Abstract
Human work is at the foundation of civilization. Religion "an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly" is at the core of every civilization, and without its overarching vision, motivation and direction human work becomes increasingly meaningless.
An essential characteristic of Christendom become pluralist Western Civilization and now emerging into a Global Civilization which has lifted it beyond all previous civilizations is the separation of religion from the power of the state. A second major characteristic is the "turn to dialogue." It is interreligious dialogue that will provide the vision, motivation and direction for the new Global Civilization.
Pioneering business leaders are beginning to emphasize ethics,
even spirituality, as essential for the business of the future.
But they have neglected the greatest source of both: the world's
religions out of fear of destructive, dogmatic religion.
In the future they must turn to dialogue with
"religionsindialogue."
1. Religion is at the core of every culture/civilization
Religion is at the heart of every civilization. A creative religion
promotes a creative civilization; a fragmented religion results
in a fragmented civilization. This is just as true now at the
edge of the third millennium as it was six thousand years ago
at the dawn of the first civilization at Sumer in the Fertile
Crescent.
2. Understanding the term religion
"Religion is an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life
,and how to live accordingly." Normally all religions contain
the four "C's": Creed, Code, Cult, Communitystructure,
and are based on the notion of the Transcendent.
Creed refers to the cognitive aspect of a religion; it is everything that goes into the "explanation" of the ultimate meaning of life.
Code of behavior or ethics includes the rules and customs of action that follow from one aspect or another of the Creed.
Cult means the ritual activities that relate the follower to one aspect or other of the Transcendent, either directly or indirectly; prayer is an example of the former, and certain formal behavior toward representatives is an example of the Transcendent, such as priests, of the latter.
Communitystructure refers to the relationships among the followers; this can vary widely, from a very egalitarian relationship, as among Quakers, through a "republican" structure like Presbyterians have, to a monarchical one, as with some Hasidic Jews visavis their "Rebbe."
The Transcendent, as the roots of the word indicate, means "that which goes beyond" the everyday, the ordinary, the surface experience of reality. It can refer to spirits, gods, a Personal God, an Impersonal God, Emptiness...
In modern times there have developed "explanations of the
ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly" which
are not based on a notion of the Transcendent, e.g., secular humanism,
Marxism. Although these "explanations" function as religions
traditionally have in human life, because the idea of the Transcendent
plays such a central role in religion, but not in these
"explanations,"
it is best to give these "explanations" not based on
notion of the Transcendent a separate name; the name often used
is: Ideology.
3. The relation of work to religion
To sustain life, humans had to gather and produce the fundamental necessities; as life became more fully human people banded together to make their efforts more efficient through differentiation of labor. Eventually this coalescing became so layered that it produced cities (whence the name civilization, from the Latin civis the stem for the English cognate city), built on the now increasingly complex human work, economic activity.
If human work is the foundation of the development of civilization,
the broadest context within which this is understood, explained
and significantly shaped is the civilization's religion. Without
the overarching vision, motivation and direction of religion,
human work becomes increasingly meaningless and consequently drifts
into ineffectiveness and ultimately collapse into chaoswitness
the resultant economic and other chaos in the former USSR when
its functional religion, the ideology of Marxism, proved intellectually,
morally and spiritually bankrupt.
4. A pluralist world and the separation of religion and state
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century in Europe, Western Civilization was essentially formed and driven by the Christian religion, with all its strengths and weaknesses. One of the greatest of these strengths was the uniqueinhistory separation of religion from the power of the state. Indeed, this was an essential characteristic which allowed Christendom (after the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment more and more known as Western Civilization) to become the most powerful, accomplished, dynamic civilization in the history of humankind. Without it, Western Civilization would have, like all other civilizations, been born, developed, plateaued at about the same level as the other "high" civilizations, and then declined.
But with the critical separation of religion and the power of
the state, developing largely in the eighteenth century and subsequently,
Western Civilization increasingly freed the illimitably creative
human spirit to meet imaginatively and successfully the always
arising human problemshence its break through
far beyond all previous human achievements in areas like physical
science, medicine, food production, technology and manufacturing,
transportation, communications, social sciences, politics, popular
education. Even Western Civilization's greatest problems are the
result of its unprecedented attainments, e.g., the population
explosion and the threatened destruction of the environment are
a result of its extraordinary medical and technological advances.
5. A pluralist world and the emerging global civilization
The spread of Western Civilization throughout the world is now also leading to a uniqueinhistory Global Civilization. But this Global Civilization is different from all previous civilizations in that it is not envisioned, motivated, and directed by a single religion at its heart, as were all other civilizations of the past. Rather, the emerging Global Civilization is envisioned, motivated, and directed by a plurality of religions. Global Civilization is characterized by religious pluralism.
