DD79 – The Honor Code

There are some words that give us pause for thought, because their meanings turn out to be tricky, rather than straightforward.  The Oxford English Dictionary makes this clear as it explores meanings of the word ‘honour’.  To begin with it considers honour as opposed to disgrace: “Great respect, esteem, or reverence received, gained, or enjoyed by a person or thing; glory, renown, fame; reputation, good name.”  To act with honour is to demonstrate “Great respect, esteem, or deferential admiration felt towards a person or thing”. Frequently, the dictionary advises us, this leads to being held in honour.

From this first definition, we find that honour is also used as describing a quality of character, one entitling a person to great respect; nobility of mind or spirit; honourableness, uprightness; a fine sense of, and strict adherence to, what is considered to be morally right or just.  To continue, it is a short step to emphasise it is a code, a statement, often expressed as a  promise made on one’s honour.  If the usage is archaic, there is the sense that when a person gave his or her word, they gave it ‘on their honour”.

In many ways this takes us to the idea of ‘precepts, rules to follow’, and these have a long and complicated history.  To cite one example there are The Ten Precepts of Taoism , to be found in the Dunhuang manuscripts, generally regarded as  the classical rules of medieval Taoism.  They are often as cited in two parts: one rule that is divided into Ten Precepts. That rule is ‘the way’ (Tao), and The Precepts are:

1. Do not kill but always be mindful of the host of living beings.
2. Do not be lascivious or think depraved thoughts.
3. Do not steal or receive unrighteous wealth.
4. Do not cheat or misrepresent good and evil.
5. Do not get intoxicated but always think of pure conduct.
6. I will maintain harmony with my ancestors and family and never disregard my kin.
7. When I see someone do a good deed, I will support him with joy and delight.
8. When I see someone unfortunate, I will support him with dignity to recover good fortune.
9. When someone comes to do me harm, I will not harbor thoughts of revenge.
10. As long as all beings have not attained the Dao, I will not expect to do so myself.

They can be compared the Seven Laws of Noah in Judaism,  the set of universal moral rules given by God as a covenant with Noah, and, by extension, to all of humanity.  Hence we have the  Seven Laws of Noah :

1. Not to worships idols
2. Not to curse God
3. Not to commit murder
4. Not to commit adultery or sexual immorality
5. Not to steal
6. Not to eat flesh torn from a living animal
7. To establish courts of justice

Are these similar to modern ethical codes, developed by organisation to assist members in understanding the difference between right and wrong?  In modern usage a code of ethics will start by setting out the values that underpin the code and will describe an organization’s obligation to its stakeholders. The code is publicly available and addressed to anyone with an interest in that organization’s activities and the way it operates. It will include details of how the organization plans to implement its values and vision, as well as guidance to staff on ethical standards and how to achieve them. However, a code of conduct is generally addressed to and intended for the organization’s leaders and staff, although it may make some reference to customers. It usually sets out restrictions on behaviour, and it is often far more focused on compliance or rules than on values or principles.

Similarly, in some cases an ‘honour code’ might be a code of practice is adopted by a profession (or by a governmental or non-governmental organization), which will discuss difficult issues and difficult decisions that will often need to be made.  Following this they will then provide a clear account of what behavior is considered ‘ethical’ or ‘correct’ or  even ‘right’ in the circumstances.  Ethical codes are often adopted by management and employers, not to promote a particular moral theory, but rather because they are seen as pragmatic necessities for running an organization in a complex society in which moral concepts play an important part.  They are distinct from moral codes that that may apply to the overall culture of society, to education, and to a religion.  Overall, a code of ethics can be seen as an attempt to codify “good and bad behavior”.

Within this thicket of ideas, a code of honor or honor code is often comprised as a set of rules or ideals or a mode or way of behaving regarding honour that is socially, institutionally, culturally, and/or individually or personally imposed, reinforced, followed, and/or respected by certain individuals and/or certain cultures or societies. Codes of honor frequently concern (often subjective) ethical or moral considerations or cultural or individual values commonly found in within the context of cultures, societies, or situations that place importance on honor.  In case it isn’t clear, an honour code is a very variable aspect of current society.

It is into this complex arena that understanding change is especially important.  How does moral progress happen? How are societies brought to repudiate immoral customs they have long accepted?  In The Honor Code, Kwame Anthony Appiah explores a long-neglected aspect of reform.  He suggests that moral revolutions happen because of many issues, but that there is one issue that is often overlooked.  In particular, he argues that examining moral revolutions in the past — and campaigns against abhorrent practices today — shows that appeals to reason, morality, or religion aren’t enough to bring about reform. Practices may only be eradicated only when they come into conflict with honor.

It might well be the case that Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah is particularly well qualified to write on this topic:  he is an English-American philosopher and writer who has written about political philosophy and ethics and the author of several books.  He is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and has been a ‘Silver Professor’ there since 2025.  He was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters January 2022.  He brings to bear an academic and a cultural lens to make sense of the place of honour in the way moral revolutions happen.

The Honor Code begins with Appiah’s portrayal of the often-deadly world of aristocratic Britain, where for centuries gentlemen challenged each other to duels.  Recounting one of the last significant duels in that world—between a British prime minister and an eccentric earl—Appiah shows a society at the precipice of abrupt change.  Turning in the next chapter to the other side of the world, Appiah investigates the end of foot binding in China. The practice had flourished for a thousand years, despite imperial attempts at prohibition, yet was extinguished in a generation.   Appiah turns his spotlight on this turbulent era and shows how change finally came not from imposing edicts from above, but from harnessing the ancient power of honor from within.

In even more intricate ways, in the next section Appiah demonstrates how ideas of honor helped drive one of history’s most significant moral revolutions—the fast-forming social consensus that led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire and recruited ordinary men and women to the cause.  Yet his interest isn’t just historical.  Appiah considers the horrifying persistence of ‘honor killing; in places like Pakistan, despite religious and moral condemnation, and the prospects for bringing it to an end by mobilizing a sense of collective honor—and of shame.

For an academic, he has something of a storyteller’s flair, combining this with philosophical rigour, and The Honor Code offers an accessible and rather different approach toward moral inquiry. Briefly ranging from a great mandarin’s abandonment of an ancient Chinese tradition to Frederick Douglass’s meetings with Abolitionist leaders in London, Appiah reveals some of the details as to how moral revolutions really succeed.

Honour or honor (in American English, which Appiah uses) is a quality of a person that is of both social and personal, relevance,  often described as a code of conduct, an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both outward considerations, especially social standing, yet with an internal, self-evaluation, aspect, whereby individuals (or institutions) are assigned worth and stature based on the harmony of their actions with a moral code of the society or those that characterise specific institutions within a society.

It also refers to integrity, and he repeats Samuel Johnson who, in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, defined honour in relationship to ‘reputation’ and ‘fame’; to ‘privileges of rank or birth’, and even towards ‘respect’ of the kind which “places an individual socially and determines his right to precedence”. He also makes clear that this sort of honour is often not so much a function of moral or ethical excellence, as it is a consequence of power. Finally, with respect to sexuality, honour has traditionally been associated with (or identical to) chastity or virginity, or in the case of married men and women, even linked to ‘fidelity’.

Honour as a code of behaviour defines the duties of an individual within a social group. Margaret Visser observes that in an honour-based society “a person is what he or she is in the eyes of other people”.  A code of honour differs from a legal code, which is not only  socially defined but is concerned with justice and not set out in explicit rules.  Honour often remains somewhat opaque, implicit rather than explicit and objectified.

Various sociologists and anthropologists have contrasted cultures of honour with cultures of law. A culture of law has a body of laws which all members of society must obey, with punishments for transgressors. This requires a society with the structures required to enact and enforce laws. A culture of law requires members of society give up some aspects of their freedom to defend themselves and to retaliate for injuries, on the understanding that society will apprehend and punish transgressors.

However, in many societies an alternative to government enforcement of laws is community or individual enforcement of social norms.^. One way that honour functions is through reputation, and an honourable reputation is a very valuable way to promote trust among partners to some kind of transaction. To dishonour an agreement could be economically ruinous, because future potential transaction partners might stop trusting the party not to lie, steal their money or goods, not repay debts, mistreat the children they marry off, have children with other people, abandon their children, or fail to provide aid when needed. A dishonourable person might be shunned by the community as a way to punish bad behaviour and create an incentive for others to maintain their honour.

In the end, I begin to feel Appiah has done what we often do, which is to take a term and ‘stretch’ its meaning. Honor has been a very slippery notion, its use allowing an individual to include or exclude another on the grounds very specific attributes; honourable people often ending up ‘just like me’, not because they meet some externally validated standards. He makes me remember the challenge of claiming to do good.

In a sense, his examples do this.   As we reach the end of each of the sections, we have to face the complexity.  To end foot binding was the result of many factors. To see an end to duels was not particularly the result of honour as it was about self-interest and personal satisfaction.  To claim these as honourable actions is to ignore more pertinent issues:  in relation to foot binding the dominating concern was about the fear of being seen as backward as much as any other; in relation to duelling, it was often seen as action motivated by pride and an unwillingness to confront the nature of disagreement and avoid discussion.

Honor, Appiah makes clear, is often a mask to hide racist and sexist values, and the underlying principles are more to do with exploitation and shame. Appiah is most interesting when he moves to draw conclusions. He wants honour to be about respect, but honour codes are often used to perpetuate traditional distinctions, increasingly out of touch with our attempts to develop universal standards of equity and equality.  If an honourable person seeks respect, surely this is better addressed by seeking justice, an easier value to defend.  Appiah sees honour related to esteem and ethical behaviour, but it is more like a worrying synonym, uncomfortably associated with men seeking to mark or kill an opponent.

Despite these quibbles, in the end I gained a great deal from his analysis, and The Honor Code made me think without feeling obliged to accept his underlying thesis. Isn’t that what we want from an important thinker, to be kept alert and critical?  In doing that, he made me grateful and, I have to admit, left me with enough to think about that it’s a book I have returned to, and kept me asking is there more to a moral code than I have been able to understand?

I am clear that honour has played a role in the past, and perhaps still does today.  However, I suspect honour is one of those funny ‘portmanteau’ words that contains several aspects within the word itself.   As Appiah makes clear, it touches on ethics, morality, social differences, culture and convention.  His case studies are masterly exercises in teasing out the various factors at stake, factors that are sometimes only loosely linked to honour, but consideration of which illustrate that any effective and helpful exploration of honour inevitably forces us to examine a wide range of issues.

Civility

Stephen Carter is a fascinating thinker and writer, a legal scholar based at Yale, who has written on both legal and social issues.  He studied history at Stanford University, and law at Yale Law School in 1979.  He served as a law clerk, first for Judge Robinson III in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then for US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1980-81.  He was appointed  a Professor of Law at Yale Law School from 1982. However, he is equally – if not more widely – known for his non-fiction books.  His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, was wonderful:  published in 2002 it won numerous awards.  It was followed by several other novels, including two, New England White and Palace Council, which together with the Emperor of Ocean Park, are all set in in a fictional New England town.  He continues to publish both fiction and non-fiction.

