It is this absence of a functioning industrial society, able to integrate our industrial reality, that underlies the crises of our times.
Man in his social and political existence must have a functioning society just as he must have air to breathe in his biological existence. However, the fact that man has to have a society does not necessarily mean that he has it. Nobody calls the mass of unorganized, panicky, stampeding humanity in a shipwreck a “society.” There is no society, though there are human beings in a group. Actually, the panic is directly due to the breakdown of a society; and the only way to overcome it is by restoring a society with social values, social discipline, social power, and social relationships.
Social life cannot function without a society; but it is conceivable that it does not function at all. The evidence of the last twenty-five years of Western civilization hardly entitles us to say that our social life functioned so well as to make out a prima-facie case for the existence of a functioning society.
If freedom is incompatible with security, the masses will decide for security.
The masses, then, have become prepared to abandon freedom if this promises to reestablish the rationality of the world. If freedom is incompatible with equality, they will give up freedom. If it is incompatible with security, they will decide for security. To be free or not has become a secondary question, since the freedom available does not help to banish the demons. Since the “free” society is the one that is threatened by the demons, it seems more than plausible to blame freedom and to expect delivery from despair through the abandonment of freedom.
Faith enables man to die; but it also enables him to live.
My work has indeed been totally in society. But I knew at once, in those far-back days of 1928, that my life would not and could not be totally in society, that it would have to have an existential dimension that transcends society. Still my work has been totally in society—except for this essay on Kierkegaard.
Though Kierkegaard’s faith cannot overcome the awful loneliness, the isolation and dissonance of human existence, it can make it bearable by making it meaningful. The philosophy of the totalitarian creeds enables man to die. It is dangerous to underestimate the strength of such a philosophy; for, in a time of sorrow and suffering, of catastrophe and horror, it is a great thing to be able to die. yet it is not enough. Kierkegaard’s faith, too, enables man to die; but it also enables him to live. Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful. Faith is the knowledge that man is creature—not autonomous, not the master, not the end, not the center—and yet responsible and free. It is the acceptance of man’s essential loneliness, to be overcome by the certainty that God is always with man, even “unto the hour of our death.”
For Kierkegaard, human existence is possible only in tension—in tension between man’s simultaneous life as an individual in the spirit and as a citizen in society.
Disintegration of the rational character of society and the rational relationship between individual and society is the most revolutionary trait of our times.
Society must make it possible for man to die without despair if it wants him to be able to live exclusively in society. And it can do so in only one way: by making individual life meaningless. If you are nothing but a leaf on the tree of the race, a cell in the body of society, then your death is not really death; you had better call it a process of collective regeneration. But then of course your life is not a real life either; it is just a functional process within the life of the whole, devoid of any meaning except in terms of the whole. Thus an optimism that proclaims human existence in society leads straight to despair. And this despair can lead only to totalitarianism. Human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy; it is possible as existence in Faith. Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful.
Only compassion can save—the wordless knowledge of my own responsibility for whatever is being done to the least of God’s children. This is knowledge of the spirit.
Society needs a return to spiritual values—not to offset the material but to make it fully productive. However remote its realization for the great mass of mankind, there is today the promise of material abundance or at least of material sufficiency. Mankind needs the return to spiritual values, for it needs compassion. It needs the deep experience that the Thou and the I are one, which all higher religions share. In an age of terror, of persecution, and of mass murder, such as ours, the hard shell of moral callousness may be necessary to survival. Without it we might yield to paralyzing despair. But moral numbness is also a terrible disease of mind and soul, and a terrible danger. It abets, even if it does not condone, cruelty and persecution. We have learned that the ethical humanitarianism of the nineteenth century cannot prevent man from becoming beast.
The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and physiological being but also a spiritual being, that is, creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him. Only thus can the individual know that the threat of instant physical annihilation of the species does not invalidate his own existence, its meaning, and its responsibility.
“It is not enough for business to do well; it must also do good.” But in order to “do good,” a business must first “do well.”
Whenever a business has disregarded the limitation of economic performance and has assumed social responsibilities that it could not support economically, it has soon gotten into trouble.
Union Carbide was not socially responsible when it put its plant into Vienna, West Virginia, to alleviate unemployment there. It was, in fact, irresponsible. The plant was marginal to begin with. The process was obsolescent. At best the plant could barely keep its head above water. And this, inevitably, meant a plant unable to take on social responsibility, even for its own impacts. Because the plant was uneconomical to begin with, Union Carbide resisted so long all demands to clean it up. This particular demand could not have been foreseen in the late 1940s, when concern with jobs far outweighed any concern for the environment. But demands of some kind can always be expected. To do something out of social responsibility that is economically irrational and untenable is therefore never responsible. It is sentimental. The result is always greater damage.
Today’s ethics of organization debate pays great attention to the duty to be a “whistle-blower” and to the protection of the whistle-blower against retaliation or suppression by his boss or by his organization. This sounds high-minded. Surely, the subordinate has a right, if not indeed a duty, to bring to public attention and remedial action his superiors’ misdeeds, let alone violation of the law on the part of a superior or of his employing organization. But in the context of the ethics of interdependence, whistle-blowing is ethically quite ambiguous.
To be sure, there are misdeeds of the superior or of the employing organization that so grossly violate propriety and laws that the subordinate (or the friend, or the child, or even the wife) cannot remain silent. This is, after all, what the word “felony” implies; one becomes a partner to a felony and criminally liable by not reporting, and thus compounding it. But otherwise? It is not primarily that to encourage whistle-blowing corrodes that bond of trust that ties the superior to the subordinate. Encouraging the whistle-blower must make the subordinate lose trust in the superior’s willingness and ability to protect people.
Public-service institutions are out to maximize rather than to optimize.
The most important obstacle to innovation is that public-service institutions exist, after all, to “do good.” This means that they tend to see their mission as a moral absolute rather than as economic and subject to a cost/benefit calculus. Economics always seeks a different allocation of the same resources to obtain a higher yield. In the public-service institution, there is no such thing as a higher yield. If one is “doing good,” then there is no “better.” Indeed, failure to attain objectives in the quest for a “good” only means that efforts need to be redoubled.
“Our mission will not be completed,” asserts the head of the Crusade Against Hunger, “as long as there is one child on the earth going to bed hungry.” If he were to say, “Our mission will be completed if the largest possible number of children that can be reached through existing distribution channels get enough to eat not be stunted,” he would be booted out of office. But if the goal is maximization, it can never be attained. Indeed, the closer one comes toward attaining one’s objective, the more efforts are called for. For, once optimization has been reached, additional costs go up exponentially while additional results fall off exponentially. The closer a public-service institution comes to attaining its objectives, therefore, the more frustrated it will be and the harder it will work on what it is already doing.
