ESSAY: The Ungodly Bright: Should They Lead ... - Hudson Institute

WILLIAM
A. SCHAMBRA
"%e Ungodly 'Bright: Should %ey 'Lead Philanthropy
into the 'Future"
Taking his bearings from Warren Buffet's decision (summer 2006) to bequeath
his billions to the "ungodly bright" leaders of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
William A. Schambra, director of The Bradley Center for Philanthropy
and Civic Renewal, raises a general question about the form of grantmaking
leadership that this bequest represents: Are the purposes of philanthropy best
served if it looks to the few, ungodly bright among us-especially those with scientific
and technical expertise-to identify and solve our most fundamentalproblems?
Using the example of eugenic approaches to the "root causes" of human
troubles, Schambra warns of the dangers of a top-down, expert-driven philanthropy.
Echoing Tocqueville's view of what makes American civil society
strong, Schambra calls for a new approach to philanthropy-"civic renewalphilanthropy"-tha
would directly address the immediate needs of suffering humanity,
rely more on the leadership and engagement of ordinary individuals,
and promote public-spirited citizens. Can this "Tocquevillean" approach to philanthropy
work today? Who is better situated to address today's social problems,
the expert elite or everyday citizens? How can the enormously wealthy-and the
ungodly bright-best satisfy their desire to "make a difference"?
~
When Warren Buffett announced his multi-billion-dollar bequesto the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation in the summer of2006, he explained his generous
if unconventional act of charity by claiming that" if your goal is to return
the money to society by attacking truly major problems that don't have a commensurate
funding base-what could you find that's better than turning to a
couple of people who are young, who are ungodly bright. ..."
American philanthropy's romance with the "ungodly bright" has a long,
ifnot always noble, pedigree. After all, the first large foundations-Carnegie,
Rockefeller, Russell Sage-were established during, and fully reflected the
predilections of, America's progressive era at the beginning of the twentieth
century. The progressives were persuaded that, just as disease was rapidly being
conquered by modern science and medicine, so "social pathogens"-the
ultimate source of our social ills-could be tracked down and eradicated
once and for all, given new sciences of human behavior like sociology, psychology,
and public administration. But this would require that the management
of human affairs be taken out of the hands of the benighted many and

472
Philanthropic Leadership
put into the care of the enlightened few, trained and credentialed in the new
social sciences. Not coincidentally, this was precisely the direction history itself
wished to take. As their name suggests, progressives were convinced that
history was the story of inexorable progress from the selfish individualism
and parochial localism of the past to a new era of social-minded brotherhood.
But only the ungodly bright avant garde had the historical and scientific
insight to break with the parochial allegiances of the past, and persuade
or compel the many to follow them into a more promising, socially conscious,
collective future.
The first large foundations eagerly bought into progressivism's view that
new, professionally trained elites were trailblazers into a brighter future. And
so they invested massively in the rationalization, standardization, and modernization
of old professions like law, education, and medicine. To bring a new
order and discipline to public affairs, they also funded the development of new
professions like social work and public administration. These updated old and
new professions would find their home in the modern research universityanother
favorite funding target for Carnegie and Rockefeller-where genuinely
objective research could be conducted free from the distorting pressures
of politics and markets, and where the next generation of elites would be
trained.
Even the way these foundations organized themselves-existing in perpetuity,
with highly abstract statements of purpose-reflected an abiding faith in
the progressive accumulation of intelligence in the hands of the few. As longtime
Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond Fosdick noted, only openended,
perpetual giving was able to accommodate the optimistic conviction
that "the dead hand should be removed from charitable bequests," leaving
grantmaking decisions entirely "in the hands of living men," because "the wisdom
of living men will always exceed the wisdom of any man, however wise,
who has long since been dead."
This overarching faith in the new sciences of society lies behind one of the
most frequently repeated justifications for modern philanthropy, uttered first
by John D. Rockefeller himself: "The best philanthropy is constantly in search
for finalities-a search for cause, an attempt to cure the evils at their source."
The old, discredited approach of charity, in this view, responded too emotionally
and directly to the immediate problems of individuals before them. It did
not use its head. It lacked the steely, detached scientific knowledge to see
through the bewildering, distracting, superficial manifestations of social ailments,
down to the final, root causes of those ailments, which we now had the
power to cure once and for all.
But only the ungodly bright few are able properly to exercise scientific discipline.
Quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fosdick made this link explicit: "If
notwithstanding the apparent confusion and welter of our life, we are able to
find a steadiness of purpose and quiet dominating intelligence, it is largely
I

