Category: Commentary

The first message sent by the new technology of the telegraph in May 1844 was “What hath God wrought?”  The text was a bit misleading because an American had invented the telegraph and the U.S. Congress had paid for construction of the first telegraph line from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland.  Neither Samuel Morse, nor the Congress, had much divinity to speak of.

But apparently, Morse’s “message” was of deeper meaning.  He took the question from the book of Hebrews in the Bible referring to God’s plan for the Hebrew people to achieve greatness in a land reserved for them.  I think Morse was not only referring to prospects for his own native land, but to God’s plan to have humanity invent new technologies in his creation.

Now, when we contemplate the impacts of social media, should we again praise God for what we have done to ourselves?  Is social media part of a loving and gracious God’s plan for humanity? Or maybe it’s a plan of the jealous God of the Old Testament who takes care in his own ways of the recalcitrant among us who “walk not in his ways?”  Who knows for sure?

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, recently wrote an encomium to his invention in the Wall Street Journal.  His case is: “Today’s young people haven’t been ruined by social media. They’ve been equipped to unleash the power of a new technological era.”

He complains about the narrative that social media has turned them “into entitled narcissists, hopelessly distracted by superficial and trivial concerns.”  He then cites a 2018 Pew survey that found members of Gen Z valuing social media as “a key tool to connecting and maintaining relationships, being creative and learning more about the world, keeping them in touch with their friend ‘feelings.’”

Hoffman finds the Gen Z cohort living lives characterized by participation and community.

He also touts the value of growing up as a “we” and not an “I’ because careers today are all about the team, not the individual.  The individual, more and more, counts for less and less.

No wonder young people are more and more anxious and depressed.  They, themselves, don’t matter all that much.  Without safe spaces provided by “community,” their personal lives have little purpose and less meaning.  Their lot is not to find vocations, but to slog away as dependent cogs seeking recognition from the machine and always vulnerable to cancelation by the mob action of others.

In short, these network natives have little sense of personal agency.  That’s God’s plan for humanity?

But Hoffman believes that “adaptability is the new stability,” so that personal and professional networks are essential to developing that adaptability.

On the other hand, Jonathan Haidt gave us a very different take in the May issue of The Atlantic. His commentary offers as its thesis, “How social media dissolved the mortar of society and made America stupid.”

Haidt claims that Americans are disoriented, cut off from one another and from the past, unable to find common truth.  Haidt observes that users of social media learned how to present themselves as a brand, not as a person, putting on performances designed to spruce up their brand appeal.  Brand to brand relationships are not friendships, nor do they build trust in others, a form of social capital most needed in democracies.

Social media became a blood sport, a game of likes and clicks.  Thousands of unknowable strangers lifted you to fame or buried you in ignominy.  The new social game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics.

Haidt is of the opinion that social media has magnified and weaponized the frivolous.  He reports that, according to a recent Edelman Trust Barometer, people living under the autocracies of China and the UAE have more trust in their institutions than do Americans, Brits and South Koreans.

He notes that when people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the narratives told by those institutions.

He quotes Martin Gurri saying that the digital revolution has fragmented the public and “it’s basically mutually hostile.  It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.”  It is a discourse regime where stage performance crushes competence and “nothing really means anything anymore – at least in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.”

In other words, those communities touted by Reid Hoffman are not wholesome and healthy expressions of social capital, but rather, are toxic and insidiously corrosive of human commitment to the common good.

Social media has given more power and voice to the extremes, while reducing the power and voice of the moderate middle.  The online world of networking has allowed, Haidt claims, a small number of aggressive people (“jerks,” he calls them) to attack a much larger set of victims.  This may result because non-jerks are easily turned off and drop out, leaving the stage to the jerks.

But people who try to silence or intimidate their critics become more stupid in the process.

Social media has privileged confirmation bias – selecting to heed those who think as you do – which is the most pervasive obstacle to good thinking in people.

Haidt alleges that after 2010, American institutions got stupider en masse “because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear” of getting attacked and belittled or worse.  “Participants in our institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas… that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.”  In short, the communications technology made everyone more stupid.

