A Song in the Night (14 page)

For the next few weeks I lived there, entering a vast list of key words about corporate responsibility and printing out piles of sheets that had the waxy texture of early faxes. When my time ran out, I simply got back in line and waited until my turn came up again. While I stood in line, I checked off the articles that looked interesting, and every night I edited the list down to those that seemed the most promising. Fortunately I was able to attract a small army of volunteers, who fanned out across the library to make photocopies of the articles that might be included in the anthology. Every evening, working late into the night, I read the articles and assigned scores to them, looking at the appropriateness of the topic and the quality of the writing.

Within a month I had just over a hundred possible articles for the anthology, and a month after that I had boiled the list down to fifty-two. By the end of March the book was ready for publication by Pilgrim Press, and it came out the week of Big Business Day, with Mark Green and me as coeditors. Organized under broad headings such as “The Corporation and Health,” “The Corporation and Natural Resources,” “The Impact of Multinationals,” and “Corporate Governance,” the book had strong, detailed entries on agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, mining, oil, and automobiles. We looked at controversies over toxic sites, asbestos, union busting, industry advertising in classrooms, plant relocation, corporate lobbying, and campaign donations. We chronicled specific battles
being fought over unionization in southern textile plants, the marketing of Nestlé infant formula, the shipping of hazardous waste to third world countries, international consumerism, and investment in South Africa. We probed problems in the field of energy, including the dominance of fossil fuels, the distribution of ownership rights within solar power, and the risks of nuclear plants. We evaluated approaches that had been proposed or were being debated about the correct relationship among government, regulation, innovation, economic prosperity, and the protection of public rights. There were also thoughtful articles by major authors on how corporations are structured and managed, about board interlocks, mergers and acquisitions, executive compensation, market concentration, and political involvement.

All in all, two things strike me, looking at the list thirty years later. The first is that the issues raised were comprehensive, important, and in many cases urgent. The other is that after three decades, many of these issues are still being fought—and in some cases, after twenty years of Republican presidents and aggressive lobbying by business associations, the circumstances have become worse. In 1980 it was still possible to imagine the United States Congress proposing, debating, and perhaps even passing a “Corporate Democracy Act,” which would have required a majority of board members to be independent, asked boards to oversee particular areas of corporate management (including audit and legal compliance), and prohibited board interlocks with other corporations. It was a bold move that, had it been enacted even in part, might
have forestalled the financial manipulation and the distortions in corporate governance that damaged the economy over the following twenty years.

Today many of the problems have grown greater, and have led to protests in the streets all over the world, including the United States. Corporate power continues to rise, bringing with it enormous changes and influence. The willingness to imagine new forms of accountability and new pathways to prosperity has, in the public realm, sadly shrunk. In the early part of this century, discussions about the next phase of capitalism and the redesign of the American economy have only just started.

Though the timing of my year in Washington was precipitated by my mysterious illness, I had always intended to step back from divinity school for a while to consider my vocation. In most Christian denominations one must pursue two parallel tracks to being ordained to the ministry. The first track is within the church organization itself—one has to run a gauntlet of interviews, approvals, commissions, psychological tests, meetings with bishops or other church authorities, and chaplaincy training, all of which are designed to explore the underlying motivations and skills of the person who wants to be ordained. Though complex, these requirements make sense, because ordination authorizes a minister to speak not only on behalf of a specific church but for the denomination and even the whole faith. Because persons in congregations
invest enormous trust in their pastors, the people chosen for those positions of leadership must prove worthy of that trust.

The second track is the acquisition of a master’s degree from an accredited program. The Episcopal Church required steady progress on both tracks within a defined amount of time. I had to attend all the meetings and interviews set up by the denomination, concluding with one or more meetings with the diocesan bishop, who had the final say.

After my year in Washington I realized that I was more committed to community leadership than ever, that I was growing in my faith, and that I was not just ready but eager to continue on the path. At the same time, I had been plunged more and more deeply into the world of business and economics. The topics I had studied in college and during my year in Washington went to the heart of the challenge of how a person should articulate and remain faithful to his or her core principles in the hustle and bustle of modern economic life.

When I arrived back on the Yale Divinity School campus, my mind was buzzing with questions, ranging from the tightly practical to the broadly theoretical, many of them focused on economic theory and American business. I had seen from many angles that American business was an enormous engine of change—the most potent force in our century. Its impact on society rivaled or exceeded the influence of ancient kings, or the huge control exercised by the Roman Catholic Church in Europe for many centuries.

The modern corporation had grown organically. The earliest corporate charters had been granted by the king, or by
the government, for a limited period of time and with a specific public purpose in mind. A tiny number of corporations, such as the Dutch East India Company, became early multinationals, dispatching their vessels to all the corners of the earth, controlling large markets, and in some places, such as seventeenth-century America and South Africa, even hiring captains and ships to establish permanent outposts on distant shores. Both New York City and Cape Town were settled by expeditions authorized by European kings yet paid for by the Dutch East India Company.

