Text of my talk
"Maintaining and nurturing values in an ever more complex,
fast-changing and volatile world"
at the Forum Christlicher Führungskräfte, Bern, 23 & 24 March 2012
I am honoured to be invited to speak here, with some of the seniormost representatives of the Roman and Reformed churches present, as well as of business, media, government and civil society.
So you certainly do not need ME to tell you about the rough and brutal discussion regarding whether Swiss values have degenerated, that took place in the Swiss Press and Media immediately following the global economic crisis, which started in 2007.
Nor do you need me to tell you about headlines such as this one: SHOW
There is in fact a widespread feeling, that banks have betrayed Switzerland by violating Swiss values.
Of course, it was not only banks that had betrayed Swiss values, but also other financial services companies, and companies in many other branches of industry.
And not only different branches of industry but also groups such as political parties, shooting and hunting clubs, business associations, and professional associations such as Accountants and Lawyers.
All this raises some questions: What are Swiss values? Or, in business terms, what is the Swiss brand? Is „Swiss brand value destruction“ as much as feared, or less, or more?
If “brand” is the innermost core of character and goes right through– like watermark in paper – then how come we had disasters like the collapse of Swissair ELEVEN years ago, and the man who disguised himself as a policeman, walked into the Parliament in Zug and killed 14 lawmakers, while wounding 18 others?
Is this sort of thing merely an odd or exceptional occurrence as many Swiss like to believe? Or is it evidence of a long-term deterioration of Swiss character? Or even of deliberate long-term undermining of Swiss values by some Swiss? And are Swiss values the same as God’s values, Biblical values? In any case, what needs to be done to build up character, to build up values in Switzerland?
If you want to build up values and character in Switzerland, you won't find that happening by itself. You won't accomplish that by merely sitting around in churches or in good conferences like this one. Nor will you accomplish it by wandering around aimlessly. Sadly, you won’t accomplish it either by rushing in all directions, either!
If your goal is to nurture certain values, you need a strategy to accomplish that! Even in a traditionally highly moral culture such as Switzerland. Or perhaps precisely because you have had a highly moral culture but are now encouraged, by your leaders, to regard that as old fashioned and irrelevant in the interests solely of efficiency and mere profit. These new orientations of course militate against personal, relational and national flourishing, as has been demonstrated by Harvard Professor Stephen Marglin in his book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community.
The Swiss find it difficult to believe that, if Switzerland is degenerating, it is even today relatively moral in comparison to most other countries. But, for an outsider like me, it was stunningly obvious even the first time I visited Switzerland in 1968, from the fact of how clean the streets were, the fact that one can drink water from the taps, the fact that the public transport system works, and so on.
If you don’t think these things have anything to do with morality, you may want to re-examine your understanding of morality. Because morality is the basis on which everything functions.
Check any of the things that I have mentioned – from public transport to being able to drink the water that comes out of your tap – and you will find a direct correlation with Transparency International’s Index of Corruption: the most corrupt countries have the least of such “public goods”, while the least corrupt countries have the most of these “public goods” – and, WITH A VERY FEW EXCEPTIONS, there is a direct correlation with Protestant cultures.
Why that correlation is there began to be explored by scholars such as Max Weber, and is something that I, a Hindu follower of Jesus, have put forward from a very different point of view, in articles which you will find on my website or Blog.
Alternatively, read another Indian, Dr Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World, published recently by Thomas Nelson in America.
It is astonishing how few Swiss understand that it was the Bible that created the values of the modern world: its education, science, technology, its laws and freedoms, and indeed its music, sports, art, family-life, politics, economics and even the basic idea of what makes a life worth living. The same Bible and the same Jesus who transformed all these in the past in Europe and the USA, can do so again in our fast-globalising world, because the Bible is still God’s Word and Jesus is still Lord – and in fact what God is doing through globalization is opening all the world’s cultures to the sort of transformation that happened in Reformation Europe. Lift up your eyes. Don’t get taken in by secular propaganda through the media about the decline of faith. God may or may not be rejecting Christianity for a time, as he earlier laid aside the Jewish people for a time, but He is building His Kingdom even through so-called secular people who begin to see, for example through the current crisis, that certain (Godless) ways lead to decline and destruction, and try to build laws and institutions, in the case of the economic crisis of course economic laws and institutions that are more in line with God’s character (even these atheistic, agnostic or secular people may not realize that!).
