White Courtesy Telephone

Steve Jobs, The Meaning of a Nonprofit, and The Moral Imagination

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I.

I remember my sense of anticipation some 18 years ago when I landed my first foundation job. None of my friends or colleagues had any inkling what happened inside these black boxes that consistently swallowed our proposals and issued polite rejections.

I had heard that foundations were about social change, that they were about marshaling private capital for the public good. I was excited by the idea of working with colleagues who had the time to think deeply about our community’s greatest challenges, who were not constantly passing the hat to pay the light bill.

My first day on the job, I met former activists who knew what it was like to grow up black and poor; I admired the view from my 28th story window of the city I loved. On my second day, I chided myself for my overly romantic idealizations of foundation work. Of course sexism, careerism, and other isms could exist here as elsewhere. But still, foundations were anointed institutions, set apart to serve as the conscience of the community. On my third day I was wondering what I had gotten myself into.

If my idealizations were so far off the mark, what then was a foundation supposed to be about?

One reader of a recent post commented thoughtfully about the purpose and identity of community foundations:

… [S]hould philanthropy uphold or challenge the status quo? I've always seen the role and purpose of [community foundations] as being one of brokerage between the two positions. We stand of necessity with a foot in both camps, and it is our specific function to interpret each side to the other and make them intelligible. A [community foundation] that plants itself squarely on one side or the other will betray its mission.  …  We serve mutually incompatible constituencies—proponents of social change vs upholders of the status quo. All over the world, I suspect, people in [community foundations] are deliberately muddying waters in order to satisfy both at once. It’s what we’re good at, and if we leaned too far in either direction we’d stop being [community foundations] and become something else.

So beautifully expressed. I immediately begin to wonder about the apparent cold-bloodedness of our hypothetical translator. Was he supposed to have no feelings one way or the other about what he was asked to interpret, and if so, why did he bother? Did he interpret ultimately for the sake of a paycheck or for the sake of justice? And did it matter?

It’s not only community foundations that struggle to keep one foot in two camps, to broker between the lived experience of poverty, say, and the privileged world of trustees.  Small and large private foundations struggle with this as well, as does every nonprofit intent on survival.  Can an organization interpret the world to everything and everyone except itself?

Perhaps a community foundation ceases to be a community foundation not when it sides with justice, but when it fails to understand what living in community requires of us.  Perhaps any foundation or charity betrays its purpose, its identity, when corporate thinking completely replaces moral imagination.

II.

I expect many observers of the nonprofit field have grown tired of arguments that pit values like efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability against more liberal values like adaptability, empathy, and justice. Organizations that embody the latter need a nonprofit chiropractor to straighten their spines, the argument goes; their stiff-necked corporatist cousins need to work on their flexibility. Those who make these arguments typically come to the triumphant conclusion that we need both kinds of thinking in our field.

Some go further and remind us that the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit, while still relevant to the Internal Revenue Service, has lost its meaning for a new generation of social entrepreneurs who have learned to think outside the IRS’s checkboxes. They argue that there’s a growing sector agnosticism in our field, and that it’s only a matter of time before the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit goes the way of the 8-track tape. They point to the jobs made possible by for-profit companies, to the services they provide and the products they create, and they ask, “Is this not also a kind of social value?”

In our headlong rush to let everything be everything, to embrace blended corporations and the like, it’s important to call to mind some values that cannot be so easily “blended.” Consider one of the stories currently in circulation about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple.

Big Mac Attacks and Other Raids on Consciousness, Redux

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Just saw another one of those “I’m a PC” ads whose language suggests the complete identification of the consumer with his purchase. In the spirit of recent online and offline conversations, I republish this old post:

