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Running across the title of a new book over the weekend on seeking spirituality in politics without getting religious made me think of what might be going on at the present time with demands for a more “spiritual” capitalism.

I then wrote the following comment to share with our network:

I am increasingly bemused, or better, perplexed, at the recent rise of calls for a “better” capitalism because, to me, the various proposals brought forward have little to do the actualities of running a firm.  They are well-intended, I think; intentionally aspirational, without crass or hypocritical self-seeking agendas, but vague to a point of being useless.

With respect to their proponents, I am referring to calls for companies with a purpose.  Is not profit a purpose for a company?  The point seems to be that “profit,” as we have understood it and accounted for it, is not a good purpose.  Companies should have higher purposes than making money.

And then, there is “ESG” – a demand that private firms provide public goods “good” for the environment, society and governance (or is it government?).  But there are no standards, no metrics to let us know, as Lenin once demanded, what is to be done?  We are told that trillions of dollars are lined up to reward with investments companies which do well in ESG outcomes.

Then, mostly in the U.S., there is woke capitalism, where firms are expected to and many like Twitter and Disney do, take cultural stands to favor some over others, given their progressive personal, but largely elitist opinions, their birth metrics of race or ethnicity or their chosen metrics of sexuality.  Woke companies are expected to deliver cultural and political change without respect for voters or election outcomes.  A movement for race-based “diversity, inclusion and equity” has trumped various criteria for merit in the decision-making of HR and community relations staffs of many corporations.

So, what is going on?

Is it late-stage 4.0, post-industrial, post-modern, deconstructed capitalism?  The triumph of Antonio Gramsci’s proposed long march through cultural institutions with a program of non-materialist Marxism?

About six years ago, I complained to one of the wisest people in our network that I felt leadership vanishing all around the world, replaced by managing and teamwork and “go along, get along,” “don’t make waves” ladders leading up to high positions.  I expected to be corrected for being out of line, but no.  The response was immediate and forceful:

“Steve, we are living at the end of an age.  Everyone knows it.  But they don’t know what is coming, what the new age will be like, what it will demand of us.  So, everyone does today, just what they did yesterday.”

Recently, a friend proposed in line with this premonition that the European Enlightenment “has run out of gas.”

The age of the European Enlightenment is indeed over.  Just look around you.  Russia has invaded the Ukraine and entered a pact with China asserting that great peoples with traditions going back millennia can impose their own parochial values just as they see fit.  Xi Jinping boasts of China’s great dream as one of taking the world in hand and setting it right.

The historical norm for dominant regimes – dynastic, nation state, religious/intellectual – is roughly 250 years.  The European Enlightenment took off in the mid-18^th century, though it was foreshadowed by the work of Descartes, Spinosa and Leibniz.  Through promotion of science and human-centered philosophy, the European Enlightenment shifted energies and attention to secularization, giving dynamic intellectual and cultural inputs to industrialization and modernity.  At the same time, however, such regime gave prominence to materialism more than the ideal and the spiritual through the theories of Hegel on the state; Adam Smith and Karl Marx on economics; John Stuart Mill on liberty; Herbert Spencer on survival of the fittest; Nietzsche on the will to power replacing God; Darwin on evolution; Alfred Marshall in micro-economics; and later, Freud on personhood.

Simultaneously, the basis for morality was confined to a universalistic individualism – “I” think, therefore “I” am.

What I think is going on with calling for new purposes for companies, for ESG business models and with woke capitalism is simply a cry for help, as the European Enlightenment fades into history.  The help sought is for something spiritual to provide a nourishment that neither materialism/prosperity nor narcissism can provide.

Modern humanity appears to be in need of meaning, but a spirituality that is not religious.  I am not at all sure that such a product can ever be made and sold by capitalism, even a moral one.

As Jesus Christ is reported to have advised the Devil: “People do not live by bread alone.”

Ironically, I am writing this observation on May 1, International Workers Day, the annual holiday of the very “enlightened,” scientific and materialistic socialist movement.  This date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen’s Association.

Here in the U.S., entrepreneur and multi-billionaire Elon Musk proposed to buy Twitter and give it new management with a new purpose and so different business objectives from those pursued by its current owners.  His new purpose for the company is to respect freedoms of thought and speech on the part of users of its technology.

His business plan is controversial.  Some, like the current management of Twitter, question the legitimacy of his purpose.  They prefer a business model where the purpose of the company includes the power to censor user comments at variance with the morals and beliefs of the owners.  Such censorship denies users access to the public community of Twitter users and those who might see and respond to “tweets.”

