Most civilizations have been religious.\u00a0 Max Weber\u00b4s studies of four of them, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Confucianism, reveal, perhaps somewhat unwittingly, their author\u00b4s opinion that secular modern western civilization is a superior \u201cmore civilized\u201d civilization. \u00a0I agree with Susan Strange that key components of modern western civilization have morphed into a global business civilization.\u00a0 Many of its participants hold \u201cdual civilizationship.\u201d \u00a0As businesspeople they are more individualistic.\u00a0 Simultaneously, as Japanese or Arabs or Chinese they are less individualistic.<\/p>\n
We can justify saying there is now a global business civilization, despite dual civilianship, by attributing a shared common sense, a shared worldview and other attributes that constitute a civilization, to today\u2019s global business elite. We can add many of their collaborators in the public sector.\u00a0 We can regard as integral parts of the global business civilization organizations like the OECD, the World Trade Organization and the World Economic Forum.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, we also need to consider the broader and a few centuries older entity that is called modern western civilization. \u00a0\u00a0One of its important characteristics is that its basic norms are rigid. They are so rigid that the emblematic philosopher of western modernity, Immanuel Kant, declared his own neo-Roman jurisprudence and\u00a0 ethics, along with Newtonian mechanics, to be a priori<\/em> truths valid everywhere and always.\u00a0 Thus, a certain version of law makes individualism formal and official.\u00a0 It organizes and authorizes the accumulation of capital that separates the wealthy people from the common people and both from the indigent.<\/p>\n Modern western civilization was and is the general fertile soil where more specific and often more nuanced individualisms, like the viewpoints typical of the Mont Pelerin Society, and of Davos, LSE and Harvard Business School have found inspiration and support.\u00a0 A general occidental modernity underpins the specifics of business civilization.<\/p>\n So, what is mostly established today, and what is most in crisis requiring revisions, has several layers and versions.\u00a0 It is in mega-crisis because over and above its own survival as a civilization, the survival of human beings as a species and of the biosphere is at stake. \u00a0\u00a0On its watch the human species has so far not shown itself to be capable of responding effectively to at least three existential crises:<\/p>\n The way forward that I suggest is called unbounded organization. (UO) (www.unboundedacademy.org<\/a>).<\/p>\n I write this while accepting that the UO label is not the only possible label for the realities it identifies.\u00a0 Readers may find that UO describes what they are already doing under a different name.<\/p>\n Unbounded thinking is pathbreaking and innovative.\u00a0\u00a0 At the same time, it is reconciliatory and peacebuilding.\u00a0 It adapts to new realities. \u00a0It is about game-changing challenges.\u00a0 It is about game-changing opportunities.<\/p>\n A game-changing challenge is the impossibility, the literal impossibility, of continuing on the path of economic growth.\u00a0 Continuing to rely on economic growth to provide new employment and new financial resources has become a march toward collective suicide.\u00a0 And yet, it is as if these facts were too big to fit in the human brain.\u00a0 Every day in the press and the media, news about growth is broadcast as if nothing had changed, as if the old world still existed, as if more growth were good news and less growth were bad news.\u00a0 The major global economic think tanks \u2013like the World Bank and the OECD– have all endorsed green growth.\u00a0 But after that they seem to have gone numb, as if they could not process the fact that green growth, to the extent that it might exist, so far has had no measurable impact on measures of environmental damage.<\/p>\n A game-changing opportunity: the world is now awash with enormous quantities of accumulated capital.\u00a0 Most of it cannot find any profitable use in the world economy.\u00a0 We live in what the same Susan Strange who named business civilization named the casino economy.\u00a0 Day after day, of the total amounts of money that crosses borders flowing from one country to another, more than 97% is devoted to speculation.\u00a0 Less than 3% plays a role in the real economy that hires people and produces goods.\u00a0 Much of the speculation is harmful, worse than useless.\u00a0 Massive buying up of real estate, betting that its market value will increase, has driven the prices of homes and the rents of apartments higher and higher, forcing some people into homelessness, and others into debt.<\/p>\n Ever since Adam Smith, economists have been predicting that the days of surplus accumulated capital would come.\u00a0 Now those days have arrived.\u00a0 The existing huge capital surpluses could <\/em>be used to pay the unemployed and the underemployed to work on saving endangered ecosystems. This is a not-to-be-missed game-changing opportunity.<\/p>\n A bit of history will help us to see how UO contradicts in principle, and corrects in principle, today\u00b4s status quo that was constructed before any of us were born. \u00a0Thomas Piketty explains in detail in Capital and Ideology, <\/em>that implementing libert\u00e9, \u00e9galit\u00e9, fraternit\u00e9 <\/em>was far from the minds of the men who reorganized France after the revolution of 1789.\u00a0 The American Thomas Paine, in his pamphlets Common Sense <\/em>and The Crisis, <\/em>succinctly expressed the aims of the American revolutionary war and the nation building that followed the war when he wrote, \u201cOur plan is commerce.\u201d\u00a0 The USA and other modern republics were not designed to be welfare states.\u00a0 As Joseph Schumpeter wrote when he resigned as finance minister of Austria in 1918, a government with carefully limited powers, relying on taxes for its income, cannot be a sustainable welfare state.<\/p>\n UO forgives the past and builds a sustainable future.