Ours is going to be a donor-driven economy for some time – until NESARA is proclaimed.
That leads me to want to consider some of the etiquette of giving.
Thanks to Ed Love for this stimulating article. From 2013.
In Big-Dollar Philanthropy, (Your Name Here) vs. Anonymity
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/us/in-philanthropy-your-name-here-vs-anonymous-giving.html
One hundred million dollars. As The New York Times reported this week, that’s how much Ronald O. Perelman pledged to Columbia University for the planned Ronald O. Perelman Center for Business Innovation. It’s the amount Stephen A. Schwarzman promised to the New York Public Library, which renamed its main building after him.
Thank goodness for these gifts, right? In the United States, no city becomes a major center of the arts, medicine or education without generous people giving away money, often to institutions that bear their name (or put it on a plaque, doorway or wing). Imagine New York without Solomon R. Guggenheim’s museum or Alfred P. Sloan Jr.’s cancer center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Philadelphia would be worse off without the Barnes Foundation, Los Angeles without the Getty.
But we can be grateful for the gifts while still inquiring after the givers’ motives. Why do so many givers ask that stuff be named after them: buildings, rooms, endowed professorships? Judeo-Christian tradition cautions against self-promotion. With charity, the medieval Jewish sage Maimonides wrote, it is best that the giver and receiver not know each other’s identities — in this way, the poor person’s dignity is preserved. (Better than charity, he wrote, is to give a poor person a job.)
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches that “when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets” but rather “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.”
Do Mr. Schwarzman, Henry R. Kravis or David H. Koch — to pick three of the country’s most generous, and least anonymous, donors — consider these religious admonitions? They did not respond to this columnist’s calls or e-mails. But plenty of others were willing to speak to the matter.
“The goal of all religion is to help you outwit your ego, shoot the sucker between the eyes, get it out of the way,” said Lawrence Kushner, an author and Reform rabbi who for 28 years served Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Mass. So his congregation did not permit any honors for donors — no plaques, no special thank-yous at the end of the sermon. Nothing.
“It cost us about $10,000, $20,000 a month in money we could have otherwise got,” Rabbi Kushner estimated. But there was a big upside, “the awesome experience to look out over the congregation and see this guy who had just given $100,000 sitting next to the guy who I was giving money to from my discretionary fund,” with neither aware of the other’s finances. “The idea was, it’s not about you. If you want it to be about you, there are some wonderful congregations where, for enough money, it can be all about you.”
Some religious thinkers take a more complicated view. All giving is good, after all, even if some kinds may be better. “I think the primary issue is that poor people get money,” said Michael Paley, a rabbi who works with donors as a scholar-in-residence at UJA-Federation of New York, the Jewish philanthropy. And that transfer of wealth can work in many ways, he said.
Rabbi Paley said he was very moved when people gave anonymously; he mentioned one donor who gave $10 million to his organization. On the other hand, he said, public giving can spur more giving. He recalled the old tradition, now discontinued, of hosting dinners where wealthy donors would egg one another on to give more.
“A guy would get up in front of room — it was often Ace Greenberg, the legendary Ace Greenberg” — the former head of Bear Stearns, the investment bank — “and he would get up with cards and say, ‘Goodman, how much?’ and ‘Goldstein, how much?’ And in half an hour they would raise 20 million bucks. It was kind of amazing. People would get up and say, ‘Half a million dollars,’ and they would say, ‘Next!’ ” The story, Mr. Paley said, “is not about wealth but almost unbridled generosity.”
The philosopher Patricia Illingworth, the editor of “Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy,” said that “public giving is more desirable in many ways, because it really creates this culture of giving.” Only because it was public, Ms. Illingworth noted, did Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffett’s “giving pledge” inspire dozens of other extremely wealthy peers to pledge half their fortunes to charity.
There are still more considerations. A museum or hospital in the midst of a capital campaign might pressure a shy donor to be named, for the extra publicity. Institutions may dangle naming rights before they even have a donor. “When the New York State Theater was raising funds for its renovation in 2008, the opportunity to rename the theater in acknowledgment of a major gift was offered to potential donors,” said Rob Daniels, a spokesman for the New York City Ballet. Mr. Koch, the industrialist known for his conservative politics, took them up on the opportunity.
By contrast, a donor might decline to be named so as not to become a mark for every fund-raiser in town. Buff Kavelman, a New York donor adviser, mentioned a widow “who was able to give seven-figure gifts” but wanted to remain anonymous “because she didn’t want to be pounced on.”
One could, of course, give publicly without asking that a building be renamed for oneself. Yet this desire for immortality is not new. From early Christian times until the Renaissance, it was common for wealthy patrons to have their likenesses painted into scenes of the Crucifixion, or alongside the Madonna, often to be hung in churches — as if the donors themselves were holy.
Even simple admonitions, like those of Maimonides and Jesus, yield complications. Maimonides was writing about direct giving to the poor, not the world of large nonprofits. And Eric Gregory, a Christian ethicist at Princeton, said in an e-mail that while “it is hard to overstate the importance of charitable giving for the Christian tradition,” it is also true that “anonymous giving can be done in a spirit of pride as well, at least internally, when you tell yourself, ‘See how virtuous I am!’”
What’s more, Professor Gregory said, anonymity precludes relationships. “We are all receivers and givers,” he said, “so anonymity (and professionalization) might get in the way of building relationships, if it is just a matter of writing checks.” This was a concern shared by Rabbi Kushner, who said that he disagreed with Maimonides’ famous dictum about anonymity.
“I think Maimonides is wrong,” Rabbi Kushner said. “Because I think it’s very important, in matters of charity, both for the giver and receiver to see one another’s face. I think the poor man wants to know who’s giving the gift, and the rich man wants to see the smile on the poor man’s face.”
Mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail
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