Caring More for People Than Our Ideologies

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There is a beautiful old song, “Moonlight Becomes You,” that Bing Crosby liked to sing, apparently as a convenient way around directly expressing love, which he thought was too vulnerable and emotional. The song ends: “If I say I love you/I just want you to know/it’s not just because there’s moonlight/although moonlight becomes you so.” Crosby wanted the object of his affection to think he loved her but he didn’t quite want to say it.

Now I’m pro-Bing, but a cynic might wonder if he loved her at all, or if the song was just a manipulation to get what he wanted while ducking the high bar of commitment and responsibility that love invokes.

In civic and public life, we too often seem as embarrassed about pronouncements of love as poor Bing. Love is deemed unserious and unsubstantial. It is especially odd to find this aversion to and discomfort with love, and expressions of it, in philanthropy, given that love is referenced by the very name. (Philo, or “phileo,” is Greek for “love,” after all.) Everyone involved rightly wants to convey that their decisions are based on what works — grantees making the case for funding, grantors making the case for the wisdom of their funding — and love is not valued for its efficacy. We want our philanthropy to be determined by evidence and rational decision-making, not the blinding force of love, right? Ask Romeo and Juliet about what love did for their life choices!

But we are wrong to discount love. Love is not saccharine. It is not mere preamble to the “real” work of philanthropy. Love is the real work of philanthropy, and if what you’re doing is not loving, it is not philanthropy.

This is easier to see, perhaps, in direct-service efforts that feed the hungry and clothe the poor. Yet it is also true for civic philanthropy and philanthropic efforts aimed at knitting our country together.

We think love is too soft to effect change in a politics of power. We think the problems in our country are too hard, too big, too technical, for love. But love, according to Aquinas, is the “will to good” — to be committed to others and their well-being. If we are not doing that, if we are not willing the good of the people, communities, and societies we serve, what are we doing?

Too often in philanthropic work and democracy at large, we seek to influence people we do not love. This is dangerous. People are right to be suspicious of those who have the audacity to try to change them and shape their communities without the audacity to love.

Suzette Brooks Masters of the Democracy Funders Network has called for funders and nonprofits to reflect on how their work might fuel division and polarization — indeed, even when that work is done under the very banner of countering polarization and reducing divisions. Brooks Masters, who previously spent nearly a decade as a grant maker focused on immigration, describes how she oversimplified the opposition in her determination to “win” for immigrants suffering hardship. Focused on the importance of rejecting and undermining antisocial forces like nativism, she did not consider and respect that people might disagree for reasons that aren’t reducible to the most malignant forms of opposition.

While we must be clear-eyed about threats to our democracy, we must be clear-eyed enough not to make strident, “with us or against us” distinctions solely because we are confident that our distinctions are born of positive intentions. Our principles, our funding priorities, must derive from a care for the people we are serving and affecting, and they must be kept in subordination to those people. We must care more for people than our ideologies. If we are to act in philanthropy, we must do so out of love: our will to good.

There is no policy, no technique, to overcome a lack of love. This is inescapable. We cannot reliably build a democracy in which people will the good of others without love, because willing the good of others is what love entails. We cannot pursue social cohesion or building bridges or knitting people together as a means to some other end but because we believe it is good for people to be knit together. People can partner out of self-interest, but only love will knit them together.

This must be ever at the forefront of our minds, especially as our efforts grow in scale and ambition, from serving individual persons to “culture change” and political influence. Our politics requires reform, yes, but our politics needs most a new heart out of which good and just reforms can emerge. There is no plan or system that will make our democracy whole without love. Without it, our work is but a vain conceit.

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