Spirituality and Corporate Social Responsibility

Interpenetrating Worlds

David Bubna-Litic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754647638
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317051183
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Religion and spirituality have often been treated with a secular disdain by management theorists. Recently, the tide has begun to turn and there is a growing openness to cite spirituality in academic analysis and debate, and when considering issues of practical concern to those engaged in the actual business of management. This provocative book brings together a range of leading thinkers to consider the relationship between spirituality and corporate social responsibility. The book's contributors examine spirituality as an inherent dimension of corporate life even if it is only known through its absence - and through the negative consequences of this absence on people and the planet. With contributors from four continents, David Bubna-Litic has assembled a range of fascinating perspectives having their origins in traditions that include Christianity, Process Theology, Hinduism, Contemporary Buddhism, Deep Ecology, Humanism, Post-Modern and Post-Romantic Spirituality. Spirituality and Corporate Social Responsibility is a fascinating read for anyone with an interest in ways in which spirituality relates to what is or what should be driving businesses and organizations to more responsible behaviour.

Part I Issues

1 The Disappearance of the Spiritual Thinker

Pankaj Mishra

DOI: 10.4324/9781315610382-2

‘I never knew a man’, Graham Greene famously wrote in The Quiet American (1955), ‘who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’ Since the disaster in Iraq, Greene's description of an idealistic American intellectual blundering through Vietnam seems increasingly prescient. People shaped entirely by book learning and enthralled by intellectual abstractions such as ‘democracy’ and ‘nation-building’ are already threatening to make the twenty-first century as bloody as the twentieth.

It is too easy to blame millenarian Christianity for the ideological fanaticism that led powerful individuals in the Bush administration to try to remake the reality of the Middle East. But many liberal intellectuals and human rights activists also supported the invasion of Iraq, justifying violence as a means to liberation for the Iraqi people. How did the best and the brightest – people from Ivy League universities, big corporations, Wall Street and the media – end up inflicting, despite their best intentions, violence and suffering on millions? Three decades after David Halberstam (1972) posed this question in his best-selling book on the origins of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, it continues to be urgently relevant: why does the modern intellectual – a person devoted as much professionally as temperamentally to the life of the mind – so often become what Albert Camus (1957) called ‘the servant of hatred and oppression’? What is it about the intellectual life of the modern world that causes it to produce a kind of knowledge so conspicuously devoid of wisdom?

The Perils of Secular Fundamentalism

The power of secular ideas – and of the individuals espousing them – was first highlighted by the revolutions in Europe and America and the colonization of vast tracts of Asia and Africa, and then by Communist social engineering in Russia and China. These great and often bloody efforts to remake entire societies and cultures were led by intellectuals with passionately held conceptions of the good life; they possessed clear-cut theories of what state and society should mean; and in place of traditional religion, which they had already debunked, they were inspired by a new self-motivating religion – a belief in the power of ‘history’.

It took two world wars, totalitarianism and the Holocaust for many European thinkers to see how the truly extraordinary violence of the twentieth century – what Camus (1951: 11) called the ‘slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy’ – derived from a purely historical mode of reasoning, which made the unpredictable realm of human affairs appear as amenable to manipulation as a block of wood is to a carpenter.

Shocked, like many European intellectuals, by the mindless slaughter of the First World War, the French poet Paul Valéry dismissed as absurd the many books that had been written entitled ‘the lesson of this, the teaching of that’, which presumed to show the way to the future. The ‘Thousand Year Reich’, which collapsed after 12 years, ought to have buried the fantasy of human control over history. But advances in technological warfare strengthened the conceit, especially among the biggest victors of the Second World War, that they were ‘history's actors’ and, as a senior adviser to President Bush told the journalist Ron Suskind, ‘when we act we create our own reality’ (Suskind, 2004: 44).

