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Problems of Application
One of the easiest declarations a writer on global communication ethics can make is that the world is diverse and the moral life of the world reflects that diversity. Let each follow his/her path; let each culture carve its own totem. Diversity is standard operating procedure for human culture. It could not be otherwise, given the challenges of survival in different geographies, given the “up for grabs” nature of moral choice. Accepting such a situation as morally true, a chapter on the difficulty of applications would reduce to cultural anthropology: various symbol systems and traditions carry different moral values, and therein lies the tale. The best observers may do is to learn the rules characteristic of a region, its moral syntax. In the 2007 film Mongol, the story of Ghengis Khan, a Buddhist monk is told by the imprisoned Temudgin (Ghengis’ given name, played by Asano Tadanobu) to “kill the guard and steal his keys,” thus enabling Temudgin’s escape. The monk responds, “It is against my faith to kill.” Without hesitation or flicker of doubt, the weary Temudgin replies, “It is not against mine.” Thus it is: one may kill in faith while the other would choose to die before violating a sacred rule prohibiting violence against another. The world, even among near neighbors, is remarkably diverse.
One of the most contentious declarations a writer can make about ethics is that some communicative actions, done anywhere or place, are morally wrong and ought to be condemned, while other communicative actions are right and good, no matter when or where. Who dares express such cultural myopia today? Surely one who is naïve by nature, boxed by custom, and xenophobic by orientation. Yet without some declaration approaching this far-out claim, a chapter on the difficulty of applying ethics to global problems washes out. Our only reason to proceed is the belief that some actions are good, others not, and that we may justifiably talk across cultures about both. Temudgin is right to admit his propensity toward violence, but wrong to act on it, which he did with brutal regularity. Dismiss that claim and the movie and a million like it lose all point and purpose. In each human life, the moral dilemma leads to searching, justifying, testing, advocating, and then a vision of the good. Ghengis conquered the eastern world, but if his life had been without moral quest, we need pay no attention.
This chapter seeks to elaborate on why global communications present a serious claim on our collective moral awareness, and concludes with a proposal to guide us toward clarity, cooperation, and possibly peace. The mention of peace reminds us that cultures on the world’s stage at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century are radically different in mood, tradition, and ambition. Can we find sufficient common ground to abide the other’s company, fueled as they are by entrenched ideologies and passionate rhetoric? Peace in many places seems a long way off; in some places, more distant yet by the disdain in which peace is held to be a failure of nerve, a softness and erosion of discipline. It was failure of discipline, was it not, which taught young Mohamed Omar Ismail to morally excuse his theft of 10 shirts and 10 trousers in Kismayo, Somalia, and “hard peace” which led the Sharia courts, backed by al-Shabab, to declare the ancient penalty as prescribed in the Quran (BBC Africa, 2010). It was education in “hard peace” that required the people of Kismayo to assemble in Freedom Park to witness the severing of Mohamed’s right hand. Then “soft peace” spoke from a big-city office of Amnesty International, calling on the Titan of Soft Peace, the United Nations, to investigate this gross abuse of human rights, an investigation and report which will get a hearing in no place close to Kismayo.
Do such narratives lead to improved communication and understanding between East and West? No, in fact, they lead to a maimed youth, a more fearful city of people trying to hold life together, and distant grandstanders on both sides growing more certain than before that the ways of living they oppose are even more fearsome and intractable than they previously imagined. On top of that, all we (who live beyond the dust and din of Kismayo) know about Ismail’s crime and punishment is learned via a report from a news agency steeped in its own ideology, and thus not to be trusted as a reliable source of anything beyond propagandists’ lies. In a world such as this, discussion concerning the problems of applying ethics to communications issues would occur only to those who have grown soft by a surplus of goods safely stored for tomorrow, little to dread, rather in control of their fortunes, a luxury of the so-called developed world. Soft minds, soft wills, soft bodies – peace such as Ghengis so enjoyed demasking. In Kismayo, this conversation might seem quite irrelevant to the more urgent demand of putting thieves in their places.
