One day in St. Mike’s grammar school, the parish priest gave a little talk about what a good thing it was for us kids to give to the collection basket every Sunday. I raised my hand and asked what if somebody gave a dollar infected with smallpox and the congregation died, would that still be a good thing? The poor padre thought I was being a wiseguy, but I wasn’t (well, maybe a little). Even then I must have sensed that behavior without intention was incomplete.
Among the many things we can celebrate about humankind is our growing commitment to what is being called “social responsibility.” Vermont has one of the nation’s leading associations dedicated to this cause, Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. There are those who feel the U.S. constitution should be amended to incorporate a commitment to the principle. You could probably find a “socially responsible” approach to almost every human activity from conception to cremation, which may make this movement among the most powerful in the world’s history. Still, “social responsibility” is a relatively new phenomenon, and so, like every valuable principle, we continually discover new depths of its meaning.
For instance, we are learning that social responsibility begins not with changing a single thing about the world, but rather with asking ourselves: Who am I committed to being?
We are learning that when we “make the world a better place” because we are angry, say, to pick a common motivation—what we’re doing as much as anything else is perpetuating anger. And if that weren’t enough, we are learning that making friends with anger (one of the indispensable steps toward actually managing it) may be harder than quelling terrorism or feeding the third of the world’s population that goes to bed hungry every night. How many of us would rather chop off our hand than give up our attachment to righteous indignation? How many of us light a candle for the planet while we hate those goddamn polluters?
When the Dalai Lama met a Tibetan monk who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese for several years, His Holiness asked the monk if he had been afraid. The monk replied, “My only fear was that I wouldn’t have compassion for my captors.” We do ourselves a disservice if we think of this monk as somebody special. He’s just a guy trying to live the best life he knows how, like any of us. He knows that his life is not about his captors (the world outside of him), it is about himself—about who he is committed to being regardless of anything else.
A company here in Vermont has taken the courageous step of naming itself Seventh Generation, bowing to the Native American principle that one’s choices exist in a context far beyond the present moment. For some, this means looking ahead seven generations: to the grandchild of your great-great grandchild. For others, it means living at the center of a continuum that extends three generations ahead and three behind. Regardless, the value of this awareness includes how much the attempt to see our choices in a larger context becomes a conscious practice by every person who contributes to the organization’s well-being.
A friend occasionally solicits my two cents about a non-profit he founded. His firm’s aspirations are noble, their accomplishments admirable. But my friend looks at me a little askance when I say that I would serve their worst enemy with the same commitment I offer him and his team: to help them bring an ever-increasing awareness of who they are and who they can become to every choice they make.
Today, we are learning that the measure of health, whether of an individual or the planet, is defined primarily by one thing: resilience—the ability to respond in a positive way to any eventuality. By this measure, heath has nothing to do with anything other than our own consciousness.
A healthy enterprise, then, like a healthy person, is one engaged in the never-ending practices necessary to create resilience: managing fear, learning from our experience, gaining ever-deeper clarity on what’s essential (what we cannot live without), aligning commitments with action and action with commitments. The key modifier here is “never-ending.”
It was a different though equally well-intentioned priest who, at my father’s wake, made the offhand remark that we are all sinners. I was 27. Speak for yourself, I said to him. Are you saying you’ve never sinned? he asked. Oh no, Father, I said. You name it, and I’m sure I’ve either done it or wanted to. But I’ve also played a lot of baseball, and I don’t consider myself a baseball player.
As we grow in our understanding of what it takes to be socially responsible, we are learning that organizations that stagnate or die do so, at least in part, because they have neglected to address who they truly are. Their focus is primarily external, rather than within. Many of us who live lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau calls it, do so for the same reason—shying away from the question that lies at the heart of not only social responsibility, but of life itself: Who will I be or die trying?
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