So I’m at a dinner party chatting with the guy sitting next to me who I’ve never met before. He asks me what I do for a living and I tell him, and he’s very interested in that, and we talk for a little while about what it’s like to be a minister. And then I ask him what he does for a living.
“I’m an expediter,” he says.
I say, “An expediter. I’ve always been curious about this: What exactly is an expediter?”
“I help companies do their business. I mostly handle violations.”
“What do you mean violations?”
“Well,” he explains, “I hate waiting in line. So I usually don’t get permits for stuff. My client just does their thing and if they get a violation for it I’ll try to buy them more time or get it waived or whatever they need.”
“So,” I say, “it’s easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission?”
“It’s best to not get caught,” he says.
“Do you enjoy your work?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” he says. “I get to do all kinds of violations – environmental, health, a broken elevator. What have you.”
“Huh.”
I was appalled! I had always assumed that expediters actually make things more efficient and solve problems, not enable companies to avoid fixing broken elevators. I wanted to say to him, “So in other words, you help broken things stay broken for a living.” But I said nothing. I was not “brave,” in the words of the song. I did not “say want I want to say.” I did not “let the words fall out.”
I think I was stunned into silence because he was so matter of fact, so unashamed about the whole thing. It was just what he did for a living. No different, in principle, from what I do for a living. Value neutral. This is business in our world. It’s just playing the game. You hire this guy to grease the wheels and unsnag you from any snags your business encounters. Whatever they may be. Doesn’t matter. No matter that the polar icecaps are melting as we speak or that people are getting sick and dying because of all the carcinogens in our environment. If regulations are getting in your way, this guy can help get around them. And he’ll do it cheerfully. And he will not apologize for it. Keep the flow of goods and services moving expeditiously no matter what.
I feel like there’s a shift in the public discourse recently, or maybe I’m just noticing it more, where not only do people feel free to act solely in their own material self-interest but they don’t even feel the need to pretend that they’re doing otherwise! They don’t try to hide it; they don’t try to justify it by appealing to any larger values. It seems like it’s become socially acceptable to be completely indifferent to the social and environmental implications of your work.
Obviously this is not always true. Companies are trying to “greenwash” their image and some even actually care and try to make better choices. But it’s shocking to me how often public figures still feel no need to advance any kind of ethical or spiritual justification for their actions.
It would have been funny, for example, if it weren’t so sad, how things played out back a few months ago when a couple conservative organizations in Arizona tried to pass a so-called “religious freedom” bill. It would have explicitly allowed businesses to discriminate against customers on the basis of some undefined “sincerely held religious belief.” This came directly out of a court case between a gay couple and a wedding services company that wanted to deny them service. So it’s pretty clear which customers and which “sincerely held religious beliefs” we’re talking about. Enough state senators came on board with this bill, supposedly on the grounds of religious freedom, that it passed the state senate. It was then up to the governor to sign it into law or veto it.
But then something went wrong. The business community flew into a panic. It turns out that – who knew? – gay people have money and buy stuff. This bill was going to be bad for business. Suddenly the concern about “religious freedom” evaporated and everyone was back peddling, including some of the original proponents of the bill, and begging the governor to veto it, which she did.
No one even pretended that the change of heart was about anything other than money. John McCain explained, “It’s not an accident that our Arizona Chamber of Commerce and our business leaders came out with a very strong message yesterday that they don’t want the governor to sign this. This is going to hurt the state of Arizona’s economy and, frankly, our image.”
Next year’s Super Bowl is scheduled for Arizona and the NFL opposed the bill. The Super Bowl Host Committee came out with a statement that it strives to promote “economic vitality” and “adoption of this legislation would not only run contrary to that goal but deal a significant blow to the state’s economic growth potential. We do not support this legislation.”
Now, granted, John McCain and the NFL are not generally known as paragons of progressive values, but seriously? That’s the reason not to support the legislation? Because it’s bad for business? Not because it’s discriminatory and unethical?
And on the other side, where did all the “religious freedom” people go? Where were all the diehards saying, “No, we have to stick to our guns (so to speak) and protect our freedom to discriminate even if it costs us money?” Where were all those people? Nobody in power on either side was ultimately arguing this on the basis of the principles of anything. The issue was decided on the basis of financial expediency and everyone could agree on that.
