Maimonides: Patron Saint of Venture Capitalism

Democracy Project blog ^ | 12-28-08 | Laurie Morrow

[lpmorrow]

Suppose you were standing on the stairs outside the New York Public Library, beside Leo Astor or Leo Lenox, who gaze with serene, marbled regard across the exuberant pandemonium of Midtown Manhattan. Suppose, also, you were to ask the panoply of patrons passing by to name the fictional character who best captures the essence of capitalism. Chances are, the names you’d hear most often would be of miserly or unscrupulous figures—Dickens’ unredeemed Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, or Gordon (“Greed is Good!”) Gecko, from the movie Wall Street. Even in December, no one heading up to the Main Reading Room is apt to name the fabled the toy manufacturer/distributor who created jobs in a rural area bereft of employment opportunities, built a business unsurpassed in growth, and whose non-unionized employees are unrivalled in productivity and job satisfaction. No: when it comes to images of capitalism in the popular consciousness, even at Christmas, Santa Claus doesn’t come to mind.

And this is rather a pity. While capitalism certainly allows the greedy, the exploitative, and the corrupt to prosper, it also offers vertical mobility for the generous, the selfless, and the exemplary. Sadly, few of us Library patrons remember that capitalist entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie, a poor, immigrant boy who became the head of U.S. Steel, was a major force behind the lovely library the Leos guard, as well the primary financial donor to several dozen additional public libraries scattered across the five Boroughs. Fewer of us still know that, by the time of his death in 1919, Carnegie had built over half the public libraries in the United States, some 1,689 structures from Pittsfield, Maine to Eureka, California; from Pawnee City, Nebraska to Palestine, Texas; and from Redfield, South Dakota to Jackson, Tennessee.

Capitalism’s detractors, desperate to minimize Carnegie’s generosity, sniff that he built these libraries out of vanity, to see his name displayed across the land. The truth, however, is quite different. Although Carnegie requested something be carved above each doorway, it was not his name, but the Biblical phrase, “Let there be light.”

Largely self-educated, Carnegie knew what it was to hunger for books his family could not purchase. He was inspired to fund libraries in particular, by a businessman who let poor boys, including young Carnegie, borrow books from his personal library:

When I was a working-boy in Pittsburgh, Colonel Anderson of Allegheny –a name I can never speak without feelings of devotional gratitude – opened his little library of four hundred books to boys. Every Saturday afternoon he was in attendance at his house to exchange books. No one but he who has felt it, can ever know the intense longing with which the arrival of Saturday was awaited, that a new book might be had.

–Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth” (1869)

Carnegie focused his entrepreneurial mind on how to maximize his gift’s positive impact. He realized that, important as access to books might be, equally important was having a safe, quiet place, to read and reflect, cloistered from the screeching squalor of the slums. He thus funded buildings where readers could enjoy comfortable, aesthetically uplifting surroundings. Carnegie also reconceptualized the relationship between borrower and book, instituting an innovation that spread to libraries across the nation. During Carnegie’s lifetime (1835-1919), books were luxury items, and the librarian’s duty was to safeguard these precious artifacts from the page-smudging, spine-bending, ear-dogging fingers of the Great Unwashed. Libraries minimized damage to books by keeping them locked away from patrons, in closed stacks. The patron wishing to borrow a book would fill out a slip with the requisite information and present it to the librarian, who would then disappear into the stacks and emerge bearing the desired volume.

Carnegie, however, wanted the books in his libraries to be tools, not artifacts, and was determined to maximize library patrons’ access to as many tools as possible. He directed his libraries to put the books out on open shelves for patrons to browse through, a democratization of consumption perhaps inspired by another innovation of Carnegie’s time, the self-service department store. Thanks to Carnegie, the lady who browsed for hats in the department store could now browse through Booth Tarkington or James Boswell. This change, the product of an entrepreneurial, rather than an academic cast of mind, increased exponentially the ability of Carnegie’s libraries to uplift the lives of patrons. Little wonder that Carnegie was nicknamed “The Patron Saint of Libraries” by grateful contemporaries.

