1] The collapse of public responsibility in our business elites
All opinion worth its salt is addressed to a question that goes something like: ``What's wrong with our times, or with this or that behaviour, and what can be done to improve, if not correct things?"
I want to pitch this question at the society-wide level Australia, that is and open by looking through the clarifying lens of some basic sociological principles.
All human collectivities are structured in part hierarchically, with an ascending order of power, wealth and status. Once they reach some degree of size and complexity they depend on elites for their sound direction, justice and well-being. One of the laws about elites, as put by Vilfredo Pareto in the 1890s, is that they circulate. They are a given in terms of the inevitable existence of a small minority that wields power what Roberto Michels in the same decade dubbed the ``iron law of oligarchy". What changes are the occupants of the elite. Moreover, societies that change rapidly produce vigorous competition for the seats of privilege.
The good of a society depends on the quality of its elites. I am not interested here in the processes that produce elites, but on the sort of ethos that shapes them what they believe in, what motivates them. On this question there are two plausible views.
There is the ``realist" tradition, anchored by Machiavelli, that argues that the only thing that matters is that rulers dedicate themselves to the strength of the state, doing everything in their power to further that end. Their personal motives are irrelevant, history loaded with examples of good men, with high-minded principles, leading their societies into ruin. It is just as possible that evil or corrupt men will steer the ship of state adroitly. What matters is the well-being of the collectivity, not the quality of soul of the ruler. To provide a modern parallel, those who choose their surgeon because they like the colour of his eyes, rather than his aptitude with the scalpel, are fools, and deserve what they get.
There is a separate tradition, perhaps best identified as ``aristocratic", that assumes that the good of a society depends on an elite which is governed by a code of honour. The code is that of noblesse oblige those granted privileged position, whether by accident of birth, or whatever other path of accession, are under obligation to serve their community. This ethos is one of service and sacrifice. In the English tradition, out of which Australian practice overwhelmingly derives, the aristocratic heritage conjoined with a Protestant Christian one that stressed civic duty, that it was a main responsibility of every citizen to make a selfless contribution to the whole.
Today it is a commonplace that the Australian electorate is disenchanted with its political leaders. It has lost faith that either major party rules in interest of the nation at large. It has, reluctantly, slipped into the cynic's mantle, reading self-interest disguised by hypocrisy into every move in Canberra. In concrete terms, it has observed since the early 1980s the reversal of the century-long trend to a fairer spread in the distribution of wealth. It has seen a new and steadily increasing inequality in Australia met with seeming indifference from the Commonwealth.
A first principle of government should be to protect the people, and especially those less able to look after themselves, from the excesses of the time. Yet there was little interest shown in counterbalancing the running down of manufacturing industry, the pauperising of much of rural Australia, the undermining of permanent full-time jobs in favour of unreliable part-time ones and thereby compromising the chances of people in their 20s moving towards buying their own homes. Indeed governments have proudly defended their non-intervention using the lofty, principled language of the free market. They have lauded their own purity of motive.
The same political cynicism has infected the youth, producing a complete collapse of civic idealism among those entering adulthood so much for the hope of the future! The last belief in public action that might better the world, environmentalism, went the way of other causes sometime in the early 1990s.
This has not always been the case. Whatever anyone's political inclinations there could be no sensible questioning of a predominant commitment to nation-building during the Menzies era. Nor of the incorruptibility of a political order which saw the nation's longest serving Prime Minister leaving office after 16 years with so little personal wealth that Melbourne businessmen had to pass around a hat to buy him a home for his retirement. Similarly, whatever the fiscal imprudence of the Whitlam era, no-one could doubt that government's idealistic commitment to improving the lot of segments of the disadvantaged.
It would be unfair, nevertheless, to single out our political elites. They are a part of a wider malaise. Indeed many of their company are less guilty of self-serving egoism than the nation's new breed of business leaders.
