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As a boy, I contracted the polio virus and was hospitalized. I was lucky the infection did not lead to paralysis and so I was not put in an iron lung, as were two other children in my hospital ward.

Thus, when I read the short essay below written by my colleague Richard Broderick on his friend who had polio about the same time I did, I thought Rich’s words captured an important reality, which I want to share with you:

End Times at Play

by Richard Broderick

His name was, ironically enough, Jimmy Walker – ironic in that at an early age he’d been inflicted with polio during one of the waves of contagion that spread across the country – and world – from time to time.

Polio’s most famous American victim was FDR, but Jimmy was the polio survivor I knew best. He lived a few doors down from my house on Rainbow Trail. And while he had not suffered a case of the disease severe enough to doom him to life in an iron lung, his right leg was withered from the knee on down and he was hobbled with a limp that was impossible to overlook. It’s an ill-wind, of course, that blows no good and with Jimmy, that good was the tremendous upper body strength he’d acquired from years of walking on crutches and canes. By the time we got to know each other, the crutches and canes had disappeared, but his formidable musculature remained.

He and I played on the same baseball team in the Hub Lakes League and it was always remarkable to watch this limping 12-year old drive a ball 400 feet into the woods beyond left center field, then trot awkwardly around the bases as members of the opposing team scrambled through the trees in search of the ball. They rarely found it and the one time they did retrieve it in time to relay the ball to home plate, Jimmy simply charged through the catcher causing him to drop the ball and earn Jimmy another round-tripper.

Though friends, he and I still enjoyed bouts of pre-teen male rivalry. When off the field, we’d spend hours sitting on the bed in his room arguing about such profound topics as which was better, the American League or the National League. Living 35 miles outside of New York City, we both were avid fans, he of the Brooklyn Dodgers, I of the New York Yankees, where the die-casting company that employed my father had season tickets just behind the first base dugout. This, during the Golden Years of the Yankees, when Maris, Mantle, Elton Howard and Yogi Berra stepped to the plate and Whitey Ford and reliever Juan Gonzales took the mound.

But Yankee prowess was not the crux of my argument on behalf of the American League. In one of the most clever, yet absurd rejoinders imaginable in answer to Jimmy’s passionate fandom, I would remark, with shrewd bravura, “Yeah, well at least we know what country the American Leagues is from. The National League could be from anywhere.”

Game and match to Mr. Broderick!

It’s been a lifetime since Jonas Salk created a vaccine against polio, but those days feel eerily similar to the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the world today. I remember one truly lamentable occasion when my family happened to be on vacation in Quebec City and a sudden polio outbreak led officials to ban swimming in public pools. Today, owing to COVID-19, I would not even be able to cross the Canadian border, let alone dip a toe in one of the country’s public pools, but the apocalyptic feeling was very similar, magnified by the equally terrifying prospect of the nuclear war we were guaranteed would wipe out half the American population – about the same mortality rate as the Black Death – and schools like mine held weekly air raid drills in which we students had to crouch beneath our desks as the nuns (members of the aptly named Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother) lovingly described how when the shock wave that shattered the wall of windows, we would all be slivered into bite-sized pieces before being burned to a crisp by the ensuing waves of intense heat. It was many years before I stopped waking in the middle of the night at the sound of a fire siren, my heart pounding, my breath caught in my throat.

The lessons we should have learned then are the same as the lessons we should apply today. Don’t panic. Take reasonable precautions. Remember – as in 1918 and then in subsequent epidemics of polio – we are, for better or worse depending upon how we conduct ourselves, all in this together, including not just political and business leaders, but also those rare individuals like Jimmy Walker, who turned what seemed like a curse into a costly, though lifelong advantage.

Our Japanese colleague, Professor and former Ambassador Kazuhiko Togo, has written me with his thoughts from an East Asian perspective on implications of the coronavirus pandemic for international, state-to-state relations.

Professor Togo has convened several workshops in Japan on ethical principles from China and Japan which could contribute constructively to a shared global understanding of moral obligations. From Japan, he is suggesting use of yawaragi or seeking harmony through moderation and mediation of different interests for mutual collaboration. Professor Togo has just co-authored a book in Japanese on res-assessing conventional norms for evaluation of public policies.

I would be very interested in your thoughts and feedback.

