Sent to the Corner
This is essay fifteen in Taming the Gift, a 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.
To get straight where we are, we have to go back and tell the story properly. - Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
For as often as those of us in the social sector describe our work as transactional, ourselves as disillusioned, our practices as hollowed out, I suspect very few of us have paused to consider how it came to be that way and what has been done away with that might have gotten us here. Don’t blame the boss, the consultant, or the tech vendor. None of this is new, and none of it is confined to our sector.
More than a century ago, Max Weber named what had happened. The world, he explained, had become disenchanted. The growing consensus was that there are no mysterious forces at play, that everything can be calculated and mastered, that the world has become an object of technical control rather than a place of meaning that exceeds us.
Weber understood what was lost. He grasped what Davis described as gift mode, Polanyi as embeddedness, Mauss as a total social fact, and Tonnies as Gemeinschaft. Weber grasped that modernity was a domestication project, and the gift was one feature of everyday life it had muzzled.
The gift was how the enchanted world was woven together. It was not a feature alongside others. It was a thread that held the others in place. It bound persons to each other, communities to their members, the living to the dead. The enchanted world was held together in no small part by the practices of giving and receiving. When we consider the gift today, it has lost much of the power it once carried. In the modern world, the gift has been diminished, sent to the corner and told to behave.
To understand how the disenchanted world came to be, we want to remind ourselves how Charles Taylor explains it. To domesticate the mysterious, the uncertain, the wild, all the things that could not be calculated and controlled, modernity had to liberate itself from them. This in large part meant that much of the world the gift once wove together had to be subtracted. The thick webs of obligation and embedded relationship were cast off. What remained was a rational, rugged individual, capable of mastering the universe.
The Porous Self
The first of the subtractions Taylor helps us grasp is what he calls the porous self. The porous self lived without a firm boundary between its interior and the outside world. What came from beyond could move into us and through us. Taylor reminds us that the candle blessed by the priest carried something the household could feel when it was lit. The grief of a neighbor could enter the body of the one who sat with them. The blessing or curse spoken over a person did not stop at the surface of the skin. The self was a place through which the world moved, not a closed container watching from inside its own walls.
For those aspects of the enchanted world that had to go, modernity had to put something in their place. What replaced the porous self was what Taylor calls the buffered self. The buffered self meant we became our own enclosures. Meaning was generated within. Causation was mechanical. What once moved through us has been ruled out as illusion.
The buffered self was sold to us as freedom, as the end of superstition. What we were not told is that the same closure that keeps out curse also keeps out grace. The buffer does not discriminate. It seals us against everything we did not arrange.
The porous self and the buffered self encounter the gift differently. The porous self gave and received the gift as something that was moving through and always taking a part of us with it. Whether giving or receiving, the porous self could not predict what would happen next. The buffered self meets the gift at the wall. An object changes hands and a transaction is completed. Neither is moved by the encounter or feels a sense of obligation to the other. The gift still moves, but it no longer passes through anyone because we’re not porous enough to let it.
A Moral Order Built into Reality
Then there is the moral order built into reality itself. In the enchanted world, things had their proper places, persons had their proper relationships, actions had their proper consequences. The just and the good were not preferences a society chose. They were features of how the world itself was arranged. The medieval peasant who broke an oath did not face only social disapproval. He stood outside the moral order, and the world was understood to respond.
Modernity replaced this with personal preference. The good became what each person decided was good for them. The just became what could be negotiated between parties. The moral order was no longer a feature of reality but a construction of individuals and the societies they formed. Taylor calls this the age of authenticity in which the highest value is the realization of one’s authentic self. What the enchanted world treated as the shape of reality, modernity treats as private opinion.
The gift in the enchanted world moved through a moral order larger than the giver. To give was to take part in how the world was arranged. The receiver received not just an object but a place inside that order. Both parties were claimed by something larger than their preferences. The gift in the modern world moves through nothing larger than the giver’s intentions. To give is to express who one authentically is. The receiver receives the object and the giver’s preferences, but nothing claims either party beyond the transaction.
Fullness
There is also what Taylor calls fullness. In the enchanted world, life was charged with meaning that arrived from beyond the self. The harvest came as gift. The child came as gift. The healing came as gift. Human practice prepared the ground; but the meaning, the weight, and the sense that what happened mattered came from somewhere larger. The porous self lived in readiness for this arrival, knowing that what mattered most could not be manufactured; it could only be received. The proper response was gratitude.
Modernity replaced fullness with achievement. What had once arrived as a gift came to be understood as something produced through effort, secured through competence, claimed through rights. The buffered self was now responsible for generating meaning, and the failure to generate it became a personal failure. Meaning was relocated to private religious experience where it could survive without interfering with the assumption that effort produces outcomes. The world no longer offered what arrived. The self produced, or failed to.
The gift in the enchanted world was one of the practices through which fullness became reliable. To give was to extend it toward the receiver. To receive was to be met by what exceeded the exchange. The gift carried what the world itself was charged with. In the modern world, the gift has been pulled inside the self. The giver gives what they choose. The receiver receives what they choose. Nothing arrives from beyond.
Inside Something Larger
Finally, there is the assumption that the human was held inside something larger than itself. In the enchanted world, the household stood inside the parish, the parish inside the church, the church inside the cosmos, the cosmos inside God. The dead remained active in the lives of the living. The saints could intercede. The ancestors held the lineage together. The human was never the highest reference point. Human flourishing was real and important, but it was held inside structures that exceeded it.
Modernity replaced this with what Taylor calls exclusive humanism, the position that the human stands alone. Human flourishing is now the highest good. Nothing beyond the human is needed to account for meaning, morality, or a good life. The dead are gone. The saints are decorative. The cosmos has been flattened into the universe. God, for those who still believe, has become a private matter. Exclusive humanism is the modern achievement, and what it costs is the sense that the human is held by anything beyond itself.
The gift in the enchanted world participated in what exceeded the giver and receiver. To give was to act inside something larger than the transaction. To receive was to be claimed by something beyond the exchange. The gift in exclusive humanism stays within the human. The giver gives. The receiver receives. Nothing larger holds the exchange because nothing larger is acknowledged. The gift has been pulled inside the human and made to fit, and what it can carry has been limited to what the human alone can transmit.
Where This Leaves Us
The next essay turns to what Taylor calls the immanent frame, the world modernity has built in place of the enchanted one, and shows what it does to the gift in present-tense practice. The transactional work, the disillusioned practitioner, the hollowed-out practices are not three separate problems. They are three faces of what the frame does to the act of giving and receiving. The next essay shows why we feel the burden of this in our work every day even when we have no name for it.
- 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.