Blog

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?

A colleague recently sent me a book on “character development” to achieve a life well-lived.  The points made seemed to channel the old Protestant Ethic.  I then took out an old book (printed in 1668) which I had purchased long ago in London.  It is called “A Gentleman’s Calling” and was first published in 1660.

On looking through it, I ran across this passage which argues, in Protestant terms, of the happy coincidence between duty and advantage.  This had also a truism to Cicero in his book, De Officiis.  It is a moral stance predicting the feasibility of a moral capitalism.