by Mark Tully
What is the aim of all this competition? The business community says it is to cut costs so that products and services become cheaper. Price is one of the biggest selling points, with businesses competing with each other to convince customers that their product is cheapest. In England one retail chain advertises that it is never knowingly undersold. In India, where the mobile phone market has become extremely competitive, you would need a double doctorate in maths and law to deconstruct the rival offers and work out which deal really is the cheapest.
So surely no one can object to the benefits of competition? Who wants to pay more money to fill their supermarket trolley or phone their family if competition can help to keep the prices down? But the price tag on a product does not represent its real cost. There are social, environmental, health and other costs involved in its production, distribution and marketing that are not accounted for. Because marketing has made us so obsessed with the price of everything, Barbara Panvel, the coordinator of the Centre for Holistic Studies, a network I belong to, agreed to launch a project to calculate in financial terms the real price of what we buy. She warned me that in some instances prices couldn’t be compared directly because business calculations left out many costs that it would be difficult to put a financial value on.
The project is called ‘Counting the Costs’. Molly Scott Cato, an economist who lectures at the Business School of the University of Wales in Cardiff, wrote the first paper for it. At the top of her paper Molly quotes the poet William Wordsworth’s words ‘high Heaven rejects the lore of nicely-calculated less or more’ in relation to business lore. She goes on to say, ‘The purpose of this project [Counting the Costs] is to confront global capitalism on its own terms, to challenge it to explain why, if it is so efficient, it has failed to notice that so much of the energy expended is dedicated to repairing damage it is creating.’ When I first read that, my mind went back to the words of the Irish economist who told me that clearing up oil slicks was good for GNP. Molly suggests, ‘It is one of the direst indictments of developed economies that people are so dissatisfied that they need to find a multitude of means of escape.’ She then goes on to look at the evidence for this dissatisfaction and to assess the cost of the various escape routes Britons take, after rightly warning about the dangers and limitations of doing this.
Molly’s evidence for the dissatisfaction in Western society includes a survey by a reputable organisation which found that one in three Britons is actively considering a move abroad. The ways people try to escape from life if they stay in Britain include gambling, smoking, drugs and alcohol abuse. Molly quotes a Cabinet Office estimate that alcohol abuse alone costs 20 billion pounds sterling per year in terms of health disorders, disease, crime (including domestic violence), anti-social behaviour and loss of productivity at work. Molly also discusses depression, because she sees it as ‘a response to an oppressive social and economic system’. She calculates that in 2002 the cost of prescribing the most common anti-depressant drugs was 7 billion pounds. At the end of her paper, Molly Scott Cato calculates that the overall cost of Britain’s dissatisfaction, within a society that calculates values in terms of price, profit and loss, is about fourteen per cent of the whole of government spending.
Back in the days of the Industrial Revolution, the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill warned against the evils of a society which, in terms of its values, resembles a modern business-culture dominated society. He wrote:
I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of industrial progress … the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
Britain is sufficiently wealthy today to ensure that no one need be poor, so there should be no need for a culture of thrusting and crushing – but this is exactly what modern management seems to be all about. Perhaps that’s not surprising, because the culture of modern management doesn’t share Mill’s concern for the lot of human beings. Its goals are far narrower than that.
But it was not always so. Puritan ethics inspired the management of the new industries and manufacturing processes that arose in the nineteenth-century United States in what has been described as the second industrial revolution. Puritans believed that the aim of creating wealth was to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, not merely to create shareholder value. Before the first Puritans set sail for America in the seventeenth century, John Winthrop, who was to become the founding governor of the new colony, told them New England was to be ‘as a City on a hill’. None of the Puritans listening to that sermon would have missed the reference to Jesus’ words to his disciples, ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.’
As time went by, the Puritan aim of creating wealth became the secular Great American Dream. No matter how much non-Americans, and I’m sure many Americans, may squirm when they hear presidents of the United States repeatedly referring to America’s greatness, no matter how strange people like me might find the fact that the Stars and Stripes flies over so many homes in the United States, these are signs that the Dream remains alive. But what has happened to the industry and commerce that was to make that Dream real? In their book, Kenneth and William Hopper maintain that American business has lost its way since the 1970s because its roots in Puritan culture have dried up. They believe that ‘if the whoring after false managerial gods is abandoned in favour of the pursuit of true ones the uneven distribution of wealth that occurred in the United States in recent decades can be halted and perhaps even reversed’. The false gods are ‘financial engineering’ and the main beneficiaries are ‘financial engineers’.
One of the other Puritan values the Hopper brothers describe in their book is the importance of collective action and cooperation in any activity. They quote John Winthorp telling the New Englanders, ‘We must knit together in this work as one man … we must make each other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together.’ That is the opposite of the rat race modern management culture believes in. The rat race reflects the individualism of modern times, which is not properly balanced by responsibilities to others.
