(From Mathew Fox, The Reinvention of Work, Harper Collins, 1995) Reinventing Work:- Economics, Business, and Science To me, this concept of GNP (Gross National Product] means nothing at all.... GNP being a purely quantitative concept, bypasses the real question: How to enhance the quality of life. E. F. SCHUMACHER' That human well-being could be achieved by diminishing the well-being of the Earth, that a rising Gross Domestic Product could ignore the declining Gross Earth Product; this was the basic flaw in this Wonderland myth (of progress]. BRIAN SWIMME AND THOMAS BERRY' GNP values very highly bullets, tanks, and cars; and it values at zero the environment, clean air, clean water, etc. It also values at zero our children, who really are our future wealth.... The raising of children, managing household activities, serving on the school board, and many other activities are not considered to be part of the formal economy.... In so many countries in the world, the contribution of unpaid workers is far larger than the GNP. HAZEL HENDERSON The community supports that business that supports the community. BEN COHEN Primitive and even colonial women played a much more integral role in the business of survival. Their identity as workers and managers was taken for granted.... Women were relegated to an inferior caste... most dramatically with the coming of industrialization. MADONNA KOLBENSCHLAG' The model that presents the business organization as a cold, impersonal machine denies humanness. People have needs in three areas: body, mind, and spirit. Yet most companies, if they acknowledge people have needs at all, act as if there are only two requirements for producing good work: money and job security. RICHARD McKNIGHT' -- The primary purpose of a company is to serve as an arena for the personal development of those working in the company. The production of goods and services and the making of profits are by-products. ROLF OSTERBERG' As more about the fundamental role of consciousness in the universe is revealed and the new ideas promulgated, a basic change in science will eventually occur. . .. It is even possible that eventually a new science will be born, a science that accommodates the whole human with fully realizable capabilities of body, mind, and spirit. BEVERLY RUBIK' In this chapter we will discuss how we might reinvent the work of economics, business, and science. ECONOMICS I do not derive a great deal of confidence from the words of economists-and neither, apparently, do many economists. Paul Krugman, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, confessed in a recent newspaper report, "We don't know a lot about what's going on." Another economist says, "Quite candidly, I don't know if we as economists know an awful lot about what it takes to improve long-term economic performance." As economic writers Peter Gosselin and Charles Stein suggest, humility "is becoming more common in the economics profession these days."9 Maybe it's time for economics to let go of its faith in an outmoded paradigm. I recently spoke to a new graduate of economics from a respected state university. He told me that he had studied the economic theories of the old paradigm-Adam Smith, Milton Freedman, and a bit of Karl Marx-but he had been asked to read nothing whatsoever of new-paradigm economist E. E Scbumacher. This is a shame, because Schumacher is an economist worth reading. First of all, he knows as much as anyone can know of the mysteries of our economic systems. Born in Germany, he came to England in the 1930s as a Rhodes Scholar to study economics at New College, Oxford, and later taught economics at Columbia University in New York. He served as economic adviser with the British Control Commission in Germany from 1946 to 1950, and from 1950 to 1970 he was the economic adviser of the National Coal Board of England. He has advised many developing countries on the problems of rural development and is author of Small Is Beautiful and Good Work, as well as A Guide for the Perplexed. Yet, as we have seen already, Schumacher also pays attention to the inner life of the self and society. This dimension gives him the authority to bring the new paradigm into his own profession. About the economics profession Schumacher is severely critical. He proposes, for example, that the great litmus test of economics, the GNP or gross national product, is essentially meaningless. "To me, this concept of GNP means nothing at all.... GNP, being a purely quantitative concept, bypasses the real question: How to enhance the quality of life." Instead of GNP, Schumacher proposes that we critique our economic system from the viewpoint of meaningful work for evervone. Perhaps FE (full employment) should replace GNP as the yardstick of a healthy economy. "Let us ask then: How does work relate to the end and purpose of [humanity's] being? It has been recognized in all authentic teachings of [humankind] that every human being born into this world has to work not merely to keep himself alive but to strive toward perfection."10 Schumacher sees a threefold purpose in human work: As a divinely arrived being [the human person] is called upon to love God in traditional language. As a social being he is called upon to love his neighbor. And as an incomplete individual being he is called upon to love himself. The social organization ought to reflect these three absolute needs. If these needs are not fulfilled, if he can't do it, he becomes unhappy, destructive, a vandal, a suicidal maniac. The social, political, and economic organizations ought to reflect these needs. But they do not. 1 Schumacher observes that "joyful, constructive labor" com- pletes us, makes us feel that we are created "as a child of God." Yet most jobs are organized to be so dull that they cannot serve this purpose. Notice how thoroughly Schumacher fits in the tradition of the mystics who speak of the joy of work and of our being children of God. One problem that Schumacher names in the GNP mania is the notion that an economy must always be growing to be healthy. This does not make sense when the Earth itself is finite. At whose expense will the economy grow? How can we have infinite growth on a finite planet without someone or something having to pay a dear price? And isn't that exactly what industrial societies have subjected the planet to an infinite plundering of limited resources of fossil fuels, forests, water, air, plants, animals, people? Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry concur. They recognize the doctrine of the GNP to be the dominant myth that drives our anthropocentric civilization in the name of progress. They believe that the "terminal phase" in which the Earth finds itself today "was caused by a distorted aspect of the myth of progress. Though this myth has a positive aspect in the new understanding that we now have ofan evolutionary universe, it has been used in a devastating manner 'n plundering the Earth's resources and disrupting the basic functioning of the life systems of the planet." 