Author: CRT Admin

Last Saturday, December 10, was Human Rights Day.  That same day, Memorial, a Russian research and human rights organization, received a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

The principal mission of human rights, as set forth in the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, is to put limits on government.  Certain rights of individuals are given priority over and protection against some applications of state power.  Under the social justice standard of human rights, individual persons are given some powers which governments must not restrict and governments are given some duties to serve individuals which such governments must not ignore or abuse.

In short, human rights prevent the state from acting as a tyrant and transform its work into service of the people.

When it recognized that no moral capitalism could survive cruel and oppressive political regimes, the Caux Round Table proposed a set of moral principles for governments.  The principal standard for all government action is to faithfully execute a public trust.  The Caux Round Table’s standards for government mirror the moral foundation of human rights.

The Caux Round Table Principles for Government hold as a fundamental principle that:

Public power is held in trust for the community.

Power brings responsibility.  Power is a necessary moral circumstance in that it binds the actions of one to the welfare of others.

Therefore, the power given by public office is held in trust for the benefit of the community and its citizens.  Officials are custodians only of the powers they hold.  They have no personal entitlement to office or the prerogatives thereof.

Holders of public office are accountable for their conduct while in office.  They are subject to removal for malfeasance, misfeasance or abuse of office.  The burden of proof that no malfeasance, misfeasance or abuse of office has occurred lies with the officeholder.

The state is the servant and agent of higher ends.  It is subordinate to society.  Public power is to be exercised within a framework of moral responsibility for the welfare of others.  Governments that abuse their trust shall lose their authority and may be removed from office.

The fundamental principal for moral government was eloquently applied by Jan Rachinsky on Saturday in his remarks accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Memorial.  He said, in part:

We are investigating and documenting crimes; crimes against individual human beings and against humanity, already committed or currently being committed, by state power.  What we see as the root cause of these crimes is the sanctification of the Russian state as the supreme value. This requires that the absolute priority of power is to serve the ‘interests of the state’ over the interests of individual human beings and their freedom, dignity and rights.  In this inverted system of values, people are merely expendable material to be used for resolving governmental tasks.  This is the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union for seventy years and regrettably continues ‘til today. …

Another consequence of this exaltation of the state was and remains impunity, not only for those who make criminal political decisions, but also for those who commit crimes in the execution of those decisions. …

For seventy years, the Soviet state destroyed any solidarity among people, atomized society, eradicated any expression of civic solidarity and thus turned society into docile and voiceless masses.  Today’s sad state of civil society in Russia is a direct consequence of its unresolved past.

If the state has supreme value, as Rachinsky asserts, it cannot serve as a faithful trustee of its citizens and their values.

There has been a lot of hype these past months on ESG as the road to capitalist nirvana, but it might be, as Texans allegedly say those who would be taken for cowboys and cowgirls: “All hat and no cattle.”

A recent commentary by Rob Wiesenthal in the Wall Street Journal teaches a playground lesson about corporate governance – beware the second law of thermodynamics.

Authority structures which use power and rules to isolate themselves from a surrounding ecosystem succumb to entropy.  Entropy then opens the way to a slow death – to atrophy.  Self-absorption and decadence are two peas from the same pod.

Wiesenthal wrote about Twitter and the beneficial impact on its governance made by its new owner, Elon Musk.  His point is that Musk is anti-entropic.  Musk seeks maximum work output from the system (overcoming entropy) by linking it directly to the ecology in which it lives in ways that will promote a flow of productive energy from the outside to the inside.

Wiesenthal writes:

Minutes after closing his purchase of the company, he started a process that reduced the workforce from 7,500 to 2,500 in 10 days. …

Mr. Musk is trying to cure a degenerative corporate disease: systemic paralysis.  Symptoms include cobwebs of corporate hierarchies with unclear reporting lines and unwieldy teams, along with work groups and positions that have opaque or nonsensical mandates.  Paralyzed companies are often led by a career CEO who builds or maintains a level of bureaucracy that leads to declines in innovation, competitive stature and shareholder value. …

Redundant managers, along with managers who have opaque responsibilities, are in essence professional critics.  Kenneth Tynan said, “A critic is a man who knows the way, but can’t drive the car.”  While corporate execs typically can’t drive the car, they do have a time-tested path to success at big companies: Don’t do anything.  Simply critique others’ attempts to do something. Don’t initiate any projects that have any risk of failure or embarrassment.  And always stay close enough for credit, but far enough from blame.  That’s the road map for job security, but not for innovation.