Cataloging the Challenges
Even a brief review of the development of mediated communication reveals constant threats to veracity, covalent concerns for truth tempered by commercial considerations, and obvious intrusions of political power in the production of messages. Christians cites the major problems of communications ethics to be justice, diversity, violence, and privacy (2005, vol. 1, pp. 367–9). Statements presented as authentic are everywhere tempered by considerations of self-interest, sometimes of survival. Money speaks loudly in the public square. Those who hold and exercise power did not achieve it through passivity; control of social messages is perhaps the most important device available for political tenure. Everywhere messages are filtered, refined, and often trashed because the cost of speaking/writing is believed to outweigh benefits. Yet public speech (in any format) is still a treasured resource among democrats who need an informed public to achieve responsible consent. Cornell West (2004, p. 39) urges:
Democracy depends, in large part, on a free and frank press willing to speak painful truths to the public about our society, including the fact of their own complicity in superficiality and simplistic reportage. There can be no democratic paideia – the critical cultivation of an active citizenry – without democratic parrhesia – a bold and courageous press willing to speak against the misinformation and mendacities of elites.
That “bold and courageous press” is the product of a long learning curve that has taught democratic free-speech advocates to prize dissent as the signal that pursuit of truth and responsible public action is renewable and vital. A proper measure of communicative justice is not what is forbidden, but what is allowed (Carter, 1995, p. 6).
Dissent is not everywhere treasured, obviously. In Guinea, on African’s west cost, independence came on October 2, 1958. Ahmed Sekou Toure, a trade union organizer and first national chief executive, so offended the French (dissented from French designs on continued colonial influence) that Charles de Gaulle terminated all aid, withdrew French civil servants and army units, including doctors who provided care to the civilian population, and all French property, even furniture and fixtures in the former governor’s house, to make Toure’s move-in less exquisite. The new executive cared nothing about de Gaulle’s pull-back. The cost of freedom might be dictated by French sensitivities but never again curtailed by them. Toure spoke with the boldness of his Ghanaian mentor, Kwame Nkrumah, “We prefer poverty in freedom to riches in slavery” (Meredith, 2005, p. 67). Once in power, that strong rhetoric metamorphized into leadership by paranoia. Convinced he was vulnerable, Toure found plots and conspiracies at every turn. In 1961 when teachers demanded equal pay for equal work (dissenting from Toure’s corrupted ministry), prominent intellectuals were detained and imprisoned, and the Soviet ambassador was expelled, apparently under the notion that the Soviets were plotting. A cholera epidemic in 1973 was called a counter-revolutionary plot. The 1976 defeat of Guinea’s soccer team in African championships was further evidence of a scheme against him, Toure believed (Meredith, p. 217–74). Such was the fear he inspired that years after his death in 1984 in an American hospital, older Guineans would refuse to answer questions about his regime because they feared that news of his death was planted by Toure to uncover silent disloyalty.1
News of Africa is “almost exclusively about poverty, wars and death,” wrote one Western observer (Dowden, 2009, p. 4). Even in the great surge of independence in the 1950s and 1960s, international media struggled to find stories about anything other than poverty, wars, and death. Democracy was there, alive and growing on the continent, but obscured by blood, money, and traditional channels of power.
The essence of democracy is not at all alien to Africa. Although few African societies were pure democracies, some … were almost egalitarian, at least among men. They did not have kings or chiefs and decisions were taken after debate at meetings of the male elders. Discussions tended toward consensus rather than adversarial debate (Dowden, p. 71).
In one state, however, monarchical control was deeply entrenched. Haile Sellassie (1892–1975, Emperor 1930–1974) based his power on alleged blood connections to Solomon of ancient Israel. When rains failed in the early 1970s, he forbade Ethiopian media to discuss or admit to a famine. Dissenting university professors traveled to the ravaged provinces, returning with photographic proof. Government response to the evidence was weak and corrupt; officials were unable to deliver grains to the people without calloused profiteering. When international media began reporting, Ethiopia officially denied any problem and claimed, despite all, its internal affairs were being unfairly exaggerated by the international press.
