Gift Hub

Opportunity Cost of an Oxbridge Arts Degree?

Per The Economist, the lifetime opportunity cost of an Oxbridge arts degree, as opposed to an Oxbridge Econ degree, is 500,000 pounds Sterling. In The Happy Tutor's case, he computes his own forgone earnings since the Renaissance at well over 2 b pounds Sterling. Yes, that is offset by the great intangible value of the wisdom literature with which his Dumpster is well provisioned. As Morals Tutor to the world's wealthiest, he computes that the money he has lost is offset, in the larger view of things, by the value to the body politic of the wisdom that he has passed on to Kings and Queens, Senators and Fine Ladies, Builders of Empires, Presidents and their Heirs, and most recently our once and future Queen, Audrey, she who will inherit a controlling interest in the World's Stock and Trade. "When money is the measure of all," says Tutor, "Wisdom goes for a bargain  price." The Holy, like Tutor, take vows of poverty, which helps when working with the wealthy who pay only for Results. As for chastity in Wealth Bondage that too comes at a price. No moral judgement here. Wait! Wisdom is free for a moment. May I get you towel? 

Please Rate your Beating on a Scale of One to Five

Sometimes I am just not sure about Tutor. I can't tell whether he is operating as a Catholic Priest (Monk), a free lance morals tutor, a satirist, a Dungeon Master, or as an employee in good standing of Wealth Bondage, Incorporated, The Metaphysic of our Age. In any case, after singing a High Mass, in the Chapel at the Castle by the Sea, complete with incense, religious regalia, a crucifix on a staff, Audrey disguised an as altar boy, and Holy Communion, Tutor sent around a Zoomerang Customer Satisfaction Survey, with a five part Lickert Scale, rating his singing, the quality of the wine, the taste of the bread, and the degree to which the Sermon addressed the Customer's greatest moral improvement opportunities, and induced a change of heart that he called "repentance." How do you read this? Maybe at age 2000 or so he is finally losing his holy mind.  In any case, attendance is up at Chapel, and the weekly take in the collection basket is up 14% YTD. Tutor is buying better wine. He must be doing something right.

The Style Best Suited to Subaltern Advisors Writing on Governance of Flourishing Familes of Wealth

To say that for a priest, Tutor is a bit macho, in a 1540's kind of way, is putting it mildly. His true calling was Dungeon Master to the Stars in Wealth Bondage; the priest gig was just because in his day, under primogeniture, the career choices for a younger son were not many. The army, the church, or the law. The priests were the biggest drunkards, gluttons, and whoremongers at Oxford so he went with them for his Masters of Divinity. In our times, he would have been an attorney.

Today, I was talking to him about prose style, the style of our Noble Trade, as Wisdom Consultants to the World's Wealthiest. I was asking him what he thought the right style should be for writing about dynastic families and to help them flourish, from our position as spiritual guides and trusted underlings. I asked if it seemed to him that the prevailing style was more masculine than not, even from the pens of the women. "You mean the virile plain-style?, Phil?," he asked. "Yes," I said. "You mean the prose of the honest man?" "Yes, I said. "You mean the prose that descends to us from insiders in the courts of Emperors and kings, like Horace, Seneca, and Dryden?" "Yes," I said. "You mean the prose of the Courtiers to Louis The Sun King, as it descends from...." "Well, yes, Tutor," I said. "You mean the prose of the coffee house, the prose of the earliest English magazines, like those of Dr. Johnson, Addison, and Steele?" "Yes, Tutor," I said. "And all these highly educated, highly professional women write it. Even when writing about family, and surely that is when we ought to be speaking female. And if they did we could all learn from them." "You mean," said Tutor, "that these females you mention, who do family governance and dynamics, write the prose of Strunk and White, at best the urbane prose of those New Yorker Talk of the Town pieces that E.B. White did, in imitation of Horace, the occasional essay?" "Yes," I said. "The best women in the field sometimes say that the field is male dominated, but they have internalized those very conventions, and don't need to be dominated, because they now quite handily dominate themselves in favor of dynastic, hegemonic, mostly patriarchal power and its prose." "Well," said Tutor, "domination is certainly an interesting topic. Which females do you have in mind?" But we were interrupted.

