LOOKING FOR ANDREW CARNEGIE
by Richard Todd

reprinted from Worth magazine, November 1996.

Is there anyone big enough to match the great man's largesse? Not long ago, on a trip up the Maine coast, I stopped at the Portland Museum of Art and soon found myself staring in admiration at a small painting by John Singer Sargent. It was one I'd never seen before, a portrait of Mrs. Henry St. John Smith. According to a plaque, the painting had been a gift to the museum from the subject's grandson. Mrs. St. John Smith had been a beautiful woman, with dark hair and a thin, elegant nose, and Sargent had painted her with his usual intimacy and constrained sensuality. It's a splendid painting.

I had been thinking about philanthropy recently, and standing there I had a sudden apprehension of the philanthropic impulse - it seemed a concretely noble thing. I realized simultaneously that I must lack it, because had I been the owner of such a beautiful object I could never have parted with it.

Later I looked into the painting's history, and the story, of course, turned out to be more complicated than I had imagined: a family dispute over whether or not to sell, a compromise decision to make the gift to the museum, a donation assisted by the U.S. tax code, which allowed the donor to take a charitable deduction equal to the full appreciated value of the painting.

Yet I still had the sense that the man who could give this thing away was not just a richer but a better man than I. And it struck me that in a society concerned about its stability feelings of this sort are usefully cultivated.

We are famously a country of dualisms, and one we enjoy is this: Unless some tribe of loony getters and givers is discovered in the rain forest, America is at once the most acquisitive and the most philanthropic of cultures. It's a paradox remarked on by Tocqueville and cherished ever since. Often enough, philanthropy is the story we tell to help us forget the materialism of national life. But it's a true story, too. Robert Payton of the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy says, "The philanthropic tradition is America's most distinctive virtue."

	FACTS & FIGURES This year, Americans are expected to spend a record $376 billion on dining out, says the National Restaurant Association. If the average American family would spend half their dining-out budget on philanthropy, the nation's giving totals would double. More Facts & Figures

The health of that tradition, though, has many people worried, particularly as they contemplate the famous "$10 trillion transfer" of wealth that will occur in the next generation. Total philanthropic contributions continue to rise - by nearly 11 percent in 1995 - but what ethic will govern the disposition of the enormous wealth assembled since the Second World War? A study done three years ago revealed that eight of ten individuals with estates over $1 million left nothing to nonprofit institutions. "Put another way," says Peter Karoff of the Philanthropic Initiative, a consulting group, "10 percent of the wealthy give 80 percent of the gifts."

Last year, Americans gave about $140 billion to charity - that is, to one another. How large a sum this is depends on your perspective. On the one hand, it's about $20 billion more than the federal deficit, and it almost equals total revenues from corporate income taxes. On the other hand, $140 billion is considerably less than the total net worth of the 100 richest Americans.

The country now has 149 billionaires (individuals and families), according to a July issue of Forbes magazine. One would not want these billionaires to strip themselves of assets, but suppose we approached only those with more than $2 billion and asked them to give away all but a basic billion. Together, this little group of 62 could create, for example, 27 universities as well endowed as Harvard. Yet despite some instances of spectacular generosity among the new plutocrats - such as George Soros, Walter Annenberg, and the late David Packard and Walter Haas - most of the fortunes remain unnicked by philanthropy. (Perhaps the situation will change soon: Ted Turner, whose net worth is about to increase thanks to Time Warner's acquisition of his network, has proposed a philanthropic competition among billionaires.) Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Sumner Redstone are just the best known of the billionaires who have to date declined to commit substantial portions of their fortunes to the public good.

But $140 billion is also less than it may seem because neither the source nor the use of the money is subject to even the roughest hand of a market. It's a glory and sometimes a heartbreak of philanthropy that it often seems utterly random and chaotic. A celebrity falls victim to an obscure disease and suddenly it has a foundation and researchers devoted to a cure. Huge fortunes sit on the sidelines, while lesser ones participate. No one asks Mookie Wilson, the former New York Met, to endorse sneakers these days, but among athletes he is one of the most dedicated of philanthropists. The famous MacArthur Foundation hands out "genius" grants, but a renegade MacArthur heir, Rick MacArthur, runs his own foundation, which concentrates on the rights of death-row inmates: "It gives me a lot of satisfaction to help those despised by the rest of society," he says.

