A World of Low Expectations
This is essay sixteen in Taming the Gift, a year-long project examining the limits of contemporary fundraising and what it might take to recover the power of Wild Generosity. To learn more about the project, visit here.
In the previous essay, we explored what Max Weber described as the disenchanted world, and Charles Taylor helped us see how the modern gift was sent to the corner and told to behave. This essay and the next will bring the first half of this project to a close. We will have traced how modernity has domesticated the gift, using the social sector as our best case study.
At the beginning of this journey, we observed how modernity’s default settings operate below the surface. Taylor described this as our social imaginary, a framework that is collectively shared yet operates below the level of everyday consciousness. This imaginary is not composed of ideas we consciously choose or deliberately affirm. It is the master story that none of us gets the privilege of opting into or out of. It is learned through habit, repetition, and routine, not through convictions we arrive at by argument or reflection. By the time values and beliefs are named, the boundaries of what is acceptable have already been drawn.
The features that follow contribute to the social imaginary we are all living inside. They are not anything we have agreed to. They are the water we swim in. And each runs contrary to the conditions the gift requires in order to be experienced in its fullest sense.
A World That No Longer Speaks
The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has spent his career making sense of the disenchanted world. Where Weber described disenchantment as the world’s progressive alienation, the loss of its color, its magic, its voice, and its meaning, Rosa describes it as a world that has fallen mute. We have made it manageable, predictable, controllable, and in doing so we have rendered it silent. We address it, act on it, measure it, and the world remains silent in return. The forests are timber. The rivers are hydrology. The people on the other side of the encounter are stakeholders, demographics, data points.
What Rosa describes as resonance is a mode of relation in which we are affected by what we encounter, respond with our own voice, are transformed by the meeting, and cannot fully control what it yields. Modernity has made this way of relating much harder to come by.
The gift in its fullest sense wants to participate in something with resonance. The giver hears the receiver’s need. The receiver hears what the giver has carried. Both are moved by what passes between them. The world speaks, and the parties speak back, and the gift is part of how the speaking happens.
In the mute world, the gift cannot speak. Something changes hands. A transaction is completed. But nothing resonates. The parties remain who they were before the encounter, because the encounter did not speak to and through them. The gift still moves, but it moves through silence.
The Gift as Means
There is a question that runs underneath nearly everything we do in the disenchanted world. What does this accomplish, what does this measure, what does this deliver. Weber described this mindset as instrumental rationality. Every act is judged by what it produces. Every relationship is evaluated by what it can be used for. Every practice is converted into a tool. The world becomes a field of means arranged toward ends the self has set.
The gift in its fullest sense wants to be more than a means. It wants to matter in itself. The giving and receiving are not for the sake of anything beyond themselves. The encounter between giver and receiver has its own weight, its own worth, what Alasdair MacIntyre would have called internal goods that cannot be specified in terms of what the encounter produces.
Inside instrumental rationality, the gift becomes an object the giver transfers to accomplish something. The receiver receives it in order to do something with it. The gift becomes a commodity, valued by what it can be used for rather than by what it carries. Both parties are oriented toward outcomes the object is meant to produce. The gift is no longer the practice through which something matters in itself. It is the means by which something else gets done.
The Self as Source
The sociologist Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart, described modern selves as expressive individualists. The self is now the source and arbiter of its own meaning. The work of life is to find the authentic self and express it in the world. Bellah traced this back through Walt Whitman to the Romantic tradition, and Taylor similarly described it as the age of authenticity. The cultural slogans are everywhere. You be you. Be true to yourself. Follow your heart. Find yourself. The self has become the highest reference point, and meaning is what the self produces from within and expresses outward.
The gift in its fullest sense wants to exceed the giver. It wants to reach beyond the self into something neither party authored. The bond between giver and receiver is not constructed by the parties. It arrives in the encounter and carries what neither one could have produced alone. The gift is not the expression of the giver’s authentic self. It is a practice through which the giver and receiver participate in something larger than themselves.