Nevertheless the story was out, and worldwide response began to rush supplies to save those who could be helped. However, it was too late to help the leadership. By February, 1974, a student uprising and military coup led to a Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces (called the derg, “committee”). Its leader, Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, nationalized land and industries, tolerated no dissent, and purged and executed at will (Marcus, 1994, p. 181). Accounts of this era tell of fear, arbitrary control, a failed economy, and then the inevitable counter-revolution. In all this, the Ethiopian press was totally incapable of informing its own people, or the world, of realities of poverty, war, and death hidden behind utopian rhetoric and a drought of both rainfall and political transparency. Only in 2004 was the first-ever graduate program in journalism offered at the University of Addis Ababa, and then, some of its most vocal sponsors were still facing jail terms for dissent against the “democratic” regime which replaced the derg.2
Examples from the developing world inform advanced democracies on the extent to which ideals of freedom are vulnerable to realities of political control and conservation of power and resources. Dissent in the “free world” is hard won and rarely without struggle. Dissent in the developing world is still, in many places, an occasion of extreme personal courage and sacrifice. In no case is the application of a vision of the good, or communication ethics, an easy roll-out.
Our examples also serve to point out the dialectical relationship between democracy and a responsible and free press. One does not build the other; one is not the cause or origin of the other. Rather, each plays a reciprocal role in the development of the other. In the west, the press is corrupted by the economic might of large corporate players, whose role in public life is often subtle but powerful, as king-making and deal-breaker. McChesney writes (2008, p. 308): “Today the regulatory and policymaking process is arguably more corrupt than ever, as tens of millions of dollars have made members of congress and regulators beholden to powerful corporate lobbies.”
In the developing world, the press is equally vulnerable to the influence of money coupled with state power. Even where democracy has taken hold, ownership and office frequently overlap, presenting reporters and editors with a phalanx of opposition which makes even the importing of newsprint and ink, or the power to arbitrarily tax, a considerable pressure-point to reporting the news. The history of the Economist magazine in Kenya is a case in point. Its staff regularly uncovered flaws in government offices, bribery and kick-backs, schemes and trickery. Its editor, Peter Warutere, was one of the most admired journalists in the country, for integrity and clarity, and for avoiding detention, which he claimed was due to his careful, redundant research and his airtight agreement never to reveal a source.3 During a European trip by Warutere in 1999, taxes evasion charges were brought against the magazine. It could not pay, and the premises were closed. Clever bureaucrats have many ways of dealing with sophisticated journalists.
Educated citizens ready to work for their rights, and a press ready to articulate a way to achieve those rights, must work hand in hand. Tabloids and television have proven that citizens in most democracies are codependent on media for entertainment and escape. A much smaller population in East or West – small in ambition and will – is ready to engage in participatory democracy: the heart of the enterprise for a free press.
Unless there is a citizenry that depends upon journalism, that takes it seriously, that is politically engaged, journalism can lose its bearings and have far less incentive to do the hard work that generates the best possible work (McChesney, 2008, p. 34).
Culture as Moral Arbiter
The first edition of a popular text in media ethics proposed to do ethical analysis using the Potter Box, a four-part sequenced process helpful in isolating key issues in moral dilemmas (Christians et al., 1983, p. 6). Now 30 years later, the ninth edition (due in 2011) still uses that methodological frame. The famed and porous “third quad” in the box is Cultural Values. The reason culture plays such a significant role in the Box is the authors’ belief that we humans, in all times and places, are shaped, defined, and nurtured by culture. Our values derive from relationships of all kinds, all culture-based. Our education is determined by culture, our choices constrained by culture, even our very names emerge from culture. How indeed could values not be shaped by culture? Understanding culture is the key to moral insight. Bernard Adeney notes that many people claim to follow a timeless morality, but all such claims are understood relative to the culture in which they are articulated. Virtues “are formed out of the habitual actions of real people” (Adeney, 1995, pp. 20, 27).