CD Kemp portrayed from first-hand knowledge, in his 1964 book Big Businessmen, an admirable older generation of Australian captains of industry. They had taken it for granted that the future of the whole society was in their hands. While their jobs threatened to over-work them, they would devote tens of hours a week in an honorary capacity to other bodies. They would have been ashamed to put their own interests first, starting with the salaries voted them by their boards of directors. For these men an ethic of noblesse oblige was central to their view of themselves. As a consequence the population at large took for granted that it could trust the corporate world. It is no accident that in this period the average Australian looked up to his or her local bank manager.
The 1990s saw epidemic rises in chief executive salaries or to be more precise, ``salary packages". The public looked on open-mouthed as the CEO's of the major banks, AMP, BHP, Coles-Myer, Southcorp, Tabcorp, indeed every corporation that aspired to top status, saw their pay skyrocket, seemingly in the order of a million per annum. Moreover rises were linked, in theory, with gains in productivity, which in this glorious decade in the history of capitalism, usually meant ``downsizing". The more staff sacked, and the more successfully the income of the survivors was squeezed, the larger the management bonus! Capitalism had turned into the Marxist caricature, and it was flagrantly, quite open about its new antisocial practices. This was greed with a good conscience, unashamedly thumbing its nose at the rest of the society.
This is the period in which the intellectual Left, with a major real role for the first time since the 1930s, went missing. The ALP's younger Turks became indistinguishable in their beliefs from a John Hewson, while their university counterparts enveloped themselves in impenetrable post-modernist abstraction. Just at the moment Marx was ditched, his powerful analytical polemic gained renewed bite. Take a famous passage from the Communist Manifesto: ``The bourgeoisie ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous `cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up a single, unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
This year Kevin Gosper, former chief executive of Shell Australia, one of the nation's blue-ribbon corporations, got caught favouring his own family to wit, his daughter with his insider clout on the Olympic Games executive. It was clear from his initial astonishment, followed by outrage at the public exposure and condemnation, that he did not understand the problem. What was my crime, his demeanour seemed to protest?
The Gosper case is striking in that the principal figure straddles an earlier time in which there was some executive restraint, and the new order of buccaneer managers dressed in Italian suits and slippery words. Into this polluted kitchen stepped SOCOG. Australians would be singularly outraged by the tainting of an area of life that they believed to have retained its standards sport. Nevertheless they misread its fall. They assumed that the Games Minister, Michael Knight, and SOCOG were an un-Australian exception. In reality they were typical of the new order of elite institutions although in this particular case redeemed in the national imagination by the success of the Games they staged.
The greediness of this entire culture, including the emptiness of its self-justifications, has been highlighted in the recent AMP debacle. One of the nation's strongest and best-respected companies its largest insurance broker was led into an ill-researched and bungled takeover of GIO. The CEO, George Trumbull, was eventually removed by the AMP board. Yet his punishment for almost ruining the unruinable company was to walk away with salary for his final year, exercised options and compensation for early termination of contract totalling $23 million.
This story contains everything. AMP was solidly conservative, one of the bastions of corporate Australia. Its board membership was drawn from the top establishment end of town. According to an AMP source and Trumbull supporter quoted in The Australian Financial Review, that very same board, exemplar of ruling culture, bought off the CEO in order to keep him quiet. Trumbull walked away with a sum of money so huge that no ordinary person can imagine what it translates into in terms of any range of goods and pleasures which might bring happiness to a normal human being. When forced to make some public explanation, the board avoided its standard excusing strategy the hard-headed language of ``shareholder interests" and the ``bottom line". It switched to the stock-in-trade of the cowardly kid caught red-handed: ``Everybody else does it."
The next question: Where have the checks gone? Brian Quinn, a former chief executive of Coles-Myer ended up in jail, as did Alan Bond. Skase remains in permanent exile.
In the realm of the media, John Laws tramples all over the central code of journalistic independence and integrity. There is public vilification of Laws across the entire Australian media apart from his own radio station. Yet he continues on, his job unchanged, his audacity undimmed.
Trumbull and Laws seem to say that it is possible to rise to a level of wealth and prestige at which you are above the law, beyond morality. And this is occurring in an age in which the average tax-paying, law-abiding citizen can no longer gain the consolation of belief in the ultimate check - divine retribution.
