Category: Commentary

Here are the proceedings from our most recent fellow’s meeting on the American crisis from international perspectives.

On February 4, the United Nations General Assembly celebrated the Day of Human Fraternity to honor the Document of Human Fraternity, jointly issued by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo on February 4, 2019. Religions for Peace held an online conference that same day. Lord Daniel Brennan, Chair Emeritus of the Caux Round Table, is a member of the advisory council of Religions for Peace. He spoke on the covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with Christian communities as a model for human fraternity and engagement with others.

You may read his remarks here.

The collapse of moderation as a political culture in America as demonstrated by the decline in trust and tolerance of Americans on the left and on the right towards those who disagree with them is an existential crisis for the American Republic.

Such collapse, one, removes a social foundation for vigorous fidelity to the Caux Round Table Principles for Government and, two, threatens the survival of our constitutional arrangements.

I have attempted to show in two graphics how the American political system has changed from a centrist modality of compromise and collaboration to a bi-polar confrontation, encouraging more and more aggressive tit-for-tat escalation between the extremes.

I add to this presentation three graphs I designed for my classes some eight years ago when the process of polarization was getting firmly underway. There is one graph for each of the three major cultural orientations of Americans – left, center and right.

You may read this explanation of where we are here.

Just recently, I commented on Apple CEO Tim Cook challenging the business model of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook in giving users a free service in return for their supplying Facebook with valuable information to sell to advertisers, thus turning “customers” into “suppliers.”

Cook announced that Apple would provide a filter so that users could gain control over the use of their personal information.

Facebook has now bowed to the morality of Apple’s concern for its customers by inserting a prompt in its app to educate users about the use of their personal information. The new Facebook screen will ask users for permission to use data collected from third-party websites and apps.

Thus, competition from Apple has forced Facebook to give its “suppliers” more respect, as persons with dignity.

Just recently, I raised a question about the application of stakeholder theory to social media, pointing out that a social media business model which relies on selling advertising converts users into suppliers to be squeezed and privileges advertisers as customers.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in a public talk, made a similar point on Data Privacy Day. (Linked here and embedded above).

Two years previously, he had spoken, with real concern, of the “emergence of a data-industrial complex.”

Cook said this year: “The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been. And it has never been so clear how it degrades our fundamental right to privacy first and our social fabric by consequence.”

“As I’ve said before, “if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, then we lose so much more than data. We lose the freedom to be human.”

“Together, we must send a universal, humanistic response to those who claim a right to users’ private information about what should not and will not be tolerated.”

Cook then announced that Apple is introducing a product which will give users of social media the power to limit their exploitation as suppliers of personal data. The new product to be introduced this quarter is called App Tracking Transparency or ATT. Cook said: “At its foundation, ATT is about returning control to users — about giving them a say over how their data is handled.”

He then noted that the apps “we use every day contain an average of six trackers. This code often exists to surveil and identify users across apps, watching and recording their behavior…. Right now, users may not know whether the apps they use to pass the time, to check in with their friends or to find a place to eat, may in fact be passing on information about the photos they’ve taken, the people in their contact list or location data that reflects where they eat, sleep or pray.”

He continued: “Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it. And we’re here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.”

“If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.”

“Call us naive. But we still believe that technology made by people, for people and with people’s well-being in mind, is too valuable a tool to abandon. We still believe that the best measure of technology is the lives it improves.”

In response to Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that “Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work.”

To put his complaint in other words, Zuckerberg confirmed that competition provides a public good in restraining the rapaciousness of monopoly niche players like Facebook.

ATT restrictions, if taken up by users, will put users in charge of their relationship with Facebook.

Apple’s ATT fence protecting personal data will cause revenue losses to Facebook in its core business, experts say, as it becomes harder for the company to gather personal data and use it to prove to advertisers that advertising on Facebook increases sales for whatever is so advertised. The flow of data Facebook currently extracts from apps allows it to build profiles of app users. Those profiles are valuable to advertisers in educating them on the conversion rate of their ads into purchases.

Who is more on the side of a moral capitalism – Cook or Zuckerberg?

Our colleague, Mary Gentile, sent me this comment of hers on a kind of “mindfulness” which seems most needed just now in our world.