In 1998 he published a book sometimes referred to as a self-help guide, sometimes as a reference work.  Civility has an intriguing subtitle: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy.  At The Aspen Institute that year, he explained he believed civility was disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other and are ‘awash instead in a sea of self-indulgence’.  I found his talk, and the book, fascinating:  now some 25 years later, I suspect I see it differently, not just because he wrote from an explicitly Christian perspective, (he claims that agreeing to his approach does not presuppose being Christian, or religious). But he makes it clear that being civil toward strangers, toward opponents, follows from an acknowledgment that every person is as much God’s creature as we are, and we owe it to others, even opponents, to treat them with respect, even awe. But he is saying more than this, that civility is a moral duty.  25 years later I find the Christian tone is less easy to accept.

His overall thesis is that basic good manners have become a casualty of our postmodern culture. He argues that civility is disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other and are lost instead in a sea of self-indulgence. Neither liberals nor conservatives can help us much, Carter explains, because each political movement, in a different way, exemplifies what has become the principal value of modern America: that what matters most is not the needs or hopes of others, but simply getting what we want. Taking inspiration from the Abolitionist sermons of the nineteenth century, Carter proposes to rebuild our public and private lives around the fundamental rule that we must love our neighbours. He investigates many of the fundamental institutions of society and in the book he illustrates how each one of us must do more to promote the virtue of civility.

Civility is in three sections.  The first part of is devoted to exploring the idea of “The Collapse of the Three-Legged Stool,” a reference to three legs supporting civility, the home, the school and the place of worship:  “If all three institutions work together, mutually reinforcing the moral understandings that the others are teaching, then the children are likely to learn what they should. If any one of them fails—if even one of the legs should break—then the task is much harder, and perhaps impossible. The metaphorical stool topples”(p. 229)

The middle section of the book explores what he calls “Incivility’s Instruments.” Among these are demonizing opponents, not listening to others, fighting words , market language, the technologies of incivility (including the internet), and law. Looking back, American society seems even worse off now some two and a half decades later.  The corrosive effects of America’s national political and economic environments make it harder to keep being civil.  The final part, “Civilizing the Twenty-First Century,” is almost poignant, because it is clear that we have failed to follow his call for action:  instead of increased civility in public life, we have two contending camps each accusing the other of being a mortal threat to society, each seeing itself as the only true defender of democracy.

Throughout the book he notes various ‘duties’ that civility requires us to observe, and it is a tough yet clear agenda.  The first duty is that “Our duty to be civil towards others does not depend on whether we like them or not.” (page 35).  It’s a comment that reminds me of the oft-cited idea of ‘blind justice’. He goes on to propose a second rule, that “Civility requires that we sacrifice for strangers, not just for the people we happen to know’ (page 58).  Just four pages later he adds “Civility has two parts:  generosity, even when it is costly, and trust, even when there is risk”. These comments become more pointed as we read on that “Civility creates not merely a negative duty not to do harm, but an affirmative duty to do good” (page 71).  Now, even more focussed, he adds “Civility requires a commitment to live a common moral life, so we should try to follow the norms of the community if the norms are not actually immoral (page 87).  The next rule, which he admits is a ‘hard one’, is “We must come into the presence of our fellow human beings with a sense of awe and gratitude” (page102).

He remains practical: “Civility assumes that we will disagree: it requires us not to mask our differences, but to resolve them respectfully’ (Page 132).  He adds the obvious corollary: “Civility requires that we listen to others with knowledge of the possibility that they are right and we are wrong.” (page 139).  Finally, in case we missed it, he notes “Civility requires resistance to the dominance of social life by the values of the marketplace.  Thus the basic principles of civility – generosity and trust- should apply as fully in the market and in politics as in every other human endeavour” (page 173).   He’s realistic, too “Civility allows criticism of others, and sometimes even requires it, but the criticism must always be civil” (page 217).  After suggesting legislation be last resort to settle disputes, he adds “Teaching civility, by word and example, is an obligation of the family.  The state must not interfere with the family’s effort to create a coherent moral universe for its children’ (page 230).  It’s getting tricky and he adds “Civility values diversity, disagreement, and the possibility or resistance, and therefore the state must not use education to try to standardise our children” (page 242).

In 2012, Carter was interviewed in the Yale publication Reflections, on the topic of Civil Thoughts on Uncivil Times, fourteen years after the book first appeared. In this extract from the interview, he raises and sometimes reiterates some important points:

REFLECTIONS: Has the moral mood of the nation changed in recent decades?

STEPHEN CARTER:  “The late religious philosopher Henry Nelson Wieman coined the phrase “traffic society” to refer to a culture so steeped in generalized impersonal regulation that people are treated in effect like automobiles rather than human beings. That seems to me the direction in which we’re headed. It isn’t that any particular law or rule is particularly bad (although there are some clunkers out there), but that the sheer weight of rules displaces other goods.  Let me give you an example of what I mean. Fifteen or twenty years ago, a college student in California decided to attend classes naked. When criticized, he insisted that he had the right to do it. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. The point his critics made was that whether or not he had the right, what he was doing was wrong.  Nowadays, this sort of argument is quite difficult to make. Once a claim of right has been asserted, the asserter (often aided by the media) expects all critics to shut up. It is as though the establishment of legality ends questions of morality. A public conversation premised on that vacuous notion isn’t worthy of the name.”

“Edmund Burke, in an early essay, bemoaned the way that lawyers and theologians had divided up the world, so that nobody dared act without consulting both. Few people are very frightened any longer of the theologians. The lawyers of his day have morphed into the bureaucrats of ours; and the bureaucrats scare everybody.  One predictable result of a heavy reliance on rules is a decreased reliance on moral suasion – and as the need for moral suasion declines, so does our ability to engage in moral argument. That is why, for example, critics of the Bush Administration’s adventure in Iraq, or the Obama Administration’s drone war, have found themselves forced to rely on shaky arguments about legality. In both cases, they should have been making arguments about morality. Alas, we no longer do public moral argument particularly well. If we don’t recover the skill, we will cease to be in any recognizable sense a moral people.”

REFLECTIONS: In Civility, you said it was your prayerful hope for America that “we build a society in which we act with, rather than talk about genuine respect for others.” Has civility lost ground since 1999? What conditions are needed for it to flourish?

CARTER:  “In the book you mention, I define “civility” as the sum of the many sacrifices that we make for the sake of living our common life. Thus civility isn’t only good manners (although it is that) and it isn’t only how we think about and talk about others (although it is that, too). Civility resides, for example, in acts of charity, particularly when they are truly costly to us.  Are we being more sacrificial? It is difficult to say. Acting through government isn’t sacrifice – it’s the use of coercion to require sacrifices from others. Coercion isn’t always bad, and there are things government must coerce – but we should be careful to separate acts of state from acts of charity.”

“The distinction matters. Consider for example the substantial literature suggesting that when individual income tax rates rise, so do charitable donations, because the benefit to the giver (the charitable deduction) is worth more at a higher marginal rate. If this is so, however, we must recognize the implicit failure of civility: People are giving money to charity because they are being paid to do it! (The older view, that only the giving of the rich and not the giving of the middle class is influenced by tax rates, seems not to have stood empirical testing.)”

REFLECTIONS: What sort of wisdom can faith traditions inject into turbulent times?

CARTER:  “Our modern word wisdom comes from an Old High German word meaning, roughly, judicial precedent. The idea was that wisdom was the guidance that the experience of the past could offer to the present – and that the guidance of wisdom, absent exceptional circumstance, should be binding.  I have never thought that we should somehow be ruled by the wisdom of the ancients. That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t consult it and, at times, defer to it. The ancients can be wrong, but so can we. Here it is useful to follow the example of Socrates in Plato’s Apology, and be as acutely sensitive to what we don’t know as to what we do. A lot of traditional teachings are, by our present lights, morally reprehensible, and have quite properly been rejected.  But we shouldn’t turn this around and suppose that they must be morally reprehensible because they’re ancient. When a moral teaching has been held for generations, that at least suggests that a lot of people over the centuries have thought it might actually be true. That fact does not make a traditional answer true, but it does suggest that we should embrace a certain humility when deciding whether to reject what tradition teaches. On the other hand, many religionists are nowadays in retreat from their own traditions – or else cowering in bunkers, trying to protect what tatters of tradition they can from the strengthening cultural and legal assault”

REFLECTIONS: If American history can be characterized as a long debate between individualism and community, who’s winning?

CARTER: “If the question is about sex, individualism is winning. If the question is about just about anything else, community is winning. If you doubt this proposition, just consider where we feel comfortable regulating, and where we don’t.  As more and more corners of life are regulated for the sake of the common good, the tricky question is who’s in charge. Come to think of it, the same question applies to sex. Odd how our culture seems most individualistic in the one sphere where the intellect is least involved in the taking of decisions.”

REFLECTIONS: There’s talk of a “narrative of decline” taking hold in this country. Is that overstated?

CARTER:  “Oh, we’re in a decline. No question. Not because the economy is retrenching – that’ll work itself out eventually, and people will fight viciously over credit the way they now fight about blame – and not because American influence abroad is receding, either – although that, too, presents problems. No, the reason we’re in a decline is that we no longer are capable of being serious about public argument. Election campaigns have become opportunities for entertainment, each side declaring a jeremiad against the other, but mainly pointing to silly gaffes, and lying happily about what the opponent is up to.  Supporters of this or that candidate, when pressed about why the campaigns are so vicious, will routinely answer that their side is just matching the other, doing what’s necessary to win. As a Christian, I find this response terrifying. Christianity seeks to build a morality of means that is every bit as important as the morality of ends, and often more so. And not just Christianity. The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn’t justify the means, and I think he was right. Our goals obviously matter, but so do our chosen strategies for attaining them. There is nothing admirable in doing whatever is necessary to win, because victory is not a virtue. (John Courtney Murray’s clever mot – “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” – is often quoted in response, but usually out of context.)”

“It’s not that politics wasn’t nasty before. In America, politics has always been nasty. But we used to spend a good deal less time on it than we do now. People paid attention for a few weeks and then went on with their actual lives. Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.”

“And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviours, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.”

Thirteen years later an interestingly hopeful final line, given the state of the US today!

Here and There – Maryland, USA

To explain why I spent time in Maryland requires something of a detour, both in time and place.  The story starts in 1945, in Aspen Colorado.  The key figure in this part of the story is Walter Paepcke, a very successful businessman running a logistics company in America.  The demand for transporting materials and finished products during the Second World War had ensured that his company, Containers Ltd, became very profitable.  His wife, Elizabeth Paepcke, persuaded her husband to take a break and visit the small and then relatively unknown town of Aspen, which she’d first seen in 1937.  Paepcke was entranced and saw this as the place to create a ‘Salzburg’ in the US.  He started buying properties and set up two companies:  one would purchase and run developments, including the one hotel in town; and  the other, The Aspen Skiing Company, began the planning of a major chairlift, which opened in 1947, the start of Aspen’s transformation into one of the leading ski resorts in the USA.

The other important driver for Paepcke was his desire to establish a centre for learning and the arts.  He bought Aspen Meadows, a large tract of land near the centre of Aspen, as the location for a major event, a Goethe Bicentennial Convocation, planned for 1949.  The convocation brought intellectual stars to Aspen, among then Albert Einstein, and, for the only time he ever visited to the USA, Albert Schweitzer.  Facilities were built, seminar rooms constructed, and even a huge tent for music performances.  Among the many people involved were two key members of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins the young, dynamic President of the University of Chicago, and Mortimer Adler, one of the Chicago professors, well-known as the leader of the ‘Fat Man’s Seminar’, drawing on the collection of ‘great books’ he had been helping to develop for the Encyclopedia Britannica with Hutchins.

