Do the right thing

Why is it so difficult for us to do the right thing?  When I was young I once went to a store to buy some plants and when I came out I realized that the teller had failed to charge me for one of the items.  I started to go back to pay for it, $3,  and the person with me couldn't believe I would do that.  I'd gotten away without paying and it was a big store anyway so why not take the money and run?  How many times have we all done something like that?  Myself included.  It's so easy to take the money and run, and so hard to do the right right thing.  It starts young and it pervades our lives.  My daughter told me that she recently went to a community pool with one of her children.  The other two boys were playing ball at the adjacent field and when they were done she opened the back gate to let them in.  My grandson said "mommy, we didn't pay" and she went out and did, thank God (or maybe me.)  She told me her first reaction was to say  "Shh, nobody will know."  That's what they said at Enron.  That's what they said at Goldmann Sachs.  That's what Nixon said.  That's what we say to ourselves when we cheat on our taxes.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young once wrote "Teach your children well..."  And so we must, or sneaking in back doors will enable them to sneak through life without taking responsibility for having integrity.  
Why is it so difficult to do the right thing?  Businessmen with more money than they know how to spend commit fraud and abuse to further their business.  And even when it's not abuse they make decisions based on money instead of doing the right thing.  Politicians who've reached the pinnacle of their careers still take money from lobbyists and vote against their conscience or lose their conscience all together.  They've just forgotten how to do the right thing.
We have recently witnessed the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, a disaster of unsurpassed proportion (the subject of a future blog.)  It is not so terribly surprising to me.  The incentive to make more money forces us to increasingly push the bubble in every endeavor we undertake, without the proper safeguards.  It would serve everyone well to constantly remember that a history of past performance does not insure future rewards.  So now everyone is screaming that drilling 1 mile under the ocean requires more oversight and this terrible environmental disaster should have been foreseen and prevented.  And yet, many of those people screaming the loudest were shouting "Drill, baby, drill" only a few months ago.  More importantly, oil companies know that they continually pollute our environment in rain forests and in oceans.  They know that what they do is bad but are incapable of doing the right thing.  Maybe we should begin to look at preventative measures before the disaster.  Maybe we should look at existing nuclear reactors to see if they're safe enough, or the food industry or coal mining or...You get the point.  It would take more money, drive profits down but it would be the right thing to do.    For whatever reason we have no integrity as a human race.  Let's wake up and understand that doing the right thing is a must.  If we don't teach our children to pay for the $1 toy instead of stealing it, we will never stop the abuse in government and business, the pollution of our planet the murder of innocent victims in third world countries...the very end of the human race.     

Hubris and humility

Hubris and humility.  I've always loved the sound of those two words.  They come from deep inside you, on the back of a breath, as if you were exhaling them from your soul.  And maybe they represent, each in its own way, the essence of who we are.  But they are so different, so antithetical, that if in fact they describe us, then we must choose sides, choose how we wish to be known.  Hubris, the unquestionable belief in our rightness, is often a characteristic of our greatest heroes.  How else would we have become a country, if not for the hubris of John Adams or Ben Franklin?  Where would we be if Christopher Columbus began to question his belief that India was just around the corner?  Isn't that what has driven us to ever greater heights, the confidence of our convictions, the courage to charge on, whether what we did was popular or not?  The greatest athletes believe they're great, that they can win, that they will win, and it is within their power to turn the tide and garner victory from defeat.  So what is it that makes hubris so distasteful?  Why do we dislike arrogance so much?  Is it based on a false belief that we could do what they do...if only?  Maybe some people are just better than the rest of us and deserve to think of themselves that way.  Maybe.  But here's the rub.  Arrogance breeds discord.  Two people on opposite sides of an issue cannot believe themselves absolutely right and not feel the urge to fight.  Righteousness is the mother of contention and the father of war.
In my view the world would be a better place if humans valued humility above hubris.  We would be a better place inhabited by Buddhist monks than Chinese warlords.  We would be better to believe that man is not the brainchild of God, but only a curious development in the vast bush of life.
I have noticed that there are people I have known who seem incapable of having enemies.  People who I can tell are "nice" after five minutes of conversation.  They are soft and gentle and though I don't know what resides in their private mind, I know they are never arrogant and usually humble.  In general women have less hubris then men so I wonder if there is a gene for humility that we lack.  I would like to say that if women ruled the world, there would be no war.  But women who rise to high levels of power seem as corruptable by hubris as their genetic partners, sometimes more-so.  I like to think I am a humble man, but I have this need to project my disdain for poor workmanship as well as arrogant people.  So where does that leave me.  I feel like a snake swallowing its tail, round and round, inside and out.  Bottom line is that hubris beats humility, and the human race (another soulful sound) is destined eventually to be hoist on its own petard of arrogance unless we teach humility to all our children.      

