Noblesse Oblige Is Dead: Today’s Wealthy Elite Just Don’t Give a Damn

We need a cultural shift that views wealth not just as privilege, but as a duty to uplift society—reviving the forgotten principle of noblesse oblige...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

“To try to make the world in some way better than you found it is to have a noble motive in life.” —Andrew Carnegie

Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who’s a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said:

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. … I want to grab all that money.”

Two days before, we learned that the billionaire owners of The LA Times and The Washington Post killed their own newspaper’s planned endorsements of the Harris presidential campaign, presumably to avoid angering Donald Trump so he wouldn’t mess with their business interests should he be elected.

“To hell with democracy,” they essentially said. “There’s money to be made!”

What ever happened to the sense of obligation that wealthy Americans used to feel to help out their country and her people in need?

Maybe it’s all the new money. Maybe it’s just good old-fashioned greed. Maybe it’s the nearly psychopathic drive to crush everything and everyone in your way to make that first billion dollars that twists people’s perspectives and their view of their fellow citizens.

Whatever it is, the concept of noblesse oblige — the obligation to give back to the society that helped make you rich — seems dead for today’s “conservatives” among the morbidly rich.

It wasn’t always this way.

— At 13, Andrew Carnegie came to this country from Scotland with his parents, his younger brother, and two dollars in their collective pocket; he became, within four decades, the richest man in the world. And he funded 2,509 libraries, ultimately giving away his entire fortune before the end of his life. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote in his book The Gospel of Wealth.

— Joe Kennedy was a bank president at 25 and a millionaire by 30; he and his wife Rose pounded into their children the idea that, because of their great wealth, they had an absolute obligation to serve their nation and its people, particularly those most in need. From that simple childhood instruction came Joe Jr., who died when his plane was shot down during WWII, and the political careers of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy.

— Foundations established by the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller families have all done great good in America (until Timothy Mellon disgraced his family by giving millions to Trump), and self-made billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have made funding good works central to their lives by giving away most of their fortunes.

But that noble old concept is now lost on most among the current crop of billionaires and multimillionaires. Instead of devoting themselves and their fortunes to bettering our nation, so many are instead promoting climate change denial, funding politicians who promise them tax cuts, and spearheading efforts to strip America of its social safety net and public education system.

Changing attitudes toward wealth and success have been a hallmark of the post-Reagan “greed is good” era. When the Libertarian Party was started in the 1950s by the real estate lobby to provide a front to fight against rent control and low-income rent subsidies, it — along with Ayn Rand’s writings — provided the morbidly rich with a convenient excuse for greed.

If everybody acted with maximum greed at all times, they argued, all of that greed would power society toward a new utopian era. It was demonstrably a lie, but provided a great excuse for extremely wealthy individuals to back away from the philanthropy that helps America and its people, replacing those efforts by funding think tanks and politicians who champion more tax loopholes, deregulation, and voter suppression.

As John Kenneth Galbraith famously wrote:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”  

These billionaires have also supported sycophantic scholars and media stars willing to promote the idea that they didn’t get rich because of luck or coming from wealthy families, but, rather because of their rare and extraordinary talent and brilliance.

To this bizarre end, at least one of today’s billionaires who came to America from South Africa seems committed to impregnating as many white women as possible to spread his good genes.

As the gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else has widened, we’ve experienced less social connection and empathy between economic classes.

America also now has the greatest income inequality in the developed world. The morbidly rich have largely separated themselves from the rest of us, traveling on private jets through private airports that don’t even check security, vacationing on their massive private yachts with Supreme Court justices, and living in gated compounds with round-the-clock security and live-in butlers, cooks, and nannies.

Another thing that may be causing so many of America’s billionaires to abandon philanthropic efforts to help the country that made them rich is the globalization of wealth.

Because many now run business empires that span the globe, they feel less tied to any particular local community or even to the United States. Others, wanting to continue to do business with authoritarian regimes, simply avoid doing anything here that might be seen as supportive of democracy or even of America.

Reagan’s massive income tax cuts, lowering the top bracket from 70 percent down into the twenties, give another strong incentive to obscenely wealthy individuals to hang onto every penny. When you’re no longer looking at high tax rates, you no longer need the tax breaks that come with charitable good works.

Finally, between the decline of social expectations of generosity and the fetishizing of capitalism, some billionaires are now embracing what they call “philanthrocapitalism.” Pushing everything from private prisons to private schools to privatizing Medicare and Social Security, they argue that the so-called “free market” will solve all social problems.

We thus need to create a cultural shift that reframes wealth not just as a privilege, but as a responsibility to contribute positively to society, bringing back the notion of noblesse oblige. This requires a multi-faceted approach involving education, incentives, and a redefinition of social norms.

We should teach the concept of noblesse oblige in our elementary schools, both to inculcate future individuals who may rise to great wealth and to give our people the ability to spot and shame those rich people who ignore their obligations to society.

Social recognition is another way to amplify noblesse oblige by publicly acknowledging and celebrating wealthy individuals and families whose generosity has had real and positive impact.

We also need to return to the tax incentives for philanthropy by returning to a top tax bracket well north of 50 percent which can be reduced through charitable contributions. Similarly, corporations should be both socially pushed and financially incentivized to consider their broader social impact.

Finally, let’s encourage and reward those filmmakers and television producers who embrace social issues like Frank Capra did with It’s a Wonderful Life.

We occasionally get a taste of this with movies like the Dark Knight series, where wealthy Bruce Wayne becomes Batman to help his city and its people, but more movies and TV shows with a message of social conscience and noblesse oblige could have a real impact on the generation coming up now.

The rich, as Jesus noted obliquely when speaking of the poor, will always be with us. But there are ways we as a society can encourage them to be less destructive of the public good. We should take them.

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.