In the recent past, however, gratitude for and even awareness of the generosity of Carnegie was nearly exterminated by professors, education bureaucrats, and media people, who were often infatuated with Marxism and near-universally contemptuous of capitalism. When they did not omit him from American history, Big Education demonized Carnegie as a “Robber Baron,” despite his having done more to help teachers, scholars, schoolchildren, and journalists access information than any other individual in American history.

With the rise of the high-tech economy, which is highly individualistic, competitive, and entrepreneurial, doctrinaire anticapitalism is fast going the way of earth shoes and roller disco. It is out of this new, high-tech world that many of today’s most generous philanthropists come. Often politically liberal, they are not anticapitalist, but seek to harness the energy of capitalism and its culture of accountability to generate social and economic good more surely and more efficiently than traditional philanthropy. Like Carnegie, these philanthropists are thoughtful, strategic investors in human potential; they, too, approach giving in an analytical, businesslike manner. These new philanthropists want a ‘return’ on their investment, in the form of demonstrable progress towards solving the problems they take on.

This seemingly innovative, businesslike approach to philanthropy has very old roots, in, for example, the medieval rabbi and philospher, Maimonides, who developed a systematic means of assessing the quality of philanthropic giving according to the circumstances under which a gift is given, and received. The concept about which Maimonides wrote was tzedakah. Commonly translated as “charity,” this Hebrew word means something more akin to “justice” or “righteousness.” For Maimonides, giving to those in need isn’t a virtue, but an obligation, something one is simply obliged to do by the Creator, as a steward, not a possessor, of His gifts. For Maimonides, all giving is not created equal. A gift’s quality depends on the circumstances under which the gift is given, the spirit in which it is offered, and its potential for what we now call ‘sustainability’. Maimonides ranks the quality of giving as follows, from minimally virtuous (#8) to maximally virtuous (#1) :

8. You give, grudgingly.

7. You give less than you should, but with a generous heart.

6. You give to someone in need, but only after they ask for help. (They shouldn’t have to ask. You’re God’s steward, and are supposed to be paying attention.)

5. You give without being asked, having observed the need. You know whom you’re helping, and they know you’re helping them.

4. You don’t know the person receiving your gift, but the recipient knows you’re the giver.

3. You know whom you’re helping, but they don’t know you’re their benefactor.

2. You give without knowing the recipient, who benefits without knowing your identity.

1. You help a person in need find employment, or start her own business.

What a remarkable, refreshing idea: that the highest form of charity is to help good people find employers who value them, or, even become business owners themselves, and, potentially, employers of other good people in need of work. In so doing, the giver removes from the recipient the humiliating stigma of the supplicant, offering instead a testament to or tangible endorsement of the recipient’s talent and character. A time of struggle and despair can thus be transformed into a time of creativity and gratitude. Someone whose life is transformed in this manner is apt to be disposed to replicate that experience for others, and those she benefits may do the same. This entrepreneurial philanthropy can thus have a kind of multiplier effect that uplifts not merely the checking-account balance but the soul.

This possibility of replication suggests there may be an even higher level of giving than Maimonides identifies, a level even beyond helping a person start a business. Perhaps the most estimable gift is that which inspires philanthropy in others, and which provides the philanthropist with an analytical framework that enables their gift to have maximal effect. Such philanthropy Maimonides himself has extended to the world for nearly a thousand years.

Andrew Carnegie well deserves his title of Patron Saint of Libraries.

And if, on this last night of Chanukah, anyone feels inspired to nominate a Nice Jewish Boy as the Patron Saint of Venture Capitalism, Maimonides certainly has my vote.

[count-your-change]

For those who do not know Maimonides, Moses Maimonides was a 12th. century Jewish writer, commenter, thinker, who is sometimes called the second Moses.

In the small town where I grew up one of the two most imposing buildings in town was the great heap of ornate limestone library with Carnegie’s name on it. A solid and substantial mass it was that told all who entered that something extraordinarily valuable was housed therein.

[The Spirit Of Allegiance]

Some interesting thoughts and quotes.

A false premise is the very one of ‘capitalism’ ... everyone is a capitalist. The distinction is this: there are those who are for private capitalism—and the elitists who are for ‘public’ capitalism—concentrated under their control.

Too often the spirit is a mere love of money or using it to curry human favor...worship of mammon, not emulating Maimonides; lacking a humble, righteous spirit of genuine altruism.