SPEAKER_00 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropisms podcast with Roger Davis. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast, the place where we try to put philanthropy in context. With me, your host, Rodri Davis. So this is episode one, first ever one. And what I want to do in this is give a bit of background about what the podcast's about, why I'm doing it, who I am indeed, and then talk a little bit about the question of what is philanthropy and why should we care? Which hopefully should lay the groundwork for you knowing whether or not this is a podcast you actually want to listen to, because if the answer to the second question is I don't care, this may well not be for you. So as I said at the start, this podcast is very much about putting philanthropy in context. Um, something I've been trying to do through my work uh over many years, putting philanthropy in historical context, in the context of current trends going on around the world, and looking ahead to the future and thinking about some of the trends that might shape it as we move into that future. Um so on the podcast, we're going to do that in two main ways. Um we're gonna have conversations with experts and interesting voices uh from around the world, who'll bring a range of perspectives, hopefully, um some of which will be very positive, some uh slightly more critical about philanthropy and sort of broader civil society issues. Um we'll also do some deep dives that I'll be doing myself uh into kind of particular themes relating to philanthropy in civil society that I find interesting, and I'll be bringing the whole gamut of historical tidbits, uh thoughts based on conversations and my experience over the last 15 or years or so of working in this field, and some of my uh speculative hand waving about the future. So a little bit about who I am, just for for those who uh don't already know me or don't recognise me, because I should say at this point, I have previously done another podcast about philanthropy, of which more in a moment, uh, and anyone listening to this might be getting a slight sense of deja vu or whatever the audio equivalent of deja vu is, but yes, it is me. Uh and no, this is not the Calf Giving Thought Podcast, this is the new podcast, uh, although it will still be me talking a lot about philanthropy, so there are evident similarities. Um my name is Roger Davis, as I say, I've been working in this field uh around philanthropy and civil society for almost 15 years now. I write, I speak, I think, I podcast uh a lot about philanthropy and civil society stuff. Um I'm uh known as a sort of inveterate nerd about these things. Um I also have a Twitter feed for literacy where I do all sorts of stuff about the history of philanthropy, and basically um I just won't shut up about it. So if that sounds like a strong recommendation to you, then you might enjoy this podcast. Um I'm currently doing a few things. I work with the Payers Foundation in the UK, um helping them with their own thinking about philanthropy. I'm also in the process of setting up a new mystery entity, TBC, um, that will very much kind of take forward some of the work uh that I talk about on this podcast about putting philanthropy in context. I also work a day a week at the Centre for Philanthropy at the University of Kent. Previously, I've written a book about philanthropy called Public Good by Private Means, which is all about the history of philanthropy in the UK and what it tells us about the modern context. So, you know, that's my track record, but I've been kind of doing this stuff for a while and hopefully I've got uh some interesting thoughts about it myself and also a decent address book where I can call on people uh to come and have interesting conversations and hopefully meet some new people and have interesting conversations. I guess there's a question about why I'm doing this. Um, does the world genuinely need uh another podcast for a start and another philanthropy podcast? There seems to have been a sort of explosion of them uh over the last couple of years, as there has been with lots of other genres of podcasts, particularly as people were stuck at home during lockdown. I mean, my hope is, well, a couple of things. One, I hope this sort of fills a slightly different niche from others. I think some of the uh perspective, certainly historical, um, that I'm kind of bringing to bear on it might be a bit different. Um I like to think I have a you know idiosyncratic and unique take on things, but everybody likes to think that about themselves, don't they? So um I'll leave you to be the judge of that one. Um I guess as I said, I have got some previous experience of doing a podcast. Uh when I worked at the Charities Aid Foundation here in the UK, um I launched um and hosted for a long time the Giving Thought Podcast for over a hundred episodes or so. When we did that, there wasn't really much competition in the field of philanthropy podcasts. Um, as I say, there's quite a bit more now, but you know, I like it as a medium. Uh I think podcasting's a good way to explore you know serious topics in depth, but with maybe a bit of lightness of tone. It's a nice place to have interesting chats with interesting people. People seem to quite enjoy that podcast, so hopefully they'll like this one. Uh, and as you might have been able to tell already, I quite like the sound of my own voice, so it's a good outlet for me, if nothing else. Just a brief word as well about the the name of this podcast, Philanthropisms, which I was undecided about. Um I think I'm sort of broadly made my peace with it at the moment. Uh, I guess to explain where that came from, um I mean firstly there's only so many puns on the word giving that you can use in any one lifetime, and I really have used a lot of them in my in the course of my career. I wondered a bit, and I guess this will bring us on a little bit to the sorts of stuff I want to talk more substantively about in this episode, about whether it was better to embrace the word philanthropy, uh, to make it clear that's what the podcast was about, or to kind of shy away from it, either because people don't understand what it means or it has certain connotations or it's overly narrow. So, you know, I think this brings us on to an interesting wider debate about the language we use around giving and within civil society and interesting debates about whether we need to uh expand the definition of philanthropy, reclaim other notions around generosity and altruism uh to enrich that definition, or to jettison the word altogether, and that's you know something we'll come on to hopefully in this this podcast. Um in terms of the word itself, um where it came from, uh I mean I came across the word philanthropism just as a pleasingly archaic synonym for philanthropy, which is essentially what it is. Um also quite a lot of the other names that I would have liked to use for the philanthropy this podcast were already taken, so you know it's a kind of limited menu. But also it sort of struck me the more I thought about it that there was something neat about it in terms of what it says about the approach I'm hoping to take on this podcast, which is, you know, the idea of isms, which the dictionary definition uh tells us is a distinctive practice system or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement. The idea of that applied to philanthropy is quite interesting because I think it it I like the way it hints at the sort of multitude of different perspectives people bring to the table when they think about philanthropy. So for me, that word philanthropism is kind of imply it implies that it's all about the different ways in which we can understand philanthropy. And that's sort of, you know, the the key point of this podcast.

How do we define philanthropy?