The infrastructure built for the Goethe Convocation was used, a year later, for two separate activities.  Paepcke asked Mortimer Adler to develop an ‘executive seminar’ in 1950, based on extracts from the great books, and intended to help American managers learn skills other than the techniques of management.  Paepcke believed that their technological sophistication was far greater than their understanding of the broader issues that faced them.  The Executive Seminar would be an intensive introduction to liberal arts for the practicing manager.  At the same time, the success of the convocation also led to the establishment of an annual summer Music Festival, centred around the tent at the Meadows.  This would bring promising young musicians to Aspen to play alongside leading concert performers, a key strategy in developing their skills.  Today the Aspen Music Festival brings together more than 1,500 young musicians a year.

The organisation set up to host the Executive Seminars was The Aspen Institute.  By 1992 it had been running for more than 40 years, and was well-established, offering a unique way to develop promising executives.  I felt a similar program in Australia would be equally worthwhile.  With the Myer Foundation’s support, I wrote to the Institute, and asked if I could attend a seminar.  The CEO, David McClelland offered me a place.  In fact, he offered two free places.  Part of their approach was to encourage partners to attend: if the seminar was to have an impact, then it would be better if this was not just for an isolated individual, but for his or her partner, too.  The intention was that both people would learn and grow.

So, my wife and I prepared to take part in the two-week seminar.   As it happened, it was to be held at Wye Woods, the second base for the Institute, a secluded centre on the edge of the Chesapeake (famous as one of the places where Clinton had met with Arafat and Peres, in his attempt to broker a peace deal for Palestine).  Before we left for Maryland, we were sent our readings for the two weeks, a folder with some thirty odd extracts from those ‘great books’.  Many were the ones that Mortimer Adler had chosen, but there had been a few changes over time.  We were expected to read the extracts and be ready to discuss them when we arrived!

Wye Woods was a magical place.  Deer roamed around the woods (that seems less amazing now after having lived in North Carolina’s Pfafftown, where we regularly had deer in our garden).  When we arrived, the Canada Geese were heading south, stopping to stay overnight on the bay, producing a fearful noise some nights (also visitors to Pfafftown!). Each day we spent time in the seminar room, sitting around an oval table.  Most days involved both a morning and an afternoon session, but we did get a couple of afternoons off each week.

The seminar style was moderated discussion, based on Alder’s ‘Socratic approach’.  This meant each session would be focussed on one or two readings.  We would turn to a reading, and the moderator would invite one of the participants to read a passage out loud.  The moderator would then ask questions about what the passage might mean, what it suggested to us, and as the session moved on, going on how it was relevant to contemporary issues.  I loved the approach and have used it ever since.  Reading a passage concentrates everyone’s attention and gives a focus to the moderated discussion.  Participants learn to read carefully, a skill many of us have lost through skimming and reading summaries.  The subsequent discussion is intended to push participants to both reflect on what was said, and to explore ideas and views that might be new or even uncomfortable.

Our moderator was Charles van Doren.  For two Australians, his name was unfamiliar.  He seemed a little fragile at times; during the seminar he was supported by his wife, Gerry, who attended all the sessions and sometimes – only rarely – would join in the conversation.  Charles had another skill which I later practiced and developed in my own way:  he would remind us each morning about some of the topics and exchanges that had taken place the previous day.  Now when I run similar seminars, I prepare a written commentary, and the final document is something the participants take away from a program.  I learnt a great deal from Charles, who was an excellent moderator.  He encouraged and involved everyone.

I got a little (over)excited one evening and persuaded my wife to mount an argument against universal suffrage.  We were to read Harriet Mill’s seminal paper on extending the franchise to women the following day.  My wife tried, valiantly, suggesting the franchise go to one person from each household, offering views based on the family’s discussion.  The reaction of several participants was fascinating.  They took her aside afterwards and asked, “how could you do that, argue against women having the vote?”  I think my partner would have liked to have killed me there and then.  We learnt that exploring ideas had its limits.

One of the features of the Executive Seminar was that the attendees would put on a performance of Antigone.  As soon as I heard about this, I made sure that all the major parts were allocated to others in our group, and I offered to be the director, and cover a couple of minor roles.  As usual, I had rushed ahead, and I should have read the play!  The minor roles, soldiers and a soothsayer, turned out to be major.  Terrified of the thought of acting, and, either deliberately or by default, I read my part as a London cockney.  Charles loved our presentation, but especially my distinctive, and in his eyes brilliant, take on some key roles!

In the evenings, the presidential debates were being held between Bill Clinton, George W H Bush, and the pixie-like Ross Perot.  We had been advised that three topics might be good to avoid in conversation – sex, religion, and politics.  In the excited atmosphere of the run up to a Presidential election, politics was on the table, although we soon learnt that most of the participants in our seminar were Republicans.  Fortunately, Ross Perot was consistently so excitable and so funny that he was a safe topic for comments when the issues got a bit tense.

As I said, Charles van Doren was a bit fragile, even a little aggressive at times.  One evening, another participant explained that Charles had been a professor at Columbia University, the son of a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and novelist, Mark Van Doren, a recognised polymath on track to become a major figure in the world of philosophy.  Clever and handsome, NBC encouraged him to take part in the quiz show Twenty One, their preferred choice to battle with the champion, Herb Stempel.  He proved a star, winning several sessions.  He defeated Herb Stempel and won nearly $130,000 (about $1.1m in today’s money) before he was beaten.  Stempel was a sore loser and told the press Charles had cheated.  It became clear both had been coached, questions carefully tailored for them.  It was, after all, television.  Charles was mortified, first denying everything, and then confessing.  Eventually he told all:

“I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception. The fact that I, too, was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol. There may be a kind of justice in that. I don’t know. I do know, and I can say it proudly to this committee, that since Friday, October 16, when I finally came to a full understanding of what I had done and of what I must do, I have taken a number of steps toward trying to make up for it. I have a long way to go. I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them. Whatever their feeling for me now, my affection for them is stronger today than ever before. I am making this statement because of them. I hope my being here will serve them well and lastingly.

I asked (co-producer Albert Freedman) to let me go on (Twenty One) honestly, without receiving help. He said that was impossible. He told me that I would not have a chance to defeat Stempel because he was too knowledgeable. He also told me that the show was merely entertainment and that giving help to quiz contests was a common practice and merely a part of show business. This of course was not true, but perhaps I wanted to believe him. He also stressed the fact that by appearing on a nationally televised program I would be doing a great service to the intellectual life, to teachers and to education in general, by increasing public respect for the work of the mind through my performances. In fact, I think I have done a disservice to all of them. I deeply regret this, since I believe nothing is of more vital importance to our civilization than education.”

Charles was dropped by NBC, which had given him a three-year contract, resigned from Columbia University, and took up writing introductions to philosophy.  He later became an editor at the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is where he was working when my wife and I met him at Wye Woods.  He had been very foolish, but his skills as a teacher and moderator were without question.  I became a friend, and we kept in touch for many years.  I went to see him in his Connecticut hideaway once and dined with he and Mark at a very exclusive New York club.  Boy, those patrician New Yorkers know how to live.  Charles died in 2019, aged 93, but we’d lost contact before then, as he slowly retreated, becoming something of a hermit.

I guess that was a bit off-track!  Rather than dwelling on Charles van Doren, I should have stuck with taking about the Executive Seminar!  It was an exciting approach to develop learning.  I liked the model of readings and ‘moderated’ discussion:  the two tasks in moderation were to make certain everyone took part in the discussion, and, when necessary, getting the discussion back on track.  This latter was usually done by referring back to the text, getting a participant to read out a key section.  I have used the approach ever since.

I visited The Aspen Institute several more times over the years.  For one memorable visit I stayed in Baltimore, my base while meeting various people at the Institute.  Tired was the President of the Institute at the time.  I hadn’t met him before.  he offered to come over to Baltimore to meet, rather than have me drive down to the Washington offices.  I was pleased.  We were staying at the Sheraton on the Harbor, and we had been upgraded to a huge suite.  I could entertain him in the suite since my wife had gone off for the day.  When a call came from the front desk, I was a bit miffed:  Fred wanted me to come down and go out.

We left the hotel.  Dressed in a suit, I was getting warm as we began our walk up Charles Street.  “We need to find out about a restaurant,” he announced.  We went into a citizen’s advice centre, and Fred asked the African American lady on duty “Can you tell us somewhere good to eat.”  A little brusque, I thought.  She mentioned some places.  “No, not a chain, something authentic.  The places Mencken wrote about.”  Wisely, she left, and summoned the manager.  He understood and gave Fred details of a tiny restaurant over on the other side of the harbor.  We had somewhere to go (the advice proved excellent).  However, first we went further up Charles Street.  Was this sightseeing?  No, I sensed this was a walk with a purpose.

Suddenly, Fred turned off Charles Street on to East Centre Street and stopped outside ‘Ted’s Musician’s Shop’. As I was looking up at the window, without any explanation Fred entered, and I followed.  The store was small, boxes everywhere, hundreds of old instruments hanging from the ceiling.  It had been in business since 1931, supplying to everyone from Leopold Stokowski to schoolchildren.  As I looked around, I could see four others in the shop, three African Americans and a Caucasian at the desk, all wearing jeans and open necked shirts.

“Have you got any clarinets for sale?”  Fred didn’t waste time on niceties.  A little nervous I positioned myself near the door.  The man at the counter pulled out a box.  “I said a clarinet, not a piece of rubbish.”  Being near the door was looking like a good idea.  The assistant seemed unworried and pulled out another box.  “Well,’, announced Fred.  “That almost looks like a clarinet.  Try again.”  Unperturbed, he rummaged around and pulled out an old, scuffed box.  “Ah.  I need a reed”.  Fred assembled the clarinet, looked around and put the clarinet to his lips, and started playing, playing jazz, and, boy, could he play:  it was magical.  The shop was silent, everyone transfixed.  “Well, I suppose that’s a clarinet.  What about a tenor sax?”  Thirty minutes later, Fred had tested three saxophones, and decided they were all inadequate.  He didn’t buy the clarinet, but conceded it was alright.  It was time to leave, and just as he got to the door, he looked up.  “I’ll be back”, he said “to buy that fagotto.”  We walked out.

Near the store Fred explained before Aspen he had been President of Oberlin College and an expert on Russian and Eurasian affairs.  However, his passion was collecting musical instruments and he told me he was after the fagotto, an early version of a bassoon from Hungary.  He didn’t bother to explain why he could play a clarinet the way he did, but I discovered he was a co-founder of the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble, which played all over the world.  I was very fond of Fred, and sorry when he moved to Johns Hopkins.

Visiting Maryland, Wye Woods, and Baltimore, played a major role in my future life.  Not quite King’s College, but the aftermath of my visits has continued to the present, as I offer discussion sessions to U3A members in Canberra, still trying to do a good job in moderating, and writing a commentary.  Thank you, Maryland, and The Aspen Institute.

1992 – Democratic Practice

In October 1992, I was tucked away in the seclusion of the Wye Woods, on the eastern half of Maryland, USA., taking part in The Aspen Institute’s Executive Seminar, a two-week moderated discussion based on extracts from the works of philosophers, historians and political scientists, written over some 2,500 years.  Far from any town, the only noise to be heard was from the thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Canada Geese stopping on the Chesapeake on their annual migration.  An ideal place for around the table discussion, as there were no other distractions.  Our group met with our facilitator every morning and most afternoons, although there were a few excursions:  one was to a collection of consignment stores, an outing that seemed rather out of kilter with our serious morning debates!