Apropos checks, what of the elite media's role in this erosion in the culture? On the positive side, it has reported salary package excesses. Outlets owned by one organisation are eager to headline the bad behaviour of their competitors. For instance when Channel 7 suspended a TV commentator for criticising the playing surface at Colonial Stadium, a venue in which Channel 7 has a large commercial stake, football broadcasters on radio station 3AW were quick to express concern about the censorship of fair comment. This episode is easy to satirise, because the truth is that areas of Colonial turf were so bad at the time that a solitary gust of wind, like some celestial golfer, could rip out huge divots.
However colourful some of the stories, the negative that matters is cultural. The Australian newspaper published in mid-year the results of a series of studies it commissioned on material progress in Australia since the start of the economic rationalist era in 1983. The main social finding was the rapid expansion in social inequality, and in particular a thinning out of the middle classes. This was happening to the social centre, those whom Menzies had singled out as the backbone of the country, in his epochal ``forgotten people" speech of 1942 that would form the intellectual core of the modern Liberal Party.
The Australian's most influential commentator, Paul Kelly, expressed some concern about the results, but then retreated into the same defence as his newspaper's final editorial it was all a little unfortunate, but there had been no alternative. Kelly's reaction is worthy of attention. He had himself over three decades played a key strategic role in helping engineer the cultural revolution which succeeded in overthrowing Australia's traditional Deakinite policy of government intervention in the economy to build industry, control wages and regulate finance. For a moment, unlike most of his fellow economic rationalists, he worried about the social ravages caused by his theory.
Then the defence: What else could we have done? Globalisation rules! The Lucky Country is now inevitably divided by class. This was really for the long-term good of the nation.
The two strands self-serving elites and a rationalising, excusing culture inevitably marry. The cultural devil is the climate of a radical version of the political philosophy that has dominated the modern West, liberalism. Its guiding axiom leave individuals alone and they will flourish, as will their society presses to minimise government, open every area of public life to competition, allowing the fittest to survive. The intellectual father of this tradition in its economic line, Adam Smith, at least knew he had to postulate a limiting principle. His Wealth of Nations included the notion of the ``invisible hand", assuming there is balancing mechanism behind every truly free market, one that ensures just outcomes.
Radical liberalism in practice has never meant the fairness of the ``invisible hand", nor the simple freeing from red-tape and the inefficiencies of vested interests. It has meant an anarchic free-for-all in which morality is rendered obsolete, noblesse oblige cast off as some tattered coat from the stuffy age of gentlemen's clubs. It means ``naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" that is, piracy of the nation's wealth. It means that the country, served by its current elites, is in deep trouble...
2] The Corporatisation of the Church - Graham Long
The following is a transcript of a very challenging symposium Brian chaired for church leaders in 2003. Graham Long was a local Church of Christ minister with a flair for saying the outrageous! He succeeded admirably on this subject...
The church was once the place where you could converse without the language of the market. But today, the gospel is heard as a "product" and we have "strategies" to market the gospel. This is affecting the wider culture, and the church is being swept along by it.
Two generations ago, we were taught we lived in a society and we were all citizens. Now, we live in an economy inhabited by consumers.
Many Church leaders have become as hard-nosed as any CEO. Companies now have no loyalty to their staff. Does the church behave differently?
We live with schizophrenic behaviour - we read the gospels as though we are the poor Jesus refers to and had no money, yet we spend our money like we had never heard the gospel! Fear of shrinking away (numbers and resources) has produced much talk of mission, and ethics based on pragmatism rather than the principles of the gospel. Pragmatists always measure outcomes rather than by principles. They are fixated with technique. What works is right! And the bottom line is usually money.
Training institutions are also struggling to survive! So, they are being reorganised along modular lines with a resultant loss of lecture-student relationship. Modularisation disassociates the process of learning from the environment of relationship that the early church understood as essential for developing real disciples. The Internet, and its use in education, is helping this deterioration.