As we in the U.S. end the second week of a national emergency due to the imperative of stopping the spread of COVID-19, the virus seems to have been checked in China, but here, we now have more cases than occurred in China, a nation with roughly four times our population and, globally, all of us now confront the emergence of the virus in poor countries without funds and facilities to respond in depth to the spread of the infection.

A time of difficulty and crisis brings on uncertainty, fear and missteps in our lives. Having to carry within us such psycho-social burdens can tempt us to sink, to lose hope and self-confidence. And we can let those burdens complicate our relationships with family, friends and co-workers. Or …

Or, as it is too easily said, we can rise above our personal anxieties and our concerns for the economy, politics or when stock markets will recover or our gainful employment will return. Crisis is an opportunity for becoming better as people – to make a good difference and find redemptive value in our being here.

Our colleague John Dalla Costa, now retired in Italy, has written a very sound and helpful comment on our time of troubles which you can read below.

John has written some of the best books I have read on ethics and business. He lived in Canada until he and his wife moved to Italy.

I think you will take heart in reading his reflections.

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SEEING ANEW IN 2020
John Dalla Costa
Founding Director – The Centre for Ethical Orientation
Sansepolcro (AR) Italy

That Was Then:

Three months ago – when few had heard of COVID-19 – many of us were attempting to assign significance to the past decade as the new one approached. While the economy had prospered for some and markets were buoyant, the ten or so years then ending were in many ways still unravelling the harsh costs of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Inequality became much more pronounced. Work became much more precarious. And social institutions – including the church, election procedures and the Boy Scouts – lost incalculable amounts of social capital via scandal.

If the metrics used by economists showed a decade of growth, the actual social prosperity was paper-thin. Indeed, the fissures papered-over by the market figures were already producing destabilizing populism and protectionism in our biggest and wealthiest democracies. In 1988, the German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas observed that the “rationality crisis” produced by an economic meltdown invariably leads to a “legitimation crisis” for the public. In other words, when markets fail, suspicion boomerangs, undermining public confidence in its larger political and social institutions.

This suspicion becomes that much more toxic – as happened – when the recovery privileges the status quo; when those in positions of responsibility are exempted from accountability, leaving those largely powerless and most impacted by the crisis to fend for themselves. For several decades, we have watched public trust erode, always favouring the expedient over the necessary, seeking gratification and growth regardless of costs. That neglect of the public trust to satisfy self-interest has made our social immune system that much more fragile.

The global pandemic is now imposing its harsh measures on a world that mistrusts basic facts and that has lost faith in its experts, moral leaders and public institutions. Governments and policy makers had embraced globalization as a competitive necessity, but, as we’ve seen with the numerous failures to make good on climate change initiatives, there has been little to no investment in capacities for cooperation. Having created global structures for extracting personal advantage, we are now in the existentially disadvantaged position of having to deal with a viral threat which none of us can diffuse alone.

The View from Here and Now:

When the year began, (my wife) Lucinda and I told friends, with whom we were exchanging new years greetings, that our hope and prayer would be for us all to realize clear vision. The metaphor of 2020 from optometry has both practical and spiritual dimensions for us. Orthodox icons and Renaissance paintings of Jesus often depicted his eyes with a slightly different cast, intending to signify an ability to see both the temporal and the eternal. Most religions and all our traditions of wisdom teach this dynamic-seeing – looking at both the short-term and the long-term; recognizing what is needed to thrive practically, while recognizing what is needed to fuel the dreams, hopes and higher aspirations that are core to our being human.

In only a few weeks, 2020 has brought into focus many things that we preferred not to see or were too busy to glimpse. One is that we cannot escape our creaturely vulnerability. Another is that we are intimately interconnected. There are no walls or laws that can prevent us from breathing the same air or drinking the same water. For the sake of efficiency, we have created just-in-time supply chains and for the sake of cost-cutting, we have built just-in-time health systems, both of which have no capacity for the emergency we now face. And while our economy is now dammed by fear, the institutions we once relied on for solutions remain divisive or marginalized – therefore without credibility.

In only a few weeks, 2020 has also clarified many of the qualities we will need to go forward together. Rather than according preferential option to shareholder value, we must learn – as leaders, executives, managers and teachers – to develop and nurture the capacities to share. As researchers have long shown, trust is never simply an outcome from consistency or competence. It also requires demonstration of care – proof of character, which means being willing to sacrifice one’s self for the sake of principle.