Schambra, "The Ungodly Bright" 473
because of [those] who have been trained to a considerable extent in the scientific
method."
It might seem today that we no longer look to social science with such na-
Ive, utopian expectations. Nevertheless, the language and practice of modern
American philanthropy still reflect an abiding faith in the ungodly bright to
lead us into a new, more rational world. As recently as 2006, the new president
of the Rockefeller Foundation took office with an unabashed reaffirmation of
the vision of 1910: "The focus of this wonderful foundation on the root causes
of social ills is very powerful and very compelling."
Hence, foundations invariably describe themselves as innovators and experimenters,
relentlessly pursuing "social change" through new and imaginative
projects that will conclusively reveal the hidden workings of underlying
social forces. Their programs are designed according to cutting edge academic
theories about social behavior and carried out by staff with impressive professional
credentials. Foundations know that they are tapping into root causes because
their programs produce concrete outcomes analyzable by sophisticated
scientific metrics. Philanthropy is peculiarly positioned to play this pioneering
role in social change, it is often argued, because it is mercifully insulated from
market forces, political demands, and other bothersome pressures of the everyday
world, and so can come at public problems from a uniquely objective, detached
point of view. In other words, foundations still provide a perch from
which the ungodly bright can steer social change in a progressive direction.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Warren Buffett should have surveyed the
perplexing variety of charitable needs and projects clamoring for his attention,
and concluded that it was better to "attack truly major problems" by turning
his fortune over to the intelligent few. For all the changes the twentieth century
wrought, its philanthropy closed the century as it began, with leadership
by the ungodly bright still regarded as the only progressive and enlightened
path for grantmaking.
After a full century of insisting that their peculiar value to society is the
ability to get to root causes of, and decisively solve, social problems, how have
foundations performed? For a field so insistent that its grantees show demonstrable
out

474 Philanthropic Leadership
~
one, and rearranging existing services into new combinations. That may be
commendable work, but it's hardly how philanthropy justifies itself. It claims
rather that the ungodly bright deserve the privileged position of grantmaking
leadership because they don't tinker, but rather cut directly to the source of
significant social problems, grasp their cause, and solve them once and for
all-just as hookworm was decisively eradicated in large parts of the South.
And this is precisely where philanthropy has such a feeble record. It would be
difficult, if not impossible, to name a single social problem-even an insignificant
one-the roots of which philanthropy has laid bare and solved.
Even worse, philanthropy has on at least one occasion followed what
looked like a root cause in a particularly monstrous direction. Early in the
twentieth century, the new science of eugenics recommended itself to Andrew
Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and his son "Junior," precisely because it appealed
to their "root causes" aspirations. Just as tracking physiological diseases
back to germs had begun to eliminate root causes of medical ailments, so
tracking social pathology-crime, pauperism, dypsomania, and moral laxityback
to defective genes would allow us to attack it at its roots. Indeed, suggested
prominent progressive scholar Charles Van Hise, "We know enough
about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would
disappear within a generation:' They would disappear because the eugenicists
had set out to persuade the state to confine and sterilize the unfit. As Junior
noted, this was the only "scientific way of escape from the evils" to which bad
genes gave rise.
From the perspective of philanthropic eugenics, the old practice of
charity-that is, simply alleviating human suffering-was not only inefficient, it
was downright harmful. As birth control heroine Margaret Sanger (another
Rockefeller grantee) put it, -America's charitable institutions are the "surest
signs that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly
increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents."
Efforts to develop and apply eugenics to eliminate the defective classes
were undertaken with Rockefeller and Carnegie support at the Eugenics Record
Office at New York's Cold Spring Harbor. Rockefeller funds would also go
toward research institutions in Germany that were seeking ways to discourage
the propagation of inferior individuals and races, drawing their inspiration
from the techniques proving themselves in the United States. By the time Cold
Spring Harbor's eugenics program ended in the late '30s, tens of thousands of
" defectives" in America had been institutionalized or sterilized, and the ground
had been laid for the most unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century.
It might be possible to dismiss the eugenics episode as a wrong turn on the
road to progress, as indeed, it is treated in the few histories that mention it at
all. But it is also possible to look at eugenics as illustrative of the central danger
posed by commissioning the ungodly bright to drive relentlessly to the root