A young woman buys a pair of Calvin Kleins to shore up her sense of self worth. A middle-aged man who feels he’s trapped in a loveless marriage, spends an enormous sum on a wide-screen TV. “I really shot my wad that time!” he says, flushed with pleasure. All of us accept the intrusions of the market into our sense of meaning and identity. We’re strong enough, each of us reasons, to resist its effects.
	Before we know it, our ability to buy something—anything—at two for 79 cents becomes a measure of our civic health. There are no panicked crowds at the Wal-Mart, no looters carting away pieces of the central government.  We move effortlessly from bins of cut-rate flip flops to shelves of discounted ammo.  We needn’t be in any great hurry.  None of the true costs of our American way of life—e.g., environmental degradation, workers without decent pensions—are there to interfere with the pleasure of a low, low price.
To purchase is the verb into which every contemporary action resolves.
	It might have happened in your lifetime. Not long ago, in some nondescript boardroom in Milan or on Madison Avenue, a fashion executive rose from his seat to suggest that his company produce a line of clothing whose brand should no longer be confined to a discrete label attached to an inside seam. No, he said, the company’s brand should be printed in bold letters on the garment itself, essentially turning the wearer into a walking billboard. Moreover, he suggested, the customer should pay dearly for the privilege. Another executive, a small man with sloping shoulders, sneered at the idea, saying the public was too intelligent to be duped by such a clearly cynical product line.

Image sources: bus ad, McDonald’s ads, Chanel ad

The Challenge of American Consumerism to Nonprofit Work

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I can’t imagine a single area of nonprofit work that isn’t affected in some profound way by American Consumerism.  Directly and indirectly it undermines all our social change efforts.  It narrowly frames our actions, blinding us to the forces that keep so much of the world in misery.  It engenders habits of mind that transform world-be activists and supporters into passive collectors (or consumers) of information.  And it weakens our resolve to change a system from which we benefit at significant cost to people in other parts of the world and to future generations.

Here are the two basic elements of American Consumerism as I see them:

1.  A radical shift in our frame of understanding and discussion.  The primary shift is one from a conception of the human species as Homo sapiens, the animal that thinks and deliberates, to Homo mercatus, the creature that purchases.  Thus we measure the health of the nation primarily in economic terms—our rates of consumer spending, the growth in our GDP—rather than in our knowledge of history, our fitness for self-governance, and our ability to deliberate intelligently as free citizens.  In the Consumerist/Corporatist framework, the primary purpose of education is to prepare our young people for the workforce rather than for engaged citizenry.  Foreign policy is designed to create and maintain “an international order in which U.S.-based business can prosper, a world of ... societies that are open to profitable investment, to expansion of export markets and transfer of capital, and to exploitation of material and human resources on the part of U.S. corporations and their local affiliates.”* Thus we topple democratically elected governments, trade with regimes that torture their citizens, and engage in other forms of barbarous behavior to guarantee the free flow of goods and profits.  Domestic policy aims to keep alive the myth of the American Dream, which is essentially a dream about ownership.  In this dream, the home represents not a base from which we set off to engage the world and make it better, but a place that we pack full of the crap we unceasingly purchase.

2.  A weakened ability to resist Consumerist/Corporatist forces.  As Chomsky writes in his latest book, Imperial Ambitions, “If you’re trying to turn people into mindless consumers so they don’t interfere with you while you’re reordering the world, you have to keep at them from infancy.”  The first order of business might therefore be to undermine public education so that of the 70 percent lucky enough to graduate from high school only a few are able to locate Afghanistan on a map.  Childhood is also a good time to start building brand allegiance and underscoring the idea that one can simply use the latest product to point and click one’s way to a better world.  We should refuse to teach our kids media literacy—unlike other enlightened countries—so our children can grow into adults easily beguiled by advertisements as well as by the illusion of news.  Some of the hard work has already been done for us: National and statewide elections long ago turned into cynical exercises in brand-building and marketing, presenting to the political consumer a narrow range of neatly packaged Candidate Products® to choose from. We don’t exercise democracy in the voting booth: We purchase a product shaped as much by polls and focus groups as the flavorless bran flakes in our cereal bowls.

Consumerism presents two great challenges for those of us who work at nonprofits and foundations, and in civil society organizations more generally.  First, we are bought in—literally.  This is the challenge of complicity.  We benefit from a system that purchases for us some degree of comfort at significant cost to the environment and to the people who are the victims of our country’s economic imperialism.

The second challenge is one of consciousness.  Many of us work locally, in this little part of the world, on education, or in health, or in the arts, and we fail to see the connections between our efforts and the broader forces that shape the intellectual and moral contexts in which we work.  I would claim that we are doomed to failure, doomed to waste great wads of donor money, unless we understand these connections.

