Here are the proceedings from our most recent fellow’s meeting on the American crisis from international perspectives.
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Lord Daniel Brennan’s Remarks on the Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad
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.
Proceedings of Round Table on American Crisis
We recently held a round table over Zoom with some of our local supporters on the American constitutional crisis.
I thought you might be interested in reading the proceedings of the event, which can be found here.
In America, the Center Cannot Hold
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.
Competition Helps the Common Good
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.
Questioning Facebook
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?
Round Table on the Covenants. Wednesday, February 17th. Please join us!
Please join us at 9:00 am (CST) on Wednesday, February 17 via Zoom to discuss the Prophet Muhammad’s covenants with Christian communities and what it means for our time.
For no doubt very human reasons, these covenants have been rather thoroughly overlooked by both Muslims and Christians for centuries.
The good news is that we, today, are not bound by the practices of our predecessors. We can read the covenants for ourselves, assess their meaning and, if we choose, apply them in our time to relations between Christians and Muslims.
To register, please email Jed at jed@cauxroundtable.net.
Participation is limited to the first 25 people who sign-up.
The event will last about an hour and a half.
January Pegasus Now Available!
Here is the January edition of Pegasus.
In this issue, we include our 2020 Year in Review (annual report) and two pieces by our colleague Rich Broderick, one on the coronavirus pandemic and the other on whether we’re at the end of an era.
As usual, I would be most interested in your thoughts and feedback.
More Short CRT Videos on Relevant and Timely Topics
We recently posted more short videos on relevant and timely topics which I believe would be of interest to you. They include:
You can find all our videos on our YouTube channel.
Also, if you aren’t following us on Twitter or haven’t liked us on Facebook, please do so. We update both platforms frequently.
A Most Important CRT Report on Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with Christian Communities
On our homepage, you will find a remarkable document titled “Founding Principles for Modern Imperatives: The Overlooked Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad” issued by Lord Daniel Brennan, our Chairman emeritus and myself.
The report notes the discussions and presentations made to a small study group convened by the Caux Round Table (CRT) to consider the historicity and contents of covenants made by the Prophet Muhammad to respect and protect Christian communities. Our colleagues noted in the report contributed with diligence and grace to our discussions and to the writing of it.
To consider the covenants of the Prophet, the CRT drew on its network of scholars and thoughtful colleagues, asking them to participate in this two-year study of long forgotten documents.
For no doubt very human reasons, which I do not fully comprehend, these covenants made by the Prophet himself have been rather thoroughly overlooked by both Muslims and Christians for centuries.
But we today are not bound by the practices of our predecessors. We can read the covenants for ourselves, assess their meaning and, if we choose, apply them in our time to relations between Christians and Muslims.
For me personally, having participated in the three workshops noted in our report, it is incumbent upon Christians to acknowledge the good faith and grace of the Prophet in making these covenants, which are to stand until the end of time and are, by their terms, binding on all faithful Muslims. Reciprocally, it is similarly incumbent upon Muslims to reflect upon that same good faith and grace of the Prophet Muhammad as guidance for their own lives.
In these covenants, the Prophet Muhammad, to me, set forth high standards of fraternity and humane responsibility for the good of others which are most fitting for our global community of different ethnic, intellectual and religious expressions of something common – our human dignity and spiritual resourcefulness in this world which we did not create on our own.