总裁俱乐部的伪善晚宴

You’re a middle-aged man. It’s early 2018. You get an invitation from a company you know reasonably well to an all-male charity dinner at the Dorchester Hotel. You might have been before. But even if you haven’t, you know that it’s well known to be one hell of a booze up; that the hostesses are always super-hot; and that in the past there has been a bit of an anything-goes atmosphere. What do you say?

你是个中年男人。现在是2018年初。一家你相当熟悉的公司邀请你去参加在多切斯特酒店(Dorchester Hotel)举行的一场全是男性参加的慈善晚宴。你可能以前参加过这个晚宴。即使没有，你也知道那是一个著名的纵酒狂欢的场合;女服务员们都超级性感;那里总有那么点恣意妄为的气氛。你会应邀前往吗?

The astonishing bit about the Presidents Club saga is that the charity managed to find 360 people to say yes. That is partly because it was an all-male dinner. There is nothing wrong with single gender events on principle. But there is something odd about very large ones in a corporate context. It’s an odd hangover from the days when women found they couldn’t climb the career ladder because the real networking was conducted in places they weren’t invited to, over drinks they didn’t much like and long after they’d gone home to put the kids to bed. Not nice.

总裁俱乐部(Presidents Club)丑闻中惊人之处在于这个慈善机构竟成功让360个人同意参加晚宴。部分原因是这是一场只邀请男性的晚宴。原则上讲，单一性别活动没什么不对。但在企业背景下，一些规模很大的活动也是如此不免有些奇怪。这是过去遗留的奇症，那时女性们晋升无门，因为现实的社交活动发生于那些她们得不到邀请的场合，发生在她们不太喜欢的推杯换盏之间，发生在她们早就回家安顿孩子入睡之后。真不光彩。

It’s also partly about the sleaze itself. Sure most of the guests might not have known their high-heeled and black-knickered hostesses had to surrender their phones and sign legally dubious non-disclosure agreements. And we can (I hope) assume only a small percentage of the 360 guests were bottom grabbers in their own right. But still, you’d think most sentient modern men would find even the thought of their peers getting away with being — as the guidance given to the girls at interview put it — “annoying” a tad off putting.

另一部分原因也在于晚宴的肮脏之处本身。当然，大多数来宾可能并不知道，那些穿着高跟鞋和黑色短裤的女服务员们不得不交出手机，并签署法律上含糊不清的保密协议。而且我们可以(我希望)假设这360位客人中只有一小部分人本身是喜欢猥亵女性的色狼。你可以认为大多数有理智的现代男性都会觉得，只是想想其他男性在做出“令人讨厌”(用那些女孩们面试时拿到的指引上的话说)的举动之后还能逍遥法外，都让人心生厌恶。

Despite this, the real reason to wonder why anyone, however much they might love a sleazy booze up, said yes is the perfectly obvious risk to their reputation. You would have had to be living in a cave for the past year not to know about the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements and grasped that times that were changing have now changed. This stuff just isn’t socially or politically acceptable any more.

尽管如此，我们之所以想要弄明白为什么有人(不论他可能多么喜欢放浪形骸的纵酒狂欢)会同意参加晚宴，是因为这很明显会令他们的声誉面临风险。过去一年，只要你不是住在山洞里就会听说过“#MeToo”(我也是)和“#TimesUp”(是时候停止了)这些运动，并且会意识到以往那些改变中的事情如今已经真真正正地改变了。总裁俱乐部发生的事情在社会上和政治上都不可能再被人们接受了。

Thirty years ago — when The Presidents Club had its first ridiculous dinner — wives might have complained about their drunk husbands getting back late at night having spent the equivalent of £100,000 on a car they didn’t need; and professional women might have felt a little resentful about being explicitly left out of a top networking occasion. But neither group could have done much about it. Today, those women can take down a corporate or government career in a matter of hours. You might not approve of that. But why take the risk?

30年前——那时总裁俱乐部刚刚举行了第一次荒唐的晚宴——妻子们可能会埋怨她们醉酒晚归的丈夫花10万英镑买了辆他们不需要的车;而职业女性也许会因为自身被明确排除在顶级社交场合之外而感到些许不满。但对此她们都无能为力。如今，这些女性在几个小时内就能终结一个人的企业或政府生涯。对此你可能不赞成。但为何要冒这个险?

