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By
Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J.
 I was living in Washington
state when riots rocked the city of Seattle during the meeting
of the World Trade Organization
two years ago. I was a safe 300 miles and a mountain range
away in Spokane, but we noted with considerable interest—and
for some a certain perverse satisfaction—the travails of
our larger and wealthier neighbor. Seattle had been caught
completely off guard. Like the rest of the country, the city
was stunned by the size and intensity of the protests. The
protesters represented a wild variety of issues and points
of view, which seemed to have little coherence. But what
appeared to unite them and fuel their fury was a deep distrust
of private business (especially multinational corporations),
a sense that the interests of ordinary people were being
neglected and abused, and a conviction that government was
unable or unwilling to control those corporations and defend
the interests of the people. The protesters saw that dynamic
at work in environmental exploitation, sweatshops and other
labor abuses, third world
poverty and debt and so on.
The scene has been repeated several times now, most recently
in Genoa. Personally I think that the protesters’ analyses
of many of the issues have been simplistic. I don’t think
business, even when it operates on a global scale, is inherently
evil. But I do think the widespread perception that corporate
interests have become far more powerful vis-à-vis
government and the individual is worth examining. I think
that there has been a shift in power and influence away from
government and other public institutions toward private corporations.
I mean no disrespect toward government officials when I say
this. After all, it has been the stated goal of Governor
Swift and her party to “shrink government,” and in fact most
Clinton-era Democrats have gone along with that. And this
program has been successful over the last 20 years.
We can see many indications of this shift in influence
in our own country. Certainly the economy dominates domestic
policy and national news. We have witnessed the deregulation
of many industries that had operated in a quasi-public manner—from
the airlines to energy companies to telecoms—and the privatization
of functions that had been dominated by government and nonprofits,
most notably health care and now, increasingly, education.
The opening of many public lands to private use for lumbering,
grazing, mining, the shift from welfare to work, and the
dramatic loss of influence and membership by the unions are
further signs of the growing power of corporate interests
in relation to the rest of society.
Technology, my own area of expertise, has helped bring
about that shift. Years ago the fear was that technology
would give government the power to intrude on and control
our lives. For the most part, that has not happened. It is
really business—always more enterprising, efficient and forward
looking—that has found ways to use technology to extend its
influence, as recent controversies over privacy, including
consumer privacy, privacy of medical records, and so on,
have shown.
I am not saying this development is good or bad. It simply is. I taught in
a business school for 10 years, and I have a great appreciation for the virtues
of the free market, the benefits it can bring, and even its power as a democratizing
force. However, the increased power and influence of corporate interests also
mean increased power and influence of those who guide those interests. As Jesus
said, “Of those to whom more is given, more will be expected.”
The interesting question is: what does it mean to be
a good, i.e., moral, CEO or manager in this environment? In
the past, it was pretty clear what it meant to be a good
business leader: dealing honestly and fairly with others,
taking care of your employees, paying your share of taxes,
doing some pro bono or charity work, and so on. More recently
we have learned to do stakeholder analysis, which gives
us a better view of the many complex relationships that
exist in the corporate world and a way of defining our
obligations in each case. Both approaches are still very
important, of course. But I would suggest that there is
another dimension that somehow needs to be considered.
It is what we often refer to as the “common good.”
The common good means the interests of the community as
a whole, not just as a group of individuals, but as that
complex network of institutions, relationships, values and
supports that human beings need to flourish. It is this network
of church, family, civic association, and so on, that has
suffered as the free market ideology, with its ethic of extreme
individualism and competition, has come to dominate not just
our economic lives but our consciousness and most of our
activities.
There are two areas where this has become especially problematical.
One is the increasingly aggressive encroachment on what has
traditionally been known as “the commons,” that is, those
resources that are meant to benefit society as a whole and
therefore are held in common, not under the control of any
private interest. For example, as people come to realize
the centrality of “intellectual property” in the new
economy, businesses and individuals are engaged in a huge
scramble to tie up every possible idea, every spoken or written
word or melody, and every little tidbit of personal information.
Companies have been patenting business plans, procedures,
algorithms, and other very broad concepts in hopes of controlling
whole industries, to the detriment of scientific and cultural
progress. There has been tremendous political pressure, much
of it from the entertainment, publishing and software industries,
to broaden copyright and get rid of the principle of fair
use, on which education and many other segments of the community
have always depended for open access to information. Even
common facts are seen as subject to ownership. The NBA recently
sued Stats, Inc., a sports information service, claiming
it owns the scores to its games. So far the NBA has won.
