IN A DECEMBER 2021 blog post, novelist MacKenzie Scott expressed surprise at the “inclusive and beautiful” definitions of philanthropy, such as “love of humankind,” that she’d discovered in the dictionary. Scott, who has given away more than $14 billion since divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019—and who has pledged to “keep at it until the safe is empty”—wrote that she’d experienced a lifetime of less-favorable associations: “What had happened? Somewhere along the line, this big, lovely word had shriveled to describing the humanitarian impulses of less than 1 percent of the world’s population.”
Perhaps we simply forgot that philanthropy in America has never been much more than a plutocratic flex.
In Prometheus Bound, the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus coined the adjective philanthropos—from phil (loving) and anthropo (human)—to describe the fallen Titan’s fondness for the bumbling protohumans he’d fashioned out of clay. Zeus wanted the pathetic beings destroyed. Instead, Prometheus gave them the gifts of “blind hope” and fire (proprietary Olympian tech), which brought about human agency, culture, and civilization. Gifts bestowed by godly figures, according to their whims, for the betterment of humankind as they interpret it. Sound familiar?
Indeed, our laudatory view of philanthropy is a recent historical development, one that emerged before the wealth of the richest 0.001 percent went quite so parabolic. As in America’s first Gilded Age, the desire of the world’s wealthiest people to legitimize their ever-growing hoards has spawned a spate of conspicuous giving, explains Stanford political scientist Rob Reich, author of the 2018 book Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. And in this new era of market fundamentalism, he says, “that meant putting Bill Gates and Bono on the cover of Time magazine as the person of the year—and thinking about social entrepreneurs as the way to improve the world.”
The Gilded Age philanthropists faced a much more skeptical public. Consider the saga of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, not only
