The Morality Patch

I like the title of this blog. I wish I would have coined it entirely but I must admit that  I have fashioned it out from an article, "The Service Patch" by David Brooks an Open Editorial columnist of New York Times. It, so perfectly defines the new age morality. People have found a patch for morality, something which I have witnessed with silent pain and angst, as I approach my middle age.

When we started Social Entrepreneurship (we didn't use this term back then) we started it as a genuine response from the heart. At that time there were awards and recognitions for people doing good work in this field but there were no competitions, the "big boys" and "celeb whiz kids". The discourse was predominantly that of idealism, ecology and spirituality. Slowly, we saw the space being vandalized by the same dynamics we see in the corporate world. People with power and money muscled us out. Social enterprises started talking in terms of turnovers and scalable numbers rather than the language of the spirit and the heart. It was tough to see all this coming initially. But then, the outlines of this hostile takeover of a noble field became too stark for me to ignore. Subsequent years have seen me receding to a silent corner. I shy away from most events, seminars and competitions of Social Entrepreneurship because this whole field, as David Brooks points out, has become subsumed by a utilitarian vocabulary. We have lost the true vocabulary of what makes character.

Nonetheless, I have not ceased in my own endeavour and I am sure there are others like me who wage their life's struggles in the penumbra of  social recognition. I still feel, we have been extremely fortunate to receive the social recognition we achieved so far. I don't deny being torn apart between the need to make myself known in circles where it matters and the imperative to remain true to one's soul. Yet, so far, I have I have resisted the devil's temptation to take a short cut to "heroism" and make "morality patches". "We shall take the long walk", I keep telling this to myself.

Social Entrepreneurship, the way I see it is never about numbers. It is a far deeper and more profound vision of human kind. At present we are seeing it in a crass and trivial form. In another blog article I shall attempt to articulate what I see as the true movement of social entrepreneurship.

I reproduce below an excerpt from the article by David Brooks that appeared in the online edition of New York Times

Community service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service, figuring that if you are doing the sort of work that Bono celebrates then you must be a good person.

Let’s put it differently. Many people today find it easy to use the vocabulary of entrepreneurialism, whether they are in business or social entrepreneurs. This is a utilitarian vocabulary. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I most productively apply my talents to the problems of the world? It’s about resource allocation.

People are less good at using the vocabulary of moral evaluation, which is less about what sort of career path you choose than what sort of person you are.

In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests.

Furthermore, how do you achieve excellence? Around what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops? These, too, are not analytic questions about what to do. They require literary distinctions and moral evaluations.

When I read the Stanford discussion thread, I saw young people with deep moral yearnings. But they tended to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions; questions about how to be into questions about what to do.

It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.