When asked to list humanity’s most pressing challenges in the 21st century, most people would mention issues like global warming, overpopulation, extreme poverty, and nuclear proliferation—social problems that dominate the front pages of newspapers around the globe. Very few people, however, would mention the erosion of civil society and its institutions as an urgent issue that needs our immediate attention.
Philanthropists, much like the general public, focus most of their attention and money on solving headlinegrabbing problems in education, health care, economic development, and the environment. Billions of philanthropic dollars, for example, are spent every year trying to alleviate global warming, yet relatively few dollars are directed toward improving the public decision-making process, an essential function in a democratic civil society and one that plays a critical role in determining the future of the environment.
Only a tiny fraction—at most a few percent—of philanthropic dollars go to support civil society’s institutional structures and to promote the values and norms of a flourishing civil society. This neglect represents a fundamental gap in philanthropy—one that can undermine philanthropy’s ability to pursue its other problem-solving goals. For without a healthy civil society and what comes along with it—such as an informed and engaged public—it is difficult if not impossible to solve the other pressing problems.
The reason that it is urgent for philanthropists and others to address this issue now is that there is an accelerating decline in the health of U.S. civil society. Evidence of this decline is all around us. The growing dominance of commercial forces in the news media, the erosion of the public’s trust in Congress, the declining membership in civic organizations, and the steady deterioration of civility in political discourse—all testify to the weakening bands that connect and support civil society.
If civil society is so important, why, one might ask, do philanthropists pay so little attention to its well-being? The reason is that most philanthropists use an instrumentalist approach to solving social problems, one based on applied science and business investing that can produce measurable and concrete results. Although some discrete and easy-to-measure problems—such as building affordable housing or providing job training—can be solved using this approach, many other problems cannot. And it is those types of intangible and hard-to-measure problems—such as increasing civic engagement or enhancing social trust—that characterize civil society.
FOUNDATIONS OF CIVIL SOCIETY
Before delving further into why philanthropists have ignored civil society and what can be done to reverse course, it is important to first understand what civil society is. Although the idea of civil society has ancient roots, it first appeared in its contemporary form between the 16th and 18th centuries in Europe. This was the period of the growth of individualism and attention to individual rights, especially of the rights of belief and free expression, and of increasing demarcation between the realms of civil society and the state. Enlightenment thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, and Adam Ferguson articulated elements of these early visions of civil society. Following this burst of interest, there was a long period of relative neglect of the concept. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in civil society.
Some contemporary observers have a narrow definition of civil society that equates it to the nonprofit sector or nongovernmental organizations. I draw upon a more expansive definition of civil society that includes these private associations, along with the institutions of the rule of law, philanthropy, a system of free expression, and the norms of individual rights, the common good, and tolerance.1 My definition is similar to the succinct one offered by University of California at Los Angeles professor Helmut Anheier: “Civil society is the arena outside family, government, and market where people voluntarily associate to advance common interests based on civility.” 2
An important element of Anheier’s definition is its emphasis on civil society’s aim to “advance common interests.” Another way of stating this is to say that civil society (and philanthropy as a part of it) is a medium that coordinates individual efforts to provide public goods and diminish public bads. Indeed, practitioners of philanthropy view themselves as involved in the creation or preservation of public goods—such as public education, clean air and water, and cultural expression—and the reduction of public bads—such as global climate change, international violence, and poverty.
One of the reasons it is difficult for philanthropists and others to fulfill those noble goals is that there is a continual tension within civil society between individuals’ desire to pursue particular interests and the desire to pursue the common good. This tension poses two fundamental challenges: the problem of collective action and the problem of value pluralism. The first has to do with the difficulty of achieving collective ends, even when there is common agreement as to what those ends are, in the face of individuals’ self-interested behavior. An example of this is the “tragedy of the commons,” a term originally used to explain why groups of individuals, each using the same commonly held field to graze cows, often end up overgrazing the land. The term is now used to explain why resources held in common by humanity, such as the air and the oceans, are universally abused, causing global warming and ocean pollution.
