Hi everyone. I'm going to be talking a bit about a lecture that Alfred McWad gave to the Harvard Business School in 1930. The school at that point was run by a dean named Wallace Dunham. He invited Whitehead, who had been at Harvard for about six years, to give this talk. Dunham was very impressed with Whitehead's outlook and thought that it might inspire and uplift the business mind to consider more than just quarterly profits. Obviously, in 1930, the Great Depression had just started. There was a renewed sense that government might have a productive role to play in the economy. The idea of social welfare was beginning to be discussed. But before I get into that, I just want to address the conference title, "Is it too late?" And John Cod, having asked this question 50 years ago, I think provides part of the answer. Things have only gotten worse, and the business world, the global capitalist economy, has shown very little interest in responding to the severity of the situation that we're faced with. And to the extent that it has tried to respond, it's looking to really narrow down on measuring carbon emissions, and that's become the one way that, you know, capitalism can try to quantify and monetize an approach to responding to the situation. Obviously, climate change is just one, and carbon emissions are just one small, tiny piece of a much broader polycrisis, right? And so my answer to the question "Is it too late?" is yes. Obviously, it's too late. The catastrophe has already happened. And the best that we can hope to do is learn how to live virtuously in a damaged world.
And I want to begin with a just a nod to Josiah Royce, who was at Harvard sort of the generation before Whitehead. He was there with William James, and James and Royce, if you're familiar, they had a nice, friendly tension. You know, James being more of a pluralistic realist, and Josiah Royce was an idealist but a pragmatic idealist. He referred to his philosophy as "absolute pragmatism," and very influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce. But Royce had this idea of "lost causes." And there's been some discussion the last few days about hope and hopelessness, and Royce wanted to distinguish a lost cause and organizing a community around a lost cause from organizing around hopelessness. Those who are hopeless, Royce would say, have no sense of loyalty to a community or to an ideal. Whereas communities organized around a lost cause, they're loyal to a kind of truth or goodness or beauty, even if its realization in their own lifetime is highly improbable, right? And so Royce would talk about this idea of loyalty to loyalty as such. And so for Royce, to be loyal to a lost cause like ecological civilization, for example, this isn't to be deceived by a kind of opium, right? This is to be loyal to a lost cause is to insist that the meaning of life is not just in what we win, whether or not we succeed in our own lifetimes, but in what we are loyal to, who and what we serve. Right? So, I think that helps set the tone for this improbable cause that we're all here to attempt to realize. So you've all probably read, or I mean I wonder who's read Adventures of Ideas or that's book. Yeah. The first part of that, the sociological part, he gives a sort of history of the evolution of civilized consciousness, and of all of the things Whitehead has written, I'm the most kind of embarrassed by that because there's comments about empty continents and comments about inferior races and so on. And I think, you know, for his time, Whitehead, there were plenty of other major thinkers of Whitehead's time, white European men, who were far worse than Whitehead, but, you know, there's definitely some stains there. And I know when we talk about civilization, even an ecological civilization, the very idea of civilization is charged. I know we have at least one anarcho-primitivist here. I'm sure we'll have comments from when we were in Harvard, Philip was talking about this term "civilization" and what it entails, what it means. I think if we look at history, there has never been a civilization on any continent that has not been imperial, exploitative, extractive, right? And so the question is, can we um, civilization? I think for Whitehead, what "civilized" means is any society that is organized around and motivated by ideas or ideals like freedom, truth, goodness, beauty, right? And so Whitehead's not defining it in the way that, you know, looking at history, how civilizations have tended to fail to live up to ideals, but rather looking at what could be possible. But when he does look at that history of humanity, he detects a gradual movement away from force and coercion toward persuasion, rational persuasion, he says. And he thinks that commerce has tended to play a crucial role in that shift from force to persuasion. Now I think we need to qualify this because obviously, commerce can and has easily been co-opted and corrupted by the military-industrial complex for one. War is very profitable, not only in the manufacturing and sale of weapons but in opening up new markets, and also, commerce, the business world as I mentioned already, has played a large part in degrading the life systems of the planet. One of the best ways to track ecological devastation is to look at corporate profit rates and GDP. It's the best indication we have of the life systems of the planet being degraded.
