The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

  Let me add to the honor roll people who put themselves in harm’s way for the good of all—first responders, volunteers in natural disasters, firefighters, police officers, members of the armed forces. We should also honor others who do just about the most difficult jobs of all, often in harrowing circumstances—teachers in poor communities, social workers, nurses, elder-care and hospice workers. They are the true heroes of America. They keep the nation going. But they’re often overlooked, sometimes even insulted. Most earn very little. Isn’t it time we honored them?

  We can honor them with our respect and appreciation. We can honor them by making sure they earn enough money to live on. We can also honor them by raising public awareness of the importance of the work they do. We have Academy Awards for actors, directors, and screenwriters; Nobel Prizes in math and science; culinary awards for chefs; Olympic awards for athletes; Kennedy Center honors for the performing arts. Why not awards for upholding and strengthening the common good? A Common Good Award for an outstanding whistle-blower. A Common Good Award for an exemplary civil servant. A Common Good Award for the teacher or social worker whose quiet and modest work over the course of her career has dramatically improved other people’s lives. A Common Good Award for the nonprofit leader who has taken a courageous stand speaking truth to power.

  Why shouldn’t universities confer honorary degrees on these unsung American heroes? Why doesn’t the United States, as does Britain, issue honors to a thousand citizens each year who have made significant contributions to the common good? Their purpose would be to continually remind us of what it means to work for the common good, to offer examples of civic behavior we want to encourage, and to raise public consciousness of what we owe each other as members of the same society. Such public honoring could be a corrective to what we now do—blindly and automatically bestow honors on rich philanthropists because they’re rich, and celebrities because they’re celebrated.

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  Wielded appropriately, shame can also be a powerful motivator for the common good. It can illuminate the gap between the ideals we profess and the reality we tolerate, mobilizing us into action. Martin Luther King, Jr., shamed the nation by making it impossible for white Americans outside the South to condemn segregation there while at the same time tolerating discrimination all around them. As King told a crowd of 25,000 in Detroit in June 1963, two months before his historic speech in Washington,

  We’ve got to come to see that the problem of racial injustice is a national problem. No community in this country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. Now in the North it’s different in that it doesn’t have the legal sanction that it has in the South. But it has its subtle and hidden forms and it exists in three areas: in the area of employment discrimination, in the area of housing discrimination and de facto segregation in the public schools. And we must come to see that de facto segregation in the North is just as injurious as the actual segregation in the South. And so if you want to help us in Alabama and Mississippi and all over the South, do all that you can to get rid of the problem here.

  By extending the shame of Southern segregation to the nation as a whole, King raised the bar: We were all implicated in racial discrimination. Racial segregation was the North’s shame as well as the South’s. It continues to be.

  Another version of this sort of shaming occurred in 1954 when Joseph Welch, then chief council for the U.S. Army, stood up to Senator Joseph McCarthy before a nationwide television audience. During a hearing in which McCarthy accused the army of harboring communists, McCarthy attacked one of Welch’s young assistants, Fred Fisher, for having once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, which McCarthy considered a communist front. Welch responded: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” As McCarthy renewed his attack on Fisher, Welch interrupted him. “Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild….Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy tried to make another point about Fisher, but Welch stopped him again. “I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat within six feet of me and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have seen fit to bring it out. And if there is a God in Heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further….You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness.”

  At this point the audience inside the hearing room broke into applause, and millions of Americans watching the proceedings from their living rooms saw McCarthy as the dangerous bully he was. By shaming McCarthy, Welch shamed America for having tolerated McCarthy and the communist witch hunt he was leading. That was the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s reign of terror, and of America’s paranoia about communist enemies within.

  A more recent example occurred in August 2017 after Donald Trump equated the neo-Nazis who marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, with counter-demonstrators there. In response to Trump’s equivocation, Kenneth Frazier, the head of Merck pharmaceuticals, resigned from Trump’s business advisory council, the first CEO to do so. Frazier said that “America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry, and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal. As CEO of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism.” Frazier’s words and action fortified other CEOs to follow him in resigning from Trump’s advisory boards. Although Trump himself has shown no capacity for shame, their action had large symbolic importance. It signified that the corporate leaders of America were not going to abide white supremacists. They were going to take a stand for the ideal of racial equality.