12 What stands behind this destructive myth? "That human well- being could be achieved by diminishing the well-being of the Earth, that a rising Gross Domestic Product could ignore the declining Gross Earth Product; this was the basic flaw in this Wonderland myth [of progress]."13 Schumacher believes that one of the great evils of current eco- nomic theory is the idea that bigger is better. The truth is that impersonal bigness disempowers the worker, leaving him or her out of touch with the decision-making level of the work world. Americans of late are beginning to grasp th.is fact as we wake up from the greeddriven eighties to a nightmare of unemployment, loss of tax base, widening gaps between the wealthy and the middle class, and increased poverty. Smallness is the path Schumacher says will put most people to good work. "It is only in a small organization that we can meet people face to face and make decisions face to face," he observes. Intermediate technology is his term for a conscious effort to displace and let go of the giant technology that so dominates our economic world and the way we think about it. We can see in Schumacher's work a movement from the technology of giant industrialism to a human-sized or green technology that once again fits into the Great Work of the universe. The former technology was part of the anthropocentric,exaggerations and arrogance of the Enlightenment era. About smallness and technology Schumacher writes, "I can't see anything that [hu- manity] really needs that cannot be produced very simply, very efficiently, very viably on a small scale with a radically simplified technology, with very little initial capital, so that even little people can get at it."15 Schumacher believes that consciously returning to smallness is not a romantic return to tribal ways; reinventing ways of doing things on a smaller scale will in fact require all our resources of creativity and imagination. He gives the example of metal rims needed for wooden oxcart A,heels in developing countries. In the old days persons knew how to make these rims, but at some point the art was lost. Having found a two-hundred-year-old tool in a French village, the Schumacher team took the challenge to the National College of Agricultural Engineering in England. These people reinvented this old tool and came up with a rim-maker that costs only thirteen dollars, doesn't require electricity, and can be operated by anyone. Prior to this, the cheapest machine for making rims in the modern West cost $1100 and required outside power and electricity to operate. After putting the word out to inventors that such a thing was needed a new way of creating these wheels emerged. A return to smallness will create new and good work for people, Schumacher believes. Experience shows that whenever you can achieve smallness, simplicity, capital cheapness, and nonviolence, or, indeed, any one of these objectives new possibilities are created for people, singly or collectively, to help themselves, and that the patterns that result from such technologies are more humane, more ecological, less dependent on fossil fuels and closer to real human needs than the patterns (or lifestyles) created by technologies that go for giantism, complexity, capital intensity, and violence. Notice how often Schumacher speaks of needs. Needs are not the same as wants or desires. A healthy economy satisfies needs first; it does not indulge in satisfying wants for a few before it satisfies the needs of the many. In this regard our entire industry of advertising must be sub'ected to a spiritual critique. Is its purpose not to pump up the wants of those who have extra means? And does this economy not then oppress those whose true needs are not yet met? "What is the great bulk of advertising other than the stimulation of greed, envy, and avarice? It cannot be denied that industrialism, certainly in its capitalist form, openly employs these human failings-at least three of the seven deadly sins-as its very, motive force."17 An economic system built on titillating and stimulating greed, envy, and avarice as its "very motive force" cannot or ought not long cndure. People are at the heart of our work, even when business ideologies and narrow conceptual litmus tests (such as the abstraction known as GNP) cover up this fact. "Business is not there simply to produce goods, it also produces people, so that the whole thing becomes a learning process. In othcr words, business must be critiqued from a qualitative point of view and not merely from a quantitative perspective. Schumacher is not alone in offering a new paradigm that could help reenchant the profession of economics and eventually our worlds of business. Hazel Henderson is an economist committed to a new worldview as described in her books Politics of the Solar Age, Creating Alternative Futures, and Redefining Wealth and Progress. She criticizes the worldview of "industrial economics" by pointing out that the debate between communism and capitalism was actually a trivial argument. Both Marx and Smith devised a discipline that led to industrialism and materialism. Unchecked production, consumption, and continuous economic growth are common in their thinking.... It is high time to give Adam Smith and Karl Marx a decent burial. 19 Henderson also criticizes the ideology of the industrial revolution for its abuse of the Earth and its reductionism in holding up the GNP as the measure of a healthy economy. "GNP values very highly bullets, tanks, and cars; and it values at zero the environment, clean air, clean water, etc. It also values at zero our children, who really are our future wealth." Nor are women counted in the GNP. "The raising of children, managing household activities, serving on the school board, and many other activities are not considered to be part of the formal economy.... In so many countries in the world, the contribution of unpaid workers is far larger than the GNP. Henderson finds hope in the G-15, the group of developing countries that repre- sents twice as many human beings as the G-7 (the seven industrial countries that meet yearly to determine the future of the world's economy). She finds hope in the contribution that women, who have been largely excluded from industrial economics, can make to the reinvention of the global economy. Henderson pictures the total productive system of an industrial society as a "three-layer cake with icing." The icing is the official market economy of cash transactions or the "private sector." The GNP-monetized section of the cake represents the officially measured GNP that generates all our economic statistics (even though 15 percent of that is "underground" or illegal and therefore pays no taxes); this is the "public sector." The layer that holds up the public sector is the nonmonetized production of the social cooperative countereconomy- This includes "sweat-equity," do-it-yourself work, bartering, parenting, volunteering, caring for old and sick, use-subsistence -agriculture, and other activities. And the bottom layer is nature's layer-the natural resources base so jeopardized by pollution, deforestation, and toxic wastes. This picture of society's economy appears far more inclusive than the male-dominated and anthropocentric definitions we have been given by custodians of the GNP ideology. Henderson consciously applies the new scientific paradigm to her work as an economist. She speaks of "the end of economics," because economics (from left to right) was primarily concerned about industrialism as a method of producing material goods efficiently and with ever greater technological virtuosity." She names the new paradigm as "the dawning of the Solar Age," meaning a shift to renewable resources management and sustainable forms of production. The new paradigm rejects the idea that the Earth is inert-the foundational idea of industrial science and technology-and opts instead for the view that the Earth is Gaia, a living planet, whose systems are living, dynamic and self-organizing. "The Solar Age is an image that reminds us that the light from the sun is what powers our extraordinary blue planet and it is the sun's stream of photons which drive all of Earth's processes: the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, the water cycles, and climate...... In addition, the Solar Age will include a new appreciation of mystical or right-brain experience. "The wisest of us recognize that our Earth still has much to teach us-if we can humble ourselves and quiet our egos long enough to really listen, see, hear, smell, and feel all of her wonders." This newly found sense of spirituality will, in turn, end the cycle of avarice on which modern consumer economics is based; we will find our quest for the infinite or for Spirit in places that truly satisfy. "As we re-integrate our awareness in this way, we no longer crave endless consumption of goods beyond those needed for a healthv life, but seek new challenges in society for order, peace, and justice, and to develop our spirituality."22 Economist Herman E. Daly has long been conscious of the need for paradigm shift in his profession. Author of Steady State Economics, he has not only taught in academia but