SPEAKER_00 7:18

So enough of that Yakin, uh, time for some different uh Yakin. Um so what I wanted to talk about actually in this podcast is just a very basic question, taking things back to first principles. I mean, firstly, what are we even talking about when we say philanthropy? Um and that's not a stupid question or a stupid point to be making. There may be some people listening who've never thought about philanthropy before and genuinely just want, you know, the most basic introduction. But even people who've worked in this field for a long time, myself included, when actually asked the question, yes, but what do you mean by philanthropy, and then pushed on it, usually find that it becomes quite an awkward conversation. Because philanthropy is not necessarily a widely understood term, and where it is understood it often brings particular baggage, and as I said before, connotations that aren't always helpful. I have to say there's a lot of people that would be known as philanthropists who I've talked to over the years, who very much shy away from the term and hate being called philanthropists and would never call themselves philanthropists. Um and there's you know quite a rich academic literature uh on this question, trying to sort of face up to the question of uh what the definition of philanthropy is. Probably the most popular definition or the most sort of broadly used is the one given by Peyton and Moody, which is talking about the idea of voluntary action for the public good. Um, and this goes into sort of you know the title of my own book, which was Public Good by Private Means, that idea of sort of taking uh private resources and action and putting them towards public goods, um, kind of encapsulates something, uh at least that is central to philanthropy for a lot of people. Um, but I think it doesn't capture all of it, and we'll try and unpick a little bit where some of the disagreements about the interpretation of philanthropy might come and what they sort of tell us about some of the key issues uh in the field today. I think part of the problem with philanthropy is the use of the term varies very widely across not only time but also space. Um, not in a sort of Doctor Who sense, particularly, I don't mean though, I just mean that throughout history um usage around the word philanthropy has shifted, um, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and also different cultural contexts um uh at the moment around the world have a big impact. So some countries use philanthropy uh very differently from others, others don't use it at all, and it's not a word that has any sort of cachet. Interestingly, the sort of general consensus I think among practitioners, based on my experience, um, is that this is all very interesting, but we probably just need to roll up our sleeves and get on with things, and we can kind of broadly have a sense of what we mean by philanthropy, even if you know we occasionally need to kind of clarify with each other what we're actually talking about. Um I always think this this reminds me of um the famous quote uh given by the Supreme Court uh Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart um in a 1964 obscenity trial um of Jacobellus versus Ohio. Um but he famously said at that point, and this was an obscenity trial obviously talking about kind of hardcore pornographic material, um, and he said, I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, talking about uh hardcore pornography, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so, but I know it when I see it. And it seems to me, you know, philanthropy is a little bit like pornography in this case, in that, you know, uh it's not necessarily something that all of us can define or can you know define at all, but we we kind of know it when we see it, um or at least enough to be able to usefully get on with our day jobs. And I think you know that's not just a kind of practical view amongst practitioners, it's actually almost a kind of consensus view in the academic literature, which seems broadly to agree that we should accept philanthropy as as a kind of inherently imprecise or vague term, um, or you know, you what Claude Levi-Strauss called a floating signifier, um, which is a term that has no referent, doesn't point to any actual object and has no agreed upon meaning, but we can kind of use it through a mixture of kind of uh convention and and sort of um practical knowledge in a way that that allows it to have utility. Um and actually in that paper I already referenced by Peyton and Moody, they sort of talk about philanthropy in these terms as well. They call it an umbrella term, you know, which captures lots of different concepts and but where the boundaries are somewhat sort of vague. And so, what can we actually say about philanthropy? We know so far um that it's uh that it's a fairly vague term. We we can't always precisely define the boundaries of it, but we seem to be able to use it in at least some contexts in useful ways, although uh it does tend to cause some disagreement. So a lot of the points I'm gonna touch on uh here in the course of this episode are ones that we will come back to in a lot more depth uh in uh further episodes, either through conversations with people um or through deep dives that I'm going to do. Um so for now, this is going to be just something of a whistle stop tour to wet your appetite. So let's uh first of all dig into the history uh straight after this.

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Yet the day is not far distant when the man who dies, leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which foresee for him to administer during life, will pass away unwed, unhonour, and on side and display, guys, this place, this place.

The history of the word "philanthropy"

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Okay, so uh first of all, in trying to understand a bit better what we mean by philanthropy, I think it's really useful to look at the historical context. Um you will probably get sick of me saying that because I always think it's useful to look at the historical context, but I remain entirely unapologetic about that. Um but I think in terms of the word philanthropy we can look at how it's been used throughout history and how it's used now and see what that tells us about the different aspects that we might want to include in our definition or rule out or to highlight or to play down. So I mean etymologically speaking, it's it's virtually kind of compulsory in any discussion of philanthropy to point out that it means at root love of humanity. Um and the first usage of it as such uh is mostly cited as the Aeschylus play Prometheus Unbound, where Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, is described as as being a philanthropist or that being an act of philanthropy, so sort of love of humankind, which is obviously a slightly different context from how we would use it today. Um and actually the usage in ancient Greece and Rome was quite commonplace, but it was different and quite a bit broader than we would use it today, and so it's somewhat confusing sometimes to talk about philanthropy in in uh ancient Greece and Rome or the classical world and try and draw direct comparisons to today. Philanthropy in that sense, or love of humankind, referred to a sort of broader set of activities that were seen as uh what made for being a good citizen, um, and the particular bit of that that focused on gift giving um in that context um was important um but not the whole picture, and also it was very much done with a kind of embedded sense of reciprocity. So it wasn't altruistic gift giving, it was gift giving with an expectation that the giver would get something back, either in terms of you know social status and position uh within uh the polis uh or just overtly in terms of actual financial reward. So this the idea of sort of selfless altruism uh or kind of concern for the poor as well, um, in the sense that we would think of it today, is quite anachronistic if you're talking about the classical world so you have to be quite careful about imposing those sorts of concepts on it. Um and that notion of philanthropia, as it was often uh called in in that context, was over time, um obviously kind of um in the first millennium replaced by more sort of Judeo-Christian notions of charity um or caritas as Christianity spread throughout the the medieval and the pre-medieval world. Um although it's also important to note that whilst there are some sort of shared elements of um ancestry