Last night, I had a conversation over dinner with a couple of friends who are both waaaay smarter than me.

Part of what’s fun about our friendship is that all of us are interested in roughly the same topics, but from different angles: domestic vs. international, qualitative vs. quantitative, research vs. journalism.

Last night, we applied our various frames, methods, and trainings to politics and policy. And one of the big sticking points we quickly came to was the question of truth-telling in politics. When “flip-flopping” (i.e. changing your mind in response to the evidence — the rational thing to do) is anathema, and the moral-political imperative to tell the truth or change course might seem to contradict the retail-political imperative to reassure people that we’re just as exceptional, infallible, and indispensable as we ever were and ever will be, is an honest look at the state of the Union (or of the world) even possible?

After dinner, I went home and read a little bit from one of the great theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann’s books. Lo and behold, I came to a sermon delivered on the 100th anniversary of the preacher’s own home church. And what does he tell this community that cared for him as a child and for his family even before he was born?

He uses the first couple of paragraphs to establish his own ties to the community, then spends the first two full sections of his sermon singing the glories of the first century of its existence (admitting, from time to time, that of course not all members were saintly all of the time).

Then, in the third and fourth sections, he does something remarkable: he says, “as we remember, we also look forward.” And he throws down the challenge, saying that the worth of those first hundred years will be determined by the work of the next hundred. On that anniversary, he insists that the work begins by asking “what will the [community] be now, what now will we do … in a community that has become ethically complex in a world that is deep in bewilderment and violence, when old ways are fading?”

I don’t think that message was put to a focus group before it was preached. Do you?

Our politicians might take a lesson. Instead of pandering to us, or offering endless platitudes and paeans to founders and heroes and the old ways that are (rightfully) fading, what if they asked us to celebrate what’s best in our past by building a better future? To engage with the ethical complexities and bewilderment and violence of a modernity the founders could not have imagined rather than shutting our eyes and clinging by our fingernails to the status quo?

That would tell us much about the state of the Union, wouldn’t it? To see if we could hear such an invitation, and rise to it?

***

Walter Brueggemann is even more fun to listen to than he is to read. To hear him in his own words, I recommend this episode of On Being.

I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday afternoon and she mentioned a situation that came up in a gathering she’s part of. She was with a group of people who were talking about the future of business — how it might be more human, more humane, less harmful to people and planet.

All was going swimmingly until someone in the group pointed out what an elitist project this was: what could it possibly mean for people of different class, status, culture, or opportunity? You know, the kind of people who can’t gather in a major European city for a day to talk about better business?

This apparently led to a breakout conversation and some commitments to explore how to bring the ideas of the gathering to less privileged people. And here, I’d like to add an asynchronous riff along those lines.

On one level, I believe this person was absolutely right. The people in a room like that, for a conversation like that, are almost inherently going to be people for whom the system works, and who already have the freedom and opportunity to try to innovate around the edges. They’re not producing T-shirts for pennies a day, or otherwise working jobs that bear the real costs of our current ways of doing business.

But on another level, I think it’s more complicated. If the people with power and privilege aren’t having conversations like that, how will things change? And if the goal becomes meaningful, humane work for all people on the planet right now, how shall we start making that reality?

Power, to use a popular term, is leverage. Working to help people with leverage see how they could move the culture forward is good work. Helping them understand that they’re responsible for how they use their leverage (or don’t) might be even better work. And helping them use their leverage to help build the culture is great work.

Wealth, power, and privilege aren’t going away. (Who holds them might be changing, though.) If we can begin to talk about who holds these levers, what’s expected of them, and what they expect of themselves, we might — just might — be able to lever up the quality of a lot of people’s lives.

And that might be very good and humane business indeed.

Only questions today, no answers or definitive assertions.

• What are the ethics of trying to change someone’s mind?
• What are the ethics of trying to change the culture?
• If “first, do no harm” is a good general rule, how far into the future do we have to extend our care, and how are we going to define and assign harm?
• What are the ethics of tribes today? In other words, if it’s true that small groups have strong associative power, how can we build tribes that also help build the culture (as opposed to increasing partisanship and factionalism)?
• What does it mean ethically when we change our own minds?

