Something notable happened on the New York Times op-ed page a few weeks ago, though it was easy to miss — since what was worth noting was something that didn’t appear.
For the last several years, Nicholas Kristof had been cultivating what looked likely to become a steady New Year’s tradition, writing an annual late-December column explaining why the year that had just passed could be considered “the best year ever.”
In his column published a year ago, as 2019 came to a close, for instance, Kristof argued that “2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.” Kristof meant these columns to be more than uplifting. They also had a subversive streak, pushing against the dominant note of crisis that he believed informed much reporting. “I fear that the news media and the humanitarian world focus so relentlessly on the bad news,” he wrote in that 2019 column, “that we leave the public believing that every trend is going in the wrong direction.”
This was, it should be said, a low-level insurgency; Kristof conceded the many causes for alarm in the world and “promise[d] to tear [his] hair out every other day.” But he did urge his readers to “interrupt our gloom for a nanosecond” and entertain the possibility of optimism.
Given, well, everything, it’s not surprising that Kristof decided to forgo the column this year. Our gloom didn’t suffer many interruptions in 2020.
We should be wary of assessments of the future that stray too far from the actual experiences and attitudes of those who will bear whatever it brings.
Yet even before the pandemic struck, fierce debates were raging over the appropriateness and legitimacy of optimism. At stake were not just empirical questions — was the world really getting better and how would we know? — but more fundamental ones involving the deeper ideological underpinnings of that forecasting.
Philanthropy and philanthropists were at the center of those debates. So this transitional moment — between calendar years, between presidential administrations, and perhaps even from the depths of the global pandemic to the beginning of its end — provides an opportunity for philanthropy to reconsider its relationship with optimism.
Doing so, which requires incorporating the critique of philanthropy into the practice of philanthropy, would offer a modest sign that some trends, at least among major givers, are heading in the right direction.
Optimism Is Easy for Some
“You won’t find it on cable news today, but one of the biggest stories right now is how the world is getting better,” announced Ted Turner in a 2018 Chronicle op-ed.
It’s not a surprise that leading philanthropists have become some of the most vocal promoters of optimism. It’s relatively easy for those who have enjoyed financial and professional success (even during the pandemic) to believe things are generally going well and are likely to continue to get better, especially if they are at the forefront of efforts to extend those trendlines.
Jeff Bezos has made the idea that “by so many important measures, the world keeps getting better” one of the foundations of his Day One Fund.
And in his 2020 annual letter, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker urged readers “to re-enlist, re-engage, and reconnect … with the deep, abiding optimism at the heart of the democratic creed.”
It’s likely the nation’s most prominent optimists are Bill and Melinda Gates; their sense that the world is steadily getting better is firmly rooted both in a commitment to global health (where many of the improvements cited by optimists reside) and in their belief in data’s ability to capture and accelerate those improvements.
The Gates Foundation blog, for instance, is called Impatient Optimists, and over the years, Bill and Melinda have given numerous interviews explaining why optimism is central to their philanthropic creed. “Sure, it can be tricky,” Bill Gates told USA Today in 2017, “but on balance, things are tending to improve.”
For a brief period during the pandemic, the coronavirus complicated Gates’s status as leading optimist as he also became one of the public’s most celebrated Cassandras. When the Covid-19 crisis struck, much was made of the warnings that Gates had issued, most famously in a 2014 TED talk, that the world was disastrously unprepared for the likely onset of a global pandemic.
But it did not take Gates long to re-emerge as one of the chief purveyors of a data-driven, technocratic optimism during the Covid crisis, pegged, in part, to the investments his own foundation has made over the last year. “There is good news coming in 2021,” he assured readers of his “Year in Review” blog post.
Not a New Phenomenon
Philanthro-optimism is by no means a new phenomenon; in fact, philanthropy and optimism have been entangled from the start. The word “philanthrôpía” was first used in a fifth-century B.C.E. drama attributed to the Greek playwright Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. Alongside Prometheus’s most famous gift to man, fire, the drama also recounts that he gave man “blind hopes.” The term “philanthropy” first became commonly used in English during the Enlightenment, when it referred to the love of humanity, the belief in the improvability of the human condition through benevolent acts, and the dedication to assisting the suffering stranger.
As the term “philanthropy” came into common usage in the United States in the early 1800s, it often carried associations of millennial possibility. When, at the close of the 19th century, philanthropy became associated with large-scale monetary benefactions, it maintained a connection to optimism largely through the influence of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. His personal motto, adapted from his intellectual mentor Herbert Spencer, was “All is well since all grows better.” (He had it painted on his own library’s wall.)
The incomes of the world’s poorest have gone up over the last decades, but that increase is by no means adequate nor does it guarantee similar increases in the future.
Nothing captures Carnegie’s extravagant optimism better than the proviso he tacked on to the charter of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1919. Carnegie had established the organization in perpetuity. So what should it do when it completed its mission and peace was permanently installed throughout the world (which he naturally assumed would eventually occur)?
“When … war is discarded as disgraceful to civilized men,” he wrote, “the trustees will please then consider what is the next most degrading remaining evil or evils whose banishment … would most advance the progress, elevation, and happiness of man, and so on from century to century without end.”
