"The underlying premise of philanthropy and of civic engagement is that it is important that we care about something beyond ourselves, that we act on that concern and that we teach others to do so.
I would wager that everyone in this room thinks those propositions are self evident. But I would also bet that, although some of us have thought about how philanthropy and civic engagement should be fostered, very few of us have reflected very deeply or long on why. Most of us refer, without a great deal of thought, to religious obligations, family traditions, cultural imperatives—all of which are important. Indeed, even now I routinely do what my mother told me to do fifty years ago, and I have no doubt that I will go to my grave honoring her dictates, as I hope my own children will do.
But why does it matter? And what investment does a university have?
Well, let us start with the fact that I identified my mother as an important animator of my own concern with the well-being of others. We begin with our families—immediate, extended, fictive, proxy, metaphorical. We care about those whom we believe to be, or can describe as, related to us.
Over the course of human history, and certainly over the course of individual biographies, the extent of those relations expands. From the relatively tiny families of early human history and of our youth, we have grown, individually and collectively, to see ourselves embedded in worlds beyond our homes and our localities, in vast and far-flung religious communities, in the “imagined communities” of print capitalism that produced nationalisms, and—increasingly—in social networks defined, or at least fostered, by new information technologies. The capacity to imagine ourselves related, in nontrivial ways, to people—and perhaps even things—we will never actually encounter is one of the essential features of the modern human experience, and it is the foundation of the concern—the philanthropy and civic engagement—to which the Gerhart Center is devoted.
What is interesting about this moment in history is how rapidly the societies that will both reflect and foster those networks of relation and concern are changing, both in scale and structure. Much of the last two centuries have been devoted to the construction and contestation of the state as the organizing mechanism of mutual concern. The welfare state--in Europe, North America, Egypt and virtually everywhere else—was a device for mobilizing concern, for realizing and activating mutual responsibilities. My responsibility to others as a citizen was a constitutive feature of that state and of the distribution of resources—time and money—that was one of the important foundations of social welfare.
The flaws, or limitations, of the welfare state—its bureaucratic bulk, its lumbering and clumsy suppression of the light-hearted, nimble, joyful embrace of human ingenuity—produced a backlash, and for a quarter century or more, we celebrated the isolated, individualistic and selfish “magic of the market.” Prosperity was to have been an externality of selfishness, and the rising tide, as the cliché went, would raise all boats. In fact, as the global crises of the last few years—the steep rise in commodity prices, the threat of financial collapse, even perhaps the looming pandemic—starkly illustrated, altruism and indeed, welfare are barely visible in the traces of the market.
Today, we are both released and unmoored—neither the state nor the market provides the anchor in social responsibilities without which we all become unfastened, from our societies and communities. At the same time, however, I think we can begin to see the faint outlines of an alternative—embedded in the new technologies which shape our daily interactions but not entirely defined by them. And here I think nodes like the Gerhart Center play a role even more important than we fully understand.
Our identities will increasingly be the elective families of what our children, and certainly our students, call “social networks,” and these communities will be both the constitutive elements of our identities, and the vehicles by which we express our concern for others—particularly those whom we will never actually encounter. These networks will have less hierarchy than states and more cohesion than markets, less anonymity than the faceless bureaucracy, and more autonomy than the intimate household, and more flexibility than any of these alternatives.
We care because we imagine ourselves related—and in novel ways in two dimensions, space and time. Globalization has shrunk the world geographically—distances are shorter. This is not a novel observation. But it is worth considering that the underlying theory of sustainable development has also transformed time, obliging us to care about not only those who are distant in space but those who are distant in time; future generations.
In this context, it is important to recognize that universities—particularly universities like AUC-- play a pivotal role, negotiating not only between places and cultures but between generations.
Universities, and again particularly, places like AUC, are nodes in an emerging cross-national, cross-class, cross-generational network of relationships, of “families” about whom we care. All of which is to say, that the Gerhart Center, perhaps even more than those of us in this room, than those of us who animate and invigorate the Center, from John Gerhart himself, to Barbara Ibrahim, and Dina Sherif, and the Board members, and the staff and interns—all of us—more than any of us realize, is constructing the future.
The future is about networks of concern, about philanthropy and engagement, about mechanisms and vehicles for sustaining our fellow citizens—those who are with us and those who have yet to appear-- in this new world, this third sector beside and beyond the worlds of the state and the market. It is a complicated time, but heady too, as we all consider the opportunities we have at universities to shape the public debates of the day and the values of future generations. The Gerhart Center’s capacity to identify, animate and celebrate these networks of commitment, concern and community represents in real time an important window into this rapidly changing world, and it is an elegant token of the actual and potential contributions AUC makes to its world.
It is a privilege to be associated with institutions that play such a pivotal role in their communities, and I hope all of you are as inspired by the work of the Center and its staff as I am."