Because the modern corporation is relatively new, it never occurred to early political theorists to wonder what would happen if this particular form of human organization became so wealthy and powerful that it might rival governments for power. In the formation of the United States, the founders worried about many different forms of human aggregation that might cause trouble for the fledgling democracy, and they worried the most about “factions.” We can only speculate how they would have factored in the political power of mammoth corporations, some of which now control unimaginable riches, globe-spanning assets, and armies of employees. There are ample reasons to suspect that they would have had reservations about the legal fiction and political status of corporate “personhood,” because these “persons,” unlike humans, are both immortal and amoral.

Everywhere I looked, I saw the effects, talents, and influence of business. Businesses took all forms, from the local corner store where I bought milk to the multinational behemoths
that could reshape almost any place on earth. The bigger they became, the more breathtaking their capacity was; the largest firms, acting with broad legal rights and sometimes without legal constraints, could gather and apply hundreds of millions of dollars to any project of their choosing. In some ways they were amazingly effective: they had the capability to organize human cooperation across cities, states, and nations; they had figured out how to combine vastly different skills to attain a single objective; and they could identify specific goals and then implement all the steps necessary to achieve them.

At the same time, some corporations took steps that were impossible to align with even the most elementary standards of human morality. Any action—and every action—seemed to be justified as long as someone somewhere could concoct an argument (no matter how tenuous) that it would be beneficial to the shareholders. Investing in destructive products or industries; trading with dictators on both left and right; corrupting democratic institutions and processes; manipulating markets toward monopoly; engaging in price-fixing, kickbacks, excessive pay, intimidation, firings, union-busting, and layoffs; distributing inadequately tested products and chemicals for business and consumer use; destroying forests, oceans, waterways, open land; devastating communities after plant closings—all of these things were justified by the supposedly self-correcting virtue of the free market and portrayed as necessary to human prosperity.

I found the combination of business and politics particularly toxic. Politics, though a messy and imperfect field, was
tasked—at least in theory—with the objectives of protecting and pursuing the common good. Many businesses agreed with this goal and asked only that they not be so smothered in regulation that they would be prevented from creating the jobs and investing in the products of the future. But other companies had very different objectives and much more aggressive tactics. They employed huge numbers of lobbyists to bend legislation to their advantage, either by inserting special benefits or by ripping out provisions that they didn’t like. They maintained stables of lawyers, both inside and outside the firm, ready to attack anyone who seemed like a threat. And some of them spent considerable money on political donations to make sure that their voices would be heard at critical—and often secret—moments.

I arrived back at Yale Divinity School filled with new information and questions about wealth and poverty, cooperation and competition, political and economic justice, fairness and efficiency, and I wondered what my newfound field of theology and ethics might have to say about them. I had been exposed to the fascinating power of the modern corporation, and I believed that these entities raised complicated and important questions about the kind of world we want to live in. I looked forward to taking a few courses on the relationship between economics and ethics, or politics and social justice, or money and morality.

To my dismay, I discovered that there weren’t any. Not only
that, there were few people who knew enough about them to offer a perspective. I had a wonderful faculty, deeply schooled in the historical controversies of past eras. I could learn about the early church fathers’ attitudes toward the accumulation of wealth, about Martin Luther’s essays on usury, or about the role of religion in the perpetuation and then the abolition of slavery. There was even the occasional lecture on economic development in Third World countries or in inner cities, or about specific controversies like human rights or the sale of infant formula in underdeveloped nations. If I was looking for a clear, thoughtful review of America’s economy and of the functioning of the modern corporation, with special attention to how people of communities of faith or specific local churches should approach them, there was nothing.

Equally surprising to me was that the institution that I was coming to know and understand well—the church—was also largely silent on many issues central to daily life. To my mind, many churches were often slow to identify new questions or injustice that might challenge long-held assumptions. Part of the problem was the result of the periodic swing back and forth between two visions of ministry, the prophetic and the pastoral. A prophetic ministry focuses on speaking about the world, pointing out the gap between reality and aspiration, and urging change. A pastoral ministry put the emphasis on personal interactions between people of faith, in which individuals encourage and support each other. I discovered while I was in divinity school that the pendulum of education had swung strongly toward the pastoral. The structural critique that had
flourished throughout the 1960s was steadily being replaced in the 1980s by a focus on the needs of individuals and families. Though I understood and supported my many friends who devoted themselves to this role, I remained perplexed that one of the most important institutions in modern society—the business firm—was never covered in class, discussed over meals, or preached from the pulpit. It was as though certain structures in society had grown so prevalent and powerful that they became invisible. This was a mystery to me. Was it possible that one could be so close to something that one could no longer see it?