The Season of Generosity

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 30, 2024

 

This is the season of generosity. 

 

Generosity is slippery. 

 

If you’ve lived a certain kind of New York life, then you’ve heard a certain kind of New York man complain about how much money he is expected to hand out this time of year in tips to his doormen and that sort of thing. Rich New York guys hate having to tip their doormen—except that they love having to tip their doormen, because it gives them a chance to complain about how much they spend tipping their doormen, which is one of the few remaining socially acceptable ways of bragging about how much money you make. (The others are being a rapper or a social-media influencer or a Republican presidential candidate.)

 

The money all spends the same for the doormen, but that kind of generosity isn’t exactly the real thing: It is a matter of social convention, of course, but also part of the price you pay for being a relatively high-income Upper East Side type. (I myself lived downtown, where I had a doorman, and, before that, in the South Bronx, where I didn’t have a doorman but where one of my neighbors was a doorman. One of the things that makes New York City interesting is the way the landscape of class that normally is pretty spread out in an American city is geographically compressed, especially in Manhattan and in the affluent parts of Brooklyn. There are some real upsides to population density, i.e., people, in addition to the obvious downsides, i.e. people.) And there are variations on that conversational gambit that allow non-New Yorkers to get into the game: California people who complain very loudly and publicly about how much they have to pay in tax, Washington people who complain about the outrageous tuitions at their children’s private schools, Florida people who complain about the HOA fees in their carefully manicured rich-guy enclaves, etc. 

 

I don’t mind all that very much, if only because silly rich people are usually more fun at lunch than the terribly earnest ones, and they say amusing things: “Gstaad in summer? There’s nothing there except cow shit and Russians.” (It was to be understood that the Russians were the slightly less desirable of the two presences.) A friend tells the story of running into someone at a five-star resort in Playa del Carmen she’d first met in Gstaad and last run into at Pastis in Manhattan, who upon their unexpected reunion exclaimed: “It’s a small world when you’re rich and white!”

 

Very wealthy people can be very damned peculiar when it comes to money and giving it away. There are wealthy people I know who are absolute skinflints in their private lives, and in particular when it comes to their families, but who at the same time are happy to give away millions upon millions of dollars to charitable causes or universities. Some of them are the vulgar kind who like to put their names on everything, but many of them are that better, quieter kind of philanthropist. 

 

I know that when it comes to children, some of that financial reserve is meant to be character-building: Give them too little, and they’ll grow up resentful and insecure; but give them too much, and they’ll grow up lazy and entitled. But some of it goes way beyond that. I get the sense from some wealthy fathers—it’s almost never mothers—that they envy the advantages their children grew up with, and that envy can turn vindictive and sadistic. It is worse for the self-made man, though I do know carefree people who inherited their money and treat their working adult children as though they were trust-fund loafers. Very strange. I always preferred William Weld’s self-deprecating attitude, saying things like, “My money was earned—my great-great-grandfather worked hard for that money,” or “The Welds arrived in 1630 with only the shirts on their backs … and 2,000 pounds of gold.” Blue-blazered WASP, sure, but I’ll bet he has tipped well enough over the years to send his bartenders’ children to Princeton. (They might prefer Harvard, where they could do some of their work at Weld Hall … or the other Weld building; the Welds have a long history at Harvard, which expelled one of them in 1644.)

 

Financial generosity ought to be the easiest thing in the world if you have a lot of money, but, as it turns out, there is a catch: The sort of personality that tends to go with making a lot of money is not the sort of personality that goes along with giving away a lot of money. A few heirs and lottery winners aside, one does not become a billionaire by accident. The nickel-and-dime mentality is tedious, but it is the only way to manage a profitable bank or grocery store. 

 

And—pity the rich this much!—it must be exhausting for those who are known to be wealthy to be asked for money all the time. I have a friend who started a business that is today a household name, and I have seen people who just met him ask him for a few tens of thousands of dollars—to get them out of credit-card debt or to catch up on their child support payments or whatever. Another wealthy friend occasionally gets letters from people asking him for money—in one case, a very specifically annotated plea for a modest few million dollars. Both men are generous when it comes to charity, but tend to be programmatic and institution-focused in their giving—at least, they do not write checks to everybody who tells them a sad story. (As far as I know.) I suppose there must be some kind of golden mean between Ebeneezer Scrooge and MC Hammer, who made millions of dollars the year he went broke. The easiest thing, I suppose, is to plan to give what you’re going to give and just say no to anybody who asks. 