There’s an obvious answer — arrogance bred of a sense of immunity from being in a big group of properly powerful men, many of whom come with the confidence of knowing that they aren’t beholden to regulated or public companies.

一个明显的答案是——傲慢。这种傲慢来源于知道自己属于一大群有权有势男人的一员而产生的逍遥法外感，他们中很多人都因为知道自己不必对受监管企业或上市公司负责而有一种信心。

The core assumption, conscious or not, must have been that behaving badly, if done inside a large group of 360 top businessmen, charming aristocrats, minor celebrities and property chieftains, is different. Lower risk. But there’s something else in the mix here as well: the fig leaf of charity.

他们内心的核心假设(不管有意与否)必然是，行为不端如果发生在360名商界顶级人士、迷人的贵族、小名星和房地产大佬之中会另当别论。风险会更低。但是这其中还有别的因素：以慈善为名。

“But it’s for charity” is a catch-all excuse for all manner of things — and who’s going to call out well-off men for a little groping at a dinner that raises millions for good causes? If people hear the words “charity dinner” and don’t think about helping sick kids, but instead think “top food, bit of booze and a chance to use the auction bit to show the guys how much I’m making on the back of the government’s help to buy nonsense” — what does it matter? Think of the children!

“为了慈善”是个万能的借口——谁会指责一群有钱男人在为慈善事业筹集数百万美元的晚宴上有少许动手动脚呢?如果人们听到“慈善晚宴”这个词，想到的不是帮助患病的孩子，而是“顶级美食、纵酒狂欢以及一个借着拍卖向别人展示自己在政府的帮助下赚了多少钱来买没用的东西的机会”——那又如何?想想孩子!

The problems here are manyfold. First, a dinner raising money for charity should probably be held to higher standards than one held just for fun. There has been too much scandal in the sector over the past few years for comfort. If it wants to maintain public trust (and how can it operate without it?) it can’t afford this kind of thing.

问题是多方面的。首先，一个为慈善募捐的晚宴或许应该比一个仅仅为了娱乐而举行的晚宴格调更高。过去几年，慈善行业爆出的丑闻太多，令人担忧。如果慈善业还想保持公众的信任(没有公众的信任它要如何运作?)就不能再发生这种事。

Second, your average charity dinner doesn’t come cheap. The Presidents Club event is a slightly special case (130 hostesses add up). Nonetheless, based on the latest accounts available, it seems to have cost the organisation about 30p to raise 70p for charity, a ratio that makes even the government’s methods of fundraising look insanely efficient. The Charity Commission will say that with 167,000 charities to police they can’t be badgering everyone about their morals and money-raising matters. But all that tells us is that we have too many “charities”, the answer to which is not to pour more taxpayers’ money into the commission, but to cut the number of organisations in the UK given charitable status. We can’t possibly need more than a couple of thousand (tops).

第二，你的慈善晚宴并不便宜。总裁俱乐部事件稍有点特殊(总共有130名女服务员)。然而，最新账目显示，该组织每筹集70便士善款的成本似乎是约30便士，这一比率甚至令政府筹资方式都显得异常高效。英国慈善委员会(The Charity Commission)会说，他们要监管167000家慈善机构，所以不可能在道德和筹款问题上纠缠每家机构。但所有这些都告诉我们，“慈善机构”太多了，因此别再把更多纳税人的钱投给慈善委员会，而要减少英国被授予慈善地位的组织的数量。我们需要的慈善机构不可能超过两千家(最多)。

Yet despite misgivings about the event, the charities that were in line for donations should take the money. Not doing so suggests they are more concerned about the way their charity looks than what it achieves. It’s do-goodery gone mad. Their job is not to indulge in political grandstanding (that is already a very crowded market). Their job is to do useful things. The Charity Commission might want to find time to have a word with some of them about that, too.

然而，尽管人们对晚宴事件感到担忧，但那些之前准备接收善款的慈善机构应该把钱拿走。如果不这样做就表示他们更关心自己做慈善的形象，而不是实际取得的成就。这是疯狂的伪善。慈善机构的职责不是沉溺于政治哗众取宠(已经有太多人这样做了)。他们的职责是干些有用的事。慈善委员会或许也应该抽时间和他们中的某些人就此聊一聊。

The writer is editor in chief of MoneyWeek

本文作者是《Money Week》主编