This pluralism, however, can quickly lead to enmity, disintegration
and chaos (see, e.g., the polarization of Islam and the West),
for as such it resembles a collection of spokes without the hub
and has no unity with which to inspire and direct the emerging
Global Civilization. How can not only this incipient chaos be
avoided, but still more, how can the emerging Global Civilization
be provided with the spiritual heart it desperately needs?
6. The turn toward dialogue and interreligious dialogue
One of the profound insights that more and more humans have been gaining in recent decades is that all knowledge, all "truth," that is, all perceptions of and statements about reality, are necessarily limited, for all my "statements about reality" are always answers to my questions, posed in my thought categories and language, built on my prior assumptions, etc. My perceptions and statements about reality might be true, but they will always be limited because they come from my perspective. This deabsolutized understanding of truth (the word "absolute" comes from the Latin absolvere, meaning to be "loosedfrom all limitations") is valid not only in general, but also with special intensity in the "truth" about the "ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly"in religion.
Now, even if my religious view of reality is "true,"
that is, even if it accurately describes things the way they really
are, I increasingly realize that it cannot be the "whole"
truth, the "absolute," unlimited truth.
Whereas in the past I would simply have said to those who differed
from me in religion that they were clearly mistaken, I now have
to ask myself whether I might not learn more about reality and
the ultimate meaning of life from my religiously other. Consequently
I need to be in dialogue with those who differ from me religiously.
7. Interreligious dialogue the heart of the emerging global
civilization
Dialogue, then, is the way forward to an increasingly but never
fully complete grasp of reality. Thus, interreligious dialogue
must beand in fact is becomingthe new
religious heart at the core of the emerging pluralistic Global
Civilization. This core spirit of dialogue is fundamentally democratic,
egalitarian, personincommunityandcontext
oriented. For dialogue can occur only among free, reflective
persons. If there is no freedom or no reflectiveness, there will
be no dialogue. Further, dialogue can take place only among equals.
Also, dialogue happens only in community and in the environment
of the wider common context.
8. The intertwining of business, religion and dialogue
8.1 General principles
Abroad in the world, including religion and business, are these characteristics:
(1) a search for the "meaning of life," even a search for "spirituality," including in work,(2) a pressing for increasing freedom and democracy everywhere, including in religion and in the workplace,
(3) a concern for more equality,
(4) a focus on persons,
(5) on community, and
(6) on the environment.
Indeed, the basic goal of organizations such as "Business for Social Responsibility," the "Ethics Officer Movement," and the "World Business Academy" is precisely the promotion of these characteristics in business.
CEOs with foresight have been putting in place ethical principles which reflect these concerns, and have learned that even "doing the right thing" also in the long run is financially rewarding. A recent study has shown that the companies formally committed to the ethical principles of "Business for Social Responsibility" outscored Wall Street.
It is gratifying to find such an expanding commitment to business ethics. However, one finds here no reference to the traditional religions. Their great constructive and destructive energies are completely avoidedmuch to the potential danger and actual missing of creative resources for the corporations involved and the people, communities and environment they impact.
Let us look for a moment at the American scene. One of the fears in American culture, and especially in the business world, is speaking of the traditional religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. It is becoming permissible to speak publicly of ethics, values and spiritualitybut almost always without reference to God or any traditional religion. This reflects a longstanding tendency in the public domain to shy away from the mention of religion, fearing it as a divisive and even explosive force, and unfortunately this tendency too often also applies elsewhere in the world.
But for enlightened business leadersnow embarked on a path of bringing social ethics, spirituality, and concern for the environment into the center of their goals along with financial profitabilityto eschew engaging both the worst and the best the traditional religions have to offer is a vain attempt to hide from massively destructive global forces of the first magnitude (recall the Middle East, Bosnia...). Perhaps even more importantly, such avoidance of the traditional religions also misses benefitting from the most incredibly creative force ever generated in human history.
As a human activity, religion is inherently ambivalent and hence can be used destructively as well as constructively. Business leaders need to learn about these hidden dangers to avoid foundering on those jagged rocks. This is true not only on the international level, but also closer to home. What tensions are generated in the workplace by religious ignorance and disrespect on all the levels of a business: stockholders, management, labor, suppliers, customers, the communities of all five? How might they be helpfully brought out into the open, defused, remedied, turned into positive characteristics of dialogue and cooperation? These and related questions need to be raised to the conscious level and addressed knowledgeably, sensitively. To do this, however, enlightened business leaders need the collaboration of the creative, dialogic thinkers and practioners in the various religions. Precisely because they must be willing to engage in genuine and openminded dialogue these thinkers and practitioners tend often not to be members of the respective Establishments; hence the search for religious "dialogists" must cast a wide net in the various pools of the different religions.