 

(Charles Dickens, being a genius, absolutely ruined the name Ebeneezer, which is no more usable now than is Adolf. The name means, roughly, “stone of help,” after the victory monument Samuel raised to the God of Israel. “Thus far the Lord has helped us,” he said, and I have always liked the ambiguity of that statement: “Has the Lord helped you?” the skeptic asks. “So far,” the prophet answers.)

 

Ours is a fabulously wealthy society, and so the merely economic kind of generosity should come more easily. But there are other kinds of generosity, the different generosities of spirit. 

 

Readers do not like it when I write unflattering things about my mother—it seems ungentlemanly, and she isn’t here to defend herself—and generosity of spirit never has been my strongest suit. But I don’t think she’d much mind my citing her here as one of the least generous spirits I ever knew.

 

Part of that was character, but a lot of it was poverty. And her meanness had very strange ways of asserting itself. Some of it was the obvious stuff you see among poor Americans everywhere, including imperiousness and cruelty toward people who were her social or economic inferiors, even if that inferiority was temporary and purely situational: Because we lived in a college town, many of the people who checked her out at the grocery store or took her order at the Brittany (a strange little hamburger place at the mall; you sat down at a table in a dimly lit room that looked sort of like a steakhouse and then called in your order to the kitchen on a red telephone, one of which was installed at every table) were college students, as were a lot of the people who mowed the grass and washed the cars and that sort of thing. If one of these service workers screwed up something, my mother was volcanic and unforgiving.

 

There was an element of opportunism there—she did not get a lot of chances to boss other people around or to feel superior—and part of it was, I now believe, another manifestation of insecurity, suspecting that she was getting poor service because she was seen as an unimportant person. She worked at the local university, where her superiors treated her with extraordinary courtesy and eventually gave her responsibilities far in excess of her education or formal qualifications, but she never stopped feeling judged, condescended to, and excluded. Her relatively low socioeconomic status and her physical disfigurement (she was badly scarred and partly disabled after a series of skin grafts and partial paralysis of her right arm following an infection caused by a scratch from her poodle) left her curdled, veering between self-pity and cruelty, from pathos to sadism. 

 

One of the things she hated most in life was good sportsmanship. 

 

There is much that is destructive in the culture of West Texas high-school football (you can learn all about it in Friday Night Lights—the book, not the movie or the soap opera), but it also has its glories, including some very involved rituals of good sportsmanship. When I was playing, it was customary—in fact, obligatory—to help another player up if you knocked him down, to take a knee when a player on the opposite team was injured, to applaud him when (if) he got up and limped off the field, that sort of thing. My mother despised these as contemptible displays of weakness. But it was more than that: She did not see such courtesies as only a sucker’s failure to take maximum advantage of an opportunity, but also as a kind of betrayal of the competitive spirit of the game itself—which is to say, she considered displays of good sportsmanship to be poor sportsmanship.

 

She couldn’t understand why our coach didn’t simply send some benchwarmer into the game in the first quarter to commit some outrageous foul to injure the star quarterback of the other team, sacrificing a negligible player to neutralize a more significant opponent. She raged when a player would extend his hand to help up an opponent he’d knocked on his ass—her creed definitely involved kicking them when they were down. There was a kind of theology to this, too: This being West Texas in the 20^th century, she took it for granted that God was involved in deciding the outcome of the game, and, apparently, He wanted us to play dirty. It surely did not help things that I went to an academic magnet school, which had a hell of a chess club but was literally the losingest 5A football team in Texas at that time. We were everybody’s homecoming game. 

 

My mother was terrible with money, of course: Retired too early with too little, bought a Cadillac with a credit card and paid goodness knows how outrageously usurious interest on it. I once tried to help her rationalize her finances and was surprised (and, I will confess, a little annoyed) to discover that she and her fourth husband, an illiterate retired municipal water-utility worker and former pimp, were earning a little more in retirement in Lubbock than I was earning working as a newspaper editor in Philadelphia at the time, once everything was accounted for. (It was not very difficult to outearn me at the time.) That said, they were still broke, always having some kind of money trouble. 