Musk’s takeover offer for shares of Twitter at a nice premium over their market price brings out into the open very real world and immediately actionable issues of what capitalism should be.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement.  “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

Yesterday, the current management gave up defending its business purpose for Twitter and agreed with Musk that he can buy shares of the company and take it private.  Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction.  The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1.

Twitter’s independent board Chairman, Brett Taylor, said the company “conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon’s proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty and financing.”

Musk has secured approximately $46.5 billion to finance the transaction, including $25.5 billion of fully committed debt and margin loan financing and $21 billion in equity financing.  The transaction is expected to close in 2022, subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders, the receipt of applicable regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.

On one hand, Musk seems to challenge the norm that capitalism is about making profits, that earning money is legitimate purpose enough to justify both enterprise and a free market for private property and private goods and services.  He is challenging the way Twitter currently makes its profits.  He wants the company to have a different social justice agenda and presumes that enough profit will be made by it doing what he prefers it to do.

On the other hand, there is an argument that a business model enshrining the ideal of free thought and free speech will enjoy greater demand and so garner more customers, thus earning more profits.  Thus, Musk’s business is still only plain-vanilla capitalism.

Evidence for this is provided by Twitter’s Chairman.  When he referred to the Twitter board considering only “value, certainty and financing,” he was admitting that the outgoing board was focusing on profit for current shareholders, not some social justice agenda of using Twitter to police speech and thought among the public.

But there is a category error here: users of Twitter are not its customers, but its suppliers.  The social justice issue is more exactly exploitation of suppliers who have little power to protect their moral integrity.  Users of Twitter do not pay money for access to its service of getting them before a mass audience.  Twitter earns its money from others who are its real customers.  Those are the advertisers who pay for access to information on Twitter users which Twitter provides to them in order for them to better to sell to such providers of data.  Twitter is an intermediary between certain sellers and their potential customers.  Twitter needs users to supply it with information that holds value for other companies.

Twitter’s core business is the collection and sale of information – data.  Providing users with a communications service is its way of tilling fertile soil to get a bumper crop.

Thus, the concerns raised by Twitter’s business practices and Musk’s alternative business model can be seen as universal across our digitized global community.  What is the best practice for internet platforms everywhere?  Some countries, like China, demand that internet platforms accessible to everyone are public utilities under government control and license.  Thus, censorship of expression and opinion is defined by law as a public good, seeking to improve the morals, welfare and behaviors of those subject to the state, uplifting the common good and suppressing the cruel, malignant, perverse, divisive, upsetting, the unwanted detritus of the deplorables.

So, when we apply the model of stakeholder capitalism as the standard for corporate social responsibility and a more moral capitalism, what kind of stakeholders are the users of Twitter?

I would like to suggest that they are citizens first and foremost, members of the community. What, then, should be the ethics of a company which serves citizens?  To answer that, we first need to consider the moral duties of citizen and then recommend how internet platforms can affirmatively support citizens in doing what they should.

First, we need to consider citizens as members of what kind of polity – a constitutional democracy, an oligarchy, a one-party dictatorship, a kleptocracy, a theocracy, etc.  In most authoritarian polities, whether ruled by an elite or a mob, the proper office of a citizen is to obey the state; very Hegelian.  Such polities don’t have citizens, only subjects, much like the free particles in Brownian motion, which enjoy erratic random movement in a fluid as a result of continuous bombardment from molecules of the surrounding medium.

Also, in such polities, internet platform companies will also take their direction from the state, so there will be few occasions when they will need to decide for themselves what degree of free thought and speech should be provided their users.  Such regimes have no citizens, only subjects.  To borrow from the woke American narrative, they have only two classes of people – the oppressed and the oppressors.

Here is a chart from The Economist of who among us lives in what kind of political system:

In proper democracies, those which honor human rights and the rule of law and which use fair and open elections to select governments, the office of a citizen is one of autonomy and integrity, responsibility and foresight.  The true citizen shapes the medium, which is the collective, not vice-versa.

To perform the duties of such a station, citizens need access to information and the opinion of others.  Without freedom of thought and freedom of speech, true citizens cannot meet their obligations of sustaining justice and right.  A fundamental duty of citizens in democracies is to search for truth among the chaotic clashing of competing and inconsistent personal narratives.

Internet platform companies, therefore, have a social responsibility to support that open-ended, unsettled, search for truth.  Their higher purpose, their vocation, is to seek profits as best they can in the course of facilitating that search.  Thus, they provide a process which, when used by citizens, gives reassuring meaning to worthy cultures and societies.  That is their social justice function.

