by Rushworth M. Kidder

As a small boy, I grew up with a 1920s Louis Armstrong recording of W. C. Handy’s “Loveless Love.” In his trademark gravelly voice, the cornet player they called Satchmo delivered a pithy social commentary that has stuck with me through the years:

Love, oh love, oh loveless love,
Has set our heart on goalless goals:
From milkless milk and silkless silk,
We are growing used to soulless souls.

Such grafting times we never saw –
That’s why we have a pure food law.
In everything we find a flaw,
Even love, oh love, oh loveless love.

If Satchmo were around today, imagine how he could have improvised on that theme of “grafting times!” Here’s a snapshot from last week alone:

• Chipmaker Intel was fined $1.45 billion by the European Commission for antitrust violations. The EU’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, said that Intel “went to great lengths to cover up its anticompetitive actions” and “harmed millions of European consumers.”
• The trustee overseeing the Bernard Madoff bankruptcy filed $6.1 billion in lawsuits against investors whose profits (in one case reaching 950 percent in a single year) raised strong suspicions that they were party to, rather than victims of, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
• Laura Pendergest-Holt, the chief investment officer for Stanford Financial Group, was indicted on charges related to a suspected $8 billion fraud by Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford’s Houston-based company.
• German authorities announced they were investigating truck-maker MAN, one of the country’s largest industrial firms, on charges of paying bribes topping $1 million in Germany and possibly much more elsewhere.

And that’s just the big-dollar financial stuff. Also bubbling away:

• The New York Times is reporting that a former Army surgeon who published a favorable scientific study of a drug sold by Medtronic — for whom he was a paid consultant — fabricated data about soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, forged the signatures of his co-authors, and overstated the effectiveness of the drug.
• Investigators into the February 12 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 fingered pilot inattention as cause of the crash. The idle chatter that left them unprepared to respond to stall warnings was, according to the airline’s director of operations, Dean Bandavanis, a lack of “integrity,” which he defined as “doing the right thing when nobody’s watching.”
• A stinging report by the New York inspector general identified the state’s ethics commission as the source of leaks to former governor Eliot Spitzer during the commission’s 2007 investigation of his activities. Governor David Paterson has demanded the resignations of all 12 commission members.

What to do about it all? One approach, of course, is more rule-making. In a widely reported speech last week, U.S. assistant attorney general Christine Varney called for tough new antitrust regulations, effectively reversing the more laissez faire approach of the Bush administration. While noting that there is “no adequate substitute for a competitive market, particularly during times of economic distress,” she concluded that “passive monitoring of market participants is not an option” and identified antitrust regulation and enforcement as a “frontline issue” in the government’s response to the economic downturn.

Which takes us back to Satchmo. If he were updating Handy’s lyrics for 2009, he might have noted that investors buy trustless trusts, pilots take careless care, and citizens get ethics-less ethics commissions. But his riff goes deeper. When integrity ebbs, the response is inevitable: We get the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the upcoming flood of financial-industry regulations. In other words, we get more rules.

But Satchmo’s real chiller is his last line. Under the steady water-drip of corruption, we’re numbed into accepting “loveless love.” When ethics collapses, our deepest emotional and intuitional feelings are betrayed, squelched, and deadened by counterfeits that look like love but aren’t. We catch a glimpse of what it would be like to live in a moral void that can’t tell the real from the fake.

For that condition, law-making offers no real remedy. These days, the old saying that “You can’t legislate morality” is truer than ever. There’s no rule that can impose integrity on a populace that doesn’t care about it. Integrity grows up from within, among people who see that they can’t survive without it. Just as there’s no quick fix for loveless love, there’s no legislative pill for valueless values. Yes, we’re in for whole new round of “pure food law.” But unless today’s rule-makers also hammer home an expectation of integrity — calling strongly on individuals and organizations to do the right thing even though nobody’s looking — we’ll find ourselves still duped by counterfeits.

I suspect Satchmo knew all that. But he also sang with an optimistic twinkle in his eye. His music, rooted in the gospel singers’ against-all-odds faith, grew out of the tailgate Dixieland that celebrated funerals with buoyant hope. He knew his audience wouldn’t settle for milkless milk, silkless silk, or loveless love. So he warned them about flimflams, feints, and frauds. Sometimes that warning is all it takes to spark the vigilance that bites the coin, holds the twenty up to the light, casts aside the phony, and demands the sort of moral reform that goes deeper than any rule can reach.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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