“Relative to the culture” reads as if values are indeed relative, and that is not the conclusions to which this essay points. Relativism – the belief that “because moral judgments vary across cultures and historical periods, all moral systems are equally good” (Christians et al., 1993, p. 59) – is to let culture dictate, an unacceptable strategy. Christians points to the incongruity of seeking an ethic while granting permission to all options, so long as a social group lays claim to it.
Without a normative basis for moral decision making, relativists frequently accept a utilitarianism that seeks at least noxious resolution for the distribution of limited goods and resources. However, relativism is the most conservative of moral strategies, because it seeks stability with established mores and has no reason to consider counter-claims from outside the group…. To believe that ethics is the code of the majority would allow the majority to tyrannize the minority (Christians et al., 1993, p. 59).
Edward Purcell’s (1973) weighty dissection of American thought in the twentieth century projects relativism as the antidote to der Feuhrer and el Duce. Dismissing absolutes as the regime of tyrants followed in the wake of social Darwinists and critical scholars such as William Graham Sumner, Ruth Benedict, Rudolph Carnap, and others, Purcell claims. The language of moral norms is now a foreign syntax. People do not use such terms anymore (1973, p. 202).
The critics of absolutism and relativism observe that tyranny draws its energy from both polarities. This essay promotes neither. Instead, we advise a normative ethics based on life and its liberties, responsibilities, and discoveries held in common and in trust across human societies. We need not “start from scratch” in devising moral norms, but neither do we recite ancient verities as final answers. The human community is not like that – monochromatic, inscribed norms, timeless judgments on application or substance. The human community grows, tests, tilts, and repositions its notions of the good, always with continuity to the past, always with the hope that futures will open to less struggle, more fertility, less bombast, more wisdom. However, we still need a moral center to the orbiting values and readjustments that human communities devise. We need a discourse that leads to responsible change. As Appiah observed, peoples do not alter their ethical norms as a result of long discussions over theory or principle, but gradually acquire “a new way of seeing things” (2006, p. 73). Is there an environment where we can see things anew, together, with good results for all?
Addressing the Problem
Communicative problems associated with greed, power, and suspicion (failure of trust) begin to coalesce around the meta-problem, a vacuous ethical center. Relativism plagues the trust–recovery process. No standpoint under heaven seems capable of sustaining the weight of widespread public belief and consequent action. No right-minded soul will “take the leap” into moral certitude while waters are churning, no break in the cloud-cover.
These problems are not new. Sissela Bok (1978, p. 9) has noted the skeptic Cratylus, who adopted a language of gesture only to signal he had heard a sound, but that audible reply was meaningless given the variance of words and meanings; or Pyrrho, who 23 centuries ago gave up knowing anything, then surrendered speaking. Today, we have come to widespread dismissal of the correspondence theory of truth, or as Taylor (2007) has written at considerable length, we have arrived at the secular age – no more assurances, no cosmic platforms on which to weigh the veracity of claims to know.
Courting this epistemic abyss (to use Peters’ artful phrase of 2005), a surge in communications scholarship has isolated and articulated postmodern universals grounded on fundamental human identity, that is, the web of relationships that sustain identity and culture, without which humanity cannot exist. Clifford Christians (2005, p. 238) has turned the soil on much of this ground, arguing the case for feminist communitarianism as best suited to address contemporary pleas for caregiving and peace. Remarkably, scholars from quite diverse traditions are reflecting the themes which now appear regularly in Christians’ voluminous writing. Haydar Sadig (2010, p. 240), as a hopeful case in point, takes a communitarian strategy in his presentation of “reformed Islam” based on the teachings of Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, whose own work before his untimely death in Sudan sought above all to address the lost trust disabling social progress:
Fear, whatever form it takes, is the legitimate father of all moral perversion and behavioral distortion. Man will never perfect his manhood, and woman will never perfect her womanhood, as long as they remain frightened to any degree or in any fashion. Perfection is obtained through the process of liberation from fear (Taha, 1987, p. 84).