The last bastion of ethics in an unethical world

Tiger Woods cheated on his wife. Why are we so appalled? It could have been worse.

It has become a matter of mundane observation that seemingly every group in modern society is rife with unethical behavior. Whether it is priests molesting children, doctors ripping off Medicare or lawyers chasing ambulances, the news of our day is most often about the wayward nature of our institutions and professions. To be sure there are always the standout heroes, the caregivers, the volunteers, the philanthropes, but they seem to garner our attention for their uniqueness rather than their representation of the whole. Historical perspective seems to give us a sense of “better times” when people played fair, when Platonic ideals were the rule of the day and not the “dog-eat-dog” philosophy we seem to live by. Admittedly every age has had its scandals, from Teapot Dome to Boss Tweed, from Piltdown Man to the frontal lobotomy. Politicians, scientists, businessmen and teachers, builders and reporters, almost every group imaginable seem to have succumbed to the basest instincts of our nature to cheat and lie. But it does seem the past was simpler, slower, less frenetic and fraught with danger. Even I remember the days when my neighbors left their doors open, when I could stroll to my elementary school alone and my mother didn’t worry about me being molested and murdered. Those times, alas, seem to be gone and it will be a Herculean task to prevent them being gone forever.

The answer will not come in the form of more preaching or more legislation. That has clearly not worked. When government tries to incentivize ethics it inevitably foments fraud. Medicare rip-offs are estimated to be on the order of 60 billion dollars a year! But lest we blame doctors for leading the way down this path of corruption, let us not forget the lawyers, who codify kickbacks by calling them referral fees, or politicians who excuse their golf junkets as fund-raisers and rail against sinners while they themselves are the most egregious examples of sin.

In 1998 the biggest story of the day was not war, or famine or genocide. The world was relatively peaceful and the government had a 2 billion dollar surplus. But it was discovered that our president had had extramarital sex with a younger woman. Congress was ready to impeach for high crimes and misdemeanors, and half the country was incensed at his behavior. Never mind that extramarital sex in the White House from Roosevelt to Kennedy, among others, was common knowledge even to school children. Interestingly, the republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, a leader of the impeachment proceedings had been overwhelmingly sanctioned by the House just two years earlier on ethics violations. And representative Bob Livingston who succeeded Gingrich as Speaker-designate to lead the charge, stepped down when he was discovered himself to be having an extramarital affair. A new political sex scandal seems to crop up every year, sometimes every month.

And don’t look to our clergy or our press. The ‘holier than thous’ became the ‘hornier than thees’ and stole the innocence of generations. Not so surprising when organized religion has been responsible for more death and torture in the holy name of salvation than Genghis Kahn, Atilla the Hun, Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung all rolled into one. And when the muckrakers got down into the dirt to bring revelation to the masses it merely spawned the yellow journalists who traffic in rumor, scandal, sensationalism and lies.

Is there any group that is exempt from this pattern? Are accountants so corruptible? Ask the employees and shareholders of Enron and Arthur Anderson. How about engineers? Ask the project managers for the space shuttle Challenger. And what of the soldiers? Each side in every conflict will point to a whole segment of society guilty of the crime of being wrong. Is there an ethical ideal to which they hold other than the great cop out of doing what they’re told?

