It is a telling comment on our times that it was a very rich American that gave the very rich British a lesson in philanthropy. The super-rich have done well from the Eighties and Nineties but they have not reciprocated in kind in Britain. As inequality of wealth balloons back to nineteenth-century levels there is no sign of nineteenth-century levels of civic engagement and philanthropy by the rich. If anything, the opposite is true. Sir Paul Getty's life was a tribute to the futility of regarding personal wealth as an end in itself. Riches literally killed him - his death at 70 last Thursday was largely the result of having broken his health in the 1960s and 1970s by using heroin and cocaine without limit because he could and because he needed to.  When your living needs are met many times over for the rest of your life without your having to lift a finger, then any sentient body starts to ponder what it is all about. And, after 20 years of answering the question by being out of his head, Sir Paul in the later stages of his life came up with a different answer. It was to give.  He described himself as a professional philanthropist, and last week's obituaries lavishly named him as probably Britain's greatest of the breed. Whether it was the 50 million to the National Gallery or his last gift to St Paul's Cathedral, the list of his beneficiaries is impressive. Over 20 years he gave away some 120m. But in the context of a fortune worth an estimated 1.6 billion and an annual income of around 80m, he probably gave away no more, on average, than 10 per cent of his income every year.  That's 10 per cent more than many other very rich people, and enough to make an enormous difference to the institutions who received it - but it was a level of giving that made only the slightest dent on his fortune. His philanthropy gave him a sense of purpose without seriously damaging his wealth, and it oiled the wheels of a lot of worthy causes and left the country culturally the better.  We should expect all our rich to behave the same. That Sir Paul was so unusual is an indictment of both the way in which the rich define themselves in relation to society and of our diminished expectation of what that relationship should be. Sir Paul should be the norm, not the fted exception.  But Sir Paul also gives a clue as to why this should be. He was an American who loved England, and carried the best American attitudes to giving to his adopted country. The American rich expect to be celebrated as being rich - it's a sign of industriousness, hard work and guile - but equally they expect to give some of their wealth away as part of the bargain with the society of which they are part. In Britain, the rich want to be able to enjoy their wealth with the same lack of guilt and even approbation - but they have no intention of putting anything back except under duress. Charitable giving runs at half the rate it does in the US, and is sustained by ordinary people in their millions; the British rich are scarcely in evidence.  What has happened is that simultaneously with the collapse of religion has come the refusal of the rich to champion liberal and social democratic values. The result has been that we end up with the worst of both worlds. Christianity has very specific claims to make of the rich. God gave the world to all humanity, and every human being is equal in his eyes; Christ died to save everyone - the heart of the Easter message - and we can all expect to find life after death provided we try (even if we fail) to live up to Christian precepts. The rich are not a race apart. They must live by the same Christian values as all of us, including charity to their fellow men and women.  This Christian egalitarianism was the hallmark of the early Church. The wealthy were expected to contribute more to the common good and they did - the idea of noblesse oblige which underpinned feudalism. It is an egalitarianism and commitment to fairness which surfaces again and again - in the medieval idea of the just wage or successive Papal encyclicals. After the English Civil War the Leveller movement famously invoked biblical texts to justify universal suffrage and redistribution of income - demands for which they were crushed by Cromwell. Yet when the English puritan tradition migrated to America and made exactly the same demands, the founding fathers responded with the American constitution and, as John Adams said, the promise of enough land in the New World for all without having to redistribute from rich to poor. The rich instead would give back of their own volition in a universe in which everybody was held to have a chance of being similarly rich - the American social bargain that excuses gross inequality even today.  It took the rise of socialism to drive home a social bargain in Britain, but the rich never accepted its legitimacy. They resented progressive taxation of income and wealth to finance their contribution to the commonweal as an illegitimate confiscation of what their families owned by right. Yet for the majority in the country it was the long overdue assertion of what should always have been their obligation, and thus made what the rich kept for themselves - still substantial - legitimate. One-nation Tories insisted on the same basic bargain, while the rich smouldered in revolt fathering elaborate tax avoidance and evasion industries.  Socialism was its own worst enemy; it preferred to characterise progressive taxation as a half-way house to full socialism rather than the new social bargain that it really was, thus fatally undermining the principle. A social bargain was defensible while a levelled-down society was not and Britain's rich have fought off all claims on their purse with righteous indignation. The substitution of the Labour party's Clause 4 with another that does not argue for the explicit public interest of a social bargain represented their most complete victory.   So we arrive at today; executives clamouring for American levels of remuneration but not accepting either an American approach to giving or a European approach to taxation and with no live values based political coalition to fight back.  Sir Paul loved England and its civilities - the ritual of a cricket match or the beauty of its long tended countryside. Yet what lies behind that has been a bitterly fought-for social bargain sustained by three traditions now in decline - Christianity, one-nation Toryism and socialism. It would be comforting to hope that we might produce some British philanthropists with Sir Paul's readiness to give, but until our society can find a legitimate way of talking the language of social bargains there is little chance. The country that Sir Paul loved is in peril.