is a member of the Environment Department of the World Bank. Recently he teamed up with process theologian John Cobb, and together they published a book called For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy totvard Communi'ty, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. In this book they explicitly recognize the need for a paradigm shift in the profession of economics and in academia itself. Their book, they say,is meant to outline an alternative to both capitalism and socialism, which founder on the myths of growth-based economics. They acknowledge that economics today cannot be done in isolation from other disciplines, including -even cosmology. "To conceive of such a radically different economy forces us both to think through the discipline of economics as well as beyond it into biology, history, philosophy, physics, and theology. Part of the assault of the wild facts has been against the very disciplinary boundaries by which knowledge is organized (produced,packaged, and exchanged) in the modern university."23 They trace the accomplishments of industrialization over the past few centuries, whereby "the standard of living has soared from bare subsistence to affluence for most people" in the northern hemisphere. But they also deplore the price that has been paid in the souls of the people who have most profited from this wealth, wherein individual egoism and a "spirit of social irresponsibility" reign. They underline how little attention has been paid by economists of industrialism to "the exhaustion of resources or to pollution." The suffering of the biosystem is seldom if ever calculated in this kind of economic thinking; nor, might we add, is the suffering calculated of preindustrial economics whose land and labor are so readily abused by northern countries. The authors call for a "paradigm shift in economics, citing a poll of economics professors at fifty ma'or universities that showed two-thirds of respondents felt economics had lost its moorings. "Instead of Homo economicus as pure individual we propose Homo economicus as person-in-community." The changes they are proposing to their own profession, they insist, "will involve correction and expansion, a more empirical and historical attitude, less pretense to be a 'science,' and the willingness to subordinate the market to purposes that it is not geared to determine."24 Daly and Cobb point out that the industrial revolution was a rev- olution "from harvesting the surface of the Earth to mining the subsurface," and thus a shift "from dependence on energy currently coming from the sun to stored energy on the Earth." This is vitally important, because what occurred was a shift from dependence on relatively abundant sources "to the relatively scarce source of the ultimate resource: low-entropy matter-energy." Both capitalism and socialism remain uncritical about their commitment to "large-scale, factory-style energy and capital-intensive, specialized production units that are hierarchically managed." Invoking the poet-farmer Wendell Berry, the authors praise the "Great Economy-that economy that sustains the total web of life and everything that depends on the land. It is the Great Economy that is of ultimate importance."25 This phrase, the "Great Economy," sounds much like the phrase used in this book and borrowed from the poet Rilke: the "Great Work." The authors acknowledge their Protestant roots and decry its overemphasis on individual salvation, inherited from Augustine's question of whether he was saved or not. Left out has been the community perspective, a perspective they credit medieval feudalism and Roman Catholicism with having celebrated better than Calvinism and,the Enlightenment philosophy. They envision an economic order that would be "just, participatory, and sustainable." Invoking the prophetic tradition of Israel and sounding the trumpet for economic change, they call for "an economics for the common good" that interferes with "an ideology of death," which is "destroying our own humanity and killing the planct."26 While the authors address the academic discipline of economics, they also lay out practical applications of their work. Prophetic and apocalyptic in tone at times, this study nevertheless communicates a spirit of hope and challenge: "Huinanity is not simply trapped in a dark fate. People can be attracted by new ways of ordering their lives, as well as driven by the recognition of what will happen if they do not change."27 They conclude the book with a statement of their belief that a spiritual vision is necessary to sustain the struggle for a para- digm shift in economics. The work of Daly and Cobb, embracing as it does the work of other economists invoking a paradigm shift in their profession, is a fine example of how the profession of economics could be reborn. Geologian Thomas Berry is challenging economists to renew their profession by throwing off anthropocentrism and waking up to cosmology and ecology. He warns, "When nature goes into deficit, then we go into deficit," and he bluntly states the facts: "At least in its present form, the industrial economy is not a sustainable economy.... An exhausted planet is an exhausted economy." Perhaps this helps to explain why industrial nations are so deeply in debt today. Our economics are not working. Even our economists are exhausted! While economists often wring their hands over this reality, Berry has some suggestions for moving on: The earth deficit is the real deficit, the ultimate deficit, the deficit in some of its major consequences so absolute as to be beyond adjustment from any source in heaven or on earth.... For the first time we are determining the destinies of the earth in a comprehensive and irreversible manner. The immedate danger is not possible nuclear war, but actual industrial plundering.29 To go beyond this situation, we must change our vision. The impetus behind our economics is not facts but ideology or vision; therefore it can be altered by a truer vision. Berry writes, "However rational modern economics might be, the driving force of economics is not economic, but visionary, a visionary commitment supported by myth and a sense of having the magical powers of science to overcomc any difficulty encountered from natural forces." The economic visions we have been granted over the past few hundred yearssocialist, free enterprise, mercantile, physiocrat, or supply-demand theories-all are "anthropocentric and exploitive" in their programs. "The natural world is considered a resource for human utility, not a functioning community of mutually supporting life systems within which the human i-i-iust discover its proper role.,,30 Berry points out the kind of pseudomysticism that the industrial age ran on: The industrial age itself, as we have known it, can be described as a period of technological entrancement, an altered state of consciousness, a mental fixation that alone can explain how we came to ruin our air and water and soil and to severely damage all our basic life systems under the illusion that this was "progress." But now that the trance is passing we have before us the task of structuring a human mode of life within the complcx of the biological communities of the earth. This task is now on the scale of "reinventing the human," since none of the prior cultures or concepts of the human can deal with these issues on the scale required.31 It would follow that we need new visions to replace those that dominated our ways of seeing the world during the industrial era. Berry does not hesitate to challenge the power brokers of our culture to look at their souls. For the past hundred years the great technical engineering schools, the research laboratories, and the massive corporations have dominated the North American continent, and even an extensive portion of the earth itself. In alliance with governments, the media, the universities, and with the general approval of religion, they have been the main instruments for producing acid rain; hazardous waste; chemical agriculture; the horrendous loss of topsoil, wetlands, and forests; and a host ofother evils the