God's struggle with mammon is eternal, but any time the Nasdaq falls 75 percent, the Big Guy gets the upper hand.
Bruce Wilkinson's 2000 best seller, The Prayer of Jabez (Multnomah, 96 pages, $9.99), was a commercially clever shellac job of religious sentiment over the idea that you deserve a Lincoln Navigator in your driveway, a perfect devotional for the bull market.
This confusion of salary with salvation, hundreds of years old, is not always bad. As German sociologist Max Weber and English socialist economist R.H. Tawney showed long ago, the idea that earthly and heavenly blessings go together was important to the economic growth of Protestant Europe after 1520. The modern primacy of the United States owes much to the legacy of the Puritan Pilgrims, who believed material prosperity was the mark of spiritual favor.
But when trouble calls and wealth vanishes, the traditional God of the modest and meek gains market share. Wilkinson's newest product, also commercially clever, is a post-Enron sermon, calibrated for recession and ethical recrimination. Instead of asking God to "enlarge my territory," as the earlier book does, A Life God Rewards -- Why Everything You Do Today Matters Forever (Multnomah, 124 pages, $10.99) focuses on the treasure of the afterlife and its relation to mortal deeds.
It is distastefully Pavlovian. Its implied message is that a virtuous life is worth living not for its own sake but for heavenly bonus points to be cashed in later. But the booklet is a cultural marker. The question asked by Confucius and Kant and a hundred sages in between -- How to live a good life amid vanity and venality? -- seems to be getting a renewed hearing.
None of the answers given by Derrick Bell in Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth (Bloomsbury, 176 pages, $19.95) is original, as Bell would admit. There is little new left to say after three millennia of recorded philosophizing. But we always need reminding of the ratified wisdom, and Bell's book eloquently updates the ethical recipe for the age of the corporate rat race.
Bell, who teaches law at New York University, resigned from Harvard a decade ago to protest a lack of tenured black women professors, and he is a veteran of the civil rights struggle. His arguments are often illustrated with his own experiences; his conclusions are universal.
The "ethical ambition" of the title has double meaning. We should be ambitious to be ethical, Bell is saying, but it is also possible to be ambitious in the conventional sense -- for promotion, for reputation, for modest material gain -- in an ethical way. That's good news if you've been living in a cave and eating bugs for the sake of your soul, and it's really good news if you strive in the real world while sometimes suspecting that morality is a fatal impediment.
According to Bell, the ingredients of an ethical life -- this won't surprise anybody -- are humility; meaningful work; loyalty and attention to spouse and family; realistic adherence to principle; succor for the less fortunate; and due attention to the divine. He believes there is a necessity -- a duty -- to brave the jungle of jobs, competition, discrimination and dollars.
"If we sought to steer clear of situations that challenged us ethically," he writes, "we would make our lives extremely narrow -- and not necessarily ethical."
But he thinks that, with the proper adjustments, the course can be navigated with grace and conscience. Perhaps the biggest adjustment is to trim one's obsession with money and the means to get it. Money can be poison to almost everything in Bell's ethical prescription. Moral behavior, humility and religious inclination are in obvious jeopardy. But so, Bell shows, is the duty to family.
"Unfortunately, our passion for our work may be real, but carried to extremes it can result in our neglecting the people we care about most passionately," he writes. "This ... is both wrong and unethical."
Even so, Bell points out, money is not always an enemy. It can be a valuable ally in setting the moral compass, and he's not talking about God's commandment for us to vacation in Aruba. His principled resignation from Harvard was cushioned by a modest personal financial reserve, he notes. He makes the crucial point that the freedom to live ethically increases as one approaches financial independence, and financial independence is nurtured by saying no to consumer-spending mania.
Dinesh D'Souza's The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence (Touchstone, 304 pages, $14) also looks at wealth's double edge. But, while he touches on money's threat to contemplation and character, D'Souza emphasizes the positive side of riches, maybe because the book was first published in 2000 near the height of the bull market. Indeed, to read The Virtue of Prosperity is to see how much our assumptions about the world have changed since then.
"We're seeing more than faith in the capitalist system; we're seeing a huge surge of confidence on the part of the average American that the system will benefit him directly," D'Souza writes.
Ouch.
D'Souza rehearses Adam Smith's praises of capitalism: that it harnesses an eternal aspect of human nature -- selfishness -- for the good, that by seeking profits entrepreneurs make things people need, create jobs and reduce poverty. But he also sees money as the driver of technology, technology that he portrays as largely beneficial even as it encroaches on purviews -- in the life sciences, for example -- that once were God's only. Ever the optimist, D'Souza leaves us with the impression that the problems caused by money and technology will be ameliorated by more money and technology.
Yale School of Management Dean Jeffrey E. Garten also sees economic growth as beneficial, but he wants to salt it with altruism. Most commentators so far have seen curing U.S. business as mainly an outside job, with the onus being on Washington to provide economic impetus and better regulation. Garten believes CEOs and other corporate insiders have an important role to play, and his ambitious marching orders for them often look like something that Derrick Bell would recognize.
In The Politics of Fortune (Harvard Business School Press, 224 pages, $24.95) Garten advises CEOs to mind their profits and fight for free trade but also to support substantially increased aid for the Third World, strengthen the domestic social safety net and "see their responsibilities extending beyond insuring the health of their own companies or industries."
This is contrarian stuff for America's boardrooms. To see how contrarian, consider Garten's observation that "a market economy [is not] the same as a market society; prices and competition should not govern everything." Although he doesn't cite him, Garten is paraphrasing no less an enemy of U.S. capitalism than the former French Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Garten hopes the current climate of reflection and urgency will speed the message.
Rakesh Khurana has a bone to pick with CEOs, too, or, more specifically, with the boards who hire them. In his excellent, readable and highly original Searching for a Corporate Savior (Princeton University Press, 295 pages, $29.95), Khurana lays bare the CEO search process and shows how directors at company after company favor executive glitz and corporate pedigree over demonstrated competence -- and then grossly overpay their recruits while demanding miraculous results. Not surprisingly, in trying to live up to expectations, the bosses often end up wrecking the company.
It was Max Weber, Khurana notes, who described the dangers of charisma in politicians. Khurana does the same for charisma in business leadership, concluding it is a fool's game "to hope that a high-powered CEO can be a corporate savior."
Garten might disagree. "Savior of what?" Bell would ask.
Jay Hancock is a financial columnist for The Sun who began working life as a public relations operative for Owens Corning Fiberglas Corp. He was The Sun's diplomatic correspondent from 1999 to 2001 and its economic correspondent from 1995 to 1999. He has twice been a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award in business and financial journalism.