The Moral Limits of Professionalism
I want to do something unusual for me, and write about work; not my work specifically, which I feel very lucky in, but professional norms in the United States generally. This isn’t a response to any particular experience, but to the weather around us all growing increasingly stormy of late. Organizations with a culture that is stable and successful over the long-term have a healthy aversion to sudden changes in direction, and generally avoid counterproductive catastrophizing. This is far preferable to the alternative, which is a kind of manic chaos, but it does have limits. For those with the right attitude, the attitude selected for by successful businesses, there may be no bad weather, only bad gear; but if a tornado touches down, it’s important to sound the alarm.
I’m speaking, of course, about politics, which carries with it a stronger set of professional norms, and for very good reason. Over the course of my life, I have changed my mind about many issues, and have been in offices, classrooms, and churches where I was well to the right of the room, or well to the left of the room, and as a socially sensitive person with a strong need to be liked, I value the norm of professional political neutrality and tact on a deeply personal level, despite not always perfectly embodying the same consideration in my own life. I can recall specific instances where someone either in a position of authority or of greater social status made off-hand remarks or jokes that clearly showed me I was the political-cultural minority in that context, and this did feel isolating, not so much because of the difference of opinion, but because of the uneven imposition of tact in order to avoid drama, and because it sowed doubt as to whether or not colleagues or classmates would respect the real version of myself, and not a neutral facsimile. All that is to say, I sympathize with the feelings of those quietly holding unpopular opinions, and appreciate the importance of our professional norms against being overtly political, especially where senior leadership is involved.
The difficulty with nearly any good value, principle, or heuristic, is that it is easy to follow it too far. With the exception of the commandments to love God and our neighbor, there are almost always limits beyond which a good rule begins to undermine more than it upholds. If we tell the truth when we express our core values, our desire to make the world better in some way, then integrity demands we speak truthfully about what is happening in this country. To remain silent when the subject arises, when the consequences confront us, does actual harm.
The first objection many will have is to disagree about the nature of what is transpiring. This is not the place for me to rehearse all of the facts, or to argue fruitlessly over their significance. I will only say that we have now reached a moment in which the Executive has arrogated to itself the power to seize any person off the street, cut off all communication between them and their families, deny legal counsel, a trial, or a hearing, and place them in a prison where torture and brutality are built into the physical structure itself, and then leave them there for the rest of their lives, regardless of what any later judicial process determines. If you disbelieve this, I urge you to avail yourself of the facts; if you are unbothered by this, I encourage you to spend time in prayer. I am not writing this for the unconvinced, but for those who see that the emperor has no clothes, but feel unable to say anything because of a lifetime of otherwise virtuous professional tact.
The second objection I anticipate is the charge of simple naïveté about the purpose of professional norms. After all, everyone jokes about how, despite whatever corporations say, the bottom line is ultimately the Bottom Line. And there are of course good reasons for this – without profit, without growth, people are ultimately impoverished. There is a moral dimension to economic productivity, which dovetails with the social need for people of widely differing views to live and work together in peace. But we need to consider the possibility that if we take the business case for or against any action as the final arbiter of what we should do, we remove the faculty of moral choice, the freedom which makes us human. A sufficiently-advanced intelligence could, in that paradigm, map out what decisions we should all inevitably make to maximize shareholder value into the future; but this would likely produce a society in which one could not enjoy these economic gains because such a total prioritization would foreclose all other freedoms. I say this as someone who really does care about shareholder value, who closely watches all of my investments, especially the stock I own in my own employer. But I refuse to be cynical about human decision-making, even if that appears naïve. I am never surprised when rational actors prioritize the bottom line regardless of whatever stated values they have expressed, but up until that point I think I owe everyone the respect of taking them at their word, and make decisions assuming others will act as they should. Anticipatory cynicism may be a strategy for self-defense, but it corrodes social trust and quickly robs us of any higher moral telos.
