Category: Commentary

We have, in recent months, responded, as best we can, to the current levels of distemper in our world, thinking more about social and human capitals as foundations for moral outcomes – social, political and economic.

The outcome of better social and human capitals, on an individual level, is more effective agency for individuals.  Agency, we might say, is the manifestation of human dignity, moving it from norm to fact.  It also provides each of us with the capacity for freedom.  Without agency, how inert would we be?

Individual agency, in fact, is the cosmos’ way of bridging between norms and facts.  Human agency possesses norms and thoughts and at the same time, lives with facts.

I recently read that in the state of Mississippi – long derided for having the lowest achievements in education and the most child poverty among all the 50 American states – over the past decade has committed its educational system to having every child able to read by the end of third grade.  As a result of this community effort, Mississippi children no longer test at the bottom of all American children.  They now demonstrate abilities closer to the average, no matter their family’s economic circumstances.  Among poor families, Mississippi children are now tied for best performers in the nation on one standard test for reading, while ranking second in math.

The abilities of high school graduates have also grown.  In 2011, only 75% of students graduated, 4% below the national average graduation rate, but in 2022, 88% of Mississippi students graduated high school, when the national average for graduation was 87%.

The lesson to be learned from this is that poverty is not an insurmountable obstacle to developing our agency capabilities.  It is the person incubating the divine spark, not life circumstances, which can make all the difference for the quality of our life outcomes.

Does that fact not argue for setting high standards for ourselves and others and persevering in living by them?

Robert Browning insisted that a person’s “reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Recently, I sent you some thoughts on the role and place of corporate social advocacy in a market of competing ideas, values and emotions.  What provoked my concern was an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Now, there is more of the same.

From the article:

Companies’ mentions of green and social initiatives during earnings calls have fallen off sharply in recent quarters, reversing a more boastful approach taken over the past few years amid intensifying pressure from some investors and conservative activists.  … Finance chiefs and other executives have significantly quieted down in public settings about their environmental and employee diversity efforts as opposition has mounted from a confluence of interests: investors who want companies to focus on their operations, not the social good and conservative groups and political leaders who have seized on corporate support of such causes to rally “anti-woke” constituents—for example, calling for boycotts of brands that advertise their support of the LGBT community in the wake of recent disputes with Target and Bud Light.

“The easiest thing to do is just to stay out of the conversation and emphasize other facets of business that are going to be perceived as less controversial and more core to the traditional metrics of the business,” said Jason Jay, senior lecturer of sustainability at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Executives at U.S.-listed companies mentioned “environmental, social and governance,” “ESG,” “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “DEI” or “sustainability” on 575 earnings calls from April 1 to June 5, down 31% from the same period last year, according to data from financial-research platform AlphaSense.  That is the largest such year-over-year decline and the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year drops, following a pickup in these discussions and corporate social efforts in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. 

Food for thought on what is the social function of enterprise?

While flipping magazine pages recently, I happened to see a reference to something I had not thought of in years and years – the meeting of Alice with Humpty Dumpty when they argued over the meaning of words, as recounted in Through the Looking Glass.

The nub of their conflict is here:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’  ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’  ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

And there is a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” of just how does language work?  Who sets the meaning of words?  If the boss determines meaning, then where is our fundamental freedom?  Human discourse degrades into another form of artificial intelligence.

What are words anyway: truth, hallucinations, approximations, inventions, carriers of fixed or malleable cultural perceptions?

Humpty Dumpty, as conceptualized by Lewis Carroll, is a narcissistic, post-modern, deconstructionist – meaning is whatever you want it to be.  But to have others get your meaning and follow your lead, you need power to compel or at least manipulate them into seeing things your way.  And just so, post-modernists are 1) fixated on who has power and prestige and 2) desperate to attain social and political power and hold it in their own hands, responsible to none other.

You can read the entire conversation of Alice and Humpty Dumpty here.

Carroll takes us back to Plato’s proposal that only philosophers should be our kings and teach us right from wrong.  Tolkien also made a good story out of Plato’s conceit, where his Lord of the Rings was the one to “rule them all.”  Thomas Hobbes, in 1651, proposed the sovereign state as leviathan to impose order on the anarchy enjoyed by self-interested individuals who think and feel for themselves, just as they wish to do.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau followed with his proposal to have the sovereign create a general will, which would take the place of all the variant “particular wills” animating individuals.

In ancient China, Confucius affirmed that the first thing to do in governing people is to “rectify names,” to give them the proper words which would direct them to the right way of thinking and acting.

So, with words, language and discourse, how can we talk sensibly about ethics?

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

–The Intersection of Systems

–The Negative Externalities of Social Media

–Rice as an Indicator

–More Hope on The Horizon for Climate Change

All our videos can be found on our YouTube page here.  We recently put them into 9 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.

We are getting close to the opening of the Global Dialogue on the evening of July 25, with sessions on the following two days, July 26 and 27.  If you are thinking about joining us, please let us know if you can within the next week.