Stealing is always wrong, right?

That’s usually treated as a pretty basic and general ethical claim. But today, I want to look at what kind of stealing counts and what we often overlook.

Let’s start with this passage from Seth Godin’s article “Let’s Stop Calling Them ‘Soft Skills,’” the whole of which is worth your attention:

Theft

If an employee at your organization walked out with a brand-new laptop every day, you’d have him arrested, or at least fired. If your bookkeeper was embezzling money every month, you’d do the same thing.

But when an employee demoralizes the entire team by undermining a project, or when a team member checks out and doesn’t pull his weight, or when a bully causes future stars to quit the organization — too often, we shrug and point out that this person has tenure, or vocational skills or isn’t so bad.

But they’re stealing from us.

Seth Godin, “Let’s Stop Calling Them ‘Soft Skills’” (31 Jan 2017)

I think it’s true that actions like those count as stealing. Anyone who’s ever worked with or for demoralizing people knows the feeling of having hours, days, weeks of her life stolen.

Part of the challenge with this kind of theft, though, is that both the act and any response are social and political. Can you tell your boss he’s stealing your time or talents? What kind of culture would you have if you carelessly “prosecuted” teammates for stealing-by-demoralizing?

If we treat this as an enforcement or compliance problem, I don’t think things will get better. People will fight to avoid being publicly labeled thieves, even if it’s true that they’re stealing our best work and care.

Instead, it’s important to see this as an ethical matter for ourselves, as employees and especially as managers. With power and responsibility come the ability to steal people’s time and talents, and we shouldn’t give ourselves permission to do that even in exchange for some treasure.

The truth is that we know this kind of behavior is real theft: we can see it and we can feel it. But, as with so much else in the realm of morality, it’s really hard to legislate against it effectively. What we might be able to do is to start a more honest conversation about the standards we’re going to hold ourselves to, and how we’re going to deal with people who steal from the group in this way.

Bad management (of self and others) costs real money, after all. Opportunities are missed, people leave organizations to escape their managers.

What are we going to do about that, now that the economy so prizes efficiency, connection, and discipline, and we’re all working in public like never before?

This weekend, I had a chance to read Scott Perry’s ebook Be Creative on Purpose. (Visit him here for a free copy and to see his other work. I particularly recommend the best advice he received in 2018, which he was generous enough to share with all of us.)

I like so many ideas in that book, but one of my favorite things about it is how up-front Scott is with his ethical claims.

That was personally refreshing to me, since it reminded me in the reading how near and dear that idiom is to my heart. I also think it’s important in general for people to demonstrate their ethics in their work — and, when they have the generosity to show their work in the way that Scott does, it can help the rest of us see how valuable this is, and how we so often leave ethical claims implicit.

Generosity, for example, is a one-word meme that contains the germ of a much larger set of beliefs about how the world works and how we’re meant to work within it. It sounds attractive (and I happen to think a more generous world would be a better one, and therefore that more generous work is worth it), but it really helps to think through that idea aloud to ensure we have a chance to see it, test it, and decide whether and how to accept it.

On that note, I hope more creatives have this conversation more publicly. Creation, after all, is a deeply ethical act with lots of ethical consequences. In order to realize the promise of a creative, entrepreneurial culture and economy, we need to be clear with each other about the kind of culture we want to create and how our work is helping to create it.

If it’s true that the personal ethics of people in position to affect the rest of us can have direct consequences for us, that begs the ancient question as to whether there is a significant difference between personal and public or institutional governance. Is it OK for bankers to manage their own money one way while taking risks with others’? Or for the state to enact justice up to the point of violence and killing, while denying those recourses to its citizens?

The consensus view seems to be that it’s complicated, and I don’t have a truly novel answer to pose here myself, at least at this moment.

But I had reason the other day to contemplate the difference between justice blindfolded versus justice open-eyed, holding the sword firmly but the scales less so.