The evenings were free, although we each had a massive folder of readings demanding attention, all to be read for the sessions on the following days.  Despite this, after dinner the group watched the television news:  the reason that drew us every night was this was in the final months running up to the 1992 US Presidential Election.  There were three candidates, George W H Bush, the sitting President, and the nominee of the Republican Party, William (Bill) Clinton, the nominee of the Democrats, and Ross Perot, businessman and independent.  Compared to more recent debates, this was conducted in a rather considerate fashion.  It was Ross Perot who managed to capture surprising attention, though hardly any votes.

In a time before politically correct speech,  Perot was far from careful in his remarks.  I heard him refer to African Americans, as “you people”.  However, for me his most memorable contribution came in an individual interview when he was explaining his views on the issues of economic management and inflation.  He’d prepared some points on two-foot square cards.  Putting one on an easel, he talked about the way inflation was rising, but the card showed it dropping.  When this was pointed out, quite unfazed he took the card, rotated it 90°, and put it back.  Yes, inflation was clearly rising!  The group in the Wye Woods laughed and moved on to talk about some of the issues at stake between the Republicans and the Democrats:  most were Republicans, Perot was quickly forgotten.

However, those evenings had another significance for me.  Brought up in the ‘western tradition’, I knew about democracy, and was coming to terms with the US variant.  I was used to the idea that in an election people voted for their local representative.  The party that returned the larger number (the majority) of elected representatives then chose from among their number the leader who would be appointed Prime Minister (this person usually known well in advance).  I suppose you could say that the electorate that voted in the candidate who became Prime Minister were ‘choosing’ the Prime Minister, but that wasn’t how it was seen.

In the USA, it was different.  Everyone did get a chance to vote for the next president (although as in the UK, and unlike Australia, voting is not mandatory).  Whatever the other advantages and disadvantages of this system, you did get  to see and hear the would-be-Presidents.  I found it a little surprising, having been brought up in a Westminster system world.  Previously rather uninterested in the US process, it was the first time I grasped the immense power the president had, both legally, but also through the ‘bully pulpit’.  The contrasts between the three candidates were almost stereotypical:  Bush was patrician, confident, affluent, with an oil industry background;  Clinton was charismatic, enthusiastic, an upstart from a smaller southern state; Perot was like an elf who had wandered on to the television set by mistake, excited and excitable, and a little confusing.  What would each do if elected?  Bush had a track record, and was running for a second term, comfortably conservative.  For the Republican electorate, he was safe and sensible.  Clinton was already mired in controversy, with some of his early sexcapades coming to light and he must have provoked alarm, even in the Democrat camp.  Would he do the right thing?  Was he moral?  As for Perot, since we knew he wouldn’t be elected it was as if the television gods had thrown in some light relief to make the debates and interviews less weighty, less boring!

Clinton won, of course, and did again four years later, leaving behind a series of legislative changes, a series of increasingly dubious appointments, and a collection of tawdry scandals.  Could we have believed, back then, he would be something of a reformer, only to see the Bush family return with the somewhat less patrician Bush junior to settle everything back down.  As I learnt after that 1992 introduction, Presidents have power, but they also face battles.  If Congress is with them (it usually is in the first couple of years), they have power and the ability to wield it; but once they lose Congress, they lose effectiveness.  Many a two-term President achieves most in those first two years, and Biden may not even have that long.

Is the US system any more consequential than the Australian one?  In both cases, general elections are rather irrelevant.  A superficial sense of democracy is sustained each time the people go to the polls, but, well, it’s like buying a pig in a poke.  It is only when you get the bag home and open it that you know whether the pig was fat or skinny, healthy or diseased.  When you vote for a party, it is only years later you find out in what your vote resulted.  Of course, circumstances change, and events that party political platforms neither considered nor had articulated can become important.  In Australia that year, the most important was well outside the government.  This was when the Australian High Court handed down its ‘Mabo Decision’, a land rights case that recognised the Torres Strait Islanders ownership of Murray Island and confirmed the British 1788 view of Australia as terra nullius was a legal fiction.

Watching those presidential debates in the Wye Woods, I was struck by what is meant by democracy in a country dominated by size and complexity.  Each person has a vote, but the vote is largely ephemeral.  Every few years, cast your vote, and for the rest of the time your preferences are unknown and ignored, except for opinion polls and constituency meetings.  At Aspen, we read Plato’s plans for a Republic, ruled by guardians.  Plato had no interest in democracy and wanted the rulers to be the best possible people for the task, philosopher kings, who would receive no special benefits in their role.  Just imagine, a government run by people who lived simply, and who received less than those around them!  Nice idea were it not for human nature:  even Plato seemed to concede that people were largely driven by the desire to achieve and obtain more and more, striving for a never-ending list of ‘wants’.  He believed his philosopher kings would be different , but his ideas seem rather unrealistic.

Are we doomed?  Will government leaders always succumb to the temptations that their advantageous positions permit?  It was around the time I was in Maryland that an interstate colleague came up with his solution.  His inspiration had come from reading about the UK’s peacetime National Service, a conscription scheme for men that began on 1 January 1949, whereby healthy 17–21-year-olds were required to serve in the armed services (army, navy or air force) for 18 months, and remain on the reserve list for four years, from which they could be recalled for up to 20 days no more than three times.  There were exemptions, for ‘essential workers’ and ‘approved’ conscientious objectors.  When the Korean War began, the service period was extended to 2 years.  The requirement began to wind down from 1957, and those born on or after 1 October 1939 were no longer called up.  In November 1960 the last men entered National Service, and the last conscripts left the armed forces in May 1963.

My colleague’s idea was simple.  Why not have government national service?  In his system men and women would work for two years in government, at the national, state or local level.  This would have three advantages.  First, it would provide a stream of new recruits into government, rather than stuck with public servants remaining in their positions for years.  Second, it would ‘demystify’ government, helping everyone understand what governments did and how they did it.  Third, he thought it would make elections more effective, as voters would know what it was they were voting for, having seen the system from the inside.

Would it achieve those goals?  The evidence from the UK’s National Service suggests not.  Unwilling conscripts finished their time in the military with relief, and no love for their time or the people who commanded them.  There were exceptions, of course.  Some signed up, and some loved playing with guns, an enjoyment that continued in their civilian life, a predilection that would almost certainly have appeared without those enforced military years.  In the same way, for many time in national government service would be seen as two wasted years, with no continuing love of government, and only a small proportion might decide this was the life for them.  It seems unlikely propinquity would lead to passion! Many would be likely to support Winston Churchill’s assessment that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”.  Well, the first half, anyway!

Some years after that time in the Wye Woods, I read Robert Dahl’s book, Democracy and its Critics (which had been published in 1989).  It was and remains an outstanding work.  Dahl is consistently clear and wise.  Here is his opening line in a chapter critiquing Plato’s guardians: “Lofty as guardianship may appear as an idea, its extraordinary demands on the knowledge and virtue of the guardians are all but impossible to satisfy in practice”.  He considered rule by philosopher kings inferior to democracy both as an ideal and in practice, arguing government cannot proceed with some version of technological or scientific rationality alone.  People do not behave like inanimate objects, and as government is concerned with making choices about policy, it must confront the tricky trio of risk, uncertainty and trade-offs.  These combine to make judgements contain a balancing act between probabilities, possibilities, a sense that things will change in some way as yet indeterminate, combined with the ever-present Murphy’s law that ‘if things can go wrong, they probably will’.

At the time he was writing, Dahl saw ‘polyarchy’ as the best form of democracy in large nation states, where more immediate and face-to-face democratic processes couldn’t be sustained (although the Swiss still attempt to keep them). He saw the basis of polyarchy as universal suffrage, the right for anyone to stand for office, and an electoral system in which all senior government positions are held by elected individuals.  Other elements central to a polyarchy included the existence of alternative sources of information, freedom of expression and freedom of association.  He also warned that size and complexity would make it easy to slip from democracy to rule by bureaucratic systems and, worse, to oligarchy.

Partly out of date now, the last third of Dahl’s book examines what democracy means in a ‘modern dynamic pluralist society’ (MDP).  Does an MDP offer the ideal characteristics to sustain a polyarchy?  Carefully, he explains that it nether necessary nor sufficient.  His concerns are many, but the central issue is about the distribution of power.  An MDP does ensure that power is distributed among many groups:  these include class groupings, pressure groups, occupational groups, religious groups and many others.   Political parties struggle to keep as many of these groups as possible aligned with their agenda, but inevitably, each group tends to want to wield its power for the benefit of its members and may resist linking with others.  The history of occupational groups, from lawyers and doctors through to traditional trade unions, shows how these have shifted in their preferences, alliances and opposition.  To put that the other way around, over time groups vary in the power they wield, and their influence on the political process and government operations.  Pressure groups do have more impact on policy than individuals, as pressure is exerted daily while individuals only assert their preferences at the time of elections.  De Tocqueville marvelled at the existence of cross cutting groups and affiliations in America;  today we despair at the power and influence some have at the expense of our rather idealised concept of a democracy.

Are there any solutions on offer?  First, surprisingly, is Dahl’s view that democracy should be extended to economic organisations.  Dahl points out that shareholders do not run organisation, even if their claimed preferences are used by managers to justify many actions, and by directors to assert policies and broad strategies.  Managers do.  Dahl wants to see the enterprise as democratically governed, just like the state.  He makes a telling point in considering the standard objections to such an idea, arguments about knowledge and access to information.  These, he points out, bear an uncanny resemblance to the arguments used many decades earlier to suggest democracy could not be applied to the government of states.  Those arguments failed in relation to political government, and he suggests should be set aside in relation to introducing democratic practices into enterprises, too.

His greatest concern, however, was with the tendency of governments to come under the control of a modern alternative to Plato’s guardians, a policy elite, a group which sustains its control through esoteric language, special education, and a rigorous control over who can be admitted to their ranks.  Some writers have gone so far as to suggest governments are ruled by a dominant and exclusive minority, a political caste if you like.  Given his concerns, Dahl comes up with a counterproposal which resembles my colleague’s thoughts from the past, but through a different process.  He suggests we begin to use minipopuluses to look at important issues, each a group of randomly selected citizens, perhaps a thousand at a time, who are asked to deliberate on a topic, and, after a year perhaps, identify appropriate policy options and actions.  A minipopulus could operate at any level of government, complementary to existing legislative bodies, and  providing a path for citizens to directly address a key topic.

It wasn’t all bad in the Wye Woods in 1992.  Americans did have the opportunity to see and hear their presidential candidates.  Seeing is important, observing how a person responds to questions, how they look at you, and offering the opportunity to catch those slight but significant ‘tells’ that indicate whether the person is lying or not, and whether they mean what they are saying.  Each candidate was expected to explain policy in relation to various issues, and, with good moderators, to describe how policies would be put into practice.  In that American system, when election day came, Americans could vote for the candidate they preferred, and could do so with some sense of the policy alternatives on offer.  Thirty years ago, candidates hadn’t perfected the skill of never answering questions, only addressing the topics they preferred, and moderators were less biased in questioning, and less willing to allow style to subordinate substance.  The United States was an oligarchy, but with some elements of democratic practice in place.  We didn’t realise how much worse it would get.