It can certainly be argued that a fundamental weakness of modern management and modern market capitalism is their lack of moral purpose. Whatever can be said against socialism, no one can deny that it has a moral purpose – to remove poverty and to create an egalitarian society. Modern management culture encourages shareholders, directors, managers, and staff to believe that the purpose of economic activity is to make them wealthier.
However, the Bhagavad Gita warns that those who ‘take action with their eyes on the rewards for themselves will never enjoy serenity, fearlessness, peace, harmony, or the supreme happiness’. It’s not that the Gita recommends withdrawal from the world or renunciation, as some have suggested; rather, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan called it ‘a mandate for action’. It is the mandate the god Krishna gives to the warrior Arjuna when he begs to be allowed to renounce action and withdraw his army from the battlefield of Kurukshetra, where he has come to fight to regain his kingdom. ‘What use is it going to be getting back our kingdom?’ Arjuna laments. ‘I do not see any good in slaying my people in the fight.’ But Krishna insists that it is his duty to fight because the battle is between good and evil. He tells Arjuna, ‘To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction.’ In his commentary on the Gita, Radhakrishnan notes, ‘This famous verse contains the essential principle of disinterestedness. When we do our work, plough, or paint, sing or think, we will be deflected from
disinterestedness if we think of fame or income or any such extraneous consideration. Nothing matters except the good will, the willing fulfilment of the purpose of God.’
There is a well-known Christian prayer of St Ignatius that says much the same thing as Krishna tells Arjuna in the Gita. Ignatius prays to the Lord to teach him, ‘to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labour and not to ask for any reward save that of knowing that I do Thy will.’
While writing this book I have often wondered what my reward will be – not so much the financial reward as the comments I’ll receive. I’ve worried that they will be hostile, and I’ve worried, as I did before giving the lecture on the BBC, that no one will be interested in what I have to say. But then my mind goes back to someone to whom I was devoted when I was a teenager.
Philip Francis was the vicar of the small country parish in Cheshire where my siblings and I lived as children after returning from India. There are many historic parish churches in Cheshire, but All Saints Marthall was neither particularly old nor particularly beautiful. Nor could it have been called a prestigious post for a parish priest.
Philip, a small, rather insignificant figure with a wisp of hair standing up on his otherwise bald head, emerged from the vestry Sunday after Sunday to preach to the same handful of faithful church-goers. He was a humble man, and some of his parishioners seemed to think of him as Churchill did of Clement Atlee: ‘He has plenty to be humble about.’ Philip was unmarried, not because he was a celibate priest, but because he had never found anyone to marry. His career was going nowhere. He was never going to hold any higher office in the Church than that of parish priest, and only in small insignificant parishes. If success in his job was to be measured, as it often was in the Church, by ‘bums on seats’, the number of people attending Sunday Services meant that he was a failure. But to me he wasn’t a failure at all. He was an inspiring example of someone who laboured and yet who did not seek for any reward; someone who truly practised the Christian virtue of humility.
The memory of Philip Francis came back to me while I was writing this chapter because it is a critique of a competitive culture obsessed with rewards. Of course there has to be a balance. We can’t have a society without competition and rewards. We are never going to have a world of people like St Ignatius and Philip Francis. But that does not mean we should go to the other extreme and accept that rat-racing is the natural sport of human beings.
VARANASI: THE UNITY OF OPPOSITES
I STARTED THIS book in the temple town of Puri, remembering my childhood holidays there. I am ending it in the holy city of Varanasi on my seventy-first birthday, because this city symbolises for me all that the adult years I have lived in India have taught me. Varanasi is, for me, a city where communities remain different but live together, where there is not one but many different certainties.
For many Hindus, Varanasi is the archetypal sacred place, yet almost one-third of its population is Muslim. It is Shiva’s city, yet many gods are worshipped here and different religions practised. It is also the city where the Buddha said he would not concern himself with matters of ultimate reality, such as whether God exists or not.
Accommodating diversity is second nature to Varanasi, which is even known by more than one name. Internationally, its best-known name remains Banaras (Benares), a corruption of the much older name the Indian government has now restored: Varanasi. According to one popular tradition, the name is derived from the geography of the sacred city, most particularly the area between two small rivers that flow into the Ganga: the Varana in the north and the Asi in the south. But this being India, where tradition is respected, the most popular name of the city is still Kashi, the city of light – its oldest name.
For all its sanctity, Varanasi symbolises a balanced life in which worship, work and pleasure all play a role and earning money is an obligation but not an obsession. God and Mammon are both given their due, for as well as being a place of pilgrimage, Varanasi has a long history as a commercial centre. As the city of Shiva, it acknowledges the pleasures offered by Kama, the god of love, and also the danger of his arrows.
Varanasi has learnt to preserve tradition and accommodate change. It is one of the oldest living cities in the world – as old as Jerusalem, Athens or Beijing. But there is a difference between Varanasi and those ancient sites, which the American scholar Diana Eck, who has studied the city’s traditions, religion, and culture carefully, has observed. In her book, Banaras, City of Light, she says:
If we could imagine the silent Acropolis and the Agora of Athens still alive with the intellectual, cultural, and ritual traditions of classical Greece, we might glimpse the remarkable tenacity of the life of Kashi. Today Peking, Athens, and Jerusalem are moved by a very different ethos from that which moved them in ancient times, but Kashi is not.