It was a Gresham’s law at work – stupid people drive away smarter ones.  Thus, has technology created a “stupefying” process.

A third recent article which bears on our assessment of the goods and bads – the net impacts – of social media was written by Arthur Brooks in the March issue of The Atlantic.  He looks at our innate need for self-affirmation – satisfaction with our lives.  As a living system, our body tries to maintain stable conditions, avoiding extremes.  This is called homeostasis.  When we experience a shock – alcohol, drugs, emotions – our brains work quickly to get us back to the status-quo ante.

So, when we experience a lift from, say, success, our brain puts us back in our pre-happy state and so we act to get that happy feeling once again.  This is called the hedonic treadmill.  Once our sense of self-worth turns not on our inner convictions, but on what others do or don’t do for us, on externals, like money or position, Brooks says we will run from small victory to small victory, but never get “no satisfaction,” as Mick Jagger famously complained in song.  Without internalizing the insights of the Stoics and the Buddha, our race through life is, as Schopenhauer said, like drinking seawater; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.  And the same is true of fame.

How do we link this struggle against homeostasis with social media?  When we see ourselves only as others see us, we have become objects, no longer in control of our satisfactions, always needing the next hit of reassurance, the sense of power over others, validation of ourselves from submission to their norms and tropes.  Social media attaches us to others dysfunctionally and so triggers a need for more and more exposure to seeking what we are attached to.  This is the state social media puts us in if we do not defend ourselves from within using our moral sense and good conscience.

Brooks goes on to contrast haves with wants.  He argues that while we can never have enough, we can manage our wants and so slow the pace of wanting to have more and more.  He advises that the sources of happiness are intrinsic – “They come from within and revolve around love, relationships and deep purpose.”

There is very little of that on social media.

So, did God plan for us to have social media or have we presumptuously built ourselves a tower of Babel which will end up leaving us divided and without community?

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a remarkable jurist and student of the moral sense. But in his time, his Roman Republic was rotting from within.  Executed on orders of Mark Antony, Cicero lived until the death throes of his beloved republic.

Once, however, he – without knowing it – put his finger on the disease which was eating away at the life force sustaining Republicanism – the culture which valued and sustained a res publica – a “common thing.”

This month of June in 59 BC, 2,081 years ago, Cicero wrote a letter to his friend, Atticus.

Atticus, as I recall, was out of Rome in Greece on a business trip.  The triumvirate of Crassus, Pompey and Julius Caesar was in power unconstitutionally.  Crassus allegedly fixed elections and bribed juries.  Pompey had legions loyal to his person.  Caesar had smarts.

Cicero wrote: “We are held down on all sides.  We don’t object any longer to the loss of our freedom. … All with one accord groan of the present state of affairs, yet no one does or says a thing to better it.”  The only one to speak or offer open opposition is a young Curio.

All this, wrote Cicero, dolor est maior, cum videas civitatis voluntatem solutam, virtutem adligatam: “only makes sadness the greater for we see that the will of the community is not tied down, its virtue is in chains.”

Whenever virtue is in chains, the state does not belong to citizens, but to those who dictate the terms and conditions of life.

That is the way some years ago, the Caux Round Table took for its motto the Latin phrase – Virtue is not Chained:

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal reported that Unilever is associating its product Hellmann’s mayonnaise (full disclosure: Hoa and I buy Hellmann’s) with a mission to curb food waste.

For example, in the post-industrial consumer economy of the U.S., each year, 108 billion pounds of food is wasted.  That equates to 130 billion meals and more than $408 billion in food thrown away each year.  Shockingly, nearly 40% of all food in America is wasted.

This follows a “brands with purpose” business strategy adopted by Unilever CEO, Alan Jope.

Some resist this strategy of associating virtue with the products and services provided by capitalism on the grounds that companies should not go “woke” and attempt to impose political, social or cultural outcomes in free societies.  Consumers, it is said, should have the right to follow their own values in the way they spend their money.

But as I argued almost 20 years ago in my book, Moral Capitalism, the values of capitalism come from consumers, from buyers, not suppliers.  Consumers, on the whole and in sub-markets, determine the outcomes of capitalism.  If no one wants a product or a service, any company planning to supply it will quickly run into market failure.  Investors and lenders will only fund such a profitless company for so long, unless they look at it as a charity meeting some deserving need, like a church or a homeless shelter and become donors.