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  Shame may be in our genes, helping us survive. Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, noted that humans around the world express shame in similar ways—blushing, becoming hot, casting their eyes downward, and lowering their heads. Shame may have evolved as a way to maintain social trust necessary for the survival of a group and, therefore, of its members. In a 2012 paper, psychologists Matthew Feinberg and Dacher Keltner and sociologist Robb Willer found evidence that embarrassment—which often accompanies shame—functions socially as a kind of “nonverbal apology” for having done something that violates group norms. A display of embarrassment shows others that the embarrassed person is still aware of the group’s expectations and is still committed to the group’s well-being.

  But in modern America we often shame the wrong people. Instead of deterring behavior that undermines the common good, shame is too often deployed against people who don’t fit in—to ostracize them even further. That has happened on social media through “cyberbullying.”

  Even when it comes to truly shameful acts, the ability of anyone to use social media to accuse anyone else of committing them can have unfair and destructive consequences. After white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, onlookers shared hundreds of photos of them online. This form of shaming may have deterred some white supremacists from participating in future marches. But in this case, some people who hadn’t been involved in the march were accused of marching because of their likeness to someone who had been. An assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Engineering who resembled a white supremacist at the rally was misidentified as a participant, and received a torrent of threatening messages. If the common good is to be revived, shame must be used carefully and accurately.

  Even when the right people are shamed, there must be appropriate consequences. Members of Congress often make demonstrations of shaming CEOs who have harmed the common good, but they’re typically no more than shaming rituals for the cameras. Hearings have been staged to berate CEOs of tobacco companies, oil compan
ies, auto companies, Big Pharma, and Wall Street—even Martin Shkreli and Wells Fargo’s John Stumpf—but the scolding merely creates an illusion of accountability. After Shkreli’s appearance, Congress didn’t take action to prevent drug-price gouging. After Stumpf appeared, Congress didn’t pass legislation making it harder for banks to defraud their customers, and Stumpf was never prosecuted.

  When the carelessness of oil company BP on the North Slope led to the temporary shutdown of the nation’s largest oilfield, in August 2006, Congress demanded BP executives appear in person to answer for it. Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican and vice chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, excoriated them: “If one of the world’s most successful oil companies can’t do simple basic maintenance needed to keep the Prudhoe Bay field operating safely without interruption, maybe it shouldn’t operate the pipeline,” he fumed. “I am even more concerned about BP’s corporate culture of seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues. And this comes from a company that prides itself in their ads on protecting the environment. Shame, shame, shame.” Committee members grilled BP executives about why the company had failed to do adequate inspection and maintenance, and the BP executives solemnly promised to be more careful in the future. But no legislation was passed to force them to be. Four years later, BP spilled 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the worst oil spill in history.

  If we’re serious about restoring the common good, congressional shaming must be followed by legislation and criminal prosecutions that confirm the standard of behavior we expect. Such criminal investigations must be directed against individual wrongdoers rather than at companies as a whole. Corporations cannot feel shame; only individuals can. There is not much shame being associated with a large corporation that gets slapped with a fine. There can be a great deal of shame in personally going to jail. Yet these days few executives of major corporations and Wall Street banks are ever held personally accountable for illegal acts. As I’ve noted, no executive of any major bank was prosecuted for causing the 2008 financial crisis. This was not for lack of evidence. Goldman Sachs clearly misled its clients by betting against the same financial products it was peddling to them, to take but one example. Obama’s Justice Department stopped bringing cases against corporate executives because, as ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger found, winning cases against individual executives has become too difficult and expensive for government prosecutors.

  Corporations have become adept at giving their top guns plausible deniability of knowledge in any nefarious scheme (Goldman executives used the abbreviation LDL—“let’s discuss live”—to hide their traces), and prosecutors are routinely outgunned and outmaneuvered by platoons of high-priced corporate attorneys. Young government prosecutors who want lucrative partnerships in prestigious law firms when they leave government often don’t want to jeopardize their career prospects, so they go easy on individual executives. They view the executives as “good people who have done one bad thing,” as one SEC lawyer who was reluctant to bring charges against individual executives explained to Eisinger. It is often more convenient for prosecutors to give government a PR victory by slapping corporations with a fine (ultimately paid for by shareholders) and making them promise to behave better in the future. But individuals, not corporations, must be held accountable for undermining the common good. That is where the shame is. And shame is what is in short supply.

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  In recent years America has become confused about the difference between private morality and public morality. Private morality concerns what people do in private, often involving sex—sex between unmarried people or gay people, adultery, contraception, abortion, gay marriage, even which bathroom a transgendered person must use. Public morality involves what people do when they hold positions of power and public trust.

