Peter Buffett, the son of Warren Buffett, writes of the āCharitable-Industrial Complexā in the Times. I found it resonant and revealing, and you should read it.
Itās resonant because I think Buffett correlates, as Iāve seen few other authors successfully do, the global rise in inequality with a rise in non-profit activity and power. āInside any important philanthropy meeting,ā he writes, āyou witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.ā
It reminded me of a phenomenon at Northwestern University, which I graduated from in June.
At Northwestern, there was a special kind of non-profit group, and groups of that kind were flourishing. They prized concepts like engagement, design and community. Almost all of them focused on the global. They were social justice-oriented--if anything, that was the moniker for this kind of group--but they were neither activist nor leftist. Almost all their members would ultimately declare, with Buffett: āIām really not calling for an end to capitalism; Iām calling for humanism.ā
They had a politics, but it was separate--and meant to be separate--from American party politics. Their politics sought to end global poverty, mostly with or within global capitalism; they sought sustainable, rather bland anti-climate change policies; and they sought designed solutions, small alterations to systems, probably conceived by collaborating amateurs, which tweaked an aspect of someoneās everyday routine so that some other goal might be accomplished. These are the loose politics of the global progressive elite.
These groups weren't ineffectual, and there were jewels among them. Globemed, for instance, had a concise mission and took its structure from the community-centered approach of Partners in Health.
Yet groups of this kind had certain tendencies. They were (and this is not a technical, nor technically correct, term) almost franchises: they had a structure easy to duplicate, the intention to expand to other colleges and universities, and a financial system to buy into. They were meant to foster (a favorite word) thoughtful leaders, to propel non-profit entrepreneurs into professional charities. They were elite preparation organizations, in other words, so there was a premium on founding, on opening a new branch of something, on being notable in a way that fits inside a Twitter bio. The young, attractive entrepreneur of technology mythology roams beyond Silicon Valley: with charitable accomplishments swapped out for technological ones, he or she also stalks non-profit conferences, lectures to other world-making devotees, advocates design and development in places beyond social media.
If you went to college recently, you probably recognize this cohort. Iām friends with many people who worked in the āchange-makerā space, and I respect them and their work. (I, meanwhile, spent college on Twitter, and writing bad poems about newspaper history.) But these groups are unmistakably pre-professional, preparing for an industry (Buffett says nonprofits employ 9.4 million people in the US) and they sit snug beside all the other factories of the elite: the technological industrial complex, the consulting industrial complex, the financial.
And it's here I found Buffettās op-ed revealing, because he cannot process, cannot provide a path, for how to break down these factories. He laments a ācrisis of imagination,ā and calls for a new operating system, ānew code.ā I am not sure whether this is out of humility--he does not have an answer--but it is odd to watch his op-ed become a TED talk.
And reading his closing, I could hear leftist friends responding. Buffett explicitly rejects anti-capitalism, but then he tumbles into platitudes, and itās easy to see all this and shout: Look where his privilege cannot take him!
I am not so certain. A crisis of imagination strikes me as a crisis of vocabulary, and I wonder if an unspoken first principle of these groups--to prize the often apolitical--is the mistake. I am not sure that I want ātechnologyā and āphilanthropy,ā the industries which, thanks to their novelty, feel āexciting,ā to become plainly intelligible to boring old politics. Iām not sure I have a choice, though: The gargantuans of tech are gearing up for politicization. I wonder if these new, āworld-changingā non-profits will gear up soon, too.
2087
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