And innovation in its various manifestations – tangible and intangible – is the death of entropy and the road to sustainability.  Innovation brings energy to a firm’s stocks of human and social capitals.

Our colleague, Professor Emeritus Doran Hunter, who taught government, administrative law and jurisprudence for many years, has applied the process of seeking a “re-birth,” – a renaissance – to the U.S. as a remedy for its current travails.

I attach his essay here.

His suggestion may have broader application.

The COP27 gathering of leaders to reduce warming of our atmosphere was notable for its limited results, more in the line of charity for poor countries than investment in promising new technologies.

In China, the people’s resentment of one-party autocratic micro-management of individual lives expressed itself in protests.  The critique of Xi Jinping’s reimposition of an imperial order is an uncompromising rejection of its moral legitimacy.

In Iran, the news is of the regime surrendering its religiously grounded theory of restricted social intercourse for women, restrictions enforced by a special police force.

In Russia, Putin has refused to go along with long standing principles of international law and respect for others.

In the U.K., parliamentary governance is showing signs of wear and tear after 300 years,

Failure of the state’s capacity to provide law and order is worrisome in South Africa and Mexico. The Taliban has not yet brought well-being to Afghanistan.  Several million citizens have left and in 2023, more are expected to join them in leaving their homelands in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to illegally enter the U.S.

If systems are experiencing stress and entropic decline, they need to be replaced with others energized by a better vision of the good.

An impressive effort to build anew a capable civilizational dynamic which, over several centuries, produced our modern civilization, began with a return to first principles – the Italian Renaissance.

Wikipedia notes that “The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that “man is the measure of all things.”  This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature.”

In many ways, the thinking of the Caux Round Table on moral capitalism and moral government has been inspired by the very humanism associated with that effort at “re-birth,” but now generalized in association with many other wisdom traditions.

With this scope for its importance to all of us, I commend to you Doran’s essay.

Curious indeed that a billionaire capitalist and not politicians or bureaucrats or theological divines has come to the defense of free speech and open-ended social evolution.

Elon Musk made his money, as far as I can see, the “old fashioned way,” not from rent-seeking, but from innovation and risk-taking.

But if he converts Twitter to a free-for-all without censorship and human persons retain their fondness for speaking out stupidly, maliciously, with meanness and prejudices aforethought, must we suffer such indignities in quiet isolation?

The issue of freedom becomes that of responsibility – who should be responsible?  It’s the retort Cain put to God in the Old Testament: if I am free to be me, then “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

If censors on Twitter have freedom, the users don’t.  If users have freedom, then how will they use it – for good or for evil?

The Caux Round Table has answered this question with ethics – users of Twitter have an ethical obligation to be responsible.

We drafted a proposed code of ethics for users of social media, which we have shared before.

Here is our proposal:

General Principle: Serve the Common Good by Promoting the Moral Sense of Each and All

The business of social media is to attract users who in using the service provided by the business, provide personal data for the business to commodify and sell to commercial firms, along with advertising.  The users of social media stand in a stakeholder relationship of supplier to the business.  But the principal stakeholder of social media companies should be the community with a focus on its moral integrity.

Social media thrives at the intersection of private interest with the common good.  Social media companies contribute to the formation of foundational social capital, a pivotal public good supporting civilized living.  Individuals who use social media similarly contribute to such a public good through their personal use of communications, the consumption of a private good.

Social media can enhance the moral sense of individuals or entice them to ignore or even repudiate the moral sense, which is the foundation for human felicity and living in community.

Social media contributes to the enhancement of trust, a social virtue, but also to the destruction of trust, which degradation injures the community by eroding goodwill and good relationships.
Social media can educate and bridge divides of race, religion, ethnicity and perspective, all to the good of improving social capital, but it can, as well, aggravate ignorance, suspicions, hatreds and contempt for others and in so doing, destroy society’s capacity for promoting human flourishing.

All providers and users of social media have a stewardship responsibility to care for the common good, in addition to advancing their own private interests.  Self-aggrandizement and exploitation of others must yield in principles to faithful concern for the common good and for taking due care in minimizing harm to that common good.

There are, across religions and cultures, three ethical standards for providers and users of social media to uphold: 1) do unto others as you would have them do unto you, so do not presume to judge them, as you would want them not to judge you; 2) seek understanding and trust; and 3) be humble and seek no harm.

The contribution ethics makes to civilized living is to draw forth the “better angels” of our natures.  Power, of any kind, when administered by human hearts and minds can be abused.  Ethics guides the power we have towards mercy and justice.