Don McLean’s American Pie had been recorded 20 years earlier, a memorable evocation of the way the world was changing.  With a few tweaks to his words, it’s an apt commentary on politics then and now: Do you recall what was revealed, The day democracy died? We started singin’, Bye, bye Miss American Pie, Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye, And singin’ this’ll be the day that I die.  We’re not dead yet, but if critics like Dahl are ignored, I fear democracy is terminal.

Being Generous: On American Philanthropy

On average, I receive eight personalised requests for donations a week.  I also see many other generic requests daily, through the mail or attached to emails, and websites.  It’s not surprising; after all, I am living in the US, a country famous for its philanthropic ethos.  Sure, this is a country where some people become rich, very rich, but they give back.  America’s commitment to donating for the public good is legendary, an example to the rest of the world.  In many cases billions of dollars are spent, from Andrew Carnegie endowing libraries (and church organs), to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding medical programs, including many aimed at endemic diseases in developing countries, as well as broader educational endeavours.

Choosing where to make a donation is hard.  I support education, restricting gun ownership, and public broadcasting.  When I worked fulltime, I could do more, donating to a variety of deserving organisations.  Now I give somewhat less, but the three I regularly support never leave me alone.  On a bad day, I believe that all the money I give is used up in asking me to send more.  Am I contributing to marketing salaries rather than the cause I funded?  Other organisations to whom I have made the odd donation are similarly relentless.  I unsubscribe from emails and other marketing content, but the requests keep coming, and I keep junking begging letters.

I believe my approach is reasonable.  I don’t consider myself well off, although compared to many people living in North Carolina I know I am lucky:  I have more than they do.  I tell myself I worked hard for many years, and deserve the modest retirement income I receive, and I can get occasional work.  But what I give plays on my conscience: should I be donating more?

This leads me to talk about Anand Giridharadas.  Anand Giridharadas was an Aspen Institute  Henry Crown Fellow in 2011.  The Aspen Institute is an impressive organisation.  Established seventy years ago, its initial focus was on American managers, seen as technically very good at what they did but who had missed out on a liberal education.  It introduced a two-week program, reading and debating great thinkers and ideas, and I attended their Executive Seminar in 1992.  I found the experience life-changing, and it has informed much of what I have done ever since.

The Aspen Institute has grown past that focussed and relatively humble beginning.  Now it is a venue for the great and the good to come together, juggling between activities to develop future leaders and providing a forum for those already at the top.  Speakers and participants are both influential and affluent.  It claims a “reputation for gathering diverse, nonpartisan thought leaders, creatives, scholars and members of the public to address some of the world’s most complex problems … to provoke, further and improve actions taken in the real world”.

The Henry Crown Fellowship Program was established in 1997  to “develop the next generation of community-spirited leaders, providing them with the tools necessary to meet the challenges of business leadership in the 21st century”. Each year 20-22 leaders are chosen to “engage in a thought-provoking journey of personal exploration”.  Selected on the basis they “have already achieved considerable success in the private sector and are at an inflection point in their lives or careers”, the two-year program comprises four seminars and a personal leadership ‘venture’. [i]

In 2015, Anand Giridharadas gave a speech at the Institute’s Action Forum.  He was reflecting on the world he saw in which there were very few ‘extreme winners’ and very many ‘extreme losers’.  He began by explaining what he called the ‘Aspen Consensus’.  “There is no consensus on anything here, as any seminar participant knows.  But I believe that many of our discussions operate within what I will call the “Aspen Consensus,” which, like the “Washington Consensus” or “Beijing Consensus,” describes a nest of shared assumptions within which diverse ideas hatch. The “Aspen Consensus” demarcates what we mostly agree not to question, even as we question so much. And though I call it the Aspen Consensus, it is in many ways the prevailing ethic among the winners of our age worldwide, across business, government and even nonprofits.  The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good.  But never, ever tell them to do less harm.” [ii]

He continued: “The Aspen Consensus says, “Give back,” which is of course a compassionate and noble thing. But, amid the $20 million second homes and $4,000 parkas of Aspen, it is gauche to observe that giving back is also a Band-Aid that winners stick onto the system that has privileged them, in the conscious or subconscious hope that it will forestall major surgery to that system — surgery that might threaten their privileges.”  Indeed, the last forty years has seen a huge transfer of wealth to the top 1%, aided by government policies and businesses with an unrelenting focus on increased efficiencies, rising stock valuations , and workers with declining real incomes.

However, the real sting in his comments comes from another observation, when he noted the winners are increasingly remote from any community, the increasing globalisation of business separating them from seeing and feeling the effect of their decisions.  He reiterates a key point in his address: “We talk a lot here about what we should be doing more of. We don’t talk about what we should be doing less of… So let’s just come out and say the thing you’re never supposed to say in Aspen: that many of the winners of our age are active, vigorous contributors to the problems they bravely seek to solve. And for the greater good to prevail on any number of issues, some people will have to lose — to actually do less harm, and not merely more good.”

Look, I loved his remarks, so I will quote once more: “Ask yourself: Does the world need more food companies donating playgrounds to children, or rather reformed food companies that don’t profit from fattening children?  Does the world need more Chinese tycoons engaging in philanthropy in China, or rather more honest and less corrupt Chinese tycoons?  Does the world need Goldman Sachs partners mentoring women or giving money to poor kids’ schools, or rather Goldman partners gambling everything to say: the way business is done at my firm isn’t what it should be, and I will fight to make Goldman a steward rather than a vampire squid of resources, even if that costs me my job?”

That talk led Giridharadas to write a book, Winners Take All, one that deserves reading. [iii]  It also encouraged a great deal of supportive commentary. [iv]   Shortly after it appeared, Robert Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford and a co-director of the university’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, published Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do It Better. [v]

His book is packed with some compelling data.  Reich begins by noting that for every foundation that existed in 1930 there are now five hundred, and the growth in foundation assets has been from less than a billion dollars to an almost unbelievable eight hundred billion dollars.

Meanwhile, the cost to the government keeps growing. In 2016, tax deductions for charitable contributions were more than fifty billion dollars. What is the justification for this arrangement? Reich considers several possibilities. One is that the government, by encouraging giving to private philanthropies, is fostering participation in civic affairs. This rationale Reich discards, since, if anything, the correlation seems to be negative. “The rise of nonprofit organizations in the United States and the use of the charitable contributions deduction coincides with the decline of civic engagement and associational life,” he observes.

A second possibility is that giving promotes equality. Once again, Reich is skeptical. The deduction for charitable contributions is available only to taxpayers who itemize their returns, and these people tend to be relatively affluent. And the more affluent they are the more the deduction is worth: families in the highest tax brackets get bigger breaks than those in the lowest.  How about all the needy families that are being assisted? Here the figures are harder to come by, but, even so, they don’t look very good. A recent study suggests that, at most, a third of all tax-deductible giving goes toward aiding the poor, while the donors receiving the biggest tax breaks are the least likely to be aiding the indigent and the marginalised: Reich cites research suggesting “the inclination to give to help to meet basic needs declines as one rises up the income ladder.”

Instead of promoting equality, Reich suggests tax subsidies for philanthropy may actually be doing the reverse. He cites the example of local-education foundations, or LEFs. These are a form of parent-teacher association set up to supplement public-school budgets, and they’ve grown dramatically in recent years.  Some LEFs raise only enough money to buy paint sets or musical instruments, but others, in more affluent districts, raise thousands of dollars a pupil.  In one town in California, Reich reports, parents of public-school students get a letter at the start of the year asking for a contribution of twenty-three hundred dollars for each child enrolled, thereby sustaining existing inequities in school funding, and all done with tax-deductible contributions.

As it happens, there is a rather pressing case study right now about companies doing harm.   It involves the family that owns Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, a pain management drug.  In case you aren’t aware, I am talking about the Sackler family, which has provided many millions of dollars to such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, the Smithsonian, the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Louvre, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge universities, and many, many more.

America is currently experiencing an epidemic of deaths from opioid addiction.  It is so bad that people on all sides of politics are concerned, (even President Trump).  In 2017 some 80,000 deaths were ascribed to drug overdoses, compared to 40,000 in car accidents, and almost exactly the same number from firearm injuries (of which about half were suicides).

Purdue Pharma is a private company, providing the Sackler family with their millions in large part through the manufacture and marketing of OxyContin, a highly effective drug for pain management.  More recently other income has come through a newer company (Rhodes) set up to sell generic versions of the drug.  OxyContin is a slow release version of Oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (based on a substance derived from opium): the slow release version “is one of the most abused prescription opioids because people can crush it and dissolve it to inject or snort it. The result is a rapid, powerful high because the entire extended-release medicine affects the person at one time.”[vi]  Some 15,000 overdose deaths were from semi-synthetic opioids, (with a similar number from heroin, and 30,000 from synthetic opioids, fentanyl the major contributor).

The Sackler Family seems a prime example of a group that does good,  but has shown little evidence of doing less harm.  It appears Oxycontin has been a source of addiction and abuse for many years.  While it is a Food and Drug Administration-approved medication, legitimately used for patients with advanced cancer or short-term severely acute pain, it is also prescribed for patients with chronic pain.  Purdue claims it “neither created nor caused the opioid epidemic” and recently stated both the company and its former directors “vigorously deny” claims about their role in the current crisis, stating it “has long been committed to initiatives that prevent abuse and addiction, citing what it characterized as a philanthropic donation from the family to an addiction research and treatment center in Tulsa, Okla. In fact, the $75 million contribution, to be made over five years, was a condition of the court-approved settlement of an opioid lawsuit brought by the Oklahoma Attorney General against Purdue.” [vii] Has it addressed problems with Oxycontin, ensuring less harm, or is it exemplifying the Aspen Consensus?

Making drugs and prescribing drugs: a recent report makes it clear it may be the drug distributors which have been the worst link in the chain.  Over time many have given advance warning to pharmacies they might be investigated for filling prescriptions for doctors at clearly suspicious levels, and kept shipping to these pharmacies for years after these concerns had been flagged internally. [viii]   As I was writing, one distributor was charged with this kind of behaviour over several years, including supplying opioids at alarming levels since 2012.[ix]

So let me get this straight.  If I give some money to a charitable foundation, it appears I am their target for life, as they continue to spend money on hoping to persuade me to give more, at a level of expenditure that must be a close match to my modest contributions.  At the same time, while major companies are making significant contributions to foundations, with commensurate tax benefits, the evidence suggests some (much?) of what is being given is not being channelled into programs for the benefit of the broader community as a whole.  Rather the endowments often support activities that benefit the privileged.  To remind you, in many cases their profits are made possible by containing the cost of a workforce, where real incomes have hardly moved in nearly forty years, and from ensuring customers pay hefty margins added on to the cost of many services and products.  They are probably doing some good but there is no doubt several are failing to do less harm.  I know I’m naïve, but who exactly is being generous to whom?

[i] https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/henry-crown-fellowship/

[ii] https://medium.com/@AnandWrites/the-thriving-world-the-wilting-world-and-you-209ffc24ab90

[iii] Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas, Knopf, 2018

[iv] Among many, this was an excellent overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/books/review/winners-take-all-anand-giridharadas.html; also Gospels of Giving for the New Gilded Age, Are today’s donor classes solving problems—or creating new ones? Elizabeth Colbert, The New Yorker, August 20, 2018

[v] Princeton University Press, 2018.