natural world has had to endure from human agency. The corporations should be 'udged by their own severe norms. What exactly have they produced? What kind of world have they given us after a century of control?32 Clearly, there is much work to be done by economists within their own profession. Business Just as religion depends on theology for an ideological support system, so business depends-often uncritically-on the economic ideology that underpins it. One can expect that a new wind will sweep over business when economics is sub'ected to the critique that it deserves as we move from the industrial era to a green era. Business is a practical application, a praxis, of an economic theory. As that theory undergoes transformation, so too will business. However, transformation works the other way around as well. That is to say, as the praxis changes, so too might the theory change. As business people attempt to do business more from a creation-centered model, they will feed into the theoretical world of economics some new and refreshing approaches. Examples of New Paradigm Approaches to Business Schumacher offers examples of new and small businesses that have sprung up, making intermediate technology available to people. One African village began manufacturing egg cartons in relatively modest numbers, with the result that an entire cottage industry of making egg cartons was established. (All previous manufacturers of egg cartons made them in quantities too great for small villagers' needs.) In Khur'a, India, a town ninety miles from Delhi, there sprang up within a period of twelve years three hundred pottery factories employing 30,000 people to produce pottery and hospital and electrical porcelain.33 This is an example of how people are already working with the new paradigm-putting people to work in small businesses that remain simple and people centered. Another example closer to home is the business of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the inventors of Ben and jerry's ice cream. Their corporation, which has grown into a ninety-million-dollar business, is committed to donating 7.5 percent of pretax earnings to nonprofit organizations. (Most corporations give less than I percent of pretax earnings to charity.) They deliberately support family farmers by paying more than the government recommends for milk; they use their packaging to advertise value-oriented issues pertaining to peace and the environment. They consciously contribute to defending the rain forest by purchasing Brazil nuts from people in the rain forests and calling their product "rain forest crunch" in order to raise consciousness about the rain forest. Ironically, Cohen and Greenfield were at first so taken aback by their success that thev were ready to sell their business. Instead, they took up the challenge of changing business. Along the way they ran into the business world's perhaps inevitable resistance. (All persons wishing to reinvent work can expect to encounter such resistance. It ought not to discourage us, as it did not discourage Ben and Jerry. Thomas Kuhn points out that resistance is one of the signs of a paradigm shift.) Cohen and Greenfield deliberately changed their way of doing business. Instead of the old-paradigm definition of business, "An entity that produces a product or provides a service," they coined a new slogan: "Organized human energy plus money will produce power." Business may be "the most powerful force in the world," Ben proposes, and as such it needs to accept the responsibility that goes with power. Business is a focused ener gy, like a laser, that in fact sets the tone for a society. He asks the question: "Does business have a value beyond maximizing profits? " After all, individuals hav'e-.values but are often told on coming to work to leave their values at the door. At work "we are prevented from acting on our values," he contends. "If individuals have a responsibility to help the community, we cannot possibly suspend that responsibility just when we're at our most effective, that is, when we are at work." Ben asks why it is that business lacks values. It is because of an ideology we carry with us from the old, paradigm, namely that one "can't make profits and help the community at the same time." The result of such a dogma is that the environment, the workers, and the community all suffer at the hands of the workplace.34 It is the experience of Ben and Jerry that this tired shibboleth creating a dualism between work and values simply no longer works. As long as we operate within this old paradigm, we are separated from our heart and values and feel powerless. We cannot suspend our values during the workday and think we will have them back when we get home. We're all interconnected. There is a spiritual dimension to business just as to individuals!35 Notice how Ben is invoking one of the new laws of the universe (an old one to mystics): interconnection. He sees the suffering we rain on one another as due to a lack of interconnection. Like Schumacher, Ben and Jerry criticize business for being so insular and narrowly focused on one ingredient: the quantitative. "The only measure for business," Ben points out, "is quantitative. It is only about profit and loss." In this regard Ben is critiquing the mechanistic and quantitatively-oriented worldview of the Newtonian era when what counted was exclusively what was quantifiable.36 In a conscious effort to break out of this confining and unrealistic paradigm, Ben and Jerry have redefined the bottom line in business. Instead of asking only, "How much profit do we have at the end of the year?" they now also ask, "How much have we helped the community of which we are a part?" The question is decidedly not an issue of philanthropy but "the way we do business." And so they have introduced into their business a yearly report called an "Audited Social Statement." They undergo two audits each year=a financial one and a social one. They have found that the latter "is good for business" for "the community supports that business that supports the community." Profit is a regulator of business but not the only one. Other human factors must also be taken into account. When these are lacking, thcn business takes a "narrow, selfish" stand on political issues. Business says Ben, "needs to integrate community care into its way of operating." In other words, business must join the revolution taking place around the Great Work of the universe-the work from which business, and all human endeavor, will derive its meaning and its rules. Business must become interdependent; that is, it must relate to the greater community around it, listening to its pain and its joys.37 Some ways in which Ben and Jerry's have reached out to the greater community are as follows: They went public with the company in order to invite the commu- nity to become co-owners of the business. They did this by offering stock at 126 dollars per share so that ordinary folks could afford it. The result has been that one of every one hundred families in the state of Vermont, where the busincss is located, owns stock in their cornpany. The materials they use in their product are chosen from communities that support the oppressed. For example, baked goods are ordered from Buddhist communities that hire the homeless and train them to be bakers; coffee is bought from a Mexican coffeecooperative; blueberries come from next-door small farmers in Maine; nuts come from the rain forest. Their shops are used as polling places, and their managers are authorized as notaries to do voter registration, so as to get persons to vote on the spot when they come in for ice cream (when you register you get a free ice cream cone). They hire homeless to sell their products. They intend to reduce their energy consumption by 25 percent within ten years by solar power and other ways. They chose the South Shore Bank of Chicago as their bank. That bank, located in a decaying urban area, is committed to greenlin- ing, or putting its money into the local neighborhood. Recently Ben and jerry's has announced that they will build a factory in the heart