Audrey hobbled over to Tutor, like a pintsized miscreant in foot manacles. The shoelaces of her faded red Keds, were tied together. "Audrey," said Tutor, "what are you doing, kid?" Says Audrey, "I tied my shoelaces for fun, and now they are all  knotted up and I can't get them apart!" At that she almost toppled over. Tutor picked her up and put her on his lap, working the knots with his deft fingers until they loosened.

Now, Audrey has called Rex her "mascot," and is doing her cheerleader routine for some World Class team in her own imagination. The crowd is roaring. The best of her moves is the cartwheel, from one end of her room to the other.

Now, where were we?

Tutor's mood is darker of late

Tutor is hiding in Audrey's big toy box, what he calls her Dumpster, drinking again into the wee hours, and regressing to the surly moralist he once was, under emperors and kings and queens long gone.  I only hope he does not cast a pall over Audrey, she who will inherit and rule our world, if it continues past the dynastic family now in charge. Even our future queen deserves a few years to grow as a rose grows in a well tended garden, to flourish as herself. "Come on, Tutor," she says, sensing his despair. "When I get sad, I do somersaults, really fast." And so, he trundles up and down her room, following her high rpm rolls with his slower more majestic ones. Now, exhausted, he is lying arms outstretched like the crucified Christ, as Audrey jumps up and down on his chest. But he is smiling. This Private Morals Tutoring of a nine year old, even for short money, is still his ideal job. Spanking The Wealth Creators, while they shrieked in delight, certainly had its moments, as Dungeon Master to the Stars in Wealth Bondage (Ah, the tales he could tell of important people you might know from the news!), but G-2, before the hormones hit, are more fun. If only every parent could afford a full time Moral Mentor for a kid, the world would be a better place.

The Business Model (Skipping Rope)

Audrey has tied one end of the rope to her doorknob. Tutor is holding the other end, and twirling the rope, as Audrey skips and chants to the slap of the rope on the stone floor. Teddy bear, teddy bear, Turn around. Teddy bear, teddy bear, Touch the ground. Teddy bear, teddy bear, Show your shoe. Teddy bear, teddy bear, That will do. Teddy bear, teddy bear, Go upstairs. Teddy bear, teddy bear, Say your prayers. Teddy bear, teddy bear, Turn out the light. Teddy bear, teddy bear.... Who taught her the song? Not Tutor, he recognizes it somehow from ages past, but never taught her. Maybe Cook's daughter? From my own perspective as a Wise Man and Gift Counselor, who achieved lifelong poverty without having to take the vow first, and chastity, too, unfortunately, I wonder what is the business model for that song and my work? The things we do for love, maybe that is the answer. Wealth Bondage: The Things We Do for Love. Maybe I should get a philanthropic planning job in a Private Bank. But at my age prostitution is a pro bono activity, too. Maybe like Tutor I can become a babysitter and moral mentor to some rich kid. His rap sheet is longer than mine.

How the World Ends and Why

All of Tutor’s tutorials directed to Audrey are pointedly unheard. Yet the fate of the world is determined not by a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil but by whatever a Morals Consultant may once have said to 9.5 year old Ivanka. A missile strike in Syria, the world’s largest bomb in Afghanistan, nuclear war with Korea, Russia, or China, perhaps the End Times, pivot on the aphorisms of Pubilius Syrus, a freed slave, read to a child playing jacks as her rescue dog runs off with the red ball.

Charles Koch Foundation Funds Eudaimonia Institute and Why Not?