On the positive side of religion, business leaders also need to
learn about the powerful creative currents that religion generates
so they can ride those waves to the betterment of their businesses
and those portions of humankind and the earth they impact. To
change the image, religion is like a huge dynamo which needs to
be plugged into so that its almost limitless energy can be transformed
into a variety of creative formsjust as electricity
in the dynamo is transformed and produces now heat, then locomotion,
and again light, etc. Here too, business leaders need to inform
themselves deeply of the vast resources religion presents.
8.2 Particular examples
We can see the hugely beneficial influence religion can have on all the stakeholders in two individual examples that have recently come to light. One came in the person of the observant Jew Aaron Feuerstein, the owner and CEO of Malden Mills in Massachusetts, whose mill burned almost completely in late fall, 1995. Cognizant that most of his hundreds of workers were Christians and what Christmas meant to them, he immediately pledged to continue their regular pay through beyond Christmas, although most of them would have nothing to do until the mill was rebuilt. He also promised to hire all his workers back when the mill was rebuilt.
In March, 1996, he was on the Jim Lehrer News Hour of Public Television
along with Al Dunlap, former CEO of Scott Paper Co., with the
central theme on downsizing and related ethical issues (Text found
on the World Wide Web: http://www.pbs.org). The contrast is most
instructive:
AL DUNLAP: A corporation is in business to make money for its shareholders. That's the essence of the free enterprise system. Business is not a social experiment. ....
AARON FEUERSTEIN: Corporate responsibility to me means yes, you must take care of the shareholder, but that is not your exclusive responsibility. The CEO has responsibility to his workers, both white collar and blue collar, as well, and he has responsibility to his community and city. And he has to be wise enough to balance out these various responsibilities and to act justly for the shareholder as well as the worker.
PAUL SOLMAN: But it cost a shareholder money in the case of you as shareholder having to pay to keep these people employed even when the mills were shut down and there was nothing for them to do, right? I mean, it cost it the shareholder?
MR. FEUERSTEIN: Yes, it did cost the shareholder. Nonetheless, the quality and the efficiency that we get in our factories is critical to the health of our company. And so I make it my personal business to see to it that I have loyalty and goodwill amongst my people. And that's what we enjoy at Malden Mills; they're the valued asset. They're not just a cuttable expense. They're the people who make the quality for us, and our products, our polar tech products in the performance outer wear market is the best in the marketplace, and only because I have very good workers. I'm not about to tear that apart and break that down for some shortterm gain.
Even the language used by Mr. Dunlap reflects his contrasting attitude toward the thousands of "devoted" workers he "got rid of":
PAUL SOLMAN: Well, do you like what Mr. Feuerstein did, for example? I mean, he says it's in the interest of his company, of his shareholders and so forth, the longterm interest, to have really devoted workers.
MR. DUNLAP: Their'sour workers were very devoted. He had a factory that burnt down, and, therefore, he had to keep his workers on. I had a corporation where every person stood the chance of losing their job, so I got rid of 35 percent of the people....
PAUL SOLMAN: Mr. Feuerstein, can you see yourself doing what Mr. Dunlap has done?
MR. FEUERSTEIN: Never, never. I can't imagine that his workers are satisfied with what he did. What Malden Mills always did in the pastwe understand as well as Mr. Dunlap does that there is a legitimate necessary downsizing as a result of computerization and better machinery. Technological advance requires the reduction of people. If you have a machine that once needed 20 people and now you have one that only needs 10 people, so you have to cut back. We understand that, but we at Malden, because we were sensitive to the human equation and worried about our people, we always triednot always successfullybut we always tried to take the cutback at the same time that we were expanding some part of our business, and in that way we're able to alleviate the pain. And we concentrate less onand I don't know what their situation was; I can only talk for myselfwe concentrate less on the cuttable expense of labor and more on research and development to make better quality products and to innovate and to differentiate ourselves from our competitors in the market place. And that's where the real profit can be made, and we couple that with marketing and merchandising and branding so that we are able to have a profit, together with our workers enjoying prosperity. We pay more than the average mill does, and so that's fine, because we don't concentrate on the pay; we concentrate on where the real profit is in making the product better.
One last element of contrast between the religiously ethical CEO
with sensitivity for all the stakeholders and the one who was
concerned only with the shareholdersincluding himself:
PAUL SOLMAN: ... Mr. Dunlap, you've also gotten a lot of flak...about your pay packageit was like $100 million... do you have any misgivings in the sense that...people feel that that's unfair, that people were laid off while you came away doing extremely well?
