Almost everyone knows the parable of the Good Samaritan. The story is short and deceptively simple; it touches deep emotions and common experience at the same time.
Jesus is being tested by a lawyer, who asks, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus draws from him the answer that he must love God and his neighbor as himself. The lawyer persists: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus then relates the story of the Good Samaritan:
A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half-dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; and then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.”
The passage concludes with another question: “Which of these three do you think proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer replied, “The man who showed mercy on him.” To which Jesus responded, “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10: 25-37, RSV).
Jesus is telling the story to people who know personally what things are like on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. His listeners can readily identify with what happened to the man who fell among robbers. But it is likely that none in the audience would have been prepared for what he said about the Samaritan. Jesus said the Samaritan had compassion.
Samaritans were the mortal enemies of the Jews, and Jesus was a Jew speaking to an audience of Jews. The depth of animosity between Jews and Samaritans is hard for us to understand, perhaps, but not for Jesus' audience. Biblical scholar Robert Funk notes that “a Jew who was excessively proud of his blood line and a chauvinist about his tradition would not permit a Samaritan to touch him, much less minister to him” (1982, pp. 29-34). But the hero of the story is the Samaritan. The Samaritan did the right thing while the Jews in the story did not.
The study of philanthropy usually concentrates on two perspectives, that of the person who gives and that of the person in need. In the parable, those perspectives are represented by the Good Samaritan and the man lying helpless by the roadside. There appear to be three lessons to this story; the first two focus on the Good Samaritan and the third on the person in need. The first lesson is the implicit answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” The second is that we should go to the aid of others even at some risk to ourselves. The third is that we are all vulnerable; we all face the possibility of needing the help of others, even perhaps the help of a hated enemy. The third lesson has received less attention than the other two.
For those individuals who decide to heed the parable's second lesson and go to the aid of others even at some risk to themselves, there will be no shortage of opportunities—or of risks. There are many places in this world that are dangerous, and there are thieves of infinite variety. All of us have heard reports of Good Samaritans who are themselves robbed and murdered in coming to the aid of another. We should remember that families caught harboring Jews during the Holocaust were often put to death themselves (Oliner and Oliner 1992). There are also contemporary reports of “Good Samaritan scams,” tricks to lure well-meaning Good Samaritans into traps set by decoys feigning injury or peril.
We also know of situations in which Good Samaritans were nowhere to be found: most of us have heard the scandalous story of the thirty-eight witnesses to the assault and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964, when none of the thirty-eight witnesses even went so far as to call the police (Rosenthal [1964] 1999). And, unfortunately, we know of situations where those who have intervened have been sued for supposedly causing harm in doing so. Every state in the U.S. now has some version of a “Good Samaritan Law” providing immunity from liability to those who try to help (some state laws only protect doctors). Some of those statutes also include a “duty to assist” clause, making it a misdemeanor to act like the Levite and the priest and just pass by. In fact, these sorts of “Bad Samaritan” laws requiring philanthropic aid have been enacted in places around the globe, from Mongolia in 1781 to Portugal in 1982 (Hunt 1990).
Given the risks, why is it that the Good Samaritan did not turn his eyes away and pass by on the other side of the road? Why did he come to the aid of the stranger in that dangerous place, even when he must have assumed that the injured person was a Jew? Why did he accept the risk?
Religious tradition says that God had given the Good Samaritan the capacity to feel compassion. In our time, however, the dominant assumption about human behavior is that all of us are calculators of self-interest; that self-interest motivates all of our actions. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the calculators of self-interest are the priest and the Levite, who crossed to the other side of the road and avoided the risk and inconvenience of offering assistance. Either of them might have justified himself in our terms, “I didn't want to get involved.” The Good Samaritan ignored risk and inconvenience and became involved. In the simplest moral terms, he represents a true philanthropic spirit; he has compassion. Cost-benefit analysis would not have inspired him to intervene.
The Good Samaritan story is part of our philanthropic tradition not because so many of us would be brave enough to act the way he did, but because we know in our hearts that we would want to act that way. When Robert Wuthnow (1991) asked Americans of all sorts to explain their reasons for being compassionate, he found many of them struggled to come up with a satisfactory moral or religious explanation. But when they began to explain their acts in light of the Good Samaritan parable, they became quite animated and articulate. Of course, they also bent the story to fit their circumstances, as many modern theologians have done to maintain the relevance of the parable. In fact, this parable seems to be particularly adaptable. One philanthropic entrepreneur in England, Chad Varah, borrowed the idea in 1953 when he founded “The Samaritans,” an organization “to befriend the suicidal and despairing” (see Varah 1980).
