It therefore owes a measure of respect to the free market and the philosophy of limited government that fosters wealth creation, as well as to the cultural presuppositions that underlie our political economy. Those cultural presuppositions were derived largely from the Judeo-Christian tradition. But over the last thirty or forty years much of elite society has turned away more or less from explicit identification with religion and religious-based moral perspectives. I suspect that few foundations bucked that trend. Our cultural presuppositions are related to the intellectual foundations of our moral order.
Ideas have real-world effects.
Along with a taste for big government, liberalism has taught us that we should not be judgmental, that there are no absolute moral standards, that morality is strictly a private matter, that everyone has a right to live as he sees fit, and, in the end, that all is mere opinion. Moral relativism, enforced rather vigorously by the state, has supplanted the old public morality. If there are no moral imperatives and transcendent principles for personal or social life, then no amount of government will be enough to secure our well-being. Philanthropy has a stake in that enterprise. You have to learn to care about people, to think that every human being has an inherent dignity, to believe that it is good to give, to act selflessly on others' behalf, to do your duty to your country.