Now, in ethics, Aristotle described happiness as a combination of active virtue and having sufficient material goods.  Thus, for Aristotle, a consumer of mayonnaise who wants to act virtuously, while selfishly enjoying the taste and other sensible physical properties of the concoction, is seeking personal happiness.  Such consumers can use their money freely in the marketplace for food to realize, on their own, their personal understanding of happiness.

The modern psychologist, Abraham Maslow, provides an alternative understanding of why Unilever’s brand with purpose strategy is a sound business model.  Maslow has a different, but rather similar take on happiness than Aristotle.

Maslow described individuals as seeking various kinds of happiness, from the most material and mundane to the most abstract and intangible.  He also proposed that people first seek to satisfy basic needs and then proceed to reach out for more and more intangible forms of  “the good,” as Aristotle would say.

Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human satisfactions is:

From my point of view, Alan Jope is selling in one jar of mayonnaise a product that 1) satisfies a basic need of food, but also 2) provides the purchaser with an opportunity to experience self-actualization and 3) perhaps also meet esteem needs in being appreciated by others who worry over food waste and belonging needs to be part of a cultural community which also worries over food waste.

Thus, both Unilever’s strategy to do “good,” as their customers are now more willing to purchase participation in bringing about such good and the proposal that companies should have a “purpose” over and above profit, shows capitalism evolving along the lines proposed by Maslow – from meeting basic needs to more and more selling opportunities to meet psychological and self-fulfillment needs.

I predict that the market, as driven by customers, will sort out those companies that can meet real needs that customers are willing to pay for satisfying and those that fail to produce goods and services for which there is no demand.

It should come as no surprise that, with the astounding success of capitalism over the last 300 years in creating wealth, humanity today can enjoy living where, more and more, psychological needs and self-fulfillment needs are achievable.  Wealth has enabled so many to meet their basic needs so that they can now aspire to meeting needs higher on Maslow’s hierarchy.  Thus, it is only natural that the forces of capitalism – demand and supply – are now focused more and more on helping us meet those more abstract needs.

But when business seeks to meet psychological and self-fulfillment needs, it begins to trespass into the social spheres of culture and politics, which are contentious, as different people value different kinds of psychological well-being and have different ideas about what self-fulfillment is all about.  What I insist is good for me may be anathema to you, so do I get to cancel you or do you get to cancel me?  Moreover, who between us should be the guide to best business practices?

I recently ran across a saying of American President Harry Truman which I had never seen before, but which goes to the moral core of the Caux Round Table’s Principles for Government.

Our foundational principle for moral government is that public office is a public trust.  No trust gives ownership, personal dominion to be willful, arbitrary or capricious over the powers and assets held in trust.

President Truman once said to a reporter: “Two persons are sitting at this desk.  One is Harry Truman and the other is President of the United States and I have to be sure that Harry Truman remembers on all occasions that the President is there too.”

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

–Inner and Other Directed Personalities

–The Mechanics of Pay

–The Work of Morality

All our videos can be found on our YouTube page here.

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

The U.S. is experiencing a second episode of a multi-billionaire attempting to pull the strings of democracy as a puppet master.

This raises grave issues for the possibility of capitalism faithfully supporting moral government. Since Aristotle and Mencius, it has been noted that, as a moral fact, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In its ethical principles for the ownership of wealth, the Caux Round Table advocates self-restraint on the part of the wealthy and subordination of their drive for dominion to ethical principles of moral government, first and foremost that public power is a public trust.  When a person has such arbitrary and capricious power in any form, that power confers upon them an office of responsibility for protecting and enhancing the common good, that power becoming a constructive trust held on behalf of the community.

Now, the first U.S. multi-billionaire I hold up for scrutiny is Mark Zuckerberg.  In 2020, he and his wife gave some $400 to $419 million (estimates found in the press) to an effort to help Democrats get more voters for Joe Biden in an effort to defeat Donald Trump.  Whether they succeeded as planned is contested.  Their effort was revealed early in 2021 in Time Magazine.  The caper is now known as “Zucker Bucks” or “Zuck Bucks.”