between Judaism and Christianity around notions of charity, there are also very important differences, which we'll hopefully cut talk a lot more about in future episodes, between Jewish and Christian notions of charity. So for instance, the within Judaism there's a very interesting tradition that's still very strong today around uh the idea of Siddaka, which is uh not only a a kind of responsibility to give, but also a set of rules guiding how one does best give, and that's sort of from practical things about the level of transparency or anonymity that a donor has, through to uh teachings about the relationship between charity and philanthropy and justice more broadly, which is you know a pretty complex topic, very interesting one, and one that's very relevant to current debates. But anyway, sort of parking that for a moment, a very broad brush sketch of the history is that philanthropy, after its use in the classical world, kind of died out really as a term for a long time, wasn't really used in the medieval world. Terms like charity, uh alms giving, uh beneficence, benevolence, and other things like this were much more commonplace. There was an important shift um when in the uh 15th and 16th century, both with the rise of ideas of secular humanism uh on sort of continental Europe and later in the UK, and also with the advent of the the Reformation in the UK when Henry VIII decided to to break from the Church of Rome so that he could uh divorce his first wife. It's it's a complicated story and one that that you know does uh cause some disagreement amongst uh historians of philanthropy. But but the upshot of this, or at least one upshot of the Reformation particularly, was that it was the start, um not you know, not immediately, but certainly the starting point, for a different conception of the role of charitable giving, one that kind of emphasized its impact in the world that we live in now, rather than the role that it played in uh in sort of securing the donor's immortal soul and passage to heaven. So it's kind of the shift of focus from what the gift giving did for the donor to the the impact or the effect that it had in the world. And that's a very simplified version of the story, but it's kind of it's an important shift, I think, that we can kind of trace back to some extent uh to the Reformation. The word, the actual word philanthropy, um then re-emerged um first on the continent in in France, so the the French had the word bien faisance, uh, and then they started using uh the word philanthropie. Uh that's a beautiful accent, isn't it, that I've just done there. It's really compelling. And then in the UK, um, the first person to be labelled um as such, to be labelled a philanthropist, in something approaching what we might call the modern sense, was the prison reformer John Howard, who's uh you know, a fascinating character, um, uh a sort of very uh powerful and much lauded social uh reformer of his time and sort of long after his death, and was held up as a kind of template of of what philanthropy and a philanthropist should be. At this point, the idea of philanthropy was strongly tied to sort of the enlightenment and enlightenment values and the new focus on thinking about systems and structures and kind of grand visions for how society should work. Um and this applied to poverty as m as as it did to many other things. So for the first time there was a sense that poverty was not simply a part of the way the world was or a part of God's plan for the world that we should just accept and work within, but it was actually a problem that needed to be addressed and could potentially even be solved. And this is very important in terms of how people viewed the role of philanthropy and sort of social change, you know, that shift from it merely something that kind of happens within those fixed and immovable structures that are already there, or actually whether it's something that can be used to change those structures. And again, you know, that brings us breakneck speed up to the modern day, because that's absolutely a debate that still kind of rages on in the world of philanthropy. So you should say actually at first philanthropy was very much associated with social reform and actually probably more with kind of campaigning than it was with direct service delivery. So the sorts of people you would get called philanthropists were people like John Howard, or also people like um anti-slavery campaigners like William Wilberforce or Granville Sharp. This wasn't always in a positive way, um, has to be said. There was quite a lot of criticism of these people. Um, and when we come on in a minute to talk about the potential differences in tension between charity and philanthropy, there was actually a lot of sort of caricaturing of the the philanthropist as a sort of high-minded biddy body busybody who would prioritise grand utopian schemes and visions for society over just thinking about the kind of immediate needs of their fellow man around them. But then over time there there was a bit of a shift, and philanthropy, certainly into the Victorian era and through that, became more and more associated with what we might think of now, which is the sort of direct addressing of social issues uh and sort of alleviation of poverty. And this was also very tied in with um shifting views on the desirable role of the state as well, which again is another big shaping force in debates about philanthropy more broadly, which is kind of what are our expectations about what the state does when it comes to the welfare of citizens and what is the responsibility of us as other citizens to do through philanthropic means. Another shift that was happening sort of at the same time that was important and is important to mention, I think, is around the impact of industrialization and urbanization because the the scale, as people moved from a rural setting into the cities and were living in very kind of crowded um environments, they didn't have outside space of their own, they had no access to commons land on which to farm. A lot of the employment was uh extremely uh kind of not even seasonal, but sort of difficult to predict and uh very much subject to changes in employability and kind of um ups and downs in terms of levels of employment. So there was sort of very high unemployment at times in these urban settings, and people weren't able to kind of farm for themselves and and look after themselves from that point of view. This really shifts. shifted the nature and the scale of poverty and and the the old forms of charity that were based on kind of direct person-to-person uh arms giving at a parish level were would were very much no longer um kind of adequate to deal with with those issues. People couldn't within that urban setting uh sit there and and deal with the number of potential recipients of arms that might be coming to them or to kind of distinguish between those that they felt were the most deserving of their help and and those who might be less deserving, which is what people very much wanted to do. As a result, what we got was increasingly people following the model that was happening at the same time in the commercial sphere where people started to kind of come together and associate with one another to form structures that allowed them to kind of group their assets and combine their efforts. And in that case you get the joint stock company in the commercial sphere and in the sphere of philanthropy you get what becomes known as associated philanthropy and you know what eventually leads to the idea of the sort of charitable organisation or non-profit that we have today, a kind of structure in the middle that allows a group of people who are philanthropically minded to pool their resources, maybe appoint some experts or professionals in the middle to kind of manage those resources and decide how best to allocate them and then to do the job of distributing those resources to where they're most needed. And as a result of this what we also see is more and more formalisation in terms of structure but also much more focus on the idea that charity needs to be rational that philanthropy needs to be rational and that we must apply scientific methods, whether those are the methods of social science or increasingly the methods of things like evolutionary science and there's a big crossover between you know the ideas that are embedded in Darwinism and you know and charity. And this is something that then gets transported across to the US in the late nineteenth century and certainly into the