Globe and Mail Winnipeg Free Press "...intriguing" Maclean's Chris DeVito, CD Syndicated (radio stations: CJSF, CiTR, CO-OP, CJAM) National Post Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress Vancouver Sun Kirkus Reviews The New York Times Montreal Gazette The Globe and Mail Publishers Weekly David Pitt, Bookloons "Galileo's Mistake has the lazy ease of a multi-course Italian dinner, at once relaxing and enriching". Robert Wiersema, Quill & Quire B. J. Hodgson, PhD, Trent University Faculty of Philosophy of Wade Rowland Purchase Greed, Inc. online at: Indigo.ca or Amazon.ca |
Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and How We Let It Happenby Wade Rowland
The following review appeared in the National Post - FP Weekend
on May 28, 2005
Crucifixion in the marketplace might have been exacted of author Wade Rowland in an earlier age for his latest assault on contemporary moral, intellectual and behavioural standards, Greed, Inc. (Thomas Allen, 232 pp., $36.95), a critique of capitalism as co-opted by corporations. However Mr. Rowland has, so far, escaped impalement on a plinth at the intersection of Bay and King Streets - although he expected to be 'eviscerated by the business press' for what might be seen as a reactionary attack on the corporate pillars of our economy. Too early as it is to know whether criticism of the book - the fourth in a series in which he discusses moral values - will be quite that gut-ripping, it's already clear that Rowland's message is being misunderstood by some who should, but evidently don't, know better. One academic commentator, for instance, has damned the author with exceedingly faint praise for making 'decent headway' in outlining 'the moral failings of the modern business corporation'. But that, for this reviewer, is to miss or misunderstand Mr. Rowland's main point. A leading literary journalist and former network television executive who now lectures on the social history of communications technology at Trent University, Rowland here combines broad research, impressive intellectuality and what must be to his academic critic enviable clarity. And he uses that array of capabilities, presented with the freshness of quality journalism and the confidence of careful reflection, to make and then buttress his essential point - that the modern mega-corporation can fail only in terms of its efficiency and profitability. "We should not expect moral behaviour from such corporations," he said, in an interview, "because they are not moral entities. They don't know right from wrong and they have no free will. They can only act within the constraints imposed on them by their machine design." Rowland clearly believes this, passionately and compassionately, but his book is no shallow and self-indulgent diatribe against modernity, any more than it's a self-righteous rant against capitalism by one of its beneficiaries able to afford a bountiful bucolic retirement. He is concerned about his society - genuinely, not self-admiringly, like so many caricatures of the charitable who describe themselves as 'caring' - and he is at pains to diagnose and then to treat what he sees as a moral leprosy, a slow deadening, attacking its limbs and vitals. "The question," says Rowland, "is why corporations behave like sociopaths." The answer, he posits, is to be found in "everyday ethical wisdom" and in considering whether human beings are innately self-interested or instinctively inclined toward benevolence and altruism. This is, as he says, of enormous significance, "because if we believe that we are selfish by nature, we must also believe that what we call moral behaviour - behaviour directed to the welfare of others - is something that arises out of social structures. "Where else could it possibly come from? But if we believe, instead, that moral behaviour is the expression of an inborn ethical instinct or sensibility, we are likely to conclude that social structures are made possible by that moral impulse." What, you might ask, has this to do with modern business corporations and their depredations.
Just this, answers Rowland: "Selfishness and greed were confidently asserted by the newly minted social sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be defining, universal and irrepressible characteristics of human beings.... "Just as the most elegant of bridges will collapse if the engineers get their physics wrong, social constructs like the market and the corporation will fail, often in dramatic and surprising ways, if they are built upon mistaken assumptions about human relations. "This is what has happened with the corporation: it is an engineering project gone amok." If this proposition is accepted - and Rowland does an effective and absorbing job in substantiating it - it leads inevitably to the dilemma faced by modern man, by all of us, in confronting and controlling this powerful threat to an already embattled liberal democracy. But he doesn't leave the reader hanging there, scratching his head while he contemplates the rampaging of mercantile machines with all the sensitivity and responsiveness of juggernauts. He offers, modestly and persuasively, some outlines of what he believes needs to be done. Greed, Inc. is no Clancyesque thriller (Rowland, after all, knows how to construct a cogent English sentence), but it would be unfair - and no legitimate concern of this review - to detail here how he proposes we drag these corporate predators back under human control. Still, one can reveal that Rowland goes back as far as classical Greece to this most perilous of problems in perspective. We should, he urges, among other things, "revisit the Greek idea of ostracism," the exiling of a too-powerful few, for the good of the many. No mobs in the streets, no rampant flags, no gulags, this. Just a sane, compassionate, persuasive survey of our history and our misconceptions that have led, without the histrionics and horror of others' adjustments of capitalism, to our present amoral mindlessness. Ron Kirbyson is a Winnipeg teacher and writer. Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and How We Let It Happenby Wade Rowland
Title: Greed Inc.
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