 

She wasn’t neurotically cheap, either, at least not all of the time. She clipped coupons and complained every time gasoline went up a nickel, for example, but once gave one of her stepdaughters a house. (The house was, of course, encumbered with a home-equity loan shortly thereafter and eventually sold in foreclosure.) Such generosity was sporadic, and of a very traditional nature, encompassing only a relatively small circle of family. 

 

One might take an evolutionary view of such generosity: that it is not generosity at all, properly understood, but simply investing in family in the service of one’s ultimate self-interest. I don’t know much about that kind of evolutionary psychology and don’t know how such calculations are affected by the messiness of life as it is lived at that level: Very few of us were genetically related to one another, after all. My oldest son is the first person I ever met to whom I am, in fact, biologically related.

 

There is something about seeing your face on another person that complicates, or has for me at least, unexamined assumptions about adoptive families, stepfamilies, and similar arrangements. Often, these families embody the very heart of generosity, and it is not very hard to think of adoptive families and stepfamilies that are obviously more loving and generous than their natural counterparts. Who better embodies the (human) generosity of the Christmas story than Joseph? But there are limitations there, too. I resist acknowledging that, because I would prefer to have a more generous kind of spirit rather than a smaller kind of spirit, and because I dislike many of the implications of that narrow circle, that coldhearted blood-and-kin calculation.

 

I am not a nickel-and-dime kind of man, which is one reason I have fewer nickels and dimes than I might have otherwise had. And I never worried about that very much until I had children. That all makes sense, of course, but there’s something at the bottom of it that still isn’t quite right: How should it be that the generous love we feel toward our children should make us smaller or meaner or more grasping when it comes to everybody else? Of course, one prioritizes one’s own—that is a matter of ordinary responsibility as much as anything else, and those who provide for themselves and their families are providing a social good, too: The first thing to do in relieving the burdens of others is to avoid being burdens ourselves. Charity really does begin at home, as the cliché insists. 

 

Tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve, and the new year always puts me in a brumal mood. That comes (too) naturally to me. Who had a better 2024 than I did? I did some good work (though I have unfinished books on my desk), accomplished some personal goals, and (New Year’s resolutions!) lost a good bit of weight—and, much more important, welcomed three more boys into the world who are, along with their big brother, four of the most beautiful and charming little men you’ll ever meet. Christmas with crawlers is something special, and my 2-year-old son recently told his mother that his career plan is to grow up to be Santa Claus and give presents to good boys and girls. Generosity comes more naturally to him than to his father, whose heart remains divided between the part that wishes my mother and father could have known my children and the prevailing part that knows it is probably better for everyone that they didn’t.

 

As I said, I wish I had a more generous sort of spirit, but God created us all different for a reason, I suppose, and the hardhearted have our purposes, too. But you don’t want too many of us. Personality is at the root of a great deal of politics (much more than ideology or even experience), and it has always seemed to me that high-caste managerial progressives—take Barack Obama as a good example—are almost all mired in the same error: the belief that what the world needs is more people like them.

 

You can see how you’d fall into that: If you are a Barack Obama or an Ezra Klein or a Dick Durbin, it must be tempting to think: “The decisions I made turned out pretty well for me, so it must follow that others would have similarly happy and productive lives if they made the same decisions I did, if they imitated my example.” That’s how college-educated policy wonks end up assuming, evidence and experience be damned, that the best thing to do for workers and the economy is to send everybody to college, why lawyers believe against all evidence that the best place to develop the human mind is law school, why columnists so often write and speak as though we could write and speak our way out of our problems.

 

I don’t suffer from that exemplary delusion. Things have turned out pretty well for me, as it happens, but mine is not a plan of life I’d advise anybody to follow. I sometimes feel a little like Mickey at the end of Hurlyburly, who, when accused by a colleague of having no feelings, responds: “I just don’t have your feelings.” 

 

I’ll make some New Year’s resolutions, of course, and one of them will be to try to cultivate a more generous spirit. It is that time of year, I have become a big believer in going through the motions, and it is not as though there is no room for improvement. Some people say, “I have no regrets,” and they say it like they are proud of it, presumably because they do not understand that the only kinds of people who have no regrets are those who never have done anything interesting in their lives and those who are too stupid to know what it is they should regret. The first time I went to confession, I was already an adult in my 20s, one with plenty of regrets, and I brought a list. The priest was amused. “Everybody thinks they’re special,” he said. “I guarantee you that this will not be even the third-most-interesting confession I hear this week.”

