up. So for instance, you know, what about an art gallery or a museum? You know, they are presumably, unless you take a very, very hard-line view on these things, a kind of appropriate focus for philanthropic gifts of some kind. Maybe that comes after the donor has uh kind of done their duties of justice by paying tax and giving to organizations that address inequality, but then above and beyond that, they're allowed to give to things that that interest them, including potentially uh museums and art galleries. At that point, can the museum or art gallery make a claim that they don't need to be grateful because that donor should have given to them as a matter of justice? I don't think so. I'm not sure you can make so much of a claim there. Take an even more extreme example. What about something like a model railway society that's run by volunteers? If a wealthy philanthropist or you know, a moderately well-off philanthropist decides to give a reasonable amount of money to support that work out of uh their disposable income after they've again paid all their appropriate taxes and hopefully given to lots of causes that are more justice-based, can that organization sit there and say, take the money, snatch it off that donor, and say, Well, good thing you finally got round to giving us the money? I would suggest in that case, this would be almost a rude response, and that in this particular example, um, gratitude on the part of the organization that that donor has chosen out of money, which is arguably very much, you know, voluntary and what philosophers would call supererogatory, so above and beyond any kind of call of duty, has gone to them. I think they should be uh grateful for that. Um so I think we need to kind of distinguish uh between some of these different causes. So I think focusing back for a moment on those where there's a more credible claim that uh that there are sort of demands of justice and uh claims of rights on the parts of beneficiaries, because I think that's where the interesting tension is. There are some examples of this kind of playing out in practice. So one that kind of caught the headlines a little while ago was a story about one of the recipients of the uh one of the tranches of gifts from Mackenzie Scott. So again, um written about this, but McKenzie Scott, for anyone listening to this podcast who somehow doesn't know, is one of the world's biggest philanthropists uh these days. She was the uh the former wife of Jeff Bezos uh of uh Amazon Fame, and she was involved in the founding of Amazon as well. And when they got divorced, she got her fair share of the money, and as a result, is an extremely rich woman. She gives a very large amount of uh of that away uh philanthropically and does so in quite sort of interesting ways, uh, giving kind of no strings attached grants to small grassroots organizations. One of the organizations that she gave to was the Freedof Fund um for young feminists, and they put out a fascinating statement in the form of a blog, which I'll link to in the show notes, when they received this gift, essentially saying just about, you know, we're grateful for this money from uh from Mackenzie Scott, but we also continue to question, you know, the structural inequalities that have made it possible for her to be that wealthy in the first place, and you know, the business practices of Amazon, which is a large uh kind of uh proportion of the source of her wealth. So it was, you know, they were almost having their cake and eating it, I guess, in the sense of they were acknowledging the gift and not being you know outright there, but they were very uh outright rude. But they were also sort of saying, you know, we are almost um have a right to this as a matter of justice because you have profited from structural inequality and uh, in our view, kind of unacceptable modes of wealth creation. So it's only right and proper that you should give us uh that money. I think this also kind of ties into a a wider history of the fact that the relationship between beneficiary, and I do use that term advisedly here, I know it's a term that a lot of people don't like these days, but I'm using it pr precisely because it is the term that was used historically and it implies kind of relationships of deference on the part of the recipient and paternalism on the part of the donor. But but that relationship has often been one that sort of causes resent. So in uh George Orwell, I think in um Down and Out in Paris and London, he there's a bit in that where he says, a man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor. It's a fixed characteristic of human nature, and when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it. So sort of saying that actually, you know, that relationship of charity is is not one of true gratitude, it's one of sort of grudging acceptance at best. And as soon as those recipients have a chance to uh kind of address their needs in other ways, they will take it, but possibly in the form of kind of class revolution, one would imagine. Another aspect of this um uh argument that uh that we shouldn't necessarily embrace the idea of of uh showing gratitude for gift, which builds on this a little bit, is is a sense that gratitude uh has actively been an important part of using philanthropy as a tool of sort of social control or oppression. So again, this is an idea with a long history, essentially kind of saying that at best philanthropy can be um a tool or can be something where it is sort of taken as read on the part of uh those those on the giving side that it will result in kind of gratitude and therefore deference and less likelihood of social uprising. So, you know, Frank Prochaska says, for instance, in uh one of his books on the history of philanthropy, the ruling classes largely took it for granted that deference would flow from their philanthropy. But in times of particular social tension, most notably during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, they openly expressed a desire to subordinate the lower classes through charitable agencies, especially schools and visiting societies. So he's sort of saying there's a shift from a kind of unconscious expectation that through giving gifts to the poor they will be grateful and that that therefore will kind of calm their desire to repel to a more overt desire to use philanthropy as a means of uh kind of suppressing dissent. And this is an idea that that a number of people have kind of looked at in the um uh the context of of gratitude. And I think this comes to an important point about gratitude, where gratitude as a part of philanthropy is often seen most problematic. It's where it's sort of accompanied by an expectation on the part of the person giving. So it's not, in a sense, kind of thanks freely given, um, it's sort of you know an unspoken part of the deal of the within the gift relationship. Um an interesting example of of this is um in a paper or an article that Jane Adams, a social reformer and um Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote called The Modern Lear, which is a fascinating thing actually, and I I came I first became aware of it after reading Emma Saunders Hastings' book. Um but it's a paper where she looks at the story of George Pullman, who ran the Pullman Company