But I think if we if we look at the role that commerce could play, again, ideally, I don't think the problem is so much profit as such. The problem, I mean, human beings apply our intelligence to nature and we generate surpluses. I don't think that's the problem. The problem is the greed that drives this extraction and this exploitation and the exclusive focus on maximizing individual private wealth and property. I think if we if we can expand who benefits from these surpluses that can be generated by the application of intelligence to nature, then all of a sudden, profit is less of a problem. If we go back to Adam Smith, you know, one of the founding fathers of capitalist economics, he would talk about the invisible hand, right? But I think we forget about his other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even for Smith, the idea of the invisible hand, it's not some supernatural intervention or some automatic emergent law, right, that transforms selfish competition into shared prosperity. I think he was well aware that it's through our sympathetic imagination and our sense of fellow feeling that human beings are able to rein in this what would otherwise be a dominant tendency in our economies towards greed and selfishness. So, you know, when we think about the source of this astonishing wealth-generating and self-organizing power of markets, this is only invisible because I would say it first flows into the physical world through human hearts. In other words, you know, our social and ecological bonds don't just take care of themselves. Economies have to be driven by care for the common good by empathy. And capitalist economics, ignoring Smith's other book on moral sentiments, has tended to reduce human beings to our vices and encourage us to lean into our vices as the driving engine of capitalist progress. But what about our virtues? What about an economy that sought to enhance and uplift our virtues as human beings? So, not only do these do our economies need to be driven by the common good, but Whitehead would say a "method of foresight," right, that broadens our imaginations beyond just orderly profits. Whitehead sought to cure the business mind of "the disease of short-sighted motives," as he put it.
Let me just quote him here. He says in "Foresight," which again is published in Adventures of Ideas, for a short little chapter. He says, "A great society is a society in which men and women of business think greatly of their functions." "Low thoughts mean low behavior and after a brief orgy of exploitation low behavior means a descending standard of life." So he's giving this talk to the Harvard Business School in attempts to uplift the business mind and to give business people a sense of the sort of wisdom that would be required to develop this foresight. And Whitehead thinks that philosophy could help business people by examining the ideals and the motives, the ideals as motives for action, so as to lift economics from this orgy of human vices to a sustained attempt to organize human virtues. And so Whitehead's trying to provide the business mind with a new world vision, a new cosmology, a different context for commerce that would see it, you know, make good on this promise he thinks it has to transition our species beyond the foolish desire to control nature toward a wise application of foresight to our interactions with nature and a respect for freedom and creativity not only of every human being but every every living being. But he points out that foresight can't just rely on scientific laws. Our understanding of say astronomy can be based on a sense of the regularity of nature. Whereas when we look at human history, because of the contingencies involved, because of the creativity and inventiveness of human beings, it's very difficult to predict what's going to happen next. And so we can't just rely on a sort of collection of data and scientific analysis and knowledge. We need a kind of wisdom in order to have this foresight that Whitehead is speaking to. But he points out that no single person, no single corporate firm, no single government agency is going to have all the requisite data or the required understanding and expertise to have this sort of wisdom. And so he thought that economics must become a cooperative enterprise.
And here I think of the "associative economics" that Rudolf Steiner developed as part of what he called the "social three-folding" proposal. Rudolf Steiner, a kind of esoteric Christian anarchist, he developed this proposal in Germany and Stuttgart in 1919. There was the the war ended, and the war ended when, you know, Germany wanted one last attack on the British even though it was clear that they had lost the war, and the military and the dock workers rebelled, and that started this whole workers' revolution in Germany, and it was a very interesting moment, and Steiner thought that this social three-folding proposal could take root at that time. The basic idea is that economics, politics, and cultural life are these three distinct, notated distinct but overlapping spheres with their own sources of value and their own mode of operation. And he thinks that over the course of modern history, these spheres have gotten confused, and we tend to overemphasize one at the expense of the other. And so you can see in you know, in the last century and a half or so, when the political sphere gets overemphasized, you end up with state authoritarian communism or something. When the economy gets overemphasized, you end up with neoliberal capitalism. Everything gets reduced to market dynamics. When the cultural sphere gets overemphasized, you end up with theocracy, right? And so Steiner thought that we needed to find a way of dynamically balancing these three spheres. And in the economic sphere, the proposal was not to eliminate markets. I think we we often associate markets with capitalism. There's no reason we need to do that. You can have other forms of markets that are not driven by capitalist principles. Change corporate charter law, "triple bottom line," right, as a start, but the idea would be that the economy should be a co-managed operation between producers, distributors, and consumers. And economics for Steiner was really about mediating between the human being and the earth, and ecology is really the larger context within which economics should operate, and economics should be about meeting human needs, not inventing new human desires constantly to consume things we don't actually need.