It won’t come as a surprise that Carnegie was ruthlessly lampooned as naive, “a fool for peace,” by the politicians who prided themselves on their hardheaded realism. But, at the same time, his optimism was also regarded by labor leaders as a cynical ploy that allowed him to ignore the devastating conditions at the steel mills that produced his fortune and fueled his peace activism.
A century later, similar critiques, mixing charges of excessive idealism and cynicism, are leveled at this generation’s leading philanthro-optimists. They can be roughly divided into four interlocking categories.
Questioning the empirical case that the world is getting better.
Most prominently, debates over this question have centered on the extent of reductions in global poverty, often touted as Exhibit A in the case for philanthro-optimism.
In July, for instance, Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, issued a scathing report taking aim at the “deceptively optimistic narrative about the world’s progress against poverty” that has been embraced by “world leaders, philanthropists and pundits.”
Alston argued that such narratives rely on an arbitrary and intentionally low poverty line, which allows the persistence of poverty and the deepening of global inequality to be masked.
These are powerful critiques, but as Dylan Matthews argued in a 2019 Vox article, they also do some masking of their own: There are significant points of convergence between the optimists and many of their critics around the fact that the incomes of the world’s poorest have gone up over the last decades, but that this increase is by no means adequate nor does it guarantee similar increases in the future.
What was really at issue in these debates, Matthews suggests, was not the facts at hand but the contending political interests the optimistic or the pessimistic narrative serve.
Optimism as legitimizing dominant political and economic systems, especially global capitalism.
Critics charge that philanthro-optimism entails a vision of the future that relies on essential continuities with the present, devoid of major ruptures caused by clashing interests or the imperative for transformative change. In other words, they underscore the implicit ideological work done by Carnegie’s dictum: The belief that “all grows better” in the future reinforces the conviction that “all is well” in the present.
Optimism as a diversion.
In a sense, this critique is a variant of a longstanding one directed at philanthropy (made famous by Charles Dickens in Bleak House), that it is “telescopic,” frequently trained at those in the distance and, so, blind to suffering closer to home.
There is in fact a geographic dimension to this contemporary critique of optimism, especially because so much of the gains touted by philanthro-optimists are in the developing world, but it is joined by a time-based one, with talk of progress in the future obscuring the afflictions of the present.
The scholar-activist Cornell West, for instance, has explained that while he holds on to hope, which allows for more alienation from the status quo, he could never consider himself an optimist “because there’s too much suffering in the world.”
For critics of optimism, this distraction is often by design. The philanthropy critic Anand Giridharadas calls this approach “Pinkering,” after Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who has become one of the leading defenders of an optimistic worldview based on the capacity of human rationality to address humanity’s most significant challenges. Pinkering, as Giridharadas explains in his 2018 book, Winners Take All, is “using the long-run direction of human history to minimize [and to] delegitimize the concerns of those without power.”
If Bill Gates has a contemporary muse, it’s Pinker. Gates called Pinker’s 2011 investigation of declining violence in the Western world, The Better Angels of Our Nature, “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read.”
But he soon found one he seemed to like even more. He decreed Pinker’s next book, Enlightenment Now, which makes a rousing case for how and why the world is getting better, “My new favorite book of all time.”
Other reviewers were less generous. In fact, piling on Pinker has become something of an academic parlor game for scholars on the left. The “misguided optimism” of Pinker and his acolytes, historian Sam Moyn has argued, encourages a “complacency” that “blinds them to unexpected reversals in history and conceals from them the threats to their own hopes,” whether those be climate catastrophe, authoritarian violence, or capitalism itself.
Optimism as a reflection and instrument of privilege.
Those who feel they have the power, and the right, to shape the future are the most likely to believe in the promise of that future and to impose that sense of promise on others.
Pessimism can be just as imperious, of course. Some recent surveys have suggested that people living in lower- and middle-income countries and emerging economies tend to be more optimistic about the direction of the world than those in higher-income countries (note that some of this research was commissioned by the Gates Foundation).
Their beliefs shouldn’t be dismissed as inconvenient to the case against optimism. Still, in the critique and the counter critique of optimism, the point is the same: We should be wary of assessments of the future that stray too far from the actual experiences and attitudes of those who will bear whatever it brings.
So, where does that leave philanthro-optimism at this start of a new year — and this new administration?
Part of this answer depends on what the new year delivers; it’s possible that when it closes, Kristof will be just as reluctant to explain why 2021 was the best year ever as he was in 2020. But optimism is so entrenched within the history of modern American philanthropy and provides the fuel for so many contemporary megaphilanthropists that any push that it be abandoned entirely is likely to fail. Plus, the beginning of the Biden administration has uncorked reserves of optimism that will be difficult to tamp down. (The executive orders! The fireworks! Amanda Gorman! Amanda Gorman!!)
If philanthropy is going to continue to be wedded to optimism, it should be a chastened and self-critical union, drained of self-congratulation. It must be attentive to the challenges of those who do not believe all is well or that all is likely to grow better. It must invite the critique of precisely those underlying dynamics that optimists believe are the foundations of progress and be open to alternatives to them. And it must question the power dynamics that shape the metrics and measurements used to determine what constitutes progress. That sort of optimism might be difficult to cultivate and even harder to sustain, but it would do its small part in the work to make the next year better than the one that came before.
Funding disclosure: Benjamin Soskis’s work has been supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is discussed in this article.
