ONE

Taking Care of Business

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

JOHN STEINBECK

Our culture’s current dominant narrative is named here as the business perspective. But it has to do with much more than commerce. The business perspective dominates the role and functioning of our major institutions: government, democracy, international relations, urban planning, real estate, social equity, and social services. This narrative also defines our culture and how we live together.

The term business perspective is useful because it does not blame anybody. It defines the structure and direction of such fields of interest as journalism, architecture, religion, neighborhood, and more. It sets the context for how we work on such common concerns as education, the environment, our health and safety, social equity, and our isolation. We have been looking for the business promise of better management, control, and blueprints to work in these areas of concern. The business perspective at its core is attracted to modernity, which is about what is new and what is next. This narrative requires proof of where something is working and asks, before anything else, how much does it cost, how long will it take, and is it replicable? These questions commodify us and keep the system in place, even though they promise transformation.

No Longer the Alternative

In the dominant narrative of the business perspective, concerns for what fully serves our well-being but has no commercial or political value are treated as exceptions and alternatives. Alternative health, alternative economy, alternative education, alternative journalism. As for concerns about racism and racial equity, mainstream thinking in this narrative funds training programs for diversity, inclusion, and equity rather than investing directly in the redistribution of land and valuing the human assets in all of our neighborhoods. We offer efforts at economic justice through Community Benefit Agreements, Opportunity Zones, and the Community Reinvestment Act. But these efforts are implemented in a way that is either lip service or widens wealth disparities.

We can no longer live by having what we value most considered an “alternative” world. Too many of us are weary of remaining human-interest stories in the local section of the news. Of being reported on only in crises. Of never being the lead story in the evening news, only a feel-good upbeat note before signing off.

Advocates for the common good are accused of being idealists. When we choose to affirm cooperation, and focus on people’s gifts and what is collectively working, we are considered touchy-feely types, in contrast to realists. Reality is the selling point of commerce and cynicism. “Getting real” is always the argument that results in nothing shifting. “Realism” as it is used, however, rests on the belief that self-interest is who we are. So much of what constitutes this dominant business narrative, with Adam Smith as a major voice, declares that self-interest, materialism, and being competitive constitute “reality.” Darwin reported on cooperation as the basis of evolution, yet what was extracted from his work was the survival of the fittest, namely the most competitive.

The storyline of self-interest is glorified and legitimized in the dominant narrative. But self-interest is “in reality” a social construction, another term for fiction. When we accept that each narrative— the business perspective or the common good—is another social construction, it creates the opening for a counterstory. The common good perspective sets aside self-interest as a core principle on which to base a culture and way of being together. It creates a story based on the possibility that we built to be connected.

Could this be true? Who knows? You choose which researcher to quote. Show me the brain science. Listen to your historian of choice. The premise here is that in caring for the domains of the common good, an alternative to the business narrative is likely to be more useful. For example, the realms of raising a child, education, health, care for the planet, and safety do not want to be run like a business. They are not successful when they are fundamentally considered problems to be solved. When youth are seen to need socialization, when health has to be delivered by experts, when the planet is waiting for improvement, and safety has to be professionally guaranteed. Yet that is what we are doing. Most of our efforts and theories of change and improvement call for these “businesses” to be “run” better.

The option is to explore the ragged landscape of the common good, beginning with a brief look at the culturally dominant business perspective. The Magna Carta was a stance for the common good but was superseded by the modern story. This storyline of self-interest has been historically supported by the writings of Adam Smith, Garrett Hardin, Milton Friedman, and John Locke. It is embodied by the actions of European colonial exploits into Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By the western expansion of the United States including its attraction to low cost labor. By beliefs in Manifest Destiny, eminent domain, and the Doctrine of Discovery. The counterstory is to turn from all of this.