Many British and American intellectuals today help the reality-makers draw ‘lessons’ for the present and future from the ‘facts’ of history. In his book Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004), the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis claims that John Quincy Adams, in the early nineteenth century, first articulated the ‘grand strategy’ of pre-emption and unilateralism that President Bush has adopted. Gaddis believes that the methods that established American hegemony and that ‘shaped our character as a people and nurtured our development as a nation’ ought to be ‘embedded within our national consciousness’ (Gaddis, 2004: 31). In Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003), Jean Bethke Elshtain, the author of an estimable book on Jane Addams, invokes an even older tradition – Augustinian Christianity – as a moral and philosophical justification for a forceful American engagement with the world.

History as an aid to the evolution of the human race seems to be most fully worked out by the respected Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. Writing in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Ferguson (2003) declared himself a ‘fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang’, and asserted that the United States should own up to its imperial responsibilities and provide, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, ‘the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets’. In his recent book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Ferguson argues that ‘many parts of the world would benefit from a period of American rule’ (2004: 2)

Delusion and Hubris in ‘History-making’

It is hard to imagine now how this all began – how, in the nineteenth century, the concept of history acquired its significance and prestige. This was not history as the first great historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, had seen it: as a record of events worth remembering or commemorating. After a period of extraordinary dynamism in the nineteenth century, many people in Western Europe – not just Hegel and Marx – concluded that history was a way of charting humanity's progress to a higher state of evolution.

In its developed form, the ideology of history described a rational process whose specific laws could be known and mastered just as accurately as processes in the natural sciences. Backward natives in colonized societies could be persuaded or forced to duplicate this process; and the noble end of progress justified the sometimes dubious means – such as colonial wars and massacres.

This instrumental view of humanity, which communist regimes took to a new extreme with their bloody purges and gulags, could not be further from the Buddhist notion that only wholesome methods can lead to truly wholesome ends. It is in direct conflict with the notion of nirvana, the end of suffering – a goal many secular and modern intellectuals purport to share, but which can only be achieved through the extinction of attachment, hatred and delusion.

Indeed, no major traditions of Asia or Africa accommodate the notion that history is a meaningful narrative shaped by human beings. Time, in fact, is rarely conceptualized as linear progression in many Asian and African cultures; rather, it is custom and religion that circumscribe human interventions in the world. Buddhism, for instance, in its emphasis on compassion and interdependence, is innately inhospitable to the Promethean spirit of self-aggrandizement and conquest that has shaped the new ‘historical’ view of human prowess. This was partly true also for many European cultures until the modern era, when scientific and technological innovations began to foster the belief that our natural and social environment was to be subject to rational manipulation, and that history itself – no longer seen as a neutral, objective narrative – could be shaped by human will and action.

It was this faith in rational manipulation that powered the political, scientific and technological revolutions of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it was also used to explain and justify Western domination of the world – a fact that gave conviction to such words as ‘progress’ and ‘history’ (as much as ideological buzzwords of the nineteenth century such as ‘democracy’ and ‘globalization’ are of the present moment).

The great material and technological success of the West, and the growth of mass literacy and higher education, produced its own model of the secular thinker: someone trained (usually in academia) in logical thinking and possessed of a great number of historical facts. No moral or spiritual distinction was considered necessary for this thinker; no more than technical expertise was asked of the scientists who helped create the nuclear weapons that could destroy the world many times over.

The Eclipse of Humane Wisdom

It is strange to note how quickly the figure of the spiritually-minded thinker disappeared from the mainstream of the modern West, to live on precariously in underdeveloped societies like India. In the West it was left to marginal religious figures such as Simone Weil, Reinhold Niebuhr and Thomas Merton to exercise a moral and spiritual intelligence untrammelled by the conviction that science or socialism or free trade or democracy were helping humankind march to a historically predetermined and glorious future. But then, as Hannah Arendt (1968: 8) wrote:

The nineteenth century's obsession with history and commitment to ideology still looms so large in the political thinking of our times thatwe are inclined to regard entirely free thinking, which employs neither history nor coercive logic as crutches, as having no authority over us.

