Giving, evolved

We are in Bilbao, northern Spain, at the headquarters of a mid-size Spanish NGO (non-governmental organisation). In the meeting is a board member. He is a lawyer at a leading Madrid law practice, on the point of retiring from the firm. At home he serves as a local councillor for the Partido Popular, the right-of-centre political party. He supports the NGO with time – lots of it – professional advice and money, and he has done so for years. I ask him about his philanthropy. He says it is his duty (“mi deber”) to be philanthropic; it's something necessary for him, and something private. No one has asked him to be philanthropic – it is just something that he feels the need to do. Nor is his philanthropy something he talks about with others. It is not a topic for dinner-time conversation, except in the most general terms.

Here is another philanthropist from Italy, who has a family foundation. He's in his 40s, the successful scion of an Italian engineering family, who runs one branch of the family's investment empire. The investment holding company donates 1% of its profits and 1% of the founder partners’ salaries to a family-run foundation that supports people with disabilities. Why is he philanthropic? He recalls his childhood, the big villa in the mountains north of Milan and his mother who each August invited a group of orphans to holiday there. He inherited his mother's sense of duty. He is talking to me about his philanthropy, and I sense that he is a bit more willing to do so than is my Spanish lawyer. But philanthropy is still a largely private affair.

These are examples of how philanthropy largely is across Europe. The Spanish lawyer and the Italian entrepreneur fit the pattern of many, perhaps most, of Europe's philanthropists. The private duty to be philanthropic is embedded in the minds of millions of people across Europe, an inherited moral standard that is an accepted tax on wealth. These morals are not necessarily religious, although religion does provide part of the explanation of this suite of beliefs about philanthropy, including the sense that when one has money one has a duty to do some good with it. They are ancient – we can see examples of philanthropy in Europe right back to the beginnings of history – but they are evolving.