by Cecelia Lynch
As 2015 drew to a close, my inbox became more and more crowded with requests for donations from religious and non-religious groups, begging anew a central question posed by this Blog: how do those with more than enough resources aid those who have little to none? More specifically, can aid – and wealth – be transferred in an egalitarian manner that avoids the hierarchical and unequal ordering of the past and paternalism of the present? At stake is the very meaning of charity and its relationship to justice. How far have the tax-avoidance and quick-results forms of charity strayed from the original Latin “caritas” in Christianity, referring to unconditional love for others, or its role as one of the central pillars in Islam, linking it directly to the attainment of social justice?
In recent weeks, several intersecting debates have swirled around related questions, although the discussion tends to be removed from any “religious” roots, focusing instead on whether and how the grotesquely wealthy can “do good” with their enormous affluence. (The emails in my box are asking for chump change in comparison.) One of these debates concerns the so-called “Silicon Valley philanthropy,” brought to the forefront by the “donation” of billions of dollars by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan. The debate about whether the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, structured as a limited liability company rather than a foundation, can effectively provide real benefits to anyone other than the Chan-Zuckerbergs has been filling U.S. news pages. In its focus on wanting to change the world and achieve results, the Chan-Zuckerberg debate merges with the one surrounding the concept of “effective altruism” articulated by Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. These debates fail to acknowledge the growing injustices – in Africa and increasingly in countries in the “Global North” such as the United States – created by global market dynamics that enable the wealth of billionaire corporate philanthropists such as the Chan-Zuckerbergs.
Philosopher Singer argues that effective altruism – sharing the profits of wealth in ways that save the most lives – not only brings happiness to the giver but also does the most good. The implications for aid to Africa are clear: more bed nets, more deworming resources, etc. Singer’s argument is that one of his former students is doing great good by earning a lot of money working on Wall Street for an arbitrage trading firm and donating up to half of it, thereby providing funds to save many lives on a regular basis.
The assumptions underlying both the concept of effective altruism and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are problematic on a number of levels, even as anyone’s ability to help cure diseases and save lives can be a potent good.
For example, as Catherine Tumber points out in her rebuttal to Singer, his “case for effective altruism brings to mind … the well-known criticism [of Andrew Carnegie], which Carnegie himself anticipated, that the steel magnate’s philanthropic largesse was made possible by squeezing value from his workers, deskilling most and forcing them into twelve-hour workdays of low-paid penury.” Tumber continues,
Had Carnegie shared his staggering wealth through decent wages and working conditions rather than built thousands of libraries, working people could have built their own libraries – and much else besides. Modern global poverty, Singer’s preoccupation here, emerged from a series of violent historical maneuvers similar to Carnegie’s – through the colonial seizure of land, political power, culture, and hard-won skill, which continues today by means of neoliberal trade policies that primarily benefit the financial sector.
Travel writer Paul Theroux’s piece on “The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor” accuses today’s philanthropists of the same maneuvers:
Every so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, ‘to lift people out of poverty.’ Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And here’s the funny thing about that: In most cases, they have made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam or Mexico.
Theroux unnecessarily pits African, Latin American and Asian workers against American workers. But he includes the new form of entrepreneur in his charge, pointing out that Tim Cook of Microsoft outsources tech industry components to Chinese manufacturers. Others, however, defend Silicon Valley’s “new” forms of philanthropy as less ostentatious and more likely to result in breakthroughs against poverty and disease than the “old” forms of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Adam Davidson, for example, writes, “Whatever you think of Silicon Valley, the venture-capital philosophy of investing can be an extremely useful model for philanthropy in its confident embrace of risk.” But the question is whose livelihoods are placed at risk by this philosophy of taking risk by those who can afford to embrace it? Davidson notes that contemporary tech investors fund numerous ideas “with the knowledge that most will not be home runs. The ideas that prove themselves in the market move to larger rounds.” Davidson’s accolades in favor of venture capitalism also echo the ambitious, yet failed, experiments of Jeffrey Sachs that we have discussed previously on this Blog (see “The Fight against Poverty: Humanitarian Idealism and the Elusive Quest for Development”).