The second problem, value pluralism, has to do with the achievement of common purposes in a world of competing and often incompatible understandings of what those purposes are. For example, some would characterize a good society as one in which any rational person can choose the time and manner of his death, and even have a physician aid him in the process. Others would see such a society as a violation of fundamental religious or ethical principles. Such fundamental value conflicts are famously described in philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s classic summation, “the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with one another.” 3
Resolving the tension among the competing interests, goals, and value systems of individuals in civil society, in a way that increases public goods and reduces public bads, is a complex task, much more complicated than the challenges one faces in business, where profit is a clear and single test of success, or in natural science, where variables can be limited and controlled.
COMMITMENT TO THE COMMON GOOD
There are two essential features of U.S. civil society that have experienced significant erosion in recent decades—the individual’s commitment to the common good and the civic function of the media. There is a great deal of convincing evidence showing that the decline of these two features has weakened civil society’s ability to perform its vital role of creating engaged and informed citizens.4
One of the foundations of American civil society is the commitment of individuals to the pursuit of the common good. From John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” invocation in 1630, to President Barack Obama’s stress on the importance of “the common good” in his inaugural address, concern for the well-being of the community and for future generations has been a sustained theme in American discourse. Admittedly, there has always been a tension in American society between the pursuit of individual interests and the pursuit of the common good, and the balance between these two norms has changed throughout U.S. history, but evidence points to a clear pattern of declining commitment to the ethos of the common good since the mid-20th century.
Harvard University professor Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, has documented a dramatic drop in civic participation and social trust and a corresponding increase in the pursuit of individual ends and competition. Putnam and his colleagues developed a series of recommendations, described in the Better Together report of the Saguaro Seminar, to help generate new forms of social capital in the United States.5 Two of these recommendations are widely endorsed by scholars and public commentators across the political spectrum: strengthening civic education and enhancing civic engagement.
The Brookings Institution’s William Galston points to solid evidence that civic education leads to enhanced support for democratic values, tolerance, civic participation, and social trust: “The more knowledge we have of civic affairs, the less we have a sort of generalized mistrust and fear of public life. Ignorance is the father of fear, and knowledge is the mother of trust.”6 The important characteristic of effective civic education is an emphasis on ideals and principles that have direct relevance and consequences for the participants. Although a few foundations have sponsored research and education projects in this arena, notably the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, enormous opportunities exist for greater foundation support for civic education.
A second approach to strengthening the norm of the common good is promoting civic engagement, which encompasses a broad range of activities including political involvement, voting, advocacy, voluntarism, and active discussion of public affairs. Its enemies are apathy and open hostility to involvement in the public arena. Declining civic engagement is a many-faceted phenomenon that is difficult to identify with precision or to address in a way that yields quickly demonstrable results. Yet this decline poses a major threat to the functioning of civil society.
The elements of civic education, civic engagement, and social trust can move in either virtuous or vicious circles. In the positive mode, they create mutual reinforcement. In the negative mode, they generate a destructive cycle that undermines civil society.
A 2004 study of all forms of engagement across generations concludes that there is a dramatic pattern of decline in participation in public life, especially among the young, and warns that “the implications of this shift … are ominous.” The authors found that although the DotNet (ages 15 to 28) and Gen-X (ages 29 to 40) generations tend to show communal involvement at levels equivalent to those of older groups of Americans, their involvement in the political process is drastically lower. The authors conclude that “we may be witnessing a subtle but important shift in citizenship, away from a focus on government and elections as the mechanisms for determining the public good and toward alternative avenues such as the private sector and the nongovernmental public sector.”7
Some analysts see a possible countertrend in the rapidly rising participation in virtual communities, many of which involve discussion of and action on civic topics. MoveOn.org is a prime example of this form of civic involvement; the hugely popular practices of blogging and the civic use of social media are others.8 A number of researchers who have looked carefully at the relationship between electronically mediated communication and political participation, however, are less sanguine about the prospects for the future. They suggest that decreased face-to-face socializing leads to decreased political involvement.9
Active citizenship in a democracy requires people who are educated and engaged in civic affairs. Unfortunately, there are very few examples of foundations or philanthropists supporting activities that encourage these activities. The Charles F. Kettering Foundation’s long-standing support of civic deliberation and engagement is a rare example of philanthropy addressing this issue. Other foundations can support the expansion of civic engagement through programs that draw people into public decision-making processes such as deliberative polling, public forums, community organizing, volunteerism, and community service; and indirectly, through support of civic education.
