philos anthropos

While fundraising in response to a crisis (or the end of the tax year) is surely an important source of revenue for charities—and therefore an important catalyst for the downstream good they do—there’s something about those one-off donations that feels, to me, self-serving. Something less in the spirit of helping others and more in service of making oneself feel better. While these reflexive gifts don’t necessarily spoil the broth for everyone, they leave me with a sour aftertaste.

One tangible consequence of knee-jerk giving is that a select few organizations (usually those with strong marketing and PR departments) receive the lion's share of funds raised, since reactionary givers are wrapped up in the urgency of the crisis. One wonders if such well-equipped organizations need my money in the first place...

By contrast, my slower approach to philanthropy allows me to research the underlying structural causes of a given issue and find organizations working to prevent the next crisis instead of remedying the last one.

Sure, logically. As long as the organization is putting the money to good use, who cares if it's being given one crisis at a time?

For me, giving back isn't just an economic choice. It's a moral one. Which means motive matters.

At best, when one's only moments of charity are panic-induced, each such donation functions as a quasi-indulgence; a temporary escape from the purgatory of 21st century moral complexity. At worst, it’s performative virtue signaling that insidiously perpetuates the underlying issue by allowing the donor to pretend that he or she is actually part of the solution and not the problem.

The way I see it, society’s most intractable failings—from racial justice to taking care of our veterans—continue to exist between their occasional spikes in public consciousness. Indeed, it’s the less sexy, slow-moving, everyday damage they inflict that makes them so pernicious. Shouldn’t the cure fit that “always on” condition?

My “set it and forget it” approach to philanthropy isn’t just a better philosophical fit: it also produces way more total charity, cumulatively, then I would ever feel comfortable cutting in a single check. Even better? The monthly sum is basically a rounding error in my budget.