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METAPHORS OF LIFE AND MANAGEMENT Introduction In “When Corporations Rule the World,” David C. Korten revealed what had become his understanding of the world of economic development in which he had participated. He stated: “Our relentless pursuit of economic growth is accelerating the breakdown of the planet’s life support systems, intensifying resource competition, widening the gap between rich and poor, and undervaluing the relationships of family and community. The growing concentration of power in global corporations and financial institutions is stripping governments – democratic and otherwise – of their ability to set economic, social and environmental priorities in the larger common interest. Driven by a single-minded dedication to generating even greater profits for the benefit of their investors, global corporations and financial institutions have turned their economic power into political power. They now dominate the decision processes of governments and are rewriting the rules of world commerce through international trade and investment agreements to allow themselves to expand their profits without regard to the social and environmental consequences borne by the larger society Continuing business as usual will almost certainly lead to economic, social, and environmental collapse.” Korten’s warning is supported by other academics. Jared Diamond is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among Dr. Diamond’s many awards is the National Medal of Science. Diamond sees a resemblance between the collapse of earlier civilizations and the threatened collapse of contemporary human societies. See “Easter Island’s End” in Discover Magazine (August 1995), and his book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”. Diamond 1 speaks of overuse of resources, deforestation, destruction of ecosystems, excessive consumption by the wealthy for the primary purpose of flaunting their wealth, competition for the scarce resources leading to war and conflict. Diamond notes that the advantage modern societies have over their predecessors is recorded knowledge of the nature and causes of the collapses. Korten contends that to a considerable extent the current problem originates with the United States. Its representatives are the primary marketers of the false promises of consumerism and the foremost advocates of the market deregulation, free trade, and privatization policies that are advancing the global consolidation of corporate power and the corresponding corruption of democratic institutions. Resolving the crisis depends on civil societies mobilizing to reclaim the power that corporations and global financial markets have usurped. Our best hope for the future lies with locally owned and managed economies that rely predominantly on local resources that meet the livelihood needs of their members in ways that maintain a balance with the earth. Such a shift in intellectual structures and priorities may open the way to eliminating deprivation and extreme inequality from the human experience, instituting true citizen democracy, and releasing presently unrealized potential for individual and collective growth and creativity. (See Korten, “The Post-Corporate World” pp. 6-7). If we agree with Korten, the instinct of the “management mind” may cause us to venture immediately into finding practical solutions for such problems, or challenges as modern “management speak” instructs us. Such practical solutions are likely to be as effective as rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic as it was about to plummet to the ocean floor. Before effective practical solutions can be devised for matters of social policy, we must first examine the ideologies that underpin our 2 belief system, including our values and the metaphors that inform and portray our values and belief system. Moreover, in matters as complex as global cooperation, we must first understand belief systems of a vast variety of cultures, including our own. We must also be prepared to examine critically our own and other belief systems, and to incorporate aspects of other belief systems into our own beliefs. With some minor exceptions, such as the practice of Yoga in the West, it has not been the tradition of western colonialists, both military and corporate, to learn from the belief systems of other peoples. In the Americas, aboriginal beliefs and practices of honouring nature have been swept aside by the interests of the dominant western values of ‘development’ for profit and financial wealth, private property, and the belief of human dominion over nature. Nevertheless, it is critical that we examine the nature and consequences of our beliefs. Our belief systems not only predicate how we view life and the universe but how we act or fail to act. New stories and metaphors of life David Korten calls for an attempt to replace the traditional, dominant western scientific view of the universe with a new metaphor. He was inspired by the works of biologist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho whose interest in how the wisdom embodied in living systems might help develop life-friendly economic systems. See http://www.cts.cuni.cz/conf98/ho.htm and http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/MaeWanHo/. Ho contends that science is in the process of a basic paradigm shift from the metaphor of the machine to the metaphor of the living organism. Korten sees the metaphors as important in assisting us to move from the society we are to the society we have the potential to become. He notes that for 300 years Western, and increasingly 3 other, societies have been living out the deadly tale inspired by Newtonian physics. According to that tale: The universe resembles a giant clockwork set in motion by a master clock maker at the beginning of creation and left to run down with time as its spring unwinds. In short, we live in a dead and wasting universe. Matter is the only reality, and the whole is no more nor less than the aggregation of its parts. By advancing our understanding of the parts through the reductionist processes of science, we gain dominion over the whole and the power to bend the future to our ends. Consciousness is an illusion: life is only the outcome of material complexity.We evolved through a combination of chance