CIVIC FUNCTION OF THE MEDIA
A healthy system of free expression, expressed most concretely as an independent and unregulated media industry, is a vital element of civil society and one that has been intimately connected to its historical development. The media are both a formative influence on citizens’ attitudes about public affairs and the primary vehicle for the expression of their preferences.
The declining viability of major newspapers is a particularly stark example of the precarious state of the civic media and the need for philanthropic intervention. Newspapers not only serve as vital conduits for the dissemination of information about public issues, but also generate the journalism that builds a base of knowledge about public policy. Their continued decline poses a distinct threat to the health of civil society. As the commercial marketplace appears no longer able to sustain newspapers and government sponsorship is inappropriate for obvious reasons, philanthropy would seem the logical source of continued support. Although some proposals have emerged for exploring this option, no significant steps have yet been taken.
Philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, was one of the first to describe how privatization erodes the public sphere in Western democracies, inhibiting the ability of citizens to communicate with each other about issues affecting common concerns. In the contemporary world of the media in which commercial profits have become an overwhelming influence, segments of the public “mindshare” are bought and sold, and those who control major political and economic resources seek to manage public opinion through polling and advertising. The result is a civic information process increasingly controlled by market forces.
Some of the arenas in need of greater philanthropic support are strengthening the practice of professional journalism, encouraging government to be more transparent by making more of the information it creates easily available, funding organizations that do deliberative polling, and exploring ways to use new communication technologies to disseminate information and foster public deliberation.
The potential and limits of the new media (the Internet, cell phones, iPads, and other means of electronic communication) for building and sustaining civil society are still unclear. If the aspirations of new media optimists begin to be realized, the prospects for the growth of civic communication through the Internet are substantial. A modest investment by foundations in the exploration of the relationship between civil society and the Internet—both the possibilities and the limitations—could create great leverage in the future development of mass communications with a civic purpose.
In 2009, the Hellman Family Foundation announced a $5 million grant to create a nonprofit news venture involving the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, The New York Times, and other partners to provide regional news coverage in San Francisco and feed stories to media partners. Although philanthropists have funded other nonprofit news ventures, such as ProPublica and Kaiser Health News, the total amount of foundation support for this important component of strengthening civil society remains modest.
Several foundations stand out for their financial support of the media: the Florence and John Schumann Foundation’s work on transparency of public decision-making processes, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s and Carnegie Foundation’s programs to improve journalism, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ long-standing support for objective polling on policy issues, the Benton Foundation’s media policy initiatives, and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation’s continuing support for documentary film production.
PHILANTHROPY’S BLIND SPOTS
Philanthropists would seem to have a golden opportunity to address these weakened areas of contemporary civil society. But two tendencies that became prominent in 20th-century American philanthropy have made it difficult to do so: a growing instrumentalism and a corresponding narrowing of vision that limits philanthropists’ ability to adjust to the reflexive nature of social problems. The unfortunate result of these two trends is that philanthropists increasingly approach problems as if they were trying to practice social engineering or maximize their return on their investment.
Instrumentalism. The instrumentalist tendency is rooted in an epistemological orientation that began to shape American philanthropy in the late 19th century. Intended to counter the messiness, inefficiency, and arbitrariness of traditional charity, the efforts of the great foundations that arose in that era—those created by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Margaret Olivia Sage—were generally guided by a set of assumptions that can be characterized broadly as the epistemology of applied science. Their large-scale initiatives ushered in the age of “scientific philanthropy,” blending science and philanthropy in a particular way that was based in part on successful advances of the newly emerging science of medicine.
