Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [91]
All Christians are taught to tithe 10 percent of our income to the church and to love our neighbors as ourselves. From an early age, we are reminded over and over again that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” More and more Christian churches in America are expanding their giving activities beyond their congregations to the larger community in ways I’ve mentioned earlier. More and more Christian leaders are embracing the fight against climate change as our obligation to honor the biblical injunction to preserve the earth and its fruits for future generations. The great biologist E. O. Wilson’s latest book, The Creation, is written as a letter from a secular scientist to an evangelical minister outlining their shared obligation to save the planet and all its life-forms.
More and more Christian organizations are reaching out across the world to help people regardless of their faith. Christian charitable groups labored mightily after the tsunami to help Muslims in Indonesia and Buddhists and Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka. World Vision has 23,000 staff members working in almost one hundred countries to combat famine and child exploitation, provide education for poor children including equal opportunities for girls, and promote economic development. In 2006 alone, World Vision and its more than four and half million American supporters made more than 440,000 microcredit loans and more than $200 million in food grants.
All other faiths, in one form or another, teach the moral imperative of giving. Buddhists believe donation to others is an essential step on the path to full enlightenment. They believe a selfish nature devoid of charity retards development and that giving should benefit people who need it regardless of who and where they are, in a spirit of benevolence known as Dana Paramita. They teach that practicing charity without expecting anything in return is essential to creating a mind free of jealousy or hatred, something we all need.
Believer or nonbeliever, we all live in an interdependent world in which our survival depends upon an understanding that our common humanity is more important than our interesting and inevitable differences and that everyone matters. In Africa, where the first humans stood up on the savannah 150,000 years ago, some tribes have a remarkable way of greeting each other. When one person says hello, the response is “I see you.” Think how much better the world would be if we actually saw each other.
Will giving make you happier? You’ll have to answer that for yourself. When I was in Africa with Bill and Melinda Gates, watching them talk to villagers whose lives they had improved, they seemed happy. When I saw young Brianne Schwantes risk more broken bones in her fragile body to help people in the Mississippi flood, she seemed happy. When I watched John Bryant light up the eyes of poor kids with talk of how they could have different lives, he seemed happy. When I met Oseola McCarty after she gave her life savings so that young people could have the education she never had, she seemed happy. When Carlos Slim looked at a crowd of ten thousand young people he’d sent to college, he seemed happy. When Barbra Streisand and Rupert Murdoch, two highly public figures who disagree on nearly everything politically, stood together to give the first contributions to my foundation’s fight against climate change, they seemed happy. When Chris and Basil Stamos, Chris Hohn and Jamie Cooper-Hohn, Frank Giustra and Fred Eychaner, and all the others who fund my AIDS work look into the eyes of children who are alive because of them, they seem happy.
So much of modern culture is characterized by stories of self-indulgence and self-destruction. So much of modern politics is focused not on honest differences of policy but on personal attacks. So much of