[vi] https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/oxycontin-addiction/facts-about-opioids/

[vii] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/health/sacklers-oxycontin-lawsuits.html

[viii] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/health/opioids-lawsuits-distributors.html

[ix] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/nyregion/opioid-crisis-drug-trafficking-rochester.html

A Life Worth Living

What makes a life worth living?  If you are following issues that are getting attention at present, you might feel the focus is on individual rights, ensuring you have them all, and protecting them from interference by the government.  But does having and protecting rights guarantee a life worth living, or at the very least constitute an essential component?

That question was on my mind years ago, when I was teaching in Melbourne.  For twelve years, I was the moderator of a group, the Senior Roundtable, which I had helped establish with my friend Brian Hirsh.  Brian was a retired businessman, a passionate advocate for the topics he saw as important.  In the early days those included corporate social responsibility and participative management.  Brian knew several retired people living in the area around Beaumaris, a southeastern suburb of Melbourne, and wanted to bring them together so that the group could do more than complain about children and grandchildren, and worry about their gardens, oh, and their golf scores!

We decided to explore ideas and debate them, to enlarge our understanding of issues, and to widen our horizons.[i]  Brian and I would select a reading each month, sometimes a classical piece, and sometimes a more contemporary selection.  At one stage, we elected to read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, on its fifty-fifth anniversary, determine whether or not a document written in 1948 was still relevant, and if should be updated.[ii]

With due modesty, we produced a new version, which we called our ‘Statement of Civil Rights and Responsibilities’.  With Brian’s encouragement, our reasoning was simple:  if people were entitled to certain rights, then those rights must also entail balancing obligations.

Here are the opening clauses of our Declaration, as well as a later clause on government:

Article 1

All people are entitled to equal dignity and rights. They are born with the capacity for reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of fellowship.  People have an obligation to assist those less advantaged than themselves.

Article 2

People are entitled to the rights and freedoms in this Statement, without distinction of any kind, such as race, gender, genetic characteristics, colour, age, language, culture, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Article 3

To justify these rights people must accept the civil and criminal laws of the country where they live or are travelling.  To enjoy these rights and the protection under these rights they must not attack, endanger or interfere with the security, well-being or reputation of their fellow citizens, other countries, or the environment in which they live.

Article 4

In exercising their rights and freedoms, people shall be subject only to those limitations determined by law to secure due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the needs of public order and the general welfare of their society.

Article 16

16.1      Adults have the right to take part in their government, either directly or through freely chosen representatives.

16.2      The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of the government; expressed in periodic and genuine democratic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

I am not sure about the real value of what we did:  it was an engaging exercise, and we tried to ensure that responsibility was appropriately incorporated into the statement.  In retrospect, I am sure the task required more than our little group could offer.  However, we decided to send our Statement on to the group developing a Bill of Rights for the State of Victoria:  they happily accepted the submission, and in 2006 the Victorian Government passed a Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. [iii]

We also sent our document to the Australian Human Rights Commission, which was exploring establishing an Australian Bill of Rights.  Fifteen years later, a decision over an Australian statement remains unresolved.  A Private Member’s Bill was presented to Parliament in 2017 but did not progressed past a first and second reading.[iv]  There is a strong view in Australia that rights are protected by the Constitution, by various laws and the precedents of common law: given this, the Bill was withdrawn on the grounds there was little support to add to what was already in place.  One commentator argued that “We don’t need one, our citizens are amongst the freest in the world”.  However, careful analysis suggests that, on balance, the arguments to encourage Australia introducing a Bill of Rights are stronger than those against it. [v]

Ever since then, the issue of rights – and responsibilities – has always been in the back of my mind.  Last week I saw The Economist had provided a bibliography of liberalism in its 175^th Anniversary issue of 29 August, which was dedicated to renewing liberalism.  I was struck by their interest in what similarities exist among the various writers they recognised as liberal.  The Economist concluded: “A few themes emerge: a commitment to individual rights, an aversion to the status quo and a faith in progress. Liberalism has evolved, and will continue to do so. That ability to adapt and encompass a range of beliefs is a great strength. But only because it exists alongside a second critical component: an insistence on open debate and self-examination. It is this second feature that enables liberalism’s bad ideas to be pruned and the good to be cultivated”. [vi]

A commitment to preserving and extending individual rights: a hot topic at present, as the US Senate is about to consider confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh as a member of the Supreme Court, a man many believe will be happy to strike down the right to abortion, and the right to gay marriage, among others.  These are today’s battlegrounds for fights over the primacy of individual rights, and the limits which governments can justifiably place on such rights.

Does having rights make me a better person?  As I think about this today, I am drawn to wonder if having rights encourages selfishness, at least in our culture:  rights are the corollary of individualism, and it was for this reason my group in Melbourne agreed with Brian that rights must be balanced against responsibilities.  I think we had it correct in another way:  rights don’t belong to individuals alone, but they are part of the environment that defines our collective membership of society.  Today we see individual rights slipping into identity politics.

I might be able to explain my concern about this in a different way.  An emphasis on individual rights, on individualism, might appear to suggest that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was on track when she stated:  “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.” [vii]  That almost sounds like a call for no rights, (and no responsibilities?), certainly as far as the government is concerned!  However, she had it wrong:  society does exist, it is the community to which we all belong.  To deny society is to deny ourselves:  we only exist as social beings, and social beings survive through possessing an agreed set of rules to live by.

 

Some days, I even wonder if all this prescriptive stuff about rights does more harm than good.  Lao Tzu said “The more taboos there are in the empire, the poorer the people; the more sharpened tools the people have, the more benighted the state; the more skills the people have, the further novelties multiply; the better known the laws and edicts, the more thieves and robbers there are.[viii]  OK, that was a bit over the top.  However, the more rights there are, the more likely they are to conflict.  After the adoption of the Victorian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities, I was asked to work with the State Department of Justice.  Their concern: the Victorian Charter gave prisoners the same rights as everyone else, and some of these conflicted with incarceration and other limitations placed on those in jail.  When rights conflict, how do we determine which ones have precedence?

One answer is that there are one or two fundamental rights.  John Rawls came up with a very ingenious way to think about this.  He used a thought experiment, which he called the original position or “the veil of ignorance”, to make his case for an approach he described as “justice as fairness”. [ix]  If you were dreaming up an ideal society, Rawls argued, but didn’t know where you would end up in that society – rich or poor, living in a mansion or in squalor, and so on – it would be in everyone’s self-interest to ensure universal access to the same rights, and he argued that would lead to particular attention being paid to equality of opportunity and shared wealth. Today, the veil of ignorance is often used to argue for more progressive income redistribution, but Rawls noted an important caveat: that inequality in distribution was permissible if it ‘benefited the least well off in society’. That caveat is more troubling than it might first appear.  For example, it could be argued as the basis to justify resisting the growth of redistributive policies if it was clear these policies would undermine economic success; by limiting economic growth, you are limiting the opportunities of the most vulnerable.

Was Rawls saying nothing more than a new way to express the logic of the golden mean: ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, (or, in the stronger but negative sense, do not do to others what you would not have them do to you), with the added clever twist about actions having to ‘benefit the least well off in society’?  In fact, that ‘clever twist’ does more, it places the focus on community rather than individual benefits.  This is what one writer recently described as “socially-centred virtue ethics”. [x]  The author, Sebastien Purcell, was examining Aztec ethics, and went on: “If the Aztecs were right, then ‘Western’ philosophers have been too focused on individuals, too reliant on assessments of character, and too optimistic about the individual’s ability to correct her own vices. Instead, according to the Aztecs, we should look around to our family and friends, as well as our ordinary rituals or routines, if we hope to lead a better, more worthwhile existence.”

One persistent problem in this is finding the source for those ‘inalienable rights’ on which charters and declarations rest.  Back when religion held sway it was easy; they were god given; existing independently of individuals, they were ours to claim.  However, from what I have read, the god of Christian faiths didn’t say anything about rights.  He did offer some rules, of which the ‘ten commandments’ are the best example: “thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not commit adultery” and so on.  But those weren’t rights, however, they were rules to live by.

If rights are about individuals, then individuals appear increasingly concerned for themselves alone.  As one writer on loneliness recently put it: “The contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West. Industrialisation, the growth of the consumer economy, the declining influence of religion and the popularity of evolutionary biology all served to emphasise that the individual was what mattered – not traditional, paternalistic visions of a society in which everyone had a place.” [xi]  Paternalism versus consumerism?  Surely this is another facile distinction.  Society evolves and changes, and as it does so, so we develop new and hopefully better rules to live by.  It’s uneven progress, but we are more egalitarian today.

Could we change talking about ‘individual rights’ to ‘agreed rules to live by’.  As my Roundtable suggested, one touchstone should be “the general welfare of … society” [xii]  A life worth living is one where we share the same rules to live by with everyone else, (and Peter Singer would ask us to extend that logic to the animal world as well).  Certainly, even in humankind, there is still more to be done to reach that point.

 

[i] Most of the group were moderately conservative, but I felt I had moved them to think more broadly.  However, when the group continued after I left for the US, I read one of their later statements, a commentary on the ills of Australia and how they could be tackled – by restoring good old Anglo-Saxon virtues and policies.  They had several arguments to support their views, but what they offered was an unashamedly conservative agenda.

[ii] <http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/>

[iii] < https://www.humanrightscommission.vic.gov.au/human-rights/the-charter>  Did we add anything? They were probably thinking about responsibilities anyway.

[iv] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2017B00161 The first stage in creating legislation, the first and second readings, were presented on 14 August 2017; reviewed by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights on 5 September 2017; and removed from further consideration on 24 February 2018

[v] <https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/administrative-law/should-australia-have-a-bill-of-rights-administrative-law-essay.php>

[vi] <https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/08/29/the-literature-of-liberalism.>

[vii] Interview for Woman’s Own, September 23, 1987, < https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689>

[viii] Tao Te Ching, LVII, 132.

[ix] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford University Press, 1972, pages 136-142

[x] <https://aeon.co/essays/aztec-moral-philosophy-didnt-expect-anyone-to-be-a-saint>

[xi] From Fay Alberti’s essay on loneliness <https://aeon.co/ideas/one-is-the-loneliest-number-the-history-of-a-western-problem>

[xii] See Article 4, op cit, and quoted earlier.

I first met Dick and Jane twenty five years ago at a seminar. It was the launch of a new initiative, a two-day preview of a program designed to offer senior managers from all sectors of the economy the opportunity to step away from their focus on mission statements and objectives, resource management, competitive strategies, and all the other demanding work of running an enterprise. Instead, they would be reading extracts from writers on politics, philosophy and human behaviour, debating ethical and moral topics, and exploring issues outside the world of the organisation. While much of the time would be spent sitting around a table, examining and dissecting readings, the full program might include a visit to an art gallery, listening to an expert talking about two or three paintings, or going to a play, meeting the director beforehand, and the actors afterwards. During this two-day introduction, we were offering a sample of the approach.

Several leaders, both men and women, had been invited by one of their peers. I asked that each attendee be told those coming were encouraged to bring his or her partner with them. My reasoning was simple: if we were to have any impact on how these leaders saw the world, then the most important person in their life had to be part of that process. Although that reason wasn’t set out in the invitation, most did bring a partner, and the resulting mix around the table was ideal, balancing men and women, private sector and government, media and welfare.