Principle No. 1: Mutuality

Interpersonal communications is a social process.  It is the engagement of self with others.  Ethics, therefore, applies to communications, as it does to all human self-expressions and other uses of personal power in social settings.  The ethical quality of interpersonal communication rises or falls according to its degree of subjugation to narcissisms, ego-manifestations and other expressions of one’s will to power.  Interpersonal communications – oral, written, on-line or face to face – to be ethical, require habitual or alert restraint of the will to power.

Personal rights, exercised without responsibility, can be troublesome.  One person’s rights do not negate those of others, just as the rights of others do not negate the rights belonging to oneself.  There is in the moral course of justice a reciprocity of rights between self and other.  When taken to selfish extremes, rights can lose their legitimacy and become oppression of others whose rights and personal dignity are not then honored.  Rights are more noble when they are tethered to stewardship ideals.

Responsibilities embedded in the exercise of rights provide the reciprocity necessary for living with social justice.

Interpersonal communication is a common space among persons.  Ethical interpersonal communication requires finding that which can be in common, that which is not unilateral or expresses only a personal narrative or perception.  Such commonalities are often found in facts and in the search for truth.  Ignorance and avoidance of facts and a refusal to seek a higher truth than what our individual minds may, from time to time, reveal to us, may not be injected into interpersonal communication seeking to be ethical.

Taking offense at the thoughts and words of others and punishing them for having such thoughts or for sharing such speech, even just by holding them up for shame and ridicule, promote distrust and antipathy.

Principle No. 2: No Anonymity in the Exercise of Freedom of Speech and Thought

Social media may not limit freedoms of speech, opinion and thought, but can deny access to social media to anonymous users.  Anonymity draws forth egregious unkindness.  Users must identify themselves to providers of social media communications and to the public by name and email address.

Questions about and objections to the accuracy of social media communications shall be directed to the authors of such communications and made publicly available.

Identification of creators imposes on them accountability, encouraging their acceptance of ethical responsibility and respect for others.

Principle No 3: Respect

Providers of social media communications must respect those who receive such communications. Authors on social media must respect those who receive their communications.  Readers on social media must respect those who express themselves.

Those who might object to what they read or see on social media have an obligation to respect those whose beliefs, feelings, ideas, opinions and facts differ from their own ideas, opinions and facts.  Rushing to take offense at another’s words is unwise and childish.  “A kind word turneth away wrath.”  Users of social media who gain access to the words, beliefs, feelings, ideas, opinions and facts of others also voluntarily participate in a social process which protects others in having freedom to use such words, beliefs, feelings, ideas, opinions and facts.

Showing such respect requires humility in deciding who is right and who is wrong.  Such respect should cause one to think twice before seeking to resent, censor or punish another for their thoughts and words.  Consider, first, before replying with anger and disrespect that you might be mistaken.  Before concluding that someone else is hateful or malicious, seek dialogue to understand their narrative.

When reading, have courage and no fear of others; seek to understand.  Remember your strengths and dignity.  Don’t let words “trigger” you; you are your own “safe space;” “sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.”  If anxious or angry, center yourself.

Whether or not a personal expression on social media can be said to threaten others or have the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence them depends on the perceptions of whoever is making the judgment.  Perceptions are not the truth, as they reflect many idiosyncratic cognitive biases. Perceptions can be false and misleading, not at all correctly understanding the intention of the person making the communication.  The ethic of respect demands humility when judging others, giving to them a benefit of the doubt and for a moment, putting aside one’s own prejudices before drawing harsh conclusions.

When you point a finger at another in blame and accusation, remember that three of your fingers are pointing back at you.  Clean your own house first.

When composing, use words ethically and accurately.  You are not at war with the world or anyone in it.

Before posting anything on social media, ask yourself, “How does this help?”

Ridicule is a particularly judgmental, condescending and autocratic way to express your feelings and opinions.

Ad hominem disparagements, slanders and other demeaning descriptions of persons and undeserved or misleading ad hominem praise for another are of no probative value by themselves and only the objective of creating a cognitive bias in favor of or against another’s character and veracity, so have no place in ethical communications.

Don’t be an instrument of dissemination of misinformation and deception of people.  Avoid harming people unknowingly by verifying the information you get before you share with others.

Avoid posting anything on your own or someone else’s account that you would not be willing to say to his or her face.  Do not troll.  Deliberately attempting to anger or enrage someone at a remove is cowardly and childish.

Post items which elevate, challenge and encourage people to think.  If you haven’t anything worth texting, text nothing at all.  There are lots of people who will be more than happy to take up the slack.