and was uh a major philanthropist, and how that relates in her view to the story of King Lear, and she says in that, it's easy to discover striking points of similarity in the tragedies of the royal father and the philanthropic president of the Pullman Company. The like quality of ingratitude they both suffered is at once apparent. It may be said that the ingratitude which Lear received was poignant and bitter to him, in proportion as he recalled the extraordinary benefits he'd heaped upon his daughters, and that he found his fate harder to bear because he had so far exceeded the measure of a father's duty, as he himself says. What then would be the bitterness of a man who had heaped extraordinary benefits upon those to whom he had no duty recognised by common consent, who had not only exceeded the righteousness of the employer, but who had worked out original and striking methods for lavishing goodness and generosity. More than that, the president had been almost persecuted for this goodness by the more utilitarian members of his company, and had at one time imperiled his business reputation for the sake of the benefactions to his town, and he had thus reached the height of sacrifice for it. So he's sort of saying actually, you know, Pullman was in many ways a good philanthropist. He sort of went above and beyond to be a good employer and to do things for his employees, albeit in a slightly paternalistic way. But as a result, over time, the ri the response and the reaction he got from his employees and the recipients of his philanthropy, which was in his view lacking in gratitude, sort of poisoned him towards his philanthropy and hardened his his views of it over time. Um so I think that that question of expectation uh can be problematic, but also the lack of gratitude, um, if it, you know, if gratitude is not expected at the outset, but then also is not forthcoming, over time that can potentially become something negative because the donor sort of doesn't necessarily start out thinking I demand thanks and recognition for this. But if they if they get none, and above and beyond that, as as uh Adam says there, not only no gratitude or recognition, but sort of active criticism, then understandably the natural human reaction to that is to to start to feel uh less well inclined towards that that giving relationship. And this idea of gratitude and charity uh being related to the idea of sort of um uh social control uh is um not one that's kind of confined to uh the thinking of the past either. It's something I think we still see very much in thinking about uh philanthropy and charity today. Um, and I think perhaps you know the greatest text that we can draw on around this is the the song Charity by uh the British rock band Skunker Nancy, who I um used to love when I was a teenager, and in fact, charity I think is the first song that I ever played in a band on the guitar. But in that, that song is essentially about exactly this problem. And the the end of one verse goes, Why do I sense benevolence? Uh you stand tall at my great expense, thick words of gratitude, what a price to pay. Stuck in my throat I sell every word I say, and then the the chorus runs, I don't want your charity twisting me round, I don't want your charity keeping me down. Now, as ever, listening to people read out the the lyrics to songs is absolutely excruciating, uh, and you'd be better off going off and listening to that song. Um, but it you know, that is uh basically the kind of the exact sentiment of the song is um that the relationship of the recipient to the donor within a kind of gift-giving relationship, the expectation of gratitude flowing from the one to the other is something that kind of implies uh an unequal relationship and a means of of control. And then finally on this question, I guess uh another reason that you might think that um that it's gratitude is not necessary or or helpful within the uh the kind of philanthropic relationship, is that you might feel that the problem is it's always seen as something that goes only in the one direction, from the recipient to the donor or the funder, and that actually it might be okay to have gratitude as part of uh of the philanthropic um relationship, but it's some it's gratitude that has to flow both ways. Um and there's an interesting piece uh on this by Pablo Eisenberg, who uh passed away very recently, actually, um sadly. And uh he was a foundation executive and a sort of philanthropy reformer who you know wrote many interesting things and was a kind of constant critic as well as a practitioner within philanthropy in the the latter part of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century. And he wrote a piece called, let's have a look, it's called Penetrating the Mystique of Philanthropy, relations between fundraisers and grantmakers. And he's talking here more about foundations and institutionalized philanthropy than straightforward individual donors, but I think the point sort of still holds. Um he says um these perceptions and experiences have combined to create a picture of philanthropy that is deadly in its impact on so many of our organizations. It's a portrait of an elite group of givers to whom respect and obedience must be given by a host of petitioners asking for philanthropic handouts. It is like the worshippers in ancient Greece pleading with the Delphic Oracle for good fortune. We must remember that donors need us as much as we need them if they're giving us to be of high caliber. Many of us are more experienced and skilled in our fields than our colleagues in philanthropy. Many have the kind of learning experiences in poor communities that most donors will never have. Given that many corporate and foundation people want to do a good job, they often view productive relationships with donees as an important part of their work. By assuming we're equals, we can be treated as equals. If we can have solid working relationships with local politicians, congressmen, union officials, and non-profit colleagues, we can enjoy similar contact with philanthropoids. So it's interesting there he uses words like respect and obedience, and this is sort of at one step removed, as I say, it's talking about the relationship between grassroots organizations and people working in philanthropic foundations rather than necessarily the donors. But I think a similar point holds true, which is that often that relationship is seen as one in which organizations and their fundraisers are sort of scrabbling around to try and convince unwilling donors to hand them over money and that they should there be be sort of very grateful when they manage to do that and to get some some coins rained down upon them. But you can flip that on its head and say, well, if these people, these foundations or these individual donors are genuinely interested in pursuing these different types of uh social uh issues that they they say they're interested in pursuing, they need a way to do that. And they they cannot do that without the the recipients of their philanthropic pounds and dollars, and you know, with the organizations that do that work. So actually it should be a partnership of equals. Uh and maybe that's sort of slightly utopian, but um you know, we're we're all about utopianism on this podcast.

