by Rushworth M. Kidder

Over breakfast last week with several senior Washington-based analysts, we got talking about America’s moral character. One of them, after sketching out the greed and corruption underlying the current recession, concluded with a personal assertion.

“I don’t think anybody is honest anymore,” he said flatly.

It was said less in anger than in sadness, reflecting the disappointment of a lover of humanity more than the triumphalism of a cynic. He wasn’t arguing, as cynics would, that the very idea of goodness is an illusion. He just felt that, at every turn, people seemed ready to ignore or abuse goodness for their own selfish ends.

There’s nothing new about this argument. It surfaces among the ancient Greeks. It finds expression in Thomas Hobbes’s view that men in a state of nature, unmediated by government, are condemned to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” How to address it remains a key task of the world’s major religions. And how deeply it’s believed will determine how the citizens of any nation view one another along a scale stretching from suspicion to trust.

So I won’t try to refute it in a brief column. Instead, let me offer three recent global news items I wish I’d thought of that morning, all touching on the goodness of young people:

• In graduate business programs at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, and a host of other schools, student activism is centered increasingly on ethics. Example: More than half of the 900 MBA students in this year’s class at Harvard have signed the “MBA Oath,” pledging to “serve the greater good,” act with “utmost integrity,” pursue their work “in an ethical manner,” and guard against “decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies” served by their employers.
• Across Indonesia, “honesty cafes” are springing up in local schools — places where students take drinks and snacks from the shelves and, in the absence of a cashier, pay by making their own change and leaving money in an untended box. Part of the government’s new campaign against corruption, these cafes — already numbering more than 7,000 — are largely successful. The move is part of a bid by a country long known for endemic corruption to breed habits of honesty in the young, who appear to be responding with enthusiasm.
• As the government in Tehran began expelling foreign journalists last week, Iranians took to the streets with video cameras and cell phones to record huge public protests against the apparently dishonest vote count in the June 12 election. In a country where 60 percent of the population is under 30, these videos appear to be coming largely from tech-savvy youths, who at one point last week were sending the BBC about five videos a minute.

You can of course quibble about these issues. At Harvard, are students signing up because, as the Economist notes, many graduates “see non-profit and government jobs as their best bet” in a drooping corporate economy and think that “embracing the ‘values agenda’ could prove useful”? In Indonesia, where’s the evidence that youthful peer pressure, making it cool to be honorable in the cafes, will translate into an adult willingness to resist bribes worth thousands of times more than a bag of chips? In Tehran, is this just the hacker mentality at work among students who salivate at the chance to prove they can outwit their enforcers?

These are valid reservations, no doubt holding true for some young people. But I sense the makings of a larger trend toward honesty. Perhaps it has to do with the widely documented ethical lapses that led us into the current global recession. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the excesses of me-first materialism, coupled with a dimming of the life of the mind, that characterized recent decades. Perhaps it’s a sense of communal guilt at what we’ve done to ourselves — “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” as Shakespeare called it. Or perhaps it’s simply that, as survey data shows, the coming generation expects to have a lower living standard but a higher moral standard than its elders.

Whatever the reason, I’d be hard pressed to make the case that honesty has rotted out. Yes, there’s a bumper crop of moral outrage. But if the choice is between that and moral apathy, I’ll take the former any day. A citizenry that has lost its capacity for outrage has lost its moral compass. And yes, it’s easy to lose heart under the journalistic jackhammer of bad-ethics headlines. But look what happens when we dig a little deeper. When the next generation of leaders is signing on to ethics oaths, paying for snacks on the honor system, and demanding electoral honesty, I’m a long way from being dispirited. Which, of course, is what I should have said over breakfast.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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