We must deal with the Earth on the Earth's terms.
C E N T E R FOR R E F L E C T I O N ON T H E S E C O N D L A W
Affiliated with The Riverdale Center for Religious Research
James F. Berry
American Teilhard Assoc.
June 20, 1993
Circular No. 154
CORPORATE AMERICA
A Rewrite of Circular 122
"The human community and the earth community together form
the single sacred community. We go into the future as a
single sacred community or we both perish in the desert."
That's the core message Thomas Berry has been presenting to
audiences of late. The desert, for him, is the wasteland
created by the industrial giants who see the Earth as a
storehouse designed for exploiting and a bottomless
receptacle for disposal of residues. And they see human
work as a commodity to be used in pursuit of industry's
objectives.
This brings up the subject of how to think about industrial
America, or what some call Corporate America: that
establishment of national and international commercial
enterprises devoted to production and sales, that section
of the economy controlled by large companies devoted to
their own success in terms of growth and shareholder
profit. The presumption is that the success of industrial
America is identical with the success of the society as a
whole.
Corporate America owns most of the resource base and the
land that holds it; owns the means of production; owns the
jobs and, with the jobs, controls access to money and
access to the market; has heavy, heavy influence over the
universities; propounds much of the philosophy by which we
live; effectively controls important segments of the
government. Most importantly, corporate America controls
major segments of the principal avenues into our minds: the
TV, the radio, and the newspaper. They have secured
acceptance for their dominant role in our economic and
political lives to the point where they are almost
universally appreciated as a benign presence in the nation
and the world. The success of the big corporations is a
matter of major governmental concern at all levels.
National, state, and local governments are exceedingly
anxious to please corporate America and to help it
flourish. Since unemployment is a major, major concern and
since wage paying jobs are provided by profitable industry,
the entire society finds itself indebted to corporate
America for its well-being. By and large, that is thought
to be a good arrangement. But in fact, it is bringing on
the failure of nearly every ecological system on Earth.
--------------------------------------------------------"The human community and the earth community together form
the single sacred community. We go into the future as a
single sacred community or we both perish in the desert."
--------------------------------------------------------Inasmuch as the state of mind in which we function controls
the decisions we make, it must be said that we tend to
believe that what makes for corporate health is in the best
interests of us all. "What's good for GM is good for the
nation." We seem generally to be satisfied with production
and consumption as a way of life, disregarding the fact that
the success of such a system depends on a continuing assault
on the natural world. The voice speaking to us most
persuasively wants us to believe that our economic system is
the best that can be had, bar none. But the ecological
disaster that our economic system results in can no longer
be ignored. Increasingly we understand that unless we go
into the future demanding that the single sacred community
flourish rather than the industrial world, we are in fact
due to perish in the desert.
This is not to say that the corporate world does not
include a good many of the saintliest people of our age,
people whose personal heroism and compassion toward their
fellow creatures are on a scale that rivals that of the
giants of history. The corporate world is full of good
people. Their problem is that the corporate system demands
that the corporation produce as great a profit as is
possible without regard to any restraint except law, and
the law is to be bent and twisted in the pursuit of more
profit. None of the saintly officers make decisions that
defy that rule. And since the flourishing of the
corporation is the impoverishment of Earth, these "good"
people are unable to act in the interest of the life
community. They must act in the interests of the
corporation. It is this system we attack while we pay heed
to another truism, "good people are dangerous, and the
better they are the worse they are."
Corporate America closely resembles the abstraction
economists have devised called homo economicus, an
imaginary creature who acts only in accordance with selfinterest, whose wants are insatiable, who is unconcerned
with other people's satisfactions or sufferings, and knows
neither benevolence nor malevolence. Economists regularly
use this creature in their analyses, despite the fact that
it has little similarity to real people. But it does have
great similarity to the profit-oriented corporation.
Corporations hold only to one measure of value: money. They
are absolutely devoid of spirituality and incapable of
morally directed behavior; devoid of compassion; practically
devoid of any but money accountability; have little
comprehension for justice and peace, except as it affects
the bottom line; profit from war; succeed by depleting
whatever resource they depend on, while dumping poisonous
wastes into the commons for the human community and the earth
community to deal with. Examples abound: petroleum, mining,
timber, agriculture, chemistry, transportation, and their
support industries.