SPEAKER_04 21:52

Yet today is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

Okay, let's maybe have a little think now, having kind of put the the negative case for why you might not want to see gratitude as a necessary or a desirable part of Flans beef for why you might think that actually saying thank you or being grateful is actually an important part of the relationship. Um well one I guess is just a pragmatic argument. Even if you think there are problematic expectations of gratitude or you know issues around power dynamics and paternalism, if what's needed to ensure philanthropic support is to show some gratitude or thanks, then you know, is it a price worth paying? I'm not necessarily saying that it is, but I can understand that in the minds of resource-stretched organizations, that is the sort of calculation that that they're having to make sometimes. But even if you step back from being quite so cynical and don't assume that there's any kind of problematic ulterior motive or unintentional paternalism, you know, there's a pragmatic argument that we're all human beings, and when it comes to giving, you know, we might do that uh or start doing it for purely altruistic reasons. But the reality is the thing I think that keeps people giving is a sense of reward of some kind. And yes, that might be numbers on a on a spreadsheet uh for some people, it might be kind of inspiring stories about the impact that their work has had on a particular social issue or a particular community, but also probably just another human being saying thank you is probably not unwelcome. Whether you are you know an everyday donor like me or whether you are a billionaire philanthropist, you you probably still want to hear somebody say that, even if it's not done in the in the sense of sort of demanding it or expecting it. I think this goes to an interesting debate that's currently very much live in the world of fundraising, which is around the difference between what gets called donor-centric approaches to fundraising and community-centric approaches to fundraising. So donor-centric approaches to fundraising are those that you would probably think of more traditionally, where it's kind of let's think about what the donor wants, what's gonna make them give what they want to achieve with their money, and let's you know, kind of put all the focus on uh meeting and servicing their needs so that they give and then feel happy about the gift afterwards. And obviously, you know, an important part of that I think would be kind of uh thanks and recognition. Then the sort of community-centric idea of it is no, let's put our focus the other way on what is it that these communities actually need and how do we get resources to them, and you know, we don't necessarily need to take into account what the donor thinks or wants, and they don't necessarily need to get thanks or recognition for it. Now, as ever, you know, with all of these things, I think this is an important debate. Um, you'll be unsurprised to hear that I come down somewhere in the middle. Uh, I think there's an important challenge uh to all of us to kind of focus on the needs of communities as the kind of you know fundamental baseline for what we're trying to do in philanthropy. But I I do think that when you go as far as saying you don't need to pay any mind whatsoever to what donors want or thing, um I think first of all that's pragmatically quite difficult because I think it's quite hard. Some organizations might be able to pull that off to be entirely dismissive of donors or actively rude to them and yet still get people to give, but most won't. And I think also, you know, as as we've been saying so far, and we'll go on to say, I think it's potentially based on a sort of mischaracterisation of philanthropy, based on on a kind of stereotype of paternalism on the part of the donor who kind of comes in with an expectation that that everybody should do what they want and should be kind of grateful for their largesse. And maybe there almost certainly are donors who are like that. In fact, there definitely are, but there are also plenty who aren't and sort of approach these problems with humility and genuinely want to work with with you know the organizations they're funding and the communities that they're trying to help, whether those are donors with large amounts to give or donors with much more modest amounts. And so I think characterising their motives and their approaches um in the same way as as sort of problematic and and questioning whether or not it's appropriate to give them any recognition or thanks seems to me, you know, not only pragmatically not that helpful, but I but I think sort of not that they're necessarily right at a more fundamental theoretical level. And I'll I'll come on in a little bit to offering some thoughts on on why that is. I think you know there's also an interesting question about, you know, if if we get away from the idea that that we're talking about problematic examples where giving is definitely being used as a form of social control, and you know, where we recognize that there is a danger of sort of even unintended consequences of it entrenching and and uh kind of uh continuing problematic power dynamics, is there an argument that actually we should still think about saying thank you as recipient organizations on a voluntary basis, not because it's expected or demanded of us, you know, even if aren't those power differentials uh and asymmetries are there? I mean, one thing that makes me think that something we should take seriously is unless you take a very, very hard-line view that you should never say thank you, you know, to any donor of any kind. It strikes me that if you start from the point of, well, would you say thank you to somebody who had, you know, a an old lady who wanted to give you five pounds a month because she really cared about the cause that you you know uh are working on, it would seem to me personally quite natural to say yes, that seems appropriate uh to thank her for choosing your organization and uh to give her that recognition. But then if you kind of extrapolate from that to the the case of you know a major donor uh giving much larger amounts of money, even if we don't have you know differing expectations that that person should should get more thanks or more recognition, or we find that idea uncomfortable, do we do we actually think that they should get less recognition? Which which seems in some ways to be the kind of um the conclusion that is drawn from some of these arguments, that if if all of the problems are to do with issues of power differentials and expectations of of thanks and gratitude when we're talking about uh big money donors uh giving um to recipient organizations or to to individuals, and you know, and that we think therefore questioning the the appropriateness of gratitude in in that context is the right thing to do. How does that relate to to the fact that we're comfortable with the idea that gratitude and thanks to to more modest everyday donors is okay? It seems odd that there would be almost have to come a point where you say to somebody, sorry, you're giving too much, we need to stop being grateful for it. And I don't know, maybe in some ways that's a sort of facetious way of uh characterising this argument, but it that as a thought experiment, that does kind of bring home to me that there's something inherently quite odd in there. I just want to take a brief look uh as well at the you know, an argument from a sort of historical anthropological point of view here, um, which is essentially to say that we might think that that gratitude or uh some element of thanks within the relationship of giving is appropriate just because that's always been the case. I mean, and I know it's not always a very good argument to say, well, we've always done something, therefore we should continue to do it, because you can pick moments in time when that would apply to things like slavery and segregation. But but I you know in this case I think it is worth looking at the idea that the these questions have been around for for so long, I almost sort of suggest there is something inherent within the very idea of gift giving, uh, and that you know we aren't very much not grappling with these for the first time. Um so I mean if you look at it