The great liberal theorist Isaiah Berlin championed what he called a negative conception of liberty, one that left fairly unconstrained the actions of citizens.  The state was to remain neutral on questions regarding the ultimate Good, providing a framework of rights in which individuals would be free to pursue their own visions of the good life.  He imagined, perhaps, a society of knowledgeable and engaged citizens, deliberating, arguing with one another, holding their political leaders accountable.  Their deliberations would inflect the teachings in their schools, the conduct of their businesses, the prayers rising from their houses of worship.  Did he ever imagine that the Great Axiological Machine—the generator and clarifier of values—would not be the polis but Madison Avenue, funded by powerful interests to increase even more their already magnificent wealth?

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* Noam Chomsky: On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (1987).

Philanthropic Market Alignment: Getting That Green, Green Feeling

Everything’s within the realm of plausibility as we gad about in our consumerist trance, sated with our latest purchases.  In a bid to corner the new “eco-tainment” market, Discovery is launching Planet Green, a channel that will forego a hard look at Man’s effect on the environment to present consumers with new product lines they can use to redecorate their homes in eco-friendly ways.  General Motors, maker of the nine-mile-per-gallon Hummer, is a lead advertiser and partner.

I believe that in contemporary parlance this is called “making philanthropic markets more efficient.”  It’s what happens when you attempt to align market demand with social benefit.  The alignment isn’t perfect in this case—is it ever?—but we can sweeten the deal by offering to save a square inch of Amazonian rainforest with each purchase of 100 gallons or more of gasoline.  With an Environmental Product® to which we can now dedicate our consumer dollars, we can make our other purchases with a clearer conscience.  And we can forego a fruitless search for the root causes of our present predicament since that too would likely end up being a waste of precious natural resources.

We’ve come a long way since the days of Plato’s Republic.  Far from electing philosopher kings, we’ve chained them deep inside the Cave along with the rest of us and made them watch the dance of shadows on the wall, now called the NBC Nightly News.  It’s not that we can’t turn our heads to see the puppetmasters, it’s that we simply choose not to: we might in that moment of aspiration miss the ad for an important new product that will change our lives.

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Disclaimer: Only recycled 1s and 0s were used in the machine code for this blog post.

Image source: Nunc Scio

Human Rights, Human Wrongs

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I.

I’m at a philanthropy conference luncheon listening to some household names speak about social justice.  They trade friendly barbs as they describe the horrors of Guantánamo and flog the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.  At intervals they draw polite applause.

One of the speakers describes President Bush’s vetoing of a bill to outlaw waterboarding.  ‘There should have been a public outcry,’ he chides us.

I gaze into my salad of mixed greens, my head heavy with guilt.  Is there any vegetable more melancholy than kale?

II.

I had been attending these conferences for years and had never heard such strong language coming from the dais.  The speakers’ calls to conscience felt like the blows of a blunt weapon, like acts of verbal insurrection.

At the same time, there was something inescapably ironic about a plenary luncheon on human rights in which everything from our underwear to the salt shakers on our tables was made in China.  If I wanted to understand what sustained human rights abuses in China, my inner voice told me, I needed only to inspect the labels on my BVDs.

III.

This last point deserves some elaboration.

I’m attending this conference at an opulent hotel that rises like a crystal box from the banks of the Potomac.  It’s large enough to have its own zip code.  The inner space of the building is defined by a dramatic atrium soaring hundreds of feet above a fountain that periodically dances to recorded symphonic music.  A picture window the size of two football fields looks across a sparkling river to Old Town, Alexandria.

As I sit here under the newly planted figs and paper birches, I struggle with the gauzy sense that the best I can do for human rights is vote the current pols out of office.  I feel it’s me, not them, I most need to worry about.  I’m fully implicated. The purchases I make, the time I devote to scanning ads, the television channels and websites I surf—all those things I do without a moment’s reflection—sustain a system of exchange that keeps some people in chains and allows others to walk free.  My government does its part, I suppose, by hiding most of the bodies overseas.  Sitting in this place, isolated as I am from the hurly-burly of the world, I forget that the wars we most recently waged in the name of human rights have been tied to the protection of American consumption—my consumption, and that of my family and friends.

The key to ending human rights abuses is written not only on the labels to my BVDs, but also on my paycheck—the income from investments in corporations not always friendly to their workers overseas.  The key to the puzzle lies in this grand hotel that few of my poorer neighbors can afford to use.

IV.

The system is complex.  Where is my place in it, as a consumer, as a citizen who wants to do right but who over-values his creature comforts?  To what degree do I permit the demands of conscience to interrupt the flow of cheap goods?  Each time I successfully boycott some brand or some nation, don’t my fellow wage slaves lose their jobs?  The entire edifice is built stone upon stone.  Pull on one stone with enough force and it appears the whole thing threatens to come down on our heads.