Prudent philanthropic management argues for the preservation of capital into perpetuity, but some benefactors break this rule with spectacular results. Aaron Diamond, who made his money in Manhattan real estate, bequeathed about $150 million to his foundation; the intention was to give it all away within ten years of his death. Under the guidance of his wife, Irene, the foundation has now spent nearly all its capital; doing so enabled it to sponsor the work that led to the discovery of protease inhibitors for AIDS treatment.

Although for most of us foundations present the most visible face of philanthropy - awarding grants, commissioning studies - the 42,000 foundations in the country account for only about $10 billion of philanthropic giving. Last year fully 40 percent of all money given came from individuals and went to their churches; schools received about 15 percent of all individual giving.

Without this $140 billion river of charity, our culture would be an unimaginably more arid place: symphonies silenced; museums, libraries, schools, and hospitals closed, along with countless little centers of betterment, from homeless shelters to think tanks. As Robert Payton of the Center on Philanthropy puts it, most crucially philanthropy does the work that wouldn't get done otherwise, "the things in which the market is uninterested and at which the state is incompetent."

As the parable of the widow's mite instructs, it isn't the size of the gift that matters in the eyes of God but the amount of the sacrifice. By this standard, many will tell you that the poor are the most generous people in America. Indeed, an oft cited study done a few years ago seemed to prove that the poor give a larger percentage of their income to charity than any other income group. The finding became one of those pleasing, symbolic pieces of information, appealing as it does to a sentimental cynicism about the classes.

But it wasn't quite accurate. Among households that give anything, those in the lowest brackets give a higher percentage, but the percentage of contributing households rises as you go up the income ladder. Among families with incomes over $100,000, virtually all donate something to charity.

But if the myth of the golden-hearted poor doesn't quite hold up, the facts are startling enough. The truth is that, by and large, contributions don't vary much at all according to class: The proportion of household income devoted to charity remains pretty constant, between 2 and 3 percent, rising modestly among thevery rich.

Tracy Gary learned when she was quite young that she would never have to work, though she was told by her mother that she must work out of social obligation. Growing up with houses in New York and Florida and a summer retreat on an island in Lake Superior, she had not escaped the knowledge that she was rich, but her inheritance, $2 million, wasn't revealed to her until she was a teenager. By then she had received lessons in philanthropy. Her first allowance was, in effect, attached (many of the giving rich tell this very anecdote about themselves): She was to give away a nickel of every quarter she received. In high school, she was given a checking account designated specifically for charity; she donated $1,000 or $2,000 a year, chiefly on the island where she summered.

Some people go to a college like Sarah Lawrence and discover the existence of the upper class, but it was there (she graduated in 1973) that Gary realized many people were poorer than she had thought. She paid the tuition of one student who would otherwise have had to drop out. She says she made some mistakes - loans that went unpaid - and she is glad she did because they saved her from greater mistakes later on.

What is a value or a good habit for some became the center of her life. In San Francisco, where she now lives, she is national director of Resourceful Women, a network of some 80 women with combined personal assets in excess of $2 billion. The group gives away about $30 million a year, most of it to "socially progressive" causes. She acts as intermediary between recipients and donors, counseling donors on the most effective ways to give. For some, this is a life-changing experience, a moment of coming to terms with the good fortune that has often provided them with an uneasy identity.

"What I see again and again among the rich is that they feel anxious, worried that it's all going to go away and that it can't be replaced," says Gary. Creating a plan that involves giving away money in an orderly fashion paradoxically makes people feel safer. "Among women, especially, I see what I call Bag Lady Syndrome, women who won't spend a penny on themselves because they fear that, once they start spending, the money will vanish. I have literally known homeless people on the street who feel more self-confidence than many people who have $5 million in the bank....Giving helps people to integrate their sense of wealth and security."

Of her original $2 million inheritance, she has given away about $1.7 million, and she lives on investments that were generated by the rest. The pleasure she now derives from money comes from raising large sums of it for causes she cares about: "It's a skill I have." When she started giving away assets, she says, "an enormous sense of abundance came over me. You would think you would feel depleted, but no, it's just the opposite."

Those for whom wholesale divestiture is a way of life are rare; still, when you set out to learn something about philanthropy you are struck by the number of people who have walked away from substantial fortunes.

I recently met a quiet Midwesterner named David Frey, who looks like the bank vice president he is, at NBD Bank in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He also serves on the board of the Frey Foundation, which is devoted to local environmental and welfare issues. Like the fortune that founded it, the foundation is not nationally known.