Many contributors to these debates seek to revitalize what pragmatists call procedural virtues: tell the truth, keep promises, negotiate fairly, avoid name-calling, control hyperbole, respect diverse traditions. Often these virtues become like proverbs to the communications professional, sometimes collected in small booklets and bound for easy transport.4 Some follow the lead of Piaget, aiming to track the varied rates (based on age, place, gender, education, genes) of moral development (Coleman and Wilkins, 2009). Would that such well-developed persons gifted with a sense for word and symbol found their way into corporate public relations offices, global advertising agencies, or press services. Some contributors link the moral life to inherent gendered intuition and practice (Steiner, 2009). Some scholars are exploring the teachings of the stress-less faiths. Buddhism comes down to basics such as “intend no harm” or “do some good” (Stocking, 2009). Across the world in academic conferences probing the possibilities that journalism might actually promote peace, Taoism has become the favored tradition (Christians, 2009).
Do commonalities emerge from this pulsating conversation? Clearly the effort here is to respond with practical guidance to the digital age, to a one-world communications network, in the face of heightened tensions between disparate cultural centers spinning antagonistically away from Gemainschaft and the I-Thou. In many world conflict areas, Buber’s (1970) classic typology must appear as nonsense language, so divergent are the cultural orientations.
All this ethical work is important to the field, academy, and communication professions. Gradually we might expect to see positions coalesce around shared norms and practices, though some (Alleyne 2009) see trends in other directions – no common standards, little to no shared norms.
This essay contends that the problem of universal norms and applications must be resolved within communities and cultures set toward an ethic of sustainable human advancement. Such communities will explore both ethical practice and moral substance, fail often, but consistently reach for life-sustaining realities. That is the common thread in efforts to find the moral center.
Eschatological Communitarianism
The concept behind this 13-syllable, 30-letter term shows up around the world wherever people gather to contemplate the uncertainties of the future and the hope for peace. In my own tradition, the concept appears as people, gathering, church, and congregation. Eschatology, what the future looks like, derives from the Greek eschatos, furthest out. Communitarianism – an arcane term that looks a lot like community, commune, and communicate – gathers ideas explained throughout this essay, namely, that we humans are grounded in time and place, relationships, traditions, habits of thinking, and embodied values. We live and breathe in relation to others. As John Mbiti (1969, p. 109) said, “We are, therefore I am.” (Longer explanations of communitarianism are readily available. See this author’s essay in Wilkins and Christians, 2009). Together, the phrase “eschatological communitarianism” denotes a trajectory, a future, which must be hammered out in time and place, but regularly in the history of humankind points toward a social order which the Jewish scriptures typify as shalom (e.g., Isaiah 9:7) and the New Testament writings (e.g., Revelation 11:15) call the kingdom of God. Both traditions speak in terms of a future which is present and “not yet” – apparent and accessible in part, with fulfillment still ahead (Ladd, 1974, p. 114). Each contributes to a vision of social peace, justice, and transparency as essential qualities for human prosperity and fulfillment (the Greek Makarios, completion). Historical reflection has brought hopes and fears of many years past to bear on our present responsibility for setting moral trajectories, however novel our rhetoric may be. We rarely invent virtues today.
Clarifying the dynamic of the ancient Jewish or Christian communities lies well outside the range of this chapter. Indeed, a vast literature explores the many dimensions of the long evolution of a people associated around both traditions. Early in the Christian movement, there was recognition that its origins reached back to “the beginning” and forward to “the end,” and that the journey between would be difficult. Paul’s salutation in his Letter to the Philippians (and in most of Paul’s writing) expresses this reality with endearing attachments to the people with whom he will experience this “new life.” In light of much contemporary criticism of the Christian movement, its founding texts and praxis reflect a vision of community centered on fellowship (Greek koinonia) and struggle. Richard Hays (1996, pp. 196–197) notes:
The community … is called to embody an alternative order that stands as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes in the world. Thus, “community” is not merely a concept … it points to the social manifestation of the people of God…. The community expresses and experiences the presence of the kingdom of God by participating in “the koinonia of his [Jesus’] sufferings” (Philippians 3:10). Jesus’ death is consistently interpreted in the New Testament as an act of self-giving love, and the community is consistently called to take up the cross and follow in the way that his death defines.