At the same time, I was never one to buy the stories we tell ourselves about triple bottom lines and more efficient markets.  These, in my view, are self-serving fairy tales that enable us to sleep with ourselves inside these beautiful jeweled boxes we build on the banks of the Potomac.

Postscript

The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, touted from the stage of the luncheon mentioned earlier, is an odd document.  For starters, there’s no U.N. Declaration of Human Responsibilities to balance the publication.  One has to read through to Article 29, the second-to-last article of the Declaration, to discover that we have duties to the community “in which alone the free and full development of [our personalities] is possible.”  Twenty-eight articles detailing our rights.  One article alluding to unspecified responsibilities.

This is a striking asymmetry.  Twenty-eight articles before we reach what is for some the essence of good citizenship.  And even here our duties to the commonweal are framed in terms of the free and full development of our personalities, a hint of Aristotle in a document that tries its hardest to appeal to every man and nation.

Big Mac Attacks and Other Raids on Consciousness

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A young woman buys a pair of Calvin Kleins to shore up her sense of self worth. A middle-aged man who feels he’s trapped in a loveless marriage, spends an enormous sum on a wide-screen TV. “I really shot my wad that time!” he says, flushed with pleasure. All of us accept the intrusions of the market into our sense of meaning and identity. We’re strong enough, each of us reasons, to resist its effects.
	Before we know it, our ability to buy something—anything—at two for 79 cents becomes a measure of our civic health. There are no panicked crowds at the Wal-Mart, no looters carting away pieces of the central government.  We move effortlessly from bins of cut-rate flip flops to shelves of discounted ammo.  We needn’t be in any great hurry.  None of the true costs of our American way of life—e.g., environmental degradation, workers without decent pensions—are there to interfere with the pleasure of a low, low price.
To purchase is the verb into which every contemporary action resolves.
	It might have happened in your lifetime. Not long ago, in some nondescript boardroom in Milan or on Madison Avenue, a fashion executive rose from his seat to suggest that his company produce a line of clothing whose brand should no longer be confined to a discrete label attached to an inside seam. No, he said, the company’s brand should be printed in bold letters on the garment itself, essentially turning the wearer into a walking billboard. Moreover, he suggested, the customer should pay dearly for the privilege. Another executive, a small man with sloping shoulders, sneered at the idea, saying the public was too intelligent to be duped by such a clearly cynical product line.

Image sources: bus ad, McDonald’s ads, Chanel ad

The Great Re-Awakening

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The United States conducts an immoral war in Iraq and slips into the family of nations that commit torture.  Prisoners are held without due process; citizens are subject to warrantless surveillance; and the Administration holds itself above the law.

It was only a matter of time before Americans would take to the streets.

iphone

Nonprofits in the Last Days

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I was invited to review a copy of Cydnee Frith’s upcoming book, Nonprofits, Civil Society, and the End of Time, and I simply couldn’t resist.  Dr. Frith is Distinguished Professor of Critical Studies at Grand Arches State University. I interviewed her by e-mail.

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE:  In your book you describe a combination of demographic, social, and political factors that you believe signal the “end of Western civilization.”  Because your characterization of contemporary American society is so stark, some of your critics have called your book “irresponsible.”  Can you describe for our readers how you see these factors manifesting themselves in the United States?

FRITH:  We’re a society in steep decline.  Abetted by a persistent anti-intellectualism in this country, our adult population has, over time, lost its ability to think critically and question authority.  We’re easy prey for televangelists, marketing professionals, and what some observers have called the “illusion of news.”  We’re profoundly ignorant of our own history and therefore destined to repeat its mistakes.  The worst part of it, is that we’re too sated—too deep in our consumerist trance—to care.

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE: I assume you don’t get invited to many parties.

FRITH:  I call it like I see it.

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE:  I appreciate your honesty.   What about the next generation?  Do you see any hope there?

FRITH:  No, not really.  What distinguishes young people from their parents is their zeal, not their goodness, and zealotry is a wind that can blow well or ill.  Look at the Islamist fundamentalist student movement in Egypt.  Consider the fact that young voters didn’t break for Kerry in overwhelming numbers in the 2004 presidential election—not that that means much.  We baby boomers have left them a hell of a mess to clean up.