of South Central Los Angeles. This factory will employ over two hundred local citizens.38 Ben is the first to point out that other businesses are also following this path: Patagonia, makers of outdoor clothing; Seventh Generi at rL, manufacturers and distributors of env' ironmentally healthy products; Working Assets, a socially responsible investment firm; Levi Strauss; Stridrite Shoes; Aveda, makers of hair and beauty products; and others. In addition, networks are developing around these new business paradigms: One Per Cent for Peace (to which over one hundred groups belong)- Social Venture Network (over two hundred businesses); New England Business Association for Social Responsibility (one hundred members); and the national Business Association for Social Responsibility in Washington, D.C., which is launching an alternative chamber of commerce. These organizations are dedicated to encouraging businesses to take responsibility for healthy and productive workplaces, for quality and environmental impact of their products and services, for community involvement (New England Businesses for Social Responsibility), and to use business to "create a more 'Ust, humane and environmentally sustainable socicty" (Social Venture Network). The approximately 2,000 committed companies in the social responsibility movement here and abroad have combined annual sales of $2 billion. This represents only one-hundredth of I percent of the sales volume of business enterprises worldover.39 It would seem that business people are not all lagging behind in the effort to reinvent their work. In England the fastest growing holistic business is The Body Shop. Anita Roddick and her husband, Gordon, began the busine'ss in a small shop in 1976; it now has three thousand employees and a gross annual income of $241 million dollars. Its goals are to sell natural body products that are environmentally friendly. Its guidelines include simplicity, natural products, minimal packaging, no animal testing, and ingredients that can be grown in the so-called Third World. About her work Anita Roddick says, "The individual is forcing the change. People are shopping around, not only for the right 'ob but for the right atmosphere. They now regard the old rules of the business world as dishonest, bor'ng and outdated. This new generation in the workplace is saying "I want a society and a 'ob that values me more than the gross national product. I want work that engages the heart as well as the mind and the body, that fosters friendship and that nourishes the earth. I want to work for a company that contributes to the community."40 In her remarkable autobiography, Body and Soul, Roddick virtu- ally redefines the meaning of business: The trouble is that the business world is too conservative and fearful of change. All this talk about free enterprise, innovation, entrepreneurship, individuality ... it's nothing but hot air. . . . I am still looking for the modern-day equivalent of those Quak- ers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently, worked hard themselves, spent honestly, saved honestly, gave honest value for money, put back more than they took out and told no lies. The business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.41 In the excellent chapter entitled "The Transformation of Busi- ness his book After the Crash:The Emergence of the Rainbow Econ- omy, Guy Dauncey points out that the idea of worker cooperatives and worker-owned businesses is growing rapidly. From 1971 to 1975, there were only ten worker cooperatives registered in England; by 1986 there were 1,500, with a per annum combined turnover of about 380 million dollars. "This remarkable growth-rate of around 58 percent per annum, illustrates the growing desire that workers have to be in control over their own livelihoods, and to be able to create a harmony between their values and their working lives," he comments.12 In Florida, the largest retail food chain, Publix Super Markets, is completely owned by its employees and makes a profit per dollar of, sales that is twice that of Safeway, America's largest food retailer. In 1976 a total of 843 companies in the United States had employee stock option plans (ESOP) that covered a half-million people; in 1984 more than 5,700 such plans covered some 9.6 million workers or 7 percent of the U.S. workforce-a growth rate of 27 percent per annum. Were America to continue this growth rate, by the year 2004 the entire American workforce would be working under an ESOP plan. The results are equa lly impressive. Studies show that these companies outperform their nearest competition time and time again. Dauncey delineates the evolution of business in three stages: First was the era of Dickens and Marx, when there were no laws controlling or regulating businesses. Next came the organization of workers and laws against child exploitation; organizers and unions fought for and won benefits related to health, safety, living wage, and limits to working hours. But today we are moving into a new era, when a "huge evolution" is taking place. What will characterize this era? Nurturing creativity, worker self-management, participation and teamwork, setting up profit-sharing and employe-shareholding schemes, promoting the role of women and meeting childcare needs, encouraging work-sharing and flexi-work patterns, supporting em- ployees' own personal journeys of growth and self-empowerment, breaking down hierarchical organizational structures and authoritarlan modes of management ... pursuing environmental excellence, encouraging community involvement-these are some of the signs which mark a company's evolution into the Third Era.44 This evolution cannot be described by the inherited dualistic language of "right wing" versus "left wing." Its values include initiative, individuality, and enterprise, but also caring for the workforce and the community as a whole. Green movement values of environmental concern and human-scale organization are incorporated, as are human potential movement values of caring for personal growth and fulfillment; spiritual values of honesty and integrity; and values from the movement for global development of international justice, cooperation, and interdependence. Recently John Denver's Windstar Foundation in Aspen, Col- orado, sponsored a conference entitled "Establishing a Socially Just New World Environment.11 A panel of-progressively minded business people gathered to emphasize that a new paradigm in business must include encouraging employees to do good work in the community and paying more attention to how the employees themselves need to grow and develop in the workp lace. If these values are enc-ouraged, the workplace, far from being a foreign or isolated world, can- become the microcosm of what the world should be. Once again we see here the theme of interconnection replacing the laws of rugged individualism and dualism that characterized the industrial era. As one panelist put it, the employees will treat the community the way they were treated. One must build a community based on humane values within the work world if one is to reach the greater community "out there." Another panelist proposed that business pay attention to its inner, self and not just be content with outer, market forces. Impact on the community must be factored into business as well as cost, quality, and delivery time of a product. Businesses might adopt a school in an inner city, and they might give employees time off to work in that school, thereby encouraging workers to give time to the community. A woman told the story, of how, in a small town in New Mexico, small shop owners put signs in their windows if they supported a protest taking place against waste dumping in their community. Thus businesses had an opportunity to express something of their value system to the greater community. Spirituality and Business Richard McKnight is an organizational psychologist who has worked extensively with stress management and leadership personnel in business. He comments about his work: For most workers, managers, and executives I have worked with in the last 10 