Varanasi has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. Those who come here expecting to see its long history enshrined in ancient buildings will be disappointed. Varanasi as it stands today is only some 200 years old. Its ancient traditions have been challenged by centuries of Muslim rule and by the Christian missionaries of the British Raj, but they have survived. Varanasi is certainly not immune from one modern challenge, which is particularly threatening to a city with such an old Hindu tradition and such a large Muslim population: the explosive cocktail of religious fundamentalism and politics. The right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and associated organisations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council, have for years been trying to whip up Hindu fury by demanding that a mosque that stands right next to the most important of all Varanasi’s Hindu temples should be pulled down, saying that the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb pulled down an earlier temple to build the mosque on that site. There were serious Hindu–Muslim riots in Varanasi in 1991, and five months before I arrived back in the city in 2006 there was a threat that rioting would erupt again.
Shortly after six o’clock in the evening on Tuesday 7 March 2006, a bomb exploded in the courtyard of the temple dedicated to Hanuman as Sankat Mochan, or ‘Hanuman who averts dangers’. According to myth, the popular monkey god was the devoted follower of Rama and helped him to rescue his consort, Sita, who had been abducted by the demon Ravana, king of Lanka. That evening, there was a particularly large gathering in the temple because Tuesday is Hanuman’s day.
The temple explosion was followed by a bomb blast at Varanasi’s main railway station, just before the departure of the overnight express to Delhi. A rumour spread that a bomb had also exploded on the train itself, but that was found to be untrue. However, the police did find other bombs, which they were able to defuse. Three of these were also in the Hanuman temple complex; another was on the most popular ghat, a section of the banks of the Ganga, where the evening aarti, or worship, was due to begin; and yet another was in a restaurant frequented by foreign tourists. With politicians and the police already blaming Muslim organisations based in Pakistan for recent attacks elsewhere in India, and particularly given the timing and the targets of the attacks in Varanasi, it was inevitable that suspicion would fall on Muslim organisations here too. So there was a very real danger that Hindus would respond by attacking Muslims.
Indian television channels were unintentionally doing their bit to provoke rioting as well. As soon as they could get their outside broadcasting units to the sites of the blasts, they began showing continuous live coverage, consisting largely of clips of the bloodiest scenes they could film. These clips were repeated time and again, along with interviews with distressed relatives of the injured and the dead and with other angry citizens. Overwrought presenters bombarded hapless reporters on the scene with questions. On one channel a presenter, beside himself with excitement, jabbed feverishly at a map of Varanasi, gabbling in his excitement, ‘There was a bomb found here, a bomb found here, and a bomb found here!’ But all the viewers could see was his back, because he was standing right in front of the map. I remem
ber commenting that if anyone was going to turn this situation into a communal riot, it was going to be the television networks.
One person who did keep his head amidst the chaos was Veer Bhadra Mishra, the Mahant, or Head Priest, of the Sankat Mochan temple. He realised that it was absolutely crucial to get routine worship in the temple started again as soon as possible. This he achieved in a remarkably short time. He also issued a statement calling on people to be peaceful. His appeal was supported by the Muslim leader Mufti Abdul Batin Nomani. All the press agreed that it was the two religious leaders who ensured that Varanasi remained calm. In contrast, politicians of the BJP tried to disturb the peace by pestering the Mahant to allow protesters to hold a dharna, or sit-in, within the temple premises. The Mahant, however, insisted that the temple should not be used for any purpose that was not strictly religious. So it was the religious leaders who frustrated the bombers, while some politicians tried to do the terrorists’ work for them by inciting Hindus to violence.
I decided to ask both religious leaders whether they believed that Varanasi’s traditions had helped them to keep the peace. Abdul Batin Nomani is known as the Mufti of Varanasi. He has an office in a mosque deep inside a Muslim area of Varanasi. When I went to meet him, his brother led me through a maze of alleys, which were narrow even by Varanasi’s standards and in which I would certainly have got hopelessly lost on my own. The alleys widened to accommodate shops in which butchers stood hacking at great hunks of buffalo meat and doing good business because it was the eve of the festival of Eid, the end of the month-long fast of Ramazan. The alleys narrowed again, and eventually we came to a building that I didn’t immediately recognise as a mosque because other buildings pressed in on it so closely.
Once inside, I was taken down to a bare cellar, where I sat cross-legged on the white sheets that covered the concrete floor. Soon the Mufti came in and sat behind his small low desk, the only piece of furniture in the room. There wasn’t a white hair in his black beard, and his face seemed remarkably unlined for a cleric holding such a senior office. With his thick spectacles, he looked more like a scholarly student than one of the most important Muslim leaders in Varanasi. The Mufti explained that his office was traditionally held by a member of his family and he had inherited it when his cousin died.