Yet $120 million endows this organization, all wealth created by Mr. Frey's father, who started the Foremost Insurance Company. Frey says of himself and his siblings: "We didn't think it was in our best interests to have the money. Learning to live with wealth is a challenge, and the world is replete with examples of how not to do it. People who have been around wealth, particularly mature wealth, learn that it's not having a house on every continent that counts. You can take a more balanced view. You can have your toys and still be philanthropic."

The name on Peggy Dulany's birth certificate is Margaret Dulany Rockefeller. She's the daughter of David Rockefeller and the late Margaret McGrath Rockefeller, but she ceased using her last name during the 1960s after she graduated from Radcliffe, an anti-war activist at odds with her father's politics. She has long since mended her fences with her family, but she still enjoys the buffer of anonymity you don't have if you're a Rockefeller.

Of the current generation - "the cousins" - Dulany is the one who most prominently enacts the family's philanthropic tradition. She is the only Rockefeller who serves on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, she is a frequent proselytizer for philanthropic activity, and she founded a nonprofit organization of her own, called Synergos Institute.

Synergos (accent on the second syllable) addresses international poverty, concentrating on projects in six countries - Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and India. Its interests don't differ greatly from those of the internationally minded Rockefeller Brothers Fund, though it reflects its founder's liberal politics, with an emphasis on involving the beneficiaries in decisions meant to better their lives.

Peggy Dulany speaks of her student years working in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro: "One thing I learned in Brazil I have never forgotten, and that is how hard people work to solve their problems. The myth of the lazy poor is just that - a myth. But there is a terrible gap between the very poor and access to the information they need."

Vacationing last summer at her house near Mount Desert Island, Maine, she reflected on how the Rockefeller tradition of philanthropy had been passed on to her, including the instruction that part of her childhood allowance was always for others. But she added, "I've been thinking about my mother, who died earlier this year, and in a way I think I got more of my values from her. She had an intense sense of fairness and justice. She would write us from trips about things she saw that troubled her. It means a lot when a parent does that. We would travel through Harlem and talk about how wrong it was for people
to have to live like that."

There is much one would like to know about the inner life of any Rockefeller, of the pictures in the mind (memories of a ride through Harlem imposed on the view out a seaside window), the mingled sense of power and helplessness. In Dulany's mind, the questions seem to have resolved themselves pragmatically: "I don't believe that altruism is one of the basic human emotions, not like sadness or anger. It's something you have to learn. When I talk to people about philanthropy, I talk about self-interest. What I say is that when there is despair at the bottom of society it will find its way to the top. The gaps are growing wider, and in the long run that's bad for the world and bad for everybody."

Philanthropy is disarming. My skepticism fades in the presence of people giving away millions. Yet I suppose it is wise to remember that motives can be mixed. Some would say that the motives are worse than mixed. People who work in the field - the fund-raisers, consultants, program officers - can become jaded. One such woman says, "What motivates donors? The motivation is 100 percent taxes. That's what these people brag about to me - how much they're saving in taxes. There is this ethos among the rich - we don't pay taxes, taxes are for schnooks. Let the schnooks pay to run the government, we'll get the glory of being philanthropists."

The coziness the tax code affords the charitable angers many - and only in part, I think, for reasons of social policy; that is, outrage at the tax dollars lost for the government's programs of betterment. The real annoyance has to do with the motivation of the donors, whose impulse is felt to be impure if it includes self-benefit.

But one can argue: So what? Isn't it the net effect that matters? And the net effect is the movement of resources toward, if not to, the bottom of society. As one foundation executive puts it, "Whoever wrote the provision in the tax law of 1913, whoever saw that it was wise to give special benefits for the transfer of assets, that man is an unsung American hero....This is the way to redistribute wealth in this country - because it's voluntary."

Claude Rosenberg, founder of RCM Capital Management in San Francisco, is one of those men whose every phrase seems to emanate from a bottomless reserve of financial prudence. He has written a book called Wealthy and Wise, in which he "confesses" to a moment when he made an unsettling discovery about his personal finances - he didn't realize how much disposable income he had, and it was a great deal more than he would have guessed. "We had dramatically understated our potential," he writes. "Since we were basically happy with our standard of living...we concluded that we could have been sharing more of what we had. A lot more!"