We all want to believe that we are mature and responsible enough to do the right thing, to be Good Samaritans. But we also know that if we spend too much time calculating costs and benefits we will immobilize ourselves, or fail to do the right thing from a simple failure of nerve or fear of risk.
The Good Samaritan story acknowledges that there are sometimes real risks in trying to help other people. In our time, fear constrains the charity of those who might otherwise bring care to AIDS victims or participate in a project in a minority neighborhood—or for a minority person to join a project in a majority neighborhood. When there are risks, courage is called for, a kind of quiet courage that does not masquerade as bravado and machismo. That kind of courage is evident every day among those who overcome their fears and live the unprotected life of service in every American city.
Most of us have had experiences in which we have the opportunity to “be a Good Samaritan,” such as coming upon a car accident before the police or ambulance arrive. And we can draw lessons from such incidents that are similar to the lessons in the parable of the Good Samaritan. One lesson is that we are all vulnerable. We can be minding our own business one minute, and be pinned inside our cars in desperate need of help the next.
Another lesson is related to what economist Kenneth Boulding ([1973] 1981) first called the principle of “serial reciprocity.” Because we are all vulnerable to such unpredictable and sometimes dreadful experiences, we should respond like the Good Samaritan in such situations. Our own need for help is likely to be remote in distance and time; when our accident occurs, somewhere else at some unpredictable time, the persons we have helped are not likely to be there. What we must count on instead is that someone will be there, willing and able to help—hence, serial reciprocity.
The principle of serial reciprocity assumes that we will want to help someone else in trouble if we can anticipate that we might need help ourselves someday. But another way of thinking about the need of the other is not reciprocal at all, even indirectly. It is the simple and powerful feeling of shared suffering and the sense of vulnerability; it is the feeling that causes us to say—or at least to think—“I know how you feel; I've been there.” That experience of shared suffering may be the most effective motivator for philanthropic activity. Without some experience of suffering, even of suffering of a different kind, it is difficult to sustain compassion. Being a victim, knowing pain and suffering and despair, is often the experience that causes us to think philanthropically.
A final—and unfortunate—lesson we can draw from our experiences with car accidents and related sorts of incidents is that, like the priest and the Levite, most people will pass by, ignoring the call for help. In the aftermath of the Kitty Genovese case, psychologists became very interested in finding out when “bystander intervention” would occur and when it wouldn't. They found, for example, that we are more likely to help when we think we are the only ones who can help, and less likely to help when we are in a hurry. One ingenious study (Darley and Batson 1973) even found that more than half of a group seminarians hurrying down an alley on their way to give a lecture on the Good Samaritan parable were unlikely to stop and help someone slumped down in the alley coughing and groaning.
The Good Samaritan story, read as straightforward example, gives a short course in responsible service to others. The Samaritan doesn't foolishly give the victim money and then ride on; the victim can't use money at that point. The Samaritan applies first aid (another philanthropic idea) and then helps to get the injured man to a place where he can recover.
But while the parable of the Good Samaritan sounds like a simple tale, acts of charity are seldom simple. They are almost always fraught with questions and uncertainties. To begin with, there are considerations about the actions of those who give. In order to help others, we should know the facts: facts about the situation, about the victim, about our own capability and character, about other people's responsibilities, and about the likely consequences of our own action or inaction. Yet in some situations calling for our intervention we will have neither information nor time to acquire it. We will have only the preparation of our past experience. In those circumstances, our values rather than our calculations guide us.
In the parable, the Samaritan knows little about the victim, but he knows he has the capability to assist. The man has been robbed and can't pay for what he needs, so the Samaritan pays the innkeeper to care for him long enough to get him on the way to recovery. Then the Samaritan says that he'll come back—not to collect what is owed him by the victim but to be sure that all the bills are paid. And that prompts us to ask: When does an act of charity end? For instance, who should pay the extra bills that pile up if the victim's recovery takes longer than expected?
And then there are questions surrounding the Samaritan's arrangement with the innkeeper. The cooperation of the innkeeper is essential for the Samaritan's philanthropy to be effective. What if he had chosen not to cooperate? Should we expect persons who are involuntarily involved in a philanthropic act to behave philanthropically? Does the innkeeper have a right to a reasonable profit for his efforts or would we expect him to be content with breaking even? Should he accept a loss? Should we view the innkeeper as simply an “interested party,” caught in this act of mercy whether he wants to be or not? He might simply view the victim as a customer—if there is no free lunch, then there is no free room at the inn. Someone will have to pay, and pay the going rate. On the road from Jerusalem to Jericho (or from midtown Manhattan to the South Bronx), victims may be numerous. We might ask at what point voluntary hospitality can no longer be sustained.