And that made me wonder: when and where is our culture too blind to context, or too willing to let groups of people acting together do things that would be unacceptable if performed individually and personally?

You wouldn’t want to get too carried away in either direction, of course. Total relativism tends to descend into chaos, one way or another; total impartiality tends to split the baby, leaving everyone ill-served. (It also might be a fiction, if often a convenient and sometimes a necessary one.)

So, no: I don’t have easy answers here. But I think we’d better be asking better, tougher questions about this.

This is theme I’d like to return to from a few different angles: the classical notion that ethics come before economics come before politics.

Think about that: first we have to govern ourselves (ethics); then we have to govern our households, meaning our material needs and wants (economics); and then we have to govern ourselves as social animals (politics).

From Aristotle, we have the idea that he who would rule must first have been ruled — people who haven’t learned ethics and self-control don’t make very good stewards of other people’s lives or livelihoods.

And isn’t that what we so often today in ourselves, in our economics, and in our politics — people who are so ill-governed in themselves that they make a mess for everyone else when given a chance?

Such lack of control — i.e., of ethics — has historically not been a sustainable path to the good life. Complete licentiousness might be enjoyable in the short run but tends to exact its toll in the long.

And, of course, when ungoverned people are given (or take) a chance to govern something big and important to all of us, like a company or a government, what will happen to all of us as a result of the license they take?

From my first days in grad school, I’ve looked up to and personally befriended many of the mid-career military fellows that join us each year.

These are about a half-dozen officers from across the different services, each with about 20 years of service in uniform and most of them just coming out of command, which is the real proving ground for officers at that level. These are, in a word, serious folks (though I’ve always been impressed by how fun-loving they tend to be, too).

Here’s the thing: civilian control of the military (one of the hidden-in-plain-sight guardrails of our democracy) means that people like me generate the policies that determine where people like them get sent around the world, and for what purposes. It’s not specific: 20-something civilians don’t directly boss 20-year officers around. Ever. But 20- and 30-something wonks with degrees like mine do a lot of the grunt work that shapes policy papers that shape high-level decisions that shape my friends’ lives and fortunes.

Living and studying in such proximity with these people has really brought home for me the idea that policy is ultimately personal: policymakers’ work can have steep consequences for other people’s lives that aren’t anything like the abstraction of a national security strategy.

The political and economic ways in which policy is personal are topics for another time. What I’m trying to say here is that the friendships I’ve developed amidst and alongside my studies have continually pushed me to ask myself what I would do if I had to make a decision about some urgent and potentially risky policy matter.

For what would I risk lives in the abstract?

For what would I risk friends’ lives?

Some things are worth it. But knowing the people on the other end of the stick forces me to interrogate just which things those might be on any given day.

In response to a screaming headline emergency, it’s worth asking (and not for the first time):

What would I do?

What would I risk a friend to do?

It’s commonly said that ethics are what we do when no one’s watching.

That seems a good enough shorthand for now, though of course it’s important to act rightly when people are watching. (When that is, and who’s watching, is a topic I expect we’ll return to.)

Another way of thinking about this might be to say that ethics are what we do all the time. Which begs the question: when do we learn and practice them?

I’ll suggest two answers. First, we’re learning all the time. A mature ethical code should (and probably can only) be developed through repeated interactions with the real world. Second, the time to think deeply about ethics is precisely when no one’s watching — that is, the downtime between those moments when you’re expected to do the right thing, on the spot, in full view.

There’s no time to come up with a code that works in the moment, just like you can’t make up for all the weight training you didn’t do beforehand when you step onto the field to play the game.

Training always happens on your own time. Ethics, then, are the product of what you do when no one’s watching.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing in the past several days, and one of the themes that kept coming up was the roots of and relationship between ethics, economics, and politics.

Those are also subjects I’d like to return to in my own study, and to try to make sense of here.

And so, without further ado, ethics will be the theme of inquiry for this month. We’ll start with Aristotle and see where we go from there.