c. 2008 Religion News Service
NEW YORK _ Overnight rain cleaned the streets of New York. Overnight reviews pegged Sen. Barack Obama as Friday’s debate winner, Milan’s latest fashions as “silly,” and the Mets’ hopes as waning.
The morning air filled suddenly with the siren of an ambulance. Stores opened. Life moved on. Despite the apocalyptic specters that occupy our national stages, the fog that shrouded Manhattan would lift to reveal people doing what people do. Life moved on.
The owner of Harriet’s Kitchen, an Upper West Side destination for burgers, wanted to chat about Sarah Palin’s thin resume, as he sees it. But then the phone rang, and his political commentary gave way to delivery orders. Life moved on.
My wife and I found the Saturday crush at Zabar’s, where breathless announcements are reserved for specials on lox. Customer traffic seemed low at high-end clothing and accessories stores, but jammed as usual elsewhere. Life moved on.
Greed and hubris are two ways of explaining the mounting catastrophe in political and corporate leadership. Another factor, though, is leaders’ strange disconnection from the lives that people actually live. Rarefied education, cloistered homes and increasingly inaccessible office suites seem to have eliminated any semblance of a “common touch.” (Donning a flannel shirt for a campaign stop doesn’t count.)
The vast majority of our political leaders haven’t met a payroll or dealt with customers. Among those leading banks and corporations, do any listen in when customers call to complain about product quality? Do any see the impact of relentless fees, long lines or sliced-and-diced mortgages that to them are anonymous assets but to homeowners are a lifeline to financial security?
In every city I know, the wealthy strive to separate themselves from the motley herd, as if occupying a parallel universe were a well-deserved perquisite of success. The collapse of Wall Street, however, reveals how much is lost when the powerful stop seeing anyone else.
Not only do they award themselves appalling compensation, but they lose the ability to manage their enterprises. A business leader who fails to know customers and clerks soon becomes ineffective _ a lion on the social scene, perhaps, but incapable of making basic business decisions wisely.
Power corrupts more than the soul, you see. Power corrupts our abilities to see, to understand and to care about other people. By not tasting, smelling and hearing their own enterprises as they deal with customers, executives rely too much on numbers, clever systems and one-pagers. They lose the intuition and first-hand knowledge that actually constitute wisdom.
I remember the first time a clever bank sold my mortgage. It was a shock to realize that my local banker had no interest in seeing me own a home. Call it naive, but that realization _ that his transaction fees, securitization profits and chips for trillion-dollar wagers mattered more than my home-ownership _ explains why banks are failing.
Like childish bullies who commit mayhem in the sandbox and then go home to doting parents, putative leaders have swaggered and cheated in a strange mating dance of irresponsibility and incompetence, and now have left a mess for someone else to clean up.
As we sort out the ethical issues revealed by today’s financial crisis, greed and hubris will lead the list, followed by a culture that excused incompetence by denying outcomes. The way forward will lie in knowing people _ customers, clerks, foreigners and fellow citizens _ and having the decency to serve them, not fleece them.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)
KRE/LF END EHRICH
650 words
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