Fear is understandable, but what few leaders understand is that the only effective antidote to such fear is generosity. On the day that President Trump unilaterally closed the U.S. borders to travelers from the E.U., a cargo plane from China landed in Torino, Italy with 2,300 cartons of much needed surgical masks. People here in Italy still remember the Marshall Plan and many could not but note that on the day in which the country that taught nations to hope turned inwards, an ancient trading partner gave proof and substance to its commitment to a new silk road. All to say that decisions we make in the heat of this emergency will undoubtably have consequences for decades.

In Italy, we are now entering our third week of ever-more restrictive quarantine. Most of us had been observing self-isolation – or cancellations of work and other activities – for several weeks before that. The crisis has by no means peaked, let alone passed. So, in addition to their understandable worries, people are also experiencing the paradox of growing fatigue with growing grief. An already fragile and uncertain reality is becoming more indeterminate and precarious.

Remembering. What’s Needed and What’s Possible:

In all that’s happened, there are also everyday signs of resilience. Because Italian society still has memory of the war, there is a sense that what comes next will not be so much recovery as rebuilding. The post-World War II social compact has long expired. Globalization here has taken its toll on the middle and working classes. With the devastation now unfolding, there is a sense that business-as-usual and politics-as-usual are not up to the historic task ahead.

The government has already committed to a vast rebuild of the healthcare system. Here, as elsewhere, there is growing discussion regarding universal basic income, aid for small businesses and commitments to cultural institutions. Being so exposed and vulnerable, people are heeding these words with both skepticism and a recall of long-held values. The sense I get is of a growing desire, if not impatience for the radical change to develop what is possible together.

Now into 2020, it is important to remember that in two years, this country will mark one hundred years since Mussolini came to power. Fascism was created in Italy to sweep aside the political and economic powers, which had left the country in taters after the great sacrifices of World War I and after the tragic trauma of the Spanish Flu. Our challenge now – here and elsewhere – is to not allow fear to so fester as to create the conditions for tyranny.

From history and from this moment, we can discern several lessons.

First, before changing our policies, we need to change our imaginations. In his newly issued teaching-document on the social, environmental and justice issues facing the nations of the Amazon, Pope Francis introduced a methodology based on four dreams. Rather than analyze and recommend, he first sought to dare thinking in terms of what is most liberating, dignifying and unifying for people and their children. What is our dream?

Secondly, we are witnessing the now threatening gap between our expertise for globalized commerce and our ethics for global responsibility. The coronavirus is a litmus test for our ability to cooperate everywhere on everything, so as to build the shared structures for dealing effectively with shared problems. What are the values we hold or need for what is happening and what is next?

Thirdly, for all of us, but especially for our leaders, the qualities that will earn trust – and that history will judge – require modelling the highest forms of generosity and self-sacrifice. The question to ask is not “what did you do?” but rather, “how did you change?”

Finally, this is a moment when we can demand that our technologies and social media mature into a force for good. Corporations, as well as individuals, need to shed adolescent likes and avoid simplistic blaming. Our time and attention are precious and so need to focus on learning how to collaborate and dialogue. Being so vulnerable together beckons each of us to conjure and respect the solidarity that we will need to rebuild our lives. What ideas or habits do we need to give-up to make space for real transformation?

Ready-made answers are not going to work for the hard questions we’ve not yet asked. For now, most of us need to adjust to doing nothing. The gift in this imposed pause is that we can – if we choose to do it – reflect in depth about the new world that is now in our hands to imagine and create.

(The text in visual above reads: “While all the EU states are retaining surgical masks for themselves as Italy runs out, China has sent to Torino an Air China flight with 2,300 boxes of masks. [On each box] is written” We are waves on the same sea, leaves on the same tree, flowers in the same garden.”

Below the Chinese text in red on each box, the Italian message reads: “We are with you. Forza Italia! (which is the slogan fans use to cheer the national soccer team).

I was sorting through office files two days ago and found a copy of the paper by Mr. Ryuzaburo Kaku, former CEO of Canon Inc., on his ethical concept of kyosei. Kyosei was applied in the creation of our Principles for Business, along with the concepts of human dignity from Catholic Social Teachings and stewardship from the Protestant tradition.

