Morality: Sex and Business

The parade of repentant politicians stepping up to confess their sins is like an old-time tent meeting: good theater, not much more.

Yet, like any good theater, it makes us think and exposes the foibles and contradictions of our lives. In this case, it exposes our self-righteous conflation of morality and sexuality and hopefully marks a tipping point toward a more adult approach to accountability and trust.

The hard core of the Republican Party is made up of old-line patrician wealth and corporate power aligned with the religious right. This partnering works for both so that the moral majority can burden the Republican Party with its agenda of family values but ignore business or public values.

America has always considered itself a righteous country, free from guilt or sin and living with a sense of justice and morality. Righteousness pervades the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the way that we think of who we are. America was, after all, founded on the basis of general principles that granted rights to all human beings and left behind in Europe the quarrels over religion, nobility and privilege.

Righteousness is, indeed, a virtue while self-righteousness, a narrow minded moralism and self-satisfaction, is a failing. Sometime, probably in the gaudy nationalism of the 1984 Olympics or the founding of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, we moved easily from the former to the latter.

Along the road to self-righteousness, sexuality morphed into family values and family values morphed into morality. Core moral challenges became abortion, pornography, teen pregnancy, gay marriage and feminism to the exclusion of honesty, accountability and respecting your neighbor.

The major flaw in all of this is that errant sexuality is no big deal. Can anyone really take seriously a sanctimonious politician confessing that he found his “soul mate” on an Argentine dance floor or a notorious cheapskate who gets caught in his own web with $1000 a night hookers.

In the religious right scheme of things, all this sinning is forgivable and Governor Sanford is now likely to survive politically.

All this nicely distracts from the problem of American corporate morality where sex isn’t important but money is.

If the business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge so aptly put it, then a moral country should have a moral business code and community. That is just what we do not have where money is concerned.

Business runs on trust. Trust demands accountability and honest dealings. Businessmen have to believe that their counterparties in any contract will perform as promised. The present financial and economic crisis finds its roots in the absence of trust and accountability.

From Enron to Bernie Madoff, we have seen a trail of deceit and double dealing. Investment bankers, hedge fund managers and, probably the biggest hypocrite of them all, Goldman Sachs were touting deals that they themselves were betting against and on which they made huge amounts of money.

Bernie Madoff was just another victim of the crash, albeit a crooked one. Those who caused the crash are not being held accountable. Contracts to pay golden parachutes to the bankers are sacred while contracts to provide pensions to workers are easily voided.
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Thousands of individuals have just achieved wealth that runs to hundreds of millions of dollars each All of that wealth was stolen from the 401(k)s, pension funds and mutual funds that invested in their fraudulent deals. There now exists a whole new culture of great fortunes behind each of which there is a great crime.

The honest and trustworthy small businessperson did not walk away with a great fortune. They and their workers are the ones who are the surest victims of this catastrophe. Their moral code of continued righteousness is what has cost them.

We are not about to have any parade of sinners confessing publicly how they did it and giving restitution. On the contrary, the crooks are still in charge calling the shots. They are even demanding bonuses to fix the problem that they created.

Morality is more than sex and family values. In the world we are going to create getting out of this crisis, we have to build a morality that respects trust and demands accountability. We have to go back and demand righteousness.