But let’s take a simpler example. If your business expands, as most businesses are expanding, from a Protestant culture such as Switzerland, where working for the law enforcement agencies is regarded as one of the least corrupt professions, to my own country of origin, India, where 87% of the population regard the police as corrupt (I repeat: 87% of the Indian population regard the police as corrupt), then you have to make some changes if you want to keep the same moral standards in business. You must think at least a little about the kinds of people you recruit, how you train them, how you might need to change your system of incentives and punishments, your system of promotions, your quality system and product portfolio, your service system and pricing. You have to think carefully about immoral tactics which may be employed by your competitors and may not be what you expect at all, including hiring away, threatening, or intimidating your suppliers, your staff, or your customers. By doing something different from what is common in that culture, even if you are an aggressive atheist, you are beginning to transform that culture.
In the “wild west capitalism” of America, you will find different issues, such as regulation and bureaucracy gone mad, and levels of greed which now outstrip even those of India and China.
Every change has the potential to bring a shift (e.g. SMS-communication rather than hanging out together). The question is whether such a shift somehow questions, threatens or reduces life-giving values that are important and inherent to Swiss society and culture.
Any fast change with a potential value shift forces us to be value-aware and makes it necessary for us to much more deliberate about defining, installing, maintaining and nurturing values in our daily decisions.
Is the Swiss environment changing rapidly? Yes, look at the decline, among Swiss people, not only of trust in Jesus the Lord or in what the Bible teaches, but even of simple Biblical literacy - and the natural consequence: lower moral standards. Look at the number of people from non-Biblical cultures coming into Switzerland who are much more difficult to integrate than the historical Huguenot or the modern Italians, Portuguese and Spanish who have at least a somewhat similar culture. Look at the increasing graffiti all along the railway lines. Look at the increasing numbers of divorces, the incidence of fraud and theft, and even murders, abortions, suicides and assisted deaths.
But of course Swiss people don’t like to look at evidence of value-shift. We like to ignore the evidence. Too many Swiss have a comfortable house and lifestyle, and don’t want to feel the spiritual, ethical, political and business atmosphere changing around them. We don’t have much sand in Switzerland, so we cannot, like an ostrich, bury our head in that, so we just bury ourselves in our beautiful homes and gardens instead. We may complain about the decline of Switzerland, but do we want to be part of the solution?
Well, ignoring the question of Swiss values and their alignment or otherwise with God’s values is not going to help us nurture values. If we want to nurture certain values, we have to take action, as individuals, as families, as businesses, as communities.
What sorts of actions? The most important thing in nurturing values is being prepared to pay the cost of nurturing values.
Why do we ignore the decline of public standards in Switzerland? I suggest it is because we don’t like to think of the cost of reconstructing public standards in Switzerland, let alone being willing to pay those costs.
So what costs do we have to be prepared to pay if we want to nurture standards?
In my own case, following the visit to Switzerland in 1968, to which I referred earlier, I had to pay the psychological cost of doing two things, both starting with “R”.
First, I had to Revalue my own ideas as a nationalist Indian – I had to start thinking about issues I had not till then thought about – for example, caste discrimination and its relationship with the work ethic, with entrepreneurship and with national prosperity. I had to not only Re-evaluate my position on such institutionalized evil, I had to also answer the question: how can I systematically Refresh or Re-enliven my personal values and work for national upliftment?