from a sort of anthropological uh point of view, if you look at the work of Marcel Maus, for instance, who's an anthropologist and sociologist who did a seminal book on giving, he looks um at sort of gift-giving traditions within various different um, I suppose, primitive societies. I don't know whether that's the sort of terminology one would use these days, but but he he looks very much at the the idea that within lots of gift-giving traditions there are notions of embedded reciprocity. So gift giving is very much about relationships between the donor and the recipient that are bound up with kind of expectations that if you give a gift, the person receiving it then owes you an obligation of some kind and that they will then return that that gift in future, and it sort of binds people together. And as an interesting side note, this is reflected in the the etymology as well. Um, there's a really interesting paper by uh a linguist, professor, professor of linguistics, but called Emile uh Benevist from the 1960s called Giving and Taking in Indo-European Society, which looks at uh it's pretty dense, I have to say. I'll put a link to it in the show notes if if you want to dig into that kind of thing. But he's looking at the development of various words associated with concepts of uh of giving and charity, right back to the original sort of proto-Indo-European language that is the root of English and many other kind of languages around the world today. Um and the interesting thing there is when you look at w words around giving giving and donating and the roots of those words, the actual root words in the Indo-European ancestor language, they've given rise to modern words that that almost you know almost universally connote the bestowal of gifts. But actually, they at the time um were just as equally about the receipt of gifts as well. Um so that kind of notion of reciprocity was very much in there. And actually, there are a few examples of languages that have retained some of that that meaning. I mean, one that no longer is around now, but but where this um this meaning was very clear was the Hittite language. Uh, and in the modern context, there aren't many, but Gaelic, I believe, is one where some of the root the words that have come from those original stems around the word donate actually are used to denote uh the the receipt of gifts, not just giving of gifts. I think an interesting thing about these ideas of giving and reciprocity is that reciprocity, when we talk about it sometimes is almost seen as problematic in the context of charity or philanthropy. It's kind of, you know, it it implies or well outright says that you're expecting something back in return for your gift. And this goes against the the notions of pure altruism that we're often sort of presented with as the the most honourable uh motivation for philanthropy. But actually, in some in some ways, when you read Mouse and other anthropological um accounts, it seems better in the sense that reciprocity is overt, you know, the expectation of return is very clear. Everybody kind of knows what's expected of them. They you turn up at somebody else's uh village, you give them a gift, they know what that means, you know what that means. The next time they turn up at your village, they give you a gift, and and you know, these kind of traditions are are kind of uh maintained. The problem, in a way, with gift giving in the the modern charity philanthropy context is that often there are expectations on both sides, but they're they're tacit or they're very much not clear and they're unspoken. Um and I guess that kind of gets to to the heart of some of the the criticisms that that we've already looked at. And I guess the other thing in the kind of charity philanthropy context is maybe we're the fundamental difference from some of the forms of um reciprocal gift giving that we see in in the work of people like Mouse is that that is probably closer to what we see today in traditions of things like mutual aid, where it is people of um the same levels of sort of wealth and resources giving gifts to each other. So the expectation that the other person is able to kind of reply in kind is a perfectly reasonable one. The the difficulty, I guess, in terms of philanthropy and charity is often we're talking about gifts where it's clear that the recipient would not be able to reciprocate, and so the gift is given with no expectation of return. Now, in many ways, that's that's you know the most admirable thing about the gift-giving relationship is that it is done without that expectation of return. But as um you know, as Maus says, the the unreciprocated gift still makes the person who's accepted it inferior, particularly when it's been accepted with no thought of returning it. So he says, we are still in the field of Germanic morality when we recall a curious essay by Emerson entitled Gifts. Charity is still wounding for him who has accepted it. So you know, he's almost quite down on the idea of charity, actually, when when uh Maus is uh is talking uh within his work. And I and I guess that's brings us to one of the important questions is does the acceptance of a gift when you know that you can't return it, is that something that then brings in the expectation that you should show gratitude for it? And is that then tied up with a kind of acceptance of that unequal relationship and and some sort of deferential relationship between you and the gift giver? And I think that gets to the heart of quite a lot of um why people find this problematic. And from a historical point of view, um, you know, this is something that kind of got institutionalized uh as well. The idea, I think the model that we find most uncomfortable is that there's a sort of powerful donor who is kind of demanding that their recipients uh stand there and give them deference and and gratitude, and and that definitely did happen. So um in a book uh called The Culture of Giving by Alana Krasman Ben Amos, um she notes, you know, some donors also stipulated that beneficiaries must step out and announce their gratitude before receiving their pensions or doles. Under the 1612 bequest of Robert Dow, Merchant Taylor in St. Botolf without Allgate, the beneficiaries were instructed to kneel down, recite the Lord's Prayer, and say, God reward all good benefactors, and bless the worshipful company of merchant tailors. So, you know, that's very much the sort of stereotype that we're we're working with here.

SPEAKER_03 36:56

At Meeting of Industrial Leaders in Washington, here's Julius Rosenwald. Most people are of the opinion that because a man has made a fortune, that his opinions on any subject are value. Don't be fooled. I believe a man is rich, he is necessarily right. There is ample proof of the painful.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

So where does that get us to, I suppose? Um, you know, to me the interesting question is there are obviously sort of problematic elements of this whole question where gratitude is seen as something that's accompanied by an expectation, a problematic expectation on the part of the donor, um, and is something that is kind of a reflection of unequal power dynamics and a tool that is used to kind of maintain those unequal power dynamics and to kind of uh entrench the status quo. But are there, you know, is there a form of gratitude or are there forms of gratitude that that bypass some of those challenges and are less problematic? And I guess to me, the interesting question is, you know, do you have to solve all of those problems to do with power dynamics first? So you actually make everybody more equal and get them on a more even footing? Um, and and only at that point, when essentially we're talking about something that's more like mutual aid than it is about charity or philanthropy, is it okay and not problematic to talk about being grateful? Um so you know it's okay if I give something, a gift to my neighbour, and then if you know they they say thank you for it, and because I know that uh I, you know, they could do likewise and I could say thank you for it. Whereas if a wealthy person comes along and and offers to give me large amounts of money that I could never reciprocate, if I then say thank you, that's a sort of problematic acceptance of this this whole situation. But actually, you