early 20th century and has um a kind of big shaping influence on some of the the big names of philanthropy in the early 20th century the kind of the great robber barons of the Gilded Age who became the great philanthropists as well so people like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford. And then what you get is the sort of what becomes the dominant paradigm really of philanthropy almost to the present day and something that we certainly associate with it in the US and to an extent everywhere else which is the idea of philanthropy is about big money donors probably with kind of big foundations bearing their name doing these sort of huge programs of distributing money in this highly kind of professionalized, rationalized way. And then over the course of the 20th century the usage of philanthropy for a long time kind of declined here in the UK as the advent of the welfare state saw again big shifts about um views about the relative roles of the state and voluntary action when it came to meeting welfare needs. So it shifted very much you know the pendulum went in the other direction back towards an expectation that the state would deal with most people's basic needs and a lot of people thought there would be no role for philanthropy at all. Many of them thought that would be a good thing. Over time relatively quickly it became clear that there would always seemly be a role for philanthropy at the very least to fill in the gaps in that nascent welfare state or over time to to kind of advocate and challenge that state to to make sure that it could adapt to changing needs and also to kind of deal with needs that would never be met by the state. And again, you know this question of state versus philanthropy is one I'm sure we'll come back to many times on the podcast. But then you finally end up with a picture where towards the end of the 20th century maybe we start talking about philanthropy more again in the UK but in a way it's a confused picture because rather than being aware of that rich historical lineage that leads us up to the present day I think too often where we go is just back to the template from the early 20th century US and we sort of assume that philanthropy is an import from America and that that we've kind of brought it into this country whereas actually that's very much not the case if you go back a little further obviously the the export goes the other way and there's a much richer history going back before that that tells you you know a lot more about potential ways we could understand philanthropy. So again as I say that's just a whistle stop tour. We'll pick up on many of the the the points that are made there and the themes and some of the individual stories in in future episodes of the podcast but hopefully that gives you a kind of a bit of a sense for now. So in the next section we'll just come on to to think about what that history might actually tell us about the choices we have to make when it comes to defining philanthropy so stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

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 valuable.

SPEAKER_00 26:50

Don't be fooled by believing because a man is rich and he is necessarily ample proof to the contrary

Defining philanthropy by what it isn't

SPEAKER_00 27:06

okay well that was a bit of a canter through the history of the use of the term philanthropy. Hopefully that was of interest to you in all honesty if it wasn't and you were wondering what the point of all that was uh you might want to think again about listening to this podcast because it's uh it's really going to be a long old road for you if this isn't your wheelhouse. But yeah what I wanted to do now is just have a bit of a look at what that history actually sort of tells us about the choices that we can make when it comes to defining philanthropy and kind of how that is still relevant at the moment both for kind of academics and practitioners in philanthropy. So I guess there's a couple of choices here. I mean we could we can define philanthropy I guess by amount I think it's very apparent pretty early on that this is a flawed way of doing it but actually I guess it kind of corresponds to uh to some extent to the way in which the distinction is often sort of used unconsciously in practice. I think people often feel that philanthropy refers to giving of money particularly above a certain level and that that is the sort of defining characteristic. It's mostly about kind of rich people giving to charities. So you know does that work as a way of defining philanthropy? Well I don't think it does really when you you know it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. I guess one thing to say is that it sort of reminds me of my undergraduate days doing philosophy of language and talking about vague predicates and the problem there that you would talk about is terms like heap or mound and the question there is you know is that a predicate that actually defines something and you'd always sort of think you know if you have one grain of rice is that a heap? Probably not two grains of rice? No still not but then you keep doing that and then at some point you've got a million grains of rice and it definitely is a heap. But was there a point where X grains of rice wasn't a heap and X plus one grains of rice was a heap? Well similarly this would apply if the defining characteristic of philanthropy was how much money was being given it would beg the question to me is there a point at which giving X pounds or dollars is not an act of philanthropy because it's not enough but then you can give X plus one pounds or dollars and and it is that seems somewhat absurd. I think also there are many counterexamples that we could find of smaller acts of giving that clearly look more like philanthropy and that they're more considered and they're more sort of focused on systemic change for instance and acts of bigger gifts and donations that look more like charity perhaps because they are more individualistic or more responsive in nature. So this maybe suggests that the amount isn't the best guide although it's something we should probably have in that wider umbrella of the term that we're using. So could it perhaps be the method that we're using you know does philanthropy for instance inherently have to involve the giving of money or can it be other things? I think it's an interesting one lots of people point to a need to recognise that philanthropy is about private action for public good in the broadest sense so it should uh involve things like the giving of time as well volunteering also the kind of the use of networks um so giving up talents as well I think to some extent I think that's true. I think I think getting too far away from the idea of um of financial giving is is a bit problematic because I think fundamentally the kind of the financial resources are extremely important in one way or another and usually you know when you're talking about philanthropy if you start talking about it and entirely leave the the financial side out of the picture and just start talking about volunteering or social action in the round I think it gets sort of personally I think it gets too far away from what most people would mean when they're talking about philanthropy. So I think having a broad enough definition to capture other things, yes, making sure that there's some recognition of the sort of centrality of financial giving also important. Not everyone will necessarily agree with me on that but you know that kind of feels to me like it you know the the giving of money is an important part of what we're talking about. I guess in terms of method there's also a question about whether it's you know philanthropy is something that's tied to specific structures as well whether that's the structures we're using for giving you know is philanthropy something that has to happen you know through foundations for instance um or the structures that are being given to so is it you know the giving of money or volunteering for specific legal structures whether that's kind of registered charities here in the UK or 501c3s in in the US again um I think probably not um I think that's too narrow a conception although it is one I think that that often seems to be there in the background unspoken in in terms of people's perceptions of philanthropy and I think increasingly people are seeing that as problematic. I should note at this point that I was uh lucky enough to be involved in a really interesting uh event quite recently as I'm recording this