Private money from a multi-billionaire was given, gratus, to public and quasi-public workers collecting ballots in the 2020 elections and recording voter choices.

The charge is that many of those “public servants” collected ballots from persons not entitled to vote and recorded their votes as legitimate, thus preventing the genuine will of the people from being dispositive in our politics (see the book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway).

Recently, Elon Musk gave us a second tale of a multi-billionaire seeking to impact the American democracy, also in the arena of free thought and political choice – the life blood and oxygen of any humanized constitutional democracy.

Musk has proposed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, take it private and make it a platform for free speech.  Here, private power is being used to promote a moral end – free speech for all.

Again, as with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, I am forcefully reminded of the Athenian ethic as reported by Thucydides: “The strong do what they can; the weak what they must.”

I don’t know about you, but that is not an ethic I can tolerate.

Our board member, Devry Boughner Vorwerk, in collaboration with the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm in New York City, has issued a report trying to estimate the likelihood of acute food insecurity later this year, given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the inability of Ukraine to export its harvests of grain, grain now in storage and grain which might be harvested later this year.  Already, there are fears in Egypt of political instability, which will be set in motion by food shortages.

Devry’s report notes that:

The number of people facing food insecurity globally will rise by up to 243 million by November or a total of 1.9 billion people, explains a new report, “Food Security and the Coming Storm,” from Eurasia Group and DevryBV Sustainable Strategies.  This report offers new forecasts and policy recommendations for this global crisis based on a collaborative approach among the partners using geopolitical scenario analysis, market modeling and issue expertise. Russia’s war with Ukraine has shocked agricultural markets, increasing food inflation and global hunger.  Combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, the war and countries’ responses to it are pushing global food prices even higher, heightening the risk of poverty, hunger and malnutrition.

The report presents three potential trajectories for the Russia-Ukraine war: unstable stalemate, escalation and climbdown.  It estimates the impact of each on global food insecurity.  Notably, Eurasia Group’s most likely scenario, unstable stalemate (a 70% probability), is also the most grave for global hunger.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, climbdown (a 5% probability), which would assume a cease-fire and de-escalation, food insecurity in 2022 would still be higher than in 2021.

Prior to the war, levels of hunger had already surpassed previous records set in 2021, with close to 193 million people acutely food insecure and in need of urgent assistance across 53 countries and territories.

Probability Scenarios of Food Insecure Population by November:  

-Unstable stalemate – 70% probability -1.92 billion, +17.3%
-Escalation – 25% probability – 1.78 billion, +8.7%
-A climbdown – 5% probability – 1.51 billion, -7.6%

Despite this dire forecast, the report says a series of policies could help reduce human suffering in any war scenario—if the world can cooperate.  These include a concerted effort to keep food trade open with Ukraine and Russia, despite sanctions and other wartime considerations.

Devry Boughner Vorwerk, CEO of DevryBV Sustainable Strategies, underscored that point, noting that “while food aid is critical to address the immediate humanitarian crisis, this study also demonstrates the need to focus on local production zones at scale in impacted countries over the next six to 24 months.  The G7 and multilateral lending institutions need to dedicate targeted emergency funding to the greatest areas of production potential to ensure a sustainable food system going forward.”

The full report can be found here.

Recently, I met a vice president of diversity, inclusion and equity of a local institution.  He had a different take on his mission – a Gospel take, actually.  Taking Jesus’ parable (only a narrative?) about the good Samaritan seriously, as Pope Francis did in his important encyclical Fratelli Tutti, leads one straight to a non-race-based vision of diversity, inclusion and equity.

That is a moral basis for diversity, inclusion and equity I have not heard at all brought up in our public discourse about the undoing of “white racism” and “systemic racism” or cleansing our country of its “original sin.”

These justifications of diversity, inclusion and equity preferences have a moral dimension; the effort seeks the common good.  But…

Hasn’t the high ground of morality been to put aside the superficial and look to the essence of another’s humanity?  Are racial appearances a superficiality or an essence?