She took Isaiah Berlin’s noted distinction between hedgehogs, who know one big thing and foxes, who know many smaller things and juxtaposes their respective contributions to wisdom.

Mary has provided distinctive leadership in making ethics streetwise and effective in her work on “giving voice to values.” She now has a program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business which you can visit here.

Her book, Giving Voice to Values, can be found here.

For some time now, I have been asking myself how social media – Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. – might align with the principles of moral capitalism. One dimension to analyze is abuse of market power. Another is to use stakeholder analysis of the business model used by these firms – are the users of social media customers or suppliers? Social media is a free good for its users, so the companies make their money by selling the data provided by users to advertisers. Thus, the users are suppliers of a valuable product to the companies. Thirdly, issues of free speech or censorship by platforms. Fourth, there are issues of impact – is the service provided by social media morally good, bad or indifferent?

When we consider impacts, either as private goods or bads or as public goods or bads, we look to consequences. Generally, the provision of private or public bads is said to be market failure and so regulation is justified. With social media, there is accumulating evidence of its negative impact on many users – depression and lower self-esteem, emotional distress, facilitating narrow-mindedness and loss of empathic capacity. We have seen in the U.S. in recent years the effect of social media in deepening cultural, intellectual and political divisions within the society, accelerating political instability, a culture of recrimination and censorious shaming and factionalism.

In a recent column in the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Representative Chip Roy wrote of his turning his back on social media. His personal story raises concern over the moral quality of social media. Here is what he wrote:

“I’m suspending indefinitely my use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media. I’m doing so not to make a political statement, but in the hope that America can return to kitchen tables, churches, taverns, coffee shops, dance halls (it’s a Texas thing) — whatever it takes to look others in the eye and rebuild our communities and humanity.

As a husband and father, I also want to stop spending so much time looking at a screen and reacting in ways that are inconsistent with who I am and — most important — who I strive to be as a Christian.

While social media has proved a useful vehicle for sharing information quickly, I have concluded that it does more harm than good to individuals and society alike.

It tempts us to be reactive and feeds the worst of our human tendency to respond in anger rather than to stop and think before communicating. The result is more verbal combat and less deliberative thought — all with language we often wouldn’t use while looking someone in the eye. I have been guilty of this recently and I haven’t always been proud of my language.

It reduces the value of communication to statements graded by “likes” or being “ratioed” and other mechanisms that don’t reflect real human response or quality of thought.

It makes it difficult to ascertain the truth about the many difficult topics with which we all wrestle. We have replaced earnest truth-seeking with trial by retweet. Meanwhile, those who make consequential decisions such as issues involving impeachment, Covid and election fraud, often do so based on assertions that are difficult to confirm or deny.

It has politicized communication to an unhealthy level, widened divisions rather than bridge them and fed the temptation to call for censorship of views we find disagreeable.

Eighteen months ago, my wife and I joined with friends to establish a weekly Sunday Night Supper and to do our best to reduce or eliminate the use of screens on Sundays by setting rules that any screen use had to involve the whole family such as watching the Masters Tournament or a family movie.

Of all God’s earthly creations, man is the only one with rational speech, but we used to have a better way to communicate with each other. Let us dine together. Let us look each other in the eye. Let us sit down and talk again.

Then, let us unite again as Americans.”

A short article in a major paper I saw a few days ago brought to mind the interrelationship of finance to the rest of capitalism. Is it the tail which wags the dog or just a tail under the dog’s control?

The particular story presented an interconnection between finance and racial inequality of wealth. American stock markets grew in value by some $2 trillion in the third quarter. Now, households composed of those with European ancestry own almost 90% of corporate equities and mutual funds. Their wealth rose to $98.6 trillion or 84.6% of total wealth, the highest percentage in three years. These families comprise 76.4% of the total population.

The portion of overall wealth held by African American families fell to 3.8%, down from 4.4% two years earlier. African Americans are 13.4% of the total population.

Families with Hispanic ancestry held 2.1% of the wealth.

Now, presumably, access to stock market assets is not random. Investing is a choice and the marginal cost of investing varies with disposable income and the amount of accumulated financial assets.

When you focus on differential access to investable liquidity, as Marx did, you rather quickly become less enamored with the outcomes of capitalism. As Marx insisted in his Theses on Feuerbach, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

The starting point for change is common sense discovery of causes creating the status quo.