What was wrong with the way I had related to Jesus the Lord and had read the Bible that I had not even seen such institutionalized evil? I found that I need to re-read the Bible with fresh eyes, and allow Jesus the Lord to challenge my deepest fears and anxieties, my deepest hopes and ambitions, my most fundamental ideas, concepts and understanding. In fact, that allowing Jesus the Lord to challenge me through the Bible is the only way to continually melt the ice that forms around my heart because of the Arctic cold of the winds of the fast-changing ways in which evil becomes institutionalized in our economics, politics, society, technology and media.
What was wrong with my understanding of Jesus the Lord and of the Bible? Briefly, I had read it individualistically, solely in terms of my relationship with God. I had simply substituted Jesus for Indian gurus or yoga or meditation. I had not understood that Jesus the Lord is interested in MUCH MORE than merely giving to me the gift of salvation, or relating to me as an individual. He is interested in transforming me into an agent of substantial healing in society, politics, economics, technology, and so on. Because the sources and impacts of dehumanization operate today increasingly at the level of institutions and laws that are not merely local but also national and, most powerfully, global.
So, what is needed to be part of the solution?
First, the cost of articulating your values. When my son decided to start the Indian-gastronomy-company, King’s Kurry AG, here in Switzerland, he put into the company’s Constitution that 10% of its profits would be given to Indian charities. As it is an AG and, like every company, constantly seeks capital every time it has to make a new step, we are permanently confronted with the fact that some people do not want to invest in a company which intends to give away 10% of its profits! Of course, King’s Kurry fortunately does have other shareholders (at present over 40 shareholders) who are very happy to have shares in a company that is prepared to give away 10% of its profits. The company has NOT had huge profits to give away up to now, because it has focused on expanding, but profits will come as the company reaches critical size, God willing, but my point is that articulating your values and facing the consequences is the first cost that you have to be willing to pay if you want to maintain values as a company.
Second, you have to be willing to pay the cost of clarifying the strategy by which you want to keep your values. For example, in the area of recruitment. Do you want to have as executives and employees the most competent people, or only those most competent people who have a commitment to your values? In the area of rewards and promotions: do you want to reward “raw performance” or do you want to reward only such performance as is delivered in a way that fits with your values? What about your products and services? Are you willing to sell anything and everything that makes you money, or are you going to include only those goods or services which meet certain minimum human and environmental criteria? What about your investors and customers? Are you willing to deal with anyone and everyone without thinking, or do you want to deal only with people whose values are aligned with yours at least to some minimum level? Do you want to do business at all with certain countries or with certain kinds of people?
So, first the cost of articulating values, second the cost of clarifying and implementing however you wish to embed your values in your organization, and, third, identifying when and how you will honestly review your progress towards reaching your goal, so that you can, if necessary, change what you are doing to improve the level at which values are reflected in your organisation.
If you are trying to lose weight, you need to weigh yourself periodically. If you run a business you might have a rolling three-year plan and an annual review, and a quarterly review and a monthly review and even a weekly review. That requires some intentionality.
The most important reason for Switzerland’s moral morass is that Christians have ceased to be intentional about being salt and light. Christians have accepted the idiotic notion that belief is something private. Christians don’t seem to want to understand that for 2,000 years God struggled to communicate the Jewish Bible (or what Christians call the Old Testament) whose whole message can be summed up like this: God’s character is written into the structure of the universe; people can either choose to live by God’s character and by laws and institutions that reflect God’s character, and by doing that, they can flourish - or they can choose to live differently from God’s character and, by doing so, decline as a people and as a nation.
Just as an individual trying to lose weight needs a plan, and just as a company, if it is to flourish or even survive, needs to develop, implement and review its strategy, so we who are somehow leaders of Switzerland need to take responsibility for Switzerland by developing a strategy for national renewal in which everyone can see her or his part. That will mean becoming clear about what changes are needed in education, law, civic institutions, the media, and so on.