Scientific philanthropy pursued the discovery of causal agents behind negative social patterns, agents with a role akin to that of germs in disease, and then sought to eradicate them by using the proper remedies, equivalent to medical antidotes. The fundamental assumption behind scientific philanthropy is that it should aspire to gain theoretical knowledge and apply it through technical intervention, rather than to gain practical hands-on knowledge acquired from experience and apply it using judgment rather than calculation.
James Scott brilliantly analyzes this problem in his book Seeing Like a State, where he describes the superiority of practical hands-on knowledge (he uses the Greek term métis) to understand and intervene in society. His use of métis applies as much to the practice of philanthropy as it does to the limits of scientifically guided state action: “[Métis] is the mode of reasoning most appropriate to complex material and social tasks where the uncertainties are so daunting that we must trust our (experienced) intuition and feel our way.”10
Indeed, most of the social problems that philanthropy seeks to solve are defined by characteristics of randomness, innumerable variables, the absence of the conditions of controlled experimentation, and indeterminate time horizons, all of which run exactly counter to the scientific method, which relies on prediction, limited variables, repeatable experiments, and control. For example, government agencies and philanthropists have spent vast sums of money in recent decades to improve public education, relying heavily on rigorous metrics such as standardized testing scores and student retention rates. The results of this scientific approach, however, have been unimpressive. There are simply too many variables and too much randomness in those variables—cultural, political, economic, and environmental—for a scientific approach to work. The same can be said of fields such as youth development, community organizing, care of the aging, the arts, policy advocacy, and most other arenas in which philanthropy is active.
A second powerful influence that has shaped the development of instrumental philanthropy has political origins. From the beginning of the republic there has been a long-standing argument between the Jeffersonians and the Federalists over the role of private groups in setting social policy. The democratic impulse to exert public control over the influence of private power surfaced with fresh force in the progressive era. Beginning with an investigation of John D. Rockefeller’s philanthropy in the early 1900s, suspicion about antidemocratic and unaccountable expansion of the power of the wealthy was a recurrent theme in political life throughout the 20th century.
Recently, the effort to make philanthropists more accountable has moved in a different and more problematic direction. What started as a legitimate public interest in avoiding outright fraud or the misdirection of philanthropic resources toward private benefit has become an unrealistic expectation for philanthropy to yield social benefits (however these are to be measured) equal to or greater than the costs of the tax benefits received. That, in turn, has led to growing interest in an instrumentalist approach.
A third major influence that has shaped the rise of instrumental philanthropy is the movement to apply to philanthropy the same metrics and methods used by for-profit businesses. It is expressed in proponents’ attempts to connect specific outcomes (stated at best in monetary terms) to particular financial inputs, often formulated as social return on investment, and to provide assurance to donors that their investments are producing demonstrable and, ideally, quantifiable results. Although it is not unreasonable that donors should be provided with evidence that their donations have yielded beneficial results, an exaggerated emphasis on metrics is becoming a driving force in the field, creating unrealizable expectations and a distortion of organizational priorities. This “huge push toward measurability,” as described by Intel Corp. cofounder and philanthropist Gordon Moore, skews the work of nonprofits through its narrow strictures and highly directive requirements of outcomeoriented funding.11
The cumulative effect of these forces—the epistemology of the scientific method, accountability interpreted as accounting for quantitative value delivered, and an overemphasis on social return on investment—has created a powerful force, moving philanthropy to focus on highly discrete instrumental objectives and solve narrow aspects of social problems that lend themselves to measurement. This model has wide appeal, especially among philanthropists who have been successful in the business world, but it is fundamentally flawed in its ability to provide public goods, and its conceptual structure is seriously limited in its capacity to address the vastly complex, multivalent, and interactive problems of human society, which do not easily conform to linear, demand-driven solutions.