So, the Charles Koch Foundation has funded a $3.7 million Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest. For those Billionaire Clients in Wealth Bondage who do not read Greek, eudaimonia is Aristotle's word for a life well lived, for human flourishing, a good life in a just community. Aristotle was the Tutor (I hasten to point out) to Alexander, a prince in Macedonia, who went on to become Alexander The Great. Alexander is said to have carried Aristotle's work, including the Ethics, The Politics, and Poetics (on tragedy) as Alexander conquered the world. In Plutarch's Life of Alexander, Tutors don't come into it much, but Trusted Advisors do and so do Physicians. When Aristotle got good advice he did not like, from doctors and subordinates, he, in one case, speared the counselor, and in a second had him crucified. His doctors wondered if they would survive their treating him. Of course this is a parable about human flourishing under conditions of great power disparity, isn't it? Is it the kind of input Charles Koch wants from Jim Otteson, a professor of political economy at Wake Forest U who heads up the Eudaimonia Institute? I doubt it. I can only add that there is an unsubstantiated 2,000 year old rumor that Aristotle, Alexander's original Morals Tutor, got so fed up with his protégé's lust for power, conquest, glory and luxury, that he sent a packet of poison in a donkey's hoof, that was sprinkled by a Macedonian Patriot into the great man's cup, which may have been why Alexander died young. 

You could draw similar morals from Aristotle on Tragedy. To achieve happiness...  Do you know that story? How the city was sick and the cure was the conviction of the King himself for high crimes and misdemeanors, so that the King became the sacrifice, scapegoat, or pariah, the pharmakos, whose disgrace and suffering  saved the town? At the end of the cycle, Oedipus blinds himself, and wanders out of the city. "When I had eyes I could not see, now I am blind and can see. Call me happy." Happy meaning it is a happy ending, a just and fair ending, since with the sacrifice of the king, the city is healed of the plague the king's crimes caused. And happy too because the king finally sees what kind of person he really is. He is redeemed because in his self-abasement he affirms the moral order by which he has finally and appropriately been crushed.

When Wake Forest convenes the conference, as I hope they will, on Philanthropy and the Polis, I will go naked, carrying a pottery lamp, in search of the honest man, not that I will have been invited, and not that I am particularly honest. But that lamp in broad daylight is just another old joke, drawn from Diogenes, whose conversation about eudaimonia with Alexander the Great is legendary. This Dumpster at the intersection of Wealth and Bondage is my homage to that great man's (Diogenes's) barrel.  I even have a copy of The Ethics in here, if you want to thumb through it while I take a leak.

Canvassing a fair rule set for the upcoming "Save our Country" Scapegoat Lottery

Taking "The Bacchae" as a model of healing the  body politic does have one defect. The scapegoat was the King, Pentheus, and we don't have a King. We are a democracy, leading to the need for a fair procedure for picking scapegoats, which is the purpose of this important post, created pro bono publico, by a citizen down on his luck, but hopeful of preferment, when things get better again in our messed up country. 

In the earliest myths, the priest slits the throat of the sacrificial animal, and is then stoned to death himself. Scapegoats included outcasts and pariahs, the deranged, foreigners, lepers, political enemies, and the mentally ill. But they also included wise men like Socrates and Boethius, godly men like Christ, patriots like Cicero, clerics like Saint Thomas Beckett, and Kings like Oedipus, Pentheus, Charles I, Louis XVI, and even a Tsar and his whole family. 

Given all of human history, and much of literature and political theory and practice, surely, we can all agree on the need for a steady supply of scapegoats, but we must also agree on a fair procedure for designating as many as needed. I realize that calling for scapegoats to unify a nation is a good way to become a scapegoat, even if I was not one already. By way of ground rules, maybe, we can agree to exclude any elected officials, designated Morals Tutors, or anyone who is a significant owner of property. That would narrow it down to the expendables, while keeping me (destitute as I am, and a pariah), off the bad list. I come under the exemption for Wise and Virtuous Counselor to the World's Wealthiest Families and their Puppets. (That is a long list, and I am happy to share it with any Billionaire, in or out of the Cabinet, needing a Wise and Virtuous Counselor, but the short list is either me or The Happy Tutor, and he is currently fully engaged in mentoring Audrey, our once and future Queen to Be.)

Actually, maybe we should put on the good list anyone who has read "The Bacchae" and/or Rene Girard on Violence of the Sacred, or Carl Schmidt on a body politic defined as friend against enemy; or building on Schmidt, Agamben, on the state of exception, in which democracy is abrogated during a state of emergency because only a top man can save us inside/outside the rule of law. Anyone who cannot prove he or she has read and digested at least two of these (may my feminist friends please excuse the word) seminal texts goes into the Scapegoat Lottery, unless they qualify under one of the other exceptions, like powerful person, wealthy person, male, white, of European descent, Christian, monolingual in English, or a personal friend of mine, or full-paying client for morals tutorials.  

