Generosity

Meeting the unfamiliar

An imagined exploration

A local guide has shown you a permitted route and explained a turn that your map missed. Back at the route board, you begin an account for the next visitor. Your portrait makes a handsome cover, but leaves very little room for the explanation. You set it aside, credit the guide, include the useful key and mark what remains uncertain. You check what the guide is willing to have shared. Someone else can now begin where your first day ended.

Generosity shares value without demanding a disproportionate return. What you can offer after an encounter may depend on knowledge entrusted to you by someone else. A useful account carries that contribution forward with its source, limits and permissions intact. Your work of explaining and organizing can be a real gift without turning first publication into a permanent claim over the route or its meaning.

Generosity: finding the balance

Credit names a contribution; generosity also makes something useful for the recipient. One clear explanation may give more than a large pile of unexamined material.

Generosity gives…

Knowledge that another person can use, question and improve.

What Generosity makes possible

A visitor can become a contributor while acknowledging the people whose understanding made the contribution possible.

Generosity in ordinary life

Helping a beginner

Share a permitted starting resource and credit the person who helped you understand it.

Finishing shared work

Leave an intelligible account of methods, references and unresolved questions.

Nearby virtues, different work

Humility

Humility recognizes that your account is partial; Generosity offers what it contributes.

Temperance

Temperance moderates what you claim; Generosity gives something another can use.

Generosity and its counterfeits

Self-advertising access is a counterfeit of Generosity: make every useful detail another reason to promote the finder.

Borrowed generosity is a counterfeit of Generosity: give away another person’s knowledge or privacy without their permission.

How to cultivate Generosity

• Ask what would help the next person begin.
• Separate what you may share from what was entrusted privately.
• Include the contributions and uncertainties a reader needs to understand the account.

Try it today

Share one permitted reference with a willing person. Explain what helped you, who contributed it and any limit important to its use.

Share only material you may legitimately share. Protect privacy, attribution and entrusted knowledge; generosity does not cancel consent.

Questions worth returning to

• Can another person use and examine what I offer?
• Whose contribution would disappear if I called this simply my discovery?

Keep the practice proportionate

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. in a sort as may be soonest believed, and not easiest examined.

   Francis Bacon · The Advancement of Learning
   THE FIRST BOOK OF FRANCIS BACON; OF THE PROFICIENCE AND ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, DIVINE AND HUMAN.
   Francis Bacon · Cassell & Company, 1893; edited by Henry Morley; Project Gutenberg #5500

   Bacon criticizes an authoritative style of handing on knowledge. A generous account helps readers examine it instead of merely encouraging belief.

2. I trust that these, and all other friends who have been in any way interested in my travels and collections, may derive from the perusal of my book, some faint reflexion of the pleasures I myself enjoyed amid the scenes and objects it describes.

   Alfred Russel Wallace · The Malay Archipelago, Volume I
   PREFACE.
   Alfred Russel Wallace · Project Gutenberg #2530; captured English text; print edition not identified in capture

   Wallace hopes to make part of the encounter available to readers. The gift here is intelligible experience rather than ownership of the places described.

3. No doubt my voyage would seem a grander thing if I omitted mention of the help I received,

   Mary H. Kingsley · Travels in West Africa
   PREFACE TO THE ABRIDGED EDITION OF TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA.
   Mary H. Kingsley · Project Gutenberg #5891; captured English text

   Kingsley punctures the lone-explorer story by acknowledging help. Her preface foregrounds European helpers; fair attribution also needs to notice whose labor a historical account neglects.

4. Generosity is said to be a fault of Indian people, but neither the Pilgrim Fathers nor Blue-Star Woman ever held it seriously against them.

   Zitkala-Ša · American Indian Stories
   The Widespread Enigma of Blue-Star Woman
   Zitkala-Ša (fictional story’s narrator) · Project Gutenberg #10376; title page dated 1921

   The narrator’s irony follows a neighbor’s gift of food that helps Blue-Star Woman survive. The story exposes the recipients’ dependence on the generosity they disparage; it does not ask a person facing deprivation to give more.

5. In the first place, then, I would suggest that they might possibly learn something from them.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty
   CHAPTER III. OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING.
   John Stuart Mill · Walter Scott Publishing Co.; introduction by W. L. Courtney; captured edition undated; Project Gutenberg #34901

   Mill is defending the value that original people offer others. A contribution earns attention through what can be learned, not a demand for the contributor’s prestige.

6. As a child, I understood how to give; I have forgotten that grace since I became civilized.

   Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) · The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation
   IV. Barbarism and the Moral Code
   Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) · Project Gutenberg #340; captured English transcription; print edition not identified in capture

   Eastman uses a pointed contrast to question what his audience calls civilization. Giving can be learned from those dismissed as needing instruction; the irony does not make poverty desirable.

7. only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation;

   Francis Bacon · The Advancement of Learning
   THE FIRST BOOK OF FRANCIS BACON; OF THE PROFICIENCE AND ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, DIVINE AND HUMAN.
   Francis Bacon · Cassell & Company, 1893; edited by Henry Morley; Project Gutenberg #5500

   Bacon closes a defense of divine and natural learning by naming their purpose. Sharing findings should serve understanding rather than inflate the discoverer.

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