No Dollar Signs This Time
Sometimes what’s going on in the world or in my work brings a line of poetry repeatedly to mind, but just as often it’s a single word. Lately the one I keep turning over is “philanthropy.”
It’s not a word I have ever loved or identified with. A lifetime of cultural references associated it with financially wealthy people who believed they knew best how to solve other people’s problems. Since I did not believe myself to be such a person, I had always felt more kinship with people who offered a couch when someone said they needed a couch.
So I was surprised to discover that dictionary definitions of philanthropy are so inclusive and beautiful: “love of humankind”; “the desire to promote the welfare of others”; “generous donation of money to good causes”; “work of practical beneficence.” What had happened? Somewhere along the line, this big, lovely word had shriveled to describing the humanitarian impulses of less than 1% of the world’s population. When did the rich become the only people with a “desire to promote the welfare of others”? Which is a more “generous donation of money to good causes” — 100 dollars from someone who earns 50,000 a year, or 100,000 from someone with 50 million in the bank? How did the only “work of practical beneficence” worth acknowledging become writing checks?
Language experts call this kind of change in the meaning of a word semantic narrowing. Apparently once upon a time “girl” meant any young person, “deer” meant any animal, and “art” meant any skill. But none of these narrowed words disappoint me. They didn’t come to signify something diminished, just something more specific, and specificity is often more beautiful. The problem is that half the beauty of the original meaning of “philanthropy” was in its breadth. It’s as if we had taken the word “love” and reduced it to mean only familial love, or only romantic love, cutting out the love we feel for friends, or food, or sunsets, or strangers.