What Rosenberg discovered to be true of his family he found, on research, to be true of many - in fact, he argues that a wholesale underestimation of its ability to be generous pervades the American upper class. "My research," he writes, "resulted in a startling conclusion: the charitable deductions of the IRS's top income group averaged less than 10 percent of what they could safely afford!" It is Rosenberg's contention that charitable giving, chiefly by the rich, could be increased by $100 billion annually without anyone's really feeling the pinch.

This bonanza would come from a relative few: 90 percent of it from 3.4 million taxpayers, with 40 percent from just 51,000 of the very rich. Forty billion dollars
from 51,000 people means an average contribution of about $800,000 a year. That it's eminently possible for 51,000 people to do this is another impressive illustration of the amount of wealth held by the very rich in this country.

What is a reasonable amount for the well-off to contribute? Conventionally this question is answered in terms of income, in part because of the charitable deduction (limited to 50 percent). Rosenberg argues that the amount should be calculated instead on a basis of earning assets - investments that produce income. Looked at in this way, the giving habits of America's rich seem embarrassingly stingy. Rosenberg's figures are from 1991; in that year taxpayers in the Internal Revenue Service's highest tier had an average annual income of $1.8 million (excluding capital gains) and took an average of $87,000
in charitable deductions, 4.8 percent of their income. Rosenberg calculates an average net worth, counting only earning assets, of $16 million for these people and points out that the average donation is just one-half of 1 percent of that figure. (The giving habits of the poor do begin to look more virtuous; one-fifth of the population, including many donors, has a negative net worth.) Rosenberg argues that even among the moderately wealthy charitable contributions of 2 to 3 percent of earning assets are not onerous.

What would be the effect on the nation of such an upsurge in charity? The initial effect might be problematic - a loss in tax revenues. But Rosenberg argues plausibly that the near- and long-term results would be a reduction of the federal deficit and a major enhancement of social programs. Professionals in the "third sector" always caution that private philanthropy can never be expected to supplant public programs, and of course they are right. Yet suppose a significant portion of the $100 billion were directed toward innovative programs for the poor. The welfare programs the nation argued over most strenuously last year - Aid to Families With Dependent Children; Women, Infants, and Children; and food stamps - represented a total expenditure of $52 billion. Even a quarter of the $100 billion could make an enormous practical difference. Perhaps most important, the ties between the upper and lower reaches of society, which now seem frayed to near nonexistence, might be strengthened.

There is not a whiff of the revolutionary about Rosenberg, who is a friend of wealth. In conversation he has a kind of technocratic enthusiasm for problem solving and the confidence of someone whose money problems ended when he earned his first nickel. His vision is an ameliorative one; if anything, he means to preserve rather than upset the existing order. "Let's think about what will happen if we don't do this: If we were to have another recession in this country, we could see some very ugly things." Yet for all its essential conservatism, the Rosenberg model, were it enacted by America's rich, would indeed alter the social landscape.

Not surprisingly, Rosenberg's ideas are much touted among foundation executives and others in the third sector. His book has enjoyed several small printings, and he gives much of his time now to advancing his cause and to practicing what he preaches, through a family foundation. But on the outside no one seems to know about his ideas. What they need, everyone seems to agree, is a highly visible spokesman.

In liberal-doctrinaire history classes at certain schools, the figure of Andrew Carnegie struts only briefly upon the stage. He is characterized as a robber baron who ultimately did penance by a program of philanthropy that itself turned out to be an opportunity for self-glorification. The teacher will mention Carnegie's monumental libraries, pointing out that he failed to provide books.

This had been my education, and it was a surprise to learn that among contemporary students of philanthropy Carnegie is an altogether different figure - little less than a hero. At the Center on Philanthropy, he and Jane Addams are honored with a fellowship given in their names. His landmark essay, "The Gospel of Wealth," published in 1889, remains the most important credo on the subject of philanthropy ever written in America.

According to Dwight Burlingame, a director at the center, "Carnegie still has lessons for us today. Get beyond the language and the gender issues. He had the guts to face the big questions about the objects of wealth."

The "Gospel" began as two magazine pieces, published in North American Review, at a moment when Carnegie, though nowhere near as rich as he would become, started shifting the focus in his life from making money to giving it away. Only 15 years after he began to manufacture steel, his net worth stood at $30 million (by the end of his life he would give away $350 million). His good fortune suddenly seemed to him the emblematic and not untroubling story of the age in which he lived. The essay sets out its theme grandly: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship."