 

My problem is that I am enough of a believer that I am afraid to ask God to help me to cultivate any virtues. I have read the Bible, and I know how He goes about doing that; my reading of scripture is that, from the purely earthly point of view, one of the worst things that can happen in your life is for the Almighty to take an especial interest in your case. I know that comfortable stasis is an addiction and a delusion, too, but, damn it all, I am happy right now, and my secret resolution—just between us—is to do my best to be like Ted Hughes’ hawk in his nest: “I am going to keep things like this.”

 

Words About Words

 

Sheesh. Journalists. 

 

About the latest Christmas-market massacre in Germany, the Associated Press writes: “Car drives into group of people at Christmas market in Germany.”

 

Hey, dummies: Unless this was one of those self-driving cars gone rogue, somebody was at the wheel. And that somebody probably ought to make the headline. AP is literally changing the subject, as though the car were in charge of things—as though these acts of terror just happen. 

 

And The Economist, normally so careful, reflects on its podcast about the death of Dr. Ruth Westheimer earlier this year. Westheimer, a German Jew and “an orphan of the Holocaust,” as she called herself, traveled to Mandatory Palestine after the war and underwent paramilitary training. She was trained as a sniper, which, according to The Economist, “meant she could assemble and dismantle a submachinegun.”

 

No, it didn’t. Submachineguns are pistol-caliber, short-range weapons that are generally less accurate than their rifle-caliber counterparts, and there isn’t a military on this Earth that uses submachineguns as sniper weapons—you’d probably be better off giving them revolvers. (The useful range of a Thompson submachine gun, for example, is about 80 yards.)

 

Submachinegun is, I suspect, a little like epicenter and semiautomatic—that prefix at the beginning is interpreted as an intensifier rather than as a distinguisher. The epicenter is not the center—it is a spot over the center. A semiautomatic weapon is not an automatic weapon, a submachinegun is a smaller fully automatic weapon, not something you’d give a sniper. (Automatic fire is not very useful to snipers, which is why so many of them are issued bolt-action rifles that in many cases are mechanically identical to common hunting rifles.) It is possible that Dr. Ruth, as she was universally known, was both trained as a sniper and learned how to field strip a submachinegun, but these would have been independent capabilities. 

 

It is remarkable that, from the Washington Post to The Economist to the Pulitzer committee, ignorance about firearms is treated as entirely acceptable, if not virtuous, when it comes to journalistic writing about firearms. I cannot think of another subject in which such a high level of imprecision and outright falsehood would be treated as anything other than a journalistic scandal.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

I’m already running a bit long this week, but: Do read the Wall Street Journal on Janet Yellen and the debt ceiling. 

 

Furthermore …

 

I’ll start cultivating that more generous spirit tomorrow. Today, I want to murder these people. 

 

If security lines, flight delays and long layovers weren’t enough, there’s a new scourge facing holiday travelers: a surprising number of people who think it’s totally OK to have phone conversations on speaker, or watch movies and shows without headphones.

 

… 

 

The boarding gate at San Francisco International Airport is a virtual boardroom, said Sasha Sinclair, 32, who flies monthly for her biotech job. She watches in awe as tech bros pace back and forth taking business calls without any auditory buffer, sometimes broadcasting potential Silicon Valley secrets all the way through the jet bridge. “It’s definitely a little alarming,” she said. 

 

The headphones-optional attitude isn’t limited to air travel. Podcasts and sports games blare in open-plan offices. You can catch snippets of conversations on the sidewalk, some phones held aloft for video calls. Transit authorities in big cities have struggled to get passengers to keep their music to themselves on subways and commuter trains.

 

Don’t make me intervene, people. 

 

In Conclusion 

 

Some people in the Donald Trump camp are worried that the president-elect’s inner circle will make him soft on H-1B visas and on immigration in general. I recommend that they forward their complaints to Elon Musk of South Africa or to Vivek Ramaswamy of the Mayflower Ramaswamys, or maybe to that nice Slovenian lady.