know, are there ways in which you can have gratitude in the context where there are still unequal relationships, but you can do so without there being problematic expectations on the part of the donor, and there aren't kind of awkward connotations of deference on the part of um the recipient. And in some ways, you know, this is what I I guess what Pablo Eisenberg was talking about, and what I I kind of share his optimism about is actually if you can get a more kind of everybody on a more equal footing thinking about you know those who are the donors or those with the assets and those who would sort of traditionally been seen as the as the recipients of those assets, and think about what broke both sides bring to the party, that are the both of which are necessary. You know, the one side has has the resources to put towards uh addressing these issues, and the other side has the kind of skills and knowledge required uh in order to do that, and see that as a partnership of equals, then maybe it's appropriate within that context for both sides to be grateful for what the other brings. Um, and you know, that doesn't necessarily uh bring all of those kind of problematic uh consequences along with it. Maybe that's a bit overly optimistic, but uh that's where I think I've settled on this. Um, okay, in the the next section, I just want to talk about one particular kind of aspect of saying thanks, uh, which is around recognition and commemoration. So I think that kind of throws up some particularly interesting questions. Okay, so yeah, in this section, I just want to think a little bit about the whole question of saying thanks to donors uh who may no longer be around necessarily, in the form of recognition and commemoration of the the sort of statues, plaques, nameplates, that kinds of things. So I think you know this is something that has a very long history and is something that's still causing a lot of debate now. And in many ways, this is the the kind of sharp end of the of this whole debate about about gratitude and thanks, because primarily it sort of focuses mostly on elite donors, but also you know, you're it's a very concrete example of what saying thanks means and one where it does seem to be sort of particularly uh embodying some of those issues around kind of you know deference uh and and that sort of thing and expectation. I'll give a few examples of how this has played out through history, but the important questions when we're thinking about you know commemoration and recognition and examples of it are what who is doing the commemoration and the recognizing, who has kind of put up the statue or commissioned the the nameplate? You know, is it the donor themselves? Well, that's that's certainly one thing. Uh is it their family? Maybe that feels like it, you know, the motivations uh and the issues are slightly different. Is it the recipient organization and and was that done with the donor's kind of prior knowledge or by their request? You know, is it the church? Historically, that often was the case, or is it some sort of wider element in society as a whole? And I think with each of those it also raises the question of why are they choosing to commemorate this particular donor? I think you know the the most basic reason, um the sort of naive assumption is it's just genuine thanks. You know, that donor has kind of done something for them and they want to say thank you, and they think that uh putting up a statue of them or naming a building after them is the best way of doing that. You know, it might be that it's more about the kind of maintenance of hierarchy. So, you know, this very much was uh something that that was done, which is kind of to remind uh everyone uh within society who those at the top are and what the sort of strata are within society to maintain that that structure. Or it might actually be about kind of setting an example to others who are on a par. So it has a pretty rich history of sermons and statues and nameplates of donors being used as a way of trying to get other people to give money. Um, I mean, often this was by the church uh in order to get more giving to the church, um, but also latterly, you know, kind of more broadly within society to try and encourage wealthy people to be um philanthropic. So I mean if you look, you know, way back in kind of classical civilization, they loved putting up statues, and often that was very much tied into uh kind of um the social status of donors. Um now, I don't know whether we've covered this before on the podcast, but you know, without getting into the weeds too much, the kind of Greco-Roman um notions of philanthropy are quite different from those we're often talking about that come more from a Judeo-Christian um tradition. They're more about uh kind of um civic responsibility rather than kind of concern for the poor or anything like that. So they tend to be gifts, less gifts to individuals than they are gifts to um the public good. But but as a result, you know, the statues tend to get not put up by recipients but by uh the you know the the the polis as a whole. But you know, actually, this the the whole place was kind of rife with these. Things to the point where it became a bit of a problem. So in a book on charity and social aid in ancient Greece and Rome by A. R. Hans, he notes that the number of honorary statues and decrees eventually became so large there arose for both the Greeks and the Romans the temptation to reuse old material by, for example, replacing the head of an old statue with another and erasing the original name in the inscription and substituting a new one. Hence we find Cicero writing as a provincial governor of Cilicia that he is utterly tired of falsas inscriptiones statuarium alienarum, the lying inscriptions which really belong to somebody else's statue. So you know they had so many commemorations of donors that they were, you know, after an appropriate amount of time, lopping the heads off them and putting the heads of other donors on there. So you know that's how they were dealing with this thing. And actually this kind of desire to stick up statues all over the place is something you see much later in um, for instance, Renaissance Italy. Um there's a book by uh Sandra Carvalho on um on donors in Renaissance Italy, um, and she uh she notes in that that busts and statues soon became a uh usual means of celebrating the most prominent benefactors. The hospedare de Carata, as also the hospital of San Giovanni, transformed itself into a gallery of urban prestige. Busts and memorial tablets continued to accumulate until well into the nineteenth century, gradually invading the corridors, refectories, dormitories, and even courtyards of the two hospitals. In the end, this form of homage became a kind of cliche and so was devalued, but there's little doubt that for many decades after the introduction of the practice it made a strong impression, which encouraged others to compete to ensure a place in this gallery of faces and family coats of arms. So, you know, again, tied in with notions of social status and the canny fundraisers at this uh medieval, late medieval hospital, realizing that by putting up statues of wealthy benefactors they could convince those who didn't have their statue up yet to want to give more money. And if you look at England in the 15th and 16th century, sort of post-Reformation, there's a lot of focus there on the commemoration of donors. This was a really sort of important thing. So there are examples like um a great one of Sir Francis Walsingham, who was the um the spymaster to Queen Elizabeth I, but in WK Jordan's book on philanthropy in England 1480 to 1660, so he uh he notes there that uh there's a poem in the epitaph to Francis Walsingham which says, Farewell Sir Francis Walsingham, that usury sword didst hate, that still didst good to rich and poor that came unto thy gate. Farewell the comfort of the poor that them that to them arms did give, farewell the stay to soldiers good while he on earth did live, and this goes on very much in this vein. And you know, this was an important part of recognising the good deeds that somebody like Walsingham had done during his lifetime. It was also an important means of exhorting other people of similar stature to to make sure that they gave as well and and did as many good deeds. Um it was