Paul Kingsnorth names what is at stake when the self becomes the highest reference point: “If the correct path for society or the individual is based on nothing more than that individual’s personal judgement, then who or what is to be the final arbiter? Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it — without, in other words, a sacred order — society will fall into emotivism, relativism and ultimately disintegration.” The gift cannot survive this condition intact. When there is no arbiter beyond the self, the gift becomes the expression of personal judgment and nothing more.
As expressive individualists, two selves cannot give each other a gift in the fullest sense. The donor gives what expresses who they are. The receiver receives what aligns with their values. Each is using the encounter to display their identity. The gift becomes a performance of self rather than a meeting between persons. The other party becomes the audience for the self’s expression, and what passes between them is whatever the parties have arranged to express.
The Private Response
Something has happened to the way we respond to shared problems. Problems that belong to all of us get reframed as choices each of us makes alone, and the choices look more and more like shopping. Michael Maniates describes this as the individualization of responsibility. We become savvy consumers whether we are buying a sweater at the Gap, choosing an organic brand at the grocery store, or planting a tree to save the rainforest. Environmental degradation becomes the question of which products we buy. Inequality becomes the question of where we spend our money. Loneliness becomes the question of how you build your network. What once required a collective response is now reframed as individual behavior in accordance with personal preferences.
The gift in its fullest sense wants to be a shared practice. It wants to be sustained by conditions that exceed any one giver or receiver. The gift moves between persons, but the practice that holds it requires a community, a tradition, a set of expectations that no one party can supply. The gift is not a private act. It is a complex social practice that doesn’t work any other way.
In a world where all responsibility is individualized, the gift becomes a private act. The giver chooses what to give and how to give it. The receiver chooses what to receive and how to use it. Each is acting alone, evaluating their own choices, accountable to no one beyond themselves. The shared practice that once held the gift has been dismantled, and what is left is two individuals making private decisions that happen to involve each other. The gift is judged by whether it expresses the giver’s authenticity, not by whether it participates in something larger than the giver.
The Discounted Past
The historian Christopher Lasch described what time has become in the disenchanted world. The past, he argued, has been devalued. It is treated as either sentimental nostalgia or as the unenlightened era we have left behind. Tradition is suspect. Inheritance feels like burden. Ancestors are interesting historical figures. The wisdom that took generations to accumulate is set aside in favor of what the self can produce in the present. Progress is measured by distance from what came before, and the self that orients itself toward authentic expression has no use for what it did not choose.
The gift in its fullest sense wants to carry the past forward. It wants to participate in time that exceeds the immediate exchange. The gift is given because of what was received from those who came before. The gift is part of an inheritance the giver is passing on. The gift creates obligations that extend into the future and honors debts that extend into the past.
When we devalue the past, the gift cannot carry inheritance. The donor’s life story is reduced to a giving history. The community’s history is reduced to a founding date. The practice that once carried the wisdom of generations is constantly being reinvented, constantly innovated, constantly remade according to whatever current method is being celebrated. Nothing flows backward into ancestry. Nothing flows forward into legacy. The gift moves only in a thin present, between contemporary parties, with nothing carried into the exchange from before and nothing carried out of it into what comes after.
The Longing for Higher Expectations
If we look closely, we see that these and other features of the disenchanted world add up to a world of low expectations. This is certainly true of the gift experience. We have become quite accustomed to less from the encounter and the relationship it is meant to sustain. Good moderns will insist our contemporary practices work, that they’re practical and efficient, but Lasch would insist there’s more to it. These features are artifacts of what it means to live in an age of ever-diminishing expectations. The disenchanted world conditions us to ask for less, expect less, and to disregard any illusions of more.
What I see among my colleagues, those who have experience on both sides of the gift exchange, is a longing for higher expectations. Not merely more in terms of quantity but a qualitatively different experience. And not nostalgia for a world we cannot return to, but a refusal of the diminishment we have learned to accept. The longing is for encounters that speak back, for practices that matter in themselves, for gifts that exceed the giver, for shared responses to shared conditions, for a past that remains active in the present. The next essay takes up this longing directly. It is the bridge between the deconstructive half of this project and the reconstructive half that follows.
- Jason Lewis, Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed
Taming the Gift is a collaboration with Seed, born of a shared commitment to understanding the limits of contemporary fundraising and to reimagining practices that activate cultures of wild generosity.