A good argument online is no different from a good argument in person.  State your position. Read what others write.  Be polite at all times.  The world is more than well-supplied with small, belligerent people who use the internet to punish strangers for their own experiences of humiliation or scorn.

Anything posted online can and will be remembered for a very long time, possibly forever, so ask yourself, “Is this how I wish to be remembered?”

Principle No. 4: Fairness in Access to Social Media

Providers of social media platforms stand in the relationship of common carrier to users of their platforms for having market power controlling a gateway for transactions under the rule of Munn v. Illinois (U.S. Supreme Court 1876).  Providers of social media, as equitable trustees for the users of their service, may not arbitrarily infringe on the contract rights of their users.  Providers, as common carriers, may not use contracts of adhesion to inequitably limit the rights of their users.

Access to a platform may not be curtailed or denied a user without the provider finding that the user committed a knowing malfeasance or acted with grossly negligent nonfeasance, states of mind more culpable than ignorance.  The platform has the burden of establishing that the user acted from such a culpable state of mind before curtailing or denying access to a user.

More and more recently, I have thought of William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” speaking to our times:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Putin invaded Ukraine to vindicate the Rus.  Xi asserts an ethnic right to rule Taiwan.  The post-World War II liberal international order is challenged by populist nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms.  Who listens to the U.N. Secretary General anymore?  How many people even know his name?  World leaders worry about climate change at COP27, but nothing much seems to happen.  Governments flood their economies with trillions of dollars of liquidity to make life easier for people and inflation takes off.  Globalization is said to be in retreat.  Governance in the U.S. is in gridlock after last week’s election.  Confidence and happy reciprocity are less and less evident.

What has happened?

One thought is that our modern global civilization was built using the cultural architecture of the European Enlightenment, but that has run out of gas.  We have lost faith in fundamentals and are turning instead to fears and passions, not to morals and reason.

The Enlightenment encouraged science and secularism, but, as Nietzsche intuited, reason not put to good ends can easily, left in isolation, turn on what it has wrought, like Cronus eating his children.  Reason, in the wrong hands, can become a solvent, dissolving, breaking into parts, dissecting and separating what is vitally organic into non-sustaining piecemeal bits of inefficacious flotsam and jetsam.

In giving purpose to reason, we can play at being God, indulging in fantasies and narcissistic self-promotions.  Our personal narratives can lose their coherence with reality.  Logic, taken to extremes, unbalances culture and politics with clever use of words, as in post-modernism and deconstruction.  Words, then, became rhetorical devices, serving the will to power of individuals.  The Tower of Babel story from the Old Testament could be a fit metaphor – seeking to join God, but ending up with fragmentation and tribal dispersion.

Secondly, the will to power draws forth personal dedication to entitlement, that others should do unto us what we most want and not charge us a penny for their efforts, all because we are deserving.  And, necessarily to this point of view, if we don’t get what we want, it is the fault of those others.  The will to power is infantilism at its best.  Lenin once criticized left-wing communism as an “infantile disorder.”

Modernity’s privileging of the will to power has brought a spiritual crisis upon us all.  Pope Francis responded to this in 2020 with his Encyclical, Fratelli Tutti.  With our spiritual anchors floating away out of our reach, we tread water and seek rescue.  Most sought after is solace in personal entitlements.

From this spiritual perspective, ESG virtue signaling and companies committing themselves to high purposes make great sense as earning us the status of fully deserving to be well cared for by others.  We are good, so they will come to our rescue.

For example, that did not happen to Captain Ahab and his crew, save only Ishmael, in Herman Melville’s marvelous theological novel, Moby Dick.

In the U.S. especially, such logic of entitlement, coupled with a sense of victimhood whenever we don’t get what we think we deserve, has taken a prominent place in our culture and our politics.  The dissolving of systemic trust and confidence worked by post-modernism and deconstruction narratives of nihilism and narcissism has flowered into the spread of woke consciousness, a kind of sectarian Puritanism.  Wokeness divides citizens into the deserving and the undeserving, with entitlements flowing to the deserving and the burden of guilt and responsibility placed upon the undeserving.

The action arm of woke consciousness in the U.S. is programs of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to privilege some at the expense of the less deserving.

The attached essay on DEI applies critical thinking and analytical modes of deconstruction to this new and, for me, very questionable practice in employment, education and the allocation of social concern.

You can read it here.

We recently posted more short videos on relevant and timely topics.  They include:

–Reflecting on Responsibility

–Private Property vs Public Office

–Misinformation and Disinformation, Who Decides?

–How Should We Look at Work?

–Capitalism and the Intangible

All our videos can be found on our YouTube page here.  We recently put them into 8 playlists, which you can find here.