MR. DUNLAP: As I said before, I created $6 1/2 billion of value [for the shareholders]. I received less than 2 percent of the value I created....
PAUL SOLMAN: Mr. Feuerstein, do you as a CEOhow do you as a CEO feel about CEO pay these days?...
MR. FEUERSTEIN: I really think it's unconscionable that at the very time you have so much suffering amongst the workers as a direct result of the downsizing that the CEO would take so many times more than ever was heard of before. And I also would like to add that I said that technological downsizing was something that we have to do. There are other kinds of downsizing. There's the downsizing where you close up one company and open up in a foreign country at very low rates. There's the business of outsourcing, contracting downsizing, where you get rid of your own workers and hire in contractors at half the pay.
The workers of America can understand the technological downsizing, but they cannot understand the other, and it breaks their spirit and their feeling that the American dream is for them as well.
The second is a Christian example: Mr. S. Truett Cathy, owner and CEO of ChickfilA, a fastfood restaurant chain, worth perhaps a billion dollars. Mr. Cathy is said to "personify capitalism with a human face. Deeply Christian, he draws his management credo from the Bible" (the story and quotations are found in The New York Times, April 3, 1996, pp. 18ff.).
Cathy says his success comes from corporate loyalty, resulting from "an unusual social contract that shares the wealth with operators while providing extra benefits like scholarships for longterm hourly workers." Benefits also include a pension and health benefits for salaried workers and operators, and a health plan for hourly workers who wish to pay. He is convinced that "one can do right by employees and still do well, indeed that the one leads to the other." As a consequence he has a remarkably low turnover rate among restaurant operators 5% a year compared to 35% for the fastfood industry.
"The people are more important than the food," states
Cathy. "We want a person to be as successful as he can be,
and it works the other way around, too."
8. 3 international models of interreligious dialogue, ethics
and business
The dialogue among religions, indeed even among those for the most part most hostile toward each other, Jews, Christians and Muslims, has begun to focus its attention on issues of ethics, and specifically including business ethics. For example, under the patronage of HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and HRH Crown Prince Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, An Interfaith Declaration: A Code of Ethics on International Business For Christians, Muslims and Jews was "formulated in the light of the religious traditions of the three monotheistic faiths" and issued in 1994 (text found on the World Wide Web site of the "Center for Global Ethics": http://astro.temple.edu/~dialogueit offers a number of basic business ethical principles and suggested means of implementation).
It claimed that, after a number of meetings of business leaders, scholars and religious leaders since 1988 (though in fact more general interreligious dialogues had begun already in 1984), it was clear that "people of very different cultures or beliefs often have more in common than is sometimes apparent." However, this simple but highly significant principle was arrived at only after a half dozen years in which the religious scholars and leaders as well as business people were IN DIALOGUE. This amply illustrates the vital point that all of this interacting with religion must take place *with a dialogic consciousness*. Otherwise the destructive forces of religion in its traditional absolutist consciousness will once again overwhelm business, and doom all of humankind.
The most comprehensive attempt to forge a global ethic centers
around the effort to arrive at a Universal Declaration of a
Global Ethic, a major step toward which was the September
1993 "Declaration Toward a Global Ethic" 1
of the Parliament of the World's Religions, drawn up by Prof.
Hans Küng and signed by the over one hundred and fifty of the
religious leaders who guided the Parliament (which over 6,000
attended). This is a statement of consensus, arrived at in dialogue,
on the basic principles of ethics by the religions of the world
(including those dealing with business and work), which is also
designed to be acceptable to nonreligious persons. It is
precisely this huge source of human spiritual and ethical energy
that needs to be brought into intense dialogue with the business
leaders of the world so that both might learn from each other
and together help to forge a more authentically humane world.
9. Conclusion
The intertwining of business, religion, and dialogue is just beginning to become clear now. Once we humans perceive that interconnection, however, we should notindeed, as responsible persons, must notsimply let it proceed at its own haphazard pace and direction. The genius of humans is that when we become conscious of something, we can then turn to deterring or promoting it, and to directing it in more creative ways. The faster and more creatively we foster the interconnecting of business, religion and dialogue, the more rapidly the world will become more humane in the context of respect for the planet.
We each can promote these characteristics by ourselves, but to
remain alone in these efforts would be a terrible waste and inefficiency.
If we communicate with each other, if we join forces in this enterprise,
we will be able to advance the betterment of the world not only
arithmetically, but geometricallyand what business
person would not want to advance geometrically rather than arithmetically?
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