From which sources did I draw the moral sentiments that have generally governed my life? Was it my early Catholic faith, family and neighborhood, or something borrowed from the tenor of the times. Hard to say for sure but something on this matter has been nagging at me. Bear with me for a bit.

Aldo Leopold, the poetic conservationist who wrote The Sand County Almanac, died in 1948, just as television would separate people from nature. In that masterpiece, he wrote about the dance of the Woodcock. “The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.” Aldo was lamenting what he saw as the very beginnings of a societal pattern where people would be separated from nature by technology, where their attachment to what was really important would be fractured.

Harry Truman turned down many offers to get rich when he left office in 1953. He drove back to Missouri to live again in his modest family home, living on an army pension of $1,350 (in today’s money) and modest royalties from his memoirs. His sentiments back then sounds quaint to modern ears, “I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize the prestige and dignity of the office of the Presidency.” Can you imagine Trump issuing such a sentiment?

George Romney (father of Mitt Romney) was CEO of American Motors, Governor of Michigan, Cabinet member in the Nixon administration, among other achievements. As a top industrial manager, he actually argued for restraint in what we paid top people in industry. He thought that a balance between the compensation levels of management and labor was important to our overall wellbeing. He quaintly saw greed as a destabilizing force to our social fabric.

Students in my day, back when I came of age in the 1960s, admittedly were all over the place. There were those who missed the 60s altogether, those who dived into the abyss of the counter-culture experiment, and those who naively tried to correct America’s obvious failings (like me). Yet, many of us were focused on making the world a better place. We certainly talked about that a lot. And change did come about, for a short while at least.

But something fundamentally changed by 1980. I can recall Reagan’s inauguration as President. It was not just a change in power but in our national ethos. Money and status were rudely inserted into the national psyche. Gone were Nixon’s claims about modest Republican cloth coats (in his famous Checkers speech) or Jimmie Carter’s humility and simplicity. Enter hubris and the gratuitous display of wealth and status. His inauguration was a grotesque display of limousines, mink coats, and ultra chic (and expensive) evening wear. A new ethic was in town.

The dominant political patois of neo-liberalism soon segued into corporate board rooms. In my youth, a form of what Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich would call stakeholder capitalism attenuated the rougher edges of corporate life. For a while, profit-oriented organizations explicitly recognized that they had managerial concerns beyond their fiduciary responsibilities to company shareholders … concerns extending to their workers, their communities, and to the future. Quarterly statements and shareholder prices were important, but not every thing.

The 1980s ushered in a new (and old) ethos, the seeds of which had been planted in 1947 at a gathering of intellectuals at Mont-Pelerin in Switzerland. Conservatives like economist  Milton Friedman and philosopher Friedrick Hayek laid out the argument for economic liberalism … a world where individual liberty was sacrosanct and virtually all public (i.e  government) action was tantamount to tyranny. They offered an old argument founded on the notion of homo- economicus where the sum of all individual self-optimizing decisions would magically result in maximum economic efficiency. Great stuff if you believe in the tooth fairy. In reality, it proved merely to be a transparent rationalization for unbridled greed.

It took many years for this neo-liberal perspective to overcome the Keynsian alternative that had rescued the nation from a global depression and introduced a decades long era of prosperity and promise. The world, however, eventually forgot what a focus on the public good as opposed to private gain had achieved.

When future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell laid out a strategy in a 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce through which neo-liberalism might gain control of key societal institutions, the game was on. Conservative money poured into the movement conservative agenda. Traditional institutions came under attack while new ones (like right-wing think tanks) were created. Within a decade, the White House was theirs.

The concept of stakeholder capitalism now seemed quaint. It has been replaced by the concept if shareholder capitalism. Nothing matters other than optimizing the well-being of shareholders. That became the moral foundation of corporate life in the 1980s … a world in which workers, communities, the environment, and our futures be damned.

So, when pharmaceutical companies make pricing decisions that effectively kill thousands, it is just business. When extractive energy companies actively fight against safer alternative energy sources, they are doing the moral thing. When weapons manufacturers lobby against sensible gun control policies, they are just looking after their shareholder’s needs. It is Orwell’s dystopia made real. This greed is good mania now has us with a public debt approaching $40 trillion, mostly to give further tax breaks to the Uber-wealthy who are blessed with the wherewithal to buy favorable tax preferences.

There is a second social change from which I was spared during my critical formative years. Smart phones and virtual reality had not yet arrived, those technologies which have separated people from one another. Just explore Jonothan Haights The Anxious Generation if you want the background on this phenomenon. I read today about a 19 year old who melted down on a plane because he was without his phone for a day. Nothing helped until he was provided a substitute phone and he could get back to his Snapchat, tic-toc fix or whatever. He was addicted.

AI may well be the next technology to interpose an artificial chasm between humans and their traditional purposes. Most of the angst these days focuses on AI replacing traditional jobs and tasks traditionally carried out by humans. Everything from computer programming, middle management tasks, repetitive manual labor, legal services and medical diagnoses suddenly face highly uncertain futures. 

But these are just the initial challenges posed by our god-like machines. It took a hundred years to recognize the full potential of the industrial revolution and just several decades to see the digital revolution play out. Who knows where AI will be in just 10 to 15 years. Will humans be confronted with their own obsolescence by 2040? I wouldn’t bet against it.

Back to my original issue … from where did my core moral sentiments originate. I suppose all the traditional factors played a role. Of that I am reasonably certain. But I also was lucky enough to be aware of excellent role models in the public sector,  men and women of uncommon virtue. There existed salient public sentiments that explicitly seemed to value life. As my late colleague, economist Robert Lampman pointed out, a common litmus test for new public policies in the 1960s was what will it do for the poor.

In addition, I was raised largely without our modern digital communication miracles. Okay, we eventually had a 12 inch Fada television in our home (later than most). But that did not prevent me from spending endless hours playing with friends in ways that sharpened my social skills, my independence, and my initiative. I even had time to learn basic multiplication tables and to diagram sentences. As Aldo Leopold feared in the mid 1940s, we had not yet lost our connection to other people and to the natural world.

Despite my rough, working class environment, I even knew where the public library was. When I wasn’t marauding our streets with my friends (without any supervision), I was greedily reading anything I could acquire. Now, being a member of three book clubs at age 81, it is clear that some early habits stay with you.

Im short, I feel blessed. Oddly enough, I’m not sure just how blessed I was at the time. But I do now!