Well what of sport? That has to be pure. It is the embodiment of the human ideal, the pursuit of excellence and the use of nonviolent competition to satisfy our inherent desire for combat. Yet, no one is unaware of the abuse of enhancement performing drugs in all of sport, from professional football to Olympic swimming. Baseball, the ‘American past-time’, the enjoyment of which is in large part predicated on the comparison to past greats, must now put asterisks next to its players names. Records are no longer really records, just performance enhanced numbers.

And that brings me to the subject of my rantings, because there is yet one true bastion of ethical behavior in our society. In 1925, while competing for the U.S. Open, Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself when his ball moved ‘ever so slightly’, unnoticed by anyone but himself. He went on to lose the tournament in a playoff. When complimented for his sportsmanship he said ‘You might as well praise me for not robbing banks.’ In 2007 Mark Wilson was competing for his first win as a PGA professional. His caddy inadvertently called out the loft of his club on a par 3 and Wilson realized, as they walked to the green, that he may have been in violation of rule 8-1, ‘giving advice to another player.’ He called over a rules official, was awarded a two stroke penalty and lost the outright lead. He prevailed in a sudden death playoff. It is hard to find a single instance of cheating in professional golf and yet the tale is replete with accounts of self- imposed penalties. In 1983 Hale Irwin wiffed a 3 inch putt in the final round of the British Open. It wasn’t a penalty, and could have been excused as a practice stroke but he counted it and missed out of the finals by one shot. The number of stories of self imposed punishments that meant the difference between winning and losing, fame and obscurity, fortune and hardship in the annals of amateur and professional golf would fill many books. In 1986 Ray Floyd lost the lead in the second round of a tournament when he told his playing competitor that his ball had moved right before his putt, and to give him a 5 for the hole.

For sure there are the cheaters who don’t count their strokes, inflate their handicap for the member guest tournament, take mulligans and replace lost balls like police throwing down unmarked weapons at a crime scene. But there has been something existentially pure and moral about the upper echelons of competitive golf. And I, for one, choose to believe it defines the sport itself, or maybe it’s the other way around. Golf won’t make you more ethical if you’re not and if you don’t cheat at golf it doesn’t necessarily hold you’ll be an honest doctor or a faithful husband. But we will only ever regain our innocence and our ideals by teaching our young ones to ‘play nice. And there is no greater landscape to do that on than a beautiful stretch of green grass, pockmarked with pitfalls of quicksand and bottomless wells, to teach us that life may not always be fair but it is best played fairly.

Go ahead and pass new laws to help the sick and the poor, to put restraints on the greedy on Wall Street, to watch over our police lest they go too far in their pursuit of the bad guy, and to monitor the monogamy of our civic leaders. But we will only persevere in regaining the moral high ground if we resolve to reestablish our ethical compass. Instead of teaching business management to new doctors, we would be better off teaching them to memorize the Hippocratic oath. Instead of turning out more lawyers to sue each other, we would be better off making referral fees a violation of ethics. Instead of congressmen making speeches about why they support a bill that benefits their constituents, let them make lobbying illegal. Or let us take our toddlers to the park and teach them the rules of golf.

So Tiger cheated on his wife. Welcome to the world where 50% of us cheat on our spouse and to the world of the rich and famous where that number is probably 80% or higher. (Fame, like extramarital sex…be careful what you wish for.) It’s not an excuse and though there may be an explanation, it’s the equivalent of moving your ball in the rough. You just shouldn’t do it. But it could have been worse. He could have cheated at golf. And though he has confessed his marital sins let us hope and pray that we never see a day when a Mark McGwire or an Alex Rogriquez of golf gets up to say he’s sorry he ever used drugs. Golf will recover from Tiger’s infidelity but, at least for now, it remains the last bastion of ethics in an unethical world.