also very much tied up with the desire of the Protestant Church and sort of radical Protestant preachers of the time to denigrate the Catholic Church, and and one of the big battlegrounds here was around um philanthropy and charity. So they often had sermons kind of contrasting their what they saw as their sort of um rational, manly, um earthly philanthropy of of Protestantism with what you know they characterized as the kind of superstitious philanthropy of of the Catholic Church in the medieval period, which is caricatured as being very sort of self-regarding and all about uh people trying to kind of cleanse their earthly sins so they could buy their way into heaven. And this this kind of developed uh and became something that wasn't uh just within uh the realm of very, very rich donors as well. As Ben Amos again notices, um, you know, actually over time uh she says this narrative element recording the charitable deeds of the deceased came to command centre stage, not only in memorials erected in commemoration of wealthy benefacters amongst the gentry and urban citizens, but also in the more modest monuments and inscribed tombs that gradually filled the aisles and chancels of churches around the country. The late medieval period witnessed the appearance of smaller monuments in the form of brass plaques with engraved kneeling figures or a written text, commemorating lesser gentry and middling groups, including merchants, lawyers, and clergymen. Um so you know it actually becomes something that catches on as often these things did when the very wealthy did it, but actually it became much more of a kind of social norm to uh commemorate uh and recognize the the charitable deeds of people at more modest levels. Uh, and again, there's a certain amount, I think, of kind of keeping up with the Joneses in there. Um but there are some specific examples, two specific examples actually, of recognition that I just wanted to touch upon, because I think they're kind of interesting and raise some of the questions about um commemoration and statutory that we need to be asking. So one uh is the example of John Howard. So John Howard um was a prison reformer in the uh late 18th century, um, and he was the first person really in the sort of be called a philanthropist in the modern sense. And he's a really interesting figure, quite a problematic figure in some ways as well. But one of his particular things was that he had a sort of pathological aversion to commemoration, and this became an issue when a group of readers of uh the Gentleman magazine um decided to sort of collect funds to put up a statue to Howard. Howard, when he found out about this idea, was absolutely fuming, like he really, really didn't want this thing. Uh to give you an idea of the extent to which Howard didn't uh was not up for being commemorated, there's a really great little point from a paper about Howard which says Howard's probable unwillingness to consent to a statue was compounded by the fact that there was no likeness of him that a sculptor could work from. Howard always resolutely refused to allow his portrait to be painted. There is no picture, he wrote, there is no bust, and I shall never sit for any. He'd adopted a method of putting off those who might try to sneak a view of him. Standing outside a print shop one day, he noticed that someone was trying to draw him. He immediately pretended to find the print he was looking at uproariously funny and contorted his face in laughter in such a way that no likeness could be taken. I just love this idea that it's essentially a kind of slow moving eighteenth century version of a paparazzi, and that in order to make sure that he couldn't get a good picture, Howard just pulls a really funny face. Anyway, that's just an aside. Um but the interesting thing about the story with Howard and the statue is it's very clear that it's it's more about the other people wanting to fund the statue, or at least as much about that as it is about Howard himself. So it says in the same paper it says raising money for a statue was recognition not only of Howard's virtues, but also, and perhaps equally importantly, of those of the subscribers. As a subscriber puts it, I never remember an occasion which uh so much inspired me with a sensation of doing honour to myself. So I think the key point here, just skirting over that story very quickly, is that we do need to think about who it is that are you know kind of commemorating these things and you know whether it is uh actually more about recognition for them than it is for the philanthropist. And then another, you know, much more controversial example um of a statue of a philanthropist who's very much been in the news in recent years, uh, is that of Edward Colston. And again, I think this is a really interesting story just to look at in terms of unpicking some of those questions about why this commemoration was that was being done and what purposes did it serve. I think it's easy to assume from the way it's sometimes presented that the whole story of the statue of Edward Colston is about, you know, one where it's been erected by a sort of grateful populace of Bristol immediately after the death of this beloved figure who's who's sort of lauded for their benevolence. But that's very, very much not the case. I mean, for a start, the statue wasn't put up until more than 170 years after Colston died. But it's also not that clear that everyone really viewed what he was doing that positively at the time. I mean, it's not a contemporary account, but David Owens, one of the sort of leading uh uh historians of English philanthropy, his assessment of Colston is pretty damning. He sort of said he said Colston's charitable activities, in which are mingled the strains of civic pride and politico-religious emanations of the of violent sort, were lacking in the kind of human sympathy that we associate with a genuinely philanthropic outlook. David Owen's mostly nice about uh everyone in his book, so it's he obviously took took against Colston quite badly. The story kind of carries on after Colston's death in that he did give a lot of money to different societies founded in his name during his lifetime. Some of those continued after his death, um, and they sort of over time became increasingly, some of them became increasingly associated with with Whiggish politics, and some increasingly became associated with liberal politics. So there was a really kind of uh unhealthy kind of political division element, to the extent that the The Times newspaper in 1878 noted um it says the Colston anniversary at Bristol is among the oddest developments of British institutions. It's held in commemoration of the founder of some valuable charities in that city, and it doubtless serves to keep alive the memory of a well meant example, but it would seem that Bristol charity could be only clothed in political form. The inhabitants of Bristol were political first and charitable afterwards, and Tories and Whigs could not even meet each other at dinner in memory of a pious founder. So this kind of gives you a sense of where things are going. And over time the the Colston mythos became very important to these societies because it allowed them to kind of craft a narrative using his image that suited their own purposes. So there's a great PhD thesis on this by Spencer Jordan, all about kind of Colston and the Bristol civic elite. And he says in that for many of the city's bourgeoisie, this aspect of the Colston myth was a principal characteristic. The conjunction of Colston as a golden past and a merchant prince was used to legitimate the new vanguard of business leaders, appearing with the decline of the city's mercantile trade by mid-century. The parades, dinners, and collections allowed the city's political and economic elite to pose as the inheritors of Colston's mantle, who would sustain Bristol's economic fortune and shower equivalent marges on the city's poor and needy. And so the campaign for the actual statue was led by one of the societies that had sort of sprung up bearing the Colston name originally. It became known as the Anchor Society, led by a man called James Arasmith, and the other big society was called the Dolphin Society. But their fundraising efforts were far from successful. So one article on this note it says the funding drive