Sitting around a large oval table, I introduced a discussion based on an extract from Plato’s Republic. I asked one of the corporate titans to read aloud a paragraph from the piece. He did, and, as I expected, everyone was now looking at the words more closely (I had to wonder how many had actually read the whole extract, one of three that had been sent out as ‘pre-reading’). I turned to Jane, whose husband was the CEO of one of Australia’s largest companies. “How would you answer the question, Jane.” To my surprise, she answered: “My husband always answers the questions”. I waited. After a pause, she replied, and her comments sparked off an excellent discussion. We were truly launched: Socratic style sessions were interspersed with some music and meals. Everyone enjoyed themselves, even those who had come in the belief, soon dispelled, that they would be able to out-talk and out-shine their colleagues.

I didn’t know it at the time, but some months later, a friend told me it seemed the two-day seminar might have been a turning point for Jane. She decided to do more than be a CEO’s trophy wife, an attractive and thoughtful partner. She wanted to learn about places she visited when accompanying her husband, but in doing so to explore her own interests. She went to Japan for three months to acquire some basic Japanese, to help her learn about the culture, the food and the traditions of the country. She started to live a life she felt worth living, for herself. And yes, as far as I know Jane and Dick are still married!

I would see Jane from time to time. Her daughter was an older student at the school my youngest daughter attended. Then our daughter transferred to another school, and our paths never crossed again. However, I was to meet Dick a couple of years later. I had called on a number of CEOs, trying to get them to support an initiative for what was called at the time ‘inclusive leadership’. It must seem rather dated now, but at the time I was involved in a project to introduce executives to the idea that success came from embracing diversity, and, even more challenging for some, to seeing the role of the leader as enabling others, rather than simply telling them what to do. It was hard work, and many, even most, thought it was another management fad. They had good reason to be suspicious: there were always ‘consultants’ coming to tell them what they should do next.

Dick was the next on my list. Arriving at the top floor of the building, I was unprepared for what I saw as I stepped out. It appeared just Dick, his two PAs, and a few other support staff occupied the whole vast area. From the reception desk, I was sent along a corridor, with an artfully curving design, noticing small windows inset every twenty feet or so, behind each of which was some exquisite piece of art, almost always from the “far East”. By the time I reached Dick’s office, it was as if I had transitioned into another world, another dimension. No sounds could be heard, neither from the street outside nor from within the building. I managed to stifle the obvious question (how do you keep in touch with what’s going on, not the facts on your computer, but the reality?), but instead, launched into my prepared presentation on inclusiveness and participation. He smiled, and explained, as others had before, all about his company’s objectives, focussed on growth, building wealth for the country and for the employees.

I struggled on, trying to convince him about corporate social responsibility, environmental issues, social accountability. I should add that his company was a poor performer on all those issues. Eventually, I stopped my obviously unsuccessful attempt to sell the idea. Instead, I decided to ask a question: “What kind of world are you trying to create for your daughter, and for her children?” By luck, I had found a point of real connection, and we talked for some time. His company did become more inclusive and more responsible over time. Not because of me, but external events conspired to shine a strong light on some of the less than ideal practices they had followed. And possibly, just possibly, I was one of the people who had alerted him to the importance of thinking differently to address the challenges that lay ahead.

Dick and Jane. Obviously not their real names, they were appropriated from the early childhood readers, popular in the US in the 1940s and 1950’s.[i] I was tempted to name them Peter and Jane, the lead characters in the UK series, Ladybird Books my children read in the early 1960s. I have to wonder why I chose to use those names. In part, the couple I have been describing were, in some ways, examples of the white, affluent and nice world those children’s books depicted (I wonder if they ever said, “see Spot run”, while substituting the name of their own dog?). But the books were sexist, monocultural (almost racist), and stunningly dull: try reading ‘Fun with Dick and Jane’ to see what I mean! [ii] My real-life Dick and Jane were nothing like that.

Why talk about Dick and Jane? There is another reason. It has to do with the stages of life. And that was brought home to me by being given a short book, a guide to managing the transition from work to the next stage of life, life after retirement. It reminded me of them.

There is a nice little story, a myth is the best description, about the stages of life. It goes like this. Stage 1 is childhood, the images of which flow through those Dick and Jane books. Children having fun, playing games, playing with Spot, going on adventures; above all, innocent, free and uncorrupted. The world centred around the child, with meals appearing as needed, clothes always washed and smart, everyone nice and thoughtful. Ever grumpy, no wonder I loved Richmal Crompton and her grubby and mischievous hero William, scourge of the other children at school: now there’s a child closer to the real world!

Stage 2 is about adults and work, paid work or unpaid child rearing and housework. All those dreams and aspirations to be had as a child become, as this story goes, subsumed by the need to work, to earn money. Work takes over; interests and hopes take second place; and aspirations and rewards become focussed on the job, the workplace, or on supporting the ‘breadwinner’. Finally, Stage 3 is retirement. The golden years, freed from the 9-5 routine older people enjoy their leisure, playing golf or bridge, spending time with their children’s children, travelling, looking after the garden, reading, and, yes, watching (lots of) television.

It’s all nonsense, of course, but myths serve a purpose. This myth about our lives divides time into three parts: fun at the beginning, fun at the end, and responsible and hardworking for a long time in the middle. It is a myth that suits the world of organisations, where your world becomes theirs. It is a myth that suits the organisation of our lives, where the educational system takes over stage 1, the world of work takes over stage 2, and retirement industries manage stage 3.

Aimed at senior executives, the book I was given focussed on the transition that takes place at retirement, moving on from a time when your life wasn’t really yours, but owned by work. It recommended various ‘strategies’ to adopt as you face this point: take time to think, develop a plan, look to the past to identify what you want to do, remain open and flexible, look after your health, continue to learn, take up old hobbies, try something new, be a good partner, have a written transition plan, talk to advisors. Unexceptional, but by the time I got to the end of the booklet, I could see this was an exhaustive and exhausting agenda; following it might prove to be harder than the job from which a would-be retiree was transitioning.

I lost touch with Dick and Jane, but I did know Dick never transitioned. He remained working as hard as he ever had, on the boards of several large corporations and running some other businesses of his own. Dick was defined by work, and his status at work. As for Jane, I really don’t know. It pleases my imagination to believe she continued to grow and change.

And there’s the point. Chopping up life into stages reflects the convenience of the organisations around us. People either succumb to the demands made of them, accepting ‘this is who and where I am’, or they continue to develop, explore and change.

Many years ago, my views about stages of development were shaken up when I read a book by Philippe Ariès, which proved to be a fascinating and ultimately very controversial book about childhood,[iii] especially children in the medieval era. Ariès argued that childhood was not recognized and treated as a distinct and separate phase of life then, and that there was much less separation between adults and children in medieval society. He suggested children were seen as rather more like miniature adults, and our current concept of childhood as a developmental phase was something that emerged during the 17th Century. Well, he was French, his stuff was hard to translate, and the idea wasn’t much liked. Critics piled up contrary arguments, while some supporters found data to suit his views. There remains only disagreement: we don’t know, and as a novelist wrote at the beginning of one of his books, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. [iv]

I took Philippe Ariès suggestions a different way. I liked the idea that each individual has an ongoing, evolving trajectory, and that talk about stages of life, childhood, retirement, are mainly a consequence of culture, the ways society likes to organise us, constructs to sort us out.

The more I thought about transitions, I was reminded of the way in which a snake sheds an old skin, sloughing off the old. My friends at Wikipedia [v] tell me that snakes get rid of their old skin by rubbing against some kind of abrasive surface. The skin that is left behind is longer than their bodies (something to do with the skin covering the scales on the body). It is also the case that, quite often, when losing their old skin, snakes eyes can become milky, and they can’t see clearly.

What a marvelous analogy to use, because it is really a process of no real change at all. First of all, snakes don’t change when they shed their old skins, they are simply growing, and getting older! What they leave behind is bigger than they were: rather like people producing long and ‘full’ resumes of their work experience? Moreover, the process of getting rid of the old is brought about by discomfort, rubbing up against things. That sounds rather like experiencing discomforts at work and wanting to change, but not to something too different; a better job, with better people, but doing what you already do well, and finally, better paid! Best of all, the shedding process is one of temporary blindness, not seeing what is really going on. It sounds as though shedding our old skin is a bit like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire!

When I read that book on transitions, I had two reactions. The first was to think about my meetings with Dick and Jane, especially Dick. His life was defined by work, his position, his status in the community. Perhaps he was fortunate, but there was no ‘transition’ for him. He continued to do what he had always done. Jane might have been more of a ‘work in progress’. Then I thought about those many people for whom retirement is like confronting a cliff edge. They have to move forward, the ground underneath them is going to disappear, and they have no idea where they will land. Blind while shedding a skin.

In the end, I started to feel annoyed. Most people are the victims of the increasing ‘organisation’ of lives, moved from one part of the system to the next, school to college to work. Just occasionally, they are exposed to the reality of what is happening, and confronting retirement must be like that. I’m lucky. I’ve always been moving on to something new, avoiding capture by one organisation or another, and my life today is the happiest I have ever been, not a transition, but a culmination of the things I like do. For many others, retirement is a scary end.

I felt sad, too, thinking about wasted and unfulfilled lives. Mulling it over, my thinking took another course: I suppose it was Spot who led me to wonder if people like having a dog because a dog represents the freedom they could never have? “See Spot run”: running free. Fancy that, a dog’s life might be the best of all!

[i] A nice summary is here: < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_and_Jane>

[ii] The children’s reading book. There is a novel, and two film versions of the novel, also called ‘Fun with Dick and Jane’. By all accounts neither the book nor the two films were fun!

[iii] Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, translated by Robert Baldrick, Knopf, 1962; this was a translation of the original French text published by Plon in 1960

[iv] L P Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953, Hamish Hamilton, page 1

[v] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakeskin>

 

I was seduced twenty-five years ago.  It didn’t take long.  From Monday 19 October to Friday 30 October, it took just 12 days to win me over.  I was in Wye Woods, Maryland, and I was ready and willing, ‘hot to trot’!  In case you’re already wondering, my wife was with me, and my seducer was a fragile 66-year-old man.[i]  Ready and willing?  I was ready to go back to where I had been in 1965, and more than willing to do it again.  I was taking part in one of The Aspen Institute’s Executive Seminars.

Alright, that was a bit silly.  I am referring to the time when I rediscovered the insights that come from reading great writers and the power of learning through moderated discussion.  Today, reflecting on the silver anniversary of that seminar, I was reminded of Jim O’Toole, one of the regular moderators at The Aspen Institute, and his paper on ‘The Four Poles of the Good Society’ (later published as one of the chapters in his book ‘The Executive’s Compass’)[ii].  As a way of helping participants in the Institute’s Executive Seminar, it made a simple but telling point:  good societies aren’t one thing or another, they are always a compromise between equally compelling alternatives.  In his analysis, there were two particularly important tensions, between individualism and community, and between equality and efficiency.  You can imagine these two sets of extremes defining a space of possibilities, and a good society as an ever-changing balance, from time to time shifting to a different point on each of the two continua.

Where is the balance today?  It seems to me that we are moving much closer to two end points, placing greater emphasis on individualism, and on efficiency.  America has always been a country that champions individual rights, and which place great emphasis on maximising returns and minimising costs.  As such it appears to offer an excellent case study in considering the nature of a good society, and might illustrate a timely warning as to what happens when we move too far from the middle ground of compromise.