Philanthropy relies heavily on trust. In the parable, the Samaritan trusts the innkeeper to care for the victim until he recovers. What if the innkeeper thrusts the man out before he is completely well? Or what if the innkeeper pads his bills? People who are street-smart often fleece those who show compassion. Perhaps the innkeeper reasoned, if the Good Samaritan was willing to put up two denarii to help this man, chances are he would be willing to pay another one or two when he comes back. If we assume the innkeeper is a Jew, another plausible reason for him to exploit the situation is the ethnically based animosity he almost certainly feels for the Samaritan.
My sense of our common philanthropic values is that we would expect the innkeeper to be trustworthy in this case, and that we would expect him to share some of the burdens of the Good Samaritan's act. The Good Samaritan, in one sense, can be thought to be acting on behalf of all of us; he is acting by a norm that we all applaud. Because the Samaritan is acting for all of us, we expect others who happen into the situation, like the innkeeper, to act for us, too.
Another concern of philanthropists is to ask whether there are some people who aren't worth helping. What if the victim were found to be drunk, and dressed in a way that indicated he was one of the hard-core vagrants that show up on our streets? What if we discovered that the victim was still wearing his robe, apparently on the way home from a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan?
The Good Samaritan parable suggests that we are not to deny help to either a stranger or an enemy. Every human being may qualify as a neighbor—even thieves. If the Good Samaritan scenario occurred today, how would the thieves be treated? The moral imagination is always at work, challenging us. Perhaps this was a first offense. Perhaps the thieves were young hoodlums on drugs. Can they be held responsible for their behavior when they were themselves victims of a drug pusher? There are philanthropists and philanthropic organizations on all sides of this issue. There are those whose goal is to rescue thieves from a life of crime; there are others whose call is not for compassion or rehabilitation but for retribution.
Other philanthropic organizations work not with the perpetrators but with the victims of crime, helping them to recover from the trauma of the experience, to regain the use of muscles and limbs that were injured in the attack and to get back to work. Working with the victims of crime may be a strong motivator for continued philanthropic activity, because it develops the ability of law-abiding people to put themselves imaginatively in the place of the other. The human response to the suffering of others is the most basic and powerful of the forces at work in philanthropy throughout history. The extraordinary outpouring of concern for the starving Ethiopians and elsewhere in east Africa in the mid-1980s, to catastrophic events like earthquakes and tidal waves in Nicaragua and Bangladesh, and to the families of the victims of the September 11 th attacks, reflect an immediate and personal response to suffering. People want to “do something” and one thing they can do is give money to organizations at work on the scene.
The problem of philanthropy is that the emotion of compassion has little staying power; the human attention span is limited; and we now know more than we want to about “compassion fatigue,” when the media confront us with more catastrophes than we can grasp and more suffering than we can absorb.
Questions about the moral imagination have interested and frustrated scholars for centuries. We don't know whether visual observation of others' suffering on our television sets enhances our sensibilities or deadens them through repetition and familiarity. Does the repetition of appeals lead to a change in our behavior? If natural and human disasters seem to have been more common in the ancient world, did they become commonplace and fail to elicit humane response as they seem to today?
Another question that troubles givers is whether anything should be done, beyond attending to the immediate needs of the victim. In some situations, the giver may feel called upon to offer advice to the recipient of his assistance. For example, a Good Samaritan of the scientific philanthropy school might use the occasion to give a gentle lecture. “Next time,” he might say, “take a different road.” Or—more severely—“I'll help you this time, but no more.” We expect people to learn from their misfortune, just as children do. It tests our patience and our generosity to respond again and again to people who never seem able to make it on their own. A century ago, both liberals and conservatives believed that most people in need were in that condition through their own weakness and failure. That thread persists throughout the modern history of philanthropy. Good Samaritanism is all right in some circumstances, we may say, but prevention is the best answer. People may have to be encouraged, perhaps even compelled, to take care of themselves. “Welfare to work” is now both carrot and stick.
In the interests of compelling people to take care of themselves, the modern Samaritan might draw from the school of philanthropy that holds that people should be required to behave in ways that make them independent and thus advise the victim that he would have to pay for the service. To discourage the victim from being a victim a second time, the Samaritan might consider the payment to the innkeeper a loan and ask the victim to repay it. Or, desirous of simultaneously fostering independence and traditional philanthropic values, the Samaritan might say, “Go and do likewise.”