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE:  What’s the climate like on campuses these days?

FRITH:  Young people today are all about pointing and clicking their way to a more comfortable future.  They don’t see the value of struggling with great texts anymore.  “Entertain me,” my students demand, “Don’t make me think.”  A few weeks back, one of them marched into my office and asked me to accommodate his Attention Deficit Disorder.  “What makes you think you have A.D.D.?” I asked him.  “I find it hard to concentrate on things that don’t interest me,” he answered.

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE: Must be going around.

FRITH:  Yes.  A bunch of self-absorbed little f**** doomed to follow in the footsteps of their narcissistic, immigrant-hating parents.

WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE: What do you think people in the nonprofit and foundation sectors can do to reverse these trends?

FRITH:  Nothing.  It’s over.  Most of us are floating in bubbles of self-denial, completely insulated from the corpses our government is producing in Iraq and in secret CIA detention centers.  The rest of us—myself included—don’t really give enough of a s*** to do anything about it except grouse.  We’re unlikely to stop telling ourselves the lies that preserve the illusions we have of ourselves and our country.  It’s all about maximizing the GDP now.  So go ahead: watch as much TV as you want. The poor will always be with us.  Get used to it and stop complaining.

Tractatus Homo Mercatus: Notes on the End of Civilization

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Sally Wilde, a retired philosophy professor and frequent contributor to White Courtesy Telephone, lives in Colorado where she blogs, tends to her six beautiful grandchildren, and earns beer money at the Naughty Bits Internet Café.

1.  Susan Herr at PhilanthroMedia* writes:

Myriad messages now confirm that you don’t have to give up your life of comfort to make the world better. You don’t have to go to the convent or work at your local nonprofit. Neither donors, nor corporate employees, are immune to this emerging gestalt.

This massive PR campaign is something we could never have afforded but the result is that our troops are growing. Highly-resourced and skilled reinforcements are being sent to the front lines in this convergence of profit and social good.

I have to respectfully disagree.  I believe the game is essentially lost unless we begin to question and, in some cases, challenge the structures that lead to unequal opportunity—to joy for some and misery for others.  This might indeed entail giving up our lives of comfort.  I’m especially concerned about the implication that unchecked consumption might be sustainable.  Worse still, the highly-resourced and skilled reinforcements Susan mentions will attempt to answer the questions, “What is wrong with the world?” and “What can we do about it?”, but they’ll leave unanswered the most fundamental question of all: “Who really cares?”

2.  The great liberal theorist Isaiah Berlin championed what he called a negative conception of liberty, one that left unconstrained the actions of citizens.  The state was to remain neutral on questions regarding the ultimate Good, providing a framework of rights in which individuals would be free to pursue their own visions of the good life.  He imagined, perhaps, a society of knowledgeable and engaged citizens, deliberating, arguing with one another, holding their political leaders accountable.  Their deliberations would inflect the teachings in their schools, the conduct of their businesses, the prayers rising from their houses of worship.  Did he ever imagine that the Great Axiological Machine—the generator and clarifier of values—would not be the polis but Madison Avenue, funded by powerful interests to maintain the value of their investments?

3.  Our ability to deliberate as citizens has been lost.  We’re no longer citizens but consumers who identify ourselves to one another by the products and services we buy.  I’m a Macintosh kind of woman, you’re a Starbucks kind of guy.  The checkout line has replaced the Forum as the primary nexus of citizen participation and expression.

4.  The American Dream is a dream about ownership.  And in this dream, the home represents not a base from which we set off to engage the world and make it better, but a place that we pack full of the crap we unceasingly purchase.  We’ve harnessed technology not to provide us lives of enhanced contemplation, but of greater consumption.

5.  We’re consumerist sheep vaguely aware of the cost to others of our American way of life.  Poorly educated about our own history, anesthetized by marketing, beguiled by the illusion of news, we slip inexorably into barbarity.  The civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s—those great efflorescences of human consciousness—have not been able to save us from ourselves.

6.  We don’t exercise democracy in the voting booth: We purchase a product shaped as much by polls and focus groups as the flavorless bran flakes in our cereal bowls.

7.  The health of our state is measured not by the growth of our GDP but by how many times each night, across this country, we’re moved to shout angrily at our television sets.

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* Thanks to Phil Cubeta at GiftHub for flagging this post.