The problem with this is that information is what binds
communities together. After all, an important element of
intimacy is the sharing of information about oneself. A big
part of friendship and community is sharing news, telling
stories, trading sports statistics and facts. We love to
talk about Pedro’s ERA and Manny’s batting average, and what
the score of last night’s Red Sox game was. If knowledge
becomes something to be bought and sold exclusively, it makes
our society much less open.
Access to ideas, information and techniques is essential
for economic participation and growth. Richard Stallman,
the legendary programmer, tabbed by the writer Stephen Levy
as “the Last True Hacker,” and winner of a MacArthur genius
grant, argues passionately that information, and especially
software, must be free. Besides citing what he sees as the
greed of those who try to exclude others in the software
community from using their work, Stallman gives two positive
arguments for making computer programs public domain. One
is the need to have a free exchange of ideas to promote scientific
progress. It is simply too wasteful and inefficient to keep
good ideas away from those who could develop and use them.
The other argument is more interesting. It is the notion
of friendship. Friendship means sharing. If the information
and ideas that are most valuable to us are too encumbered
by ownership, it harms friendship and community. For Stallman
that means software. He lives to write code. For us it might
be something else, but the principle is the same.
Now Stallman is an honorable man, so he is not advocating
that we go around passing out copies of Microsoft Office
to all our friends. Rather what he has been trying to do
for the last 15 years is to create a whole software environment
that is free to the public, so that we have something to
pass around without violating any laws or property rights.
As Stallman realizes, the answer is not simply to take
away all claims to ownership of information or intellectual
property. Fairness dictates that those who worked and invested
to create artifacts of commercial or aesthetic value ought
to have some say in how they are used and, if they choose,
be compensated for it. But they should also be willing to
share it for the enrichment of society.
The other area where the common good is under attack is
on access to society’s goods among those on the margins.
What is great about our economy is that so many have been
able to share in it and benefit from it. But not everyone
is included. Those who cannot work, those with minimal skills,
those who cannot care for themselves are more and more being
left out. In the past there has been a network of family,
church, other nonprofit charitable organizations and government
agencies that have been able to look out for them. Now, with
more power and resources shifting to the for-profit sector,
that network is less effective. From a business standpoint,
the marginalized are not stakeholders. They do not count
in any economic calculus.
A good example is in health care. As more and more of the
responsibility for health care moves to the private sector,
especially the for-profit sector, there is perhaps more efficiency
and accountability in the system, but there is also more
pressure to cut loose the non-payers, and even those on Medicare,
who represent a loss to the system. And it is happening,
not because the executives who run those institutions are
evil or uncaring, but because they have to answer to their
shareholders and the brutal law of the marketplace. In modern
times health care has been defined as a basic human right.
Now, however, it is being treated as a commodity.
So there is a need to reassert two values that are at the
very center of the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition: sharing,
that is, holding in common what is most important to the
community and its life; and special care for those who are
most vulnerable in society. And I think that those who are
the most influential people in what is by far the most influential
segment of society have a special obligation to take a leadership
role in that.
How to do this is tricky. Executives still have an obligation
to run efficient, profit-making businesses if they are in
the for-profit sector and not to spend themselves out of
existence if they are a nonprofit. Nor is it enough to act
individually, however well-intentioned. The issues are society-wide
and require society-wide responses.
In the absence of government regulation there at least
has to be some self-restraint, some curb on the appetite
of business to control everything in sight. And if business
is going to dominate society, then it needs to take more
of an interest in the common good, especially for those who
are most vulnerable. We do, in fact, see more corporate-community
partnerships, which I suspect some of you are involved in,
working to improve neighborhoods, provide low-income housing,
build neighborhood clinics, and improve education in under-served
areas. The “Ten Point Coalition” is a wonderful example.
It is that kind of investment in the community that seems
to be a growing model of enlightened business practice.
Robert N. Bellah, the great sociologist at Harvard and
UC Berkeley, author of the classic Habits of the Heart,
in a recent article, wrote about the need for a greater awareness
of and commitment to the common good to balance the individualism
and competitiveness in American culture. He talks about “our
deep cultural code” that “combines privatized piety with
economic freedom in a way that leads to loose connections
and porous institutions and has inundated us with the incessant
language of freedom and responsibility but is virtually inarticulate
about the common good.”
I would suggest that today’s business leaders must see
their work as a vocation. I would argue we must all live
out our faith publicly by making a commitment to build up
that community that is one of the most powerful signs of
God’s presence among us.
This is an excerpt from Fr. McFarland’s address to the
Massachusetts Governor’s Prayer Breakfast, held in Boston
on May 3, 2001.
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