When you say, “It’s personal,” you may be hoping to end the conversation, but sometimes it’s an opening to go deeper. In philanthropy, it can be an invitation to innovate and recast the way we see what is private and what is public, or simply express a loving sentiment. Think of the many inspirational stories of philanthropy that help define who a person is, or how a family is perceived, maybe over many generations. Personal stories can be private, but they also play a role in building, and when needed, rebuilding the public realm. Perhaps they are even more necessary to connect us to a common purpose than we realize.
Too often we regard stories as “mere anecdotes.” Anyone can spin stories and interpretations, but “serious” authorities tell us that data, systems, strategies, and procedures are what “serious” philanthropy is all about. The policies that regulate philanthropy help reinforce impersonal processes involved in assuring technical compliance. The state often uses the law to declare that philanthropy is defined negatively — legitimate donations cannot have a private benefit. Maybe the state is jealous about who gets to advance the public good, but occasionally it does cheerlead for philanthropy.
Most definitions of philanthropy connect private actions and the public good. When we have public actions for the public good, we have the state and when we have private actions for the private good, we have commerce. Of course, there are many gray areas, but philanthropy is peculiar in that it locates itself squarely in the gray area between the private and the public. And the stories we tell about philanthropy, whether they use the word or not, play an important role in designing how we conceive and connect the private and public realms.
Interestingly, what we consider to be private and public have shifted significantly over time. As thinkers like Hannah Arendt illustrated, the ancients considered the private realm to be one of base necessity where one conducted the mundane task of material survival. It was only in public engagement that one could be truly free and engage one’s highest faculties. Others have argued that in modern times the expanding private realm of modern commerce softened the brutality of political combat, as fighting would destroy the expanding creation of wealth. And by extension, the genius of enlightenment liberalism (not the contemporary political kind) was said to be its success in relocating questions of ultimate purpose from the public to the private realm. Since true believers are wont to be cruel to non-believers, keeping these deep beliefs from clashing with each other in public allows divergent ideas about ultimate purposes to be pursued in private without intrusion from unbelieving others or public authority.
As you consider some of this shifting ground between the private and the public, there are unspoken assumptions about how much humans are likely to care for strangers, when and how they will associate with each other, and how they can and should craft stories of their ultimate purpose. Behind the way we build our public realm and the laws that describe and regulate it are stories about how we came to this state of affairs and what it means to be a citizen. At the same time, we have stories about how we are connected to meaningful others outside the domain of the state.
The best-selling author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, says that “storytelling is our superpower.” It allows the synthesis of information across space and time that enables the unique human form of cooperation grounded in communication. And it is by sharing stories that we communicate about the world we share.
These stories can be inspiring and uplifting, or cruel and demeaning, but they are inescapable in forging our connectedness to others. You might even call them a tool or technology. Some are beginning to think that machines are achieving our level of intelligence because AI can now generate stories. But AI may not know what the stories it generates mean; it relies for its “training” on a vast treasury of human creation — much of which consists of the stories we have told.
Our storytelling superpower can lead to positive and negative innovations. But it does not need to lead to novel things to be consequential. Think of all the everyday philanthropy, the common kindness based in the small stories that connect us at the local and intimate scale. Think of all the everyday love happening around the world right now in rearing children, supporting partners, and caring for those in need who are not related to us. How do we express the meaning of these deeply important connections? How do we remember and share them? Mostly in quite personal ways, by expressing them in stories.
If we want philanthropy to create new possibilities, we should welcome its effort to recast some of the conventional ways in which we conceive of the private and the public. And to be effective, this recasting will need to be meaningful and personal, and not in the cruel way that creates cohesion among some by excluding others.
One promising development can be seen in the recent transformation of The Chronicle of Philanthropy from a private business into a nonprofit. As part of this effort The Chronicle has started The Commons, to share stories of what Americans are doing to come together and bridge divides. This hopeful journalistic effort is based on publicly lifting up the personal stories that resonate publicly and privately.
So, the next time someone says, “it’s personal,” it might be the beginning of a meaningful dialogue that can change who we are for the better. Instead of apologizing for a presumed intrusion, you might say, “Thank you for saying that this is meaningful to you, I’d be honored to discuss it with you.” It could express something meaningful about who we are now and who we may yet become.
About the Author
Amir Pasic is the Eugene R. Tempel Dean of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, the world’s first school devoted to research and teaching about philanthropy.
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