And so we need an associative economy, right, in order to have foresight, in order to have a sort of wisdom. And what they're just talking about, corporate firms need to be able to work together, and there's a way in which more success can be brought about for a longer period of time through that cooperation. So this involves transforming corporations from "profit-maximizing and cost-externalizing machines" into an organizational means of efficiently serving the real needs of human beings within healthy ecological limits. I used to I used to think that we needed more government intervention to resolve these issues. And then I gradually realized that government is the governments we've known are so inefficient and so slow and so inept. Corporations move very fast, and that's why they're so dangerous. But if we want to see the sort of rapid change that we need to see, I think we actually need to co-opt the corporate model, change corporate charter law, and actually bring about change at the rate we need it by leveraging the power of the business world rather than shunning it and thinking that money is just the root of all evil. Money may be one of the most efficient means of the communication of value we have ever seen. It's just that we need to diversify the types of money that are in circulation. Steiner made this proposal. Many others have made this proposal. Steiner proposes three different kinds of money. "Purchase money" to meet our daily needs, you know, for food for example. And that kind of money he thought should expire. It should perish. It has an expiration date just like the food that we would buy would. So you can't hoard it. Then there would also be "investment money" to help, you know, new new firms and enterprises and industries begin, which would be a kind of loan, and it would be a loan from the community. The idea of private banks and usury and everything, you know, Steiner Steiner wanted to kind of he was working with the with labor in Germany with the workers trying to get them organized, give them an opportunity to become educated, to get involved in cultural life, but he was also working with the entrepreneurs and the business leaders and trying to arrive not at a compromise but at a sense of the integration of values so that everybody gets lifted up. And the problem with this was that, you know, he had some success initially in Stuttgart. The New York Times reviewed his book on social three-folding very well in 1920 or 21. But because he wasn't just taking a side, eventually the workers got suspicious because he was working with business owners. The business owners got suspicious because he was talking to the workers and getting them all excited about having more power in the workplace and so on. And so the whole thing fell apart. I don't know what happened in Germany within a decade.
Right, so we have we need different kinds of money to communicate value more effectively. But I I think money can become a means for the enrichment of human life if we can shift this capitalist greed dynamic where we, you know, if money is a form of language and a form of communication. What's happening in our economy now is something like me wanting to hoard all the words for myself. So you're not allowed to use them or you have to pay me before you use certain words, right? That's stupid. That defeats the whole purpose of language. And I think if we think of money more like a means of communication rather than fetishizing it as a as value in itself, then we can get it more into circulation and actually generate healthier societies, and really, you know, the end of human life here would not be to just make money. The economy exists to meet our needs, right? Cultural life is where we're engaging in education and science and art, spirituality. And that's where this third kind of money Steiner talked about, "gift money," would be operative and important. All of the surpluses generated by the application of intelligence to nature, which would be more equitably distributed in an associative climate, whatever is left over. Some of it goes to invest, you know, in in new entrepreneurial activities for those that the community decides are capable of doing that. But the rest of the surplus goes to cultural life, to fund science, to fund education, and that really would be where the end of human life is, not in making money, but in celebrating our freedom of expression as individuals and communities, to discover new things about ourselves, about the universe.