was a struggle from the very beginning. Despite issuing letters asking for donations from the combined membership of 1,550 of the four Colston societies, the first subscription list announced in April 1894 raised only £201, less than a quarter of the total amount required. A second round of subscriptions in June doubled this to £407, still well short of the £1,000 reply required. It says it was noted that the members of the Colston societies were not too eager in the matter. So at this point the committee issued a public statement inviting citizens generally to subscribe to the fund. So they put out a call to everyone in Bristol to say, hey, great news, you can contribute to this statue of Edwin Colston, you know, that that guy we all love. But then it goes on to say, however, this seems to have been a complete flop, as by October of that year, hardly any more money had been collected. So nobody wanted to fund this thing. Despite that, it did eventually get funded, largely out of the pocket of some of these people sort of leading the campaign, and then continued to be a sort of hugely problematic uh symbol within Bristol for a long time. Eventually, of course, you'll probably know, um, it was torn down in 2020 during the uh wave of Black Lives Matter protests that uh followed on from the murder of George Floyd in the US. But Colston had long been a sort of problematic symbol of Bristol's history of entanglement with the slaving industry and you know, a sort of poster child in a way for kind of tainted donations and tainted wealth when it comes to philanthropy, um, because he sort of lauded uh, or the argument was, you know, he's there, his statue's there because he's this beloved philanthropist. But actually, you know, he worked for the British East Africa Company and he owned slaves and he ran slave ships, and he's a very problematic historical figure. So I think you know, that brings, you know, that just a couple of those examples I think pick out, you know, the fact that when we're talking about commemoration and recognition in the form of statues or naming rights or that sort of thing, you know, we need to be very careful to think about who is doing the recognition and the naming and what is driving them and why are they doing it. And is the donor themselves actually involved, or is their their profile and their story being used by somebody else for different means and and kind of untangling those things is really important in some of these stories. Um and I guess that also brings us to the question of where we sit today when it comes to issues around donor commemoration and naming. You know, it continues to be a big issue. Um, I think it's very much linked to concerns around tainted donations, which we've talked about on a previous episode. Both historical tainted donations like Colston, um, who have problematic links with uh slavery and other sort of extractive practices, but also problematic current donors like the Sackler family, for instance, who were very big um philanthropists, but increasingly as it became known that their family company, Purdue Pharma, um, was uh very largely responsible for the opioid epidemic um in the UK due to the production of oxycontin, people started to question whether it was okay to accept their philanthropic money, and many institutions um started to uh think about removing the Sackler name uh from various kind of wings of galleries, and and that is something most of them at this point have. Uh a few have have not got around to it yet or have kind of resisted to those calls. The Sacklers are quite an interesting case, actually, again, in that when we're talking about recognition, they very much demanded it. It wasn't something that's happened by accident. All those name plaques and buildings named after the Sackler family weren't spontaneous out of outpourings of gratitude on the part of their recipients. They were contractually agreed and very heavily stipulated by the Sacklers. Um, as if you read Patrick Rad and Keith's book, Empire of Pain, there's some really interesting stuff on on this in there. And so, actually, in terms of the question of gratitude, they're they're you know slapped back at the problematic end of the spectrum that we've been talking about. I think there are you know many other sort of examples of that to pick one. Recently there was an interesting one um a year or so ago where one of the Oxford University Colleges, Lin Lineker College, um, has received a promise of a big donation, about £150 million from a Vietnamese uh businesswoman called Ngoyin uh Tifuang Tao. And as a result, they are proposing to change their name to Tao College. It's an interesting one that, because you know, people initially were sort of like, oh, this is you know awful. And I think there's some element of the particular the particular aspect of this is you know, this kind of a college at this uh you know well-known August institution being renamed after this female businesswoman from Vietnam that most people have never heard of. I think, you know, kind of slightly unhealthy uh elements of of that in there. But I think there are also questions about, you know, was this something that the college was just sort of choosing to do at its own volition? Was it something that was demanded by the donor as part of giving the gift in the first place? Was it somewhere in between the two where the donor had approached wanting to give a gift and the college sort of canily decided it could get a much bigger gift by offering this up as a as an incentive? I'm gonna say it probably wasn't a spontaneous act of gratitude. There probably was a discussion about this at some point, but but where that balance you know lies in terms of who was driving the naming decision, I I don't know. I guess this kind of raises an interesting uh question, which is you know, when it comes to naming things as an expression of gratitude, there are various concerns I think that need to be borne in mind. I mean, one is the potential present and future reputational damage to the recipient organization, you know, if you emblazon somebody's uh name all over a building uh and they subsequently turn out to be very problematic, what do you then do about that as many of the organizations that had accepted SACLA money were were forced to kind of deal with? You know, and also are you more actively making yourself sort of complicit in reputation laundering? Um, you know, we talked about these issues in quite a lot more detail on the episode In Tainted Donation, so you can certainly find out more there. I think it also sort of, you know, it this whole field of naming, name recognition and kind of plaque philanthropy, or you might want to call it, it institutionalizes a view that elite philanthropy is more important than everyday giving and that somehow, you know, you need to say thank you in different ways because it's kind of better or more or more important. There is obviously some kind of practical reality to that in that if somebody's able to give you £150 million uh and I'm able to give you £50, then you know, realistically, uh that that is quite a different relationship. But I think when we're thinking about this question of gratitude, um, you know, actually if we're sort of saying what are the appropriate models of gratitude that we can have within philanthropy, if we want to argue that actually the same principles should apply to gifts at all sorts of different levels, then if we have these models of name recognition in the uh in the form of kind of um statuary and and plaques and and naming buildings and things that are only open to those giving at very, very large amounts, then that kind of institutionalizes a problematic distinction between different levels of giving.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:00

Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire, playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:31