That theme is famously rendered by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Community appears in all his work, but his 1939 Life Together is devoted to it. Bonhoeffer wrote the book while teaching in an underground seminary (the Nazis had outlawed it). Life criticizes the “visionary dreams” of people who imagine that community is cheerful, pleasant, or ideal. Bonhoeffer scolds such expectations which remove community from oppositional struggle. Gratitude is the first sign of genuine community, and in Bonhoeffer’s case, gratitude for the virtues enable perseverance (1954, p. 29). Community is neither position nor status, but bounded action. The boundaries, today fluid, were at the start rather clearer. As N.T. Wright explains, the early Christian community functioned much like a family, with care for the needy, particularly widows and orphans, quite in accord with social obligations widely practiced within family circles.
This called for a new socio-political orientation. On the one hand, there was ‘another King,’ and this King required allegiance and worship of a sort that radically subverted the allegiance and worship demanded by Caesar, and other lesser lords. On the other hand, the subversion in question was not that of the ordinary political revolutionary, and in the normal run of things Christians must submit to legitimate authority … The early church was thus marked out from the first familial community, loyalty to which overrode all other considerations (Wright, 1992, p. 449).
Gratitude, care, and love lead to action, and are not contemplated as moral destination. The destination is communal shalom. Virtues themselves could not be acquired in the older, classical way, by dint of effort and rational contemplation. Rather, this community, being and becoming, was itself the work of divine though mystical intervention, yet all too evidently human (Stassen and Gushee, 2003, p. 25). Its telos was not moral perfection, eudaemonia in Aristotle’s rendering, the product of sufficient will and training, but community itself, that is, being together with God. Augustine caught the heart of it in his elegant phrase, ipse praemium, “he himself is our reward” (O’Donovan, 1994, p. 249). Yet action and passion, to borrow Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s timely phrase,5 was still the means and motive of this community’s common life, and all action requires coordinated purpose. What, then, is the purpose of this community’s social engagement? Nicholas Wolterstorff (1983, p. 19) writes:
They are to struggle to establish a holy commonwealth here on earth. Of course it is the mandate of all humanity to struggle toward such a community; what makes Christians different in their action is that they have in fact committed themselves to struggling toward this goal, that they recognize it as God’s mandate, and that they struggle toward it not just in obedience to God the creator but in imitation of Christ. It is because Christians are committed in obedient gratitude to work for the renewal of the earthly community that they will render their obedience in such ordinary earthly occupations as tailor, merchant, and farmer.
The time-place-political-economic community never reaches its high goals of justice and peace, yet presses on. Commenting on the “Christian realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr, Keith Ward (1986, p. 61) writes:
The Christian faith enshrines as a central part of its teaching a positive hope for the material world and a positive purpose for the historical process. The world of history … is somehow to be transfigured, renewed, redeemed, to express fully the purpose of a loving God…. Insofar as [Christianity’s] hope is for a society of justice and peace … its hope is political – it is about the founding and sustenance of a polis, a city or society of persons, bound together in the love of God.
Niebuhr himself, quoted later in Ward’s essay, wisely observed that “the Kingdom of God is an impossibility in history;” Christian hope must be “in the fulfillment of life beyond the limitations of temporal existence” (Ward, p. 69).
Thus, a community with direct linkage to ancient Hebrew traditions received from its founders a new mission, energy, and familial mutuality, with assurance that never getting to Zion, so to speak, would not be reason for hopelessness. Heaven would come to them, all in good time (Wright, 2008).