Note, however, that none of the concerns in this discussion are an argument against capitalism. Capitalism is not the problem. Nor is socialism an answer. Argument and opinion about either of these or more “isms” are interesting but take us nowhere in the moment. Also, the answer is not about more or less democracy. These debates are habits and keep us stuck. We have been mired in these arguments for a long time. It is the narrative of the dominant perspective that is in question. It is the business paradigm that needs to be contained, regardless of our governance or economic system. The work is to claim a wider version of the common good out of the warming ashes of where the business narrative has reached its limits.

Citizens Are the Point

A new pathway to restore the common good points to a dominant narrative that places our primary attention toward citizens and our capacity to control and produce solutions for what we are most concerned about. This is a storyline that brings together all the elements of the common good. Again, a dominant narrative is simply the story widely held to be true and one that claims to best serve society.

As we are interested in transforming this current narrative, the first step is to look closely at it to see how dominant it really is. To look at how, like an addiction or a habit, this perspective invades not only our thinking but also our thinking about our thinking. This paradigm cannot be changed through willpower, more science, or better problem solving. It has to be seen for what it is and accepted for how pervasive it is. All with clarity and minimum judgment. Only then is an opening created for a counternarrative to emerge and be chosen. This is why we must first explore a brief history and description of the business perspective.

The business perspective is organized on the belief that our well-being is improved when we seek more control, predictability, scale, and efficiency. Often packaged as improvement and development and more jobs. This is the heart of it. The idea that these values are working well is strongly promoted in our culture. The corollary is that the business perspective prospers when we are divided and longing for more. Our isolation makes us more vulnerable and easier to control, cheaper to hire, and more eager to yield to the authoritarian offer of certainty and the consumptive illusion that satisfaction can be purchased, with grades as a school child, income and upward mobility as an adult, chemistry in old age.

In our culture’s dominant business perspective, we are guided by a narrative of scarcity and the belief that we are incomplete and need improvement. This narrative claims that there is not enough to go around, and that if you have too little, it is your own fault. So, to compete successfully in a scarcity world, you also need to be wary of the stranger, because the stranger stands in the way of getting what we want. This perspective calls for us to compete against other nations. This is the business case for the STEM curriculum in our schools, giving priority to science, technology, engineering, and math often at the expense of arts, humanities, and making things. It was assumed to be in our national interest to be the first to place a person on the moon. And to be shamed that we were not the first nation to place a person in space. The business narrative has expanded way beyond business (where it belongs).

Wendell Berry writes in What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth about the flaws in our modern economy—increasing poverty, fragile families, environmental damage, rising health-care costs, and wealth disparity. These forms of suffering do get some attention in the business context. There are constant efforts at reform. Reform does not address the narrative, however—the thinking underlying what drives the suffering. Instead, solutions such as more schooling, more efficiency, technology in every hand reinforce the faith that we should keep trying harder to solve problems so that we can keep our perspective.

The commitment to speed, cost, and convenience replaces people. Berry asks what to do with these replaced people. He answers the question by saying that “replaced people have entered into a condition officially euphemized as ‘mobility.’”⁴ So, in addition to modern problems of land, waste, and pollution, we have the problem of displacement. Displacement began in the 1600s with enclosure. The machine then came along and drew people to wage labor and the city. Digital processes now automate our being together, and artificial intelligence is already writing poetry for us and doing our homework.

But this is not a case against technology. Or against speed, cost, and scale—they are useful. The wheel, printing press, electricity, the telephone, science and engineering bring important benefits. But just because something is amazing does not mean it must define us.

In addition to the efficiency and convenience of technology, the business perspective tends to define the many efforts to repair the side effects Berry mentions. We debate to seek adjustments in the distribution of capital: guaranteed annual wage, cap-and-trade emission systems, debt forgiveness, more health care, more public and affordable housing, earlier schooling, more policing, more minorities in top management, citizen review boards to exercise more control.

These are all efforts to redeem us from the liabilities of the current dominant narrative. They hope to make the business perspective work somewhat better. Perhaps. But these efforts are simply more of what we have been trying. None will shift us to the common good as an organizing principle. None really give citizens a path to seeing their gifts or experiencing greater control over what they care most about. Which is the essence of the common good.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

THOMAS WOLFE