.,.
Schambra, "The Ungodly Bright" 475
causes of social problems. Modern philanthropy asks our foundation elitesalready
well insulated from the rest of us by credentialed expertise, professional
detachment, and privileged tax status-to look past or to deliberately
ignore the immediate and diverse needs of those immediately in front of
them. Those needs are, after all, mere symptoms, attention to which was the
old, discredited approach of charity.
But once the ungodly bright steel themselves sufficiently to see sufferers
not as unique individuals, but rather as insubstantial manifestations of underlying
pathologies, it becomes easy to pursue solutions that at first ignore,
and finally violate, innate human dignity. Indeed, the bright may well conclude
that the most merciful way to alleviate suffering is to prevent anyone
from becoming a sufferer in the first place-by cutting off suffering at its genuine
root. They become vulnerable to British socialist Havelock Ellis's view,
that "the superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more
deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him; but perhaps the most
radically sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall
not be born."
Today, of course, our knowledge of the human genome and our growing
capacity to manipulate it at will present us unparalleled opportunities to see to
it that beggars-or "undesirables" of any sort-shall not be born. The fact that
we are now able to do so without resort to the crude, messy eugenics of sterilization
makes it all the more tempting to view this as a purely scientific act of
"radical sympathy." As late as 1952, Raymond Fosdick would praise Rockefeller's
iQ.vestments in its natural sciences program as a way to "develop so sound
and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed in the future superior men."
That temptation is compounded by the fact that the eugenics episode has been
airbrushed entirely from the relentlessly upbeat historical account of American
philanthropy. At the precise moment when we need more than ever to
grapple with the subtle moral pitfalls of genetics-driven, root-causes philanthropy,
we are too embarrassed or too ashamed even to acknowledge that we
have faced and failed the test before.
Whether the philanthropy of the ungodly bright takes a monstrous turn,
or-as it has for over a century-merely conceals its futility with lofty rhetoric,
it would be Iotseful today to rethink philanthropy, given the likely arrival of
considerable ambunts of philanthropic dollars as wealth passes from one generation
to the next.
What might a new approach to philanthropy look like? It would start by
challenging the central premise of twentieth-century philanthropy that the
ungodly bright are somehow better equipped to solve society's problems than
are everyday citizens. The notion that citizens themselves could and should
playa central role in solving their own problems is, of course, reflected in Alexis
de Tocqueville's understanding of American democracy. The great danger of