years, business organizations are seen as cold, personal machines that take raw materials, capital, and people in one end, perform some transformation, process, or serv'cc,,and produce money out the other end--or should.... In the prevailing model, the ideal business posture is characterized by words such as "competition aggression, and "winner." "Our business is only about making money, one executive said to me, "and the only way we can do that in our industry is by keeping everybody uncertain and mean-inside the company and outside it.,,45 McKnight regrets the physical illnesses and emotional traumas that result from such a model of business-as-machine. Such results are harmful to employees, to society, and ultimately, to the 'bottomline."' Talking unselfconsciously about the absence of Spirit in the prevailing machine model of doing business, he calls for a greater sense of spirituality, which he defines as "an animating life force, an energy that inspires one toward certain ends or purposes that go beyond self " Having a transcendent purpose 'n one's work, he believes, "results in being in love with the world" and allows for 'ntegration and direction in our life and work. The other model, business as a cold, impersonal machine, "denies humanness." He says, "People have needs in three areas: body, mind, and spirit. Yet most companies, if they acknowledge that people have needs at all, act as if there are only two requirements for producing good work: money and job security. His experience reveals that most workers suffer from one of two spiritual syndromes at work: "Either they are devoted only to nontranscendent materialistic purposes such as career advancement; or they have a transcendent purpose that doesn't mesh with the purpose of the company they work for.47 Creativity, enthusiasm about life, acceptance of self and others, lives lived gracefully, being perpetual students of life, giving more than taking, optimism, peacefulness, courage regularly demonstrated: these are the characteristics of a spiritual person according to McKnight, who believes that businesses can and ought to assist the development of this spirituality. McKnight is not alone in his call for spirituality and a paradigm shift in business. Peter Vaill, professor of human systems in the School of Government and Business Administration at George Washington University, calls for "a new appreciation of the spiritual nature of [the human] and a determination to keep it in any new formulation of the nature of organizational life." He values paying more attention to the human being as "a creator of phenomena," to the performing art" that management is, and to the experience of "awe," as well as to what it means to "be in the world with responsibility." He sees the new paradigm as offering "refreshing, even thrilling new interest in ethics, morality, and the spiritual nature of [humanity]," wherein a sense of "process wisdom" and the value of "relationality" will flourish." Management consultant Linda Ackerman addresses the questions of management in the new paradigm. She names three kinds of management styles: fear state management; solid state management" and flow state management, and she feels the latter is what the new cosmology calls for. She traces its imagry to the concept of Tao in Chinese philosophy and its embodiment in Mohandas K. Gandhi. She sounds like she is defining the mystical experience when, borrowing from the research of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmlhalyi, she defines flow as "the holistic sensation that people feel with total involvement." A person in such a state "experiences a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future. Rolf Osterberg has served as CEO of Scandinavia's largest film company and has been chairman of the board of over twenty companies and trade associations. But after his many achievements in business, he underwent a kind of metanoia experience wherein he questioned the direction his life in particular and work in general was evolving. He came to a point of realizing there must be more to work than the pure mechanics he was seeing in the workplace, where people are seen as mere "tools, units of negotiations, cost factors. There is no real life in the whole enterprise." He felt that others were also awakening.I became more and more convinced that something great, something much greater than I had ever believed, is happening, and it is happening to all of us. We are indeed changing our beliefs... The terrain (the systems in which we live) no longer corresponds with the map (our minds). The map is changing and the terrain must be adjusted accordingly.50 In his book, Corporate Renaissance, he calls for a major revolution in the way we envision work and business. He writes Work, as every other aspect of life, is a process, through which we acquire experiences.... The primary purpose of a company is to serve as an arena for the personal development of those working in the company. The production of goods and services and the making of profits are by-products.51 Like Juliet Schor, whose analysis of consumerism we saw earlier in this book, Osterberg has come to realize that human beings have become prisoners on a treadmill of consumerism. "Like a hamster on a wheel, their role is to keep the wheel spinning: by productive work in mass production as well as by consumption-mass consumption." He decries how developing countries are being instructed to use these models of "economic growth" (meaning increased production and increased consumption) as a goal for their development. Only the ruthless exploitation of human and natural resources has been able to keep the wheels of "economic growth" spinning. We have taken advantage of the precarious economic situations of developing countries-situations for which we are largely responsible and simply moved the exploitation there. Growth has not improved or augmented anything. It has drained, consumed and devoured, and continues to do so.52 Osterberg believes that we have to look on work in a radically different way. "There is only one way to remove these problems, and that is to fundamentally-deep down in the farthest nooks of our souls-change our thoughts about work." He feels that work has become for many in our society a way to flee one's deeper self and avoid one's deepest feelings. "Work has become one of the drugs we use to deaden and block the emotional aspect within us," he says, a process that has "gone so far that we can not enjoy our leisure time. We cannot relax" Without using the term Creation Spirituality, Osterberg is clearly speaking of what we have called the "inner work" of the via positiva, the via negativa, and the via creativa. He sees the real agenda in business today as altering our way of seeing work itself: In the new thought, life is seen as a developmental process in which we grow as human beings. Life has no specific goal beyond the process itself. The process-life itself, if you want-is the meaning, not the possessions, position and fame gathered along the way.... One who works does not contribute more than one who has chosen some other arena for personal growth.54 Many of our culture's brightest individuals go into business. Some of these persons will be able to see the pain inflicted by the business world, and they will be ripe for opening to the new opportunities that arise from redefining business so that it serves the greater needs of both the human and nonhuman worlds. Perhaps this reinventing of the quality of the workplace will also contribute to reinventing the quantity of work available. When workers have integrated spirituality with their work, their values, and their creativity, addictions such as overwork and the practice of overworking employees might give way to more shared work. Those without work or with too little work can then be invited to participate in the work world. What we hear from listening to these prophetic voices within the business world is a growing awareness that business itself (and the economic philosophies that underlie it) has an inner house to be put in order. Some are responding to