Literally, Kyosei translates into English as “symbiosis,” how living organisms can find well-being through dependency on others – a living together. Kaku-san took this biological concept and applied it to companies as living organisms in social and economic ecosystems. He pointed out that companies are dependent on their stakeholders – customers for cash and employees for products and services – and reciprocally, such stakeholders have a “stake” in the success of the company.

Kyosei, thus, becomes an ethic for living well – we prosper in relationships where we contribute to the good of others and they contribute to our good.

While our current circumstances of self-quarantining, social-distancing, restrictions on travel and lockdowns of cities are isolating us as never before, this is also a moment to apply the ethic of Kyosei.

It is a time to recognize and be grateful for our dependence on others, either right now or by recalling our circumstances before the emergency when it was easier to overlook those who contributed to our success and happiness.

It is also a time to look out for others and be of help and good cheer to them.

Kaku-san’s paper can be read here.

It is Sunday in Minnesota. Our fellow, Professor Abdullah al-Ahsan, who has tutored me in Qur’anic guidance the past 14 years, has just sent me these reflections putting the current global “affliction” in perspective:

“The current situation is definitely very grave and demands serious thinking. Will it change the course of history?

While contemplating, I encountered this article.

Is the current situation going to be like that of the Black Death in the 14th century? Are we encountering a sort of wrath of God, as some scriptures suggest happened in history?

Last October, I visited the biblical city Ephesus: nobody lives in the ancient city center any more, but some historians and archaeologists are now trying to “reconstruct” the city. It was a flourishing city of three hundred thousand people that existed almost from the 11th century BCE to 7th century CE. Several earthquakes in the 6th and 7th centuries CE destroyed the city completely.

As a student of comparative civilizations, I have been trying to make sense of the Ephesus legacy. I don’t think I have succeeded yet in understanding a pattern of history.

Coronavirus poses a new challenge to me: is it a divine punishment for human civilization today?

Was the Mongol devastation which was followed by Black Death in the 13th century a divine punishment? I have received many messages, mostly from Muslim colleagues, raising questions: the Uighur is asking “how does it feel living under fear?” The Kashmiri is asking “how does it feel living under lock-down?” The Palestinian is asking “how does it feel to live under travel restrictions?” The Syrian is asking “how does it feel being kicked out of your homeland?” The Rohingya has lost his voice completely.

We talk about creating trust. How can we create the trust we need globally when we don’t treat all human beings as human?

I don’t know whether I should raise these questions or not: they are so political!

There is, of course, a silver lining for every crisis. We know in history the 14th century was followed by the humanist movement. Will this coronavirus lead to any such understanding for our future?

We are already witnessing many positive developments: families are together, parents are spending time with children and we are eating healthy, homemade food. A letter from Wuhan that has gone viral says “Air is getting fresher, the haze is gone, the sky is getting bluer, the sun is getting brighter, family lives are getting warmer, harmonized, cordial, hearts have become more and more calm.” CNN has reported that fish have become visible in clearer water in canals in Venice.

Jose Luis, in an earlier message, has called for “common good.” Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has appealed for “working together.” Are world leaders ready for this?

This, of course, is not the end of the world, but my understanding of history and scriptures suggest that this is a warning for humanity. Could we appeal to world leaders, intellectuals and common people for collective thinking? Could we create an initiative for some soul-searching?”

Abdullah al-Ahsan
Professor of Political Science and International Relations
Istanbul Sehir University

First, I want to thank those of you who have watched our podcasts and those who have gotten back to me with helpful thoughts.

Secondly, we are reaching out more broadly for guidance and comments on the global confrontation with the coronavirus.

I note that a virus acts without discrimination based on gender, race, religion, ethnicity or age. From its perspective, it is value neutral, a perfect nihilism or, perhaps, an absolute inclusivity.

In this sense, the coronavirus unites all humanity in a common cause – to stop its transmission.

Earlier today, our podcast benefited from Michael Sheldrick, one of the founders of Global Citizen and now its Chief Policy and Government Relations Officer.

Over the last 10 years, Global Citizen has inspired program contributions of $48 billion dollars for poverty alleviation, with positive impacts on 800 million persons. We discussed how social capital in the form of a social movement – young people and artists – can enhance human capital to change financial outcomes for the world. Mobilization of citizens is what it is taking to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

On Monday, we have asked imam Asad Zaman to join us and on Tuesday, Jean Rognetta from Paris, who is the Editor of Forbes, France.