Philanthropy comes in many shapes and sizes. I’m good with people who have the resources giving to a needy individual, giving to a beloved institution, giving to a specific tangible cause serviced by a particular organization. Though as I’ve said before, I don’t think financialization of institutions and causes has been good for them—it draws them into caring more about asset protection and soliciting more donations all the time and less about their mission or purpose.
At a certain scale, however, philanthropy becomes something more dangerous and destructive, diverting resources and claiming power that it should never possess. It becomes the incarnated hubris of billionaires who think they know better. Even when the donors are doing something I personally approve of—say George Soros’ open society work—it’s still a problem. Governments can check or oppose the activities of a non-governmental organization that follows the will of a billionaire donor, but if the donors are canny enough about targeting governments and institutions that are either weak or desperate for resources, they can impose their will in completely unaccountable ways.
That’s been the story, by and large, of the Gates Foundation’s educational philanthropy, which was driven by its founders’ stubborn certainty that they knew the right way to reform education and that everyone telling them otherwise was part of the problem. Until they spent $1 billion dollars and basically failed to meet their basic goals. After which they remained unaccountable nevertheless despite having provoked a whole series of nationwide interventions into the professional work of teachers. The large-scale philanthropist can choose to reform and try again, or can take their ball and go home. They can bury bad news or accept it: that’s their choice. They don’t have to answer to anyone as long as they follow some basic tax rules and find some officials or leaders desperate enough for resources or power that they’ll open the gates to whatever they have authority over.
Now Jeff Bezos is entering the ring, after years of public attention to his lack of philanthropic activity despite his grotesque wealth. And he’s decided to top Gates for hubris. He’s starting an organization to protect three key global ecosystems, a goal which will absolutely require him to assert some form of managerial dominion over those places if he’s remotely serious about it. Existing examples of ecological protection funded and administered by outside organizations already pose some serious problems in those regions—Tamara Giles-Vernick’s study of the impact of World Wildlife Fund management of reserves in the Central African Republic is only one example of those issues—but at least those organizations have a coherent focus and some considerable experience with their chosen mission.
Philanthropy at this scale looks for what pleases the ego of the donor, and what pleases a person like Bezos most is a sense of indispensibility—that he alone can accomplish some purpose. Which means also that the philanthropy has to have a visible impact: after the money is spent, the mega-philanthropist needs proof that it did something. Some trophies for the wall. It may not even matter if it did anything particularly good or lasting as long as something measurably happened (or can be made to look as if it did happen in glossy reports and TED talks).
Which makes for a focus on ecosystems far away from Bezos’ own corporate wealth, far away from his company’s activities, far away from the really hard but immediately available challenges. Ecosystems in minimally governed spaces, in vulnerable and impoverished societies, where money can buy a lot of ego-gratifying signs and performances of impact without really perturbing anything that matters to Bezos. Without him having to give anything up or without him having to get into fights he might not win.
Consider this hypothetical: if you were the recently stepped-down head of a company with a massive carbon footprint and now headed another company making rockets, if you had billions and billions of dollars at your disposal, and you wanted to protect large-scale ecosystems from the threat of environmental degradation and climate change, where would you direct your attention and resources? If you’d actually had an epiphany from a few seconds of looking down from the edge of space?
The threats to the Amazon, the Congo basin, and the Pacific come from somewhere else. From everywhere else. Logging in Gabon is not for the needs of Gabon’s citizens. The corals bleaching in the Pacific aren’t responding to a purely local environmental change. Microplastics in global waters aren’t coming from Fiji or Micronesia. Mining in the Amazon isn’t for the needs of Brazilian industries alone.
If you’d really had that epiphany and you really wanted to change what needed changing, you wouldn’t be looking at over there, far away, at places that rich Westerners are accustomed to thinking of as theatrical stages for their own fantasies of power. You would be looking in the mirror. You would be looking at Amazon.com, not the Amazon, and asking: come on, it’s time to do more than a slow transition to electrical vehicles. Maybe it’s time to test strategies of degrowth, to pull back from endless accumulation and expansion? What better petri dish for those necessary experiments than the largest company on the planet? They could degrow in all sorts of ways and remain dominant and successful.
Or you would be looking at confronting the real problems: the fossil-fuels industry, the intransigence of the governments contributing the most to climate change. You’d be experimenting with designs for late 21st Century living. You’d be promoting more rapid large-scale transitions to clean energy sources.
Even then, you’d be a problem in your own right, because you’d be arrogating to yourself the right to do things that democratic societies have a right to have a say about. But at least you might have a valid reason to think you were indispensible at the present impasse, and that you were genuinely going to do something that nobody else seems able or willing to do right now.
Mega-philanthropists don’t do anything like that because the way that they came by their billions in the first place was never to think of their public responsibilities or the needs of the many. You don’t become Jeff Bezos if you care about anything or anybody besides Jeff Bezos. To unbecome Bezos takes more than dropping a billion dollars far away from the foundations of a global calamity that you played a major role in cementing into place.
Image credit: "Jeff Bezos" by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0