that challenge today. In this challenge work is being reinvented. And a new kind of work is being created as well-the work of putting the inner houses of our work worlds in order. Hope lies in this kind of reconstruction. The reenchantment of work is indeed under way. Meister Eckhart on Driving Moneylenders from the Temple Much of the critique of economics and business that we have discussed in this chapter was anticipated by Meister Eckhart. He saw the dangers of an exclusively money-based economy and anticipated the addictive potential of money making as an exclusive criterion for our values. In a stunningly powerful sermon, one that did not endear him to the merchants of Cologne, the trade capital of all of Europe at the time, Eckhart took the passage from the Gospels about Jesus driving moneylenders from the Temple. Eckhart asks, Why did Jesus throw out those who were buying and selling, and why did he command those who were offering pigeons for sale to get out? He meant by this only that he wished the temple to be empty,just as ifif he had wanted to say: "I am entitled to this temple, and wish to be alone here, and to have mastery here." What does this mean? This temple, which God wishes to rule over powerfully according to his own will, is the soul of a person. God has formed and created the soul very like God's self, for we read that our Lord said: "Let us make human beings in our own image" (Gen.1:26). And this is what God did.55 Eckhart critiques what he calls the "merchant mentally" and what it does to the soul, which he understands as the temple of God par excellence, for "neither in the kingdom of heaven nor on earth among all the splendid creatures that God created in such a wonderful way is there any creature that resembles God as much as does the soul of a human being." What does a narrow definition of businessone that is bottom-line profits only, one that pays homage only to the quantity in life and not the quality-do to the vast soul of the human bel'ng' It clutters the soul. It distracts the inner person. It interferes with our great capacity to be emptied so that the Divine can fill us. "In all truth no one really resembles this temple except the uncreated God alone. [It] gleams so beautifully and shines so purely and clearly," in all its splendor. Above all, a value system based on quantitative profit alone trivializes the reason we exist and the reason we work: to be connected to all beings and their Creator, that is, to participate in the Great Work. "For this reason God wishes the temple to be empty so that nothing can be in it but the God's self alone. This is because this temple pleases God so and resembles God so closely, and,because God is pleased whenever God is alone in this temple. Wonderful things happen in this temple that cannot happen if it is cluttered by a merchant mentality, a mentality of buy and sell, of cause and effect, of quid pro quo. God is revealed in this temple, provided it is empty of whys and wherefores. For in this temple Jesus "reveals himself and everything that the Creator has declared in him in the way in which the Spirit is susceptible." In this temple, the Holy Spirit "gushes out, overflowing and streaming into all sensitive hearts with an abundant fullness and sweetness." Creativity and wisdom come together in this temple, and there "God becomes known to God" and the soul discovers its own "essential original being in one unity without distinction." But the soul must be emptied for these marvels to occur. Furthermore, for Eckhart a merchant mentality kills the spirit of gratitude and replaces it with a compulsion of ownership for attachment (Eigensschaft) that "leaves the mind stupefied and forms an obstacle to receptivity." A spirit of clinging kills our capacity for experiencing the infinite riches of Divinity. Only by driving such attitudes from our souls or temples can we "newly receive God's gift in an unencumbered and free way" and return it "with grateful pralse."57 In this amazing sermon, delivered when capitalism was just making its entrance onto the stage of European history, we have a deep and penetrating critique of what a narrowly defined economic philosophy does to our souls. But we also have a critique of what a moneylending, that is to say, an anthropocentric view of wealth, does to our relationships to the Earth and the cosmos. For the divine temple is the universe itself. We can no longer "con-temple," that is to say, contemplate or pray the universe if we overwhelm it with our agendas. All play, and all gratitude are then banished. Contemplation dies. Furthcrmore, the reductionism we commit on the cosmos will come back to haunt us. If we cannot enter into right relationships with the Earth and Earth systcms we are simply cluttering the temple of God. An emptying process is needed, and that emptying begins with our own psyches. For all these reasons then, we are encouraged to pursue a new paradigm of business and economics such as has been outlined in this chapter. Science and Technology The work of science also needs to be reinvented in our time. Much of what we presented in chapter 2 flows from scientists who have dared to bring the paradigm shift to their own discipline. Rupert Sheldrake, Gregory Bateson, Beverly Rubik, Brian Swimme, David Bohm, Erich Jantsch, Paul Davies, and many other scientists are opened heart and soul to the mysteries of the universe once again. I say "once again" because many scientists have told me that they became scientists in the first place because of mystical experiences that they had as children. Recently I took part in a discussion group at the University of Pennsylvania, and a physicist in his mid-sixties asked me a very convoluted scientific-religious question. I replied by saying, "'You know, many scientists I know tell me they became scientists because of the mystical experience they had with the night sky as children." He immediately replied, "That's it! That's why I'm a scientist.-I haven't thought about this for forty years." His face became that of a ten-year-old boy. He was reminded of the heart attraction that first led him to his vocation. It is this heart dimension that is so lacking in the modern era's definition of science and in scientific education. Thomas Aquinas says that "science puffs up"-that it becomes arrogant when it lacks the dimension of the heart. When Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry point out that "science deals with objects. Story deals with subjects," they are reminding us that to be a scientist alone is not enough. A fully human person deals with story, where the heart is nourished, as well as objects, where facts are discovered. Ironically, it is through science's devotion to objectivity in the past few centuries that we have been gifted with a new story, one that truly awakens our hearts. Science today has come full circle; that is, it has come around to demonstrating that the objectivity it once so highly prized does not, in fact, exist, and that the world cannot be explained in materialistic terms alone. Mind lives in the universe at all levels. This- means that science itself is implicated in the results of its own findings. Science, because it is human, carries moral responsi- bility with it. This is a new idea in the West, for since the Renaissance, scientists have considered themselves morally detached from the consequences of their findings. A certain myopia has dominated in science as if scientists wore moral blinders out of necessity in order to penetrate reality more deeply. In light of the realities that face our planet today, these blinders have to be discarded. E. F. Schumacher cites Albert Einstein, who said, "Almost all scientists are economi- cally completely dependent"; and, "The number of scientists who possess a sense of social responsibility is so small" that they are in no position to determine questions of the direction of research.58 Even Leonardo da Vinci, who loved creatures so much that he was a vegetarian, nevertheless invented instruments of war that increased the violence of human against human-and indeed against the nonhuman creation