podcast which was the launch for Lucy Bernholtz's new book How We Give Now a Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us and I was moderating a conversation with her and Asher Curran from Giving Tuesday and Edgar Villanueva who wrote Decolonising Wealth and Leads the Decolonising Wealth project all about the the sort of the ways in which we're increasingly needing to recognise a much broader sense of philanthropy and these other kind of models of giving that don't necessarily involve formal structures and sort of parts of the non-profit world that we would normally see as as integral. And I think you know that's that plays into a wider conversation that's been going on that I think is very interesting and I'm sure we'll come back to many times on this podcast about the way in which the landscape for doing good is expanding in all sorts of different directions and challenging some of our notions about where the boundaries of you know the charitable or nonprofit sector lie and what constitutes giving or charity or philanthropy. So again I think in terms of that idea that philanthropy is something that that changes over time I think we're at a point where it's perhaps changing once again in quite fundamental ways. So maybe I think that idea of of tying philanthropy to specific methods not only doesn't really work because it's hard to know what those methods are, but they constantly evolve and so we'd very soon sort of be out of date with our definition. Is philanthropy looking at it another way something we have to define in terms of the outcomes that it produces? So is is an act of philanthropy can something be classed as an act of philanthropy by looking at what is achieved through that act or on the other hand do you have to take into account the motivation behind that act? I think this is a really interesting question. There's a sort of again whether you can define something by extension so just in terms of looking at it and the elements that it contains or whether you have to have some element of intention which is kind of what it was that that led to those elements being collected together which again sort of leans a bit on the my deep dark days of doing set theory back in university. But I think this is an interesting one because it's it raises um a question about whether motivation is a defining characteristic of philanthropy. So if somebody is giving assets that produce a public good but doing it for instance for entirely selfish reasons whether they want sort of social status or or it's being driven by peer pressure or something like that, does that invalidate it as an act of philanthropy or do we merely look at what is produced and what we can objectively know and say that's fine. On the flip side the difficulty I guess is if you're saying oh we have to be able to judge what what it was that motivated it that puts a huge bar a very high bar on the definition because we have to almost be able to look into other people's minds or souls and know genuinely what it was that motivated them. And even asking people what it was that motivated them is probably an imperfect way to find out because people are quite often very bad at identifying their own motivations. And interestingly I mean I think this echoes a point made in one of the sort of key papers around the question of defining philanthropy by Dwight Burlingame which is a point he makes about philanthropy not being the same as altruism. And he says the altruism is not the single motive for defining philanthropy, nor is it necessarily the desired operational motive. It's further not very fruitful to attempt to explain philanthropic action by emphasising either one motive altruism to the exclusion of the other egoism while the when the prevailing evidence clearly indicates that both motives are jointly at work causing the philanthropic action to occur. So he's taking a pretty sort of pragmatic approach saying there's all kinds of different things that motivate motivate philanthropy and you know getting too bogged down in a sort of purist conception of it having to be driven by altruism and not recognising that there are you know all sorts of other motivations and most likely in any one instance of somebody giving it's probably a complex mixture of all of these different factors is you know is not really the the road to go down. So I guess that kind of you know has that moved us on any further in defining philanthropy? Probably not but I think what what is interesting and potentially fruitful is to ask the question okay well it's quite hard to say precisely what philanthropy is can we say a few things about what it isn't um and actually when you look at it philanthropy is more often than not defined at least as much by what it isn't as by what it is. So one way to to try and address this question is to explore some of the things that philanthropy has been contrasted with over time and why and that brings us back a bit to the history. So I'm just going to try and go through these you know in a in not too much detail here because I think each of them you know will probably make for a theme that we'll explore in much more detail in future episodes. So one is is comparing and contrasting philanthropy with charity and this is one of the sort of key ways of trying to to pin down the the definition of philanthropy which is difficult to do because I think the what it what is philanthropy and what is charity and what is the distinction if any between the two of them or whether they're interchangeable terms is something that uh gets a huge amount of debate going whenever the question is raised. I mean I think some of the ways over time throughout history this is people have attempted to it to uh address this distinction. There's a perhaps charity could be argued to be something that is inherently religious whereas philanthropy is something secular. Now I don't think that distinction works particularly um partly because nowadays there's a lot of things that we would class I think as charity or you know charitable giving that are clearly secular and it and obvious and on the flip side there's a lot of philanthropy that is clearly motivated by religious upbringing or religious teaching or obligation even if it's not necessarily religious in nature so I don't think that distinction necessarily works. Also at points it's been argued that charity is something that is almost a subset of philanthropy that is specifically linked to poverty as an issue and the alleviation of poverty. Again I think that might have held true at one point in time in terms of those definitions but it doesn't anymore because charity is much broader than that these days and actually you know the range of issues that we are looking at in both charity and philanthropy is much wider and the idea of sort of poverty as almost the defining issue of focus for people's altruism no longer kind of holds. Is there perhaps something about charity being an expression of care about an issue at an individual or human level and philanthropy being more about similar care about an issue but doing so at a sort of systemic level and this is perhaps more fruitful and is something that has been characterized as a difference often throughout history. Charity is the kind of human connection and its sort of personal and its people giving directly to someone affected by a problem. Philanthropy is more thinking about that problem and being motivated by a wider care for not the individual but society or humanity as a whole and trying to address it at that level. There's an interesting quote here from a paper by Robert Gross who talks about the distinction between charity and philanthropy in the US context in history and he he puts it as thus he says charity expresses an impulse to personal service. It engages individuals in concrete direct acts of compassion and connection to other people but historically philanthropy represents a second mode of social service. Coined as a term in late seventeenth century England, well you know spoiler let's go back to what we were saying I'm not sure it was coined then but it was started to be used again. It became associated with the Enlightenment for it sought to apply reason to the solution of social ills and needs. Philanthropy can take secular or religious forms. Either way it aspires not so much to aid individuals as to reform society. Its object is the promotion of progress through the advance of knowledge. By eliminating the problems of society that beset particular persons, philanthropy aims to usher in a world