Class relations is a persistent theme. Carnegie laments the separation between the classes - which, he acknowledges, increases in industrial society. But he quickly points out that this is a necessary price one pays for a civilization that has put hitherto unimaginable amenities within reach of the masses, even as it has disproportionately rewarded the few: "much better this irregularity than universal squalor."

But the social machine needs to be prevented from self-destructing, and the governor is philanthropy. Carnegie had contempt for those who sought to provide vast estates for their heirs, arguing that inherited wealth is bad for the society and bad for the beneficiaries. This leads to the essay's most famous line: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."

To Carnegie, the burden on the philanthropist is the betterment of his fellows, the placing of "ladders on which the aspiring can rise." Carnegie lays out the rationale for his program of libraries and describes other suitable venues -such as museums, universities, public halls, "swimming-baths," and parks - of which he said that they may "reach to those who have the divine spark ever so feebly developed, that it may be strengthened and grow."

One can imagine sitting in the cool, dark interior of Carnegie's Berkshire mansion of a summer afternoon and hearing the great man expatiate on the responsibility of the wealthy for the "improvement of the race," a phrase he loved. No doubt one would grow restless, even annoyed, at the vanity in his voice.

Today's billionaires, schooled in a more democratic idiom, would doubtless not make this mistake. But then again, they don't seem to say much at all about the responsibilities of wealth.

"Carnegie would be aghast at these people," says Dwight Burlingame of the Center on Philanthropy. His colleague Robert Payton remarks, "If you're going to be a philanthropist, you need a general sense of what a good society is. Carnegie may have been a sexist and an imperialist, but he had a philosophy. He believed in democratic capitalism, and he acted on it. He was a one-man GI Bill. He enabled people to learn."

Burlingame, Payton, and others make the point that contemporary philanthropy urgently needs somebody to take on the mission that Carnegie assumed for his age: to enunciate a code of responsibility for the very rich.

"We are lagging behind," Payton laments. "You look at the names of people who have the wealth today and you're looking at first-generation wealth. What is happening is just what happened a century ago, new industries producing a disproportionate number of wealthy people. Suddenly somebody has $80 million and they don't know what to do with it. I met such a person just recently. He wanted to do something for kids but hadn't thought beyond a big contribution to the Boy Scouts. I said to him: 'Why don't you make a 100-year commitment to children?' No one is leading the way. Warren Buffett is one of the most intelligent men in business, but he's been a disappointment. He should be writing a gospel of wealth. Perhaps the closest thing we have to a modern-day Carnegie is George Soros."

Soros is best known for the $1 billion profit he made in the space of a few days of currency speculation in 1992, betting correctly on the collapse of the British pound. It was a crisis that, in the view of many, he helped precipitate. Since then he has been a highly visible international benefactor, perhaps in contrition, though, in fairness, he had begun a program of philanthropy a dozen years earlier, having reached the conclusion that he needed only about $25 million to meet his personal needs.

Soros thinks in large terms. His concerns are international, particularly the re-emerging nations of Eastern Europe, where he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars. He has established separate foundations in 25 countries.

Soros also has a certain taste for disorder. Aryeh Neier, president of the Soros foundations, claims that during his first year on the job not a day went by without someone's referring to a major foundation initiative he had never heard of before: "Only George knew everything." For his part, Soros likes to talk of his willingness to trust his associates and once commented that the foundation projects that produced the greatest satisfaction were "from activities I knew nothing about, that I ran across accidentally." So a certain creative chaos seems to rule. Neier remarks dryly, "We run the largest foundation in the country with a living donor. There are advantages and disadvantages."

The most interesting part of Soros's résumé, to me, is not his dramatic moments in trading or giving but the gap - the three years in the early 1960s during which he all but abandoned his career in finance to pursue his interest in philosophy, particularly the theories of Karl Popper. It is Popper's concept of the "open society" as an ultimate political good that now animates Soros's philanthropy.

Reading Soros the philosopher is an experience complicated, I think, by one's knowledge of Soros the billionaire. During his youthful sabbatical, he acquired a great taste for theories of indeterminacy, which led to the central concept of his life, something he calls "the theory of reflexivity." The theory, he writes in Soros on Soros, "has to do with the role of the thinking participant, and the relationship between his thinking and the events in which he participates....The two roles interfere with each other." To my ear, his vision veers between the obvious ("We always act on the basis of imperfect understanding") and the inscrutable: "Recognizing the human condition does not quite qualify as knowledge - it would be self-contradictory if it did - but it provides a set of beliefs that is more appropriate to the human condition than any other." But, as I say, this would all seem more comprehensible from Jacques Derrida than from someone who has turned his wisdom into a billion dollars.

