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My optimism that technology can save us from disastrous climate change (just as it gave us the run up to potentially disastrous climate change) is rewarded when I run across reports of constructive innovations.

A Swedish steelmaker, SSAB, is building a plant that a year ago refined iron ore for the production of steel with the emission of water vapor.  Oxygen atoms must be stripped from iron ore to get iron.  Then, iron is transformed into steel.  SSAB’s new plant uses hydrogen instead of CO2 heavy coke, hydrogen separated from water by renewable energy.  Then, the hydrogen is heated to about 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit and injected into a furnace containing iron ore pellets.  The hydrogen combines with water in the iron ore to form water vapor, leaving behind “sponge” iron. The “sponge” iron is melted with recycled scrap to make steel.

The traditional steel making process produces 8% of the world’s CO2 emissions.  SSAB proposes to use electric furnaces to turn iron into steel.

Secondly, there is a systemic problem with electricity transmission grids moving green electricity.  The grids use alternating current, which must oscillate between 50HZ and 60HZ. With fossil fuels and nuclear power maintaining that stable oscillation by the inertia of the generating turbans of older plants.  With wind and solar power, there is no or too little inertia in the grid.  So, flywheels need to be added to the grid to provide the needed inertia.

In Scotland, a new plant has been built housing two giant flywheels, each of which weighs 194 tons and rotates 500 times a minute.  But existing fossil fuel stations could be repurposed to house flywheels and generate inertia for the grid.

Thirdly, researchers at MIT have soaked an order-eating clay used in cat litter with a copper solution.  The resulting compound can capture methane from the air and convert it to CO2, which is a less harmful greenhouse gas.  Devices containing this helpful compound can be put in the vents of coal mines and cattle barns to absorb methane.

If methane emissions were to be reduced by 45% by 2030, projected warming would be reduced by ½ a degree Celsius by 2100.

Another clay, zeolite, has tiny pores which permit it to function as a filter for methane.

Fourth, Alphabet (Google), Meta, Shopify and Stripe and the sustainability practice of McKinsey have pledged $925 million over nine years to buy technology which would remove CO2 from the atmosphere.  It is estimated that humanity needs to remove 6 billion tons of CO2 a year from our atmosphere by 2050.

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.

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