where charity is uncommon and perhaps unnecessary. So there's definitely something to this distinction and you see it a lot still today in the idea that charity when people are talking about in a slightly pejorative sense is kind of focusing on the symptoms of problems whereas philanthropy is something that is aimed at addressing their underlying causes and that's sort of put forward as a strength. Now interestingly again and this is something I'm sure we'll talk about much more there's a slight trend I think back in the other direction almost a kind of re charit recharitization of philanthropy these days. You look at something like the giving of Mackenzie Scott who the former wife of Jeff Bezos who is doing a huge amount of philanthropic giving but doing it in very interesting ways where she's sort of abandoning a lot of the traditional paradigm around donor-driven uh philanthropy and instead trying to give kind of no strings attached gifts to groups already doing work on the ground and I think part of that to me at least is almost embracing once again the idea of kind of the necessity of human connection and the focus on the individual and almost a kind of implicit criticism of the way philanthropy has become too distant and too kind of cold and and dispassionate. And I think you know that's something we're seeing kind of reflected in in other areas as well I say you know something we'll hopefully come back onto in previous episodes. Just finally on this question of charity and philanthropy um you know that's all quite highfalutin I also I really like there's a a small quote I came across in a an obscure West Walian newspaper from 1905, the Pembroke County Guardian and Cardigan Reporter and they said the difference between charity and philanthropy is that philanthropy can afford to engage a press agent which I think is quite a sort of neatly cynical way of defining the difference there. So what about uh contrasting philanthropy with some other um uh sort of possible things that could be used to to bring to light different aspects of it so altruism for instance we've already sort of said you know that Dwight Burlingame in his paper says that we shouldn't confuse uh philanthropy and altruism but what is the overlap between them and what are the distinctions? Well altruism as a term is relatively new actually it was coined and popularized in the nineteenth century by the French philosopher and sociologist uh Auguste Comte and as we understand it these days it's very popular among um particularly ec economists and behavioural scientists when they're talking about sort of uh positive social behaviour they tend to talk about altruism often and it it's wider than I would say most standard uses of philanthropy as it tends to apply to acts we wouldn't normally capture within our definitions of philanthropy although some might argue that we should. And as I've already said I don't not necessarily clear that philanthropy is a is a defined subset of it either in that not all philanthropy is necessarily altruistic um so I don't think you can necessarily say that altruism is wider and that philanthropy just captures a you know a subset of activities that fall underneath it. It clearly overlaps in that there is a large portion of altruism that can also be termed as philanthropy and clearly philanthropy that is driven by altruism conversely um but the two are not the same thing. What about mutuality or solidarity and mutual aid? So this is an interesting one because there's been a lot of focus on mutual aid um recently as a result of the sort of upsurge of of mutual aid that we saw during the pandemic in the UK and the US and elsewhere and it's often has been kind of contrasted with charity and philanthropy historically to to kind of make a distinction between the nature and motivations of the two different things. And certainly according to William Beveridge who wrote quite a bit about this in his nineteen forty eight book Voluntary action he saw the two the the two um traditions as being quite distinct certainly in the UK he thought there was a sort of um A mutual aid and self-help tradition and also a charitable philanthropic one, and you needed to understand the two of them. So according to Beveridge, mutual aid has its origin in a sense of one's own need for security against misfortune and realization that since one's fellows have the same need, by undertaking to help one another all may help themselves. Whereas philanthropy, uh for him, springs from the feeling which makes men who are materially comfortable, mentally uncomfortable. To have social conscience is to be unwilling to make a separate peace with the giant social evils of want, disease, squalor, ignorance, idleness, escaping into personal prosperity oneself while leaving uh one's fellows in their clutches. So the point there, I guess, fundamentally is that mutual aid is about people who are to some extent in the same situation at the same level of wealth and suffering from the same problems, uh supporting one another in a sort of reciprocal way, so it's relatively horizontal. Whereas charity or philanthropy has a an element of hierarchy in it where there are haves and have-nots or those who are affected by an issue and those who aren't, and the latter are sort of helping the former. It's interesting to test this a bit and see where whether there are blurred boundaries, because if you look across um many different cultures in the world, uh in places like Africa, for instance, there are traditions of giving that look much more like mutual aid and are driven by kind of concepts and ideas like Ubuntu and Harambi, which lead to much more sort of horizontal forms of giving that are uh much more reciprocal and mutual. So I think it's again, it's not a clear defining line, it's probably a sort of very blurred boundary, but it helps, I I guess, again to bring to light one of the possible distinctions we might want to draw uh about philanthropy. Another one is is the difference between philanthropy and gifts of private goods or the production of private goods. Um so we said, you know, philanthropy is the production of public good by private means, uh, to also borrow the title of a highly readable book that I recommend. So, you know, what about examples in which private goods are produced, so sort of gifts to one's own family? Well, they tend to be, you know, sort of used as almost paradigm examples of things that that are not philanthropy. But again, I think it's it's interesting to test that uh that boundary because there it does seem to me there are examples where it's difficult to draw the distinction as clearly. So if you are, for instance, giving to a family member but it's because you are it's not just out of a sense of uh kind of family familial loyalty or duty, but because they are affected by a particular issue, is that then uh an act of charity? And if you are giving to an individual but you are doing so because you believe that is the most effective way of dealing with uh a problem at scale, does it then become an act of philanthropy? And I think that's particularly pertinent at the moment because there's been a huge rise in the the sort of interest in direct models of giving. And I'm thinking here particularly of things like direct cash transfers. So within the world of international development and aid, there are a number of projects and platforms now that kind of adopt the model where instead of doing what you would traditionally have done for the last 50 or 100 years or so, and give money to a large international NGO or kind of uh governments to do so through their own uh aid uh agencies and allow them to make decisions about how to deploy that on the ground and often kind of also deal with the operational side of it. Instead, you just give small amounts of money to individuals or to family groups in the countries uh that you are particularly interested in and allow them to make decisions about how to spend the money. And this is often driven by um a belief that this is a more effective way of delivering good outcomes. Um so lots of people who are interested in effective altruism, for instance, are very keen on direct giving. So it's not necessarily motivated by you know the same sorts of things that would motivate an active individual charity, but if you know actually what you're looking at is somebody giving directly to another individual and allowing them to spend on whatever they want, arguably you're not producing a public good in that sense, it's a private good, but you're doing it because you