The Problem of Reflexivity. Philanthropy also has to confront the deeper issue of reflexivity, a problem that goes to the very heart of what it means to understand human action and social change. Reflexivity refers to the interactive nature of social knowledge and action—the fact that the thought and action of one person in a social situation affects and is affected by the thought and action of a second person in that same situation. Financier and philanthropist George Soros has pointed out the severe limitations of the simplistic market model in understanding and predicting complex social interactions.12
Soros points to the Asian financial crisis of 1997-99 as an instance of reflexivity at work in the financial system. The economic meltdown resulting from the mutually reinforcing judgments and gamesmanship of global players undermined what might otherwise have been a self-correcting market reaction. In the social sphere, countless ambitious programs of policy change—such as Prohibition, the Carter administration’s energy program, and “abstinence only” programs—have foundered on the failure to take adequate account of the attitudes and responses of those on the receiving end of the policy initiatives.
The tendency of philanthropic foundations to ignore reflexivity and place ever greater emphasis on narrowly directed funding targets and quantitative assessments similarly propels philanthropy toward a conceptual model that fails to do justice to the complexity of social life. The scientific philanthropy of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Russell Sage foundations in the early 20th century marked the beginning of this trend, but it became an even greater influence in the last decades of the century. Recent examples are the innumerable foreign aid projects that have failed because of the disconnection between donors’ visions and recipients’ needs. Similarly, the huge investment by a number of foundations in standards-driven educational reform in recent years has had disappointing results, due in large part, as New York University professor Diane Ravitch has forcefully argued, to the failure of large-scale philanthropy to take adequate account of the views of teachers, parents, and students.13
In the for-profit business sector there is a single purpose and a simple test of success: Does it make money or not? There is no equivalent unitary test in the social sector. To impose one in order to justify dollars invested in solving social problems distorts the nature of civil society. Civil society’s goals often include a wide range of subjectively understood actions, behaviors, and values that are differentially judged by donors, providers, recipients, and the public. It is precisely because commercial transactions fail to produce or adequately account for the reflexivity of public goods that civil society has developed as an alternative way to address public needs.
The critical need to take reflexivity into account is illustrated by the following example in the arena of policy advocacy. For more than a decade the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation supported the work of Compassion & Choices, an organization whose aim is to allow terminally ill people to have the right to physician-assisted death. Last year, the nonprofit drew upon language on human dignity that had been inserted in the constitution of the state of Montana in the early 1970s (along with some later legislative language) to argue successfully a case before the Montana Supreme Court on behalf of the “right to die.” The court’s ruling will have national and international consequences. This long-delayed but hugely important outcome of earlier philanthropic contributions was the result of visionary support of people and ideas that evolved in interaction with many other players, not of investments targeted to produce specific impacts that might be calibrated against alternative investments in a given time period.
THE TASK AHEAD
Philanthropy faces a dilemma. The most pervasive problems society faces—the need for quality education, improved public health, environmental protection, intercultural understanding, and global security—are public goods problems that civil society and philanthropy should be most able to solve. Yet, because of its increasing tendency to pursue narrowly focused, self-directed programs that promise market-like results, modern philanthropy finds itself limited in its ability to address just those problems.
The ultimate vehicle for the attainment of public goods in a democracy is the democratic process itself. But modern liberal democracy rests on a platform of civil society, and civil society both contains the tension between the private and the public and represents the possibility of balancing those polar forces in the search for solutions to public goods problems. Civil society, aided by philanthropy, is the logical vehicle to pursue public goods because it represents both sides of the equation—the freedom and creativity of individual action and the conscience of public responsibility.
Philanthropic donors, both individuals and foundations, should view one of their primary responsibilities as strengthening the structures of civil society. The question remains whether such an aspirational goal is achievable in an era when so many social forces are moving in the opposite direction. The answer is unclear, but one thing is certain: With so much at stake, enormous consequences rest on philanthropy’s ability to take on this task.
Bruce Sievers is a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He was the founding CEO of the California Council for the Humanities and the executive director of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. Sievers is the author of the recently published book Civil Society, Philanthropy, and the Fate of the Commons.
Read more stories by Bruce Sievers.