To go back to Whitehead, you know, he makes the point fully in alignment with what Steiner is saying about these distinct but related spheres, politics, culture, and economics. Whitehead thought it was very important to delimit the role of business. Business and economics should never be allowed to usurp the political and cultural values of the other spheres. Right? Politics is about protecting rights and determining collectively our responsibilities to one another. Education is not a commodity. Knowledge is not a commodity, right? Science and the products of science, religion, art, these also are not, they should not be commodified, right? So there are certain things that Whitehead thought we should resist co-option into the economic sphere. And this was in 1930, right? And just think about nowadays how everything has a price. You want to get a law passed? You have enough money, piece of cake. Washington will even let you write it. Politicians are for hire. Education, especially higher education, has been increasingly reduced to a job manufacturing plant, corporate workers, right? And so we need to protect these other areas of life from the economic sphere, and not just think that the government should be running business for example.
Last thing that I'll I'll add here before we open it up for conversation is that, you know, Whitehead warns at the end of this lecture to the business school that he says "routine is the god of every social system," and, you know, while he'll also say things like the conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe which is creating advance, on the other hand, I think he would say to those revolutionary progressives that we ought to be very careful not to imagine that we burn down the entire existing system and recreate something on rational principles alone. He thinks that "civilization advances by increasing the number of tasks that we are able to carry out without thinking about them." And so there's a lot going on that sustains human life that we're not even conscious of anymore. And if we think that we can just wipe it all away and start again from first principles to establish some kind of utopia, we're probably going to bring about way more harm than we realize. And an example of this would be when he traces the gradual ingression of the ideal of freedom over the course of human history. Clearly the Greeks were beginning to have some sense of what freedom was. And yet, slavery was pervasive. And it took thousands of years for the social conditions or the soil that was needed for these ideas to take root to be developed. And we may have ideals right now that we would like to see realized yesterday. But the question is, how do we develop not only the consciousness among human beings but the kind of institutional and and organizational context wherein those ideas can ingress in a way that is not going to function in an evil sense in the way that Whitehead means "evil as novelty in the wrong season." Right? An idea can be good in principle, but when you rush to implement it in the wrong season, in the wrong habitat, you might bring about a great deal of destruction. And so we have to proceed with caution. And I think as progressive as Whitehead is in many different ways, he doesn't want us to saw the branch we're perched on in an effort to rush the realization of our ideals. I'll stop there.
Mathew Segall
GPT:
This is a really rich and ambitious talk, and it’s clear the speaker is trying to weave together a number of historical, philosophical, and economic threads into a coherent argument about how we might reorient human activity—especially commerce—toward virtue, foresight, and ecological responsibility. A few things stand out to me:
1. Framing and urgency:
The speaker opens with a sense of crisis, acknowledging the “polycrisis” of climate change, ecological collapse, and systemic failures. Their framing of “Is it too late?” is deliberately bleak, which sets the tone for thinking in terms of loyalty to a lost cause (Royce) rather than naive optimism. This is a mature and sobering way to frame the conversation, and it allows for moral seriousness without relying on simplistic hope.
2. Philosophical grounding:
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Whitehead’s contribution is presented as both practical and visionary: the idea that business can be lifted from “short-sighted motives” toward foresight and virtue.
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Royce’s concept of loyalty to a lost cause is used to justify sustained commitment to ideals, even when success seems improbable. This grounds the talk ethically, not just economically.
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The speaker is careful to acknowledge historical limitations, like Whitehead’s Eurocentric views, which adds intellectual honesty.
3. Critique of capitalism and economics:
The talk does a sophisticated job of distinguishing between markets and capitalism. Commerce itself isn’t inherently destructive; greed and narrow profit-seeking are. The use of Adam Smith is apt—highlighting the moral imagination behind economics rather than letting the “invisible hand” be fetishized. There’s also an interesting critique of how contemporary capitalism commodifies everything (education, law, politics, culture), echoing Whitehead’s concern about keeping spheres distinct.
4. Associative economics and Steiner:
Bringing in Steiner’s three-fold social model adds another layer of historical and philosophical depth. It complements Whitehead by showing a framework for separating yet integrating economic, political, and cultural spheres. The discussion of different types of money (purchase, investment, gift) is creative and very relevant to current debates about alternative currencies, public funding, and the role of corporations in society.