The third objection is probably foremost in your mind if you’re a professional in America, and it’s the idea that it’s simply not the role of business to ever be political in a way that is at all controversial. I generally agree with this; I have not been a fan of large companies feeling the need to be performatively woke in a way that always seemed both less-than-sincere and also insensitive to the nuances of sincere religious conviction; nor do I want to polarize the economy such that people are further sorted and separated by ideology in all spheres of life – that’s done enough harm already. Obviously politics can be very bad for business, and in the long run profit is a prerequisite of success. And most importantly, there’s the risk of making employees feel socially excluded, or worse, pressured to agree with stances they do not share. These are all good reasons for professional neutrality to remain a strong norm, nine times out of ten.
But I think we are in that tenth time.
In a moment where electoral and legal guardrails are disregarded by those controlling the apparatus of state, with all its physical power and authority, the one crucial arena of contestation is the simple question of what is true. If any injustice can be made to appear normal, necessary, or warranted to enough people, then there is no safety in the law. What is needed now is to simply reject attempts to redefine the nature of reality, and the terms of what is acceptable and normal. In this, large institutions, including businesses, are unfortunately part of the struggle for the soul of the nation, even if they do not want to be. To win, authoritarians need to create a state of generally-accepted unreality, a kind of fictitious normality maintained by polite society, where people pretend not to see things they otherwise would have been appalled by. The ultimate means to power they seek is to have a critical mass of society make themselves personally hypocrites by voluntarily acting as if things are fine when they aren’t. This is a part of a strategy of cutting out and isolating the vulnerable targets of repression in the way a sheep dog cuts a lamb out of the flock.
In this process, the administration has predictably started by bullying large institutions with a lot to lose: universities, law firms, the civil service, and big business, especially federal contractors. These institutions have a small number of leaders who, because of their social class, may simply not be as cognizant of the degree of threat experienced by those more vulnerable. On top of this, they tend to be older and thus to have been formed longer by the professional neutrality of managerial culture and the historical normal of an America with normal political disputes within a sort of general bipartisan constitutional consensus. I am at the tail end of people who grew up in such an America, and I desperately miss it, but I am unable to pretend it is the America of today. Beyond this, leadership has a duty to their shareholders, employees, students, and the public to try to steer their institutions successfully through political storms without running aground on conflict, so there is an understandable desire to find some way to protect themselves, batten down the hatches, and wait for everything to blow over.
The problem is that once large institutions managed by the social elite begin to demonstrate a willingness to be pushed around, not only will the administration push further and demand more, but the pressure will then roll downhill onto individual Americans, the employees, students, and citizens, who do not all have the means to feel they can take principled stands if the institutions they are part of do not have their backs.
This is why, in this moment, it is regrettably necessary for leaders and social institutions to speak honestly about what they see happening. I am not calling for a widget-factory to become an editorial board; but wherever changes that would in any other context seem irrational, abnormal, or unjust intersect with your operations or your immediate community, react honestly, rather than glancing first at the political debate and dissembling, or retreating into a bashful silence. This is an economic risk, and it carries with it social risks as well, including the danger of inadvertently harming professional unity. We should not speak carelessly or in haste; but saying nothing at all is worse, under the circumstances. And worst of all, is to acknowledge that people feel anxious, and to try to reassure them, only by encouraging them to remain calm as in other times of difficulty. People should remain calm, but when that is the sole reassurance given by leaders, it signals that they do not see, or are not willing to say, just how abnormal and perilous our situation is. This leaves their audience to feel they are each individually alone facing whatever pressure comes from a would-be authoritarian, and that is precisely how people come to preemptively silence themselves, freeing the enemies of liberty to carry out any crime without the outrage that should confront them.
We need to speak now, and not later. If we try to preserve for ourselves the flexibility of reserved judgment, if we try to wait and see, if we follow the usual good practice of continuing a steady course and being tactful, then soon we will all be so isolated by the caving of others that we will increasingly fear to say anything, no matter what happens. Therefore it is necessary now, proactively, to cut off our own retreat by taking a clear position, not only stating our principles honestly, but doing so in such a way that we cannot later redefine them to allow us to retreat to a compromise that we would call immoral today.
Perhaps this all sounds extreme, inappropriate, or unprofessional to you. In that case, all I would ask is that you consider the role of the leaders of social institutions and businesses in Germany in the early 1930s, understanding that they may have been in denial about how far things could go, and ask with hindsight if you want to risk continuing business as usual like so many of them did.