If you aren’t following us on Twitter or haven’t liked us on Facebook, please do so.  We update both platforms frequently.

About noon on November 22, 1963, I was preparing to swim laps in the indoor pool of Harvard College.  It was then required of freshmen students to pass a swimming test.  The test was a condition put in a large gift to the college, as I recall, from the mother of Harry Elkins Widener, who drowned in the sinking of the Titanic.  A graduate of the college, he could not swim and so drowned.  His mother made a gift in his memory to his alma mater on condition that the college would teach all its students how to swim.  If you passed the test, you were exempted from otherwise compulsory swimming classes – as I recall.

You swam naked in the pool.  As I stood there that November 22^nd with 2 or 3 classmates about to plunge in, a friend of ours came running out of the locker room with a kind of desperate excitement in his face and voice: “The president’s been shot!,” he exclaimed.  Our group looked at one another in disbelief – no, we each thought separately; impossible.

Then a cold feeling came to me.  I remembered Abraham Lincoln and the much more recent assassination attempt on President Harry Truman.  Such terrible things can and do happen, I realized.

We did not want to swim, but had to wait for the class hour to expire.  As soon as I had dressed, I ran over to the office of the student newspaper.  As I walked in, many were standing around watching TV.  As I looked over at the television set, I saw Walter Cronkite take off his glasses and say in a breaking voice: “The president is dead.”

Harvard in 1963 was sort of a center of fandom for Jack Kennedy and his New Frontier.  His death seemed to sever the moral fiber of that community.  My dad, also a Harvard graduate and a friend of John Kennedy’s older brother Joe when both were undergraduates, had been President Kennedy’s Ambassador to Thailand.  Dad had taken us to Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961.

I was standing in the snow on the back side of the Capitol, where inaugurations were then held, for the ceremony, hearing with my own ears my new president’s call to action:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. …

Now the trumpet summons us again – not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need – not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation,” a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself. …

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. …

With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.

I said to myself, “yes.”

And now 59 years and many global tribulations later, I still say “yes.”  The work of doing right and good in this world must truly be our own.  We must ask of ourselves and not of others.

John Kennedy’s assassination was not the only death or inexplicable tragedy we have witnessed during these past nearly 6 decades.  Those sad and bad turns of fate can only leave us with the conclusion that our cosmos does not arrange for the best to happen to us and for us to live in the best of all possible worlds.

His assassination shocked American self-esteem.  That such a promising young man would be cut down by a lone misfit made no sense.  Many responded with denial of the truth.  They felt more psychologically secure in claiming that Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy. They needed an infamous power to blame in order to remove responsibility off the vagaries of that unknowable fate, which embraces us all.

Shifting blame the better to live comfortably in our own imaginations is very human. Scapegoating has its calming effect.  Giving our fears a knowable cause puts us more in charge of our lives, as we can then demand specific remediation for what bothers us.  If the world is out of sorts with us, then somebody needs to do something about it.

Coincidently, I just read a comment of Picasso on how our minds create safe spaces.  He referred to his painting, a process seeking to express an aesthetic, as a “form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile in the universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors, as well as on our desires.”

Recently, in the U.S., we suffer from a surfeit of conspiratorial scapegoating, as things go badly. Some saw a conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russians in the 2016 presidential election and in the riotous attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  Others see conspiracy in how ballots were accepted for counting in the 2020 presidential election.  Perhaps not totally irrational, fears of others who are different, fears too of their taking control of our lives, has turned many Americans towards such homeopathic therapy for their psychic discomfort.

Maybe we could use a magic to carry us away from the here and now in a narcissistic embrace of our psyches?

But I ask you: would it not be more realistic to work in this world – to bear every burden, pay every price, meet every hardship, support every friend, oppose every foe – so that actual events bring succor and happiness to those around us?

With my colleagues here, I have been rethinking the emphasis we place on systems rather than on individuals.  Modern social science has become accustomed to focus on systems – how they work, their rise and fall, their coherence or incoherence.  Political philosophy has moved away from virtue studies and become political science, with a data-driven focus on mass behaviors, policies and programs, bureaucracy and hard and soft powers.

When seeking the public good in economics, we are caught between systems – capitalism and national socialism.

But what about the role of individuals in shaping organizations?  Or the role of organizations in promoting some kinds of personalities over others; personalities which then, when empowered, shape the organization to fit their needs and dispositions.

Here is a current commentary on the role of sociopathic individuals in corporations, authored by Jennifer Sey, who was the Brand President of Levi’s.

Her article appeared in the Spectator.