Soros wins the heart of the philanthropic community not because of his vision but because of the sheer scope of his bountifulness and his personal engagement in the charitable enterprise. He has not become a spokesman for philanthropy and does not try to urge others to give. He claims to have considerable skepticism about the very concept of philanthropy, saying that it tends to corrupt both the benefactor and the recipient. But he is a powerful exemplar.

It is hard to divine the inner effect of Soros's extraordinary giving, but based on his own testimony, his new life of good works doesn't seem to have brought him much surcease. Maybe it was not meant to. In his book, he reflects on one of his ventures in the then collapsing Soviet Union: "I have talked about my messianic fantasies; I am not ashamed of them; the world would be a grim place without such fantasies. But they are fantasies. And to be godlike is to be removed from humanity. The great benefit of the foundation to me personally was that it brought me in touch with humanity. But the explosive growth of the foundation and the sheer size of the operation brought with it the danger that I would become estranged from humanity once again. I became an awesome figure....

"On one hand, I find it gratifying, but on the other, the sheer magnitude of my activities, both in business and in philanthropy, makes me uneasy. I must admit that I...probably could not feel all of a piece if I weren't larger than life."

I met Cynthia Mc-Lachlan at the annual meeting of the Council on Foundations, in Atlanta, which is really more like a convention for philanthropists and their bureaucratic counterparts. The air was heavy with lingo, with "devolution" and "site visits" and "ends testing" and so on.

McLachlan, a beautiful, high-spirited woman in her 50s, was at this convention but not quite of it. "I'm new at this," she said, "and I'm aglow." With the cooperation of her grown children, she had recently finished setting up Girl's Best Friend Foundation, devoted to the well-being of teenage girls in Illinois. The money, several million dollars, came from the estate of her late husband, Donald, a lawyer in Chicago who was instrumental in the formation of the Wisconsin Central railroad and became its chairman.

She spoke affectionately and unsentimentally about her husband. "He taught us that you don't quit something just because you lose interest in it. You finish. I see this in my kids all the time." At the same time she disagreed with him politically, noting that he had become more conservative as he grew more prosperous. "Just before he died, he looked at us with a wry smile and said, 'You mean I'm going to leave all this money to you five pinkos?' And we said, 'That's ri-ight.'"

The money came without restrictions, and it proved at first a source of trouble. "Suddenly we just had this pot of beans, and it's very off-putting to people who don't have it. I was constantly being hit up for money. I was asked to fund a bowling alley, a garage, a mussel farm. I was invited to join this board and that. I assiduously stay off boards - it's insulting to be asked if you aren't particularly qualified. But now I just say, 'If it's not about girls in Illinois, sorry.'"

Why girls? Though never materially deprived, McLachlan felt drawn to the plight of girls in the worst of circumstances. "Don't get me wrong. I love men. Men have been the most important thing in my life. I went to college for one reason. Because I realized that if you didn't you couldn't get your picture on the bridal page of The New York Times. But it took me 50 years to learn how to stand up to a man. I know lots of women, married to rich men, who cannot say, 'I want $10,000 to spend as I see fit.'"

Rightly or wrongly, one hears in this self-characterization the rationale for a foundation devoted to the needs of impoverished teenage mothers, a kinship with kids whose lives in no evident way resemble hers. McLachlan met with her children and said she wanted to start a foundation. They readily agreed -"They're real hair-shirt types anyway" - and took an active hand in the planning. "It was six weeks from mission statement to our first grant. It felt so good to do this. It was a relief to my conscience. It's such a high!"

It has become a generally accepted truth in our time that in order to accomplish much, even to have a successful "relationship," you have to learn to love yourself. When we forget this, we're quite willing to pay a psychotherapist to remind us. Odd that for most of human history self-love was not felt to be much of a problem.

I was struck by this recently while reading a little book about giving, in this case about giving something even more basic than money: blood. The book is The Gift Relationship, by a Briton named Richard M. Titmuss, and it contains a sentence that stands our popular psychology on its head (the author is speaking of voluntary blood donors): "To 'love' themselves they recognized the need to 'love' strangers."

