NEWS FEATURE: Debating capitalism’s nature _ greed or creativity?

c. 1997 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ Here’s a thought for corporate boards from Rabbi Michael Lerner, publisher of Tikkun magazine and progressive critic of American business: What if every business were required to reincorporate itself every 20 years, and to stay alive had to demonstrate it had improved the lives of its employees, […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Here’s a thought for corporate boards from Rabbi Michael Lerner, publisher of Tikkun magazine and progressive critic of American business:

What if every business were required to reincorporate itself every 20 years, and to stay alive had to demonstrate it had improved the lives of its employees, customers and the community at large?


What kind of case would a tobacco company make?

Or a company making heavy use of part-time, minimum-wage employees?

Or one whose product required leveling rain forests?

For Lerner, speaking on business and religion recently at Tulane University, modern business continues to be too much about “maximizing power and wealth” at the expense of individual employees and the common good.

But to conservative Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher Michael Novak, “capitalism is the economy of the human spirit” because it rewards creativity without regard to rank or class and lifts millions out of historic poverty.

“The best hope of the poor today is business, especially small business,” Novak said in a point-counterpoint appearance with Lerner at Tulane’s A.B. Freeman School of Business.

Both men have deep spiritual sensibilities _ Novak is a theologian, Lerner a new rabbi in the”Jewish Renewal”movement. Each presented different assessments of the ethics of business in contemporary society, but agreed business behaves for good or evil depending on how it respects the dignity of people.

Novak acknowledged capitalism leaves many behind. But he argued its genius for enlightened self-interest is the world’s best-ever model for creating wealth and rewarding virtue.

Its world-changing value, he said, is its power to lift generations out of poverty and degradation in the service of human dignity.

For Lerner, by contrast, modern business is the world of the Dilbert comic strip, where employees too often feel numbed by anonymity, working drone-like in an enterprise of questionable ethical value so someone else can become wealthy off their work.


The enlightened self-interest Novak describes becomes for Lerner a self-centeredness that does not recognize the sacredness of employees, customers or the community until it is in business’ self-interest to do so.

Capitalism too often encourages people to see others not as valuable for their own sake, but valuable insofar as they can be enlisted as clients, sold to, marketed or otherwise manipulated for our own advancement, Lerner said.

At worst, it blinds people to the image of God in others.

“Overall, the business community has not created an ethos to take care of the world,” he said.

Requiring companies to justify their existence with an “ethical impact statement” every 20 years, Lerner said, would give financial weight to ethical conduct.

“It’s time to bring to the workplace a new bottom line, so success is not measured by how it maximizes wealth or power, but by the way it maximizes peoples’ power to become spiritually, ethically and environmentally sensitive,” he said.

Novak’s image of business people was more benign. A survey of American cultural elites in many fields recently found religious expression and belief was most common among businessmen and businesswomen, athletes and the military, he said.


The business world’s interest in building up healthy communities leads businesses everywhere to engage in philanthropy in community projects, Novak said.

Lerner’s depiction of businesses as predators, helpless to act out of any motive but self-interest, goes too far, Novak said.

MJP END NOLAN

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