Ethics in America's Money Culture
[1] I am an investment banker. For the last two years, many of the best and brightest in my business have been pleading guilty to illegal acts and marching off to jail. Successful, wealthy, intelligent men turned out to be greedy, arrogant and corrupt.
[2] Why? Because, as much as anything else this situation underlines one of the realities of the so-called service society. Whereas making things, and the activities related to products, were the main preoccupation of prior generations, making money, and the activities related to money, are the driving forces of our society today.
[3] To be wealthy is not sinful; nor is poverty a virtue. But the pursuit of wealth and power is so pervasive today as to create something that may be entirely new--namely, a money culture. When such a culture grows cheek-by-jowl with extreme poverty, it is potentially dangerous.
[4] A recent article indicated that business schools were going to encourage the study of ethics as part of the curriculum. If graduate schools have to discover ethics, then we are truly in serious trouble.
[5] I no more believe that ethics can be taught past the age of 10 than I believe in the teaching of so-called creative writing. There are some things that you are born with, or they are taught by your parents, your priest or your grade-school teacher. But not in college or in graduate school.
[6] I believe that businesses should go back to basics in recruiting, should forget about the business schools and recruit the best young liberal arts students we can find.
[7] The issue of ethics, both in business and in politics, takes on a sharper focus in the money culture of a service economy than in our earlier, industrial days. One of society's main economic activities consists in the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate, insurance, mutual funds, foreign exchange and futures in anything imaginable.
[8] Most of the time, the product being bought or sold only exists on a computer screen or as an electronic impulse on a magnetic tape. There is no discipline applied to the activity other than its ability to generate profit. Movements of capital and the paper economy related to it used to be the result of industrial and commercial activity; now they are the cause.
[9] In a strange way, war and commerce have both become equally depersonalized, carried on by individuals located in windowless rooms, talking into telephones and looking at computer screens, thousands of miles removed from each other. In the case of commerce, they buy and sell. In the case of war, they can incinerate the Earth, without ever seeing another human being.
[10] For the businessmen and the politicians who function in such an environment, virtually the only discipline that can be applied is ethical. Financial scandals are not new, nor is political corruption. However, the potential profit, and the ease with which they can be made from insider trading, market manipulation, conflict-of-interest transactions and many other illegal or unethical activities are too great and too pervasive to be ignored. At the same time, those institutions that historically provided the ethical basis to the society--the family, the church and the primary school--are getting weaker and weaker. Hence, our dilemma.
[11] The application of ethics, as well as overall judgment, is made even more difficult by the increasing application of rapidly changing technology to major problems in our society. How does a layman deal with the questions raised by "Star Wars," genetic engineering, AIDS and the myriad issues relating to the availability and affordability of life-saving drugs and other medical technology? It is clear that one cannot abdicate to the technocrats the responsibility of making judgment on these issues.
[12] Two important risks accompany the discarding of our value system when dealing with a money culture and high technology. The first risk is that more people will turn to radical religion and politics. People always search for frameworks that provide a certain amount of support. If they do not find it in their family, in their school, in their traditional church or in themselves, they will turn to more absolute solutions. Religious fundamentalism and far-right politics are the most likely refuge.
[13] The second risk is the polarization of society. We have created hundreds of paper millionaires and quite a few billionaires. But alongside the wealth and glamour of Manhattan and Beverly Hills, we have seen the growth of a semipermanent or permanent underclass.
[14] In the inner cities and in the rural areas, blacks and Hispanics, poor whites and immigrants are falling further behind because of inadequate education, drugs and a welfare system that systematically destroys family structures. Meanwhile, jobs that can provide a future require higher and higher skills These diverging paths condemn more and more people to a permanent condition of need. A democracy cannot flourish half rich and half poor, anymore than it can flourish half free and half slave.
[15] Traditionally, Americans have characterized themselves, rather simplistically, as conservatives or liberals. The conservative ethic emphasized freedom and the creation of wealth; the liberal ethic, freedom and fairness in the distribution of wealth. Today, conservatives and liberals alike have participated in the greatest borrowing binge in this country's history and both camps wrongly pretend that freedom can only be maintained by an ever escalating arms race, on Earth and in space.
[16] Freedom consists of more than freedom from foreign domination. It consists in freedom from dependency on foreign capital and in the ability of all our citizens to fulfill their destiny. That is not the casein America today. As a country, we are no longer independent economically. As individuals, too many Americans are condemned, from birth, to being economic wards of the state and are underequipped educationally to compete.
[17] The most important function of higher education is to equip the individual with the capacity to compete and to fulfill his or her destiny. A critically important part of this capacity is the ability to critically evaluate a political process that is badly in need of greater public participation. This raises the issue of teaching ethics in graduate schools.
[18] Ethics is a moral compass. Ideally, it should coincide with enlightened self-interest, not only to avoid jail in the short run but to avoid social upheaval in the long run. It must be embedded early, at home, in grade school, in church. It is highly personal. I doubt it can be taught in college.
[19] Yet what is desperately needed in an increasingly complex world dominated by technicians is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides. History, philosophy, logic, English, literature are more important to deal with today's problems than great technical competence.
[20] These skills must combine with an ethical sense acquired early in life to provide the framework needed to make difficult judgments. We most certainly need the creativity of great scientific minds. But all of us cannot be technical experts, nor do we need to be. In the last analysis, only judgment, tempered by a sense of history and a healthy skepticism of cant and ideology will give us the wherewithal to make difficult choices.
Notes to the text:
This essay is taken from the 1989 edition of The College Writer's Reader: Essays on Student Issues by William Vesterman.