This kind of free thinking was more likely among people not entirely shaped by Western modernity; its most distinguished exemplar was Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu who used the ideals of the ethical and mindful life to challenge the prestige and influence of many purely materialistic Western notions about the nature and meaning of human life. Gandhi claimed that his Indian ancestors had done well to ignore history and seek wisdom in the Mahabharata, the epic account of a terrible war that is said to have occurred in India in the first century BCE. For, as Gandhi wrote in 1924, ‘that which is permanent and therefore necessary eludes the historian of events. Truth transcends history’ (Gandhi, 1998: 134–35).

Gandhi had little doubt about where this permanent and necessary truth of the Mahabharata lay, and it had little to do with affirming the greatness of extinct empires and civilizations. The truth lay in the Mahabharata’s depiction of the elemental human forces of greed and hatred: how they disguise themselves as self-righteousness and lead to a destructive war in which there are no victors, only survivors inheriting an immense wasteland. As Gandhi saw it, there was no clear-cut good or evil fighting for supremacy in the Mahabharata. The epic depicted a world full of ambiguities, where the battle between good and evil actually went on within individual souls and where human beings had to make their own moral choices and strive for mindfulness and virtue. Though unconcerned with facts, the Mahabharata taught the importance of an ethical life based on constant self-awareness. History, Gandhi (1998: 134) claimed, could not do this, certainly not ‘history’ as it is understood today, ‘as an aid to the evolution of our race’.

Though not an intellectual, Gandhi had an instinctive underdog's suspicion of such grandiose Western words as ‘progress’ and ‘history’. He knew that European empire-builders justified their worst excesses in Asia and Africa by invoking a particular history in which they were always in the avant-garde of humanity's march to a glorious future. He could sense that a pseudo-scientific history – one that justified foul means by positing noble ends and that could be used to retrospectively justify past crimes and legitimize present ones – had become the primary ideology of the worldconquering nations and empires of the West. It was an ideology that – as Albert Camus (1951: 11) wrote in The Rebel – ‘can be used for anything, even for transforming murderers into judges’.

The Efficacy of Non-violence

Faced with increasingly bad news from Iraq and Afghanistan, such aspiring reality-makers as Ferguson appear to have faltered briefly before clamouring even more loudly for an assertion of American military might. ‘Give violence a chance!’ they seem to say. If violence cannot remake the Middle East, then it can at least deal with Islamic fascists and terrorists.

By a perversity peculiar to our times, it is the advocates of non-violent politics – of negotiation and dialogue – who face scepticism, if not outright derision. One of the commonplace rhetorical moves is to compare radical Islamism to German fascism and then ask, ‘Could Gandhi have stopped Hitler?’. But then Gandhi or his ideas were not much in evidence at Versailles in 1918, where Western nations imposed humiliating terms on the defeated Axis powers, setting the stage for another world war. Non-violent principles of self-control, moral persuasion and dialogue are unlikely to repair overnight the vast devastation wrought by a form of politics that institutionalizes greed, hatred and violence.

It may be hard to conceive of non-violence as a viable force, especially as we appear to be in the midst of a worldwide upsurge of violence and cruelty. Nevertheless, the history of the contemporary world is full of examples of effective non-violent politics. The movements for national self-determination in colonized countries, the civil rights movement in the United States, the velvet revolutions in Russia and Eastern Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the gradual spread of parliamentary democracy around the world – the great transformations of our time – have been essentially peaceful.

And there have been activists and thinkers in our own time, such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Václav Havel, who rejected politics as a zero-sum game (in which the other side's loss is seen as a gain) and adopted moral persuasion and conversion as means to political ends. As the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote to Martin Luther King after a spate of Buddhist self-immolations in Vietnam in 1965:

The monks who burned themselves did not aim at the death of the oppressors, but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination, which lie within the heart of man.

Imprisoned by the totalitarian regime of Czechoslovakia, Havel (1985: 69–70) echoed a Buddhist-like preoccupation with actions in the present moment when he warned that ‘the less political policies are derived from a concrete and human “here and now”, and the more they fix their sights on an abstract “someday”, the more easily they can degenerate into new forms of human enslavement.’ In his own political practice, Gandhi opposed any mode of politics that reduced human beings into passive means to a predetermined end – i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I ISSUES
• PART II PATHWAYS FOR CHANGE
• Index