genetic mutations and a competitive struggle in which those more fit survived and flourished as the weaker and less worthy perished. Neither consciousness nor life has meaning or purpose. People are just extremely complicated machines, whose behaviour is dictated by knowable natural laws. Competition for territory and survival is the basic law of Nature. We cannot expect humans to be or become more than brutish beasts driven by basic instincts to survive, reproduce and seek distraction from existential loneliness through the pursuit of material gratification. A primary function of the institutions of civilized societies is to use the institutional control structures of hierarchy and markets to channel our dark human instincts toward economically productive ends. See Korten pp. 9-10 Korten sees this story as having had positive consequences of liberating people from the stultifying intellectual tyranny of 4 religious dogma. Galileo’s scientific, empirical observations about the universe were unpopular with the religious orthodoxy of his time, but his observations helped challenge the self-serving religious beliefs of reality, based on mythology. The move to scientific thinking and investigation also contributed to great affluence for around 20% of the world’s population. Korten contends that the negative aspects of the scientific revolution are putting humanity of the path of self-destruction. Money has become the defining value of contemporary societies. The ethic of Hedonism with its material self-gratification rules in most societies. With this, there is hierarchy, control-oriented institutions of governments and corporations and an economic system that rewards greed and destroys life. We have no reason to live beyond the accumulation of wealth and having technological distractions such as computer games, movies, television programs, drugs etc. Korten suggests that the materialist culture encouraged by scientific exploration has produced lives without meaning or purpose. The triumph of science over religion has allowed us to free ourselves from the intellectual constraints of religion but has caused us to lose touch with the spirituality of humanity, the earth, and the universe. Important in this view is the work of Thomas Berry in Dream of the Earth. Berry’s concern is that Christianity in the West has emphasized too much the issue and language of redemption rather that creation, in particular the role of human spirit in the process of creation. SEE THE CLASS WEBSITE FOR AN ARTICLE BY ANDREW ANGYAL ON BERRY’S WORK. Is there evidence to support the foregoing contentions? Are such issues as workplace burnout, murder and suicide committed by young people, slavery and exploitation of 5 humans and other life forms symptoms of the loss of human spirituality and its creativity? Inspired by the work of Mae-Wan Ho and Thomas Berry, Korten offers a different metaphor for the universe, involving human purpose. (see Korten p. 12). The universe is a self-organizing system engaged in the discovery and of realization of its own possibilities through a continuing process of transcendence to higher levels of order and self-definition. Modern science has confirmed the Hindu belief that all matter exists as a continuing dance of flowing energies. Yet matter is somehow able to maintain the integrity of its boundaries and internal structures in the midst of apparent disorder. Similarly, the cells of a living organism, which are in a constant state of energy flux, maintain their individual integrity while functioning coherently as parts of larger wholes. This ability implies some form of self-knowledge in both “inert” matter and living organisms at each level of organization. Intelligence and consciousness may take many different forms and are in some ways pervasive even in matter. What we know as life may not be an accident of creation but rather integral to it, an attractor that shapes the creative unfolding of the cosmos. To the extent that these premises are true, they suggest that we have scarcely begun to imagine, much less experience, the possibilities of our own capacity for intelligent, selfaware living. Nor have we tested our potential for selfdirected cooperation as a foundation for modern social organization. Evolution, although it involves competitive struggles, violence, and death, also involves love, nurturance, regeneration, and rebirth - and is a 6 fundamentally cooperative and intelligent enterprise. There is substantial evidence that it is entirely natural for healthy humans to live fully and mindfully in service to the unfolding capacities of self, community, and the planet. Yet, in our forgetfulness, we have come to doubt this aspect of our own being. Nurturing the creative development of our capacities for mindful living should be a primary function of the institutions of civilized societies. It is time that we awaken from our forgetfulness and assume conscious responsibility for reshaping our institutions to this end. Unlike the dead or dying universe theory inspired by physics, this story of life invites us to use our consciousness and abilities to master the art of living at both the individual and societal levels. The scientific discoveries of biology have transformed the metaphor of life from the clockwork universe to biological development of not only the human body but the human mind. Some will argue this is not a new story, but an old story, rediscovering that of ancient cultures. The difference of this story from those of the ancient cultures is our access to the modern phenomenon of scientific investigation and the opportunity that exists to use such knowledge to develop new understanding and power to integrate individual and societal development. Capitalism and the metaphor of cancer In When Corporations Rule the World, Korten speaks of “a market tyranny” extending across the planet like a cancer, destroying the environment and livelihoods, displacing people, undermining democracy, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money. In The Post-Corporate World, Korten revised the metaphor, substituting capitalism for “the market”. Cancer occurs when a cell is damaged and forgets that it is part of a larger body. The cancer cell seeks to grow without regard to the consequences of such 7 growth on the whole body. It ultimately destroys the body