How the Miser Became a Philanthropist: Revisiting a Holiday Fable in an Era of Modern-Day Scrooges

The spirit of giving, whatever that may be, is said to come alive this time of year. And in that tradition, I’d like to put a small capstone on 2021 by calling back to one of the oldest philanthropy fables out there: Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

I know—hardly new territory. But as certain 19th-century economic patterns reassert themselves in this new Gilded Age, I don’t think it’s a stretch to draw parallels between Victorian England and our own time.

Anyone living in a big city, particularly here on the West Coast, has likely noticed the Dickensian character some of our streets have taken on lately, with the desperate and the destitute living cheek-by-jowl with the privileged and the powerful. The same resource gulf exists elsewhere as well; it’s just less visible. I’ll also risk straying too far into the English department by pointing out that death, which figures so prominently in Dickens’ classic, now occupies the public mindset in ways that weren’t fathomable two years ago.

Faced with those concerns in his own time, Dickens’ answer in “A Christmas Carol” was private, individual charity. Redeemed as a philanthropist after a lifetime of miserliness, Ebenezer Scrooge and his wealth turned from a burden to a blessing, bringing relief to the people around him affected by structural poverty.

What Scrooge didn’t do, though, was run for Parliament on an anti-poverty platform, or advocate for higher taxes on financial services professionals like himself, to pay for some better alternative to those prisons and workhouses.

I’m joking, but the point is that proto-philanthropy stories like “A Christmas Carol” helped establish norms around charitable giving in the West that remain powerful today. That is, things like centering the philanthropist rather than the recipients, or a refusal to criticize capital accumulation in a systemic way, or invoke the public sector as part of the solution.

These are all issues we juggle at IP on a daily basis as we cover a space where individual wealth-holders are wielding ever-increasing power, and often in a less-than-transparent manner. It’s difficult. On one hand, there’s a temptation to go full Anand Giridharadas and paint all the super-rich as unredeemed Scrooges. It’s also true that in ways that weren’t as common in the 19th century, a few of today’s mega-givers do try to work at the structural level—successfully or not. But then again, we can’t forget that stinginess is still the rule among the billionaire set. And that many philanthropists’ preferred treatments for social problems fail to challenge the inequitable systems that made their wealth possible in the first place.

As much as we might yearn for a more democratic nonprofit sector, the power to make major funding decisions still lies in the hands of a very small subset of the public. Like the ghosts that haunted Scrooge, we can persuade, cajole and criticize. But in the end, what we’re covering here is private wealth. If philanthropy’s going to change, private decision-makers will need to choose change, and with no assistance from the supernatural. Government regulation could also come into play, but these days, that seems about as unlikely.

Still, MacKenzie Scott made a good point in her recent post about the “narrowing” of the term philanthropy to refer only to big gifts from people like her. As the holidays commence, it’s worth returning to the idea that the “love of humankind” needn’t just mean big gifts of money, or even small gifts of money, but something more like “kinship with people who offered a couch when someone said they needed a couch,” as Scott put it.

We’re fortunate that since the pandemic began, greater attention is being paid to these more accessible forms of loving humankind, both by philanthropy scholars and by people working on the ground, often in care roles, who can choose to identify with and be empowered by a term once reserved for white, male captains of industry.

Nevertheless, I think there’s still a role for that narrower version of the word, and perhaps more than ever, a need to demarcate and closely scrutinize what we might call “big philanthropy”—what Scott refers to as “financially wealthy people who believed they knew best how to solve other people’s problems.”

Our society, which reveres the “science” of economics and the cult of rational self-interest, still does a great deal to prop up that belief, hoisting our billionaire philanthropists up on a pedestal. But that may be changing as intelligent critique and healthy skepticism become more of a societal norm, a shift we’ve watched with great interest over the past few years. One of my hopes for the coming year is that even if we in the philanthropy media alone cannot change old beliefs about wealth, we will, like the ghost of Jacob Marley, herald the coming of those who can.

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