Impact investing - Friend or Foe of Philanthropy?

Looks like I have just now agreed to talk on impact investing for a group of fundraisers in May.  They want me to provoke table conversations with such questions as these. 

1. What is impact investing, as opposed to earlier forms of socially conscious or screened investing?
2. Where does it fit in your work as a nonprofit? (Endowment?)
3. Is impact investing friend or foe for fundraising? (A recent US Trust survey of wealthy families found that 1/3^rd  do impact investing, and 1/3^rd of that third said they do it in lieu of giving)
4. How do advisors get paid on philanthropy? How do they get paid on impact investing? Any predictions where that will go?
5. Will impact investing steal your nonprofit mojo?
6. Are children raised in a mall, whose only categories are “own,” “manage,” “buy,” “invest,” and “consume,” and whose social status, identity, and sense of community are confirmed by “likes” and “friends” going to prefer impact investing to deeper and more challenging engagement with a cause?
7. Will any rational person prefer sacrificial giving to impact investing when both get results, and confer feel-good bragging rights?
8. What is your “competitive advantage” vis a vis impact investing  if you are, say, the Catholic Church, Jewish Federation, Georgetown, a soup kitchen?
9. In seeking the good, the betterment of humankind, to whom, to what prayer, poem, tradition, or prospectus,  do you turn in the dark of the night?
10. Heidegger wrote, “We live in society, we dwell in community.” If impact investing lives in the market, in what community do you and your donors dwell?
11. If your gift planning is transactional, all about the art of the ask, who do you think is better at sales, you or the investment advisor?
12. When income tax and estate tax deductions are eliminated for the highest capacity donors, under Trump, how will you tell a story true enough and compelling enough that the “social investor” is willing to accept a guaranteed 100% loss of his or her funds via a gift, when he or she can get (according to the investment advisor) a market return and greater impact by keeping the money under management for the Greater Glory of God and the Betterment of Humankind in the Bank of Wealth Bondage?

Any thoughts? Further questions?

King Lear and The King's Men - Lessons on the Slippery Art of Family Governance

King Lear: The History Revealed by Fintan O'Toole, reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

Family Governance for Governing Families. The role of the artist, under a patron. The role of the King's Man. Support, absorb, refactor, and subvert, for the greater good. More power than a Wise Counselor in the traditional Courtier mode. More power than Parliament. Only an all licensed Fool could do more. Were I a wise man I would join Wise Counsel, giving sage advice to families as powerful as our former Monarchs, before we broke from English rule. 

The Wise make good use of literature, as of everything else. If they were wiser yet, they would be Fools. And perhaps The Happy Tutor could show them how. He is a Secular Priest, or actually a real priest, educated at Oxford as a cleric, since under Primogeniture (how our august predecessors beat the proverb, ashes to ashes, and rags to rags), he had to go into the army, become a judge, or be a priest and scholar, with a parish, or a school, or if lazy, as Tutor is, and a drunkard, and carouser, he could set up as a Morals Tutor to his noble neighbor's brats. Mentoring the Heirs, as we now say. The Happy Tutor is also the Lord of Misrule. So are our Wise Counsel, today, if by Misrule we mean the rule of the richest forever. Fool is one thing, Coxcomb, or Villain is another.

In Lear, do we pity the pauper at the base of Fortune's wheel as it turns, or the King at the top who must inevitably fall? When the highest and lowest trade places, 'handy dandy' who goes in ermine, and who in rags? Change places, and who is the thief, and who is the justice? Who is the sighted one? Who is blind?  Who is sane and who mad? Riddle me that, Wise Counsel. But more importantly, can we like Shakespeare, speak truth in riddles to power, and still be awarded our four yards of red cloth to wear the King's livery at court? So far Tutor, buck naked in a Dumpster, must await future delivery. Advantage Wise Counsel.

If I were to write my own Book on Wealth and the Will of God, I would add the epigraph: "Wiser are the Children of Darkness." And believe me, I have learned that to my own cost. Let it be a lesson to us all.