Our Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to Lyman Bostock

[I wrote this on the morning of March 17, 2009, and did not get to edit it until today. While some AIG bonuses have been returned since then, the essence of what’s below will remain relevant for a long time].

When Lyman Bostock began the 1978 season with the California Angels, he perhaps tried too hard to live up to his 2.7-million dollar, 5-year contract—a huge number back then—and batted .150 during the month of April—about half the average that had earned him the salary. What he did next was unprecedented: he offered to give back his April salary to Angels’ owner, Gene Autry, because “If I can't play up to my capabilities, I don't want to get paid for it.” When Autry refused, Bostock donated his month’s wages to charity.

By mid-September of that season, he had raised his average to .296. He was tragically murdered in a case of mistaken identity on September 23, 1978.

Missing from the debates and dialogues around the AIG bailout bonuses are the cognitive, moral and ethical worldviews of the men and women who receive our money. It is easy and perhaps appropriate to vilify the faces of Treasury; it is expected that the right will point to the newly arrived administration and the left will point to the departed; and it is both fair and predictable that AIG’s new leadership remind us that we are a nation based on law, bonus contracts fall under the law, and governmental interference with those contracts would create a dangerous precedent at the very least.

Law emerges due to the moral reasoning and ethical values of a given culture, and by definition is at best a step or two behind the leading edge of ethical reform: prior to 1865, the law allowed slavery; prior to 1920, the law prevented women from voting; and right now the law is wrangling over whether sexual orientation is a valid basis for conveying or denying specific civil rights.

Law evolves as humans evolve through ever-more-inclusive worldviews—from ego-centric (it’s about me); to ethno- or group-centric (it’s about us, where “us” may be family, gang, company, union, industry, religion, nation, etc.); to world-centric (it’s about all of us on the planet); to universal or everything-centric (it’s about the universe/creation). Folks who hold those self- or group-centric worldviews, often quite literally cannot see beyond themselves or their groups, and are primarily interested in how the law affects them as individuals or groups. The dynamic is actually more textured and less linear than this depiction, but you get the point.

Add to this the basic developmental truth that cognitive development is essential, but not sufficient, for moral development (e.g. Hitler, Madoff, et al.), and we get “brilliant” minds who commit horrible acts in order to further an individual or group agenda—not to equate those two men, but rather to show the diverse guises cognition can take when governed by moral stagnation.

Beyond the useful and valid essence of contract law lies the ethical dilemma created when taxes collected across a broad spectrum of millions of competent workers making five-figure annual salaries, or who were making five-figures before they were laid off, are transferred to a few thousand individuals whose incompetence and/or carelessness is clear, and many of whom will receive five-, six- and seven-figure bonuses, in additional to their five-, six- and seven-figure salaries.

What accounts for the distinctly different worldviews of Mr. Bostock thirty-one years ago, and those who would dispense and keep the bonuses in question here in 2009 is an overdetermined mix of individual and cultural values, beliefs and behaviors arising within and causing to arise the intricate infrastructure of the 21st-century planet: it’s complex.

The “right thing,” like beauty, is in the eye of the ego-, group-, world-, or universe-centric worldview. Right leadership, however, needs to act from the most evolved worldview available in order to serve the broadest spectrum of constituents. Those at AIG do not hold the most evolved view available and they are not the broadest spectrum of constituents. Even now, those who are returning some of the bonuses do so in response to an outraged populace. Lyman Bostock responded to something inside of himself.