5. Practical wisdom and foresight:
Whitehead’s warning about the “wrong season” for novelty is key. The speaker emphasizes the importance of timing, institutional context, and gradual progress—a caution against naive utopianism. This adds nuance and avoids the common pitfall of purely theoretical critique.
6. Style and challenges:
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The talk is dense; it covers a lot of material—Whitehead, Royce, Smith, Steiner, ecological economics, history, corporate law. For a live audience, it could be a lot to digest. Some sections could be tightened or broken into thematic subsections.
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There’s a lot of historical and philosophical referencing, which makes it intellectually rich but potentially intimidating for a general audience.
Overall:
This is a deeply thoughtful talk that blends philosophy, history, and economics to suggest a way forward for human society under ecological and moral stress. Its key strength is combining moral seriousness, systemic critique, and practical foresight. Its challenge is accessibility—it could overwhelm if delivered too quickly—but intellectually, it’s compelling.
If you want, I can create a succinct summary or “core argument map” of this talk that highlights the main philosophical and economic points, which would make it easier to digest and reference. Do you want me to do that?
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Here’s a structured summary of the talk, breaking it into key themes and arguments so you can see the core ideas clearly:
1. Framing the Crisis
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Question: “Is it too late?” — the answer: yes, catastrophe is already underway.
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Context: Polycrisis includes climate change, ecological degradation, and systemic socio-economic failures.
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Ethical stance: Focus on loyalty to a lost cause (Royce)—commitment to ideals like truth, goodness, beauty, and ecological civilization—even if realization seems improbable.
2. Philosophical Foundations
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Josiah Royce:
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Distinguished lost causes (worthy of loyalty) from hopelessness.
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Loyalty to ideals is morally significant, regardless of success.
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Alfred North Whitehead:
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Advocated “foresight” in business: elevate economic activity beyond greed and short-term profits.
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Philosophy can guide business to align motives with virtue and sustainability.
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Warned against novelty in the “wrong season” — practical wisdom is essential.
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3. Critique of Contemporary Economics
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Problem: Narrow focus on profit, greed, and commodification of culture, politics, and education.
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Insight from Adam Smith:
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Invisible hand works through moral sentiment, not automatic self-interest.
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Empathy and care for others are central to economic health.
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Ideal: Economy should enhance human virtues and societal foresight, not just accumulate wealth.
4. Role of Commerce
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Commerce is not inherently bad; it can shift societies from force to persuasion.
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Problems arise when commerce is co-opted by greed, militarism, or exploitation.
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Businesses can and should be tools for societal good, if redirected toward shared prosperity and ecological stewardship.
5. Associative Economics & Steiner
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Three-fold social model: Distinct but interacting spheres:
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Economy: Meet human needs, operate sustainably, and mediate human–nature relations.
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Politics: Protect rights, define collective responsibilities.
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Culture: Education, science, art, and spiritual life—not commodified.
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Steiner’s monetary proposals:
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Purchase money: For daily needs, perishable to prevent hoarding.
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Investment money: For entrepreneurship, loans from the community.
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Gift money: Supports cultural life, education, and research.
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Goal: Transform corporations from “profit-maximizing machines” into cooperative enterprises serving ecological and human needs.
6. Practical Wisdom and Foresight
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Change must be coordinated, informed, and gradual—avoiding naïve utopianism.
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Historical perspective: Ideals like freedom evolve slowly; rushing implementation can cause harm.
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Business, politics, and culture must respect each other’s spheres to prevent the domination of one over the others.
7. Key Takeaways
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Commit to lost causes: Work toward ideals even if immediate success is unlikely.
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Elevate economics through foresight: Align business motives with virtue, empathy, and ecological stewardship.
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Balance social spheres: Economy, politics, and culture must operate distinctively yet cooperatively.
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Transform money and corporations: Use financial systems as communication tools to support human flourishing.
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Practice practical wisdom: Implement ideals in the right context, respecting temporal and institutional realities.
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