There are countless examples these days of this kind of shameless, amoral advancement of self-interest. Take the Koch brothers pushing for a tax on renewable energy so that it will be more expensive and less competitive with oil and gas. They don’t pretend that this is altruism. They don’t have to. Take Republican efforts to restrict voting rights across the country, knowing the impact that will have on poor and non-white voters. They do sometimes make a half-hearted effort to say that it’s to prevent voter fraud, but it’s such a thin argument, they usually don’t even bother. They don’t have to.
The religious right has one thing right: there is a breakdown of morality in our culture. Our society is oriented around the financial bottom line often at the expense of moral values. It was good luck that in the case of the Arizona bill, the financial bottom line and the just outcome were one and the same. But that is so often not the case. Especially in the case of environmental stewardship and a whole host of issues from gun rights to health care. There are often hard choices to be made. And that needs to be publicly acknowledged. If companies and politicians continue to do the right thing for the wrong reason, as they did in Arizona, the kind of sweeping systemic change we need will never really happen.
We need an entire shift of consciousness. The world desperately needs the voices of people like us to speak out for justice in the language of spirituality and morality on the grounds of spirituality and morality. Voices that say that expediency is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is a healthy planet earth and peace and justice for everyone. This will not always be in the immediate best interest of business. It will not always be in the best interest of Americans. It’s not politically expedient; it’s not financially expedient. It involves protecting people who have no political influence. It involves protecting our environment, even though businesses will lose money in the short run. It involves love as the foundational principle in our society.
The world desperately needs the voice of something like our Unitarian faith in the oneness of all. A teaching that when one is harmed we are all harmed and so you would never intentionally enable a broken elevator to stay broken because your brothers and sisters ride that elevator. The world needs the voice of something like our Universalist faith in the radically inclusive universe. A teaching that there in fact are no “sincerely held religious beliefs” that would condone discrimination. Religions worthy of the term teach compassion and acceptance.
There are plenty of people in this room who personally manifest these values. Some sacrifice their own pay in order to work as teachers, social workers, or for non-profits. Some in the corporate world do extraordinary pro bono work and campaign for a social conscience in their corporations.
But we are all, myself included, complicit in creating a culture in which someone like the Expediter can exist. He can work with impunity and confess it shamelessly (to a minister!). We tacitly give his career and his worldview legitimacy through our silence. Interpersonal silence, like mine at that dinner party, consumer silence when we continue to buy products from companies with destructive practices, political silence when we continue to support lawmakers who answer to the financial bottom line rather than to the health of our world. We don’t want to be impolite, we don’t want to be disliked, we don’t want to be too inconvenienced, we don’t want to seem like freaks. There is tremendous social pressure to conform to a mainstream, secular understanding of what’s reasonable.
But this is precisely the problem. We feel negative social pressure if we speak out in favor of justice but the Expediter feels no negative social pressure for his shady career. It’s precisely at these places of discomfort, because they are places of discomfort, that we need to speak up. We need to keep holding up our spiritual and moral vision so that we can eventually turn the tide on the discourse of expediency. The world needs our voices.
Just as John McCain said that it’s “no accident” that business leaders opposed the Arizona bill, so we need to say that it’s no accident that Unitarian Universalists opposed it, but for entirely different reasons. The reasons matter, the speaking up matters.
My sense is that if I had cross-examined the Expediter at dinner that night, he would have said that it doesn’t matter. It’s no big deal. The regulations he’s trying to get around are stupid and unnecessary. Or, more cynically, he might have said, “Look, it’s dog-eat-dog out there. If you let yourself get sentimental about people’s feelings or the fuzzy polar bears or anything else, you’ll just get trampled. You’ve got to look out for #1.”
Our faith teaches a different perspective: that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Those who prevail in the end will not be those who look out for #1, but those who look out for all the creatures of the earth, large and small. In the words of the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the merciful. They will find mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be ranked as children of God.” This is the great hope of liberal religion – that in the long run, goodness will prevail right here on earth. If we are right, and the Expediter is wrong, someday it will happen. And it is our work as humans to expedite that day.