Corporations deal with the Earth and earthstuff by converting
resources into money at the fastest possible rate, maximizing
profits primarily over the short term. Growth is a constant
goal. We know all this, but we allow corporation values to
overwhelm human values and even religious values. Indeed, it
seems true that insofar as the human and religious values of
compassion function in this society, corporation dominance is
strengthened because suffering is relieved to the point where
public disorder is averted. The relief activities practiced by
the churches and the United Appeal, etc., take attention away
from the true causes of poverty and suffering: an unjust
economic system that is aimed at exploiting human work, and the
reduction of Earth to a wasteland. The acceptance of that
economic system as the best system available holds us captive,
unable to imagine that there might be a way out, that there
might be other ways to do things; to imagine that human work
could possibly be directed to the support of the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the community of life, instead of to
the success of industry.
It can be rightly said that corporations are committed to
death, to the death of the seas, the forests, the atmosphere,
the soil, and therefore the extinction of life on earth. A
thousand-year-old redwood is only worth what it will bring on
the market after it is cut. It was once explained to me by a
professor at the University of Wisconsin: the logic of interest
and the belief that true value can be expressed in money
equivalents, if interests rates are high enough, makes it sense
to hunt the blue whale to extinction. The money return on the
profit from taking the last pod of whales now will be greater
than what could be realized through exploiting the progeny of
the pod over millennia. It is this measurement of worth in
terms of market value, in money, that distorts our sense of
good and bad so severely.
A principal, if not the principal, argument for the continued
dominance of the corporation is the fact that huge numbers of
people derive their means of livelihood from employment by
corporations. In effect, big industry organizes and directs
human work. If a corporation goes under, so do its employees.
And that gets us down to the nub. What gets protected, the
success of industry and the wages of workers, or the future of
the life system? We can go along with Corporate America and
survive for a while longer, or we can decide that future
desolation is not preferable to present difficulty. If we take
the latter course, we can throw off the grasp that the
economic system holds on our minds and start thinking for
ourselves. There is enough stuff, there is enough money, and
there is enough brains. Stop thinking like the system wants us
to think, and start thinking in terms of how best the human
community and the earth community, together the single sacred
community, can go into the future. This is the challenge: Is
it the life community we cherish, or a system that works in the
short run but means devastation in the long run?
Religion has always been extremely uneasy with acceptance of
the corporations as controlling in our political and economic
lives. Religion is, or ought to be, a powerful voice for
morality and justice, for the practice of virtue and sensible
rules for living. It ought to persuade us to reject selfindulgence, which is the cornerstone philosophy of the
consumer economy. R.H. Tawney's masterful book Religion And
the Rise of Capitalism, published in 1925 from lectures made
in 1922, still lives in the backs of the minds of religious
students of our times, who believe in moral equity and
justice. "The odorous taint of the pursuit of riches" has been
quieted by a religion-wide olfactory autism but the stench is
still there. The acceptance of capitalism and the failure of
religion to see itself as a guardian of justice for the natural
world are the greatest tragedies of the industrial age -attributable, I suppose, to the doctrine that salvation out of
this world is the road to paradise. But there are growing
signs of churches and church people who understand that the
human community and the Earth community do, in fact, form the
single sacred community. There are signs that a few of them
want to lead congregations into an appreciation for the need
to change into lives of simplicity.
Increasingly, I believe that the nation's moralists and
philosophers, when they examine our situation, must conclude
that we cannot allow the major effort of human work to be
exerted in the service of the corporations, in the pursuit of
interests not at all compatible with the interests of the
human community and the life community to which we belong. A
few leading thinkers, like Herman Daly and John Cobb Jr. and
many others too, prescribe the "Common Good" as the organizing
principle for our entry into the future, which is to say that
the common good is the good of the single sacred community.
--------------------Fall Conference — Camp New Hope October 29, 30, 31
Therefore the Center for Reflection on the Second Law is
scheduling the Fall conference to consider the whole idea of
work. The conference is not yet planned in detail, but there
will be sessions on the philosophy of work, on how to
evaluate work according to what it accomplishes, and
practical sessions on how to make a living while avoiding
service to corporate America. Please make suggestions — you
can get in on the planning.
ADVISORS TO CFRSL
Stephanie Bass, Peter Berg, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Hal
Crowther, Billy Cummings, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, David
Haenke, Hazel Henderson, Bill Holman, Charles Mulholland,
John Papworth, Anne Pflaum, Beth Pflaum, Zach Ralston,
Sallie Ricks, Robert Rodale, Kirk Sale, Jane Sharp, Charlene
Spretnak, Clay Stalnaker, Brian Swimme.
recycled paper