that feeds it. Korten considers now that cancer is not a metaphor for market economies within capitalism but a clinical diagnosis of a pathology to which market economies are prone in the absence of oversight by citizens and democratic governments. Korten believes that restoring the health of democracies and markets is the remaining hope for purging them of the cancerous pathology. A cure? Korten offers several proposed practical solutions to cure the capitalist pathology of cancer. These are as follows: End the legal fiction that entitles corporations to the rights of natural persons and exclude corporations from political participation; Implement serious reform of political campaigns and reduce the influence of money on politics; Eliminate corporate welfare by eliminating direct subsidies; and recover other externalized costs from corporations through fees and taxes; Implement mechanisms to regulate international corporations and finance; Use fiscal and regulatory policy to make financial speculation unprofitable; and to give an economic advantage to humanscale, stakeholder-owned enterprises. 8 More important than these practical policies is the need for an enormous paradigm shift in our view of, economics, life and the environment that sustains life. Such paradigm shifts have occurred throughout recorded history. The ending of slavery in the West, the fall of apartheid, new perceptions of the role of women in society, perceptions of persons with disabilities as valuable members of society, the value of human diversity in society, democratic government, the empirical methodology of science, the dependency of human life on other life forms in our planetary ecosystems, and the humane treatment of children and animals are a few of the societal changes that occurred because of a paradigm shift in human thought and action. In the Soviet Union, the paradigm shift from a highly-centralized economy and government to a more decentralized form appears to be in the process of development. Not all paradigm shifts are positive for the generation and regeneration of life. With the creation of freedom of the individual in the 18th Century Enlightenment emerged a paradigm shift to greed as a major motivator of human action. Since the Industrial Revolution, new technology aimed at faster, more efficient production has changed the paradigm of work, from a meaningful, creative pursuit that marked the individual’s identity and his or her place in society. The new paradigm for many workers is that he or she is a commodity to be bought and sold with a value determined by the profit to be made on the commodities or services produced by the work. The intrinsic value of work that provides a sense of accomplishment, meaning, and individual identity has been replaced by a focus on extrinsic matters – the contribution of work to the accumulation of money, by both worker and employer. Social values of skilled, meaningful work and social interaction in the workplace have largely been replaced by repetitive work with little skill and workplaces stripped of human contact. Such soulless places are not confined to work. In schools, colleges, and universities, the lack of meaning and a sense of one’s place in that 9 corner of society is frequently absent in students’ experience, sometimes with serious consequences. Expanding on Roman Catholic doctrine in Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope John-Paul II presented to the world in 1981 the Encyclical Laborem Exercens, a critique of both capitalism and Marxism, particularly of their impact on the destruction of work as a creative exercise necessary for human fulfillment. In spite of such contributions to the literature, the dominant ideology of capitalism is that work is important as a creator of wealth, not for the development of the human mind and spirit. See also Heather Menzies “Whose Brave New World?” for paradigm shifts in contemporary workplaces. Competing Ideologies (A) Trickle-down theory Korten’s foregoing objection to the corporation as a social institution, in its current form, is based on a different ideology from that which underpins modern capitalism. A key element of that capitalist ideology is “trickle-down theory.” This advocates letting businesses flourish, since their profits are assumed to ultimately trickle down to lower-income individuals and the rest of the economy. This is related to “supply side economics,” a theory which holds that reducing tax rates, especially for businesses and wealthy individuals, stimulates savings and investment for the benefit of everyone. Korten, and others, challenge the assumption that the accumulation of large amounts of capital by corporations automatically serves the interests of society as a whole. While capitalism does generate income, there is ample evidence that, within countries such as Canada and the USA, “wealth” has become increasingly 10 concentrated in fewer hands. Furthermore, the proportion of Canadians and Americans living below the poverty line (that is with income less than is necessary to pay for basic requirements of food, shelter and clothes) is increasing, not decreasing, with the onset of capitalism, in spite of increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in those countries. Inequality of income between rich and poor is even greater when we consider levels of poverty in socalled developing countries, particularly but not exclusively Africa. See class web site (MGT3850B) for information on the salaries and benefits of corporate CEOs. See also Globe & Mail article of March 21, 2008. The shortcomings of “trickle-down theory” are even more evident when we consider the disparity of wealth between “developed” and “developing” countries. So-called “third-world debt” is a constant reminder that trickle-down theory has not brought greater equality of wealth across the globe and within countries. (B) Social Darwinism A familiar response of proponents of unfettered capitalism to the grossly unequal distribution of “wealth” that it creates is that the “have-nots” are poor because they are simply not sufficiently competitive. Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” is read by “social Darwinists” to suggest that life is a competition for survival of the fittest and that the poor lose the competitive struggle because they are less “fit for survival” than the winners, the rich. It must be remembered that economists use the Darwinian example as a metaphor for societal competition. If one were to view Darwinism literally in the societal context, one might conclude that the poor are fitter for survival than the rich because the number of poor appears to be increasing while the number of extremely wealthy people appears to be falling. 11 As an ideology for rationalizing and justifying extremes of wealth and poverty, Social Darwinism has broad appeal in North America. The result is that government policies tend to operate to promote wealth accumulation regardless of its unequal distribution, and regardless of other social values that are sacrificed in the pursuit of maximizing “wealth”. (C) Keynesian Economics Such alternative social values form the basis of Keynesian economics, which differs from the laissez-faire approach of trickledown theory and supply side economics. Named after economist John Maynard Keynes, this is an economic theory that advocates government intervention, or “demand-side” management of the economy, to achieve full employment and stable prices. A further manifestation of Keynesian economics is programs to foster greater economic and social equality within society. Such programs include publicly funded healthcare, education, retirement pensions, unemployment insurance, literacy programs for immigrants, etc. Government intervention formed the basis of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pre-WWII “New Deal” which sought to rescue capitalism from the Great Recession. Notably, Keynesian theory contemplated economic and social values other than maximum accumulation of “wealth”. The security of employment and freedom from the instability of inflation and deflation are identified in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Economic history has demonstrated that, if rapid economic growth is the only or primary societal economic goal, sacrifices will have to be made in other areas, such as price stability, levels of unemployment, and distribution of income. The checks of capitalism by governments in pre-WWII USA and post-war Canada and Western Europe were based on Keynesian 12 theory that sought to create an acceptable balance of growth, full employment, stability, and distribution of wealth. The underlying ideology of Keynesian economics places more emphasis on societal cooperation rather than competition. Ideology as rationalization While trickle-down theorists predict that the accumulation of wealth by the few will ultimately benefit everyone in society, empirical evidence suggests that poverty remains an issue in socalled developing nations and within Canada. To explain this, trickle-down economists suggest that, while poverty remains, the poor are still better off than they would be if they were not touched by global capitalism. The argument is that the exploited garment factory worker in Indonesia is still better off than she would be living in squalor off the land. While this may be true, it does not dispose of the issue. The appropriate comparison of relative “wealth” is not between the exploitation in the factory and bare survival and death in the country occupied by the corporations. It is well documented that colonial capitalism has destroyed much of the environment of indigenous peoples that, prior to colonization, had supported simpler, sustainable, meaningful life among such peoples. The ecological damage from colonial over-farming, mining, extermination of wildlife, deforestation, soil erosion, pollution or excessive use or diversion of water, and exposure to carcinogenic chemicals explains much of the consignment of indigenous peoples to a life of capitalist exploitation caused in large measure by environmental and social degradation caused by colonial capitalism. Furthermore, the assumption that the only choice available to people of developing countries is sweat shop exploitation or death by disease and starvation is fallacious. Small-scale, low-leveltechnology operations in developing countries have worked well 13 and have the advantage that profits are ploughed back into the local community. However, it is difficult to find media coverage of those small-scale successes. While “ideology” often refers to a system of belief as to the nature of reality, it is not infrequently used as rationalization not of reality but of a social or economic system imposed on society by those who stand to benefit most from the system. Accordingly, because the system of corporate capitalism tends to create both great wealth and poverty, it is expedient to blame the existence of poverty not on the system of capitalism but on the poor themselves. Democracy The idea of democracy resonates in Canada and the Western world. Our various wars across the globe seem to be rationalized not only as necessary for self-preservation from terrorists but as essential to take democracy to undemocratic countries. It is useful to reflect upon the inherent values, beliefs, structures and purposes of democracy as we perceive it. Possible inclusions are distribution rather than concentration of power, election of leaders and decision-makers by all adult members of society, political and legal accountability of leaders to the electorate, openness of government actions, freedom of speech, association, religion, conscience etc., freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention or punishment, freedom from discrimination on irrelevant grounds, respect for one’s privacy…..and so on. Glasbeek (Chapter 6) contends that the law structures our corporations to enable them to avert the dangers and perils of democratic rule. Democratic rule may bring less value to society than the wealth accumulation of corporations. Nevertheless, democracy is a value held in sufficient regard to warrant inquiry into Glasbeek’s concerns. 14 Glasbeek concedes the wealth creation advantage of large corporations and its benefit to society. It is Glasbeek’s contention that publicly traded corporations: (i) are legally structured as feudal institutions; (ii) commit crimes over and over again; and (iii) wield massive, disproportionate, and therefore unacceptable political power in our supposed democratic polity. Undemocratic nature of corporate governance Problem of the separation of ownership from control. 15