One of those ideas that proved not to be a home run was Mark Zuckerberg’s donation of $100 million to improve schools in Newark, New Jersey, earning the wrath of public school advocates there for siphoning off public resources and focusing on more elite charter schools. Zuckerberg’s generosity can be seen as part of the current “philanthrocapitalist” move to weaken public control, similar to previous moves by international institutions and foreign banks to weaken African states in the name of promoting reform and fighting poverty. Actually, the initiative resulted in double trouble – not only did it exclude input from those whose livelihoods were most at stake, but Zuckerberg soon decided to pull the rug out from Newark students, when he concluded the experiment had failed and defunded it.
The reliance on market solutions and the propensity to move money away from “experiments” that don’t work quickly is also the subject of a new book by Linsey McGoey of the University of Sussex that is critical of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s work in Africa and elsewhere. According to a review from In These Times, the book articulates “serious concerns about the extent to which the massive philanthropic sector depletes funding for traditional social services.” While the structures of Gates (a foundation) and Chan Zuckerberg (a private initiative) differ, and while both billionaires and their spouses are no doubt sincere in wanting to use a portion of their wealth to help the world, both are part of a “Silicon Valley way of philanthropy” that “demands more control over where the money is spent” and can disempower those they mean to help (see the AGRA Watch campaign challenging the Gates Foundation’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, http://cagj.org/agra-watch).
A very basic, and very major, problem with these initiatives is the hubris our contemporary billionaires exhibit in imposing their own vision and ideas about “what works” on those they decide should benefit from their largesse. This hubris, however, is based on a major falsehood: the idea that the billionaire has created all of [his] wealth [himself], through personal genius, business acumen, and independence from public authority and decision-making structures. Such a belief has perhaps reached a new apex with the controversial “gift” of the Chan-Zuckerbergs, whose statement detailing their intentions actually speaks of “promoting equality.” Yet, As Chuck Collins points out, Facebook and Zuckerberg clearly benefited from “50 years of public investment in the internet,” and Linsey McGoey notes that “private fortunes have always been bolstered through regulatory interventions and legal frameworks.” Zuckerberg’s $45 billion in holdings, like the wealth of Gates, Carnegie and others, could not be amassed without the significant contributions of numerous others, public and private.
To sum up, neither the new philanthropy nor effective altruism counters the neocolonial and paternalistic practices of the aid industry. Indeed, both threaten to reinscribe them more forcefully given the immense amounts of money that are potentially involved.
In Africa, a new generation of billionaires is also growing in number, and some of them are also engaged in philanthropy. More work needs to be done on how the ultra-rich amasses its wealth, its philosophies and practices of philanthropy, and the effects of resulting initiatives. There is constant criticism of repetitive, top-down models of aid among recipients and aid providers, whether religious or “secular,” yet it looks as though today’s vast infusions of money will continue to create the kinds of initiatives that often repeat the same mistakes. In the meantime, where does this leave the rest of us, including the students we teach and the people we interact with who want to do good in the world? A return to examining the meaning and roots of charity and connecting it to justice in ways that address structural causes of poverty and suffering is important. Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, has begun this conversation, but it needs to go much further, reconnecting charity and justice, and the overhaul of unjust economic structures and incentives, to both religious and non-religious ethics. Angus Deaton, an economist who, like Singer, teaches at Princeton, makes an excellent point in relating his discussions with students “who want to relieve suffering in the world”:
Should they go to Dhaka or Dakar? Focus on bed nets or worms? I tell them to go to Washington or London and to work to stop the harm that rich countries do; to oppose the arms trade, the trade deals that benefit only the pharmaceutical companies, the protectionist tariffs that undermine the livelihoods of African farmers; and to support more funding to study tropical disease and health care. Or they could go to Africa, become citizens, and cast their lot with those they want to help. That is how they can save the lives of African kids.
While it may not be possible for all to become citizens of Guinea or Zimbabwe, Deaton’s lesson requires us to reexamine, again and again, the meaning of equality. Such an examination is critical for any attempt to realize charity as love, justice, or both, and it is definitely imperative for efforts to expose the ongoing, structural links between extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
Cecelia Lynch is a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. She is also co-editor of the CIHA Blog.