I don’t have time to spell out such a plan for national renewal even if I could, but I would just like to remind you that God gave Moses a blueprint (a strategy, a plan) which created out of a scattering of slaves the world’s first nation based on the rule of law as distinct from the rule of kings or queens. As a result of the Protestant Reformation, it was on that Biblical basis that Switzerland was enabled to arise, in spite of having very few resources even as late as the nineteenth century, into one of the richest countries in the world (though we must acknowledge that crooks played a part in distorting that moral and ethical basis – which should not surprise us because, roughly from the 1880s, some European elites began to reject the Bible and reject Jesus the Lord because those challenged their self-indulgent lifestyles and personal arrogance.
Meanwhile, Switzerland has moved from being a primarily agricultural country to becoming an industrial nation, to becoming a financial economy, and now even of a global economy which can be thought of as casino economy and, in some respects, even as a robber economy. So a Sunday school level understanding of the Bible and of Jesus the Lord is not going to help us now, nor is it going to help Switzerland. We all need to dig into the Word of God and to allow the Spirit of God to dig into us, so that we are able to analyse once again, as Luther and Calvin and the Anabaptists and the Huguenots and the Mennonites and Amish and Quakers did, the forces creating the cultural and institutional oppression of the time - and contrast that with what the Bible teaches about individuals and families, about politics and economics and society. This is NOT and I repeat NOT to go down the horrible path of mixing up religion and politics as many Roman Catholics and Muslims still do, and many Evangelicals in the US want to do. No, on the basis of freedom of thought and separation of religion and state, we need to understand and communicate the ANSWERS that the Bible provides for building the right kind of globalization, for building the right kind of Switzerland, and the right kind of Europe, for economic and political freedom, for social justice and for environmental care. As we start these few hours together, I commend to you, as the single most important task before us, gathering the determination and the mechanisms for developing a plan for the renewal of Switzerland as a nation. The monasteries in medieval Europe preserved learning and technology, and were hope-bearing communities - which we also need to be! But the monasteries were not enough to free Europe from all that was wrong in medieval times. So we need to do more than merely be hope-bearing communities. We need at least a plan for articulating Biblical values in such a way that Swiss politics, economics, technology and society can be transformed into what they need to be in this time of globalisation. That involves primarily answering four questions.
A. What beliefs and forces have moved, and are moving Switzerland, away from Biblical values and therefore from human flourishing?
B. What answers does the Bible offer to the deepest cultural, social, technological, economic and political questions facing Switzerland as a nation, and facing our communities and families, and even ourselves as persons?
C. What steps need to be taken to work with non-Christians, such as myself, who share a commitment to Biblical and human values that bring hope and life to the world?
D. What steps need to be taken to communicate all this to the whole of Switzerland – and indeed to the world? Because, today, we cannot separate Switzerland from the rest of the world.
Allow me to sum up my message: The world is changing fast. So it is not enough to be implicitly or unconsciously Christian as your forefathers may have been. If God has our hearts, let us also consciously Review and Refresh frequently the question of whether our individual and family practices, our institutions, our political and national practices, our economic, business and monetary arrangements are aligned with Biblical values of environmental and human flourishing and sustainability. Finally, we need to articulate a national plan for the renewal of Switzerland, so that the country can play its part in creating the right kind of globalization, just as William Wilberforce in the 19th century took what was then one of the most corrupt countries in the world, England, and in his lifetime was able by God’s grace, to transform it into a moral lighthouse and practical blessing for the world. That included not merely individual repentance and relationships with God but also education, women’s rights, care for animals, creating more moral companies, and attempting to reform the currency system. The incredible thing is that there were never more than 15 people at the heart of Wilberforce’s movement for national and indeed global reform. And we have more than 30 times that number here, in a country that is ten times smaller, so we have here in this room 300 times the power. And we have incalculably more in terms of networks and resources, ideas, projects, organisations, associations. So let us be encouraged. Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, Jesus said, they are white already to harvest. I pray that Jesus the Lord will lead each of us, and all of us together, as we consider these matters.
Thank you.
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