believe that by producing those public goods you are producing a wider private good because this is a good way of empowering individuals within a society, and then it's sort of aggregated up to a certain level that produces you know a result that that meets your philanthropic ambitions. So I think it's quite interesting, you know, that we can actually sort of slightly test that distinction these days. You know, another distinction we might draw is between philanthropy and commercial activity. So, you know, the difference here one might normally uh point to is the profit motive or sort of expectation of financial return in the commercial sphere as opposed to philanthropy where presumably there's no expectation of philanthropy of uh of uh financial return. But is that actually always true? I mean, we're increasingly sort of told about blended models uh and things like social investment and impact investing, where people are finding ways to combine the financial motive and the profit motive with a desire for delivering social outcomes. But also this is very far from being a new thing. Um actually, arguably, the idea of drawing clear dividing lines between the commercial sphere and the philanthropic sphere is itself quite a new invention. And if you look back in history, it was more common for people to blur those lines quite significantly. So you look here at people like uh George Cadbury and other sort of Quaker philanthropists in the nineteenth century. I mean, they didn't really see any dividing line between their business interests and their philanthropic interests, or indeed their political interests, and they would use all of them as tools to try and advance their their beliefs in how society should look. Um and there are many more examples that go sort of further back as well. And so I think the the line between commercial activity and and philanthropy is is in has always been blurred and is certainly blurred at the moment. But equally, I guess we need to be careful on the flip side that in uh in uh putting forward the argument that it is possible to blend uh an interest in financial return and social return, that that doesn't merely become a tool for people to sort of muddy the waters and undermine what might be potentially the unique value of philanthropic giving or giving with no expectation of return. And so I I actually think one of the things within the world of philanthropy that we need to do much more clearly is to make a clear case for what the unique role of that form of giving, of gift giving as opposed to investment um or or kind of uh loans or anything like that is, and I I don't see that happening uh as much as it should at the moment. Um another possible comparator that we could use for philanthropy to try and draw some boundaries is provision by the state, and this is something we touched on quite a number of times uh in our whistle stop tour of the history. And the idea here is, you know, is there a distinction between public assets and uh the private assets being used to produce public goods? So again, we're what you're producing is pr arguably the same, although maybe uh there are some things that sort of fall within the boundaries of what we would expect the state to provide, and others that fall only within the boundaries of what we would expect voluntary provision to provide, and then there's a very big overlap between the two, but the means that you're using to do them are different. So on the one hand it's sort of public means of money taken in through taxation and then spent through public spending, and on the other hand it is private wealth and assets being spent through philanthropy. But actually again, I think the idea that we've got clear dividing lines uh here is very much runs against the grain of the history. For instance, I think in Hugh Cunningham's excellent paper um uh brief history of Western philanthropy, of which there are sort of various different versions out there, but he makes the point, he says in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries the terms charity and philanthropy, like the modern term welfare, designated broad areas of concern rather than particular modes of addressing those concerns. So the polarity of charity and philanthropy on the one hand and state action on the other was unknown, for the former could include the latter. The distinctions so fundamental to modern thinking between private donations and state funding make little sense. No one could say where the private ended and the public began. So I think, you know, these lines have always been blurred between state and philanthropy. I think a similar point applies to taxation on the on the supply side, kind of how you get the money in in the first place. You might want to draw the distinction between philanthropy and tax, saying, you know, philanthropy is voluntary, philanthropic giving is voluntary, and uh and the donor to some extent, the one giving it, has a degree of choice about where the money goes. Taxation, on the other hand, is involuntary and you can't choose. Again, I think this is a useful distinction to draw and it tells us something about philanthropy, but it's not perfect. I mean, does the distinction always work? I mean, firstly, is philanthropy always voluntary? In a strictly legal sense, usually yes, but but there are other ways in which something can be involuntary apart from the law compelling it. It may be morally compelled or culturally compelled or compelled by religious teachings. So I don't think the idea that philanthropy is entirely voluntary holds water. And also there are models in which arguably philanthropy is legally compelled. So there are places around the world where they have models of what they call percentage philanthropy, where part as part of your individual taxation you're allowed to uh decide where a portion of that, usually sort of one or two percent, goes and it can go towards social causes. Now, is that philanthropy or just hypothetic taxation? Hmm, the jury's still out on that one, but either way the lines seem quite blurry. Could we contrast philanthropy with politics, for instance, to try and tell us something about what philanthropy is or what it isn't? So the point here, can we contrast philanthropy as a private mode of driving social change with politics as a public mode of doing it? The thing about that is does that distinction entirely rest on an overly narrow view of what constitutes the political sphere? I think it probably does. Um, you know, in reality, a lot of philanthropy has always been aimed at campaigning for social change rather than merely delivering services. In fact, you know, to my mind it's at least as important, if not more so, than the direct provision of services when you look at the history of it. And as a result, a lot of that philanthropy necessarily crossed into the sphere of politics, and to be honest, nobody really thought much about that for a long time. I think you can also make a pretty strong case that actually all philanthropy is political in some sense, because actually the choices we make about what to give to represent an expression of views about how society should ideally be or what's lacking in the current status quo. Um and as I've mentioned, you know, when you look back in history, people like George Cadbury and John Passmore Edwards were blurring the lines all over the place because they were doing what we might think of now as phantom. They were also using their businesses to advance their kind of uh desire to address social causes, but they were also doing other things like owning newspapers or becoming MPs and sort of arguing for the same points in parliament. So it was a wide portfolio of different activities, and they didn't really see a dividing line between them. And then the final thing that I want to to flag up as a potential comparative philanthropy is justice, and this is very definitely a topic that we're going to come back to again and probably again. The point here is there's a very long-standing debate about the relationship between charity and philanthropy on the one hand and justice on the other. Do they, as some people argue, sit in opposition? So is charity sort of a uh an alternative to justice or a replacement for it in a problematic sense, or can it be a means for delivering justice? And is justice an important part of what should motivate philanthropy? And this, you know, lots of people have tussled with this question throughout the ages, from Immanuel Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft through to Martin Luther King and and probably most recently um Darren Walker, who's president of the Ford Foundation, and wrote a book a couple of years ago um called From Generosity to Justice. I'm definitely going to do an entire episode on this very question, and so I won't go into it in much detail now. But the point is just to flag up that justice is an important an important point of comparison when defining what philanthropy is not. The broad point being it's often argued philanthropy works within existing unjust systems and is a reflection of those systems, as opposed to being something that can challenge them at a fundamental level, and that requires other methods of social advance. So that's some of the things that we can compare philanthropy to, all of which has not necessarily brought us any closer to defining philanthropy, but hopefully has given you a sense of the richness and complexity of you know what seemed like a pretty simple question as a starting point. Um so then just in the final section, I want to come on briefly to uh pose the other question, which is you know, why should you care about all of this and care about philanthropy as a topic? Which, if you haven't already switched off the podcast, I'm hoping you'll be amenable to. Okay, so uh in this final short section, I just want to ask the question, uh the second part of the question posed in the title of the episode. Why should you care? Um, so I just want to think, you know, see, given what we've said about the history of philanthropy and what it tells us about the different ways in which we should define it, hopefully you've got a sense of the kind of richness of it as a topic. But I just want to add a little bit to that about why it's of relevance, uh, not only to people who already work in the field, but also to people much more broadly. And I particularly want to make the point about why we should care about putting philanthropy in wider context. Um now, partly that's out of self-interest, because I want to convince you that you should listen to future episodes of this podcast, uh, but also I genuinely do think that's important. So I guess the central point here is just to say that philanthropy has always played and obviously continues to play a key role in shaping the society we live in. Mostly I would say that's been for the better, but definitely sometimes it's been for the worst. So I think understanding what drives philanthropy, what makes for good philanthropy and what makes for bad philanthropy, what successes it's had, what failures it's had, uh and what some of the key themes that have arisen in debate about philanthropy have been feels really important to me. I think for those who are already engaged with philanthropy or working in the field, it's about deepening our understanding of philanthropy and putting it in wider context to make it clear that it's not just some weird niche little issue that sits in a corner somewhere that we care about and nobody else does, but rather that it's something that touches on a huge range of aspects of all of our lives and is and is relevant to pretty much all of the biggest debates facing society today. Conversely, for those who are not already engaged with philanthropy or never even stop to think about it, and who might well assume that it's a niche boring issue that sits somewhere over in a corner, I think this is about making it clear that philanthropy is relevant and important to a large number of existing mainstream debates that they might care about. And so actually, by taking philanthropy and the perspective of philanthropy to where people are already having those debates and making it clear why it is relevant and interesting, hopefully we can kind of widen out awareness of philanthropy as a factor in our society. Um also it's just interesting, I think. Anyway, uh I mean I'm fascinated by this stuff, and I'll keep making this podcast even if nobody listens to it, which is quite possible. But I think you know the the point to me, or like one of the best ways of putting why I think it's interesting, is that philanthropy is odd because it can be viewed from two different perspectives. So from a micro perspective, it's clearly about individual acts of giving. It's about individual donors and their choices about what to give and what motivates that, uh, you know, whatever sort of level of means they have available to them. But then when you zoom out and look at it at a macro level, philanthropy is uh something within society that acts as a means of redistribution that sits alongside the market and the state, uh, and is also a vital part of ensuring that we have a healthy civil society, which is kind of much more broadly important to democracy. And as a result, because of these two different ways of looking at it and the sort of you know the spectrum between them as you zoom in and out, I think it philanthropy lends itself to being viewed through lots of different lenses in interesting interesting ways. So you can look at it uh in terms of history, you can look at it in terms of politics, political theory, philosophy, psychology, theology, sociology, economics, evolutionary biology, literature, and loads of others. And you know, that's the sort of thing that I want to try and do in this podcast is to try and bring in some of those different perspectives and find places where philanthropy has been touched on as an issue in some of these different fields and try and sort of tie it together. So, you know, that's the point of the podcast, to share some of that with all of you. What I've already learned from engaging with all those different ways of looking at philanthropy and being a massive nerd about this stuff, and you know what I continue to learn from all the conversations I have outside this podcast with lots of interesting people working in philanthropy and civil society, and you know, some of the people that we're hopefully going to get as guests on future episodes. So if that sounds good, uh you know, go away right now, hit that subscribe button, um, give us a nice review uh on iTunes, wherever we get your podcast, um, share it with anybody else that you think might be interested, um, you know, flag it up on social media, spread the word, that would be that would be great. In terms of future episodes, um, as I say, we're gonna be doing a mixture of kind of thematic deep dives, so we'll definitely be doing stuff on uh kind of uh charity and justice, um, I'd like to look at philanthropy and literature. Uh, I definitely want to do one about uh philosophy and philanthropy and many, many more besides. Um, I've got some great interviews lined up already. Um, I'm not gonna say who they are because I'm slightly uh superstitious about that, and until they're actually recorded, I don't want to tell you in case they don't happen. But in the meantime, if you've got uh thoughts about topics we could cover on this or people I could try and talk to, um of the things that you liked about the podcast or indeed didn't like, do get in touch. Um you can do that either via the email address, which you can find on the website for the podcast, or get in touch via social media. Um I'm there at Rodri underscore h underscore Davis, uh also at for literacy. Uh and I may well even have set up a separate Twitter feed uh just for this podcast by the time it comes out, who knows? Uh if so, you'll be able to find it at Philanthropisms Podcast or something similar, but keep an eye out for that one. Um so yeah, I mean, in terms of things you might not you might like or dislike, um, I don't know if you noticed the stings that I used uh in this uh podcast. It's a thing I've just been fiddling around with experimenting. So one of them was putting some actual recorded speech of Andrew Carnegie, reading the Gospel of Wealth, to uh thoroughly inappropriate uh hip-hop backing, and the other one was a speech by the um philanthropist Julius Rosenwald that I particularly love, where he sort of casts scorn on the idea that rich people have the solutions to all of the world's problems, again set to an entirely appropriate drum and bass soundtrack, which I just thought were a bit fun. If they're not your cup of tea, do tell me, and I'll try not to do that sort of thing in the future. Equally, if you like them, uh you know, encourage me and I'll do more of it. Okay, well, thanks very much for listening. Um, I certainly hope to uh see many more of you back here in the future, and you know, hopefully this is going to be an enjoyable ride for all of us, so stay tuned. Bye, okay.