as well-and that set new standards for de- struction. The new science will include moral responsibility for one's findings. Science can no longer pretend to be morally ob')ective any more than economics or business can. The scientist operating out of the new paradigm will ask: What are the moral consequences of my work? Who is profiting from it? And at whose expense will some profit and others lose? When J. Robert Oppenheimer remarked, on the first successful detonation of the atomic bomb that he had helped to create, "Now we have known evil," he was announcing a new era in science-an era of interconnection, of moral responsibility. The alliances that scientists often make with mass industry, mass academia, or mass government with its mass mi itary can no longer be winked at. Money does not excuse the immoral consequences of one's work. It is, after all, the praxis of science, that is, technology, that has conlbuted the most to the plunder of th's planet. We must acknowledge this reality. The new paradigm scientist will see the facts for what they are: a warning that our technology must be shaped . by our values. If we have no values other than profiteering or ego-tripping on our work, in this case our scientific work, then we are a menace to the planet. Another dimension to the new science is its rediscovery of wisdom. Wisdom includes morality, but it also includes awe and creativity. Wisdom therefore flows from mysticism. The mystical scientists of our day, many of whom were cited in chapter 2 of this book, are witnesses to the depth and power of their vocation. As Thomas Aquinas put it, "A mistake about nature results in a mistake about God." If sclentists are truly devoted to listening to the revelations of nature and to passing these on to the rest of us, then they are indeed involved in spiritual work. Their learning and discipline amounts to a kind of yoga; it helps to awaken the mysticism inherent in the rest of us. But the scientist is so near to the powers of the universe and the decision-making apparatus of our culture that she or he must practice'spiritual disclplines along with the rest of us. Otherwise the addiction to power can easily overtake the scientist, whose temple, to use Eckhart's image, can be overrun with buyers and sellers. New paradigm scientists will engage in spiritual praxis, which keeps the soul young and generous and helps it resist merchant mentalities. New paradigm scientists will participate (participation being a key virtue in the new paradigm) in the quest for a spirituality both mystical and prophetic such as our times demand. They will do the dances and undergo the rituals that open the heart and delight the divine child in us all. They will learn to resist anthropocentrism and will ask questions about how their knowledge can be put to the service of ecological and social justice and how their hearts can expand by way of the wisdom they imbibe daily in encountering nature's mysteries. This daily eating and drinking of the mystery of the tran- substantiation of atoms, elements, molecules, cells, organisms, galaxies, planets, plants, animals, beings of all sorts-these encounters with the sacrament of creation-must be acknowledged for what thcy are: sacred encounters. One scientist who has been committed to bringing about a trans- formation in her profession is Dr. Beverly Rubik, founding director of the Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her center publishes a semiannual journal, Frontier Perspectives, and invites visiting scholars from around the world to openly exam novel scientific claims. The journal serves research and education in areas of science that are not yet mainstream and maintains a growing database of frontier scientists worldwide. Recently it published a book, The Interrelationship between Mind and Matter, a collection of papers presented at an international roundtable, sponsored by the center, bringing together distinguished scientists from six countries. Rubik introduces the volume this way: The notion of separability between consciousness and matter within science may be considered faulty, as certain interpretations of quantum theory maintain that the obseryer interacts fundamentally with the quantum system in the act of observation.... A case can be made for the interrelationship between consciousness and matter from medicine, anthropology, and other disciplines. Can the question of their relationship be addressed by novel scientific approaches? 59 Rubik decries the virtual stranglehold that the old paradigm of science holds on research grants and academic advancement: There are formidable, extraordinary obstacles for those who move outside of the boundaries to explore unorthodox terrain or even tributaries to the mainstream. These include a possible loss of camaraderie and respectability, loss of funding, and loss of scientific credibility with an inability to publish in mainstream journals; even a loss of one's position may result. But she sounds like she understands the prophetic vocation that is demanded of those who will stand up for a new paradigm in whatever profession they are committed to, when shc says it is a difficult path, "only for the most adventurous, courageous, pioneering individuals who are driven by an inner quest to know what 1ies beyond." She points out that historically science was usually changed by those who dared to stand outside the dominant theories of the day. Rubik speaks up for those areas of science that are neglected one might say for those without a voice, whom the Bible calls the anawim-when she says that scientized medicine simply does not address the intimate relationship of the mind and body and the importance of consciousness in the healing of a patient. Science in genera1, she says, refuses to address "the subtler, unquantifiable dimensions of innate mind, such as states of consciousness, self-awareness, and volition. Nor are meaning, value, and mind's teleological character considered relevant to the present practice of science."6 Rubik has hope for her profession, however, provided the academic system that is behind it can change. As more about the fundamental role of consciousness in the universe is revealed and the new ideas promulgated, a basic change in science will eventually occur. This change may be bigger than just a paradigm shift, as the results at present already challenge the epistemological foundations of science.... Multiple approaches to the study of consciousness need to be supported. It is even possible that eventually a new science will be born, a science that accommodates-the whole human with fully realizable capabilities of body, mind, and spirit.62 As science transforms, Rubik believes, society will be blessed. As science has powerful influences on society and the environment, this new science will undoubtedly have bountiful effects. A new cosmology, a reunion of science and spirit, may manifest. . . . It can propel us toward a conscious evolution. It can engender a new sense of awe and wonder about ourselves and the cosmos. And, if the vision is great enough, it may lead to a global renaissance.63 We can pray that she is correct; and more, we can work for such a transformation. The Nobel prize-winning scientists and the medical doctors who present articles in Rubik's book give evidence that this hoped-for transformation is already well under way. Today the soul of the scientist is being emptied of secularism--the flight from the mystery that is greater than us. This resacralization and reenchantment of the scientist's work might well begin with his or her university education, where the spirituality of science might be included along with other courses. As things now stand in our secularized academic systems, the education of the scientist parallels that of the doctor, minister, and priest for its lack of mystical awareness. This is no way to make good work for good scientists Of the future. Reintroducing the mystical dimension as well as the di- mension of values to scientific education will, among other things, create good work for many within and outside of the scientific profession.