  Some Americans object to women deciding to have an abortion, to gay people marrying, or to transgender people choosing a bathroom different from the gender on their birth certificate. I happen to believe intimate decisions like these should be left to these people rather than decided by government. But however you come out on private moral choices, there is little doubt that the nation is experiencing a significant crisis in public morality. When executives of pharmaceutical companies gouge consumers by jacking up the prices of drugs as high as possible; bank executives defraud their depositors by opening up sham accounts; and presidents denigrate the press, seem to endorse white supremacists, and disregard conflicts of financial interest, they are all engaging in acts of public immorality. They are rejecting the common good in favor of their own selfish needs for more wealth or power. This is shameful.

  Some years ago William Bennett, scourge of personal immorality when and after he was secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, railed at Americans for being “less willing than we once were to sacrifice or to keep commitments.” He said average people place a higher value than ever before on “personal growth, self-expression, and self-discovery.” He accused the nation of adopting a “deeply ingrained philosophy that glorifies…freedom from constraints.” Bennett’s target was sexual license, but I think his words are more relevant to the whatever-it-takes creed that has overtaken American leadership. “Part of what it means to be a morally responsible human is to act in ways that are, sometimes, contrary to our ‘natural’ instincts,” Bennett wrote. We struggle “against our biological impulses, against our emotional longings. We do not abjure the struggle because it is difficult or because we seem to be battling against something deep within us…even if it seems fundamental to who we are.”

  In other words, using Bennett’s logic but applying it to public rather than private morality, unconstrained desire for wealth and power is not to be excused just because it’s part of human nature. All people—especially those who occupy positions of leadership and are entrusted with the well-being of many other people—should be held to a higher standard.

  Respecting private morality does not, however, mean licensing sexual harassment and predation by the rich and powerful. That, too, is shameful. Yet society all too often ends up honoring such people while overlooking their abuses of power. In 2017 the Los Angeles Press Club honored movie mogul Harvey Weinstein by bestowing on him its Truthteller Award for Contributions to the Public Discourse and Cultural Enlightenment of Our Society. The organization called him an example of “integrity and social responsibility.” While Weinstein distributed some laudable films, he also had a long history of harassing and abusing women in five-star hotel rooms. Apparently, this was an open secret in Hollywood. (Personal disclosure: Weinstein once distributed a film I co-created, but I did not know about his history of harassment until it was widely reported in October 2017.)

  Why did Hollywood honor Weinstein despite this open secret? In part because Weinstein raised money for many activities Hollywood approved of, including the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. He also had the power to make and break careers, not just of starlets but also of an ecosystem of writers, journalists, and public relations specialists who directly or indirectly depended on him. As Rebecca Traister wrote in New York magazine’s The Cut, “There were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine,” that they shielded him from exposure and dared not sound the alarm. Shame on him, and shame on them.

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  Ideally, notions of right and wrong are sufficiently embedded in people’s moral consciousness from an early age that they don’t need to be honored or shamed into good behavior. The erosion of the common good over the past decades, however, suggests that such moral consciousness has waned. Society must buttress it, and in so doing remind others of acceptable limits. “Maintaining limits is a way of asserting community,” sociologist James Q. Wilson has written. “If the limits are asserted weakly, uncertainly, or apologetically,
their effects must certainly be weaker than if they are asserted boldly, confidently, and persuasively.”

  Setting limits isn’t simply a matter of making and enforcing laws, because, as I have emphasized, clever lawyers can almost always find ways to skirt the letter of the law. When Donald Trump said he didn’t pay taxes because he was “smart,” he meant that his tax attorneys had found legal ways to circumvent the tax code. Setting the kind of limits society depends on requires public moral judgment. Just as we shouldn’t be reluctant to celebrate behavior that exemplifies public morality, we shouldn’t be reticent in condemning behavior that undermines it.

  Faith-based leaders have a unique responsibility and opportunity here. Quite apart from whatever religious tenets they might hold or preach about private morality, they can help society distinguish private from public morality. They can also call for a public morality that rejects whatever-it-takes strategies for amassing personal wealth or power in favor of one that stresses our duties to one another. Moral guidance about what is right or decent can be found both in religious teachings and in our contemporary understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. As I have suggested, they overlap. A public morality that protects our democratic institutions, cherishes the truth, accepts our differences, ensures equal rights and equal opportunity, and invites passionate engagement in our civic life gives our own lives deeper meaning. It enlarges our capacities for attachment and love. It informs our sense of honor and shame. It equips us to be virtuous citizens.