You can register here.

I was reminded by Bob MacGregor, our chairman emeritus and the moving force behind the Caux Round Table Principles for Business, that the final discussion and agreement on those Principles took place at Mountain House in 1993 – 30 years ago.

Professor Kenneth Goodpaster of the University of St. Thomas here in St. Paul, Minnesota, has just sent me reflections on the principles after those 30 years have passed.  Ken was the wise adviser in the drafting process and we are indebted to his service.

I attach a copy here of his reflections on our time being a new one with new challenges.  Your insights and courage in meeting those challenges are needed by our global community.

I do hope to see you in Caux in about two and a half weeks.

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday held that racial discrimination in choosing some applicants over others based on their racial appearance is unconstitutional.

This ruling of first importance to the U.S. is of global relevance.

Our human propensity to use our personal identities as stepping stones for the rejection of others is time-honored and universal across our cultures and religions.

Group A disparages Group B and Group B reciprocates with pleasure or with anger.  Consider the war in Ukraine.

Pope Francis, in his last encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, gave us a lesson from a Catholic perspective in how to get the better of ourselves and not succumb to prejudice and cold-heartedness.

The American poet, Robert Frost, eloquently wrote:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down …

He writes of his neighbor, who was repairing a wall between their two properties:

I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

The Court’s opinion vindicates the Caux Round Table Principles for Government, where we hold that:

The civic order shall serve all those who accept the responsibilities of citizenship.

Public power constitutes a civic order for the safety and common good of its members.  The civic order, as a moral order, protects and promotes the integrity, dignity and self-respect of its members in their capacity as citizens and therefore, avoid all measures, oppressive and other, whose tendency is to transform the citizen into a subject.  The state shall protect, give legitimacy to or restore all those principles and institutions which sustain the moral integrity, self-respect and civic identity of the individual citizen and which also serve to inhibit processes of civic estrangement, dissolution of the civic bond and civic disaggregation.  This effort, by the civic order itself, protects the citizen’s capacity to contribute to the well-being of the civic order.

The civic order and its instrumentalities shall be impartial among citizens without regard to condition, origin, sex or other fundamental, inherent attributes.  Yet, the civic order shall distinguish among citizens according to merit and desert where rights, benefits or privileges are best allocated according to effort and achievement, rather than as birthrights.

Racism subordinates individuals to social oppression and to narrative stereotypes.  It denies humans their personal agency and freedom to flourish and constrains their ability, should they wish to, to be effective moral agents of the most high.  Thus, the Court’s decision vindicates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well.  The Declaration says:

Article 1

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.  They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.  Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

The Court, in a robust and intellectually rigorous opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, vindicated the moral basis of the American Constitutional order.  That moral basis was set forth in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, issued by British colonies in North America, which affirmed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As the Court also pointed out, a civil war, where approximately 360,000 white men, mostly volunteers, gave their lives that black persons should be freed from slavery, proved necessary to ensure that the promise of the Declaration would be made good for all Americans.  The Court did honor to those fallen dead and to their president, Abraham Lincoln, also killed for his dedication to the cause that slavery must end.  In his famous address at the battlefield of Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke of his country as a “new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

On Monday, some of our fellows convened on Zoom to mull over the implications of thinking about “civilizations” and our emerging global order.

The ideal of civilizational states as replacing the nation state system introduced in Europe as a way of ending the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants is quite current in Russia and China.

The February 4, 2022 pact between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping contains the following paragraph:

The sides note that Russia and China as world powers with rich cultural and historical heritage have long-standing traditions of democracy, which rely on thousand-years of experience of development, broad popular support and consideration of the needs and interests of citizens. Russia and China guarantee their people the right to take part through various means and in various forms in the administration of the State and public life in accordance with the law. …The sides call on the international community to respect cultural and civilizational diversity and the rights of peoples of different countries to self-determination.

The Economist has concluded that:

Not unrelatedly perhaps, on June 2^nd, Mr. Xi outlined his broadest-yet claim to rule, based on China’s exceptional culture.  He called China the only civilization to be uninterrupted over many millennia.  As if suggesting that convergence with liberal values would betray every dynasty that preceded him, Mr. Xi declared: “The fact that Chinese civilization is highly consistent is the fundamental reason why the Chinese nation must follow its own path.”  Because Chinese civilization is unusually uniform, Mr. Xi went on, different ethnic groups must be integrated and the nation unified: code for imposing Chinese culture on Tibet and other regions and for taking back Taiwan.  For anyone puzzled that a once-revolutionary party now calls itself the “faithful inheritor” of “excellent traditional culture” (plus a dose of Marxism), the People’s Daily weighed in with commentaries explaining why Mr. Xi’s emphasis on cultural confidence is vital in a perilous moment when “strategic opportunities, risks and challenges co-exist.”  Economic heft is not enough, the newspaper added.  If China’s economy develops, but its spirit is lost, “Can the country be called strong?”

