Professional ethics
From Sustain
Even if we achieved the mechanics of economic renewal, the continued success of any new system would remain utterly dependent upon its unitary elements.
I have railed at length against the failings of today’s society. And yet I retain hope that the individual behavioural change required is well within the capacity of our evolved reason. Our companies, our governments and our entire economic system are each a consolidation of their constituent parts, with the individual as the indivisible unit.
If we each took responsibility to ensure our unit input was ethical, the combined output would be utterly transformed. For the consolidation of our activities to produce a glorious whole, we each need to act as responsible professionals.
Historically, the imperatives of capitalism clashed with the direct ethical guidance of our great religions and inherited wisdom, but the success of capitalism was irresistible: it concurrently granted great earthly power to a few, while beating back scarcity for the masses. Our selfish human drive, that our religions instructed us to repress, was the motor of capitalism. And so the traditional, universal principles of ethical trade were progressively forced underground. They may not have been redacted from the scriptures, but they were sidelined from the primary teachings. In the field of economic affairs, modern religion largely abstained.
Global trade has therefore exploded in a moral vacuum. Although our selfish drive has been the direct cause of capitalism's success, it is also the seed of its inevitable collapse. The stark destruction left in the wake of this phase of human development will surely rank as one of the most cataclysmic events in geological history. While some of us remain, there will always be hope that we can fashion out a sustainable existence of quality on our planet. That society will have shared ethics, based on faith and explicitly incorporating economic behaviour. Such ethics will attribute status to the respected professionalism of honest labour, as opposed to power or wealth; genuine surplus creation as opposed to extravagant extraction.
We need to prevent underhand distortion of individuals from their ethical responsibilities: advertising and all forms of covert manipulation must be strictly prohibited. The alternative to our global bazaar of blag, persuasion and deception is the transparent, meritocratic market place. A form of this is definitely within our reach – imagine vastly upgraded reputation systems of ebay applied to all products and services, supported by pricing transparency rules.
The last few years have seen a definite awakening to our terminal folly, mainly stimulated by global warming and, more recently, the credit crunch. We are becoming cognisant, but are still flapping around for the means of real progress. The time is ripe for the wisdom that already resides in the scriptures and our libraries to be reordered and reasserted. The change we need in each individual is subtle, but the scale needs to be near to universal. Any new code of ethics needs to explicitly address our religions’ blind spot: modern economic interaction.
Next up, A new faith.