The Caux Round Table’s Principles for Government provide a standard for the operation of internet platforms, as they, too, impact the application of public power:

Discourse Ethics Should Guide Application of Public Power.

Public power, however allocated by constitutions, referendums or laws, shall rest its legitimacy in processes of communication and discourse among autonomous moral agents who constitute the community to be served by the government.  Free and open discourse, embracing independent media, shall not be curtailed, except to protect legitimate expectations of personal privacy, sustain the confidentiality needed for the proper separation of powers or for the most dire of reasons relating to national security.

When taking responsibility for users as citizen stakeholders in a community of moral discourse, internet platforms serve a civil function, not unlike that of a civil society organization.  Internet platforms, therefore, have an additional responsibility:

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.

Now, if we are to consider the status of all persons, regardless of the nature of the polity in which they live, we can award them the status of person as affirmed by the international law of human rights and by many religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam.

It should, therefore, be the aspirational responsibility of internet platforms to empower all persons with freedoms if they were, in truth, genuine citizens.

Some of the most intriguing issues of corporate social responsibility which, moreover, implicate millions of lives are bound up in social media platforms.  These platforms have generated vast wealth in terms of share values and salaries paid to employees and yet, their business practices, not to say their services, are controversial with many.

Our colleague, Shirley Boyd, has keenly analyzed some less well-examined aspects of who should use what data derived from users of social platforms. You can read her commentary here.

Shirley is a retired VP and Associate General Counsel of Cargill and now teaches a class on ethics and legal compliance at the University of Minnesota.

We welcome Shirley to our community of those concerned for a moral capitalism.

So, President Putin has invaded Ukraine.  In the U.S., with its increasingly therapeutic culture, there is a new recommendation to screen children for anxiety and depression.

Now, Putin’s “special operations mission” did not cause American children to lose their grip on self-confidence and optimism, but something did.  What does that say about Americans and their moral orientations over the past 30 years?

How does one build a moral capitalism where, today, tomorrow’s leaders are anxiously self-absorbed?

Here is the report from the Wall Street Journal:

By Brianna Abbott
Apr. 12, 2022

All children should be screened for anxiety starting as young as 8 years old, government-backed experts recommended, providing fresh guidance as doctors and parents warn of a worsening mental-health crisis among young people in the pandemic’s wake.

The draft guidance marks the first time the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has made a recommendation on screening children and adolescents for anxiety.  The task force, a panel of independent, volunteer experts that makes recommendations on matters such as screening for diabetes and cancer, also reiterated on Tuesday its 2016 guidance that children between ages 12 and 18 years old should be screened for major depressive disorder.

…

More than one-in-three high-school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic through June 2021, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of more than 7,700 students.  About 44% said they had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness within the 12 months before the survey.

…

A survey of primary-care physicians found that 76% believe in the importance of talking to adolescent patients about mental health but that only 46% said that they always brought it up with their patients, the task force said.

Screening children for anxiety and other mental-health disorders is often done through questionnaires for patients or parents, often at regular checkups.  Some hospitals or medical centers also screen pediatric patients that come into the emergency room.  Mental-health and pediatric experts said the benefits of screening include flagging mental-health risks in children who might not exhibit symptoms or whose symptoms overlap with other conditions.

“Not only does that open the opportunity for interventions for the children, but it enables the parents to learn skills and strategies to respond to their kids’ anxiety that can be helpful in the long term,” said R. Meredith Elkins, director of the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., who isn’t a member of the task force.

Panelists who drafted the new mental-health screening recommendations reviewed 78 studies related to screening and treatment for anxiety, depression and suicide risk.  None directly compared the effectiveness of screening with the effect of no screening.  Instead, panelists analyzed the accuracy of screening tests as well as potential benefits and harms of treatment.

There wasn’t enough evidence to make a recommendation for or against screening for suicide risk among asymptomatic adolescents, a leading cause of death in the age group, the task force said.

In the CDC report on youth mental health in the pandemic, about 20% of surveyed high-school students said that they had seriously considered attempting suicide in the 12 months before the survey.

Our Chair Emeritus, Lord Daniel Brennan, just spoke to me about the impact of our times on bringing into question the optimism necessary for a work such as that attempted by the Caux Round Table.  He suggested making a statement incorporating many wisdom traditions to the point of having faith and, from faith, being courageous.  Here are my thoughts for your reflection.