Socrates, The Phaedo.

Via Isak comes an article on giving:

This time of year always gets me thinking and feeling hard about "philanthropy." What and to whom do we give? How big is the gulf between what we can give and what we do give? Who -- theorists, celebrities, family members, friends -- defines can for us? What effect does our giving, or lack thereof, have on our own well being? And finally, simply how much is enough?
-- Courtney E. Martin, Putting the Humanity in Philanthropy, The American Prospect

It's an odd week for me to think about philanthropy, given I'm unemployed as of yesterday. My contract has finally come to an end, my project is pretty much wrapped up (or, at least, my role certainly is) & I'm taking a couple weeks off before job-hunting & alla that fun stuff.

So, like I said, not necessarily the week for philanthropy. The thing is that 2007 has left me with that elusive feeling of abundance I've been wanting for years -- abundance in everything but time. And so now, while I have the time, I'm thinking about my own ideas + guilt on the subject of wealth re-distribution. For that, I was lead to Peter Singer's article in the NYT (most definitely worth the irritating sing-in procedure):

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty. (It has actually become much easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have grown significantly richer.) I found the result astonishing. I double-checked the figures and asked a research assistant to check them as well. But they were right.
-- Peter Singer, What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?, NYT

( More rambling under the cut. )

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.
— Bertrand Russell, "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday"

I like this distinction, below:

"Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man."
— A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, NY: Viking Press, 1972.

(Also from Wikipedia.)

It is the difference between great and good that interests me. Because time & again history seems to prove that great works can be carried out by bad people, and good people can fall short of achieving greatness. (I offer this without any attempt to define 'great' & 'good'. I am going on instinct, & I suspect many people will know, in their guts or their hearts, what I mean.)