The other thing just to say finally about the this Lineka College case is although part of the controversy came around the fact that the college already had a name uh and therefore this was a case of sort of renaming, and people assumed that it meant that there was some sort of issue about you know money grubbing because this new donor had stepped in and was giving a sufficiently large amount of money to get the original name whitewashed off the building and her name put on. Actually, Lineker College isn't named after a donor. Interestingly, it's just named after an entirely separate person who had nothing to do with the founding of the college. So this, I mean, it's interesting in one sense to have that context for this particular story, but it also raises another interesting aspect on this story, which is what if we divorce the right to name uh a building or an institution from the donor's name themselves? So actually, if donors are able to be recognized by having the option of naming a building, but they do so after some other figure, um perhaps who otherwise would not have uh achieved recognition. And this is something that I discussed uh on this podcast with Ben Soskis a little while back and when talking about kind of controversies around naming and whether actually that was one way to sort of square the circle on some of the discomfort around the whole question of naming rights. But thinking about it through the particular lens of gratitude as we are today, I just wonder whether that still works. Does that work as a sufficient form of thank you or gratitude for a donor if you if you as an institution or an organization say to them, we're very grateful for your, you know, uh large S and your gift as a as a way of saying thank you, here is the option of naming a building, the only stipulation being you can't name it after yourself or your family. Does that then actually fulfil the role of uh of a sort of of a philanthropic thank you, or is it is it kind of impractical in reality? So I just I you know throw that in there because I think it's a kind of interesting question um about something that has been proposed as one way of addressing issues around naming, but whether it actually meets the tests that we've been discussing around gratitude and the role that that gratitude and thanks play, um, I'm not so sure. Okay, well that kind of brings us to the end, and it certainly should do because we've been going more than an hour. We've meandered somewhat all around the houses as we're kind of want to do on this podcast, but hopefully I've managed to convince you that the whole question of thanks and gratitude is more complicated than it sometimes first seems. It's not as simple as either, well, yes, obviously you should say thank you for for gifts and you should say thank you even more for even bigger gifts. Um and neither is it as simple as saying, well, any form of saying thanks or expressing gratitude for a gift implies deference and paternalism and is therefore highly problematic. You know, yes, where gratitude does imply deference and entrenches power dynamics, um, that's a problem. Uh likewise, if it's seen overtly as a tool for social control or maintenance of the status quo as it has been historically, that's also something that we need to guard against. And if gratitude and thanks are part of that toolkit, then obviously we need to think quite hard about um what we are demanding of the individuals and organizations who are receiving philanthropic gifts. But I guess you know the question to me. Is does it go too far to suggest that it's never appropriate to show thanks for a philanthropic gift? You know, that one test that I mentioned during the podcast, would we apply that logic to donations of all kinds? You know, um, would we say that even a very small regular donation from somebody giving uh you know out of amounts that uh that are very kind of everyday is it's not okay to say thank you for that and express the fact that that person's clearly kind of gone above and beyond in wanting to support a cause. If we take that hard line view, then maybe that's fine. But if we don't, it seems slightly paradoxical to be in the situation where we're essentially saying we need to show less thanks to those who have given more, or at least, you know, not not the same level of thanks. That's obviously tied in, as we said, to lots of complex questions about whether charity is a duty or a choice, whether it you know it's a just a matter of uh voluntary giving or whether it's a matter of justice. And these are very important in determining whether or not gratitude is the appropriate response, or whether there is a case to be made that we don't need to show gratitude. I think in some cases where clearly there is a claim of justice to be made, then maybe there's a good argument that there is no need for gratitude, and actually it would sort of be problematic to express gratitude. But in lots of other cases it seems more appropriate to to think that some degree of thanks or an expression of gratitude is appropriate. You know, also there are those practical considerations we discussed. If you're a fundraiser, you might have a sort of theoretical view on this, but you wouldn't necessarily hold on to your job very long if you steadfastly refused to say thank you to any donors who'd given to your organization. But even if we agree that actually showing thanks and gratitude is appropriate in some situations, there's still those questions about how it is that we go about doing that and whether the methods that we use are appropriate. Um, you know, obviously a personised letter or a phone call uh to a to a donor of any kind is one thing, you know, and and that seems kind of unproblematic in in many ways. Though actually, in practical terms, I know from lots of conversations I've had with donors and uh griping about these things over the years that that there are many, many instances in which even that's not done. And not always that the there was an expectation up front that that they were expecting thanks, but I think the longer that you go on giving to an organization at whatever level, then you you get no recognition and no thanks whatsoever, it it is, I think, uh has a kind of deleterious effect on your motivation to to keep giving, whereas a little bit of thanks goes a long way. But I think above and beyond that sort of basic thank you letter or thank you phone call, we obviously have much more grandiose forms of recognition and and commemoration in the form of statues, putting up plaques, putting names on buildings, as we've discussed. And this is something that's happened, you know, for a long, long time throughout history and raises all kinds of issues about the power dynamics between donors and their recipients and the issues about you know tainted donations and what we think of of donors of the past and how we apply uh the standards of today to them. You know, I don't think it's necessarily inherently invalid to allow uh a donor's name to be put on a building uh or on you know the the wing of a museum or to put up a name plaque to them if we take into account all the issues about where where the expectation that that is being done comes, whether it is sort of a voluntary act on the part of the recipient, why why it is that they feel it necessary to do that, whether it's a genuine expression of thanks, or whether it's a sort of more pragmatic means of of getting future fundraising uh out of this donor. I think taking into account all of those issues, um, you know, there are arguments that it's perfectly legitimate to do, but there are lots of issues to to think through um before we sort of just assume that that's the model that we need to follow. Uh anyway, here endeth the lesson. I'll put links in the show notes to lots of the things that I've mentioned, plenty of them uh in this episode. If you're interested uh more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, do check out my website at www.yphilanthropymatters.com. And you can follow me on Twitter, at least for now until I join the uh thronging hordes leaving for Mastodon. Uh that's at Rodri underscore h underscore Davis, uh, or at philiteracy if you want the stuff more specifically about kind of history of philanthropy. If you've got ideas for uh things that we could talk about on the podcast or people I could interview, why don't you drop me an email at uh Rodri at whyphilanthropymatters.com. Uther than that, just like, subscribe, do tell all your friends about it. If uh if you know people that you think might be interested in the podcast, do point them in this direction. Uh leave us a nice review on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts, and I'll see you next time. Bye.