There is a long history of efforts to help people help themselves; it is one of the fundamental principles of philanthropy. In nineteenth-century London, young Octavia Hill wanted to create decent housing for the poor. Lacking capital, she turned to social philosopher and art critic John Ruskin for help. He loaned her five thousand pounds, but with the requirement that she produce a return of five percent if she hoped to persuade others to follow his example. Following Ruskin's advice, Hill made payment of rent a first and unwavering demand upon all her tenants. She also insisted on stern self-discipline; her tenants not only paid their rent on time, they stayed within her range of acceptable social and moral behavior. Influenced by both Christian Socialism and the Charity Organisation Society—the equivalent of being a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican at the same time—Hill was pragmatic. Commenting on Hill's management style, Gertrude Himmelfarb observes: “Her aim was not only to provide the decent housing that was a precondition of independence but to promote the habits, abilities, and sensibilities that would sustain that independence. This meant treating the tenants as equals rather than dependents, and helping them in the same spirit that one might help one's friends.” (1991, p. 214)
There is a thin and sometimes barely discernible line between help and intrusiveness. This is the dilemma facing all potential Good Samaritans, especially in a culture that values both help and independence. As Morton Hunt points out, “We are taught: ‘Help those who are in trouble,' but also: ‘Don't stick your nose into other people's business'” (1990, p. 80). Intervening in the lives of others for their benefit is a definition of philanthropy; knowing when and to what extent to do so is the philanthropist's challenge.
The received liberal wisdom is that intrusiveness is the problem; the received conservative wisdom is that people who need help often need advice, whether they want it or not. In the background is the power the lender or donor has to withhold support; that power is easily and often abused. Sometimes the abuse takes bureaucratic form; there is nothing in either public or private assistance that assures the applicant or recipient of fair and sensitive treatment.
The bureaucratic approach is to spell out the terms of the relationship in detail and then to treat everybody equally. The business approach is to monitor performance very closely, especially financial performance, and let winners win and losers lose. These arrangements attempt to devise better ways to help people help themselves, providing assistance or competitive advantage to “level the playing field.” Philanthropic values are behind both equal opportunity and affirmative action. In the competitive environment of the marketplace, I seldom want to help my competitors improve their performance. In a controlled governmental environment, I seldom want to allow people to use public money to pursue their own interpretation of private purposes. In the more permissive environment of philanthropy I tend to be more lenient, less demanding, less intrusive or tendentious. The philanthropic norm is the one Gertrude Himmelfarb ascribes to Octavia Hill: to help others cultivate and nurture the “habits, abilities, and sensibilities” that develop and sustain independence.
My conviction is that the philanthropic tradition began with core values such as those embedded in the parable of the Good Samaritan—compassion, self-sacrifice, trust, generosity, courage—values present in all cultures. Over the centuries we have expanded the tradition to give other values an important place, but for most individuals, charity is still the heart of philanthropy, and that is reflected in the dominant role of organized religion as both recipient and initiator of philanthropy.
But modern American philanthropy has begun to change that ancient focus on acts of mercy motivated by charity. Philanthropic foundations have played a pathbreaking role in seeking out the underlying causes of social problems and developing solutions and reforms. Foundations and corporations have also become major influences in supporting the nonreligious part of the agenda: education, the arts, scientific research.
Still, at the source where it all begins and where we find the core values that keep it alive, is charity. If there is a social crisis—and I think there is a case to be made that there is—it is a crisis not of our failure to provide adequate financial support to our universities or our research centers or our cultural institutions. It is not even a crisis of money. It is a spiritual crisis. It is a weakening—even a loss—of core values such as those captured in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The philanthropic tradition is a process of transmitting received themes and practices over time, across generations, and even across cultural boundaries and barriers toward a norm of compassion that the world has, even now, not yet achieved. It is not our heads or even our pocketbooks that we should be most concerned about. It is our hearts. Compassion begets philanthropy begets community.
BibliographyBoulding, Kenneth. [1973] 1981. A Preface to Grants Economics: The Economy of Love and Fear. New York: Praeger.
Darley, John, and C. Daniel Batson. 1973. “From Jerusalem to Jericho.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1): 100.108.
Funk, Robert W. 1982. Parables and Presence . Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1991. Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians . New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Hunt, Morton. 1990. The Compassionate Beast. New York: William Morrow and Co.
Oliner, Samuel P., and Pearl Oliner. 1992. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York: Free Press.
Rosenthal, A.M. [1964] 1999. Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Varah, Chad, ed. 1980. The Samaritans in the ‘80s: To Befriend the Suicidal and Despairing . London: Constable.
Wuthnow, Robert. 1991. Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Learning to Give wishes to express appreciation to Dr. Dwight Burlingame, editor/author of Philanthropy in America, a Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia of Philanthropy Information, and the publisher ABC-CLIO for graciously sharing this resource information with Learning to Give. The complete encyclopedia may be purchased through ABC-CLIO.