Take a step back and Mr. Xi is crafting an appeal to what might be termed civilizational legitimacy. 

I attach here a summary of comments from the fellow’s meeting for your review.

It seems that the scope of problem-solving we will attempt at the Global Dialogue is indeed global and timely.  I hope you can join us.

To learn more or to register, please click here.

Since the 1994 publication of the Caux Round Table Principles for Business, one consistent question has been on the table – who gets to speak for whom where ethics are concerned?

The late Wharton Business School Professor, Thomas Dunfee, challenged me to show that the principles constituted what he called a “meta” ethic, one that incorporated the principles advocated by a number of more particular cultural narratives as to right or wrong, prudent or foolhardy?

To humor Tom, I did some reading of wisdom tradition texts and then started in on a cross-reference chart between the principles and a number of wisdom traditions.  To my surprise, he was correct: a concordance did exist across faiths and traditions.

I attach the chart here for you to consider.

Now, at our 2023 Global Dialogue to be convened at Mountain House in Caux, Switzerland on July 26 and 27, we will consider, in round table format, a civilizational ethic which needs to be something of a “meta” ethic.  I think our chart on our principles for business and wisdom traditions testifies to the realistic possibility of reaching cross-tradition accord on fundamental principles for living well together, with respect for all our environments.

Please do join us for these discussions.

The proposed agenda is here.

To learn more or to register, please click here.

I thought I would share with you an article I recently wrote titled “Building a Better Board Through Reflective Thinking” for the Singapore Institute of Directors (SID).

The article was first published in the Q2 2023 issue of the SID Directors Bulletin, published by SID.

I would be most interested in your thoughts and feedback.

As our Global Dialogue at Mountain House in Caux, Switzerland, gets ever closer, I hope you might decide to attend and so register.

Our colleagues at Mountain House tell me that participants for other meetings are registering so that it is quite important for you to register as soon as possible if you are thinking of joining the discussions and help draft the statement on a civilizational ethic.

Michael Wright, one of our fellows, cannot come, but has written a special comment on how we could approach not only thinking about a complex present and its implications for the future, but structure systemic responses.  I would like to share his valuable thinking with you.  You may read his recommendations here:

Dear Steve:

Today, we are caught in a dilemma regarding the application of ethics to AI and rapid technology adoption in general.  I would argue that the use of Catholic, Sunni, Shi’a, Judeo and Thai ethical norms is based on transactional and observational behaviors and is useful only when future outcomes are known, foreseeable or have historical precedent.  Today, we are unleashing technologies whose ramifications in the future are not known, may in some instances be unknowable, thereby severely reducing the context for ethical decision-making (no instance will be observed, no time constraint applied, no participants in the same space/time).  Is it possible that we need entirely new ethics to guide the adoption of technologies which are shaping, impacting, pre-dispositioning and radically altering the planet-people-purpose relationship to the point of possible self-anhelation?

The ethical norms we’ve inherited from a variety of cultural and philosophical traditions, including Catholicism, Sunni and Shi’a Islam, Judaism and Thai Buddhism (to name a few you’ve mentioned), have evolved over centuries based on human-to-human and human-to-nature interactions.  The introduction of advanced technologies, like AI, presents new, unprecedented scenarios that these traditions did not foresee.  Human-to-technologies, as yet, are not understood (as opposed to technologies, e.g., fire, that we do understand).  Yet, it is a new ‘basis’ of interaction.

As such, there is a growing consensus that we do indeed need to evolve our ethical norms to address these new realities.  The question is the usefulness of the past constructs versus a blank page as a starting point.  For me, it feels like we are refining the art of making telephone poles and ignoring the promise of satellite global coverage.

A technology solution to a technological ethics dilemma?

The idea of considering the long-term impact of technological decisions is, in my opinion, a strong ethical guideline for the investment and financial community and thinking about implications for future generations specifically could be a powerful motivator for careful, responsible decision-making.

Similarly, in the context of technology, the temporal evolution could consider how a particular technology or technological system evolves over time.  This might involve looking at advancements and changes in the technology, its adoption rate, its impacts on society and other factors.  By incorporating temporal evolution into models, we can gain a dynamic understanding of systems that better reflects their real-world behavior.  This is particularly important in complex systems, where the interactions between different factors can change over time (see EPRI-DARPA CIN/SI).

The integration of Dr. Stuart Albert’s work on time-enriched data and Dr. Adrian Bejan’s constructal law can enable models to consider the full complexity of these temporal evolutions. This new modeling methodology has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of a wide range of systems.  By considering the temporal evolution of systems, this methodology can improve the accuracy and reliability of models, leading to a better understanding of how systems work and how they change over time.  This knowledge can be used to improve our decision-making and to create new opportunities.

Michael Wright
CEO/Founder
Intercepting Horizons, LLC

To learn more or to register, please click here.