\u00a0 It proposes collaboration across all sectors for the general good. It practices a care ethic.\u00a0 It calls for mobilizing resources to meet needs in harmony with nature.\u00a0 If it can be called an \u201cerror\u201d to prefer one\u00b4s own economic interests and those of one\u00b4s class to the good of all and to the long run requirements of physical reality, UO corrects historical \u201cerrors\u201d while it rises to a higher ethical level where souls are empowered to forgive the unforgivable.<\/p>\n UO can be described as a direct approach to provisioning and to sustainability. What makes it direct is that it moves directly from identifying needs, to mobilizing resources to meet needs. \u00a0It minimizes giveaways, for the simple reason that human needs include needs for dignity, respect, self-respect, freedom, and self-realization. But it does bypass the bottlenecks imposed by the common sense of business civilization.\u00a0 The rule that needs will be met only if somebody can find a way to turn needs into profit opportunities has never been strictly enforced.\u00a0 Now that robots are better workers than humans and AI is smarter than humans, it is a good time to repeal it.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0People are not human resources.\u00a0 The purpose of an economy is to enable people to live better. What else could it be?<\/p>\n A direct approach starts with a point frequently made by Gracia Navarro, a psychologist at the University of Concepcion specializing in the study of moral development and social responsibility.\u00a0 Her flagship point is, \u201cSolidarity is a choice.\u201d\u00a0 Each of us can choose to live guided by a care ethic of solidarity.\u00a0 After we make that choice, if we do, we will find it natural to take a direct approach.\u00a0 Do what you can to solve the problem; plant trees, include the excluded, be peace, think, think and then think again.<\/p>\n Hyman Minsky illuminated negative aspects of today\u00b4s economic reality, when he wrote, \u201cWhat cannot be financed, cannot happen.\u201d\u00a0 But, of course, every day many things that are not financed do<\/em> happen.\u00a0 For example, nursing mothers give<\/em> milk to babies.\u00a0 Minsky\u00b4s point is that within the bounds of economic rationality anything not financed cannot happen.\u00a0 And what follows from his point is that economic rationality is often dysfunctional.\u00a0 It does not follow, however, that economic rationality is always dysfunctional or that entrepreneurs and managers big and small should change careers and take up dentistry or bartending.\u00a0 Concerning how to separate the wheat from the chaff, on these issues I would recommend the voluminous writings of Peter Drucker (1909-2005).<\/p>\n The history of UO dates to Paulo Freire\u00b4s methodology for consciousness-raising and literacy training.\u00a0 His friend, colleague and sometime cell mate in prison, Clodomir Santos de Morais, believed that the peasants of northeast Brazil needed something more than literacy and consciousness: they needed to learn to organize.<\/p>\n De Morais developed a methodology that facilitated learning organizing by doing organizing.\u00a0 A large group (maybe 300 people) was offered pay for completing a task.\u00a0 It was given all necessary tools and technical advice.\u00a0 But they had to organize themselves.\u00a0 They were given complete freedom to organize in whatever way they thought might work.\u00a0 It usually took several iterations before they succeeded in organizing themselves in a way that accomplished successfully the task at hand.<\/p>\n Moraisian methodologies are now used on three continents.\u00a0 \u00a0Gavin Andersson, a native of Botswana, first learned how to use them there and in Zimbabwe.\u00a0\u00a0 His tutors were two Chilean disciples of De Morais, Isabel and Ivan Labra.\u00a0 Later, in his 2004 doctoral dissertation for the Open University of the UK he elaborated the ethical approach to organization management called UO.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n The word \u201ccrisis\u201d draws its meaning from medicine.\u00a0 When a patient is in crisis, life and death hang in the balance.\u00a0 When the crisis is over, although the patient may not have recovered yet, the prognosis is that s\/he will recover. Below I suggest (1) that business civilization is in crisis too, and (2) a way forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[295,418,1982,354,380],"class_list":["post-235782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-civilization","tag-crisis","tag-economic-crisis","tag-economics","tag-solutions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235782"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235855,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235782\/revisions\/235855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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<\/a> <\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a>. He\u00a0<\/em>is Research Professor of Philosophy at\u00a0<\/em>Earlham College and he also <\/em>currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme.\u00a0He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford.\u00a0His books include:\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Evaluation of Cultural Action,\u00a0a study of an application of Paulo Freire\u00b4s pedagogical\u00a0philosophy in rural Chile\u00a0(London Macmillan 1985);\u00a0<\/em>Letters from Quebec;\u00a0Understanding the Global Economy;\u00a0The\u00a0Dilemmas of Social Democracies;\u00a0Gandhi and the Future of Economics; Rethinking Thinking;\u00a0Unbounded Organizing in Community;<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The Nurturing of Time Future.\u00a0His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson,\u00a0<\/em>Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for our Survival,\u00a0is available from the publisher, Dignity Press, and from Amazon and other major booksellers, as a print book and as an eBook<\/em>. <\/em>Email: howardrichards8@gmail.com <\/a>and howardri@earlham.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"