But I began these remarks by saying I was seduced.  For twenty-five years I have continued to base much of what I do on what I rediscovered that late Autumn.  I use moderated discussion as often as I can, as a way to introduce others to ideas and perspectives that may help them in their lives and work.  I re-introduce men and women, managers and administrators, the self-employed and the unpaid on home duties, and students and retirees to reading and to thinking.  I abandoned talking about the world of ‘ploc’ in 1992 (the acronym much loved by many managers – plan, lead, organise and control’, a world I never lived in!) for the seductive land of ‘star’ (study, think, act, re-examine’).  I’d like to think I’ve enabled others down that path.

Seduced?  Perhaps I need to stand back, and think again.  It could be argued the nature of society has changed so much that these ‘poles’ of a good society make little sense.  It seems we might be witnessing two competing attempts for our attention: the Scylla of “Yes We Can” and Obama’s attempt to create a good society, and the Charybdis of “Make America Great Again” and Trump’s attempt to restore the way things were.  Are both like sirens, dragging us off course?

Does an Executive Compass help?  Perhaps not.  Seduction can blind you to flaws!  Who goes to The Aspen Institute?  The good and the great:  that should have been sufficient warning.

Before I continue, I notice that many articles today about a book or a film use the term ‘spoiler alert’, to warn you might not want to know what is about to be revealed.  So here is your spoiler alert.  In the next few paragraphs, I am going to try to see the world as many Trump supporters and people on ‘the right’ of politics do – and justify it!

Is America the epitome of individualism?  Critics from the right claim it is not.  They seek to save individual rights against what are seen to be two unrelenting, crushing forces.  One is government, with its desire to regulate and control.  The other is big business, exploiting workers by outsourcing manufacturing to cheap labour overseas, employing migrants rather than the locally born.  Both have to be resisted to save the country from moral and economic decline.

At present, two constitutional rights are the focus of attention.  One is the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  Many see this bundle of rights under threat.  The government has taken steps to make abortion and gay marriage legal, acting against “god’s word”.[iii]  For people who fought in wars to save and promote democracy and the American way of life, these threats are a repudiation of what was being saved.  That roadside sign says it all very clearly: the soldier kneeling before a religious cross “all gave some, some gave all”; they were fighting for god and country, and now the country is tossing god aside.

As we recover from the latest massacre, a shooting spree in Las Vegas, many continue to be concerned about threats to the Second Amendment, that curiously worded statement: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”.  The focus is on the second part of that amendment, and they fear the government is trying to take that right away.  Many of these same people do accept that this does not mean a right to own machine guns, or even the oddly named ‘bump stock’ that turns a rifle into a machine gun style of weapon.  However, they also will point out that “guns don’t kill people, people do”.  You might not agree with that view, but it resonates in rural areas.  The freedom to own a gun (or guns) is now seen as a bellwether over the government seeking to restrict the rights of the individual.

Yet another sign of the government’s encroachment on individual rights concerns vaccination.  Vaccination is seen as dangerous[iv].  It conflicts with the views of a number of religions[v].  Perhaps, most fundamentally, many believe the government should not intervene in personal medical choices, both conflicting with the First Amendment.  It’s about liberty, succinctly expressed in John Stuart Mill’s view that “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”[vi].

Against these views, the response from the other side of politics is often the simple statement “you’re wrong”.  That’s provocative and unhelpful.  It is clear that ‘representative democracy’ can lead to the election of governments which can exercise the ‘tyranny of the majority’.  That is why individual rights are important.  But when the rights of one minority conflict with the rights of another – gay rights up against religious rights – then we face an impasse, especially if we emphasise rights without accepting obligations.  Surely, my right to live the way I want has to be balanced against my responsibility to accept diversity.  Once more we can turn to what Mill said: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”[vii].

Many from the right are concerned about the loss of jobs, increasing unemployment, the steady shift of many manufacturing activities overseas (where, quite correctly, these critics can see the work is done more cheaply), and the employment of immigrants willing to work for low wages.  In this case, where the concern is about an individual’s ability to get a job (a well-paying job), the government is criticised for lack of action, not for inappropriate encroachment on individual rights.  It should be closing borders, and making firms carry out their activities onshore, stamping out ‘outsourcing’.

These critics articulate and channel the experience of many living in rural areas, where concerns over the loss of rights and outsiders taking over are compounded by a sense of decline.  Roads are deteriorating, schools are poorly resourced, businesses are moving to the big cities, and the largely white residents feel they are ignored while they believe support goes to ‘people of colour’. To compound all these indicators, there is little doubt that income inequality is increasing, as the affluent are becoming increasingly affluent.[viii]

To repeat: for many of these people, their experience is about decline, depression and disadvantage, and they see their plight. the plight of millions, is easily ignored by government and the urban rich.  As communities decline, so do services.  Health, welfare, and education are all slowly disintegrating.  The quality of life is deteriorating.  If they still cling on to the American Dream, epitomised by Horatio Alger’s stories of going from rags to riches, those living in the terminal areas of America are coming to terms with the reality those opportunities are shrinking, possibly disappearing altogether for the foreseeable future.

Have I made my point?  It is easy to criticise the views of those on the right.  However, if we try the difficult task of standing in their shoes (setting aside the ravings of extremists), their views are neither senseless nor ideological.  Moreover, in trying to understand what is happening through the framework of the four poles of a good society, it is not so easy to claim that the country is slipping towards individualism rather than community.  The rugged individualism that characterised the pioneer years has long gone, and individualism today is a contested, confusing space.

How are the concerns of many on the right being heard? What are the comments from those on the other side?  Those on the right are told that guns are killing more and more Americans.  That isn’t true, (and while the number of mass shootings is increasing, they still represent a very small proportion of all gun related deaths).  America does have a very high rate of gun killings, more than twenty times the rate in other affluent countries.  However, if you support the right to carry a firearm, you know it is people who kill people, and you will need a gun to protect yourself.  That’s where the trouble sits, other people, people who are terrorists, people who are ill (or ‘evil’), people who have lost hope (and it is still the case that more gun deaths are suicides than any other reason, accounting for around two thirds of all gun related deaths[ix]).

They are told that government regulations stop companies investing in rural areas, regulations over fossil fuels and pollution, regulations over occupational health and safety.  Wouldn’t it be better to ease back on these, so at least there are jobs?  They hear people from the left talking about gay marriage, transgender youth, and cultural appropriation.  These are ideas antithetical to many of the churches that hold these communities together.  Those people from the left are not ‘God-fearing’ and they should be.  I could continue, but I am sure you get the point.  Most of the people I have put in this loose category of ‘on the right’ are neither illogical nor stupid.  Fearful?

Yes.  Sometimes credulous?  Yes.  Understood?  A lot of the time, the answer is no.

Because you are still reading this, you are almost certainly from the left, in my simple model of American society.  Do I need to carry out the same kind of description of views I did for those on the right?  I don’t think so.  Quickly, they are the opposite of the views outlined above.  Abortion is a choice to protect the reproductive rights of women (as well as dealing with rape and other unwanted sexual activity).  Transgender and gay individuals are members of society, and are entitled to the same rights as everyone else.  High rates of gun ownership are clearly linked to high rates of gun deaths.  Immigration has been one of the major drivers of growth in the economy.  Cycles of business disruption occur regularly, and are the result of innovation; innovation which brings us new products and services, and keeps American companies in world leadership positions.

Yes, my explanation is simplistic, painting a picture of two worlds, each poorly understanding the other, with little common ground.  My point is the division is not about individuality having primacy over community, as both sides seek a greater attention to individual rights.  Nor is it about a greater emphasis on equality.  Both sides want a fairer world.  A sociologist might argue we are facing anomie, usually described as a condition of instability found in societies “resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals”.  We certainly lack common values, standards and purpose today,

The problem with talking about ‘poles’ is that there are only four of them.  If O’Toole’s critique is valuable, it was in drawing our attention to the idea good societies aren’t one thing or another, they are always a compromise between equally compelling alternatives.  If it is unhelpful, it is in limiting the areas of compromise.

Where is the critique of Oligopoly, a market structure in which a small number of firms has the large majority of market share? An oligopoly is similar to a monopoly, except that rather than one firm, two or more firms dominate the market, as a result of which they can greatly influence price and other market factors: oligopoly versus free markets.  In understanding that world, we might need another pair of opposed characteristics – perhaps they are orthodoxy versus innovation.  Orthodoxy is about groupthink, the tendency of corporations to see the world through their eyes, to be rigid and controlling.  This is the world we see created by companies like Facebook and Google.  Innovation is where new ideas are pursued and supported.  This is the process we are told is being sustained by companies like Facebook and Google.  Funny that.

Where is the critique of Plutocracy, where a country is governed by the wealthy, and power is provided by wealth?  I saw, with a grim smile, the cartoon in my local paper today:  the two State senators for North Carolina are being asked to comment on the shooting in Las Vegas and the need for gun control.  They can’t reply, because both have their mouths stuffed full of money (they are the second and fourth senators ranked in terms of donations given by the NRA).  Democracy versus plutocracy.  At least I am clear about this one:  the balance is way over to plutocracy.  The current president and his gang must comprise one of the most venal governments this country has ever seen.   Ruled by the mercenary.

Yes, I was seduced.  The four poles model is a comfortable one to explore, as it downplays the realities of exploitation by governments and business, and glosses over the self-interested motives of those in power.  It made good sense in the seemingly untroubled world of the 1990s, a framework to measure progress to a better society.  Comforting for businessmen and public servants:  it’s just a matter of twirling the dials!

Wrong: it’s all there in the Aspen readings; we just have to pay attention!  Glaucon and his story in The Republic, where Gyge’s ring is about self-interest as the driver of behaviour.  Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War, describing the power politics of the Athenians as they crush the Melians.  It’s a multi-polar world, and we need to spend more attention to some of the other poles:  plutocracy as opposed to democracy; oligopoly as opposed to the free market.  Maybe even deeper than that:  we need to return to a critique of capitalism and the role of money, and toss away that shonky stuff Locke wrote defending private property.  Can we save humanity from the ills of today?  Stop treating companies as if they are people, and money as the measure of all things.  Go back to examining what’s happening.  Read.  Think.  Good or great – or is it too late?

Seduced and then abandoned, but I’m still thinking!  Maybe I should end on a lighter note.  Checking on definitions, I came across a form of government I had not encountered before: capracracy[x].  What is it?  Rule by goat.  The comment “without a doubt, the most superior form of governance known to man or to goat”.  Perhaps that’s all we deserve!

 

[i] Charles van Doren was the moderator of The Aspen Institute Executive Seminar, held at their campus on the shores of the Chesapeake.  He had become famous in 1957, as the contestant in Twenty One, a quiz show, in which he admitted he had been ‘coached.’  Whatever his past, as a seminar facilitator, he was superb.

[ii] The Executive’s Compass, Oxford University Press, 1995

[iii] I know that many church leaders do not share these views, but many others do.  Their congregations can quote biblical text which makes it clear marriage is between a man and a woman, that abortion is murder.

[iv] There are risks.  CDC, “Possible Side-Effects from Vaccines,” www.cdc.gov, Feb. 4, 2014.  They are very low probability, but they exist.

[v] Universal Family Church, “FAQ,” www.universalfamilychurch.org (accessed June 11, 2014)

 

[vi] From Chapter 1 of ‘On Liberty’

[vii] Ibid.  Incidentally, He tended to talk about men. This was before Harriet Mill helped him realise that men and women should be seen as equal!

[viii] A good summary of trends can be found here: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality

[ix] A useful summary is provided by FiveThirtyEight based on Centre for Disease Control data.  Males account for 85% of suicides, more than half are aged over 45.  See: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

[x] See: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_forms_of_government