The sad aspect of modern life is revealed in the fate of the very word "disinterested". Most people don't even understand what the word means. They sometimes take it for signifying being bored, or uninterested in some area. They can also imagine that they are being realistic in following journalists who want to expose apparently benevolent acts in terms of what everybody is supposed to be "up to". Because Christianity left space for people to explore their own inclinations rather than prescribing a customary life encompassing everything, Europeans became an enterprising lot, and the fruits of that enterprise can be seen in everything from the creation of universities in the Middle Ages to the formalisation of sport in the later modern period. The charitable activities of many Europeans, in all sorts of causes and (in the British case) in the service of all sorts of people, were merely part of this explosion of enterprise, of which commerce and inventiveness were one part, just as charity was another. The danger, of course, is that once disinterested activities prove to be valuable, as so many things done just because people liked doing them have proved to be, the regulators move in. Governments want to instrumentalise universities, and gamblers to have their wicked ways with sport. The dire process of practicality imposes its blinkers on our freedom, and that, as one might once have said, isn't cricket. It isn't, in the long run, very smart either.