Must the Jewish and Christian scriptures or their commentators be invoked to sustain a discussion of eschatological communitarianism? Kant thought not. His third formulation of the Categorical Imperative pointed toward a “universal kingdom of ends” which echoes his Lutheran catechism yet without the encumbrance of divine revelation. All the insight needed to enact this kingdom (Reich, realm) was inherent in each person, the reasonable self, whose first obligation was to be loyal to universal law, not for what rewards it might offer, including the long-sought reward of a just and happy society, but for itself, for the moral life itself, because that is indeed the human life. Yet this responsibility, borne by all people, is not able to be fulfilled by solo agents acting independently of each other. The moral obligation must be realized in the village and among the people. Sullivan (1994, p. 86) writes:
This duty … cannot be satisfied just by the efforts of individuals concerned only with their own moral lives, for the goal is a collective, social good, not merely an aggregate of the moral achievements of individuals. Therefore, our obligation to promote the kingdom of ends is a special duty, unlike any other. It involves the human species as a whole, requiring each of us to recognize that our moral destiny is inextricably tied to our relations with one another in a communal endeavor.
Kant was skeptical of the human tendency to do good for the rewards of doing good, much like a child will obey for a candy or an adult will “do good” in view of a pending promotion, more money, or prestige. Social hope was crucial to sustained moral action, Kant insisted, but the just society was to be a by-product of morality, as it were, not a critical motivation for it, lest passion override reason and ends become falsely justified means. Clearly, however, people seek answers to the moral quest which are “comprehensive as well as final” (Sullivan, 1994, p. 84):
Kant concluded that the complete final good for the human species, our ultimate “necessary end,” consists in both our obligatory end – good moral character – and our natural end – happiness or well-being (Sullivan, 1994, p. 89, paraphrasing Kant, 1785/1990, p. 396).
Postmodern critics would dismiss grand theory such as this, but never its local expressions. Always and at all times people of “good character” will advocate and sacrifice for a broader reach of human rights and ready supply of basic needs for all people. No moral argument forbids the hope of a better day tomorrow, and much moral effort is expended in finding it. People of all ideological traditions and faith-groups hope for the elusive “kingdom [realm] of ends” and will test and try any new path to get there, minimizing moral fall-out and maximizing human prosperity. The eschatological community is a people with hope and vision, anywhere, everywhere.
Moral diversity and respect for the varied traditions find here a point of meeting: human relationships matter. Aristotle’s courage may be superseded by more nuanced thinking on behalf of slaves and women; revenge as primal value no longer works (Posner, 1996); but mutuality in human community seems to stick. Richard Rorty, writing as a modern Crytalus, presents a triad of values to herald the secular age: contingency, irony, and solidarity. The latter derives not from reflection on the essence of human nature, but from stories of pain and humiliation that spark within us a realization that we are more like each other, despite cultural differences, than we are unlike. Indeed, writes Rorty (1989, p. 192), “there is such a thing as moral progress, and this progress is indeed in the direction of greater human solidarity … thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities.”
Such claims are found everywhere, from citadels of academia to the conference halls where business and leadership literature chieftains create the next surge of entrepreneurship. There sounds the call to a communal consciousness. Peter Block (2008, p. 1), writing for the marketplace, advises:
The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole. The key is to identify how this transformation occurs…. A key insight in this pursuit is to accept the importance of social capital in the life of the community. This begins the effort to create a future distinct from the past.
Communal consciousness is the modern reflection of traditional moral proverbs such as the Golden Rule. Such sayings are heard around every human hearth and boma. Settling differences to coordinate action requires constant attention to skillful communication. Marcus Buckingham (2005, p. 59) urges leaders to focus on what lies ahead, the eschaton, as it were: “Great leaders rally people to a better future…. What defines a leader is … preoccupation with the future. In his head he carries a vivid image of what the future could be, and this image drives him on.”