These words were still in the back of my mind a few weeks later as I listened to Paul Schervish, a Boston College sociologist. Schervish, whom I visited in his office, is something of a contrarian among sociologists. For one thing, he studies a segment of society that tends to bore his fellows: the top of it. When he interviews wealthy subjects, he listens for what he terms their moral biography, the story they tell themselves and others to balance the books of their lives.

I asked Schervish if there was a characteristic thing he heard in his interviews, and he provided a useful term for a familiar phenomenon: He said that the inner life of the very rich almost always partook of a "dialectic of fortune and virtue." That is, they spend a great deal of intellectual energy justifying their success in the world in moral terms. In these stories, philanthropy becomes a familiar denouement.

Thinking of a "dialectic of fortune and virtue" does organize the stories one hears from the philanthropic rich. For entrepreneurs, virtue permeates the plot: Enterprise and invention are rewarded by success. Life is fair - that's the moral of the story. But few can reach maturity believing that proposition entirely, and yet few want to attribute their own success to dumb luck. Thus, one hears from philanthropic entrepreneurs the phrase that seems so pat but has, for them, a sense of resolution as well as seemliness: "I want to give something back."

For inheritors, the story takes a rather different and in many ways more challenging turn. Their reward arrives at birth, and for some, their lifelong effort is to understand why. The story can include an inheritance of virtue as well - a tradition of family good deeds or a simple sense of genetic worth. But even inherited virtue must be enacted. Here philanthropy often plays a bigger role, and it can become the theme of a life. From inheritors, one hears the other stock explanation of their motives: "I want to make a difference."

This phrase, too, can become tiresome, but when I mentioned it to Schervish, he helped me to hear it afresh. "Perhaps the dominant characteristic of the very rich," he said, "is a quality I call 'hyper-agency.' If the well-off want to take a vacation, they find the right place and go there. But if the very rich find the right vacation place, they can buy it. When they say they 'want to make a difference,' they mean that they want to operate in philanthropy the way they operate in the rest of the world."

And of course they can - and do. Although making a difference isn't a foregone conclusion, it does happen, and it is a not inconsiderable pleasure to see part of the world change for the better as a result of your beneficence. But it may not be enough, just as making a billion dollars may not be enough.

Chat for any time with Schervish and you realize that, though one doesn't generally think of sociology as a spiritual enterprise, it is for him. I asked how he defined our subject, mentioning the commonly received definition of philanthropy: voluntary action for the public good.

"Well, that really doesn't do it, does it?" he said. "All sorts of activities - in business, in politics - could be defined that way, and yet we wouldn't call them philanthropy." Philanthropy, he pointed out, stands outside of any market, whether organized around money or votes or power. "It is a social relationship. The difference between philanthropy and other actions is that philanthropy happens in response to affective rather than effective claims. It is the nature of such claims that they have no real standing. They can be ignored without consequence - except for spiritual consequence."

Schervish is dismissive of the rhetoric of meliorism that has dominated American philanthropic tradition - present from Cotton Mather onward and triumphant in the Carnegie doctrine "Improve the race!" We hear a version of this language constantly today - notably in the national conversation about welfare reform. We hear it in the "ancient Chinese proverb" that so many people like to repeat: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime."

Said Schervish, "Sometimes what people need is a fish. Who," he asked abruptly, "is the spiritual leader of the world?"

"Mother Teresa," I said without thinking, though really I know very little about Mother Teresa.

"I think that's right," he said. "It's surely not the pope! And what does she do? She changes bandages. Sometimes that's what people need."

It may be that the somewhat discredited word "charity" needs a new life. Caritas, its Latin root, blending love and care, at any rate stands at the center of Schervish's concept of philanthropy: "You have to love the needer, not the need. If all you care about is providing food or medicine or money, you're not there." It rests on a biblical sense of the identity of self-love and love for others. Schervish pointed out that philanthropic acts are always suspected of self-interest - a tax break, a name carved in the building, etc. But it is foolish to try to escape self-interest; it is necessary only to recognize that the ultimate self-interest is interest in others.

The need for that recognition is universal, but are we romantic to think that perhaps the need is even more acute among the very privileged? I have found myself thinking this way lately, thinking that the ultimate use of philanthropy - beyond the improvement of the race, beyond the alleviation of social woes and the strengthening of class bonds - may be the solace it offers the philanthropist. I discovered a passage in an essay by Paul Schervish in which he seemed to have reached the same conclusion: "The greatest incentive to develop a moral identity of care may be the profound needs of the wealthy."