476 Philanthropic Leadership
the new age of democracy, in his view, was that citizens would become too absorbed
with narrow, materialistic pursuits to pay attention to public affairs,
and would be willing to turn over their affairs to management by bright, benevolent
elites. That might result in a smoothly operating and efficient social
service delivery system. But it would also mean an ominous concentration of
power in a few hands, as well as a gradual impoverishment of the spirit or soul
of the democratic citizen, as he lost the capacity or the desire to engage withand
to be enlarged by-vigorous encounters with other citizens of differing
backgrounds and opinions.
Curiously, American foundations today frequently fund studies and conferences
anxiously pondering precisely this problem of citizen disengagement
and the decline of the democratic spirit in America. But they seldom look critically
at their own practices, to consider whether their clear preference for public
management by the ungodly bright might not in itself convey a dispiriting
message to democratic citizens, and feed the cycle of disengagement.
How might it be otherwise? Tocqueville suggested that Americans had
avoided the central problem of democracy by leaving considerable authority to
solve problems in the hands of small, local, decentralized institutions and voluntary
associations of all sorts, within which citizens would be expected to
thrash out their differences and come up with their own, albeit often roughand-ready,
solutions to their problems. This is more than seeking "feedback"
from citizens about programs designed for them by others. It is, rather, genuine
self-government, with final decisions left to citizens themselves.
Perhaps foundations wishing to pursue an alternative to leadership by the
ungodly bright could build their giving instead squarely on Tocqueville's insight.
They could redirect funding to programs that originate with the views of
citizens at the grassroots, with their understanding of the problems they face,
and how they wish to go about addressing them. Solutions tailored by citizens
who actually live with the problems are more likely to be effective for their
own neighborhoods. Community ownership insures that these approaches
will be supported and sustained over the long haul, rather than provoking the
sort of resistance that often greets programs designed by remote experts and
"parachuted" into neighborhoods. Perhaps most important, the process of formulating
and proposing solutions to their own problems cultivates in citizens
the skills essential to democratic self-governance-the ability at first to endure,
but finally perhaps to relish, the messy, gritty process of deliberating, arguing,
and compromising demanded by American democracy's conviction
that all citizens are to be treated with dignity and respect. This is at some remove,
indeed, from Warren Buffett's preference for a kind of philanthropy that
would insulate him from being "too involved with a lot of people I wouldn't
want to be involved with and [having] to listen to more opinions than I would
enjoy."

Schambra, "The Ungodly Bright" 477
Tocquevillian or civic renewal philanthropy would reach out quietly but
actively into the communities it wishes to assist, harvesting "street wisdom"
about which groups genuinely capture a community's self-understanding of its
problems. Such groups will more than likely have duct tape on their industrial
carpeting and water stains on their ceilings. They will not be able to draft
clever, eye-catching fundraising brochures or grant proposals. They will not
have sophisticated accounting systems, or be able to layout a schedule of measurable
outcomes. They will not speak the language of the social sciences, but
more often than not, the language of sin and spiritual redemption. They will
not be staffed by well-paid credentialed experts, but rather by volunteers whose
chief credential is that they themselves have managed to overcome the problem
they are now helping others to confront. No matter what the group's formal
charter states, it will minister to whatever needs present themselves at
the door, even if it means being accused of inefficiency or mission drift. For
each person is treated not as an inadequately self-aware bundle of pathologies,
but rather as a unique individual, a citizen possessed of a soul, demanding a
respectful, humane response to the entire person.
This approach turns completely on its head the still-entrenched orthodoxy
of progressive philanthropy. Indeed, it looks suspiciously like charity-the antiquated,
discredited approach which nonetheless honored and ministered personally
to the individual before it. Charity does indeed deal with "mere
symptoms" because they are what people themselves consider important, rather
than with root causes visible only to experts who can "see through" the client.
Because civic renewal philanthropy tackles social problems individual by individual,
neighborhood by neighborhood, and because it relies on and entrusts
ordinary, public-spirited citizens, familiar with the communities of which they
are a part, to lead the way-to identify and resolve their own problems in their
own way-this approach will not appeal to the ungodly bright.
It is hardly surprising that the immensely wealthy today should find appealing
the century-old vision of putting massive funding into cutting-edge
technology in order to deliver the decisive, "knock-out punch" to some vexing
social problem. Perhaps a handful, however, will come to appreciate the lesson
of the past century, that there are no knock-outs in the effort to improve society,
and the seari::h for them can readily take ugly turns. By funding more concrete,
immediate, community-based efforts of the sort described by Tocqueville, however,
it would be possible to make modest headway against social ills. It would
also contribute to a much loftier purpose, the revival of civic engagement and
democratic self-governance in America, perhaps thereby helping to insure the
survival of our democratic republic. But to appreciate the importance of that
goal, it is necessary to transcend the narrow, scientific knowledge of the ungodly
bright. It requires instead a kind of prudence or wisdom that aims at an
attainable good, while accepting and working with, rather than trying to see

478
Philanthropic Leadership
through, the bewildering variety of human needs. It thus fully respects and
helps to preserve democratic citizenship and human dignity. This would be the
philanthropy, not of the ungodly bright, but rather of the godly wise.
Written in response to the Dialogues on Civic Philanthropy, "Philanthropic Leadership"
(November 8, 2005). By permission of the author.