Is it their appearance which gives rise to discrimination, ostracism, stereotyping, marginalization, refusing to honor and accept as a friend, peer or relative someone of a different “race?”  Is it not, rather, our misuse of that appearance in our own minds and mores, which is the source of the rejection?

What was it about the Samaritan which caused the others to pass him by?

Using race or some similar ascriptive characteristic to give preferences, to separate sheep from goats on judgment day, doesn’t square with many theologies of the human.

As you may recall, we spent considerable time over the past two years learning about the covenants the Prophet Muhammad gave to respect and protect Christian communities.  In one covenant, he wrote of taking others “under the wing of mercy.”  The Qur’an teaches that God created all persons, one by one, to serve as his “khalifa” or steward protecting and making fruitful his creation.

Mencius based his moral vision on benevolence (仁).  This character is derived from the character for human person (人) and a mark for the number “2.”  Benevolence gives us the ideal of human persons together.

Jesus grounded his ethic of being human on seeing every other as oneself; on being equitable between ego and other; on seeing diversity as a kind of sameness; and on wanting to include the perspective of others in our own thinking and feeling.

The apostle Paul spoke of there being “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The Buddhist middle way is not exclusively for those born to practicing Buddhist parents or by accident being raised in a Buddhist culture.  The Noble Eightfold Path of right-ness or fit-ness is available for every sentient human mind.

Discriminating tribalisms – “us” and “them” – I suggest, don’t rise to the highest levels of theological insight and can keep us in darkness of heart and mind.

The origin of “equity,” “epikeia” for Aristotle, was to make space for those who had a claim to differential treatment.  Thomas Aquinas explained equity as:

“When we were treating of laws, since human actions, with which laws are concerned, are composed of contingent singulars and are innumerable in their diversity, it was not possible to lay down rules of law that would apply to every single case.  Legislators in framing laws attend to what commonly happens: although if the law be applied to certain cases it will frustrate the equality of justice and be injurious to the common good, which the law has in view.  Thus the law requires deposits to be restored, because in the majority of cases this is just. Yet it happens sometimes to be injurious—for instance, if a madman were to put his sword in deposit and demand its delivery while in a state of madness, or if a man were to seek the return of his deposit in order to fight against his country.  On these and like cases it is bad to follow the law and it is good to set aside the letter of the law and to follow the dictates of justice and the common good.  This is the object of “epikeia” which we call equity.”

In the courts of equity in England and America, a person seeking “equity” needed to do equity first in order to claim its special solicitude from a person in authority.  The maxim was that one had to come before the courts with “clean hands” to ask for equity, which was a moral privilege, not a legal right.

By the way, the courts of equity were first created in England by lord chancellors who were often senior clerics and so trained in Christian theology.

We would, I am sure, do much better for the common good in our efforts to provide benevolence through diversity and inclusion and to do equity if we were to reframe our narrative away from justification by race to justification by our personal grace and by faith in all who come our way that they, too, may be inclusive of and equitable towards others.

In a recent issue, Newsweek published a commentary on “How to Be an Employee Friendly Company,” joining together the moral relationship of “friend” with the stakeholder constituency of “employee.”

Previously, in a recent issue of Pegasus, our colleague, Michael Hartoonian, deepened our appreciation of friendship as vital and humanizing us in difficult times of alienation and lonely ships passing each other in the night.

I was, therefore, very pleased to see Michael’s articulation of an ideal closely associated with moral capitalism and moral government vindicated in a real world context of practical achievement.

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker Magazine published sort of a comic strip written by a Russian artist, Victoria Lomasko, who left Moscow in a rush, so then it was illustrated by Joe Sacco.  It is titled “Collective Shame.”

The cartoon reflects the bewilderment of having to make choices when one is “caught between Putin, shame at the war and what feels like Western rejection of all Russians.”

You can find the cartoon here.

Putin’s war on Ukraine has created hard choices for many: how is one to respond – compromise to forestall greater harms?  Escalate to risk a wider war?  Punish all Russians for the sins of a leader?  Reach out to Russians today that better relations might more easily happen in the more distant future?

When ethics break down and community dissolves into Hobbesian conditions of each against each and all against all, what should we do?