The idea of vocation is becoming rare. If you decided the best way to train someone to pastor is to be in community, you would have to start a religious order! Market forces are dictating the shape of our training institutions.
The relative size of the church, denomination, etc, doesn't seem to make any difference. The change in mindset is widespread.
The language of the economy is growth. Growth becomes… A NSW Church of Christ survey was initiated by the State pastoral coordinator, "key performance indicators" ranked every Church of Christ in the State - making no allowance for local factors!
A pastor of a rapidly growing church recently said, "pastoral skills grow the people, management skills grow the church" Graham disagrees with this mentality, sating he should have used the word "institution", not "church".
Why have these ideas found so little resistance in the church? We privatised the gospel a generation ago. We reduced the NT "you" from plural into singular promises and commands.
The shift in mindset is fuelled by fear of the irrational. The media thrives on this; ratings grow, and this is affecting the mentality of the new generation of pastors, ministry trainers, etc.
The reduction of value of people ends up where we trade in the "souls of men" [Rev 18:1-13]. We are commanded to come out of such a system, and have been for 2000 years.
A ministry, cannot rely on Government funding; this makes it a social program. This is the decision facing many para-church ministries. The "measured outcomes" are being removed from gospel values to commercial values.
The church is about creating community. Communion is not a visual aid to remember Calvary. It's about the members belonging to one another. A corporate primary emphasis, not an individual one. We are there to meet God and one another, not analyse it primarily. Beware the user mentality. The bottom line is still self here.
Church structure is reduced to what is working. And worse, it becomes mandatory.
The grace gifts are not for self-fulfilment but for the betterment of others. When all are gripped by this, everyone benefits.
Today, our model of church is theatre. A growing church's second staff appointment is now often a fulltime musical director. Participating congregations become supporting audiences. Nike now brands its customers. Our badge must be Christ! How we conduct ourselves, what we say, etc, must reflect our allegiance to Christ.
What can we as individuals do about this now?
We must fight the language of market taking over the language of the church. We can embrace failure in the same way Jesus embraced the cross. Letting God work through failure is a faith stance. The Scriptures are full of such examples…
Confront and make fun of the market language.
Exegete the NT carefully, filtering out the modern mindset. Jesus spoke on economic reality more than on health. The Jubilee principle runs through His ministry.
Teach your people to think carefully about the choices we make every day. Especially regarding money and utilisation of resources. We need continuous reminding of how rich we really are.
The Church is the last place left where you can get the opinion of the public without market values weighing in! There, we (should) care for the elderly because it’s the right thing to do, rather than being a business; treat the poor as Christ would, rather than as “clients”! The Church is the last “ledge” left to engage our people in non-market value terms.
There has been more consolidation of power in the last 20 years (since around 1990) than ever before in history. Politics and business have drifted together, and almost no one speaks up.
On the Day of Pentecost the Church addressed such a concentration of power (rather than focus on a style of worship, or hammer out a doctrinal statement of orthodoxy!). The Holy Spirit appeared as “tongues of fire” that came as one fire and then distributed to everyone present (they were literally divided out to each from one common source).
As a result of this “distribution” of Holy Spirit presence, they immediately distributed their material possessions! This is jubilee language! When the People of God know who they are, there is a distribution of wealth so nobody lacks!
God’s response to the first move to consolidate power (tower of Babel) was to scatter it (Gen 11). At Pentecost, God broke down His power and scattered it to many cultures – they all heard the gospel in their own tongue. God broke the monopoly of power that centres on a dominant culture. Many missions side the gospel with the projects of the dominant culture.
The Church’s prime project is to identify the concentrations of power and deconstruct them. God formed His ek-klesia (= called out ones) in order to scatter!
Recommended reading
Binding the strongman - Ched Myers (Orbis);Say to this mountain - more readable.
The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics - Myers (compilation).
Unveiling Empire - Anthony Gwyther.
Submerge - Living Deep in a Shallow World - Ashley Barker - organised a religious order in Melbourne.
On the Internet….
Ched Myers is widely published.
Sojourners magazine