The rhetoric of many leaders respected throughout centuries would attest to this futuristic bent, alive with hope and challenge. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, well known as a champion of civil rights, captures the core message:
Wherever you are tonight, I challenge you to hope and to dream. Don’t submerge your dreams. Dream above all else. Even on drugs, dream of the day you’ll be drug free. Even in the gutter, dream of the day that you’ll be up on your feet again. You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes. But don’t stop with the way things are. Dream of things as they ought to be. Dream. Face pain, but love, hope, faith, and dreams will help you rise above the pain. Use hope and imagination as weapons of survival and progress (July 17, 1984, in Torricelli, 1999, p. 374).
That is what this chapter means to say. Communities with moral vision respect the past but fix on the future, respect the individual but work toward the common good, know the reality of their times but conceive conditions and relationships that offer hope to all. Leaders in such communities say the words that make the quest vital and perhaps even possible. They open the future with vision and symbolic power, guiding communities toward survival and progress.
The reader may ask: why communitarianism, or this version of it? What criteria of social or ontological significance permits confidence that this approach salts in any sense the stew of ethical conundra which seems able to adapt like a virus to every moral pharmacology? In our era, latching on to virtues or programs or even moral traditions is like serial marriage – one moves around searching but rarely satisfied.
Polanyi (1962) directs the “secular age” away from its bipolar epistemology of evidence/subjectivity to a unified process of inquiry that builds on informed belief. Acknowledging his debt to Augustine, Polanyi (1962, p. 266) advises:
We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things … No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.
History offers plenty of examples of knowledge and commitment generated apart from community, or in deliberate resistance to community. The result is usually power unbridled by norms that this essay and communication professionals worldwide seek and adopt. Jung Chang’s (2005) brilliant study of Chairman Mao describes a life of tactical judgments morally disconnected from even the people’s movement he is popularly celebrated for, as if “chairman” was the wrong prescript altogether: Mao was chairman-in-chief of his own grasp for place and power. The rest is façade, by Chang’s account. Greene’s (1998) acclaimed 48 Laws of Power is a rogues’ gallery of morally vacuous advice, all the while using alleged moral “softies” as pawns.
Belief for Augustine was in a good God who speaks and acts (Webber, 1980, p. 74), for Polanyi in “personal acceptance which falls short of empirical and rational demonstrability.”
This then is our liberation from objectivism: to realize that we can voice our ultimate convictions only from within our convictions – from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to … the holding of my particular piece of knowledge … I must aim at discovering what I truly believe in (1962, pp. 266–267).
This essay advises that the process of articulating identity, focusing moral commitment, achieving social gain, and overcoming the considerable resilience of greed and oppressive power, is best done in the context of eschatological communitarianism. This framework forbids the orphanage of any human being from the whole while respecting the integrity and freedom of individuals. It knows the past but works toward open futures conceivably more abundant of human happiness than the present. It mediates between the “perfectionist” tradition, in which state and civil society help people achieve a substantive vision of the good life, and the “procedural” tradition, which remains open to substance from the people while the state enables wide liberties of thought and action (Madsen and Strong, 2003, p. 2). It is the stratosphere of the responsible press, however much its atmosphere is smoky with crass residue of the hour. It requires visionary leadership grounded in presuppositions pregnant with human yearning, grounded in values that celebrate life. Problems of applying moral norms to communications practice may pick and choose codal proverbs as the fix of the day, but new technologies and audience configurations will require regular revision. A peaceful destination must be fixed, a trajectory of human prosperity established. Meaning must invade sterile process. Love will generate sustained action. Eschatological communities toil in the now, aim at the future, and take measure of human life in artful reflection of its own errors and efforts.
We tend to get what we hope for.
Notes
1 pers. comm. with Robert Bolt, 17 January 2010.
2 This author had the privilege of delivering the first lectures at that program, and interviewing the academics and students in the first class.
3 pers. comm., October 1998.
4 The “Code of Conduct & Practice of Journalism in Kenya” is such a booklet. On its effectiveness, see Fackler (2010).
5 “I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.” Holmes delivered this line in a speech at Keene, New Hampshire, on Memorial Day, May 30, 1884. Quoted in Sheldon, 1989, p. 176.
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