Doing vs profiting

The other day I watched with a student the Canadian animation of Jean Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees. This allegory of a selfless, solitary man profligately blessing with his persistent generosity a whole region and many generations came to mind as I considered the recent trend in American companies reduce the taxes they pay by shedding their citizenship.

Of course, many of the employees of these companies may remain in this country as may many production or distribution facilities, and taxes may be levied on state-side sales, but the implicit assertion of companies making such a move is that the commonwealth, the common wealth, (through common contribution) is not their concern. International laws allow for arbitrage on taxes; contemporary business thinking allows for arbitrage on the obligations of membership, largely because it absolutizes the value of profit (though absolutes are as good as nothing at all.)

It's easy to see the limit to which this thinking gets ever closer: since doing costs, less of it is better. Ideally, cash just flows as effortlessly as water into a cistern in the form of rent. Doing--exerting, creating--is not essential to the picture.

This week I've been with students each of whom has started, alone or with others, a business. So many challenges each has had to, still has to. face: getting funding, hiring and motivating, managing cash flow, building good relationships with suppliers and customers, managing regulations, differentiating what one offers from all the others, ensuring quality, focusing on the one that should be done versus the many things that can be done. All this while being members of a family and a community, and having personal lives as well.

These people make money, probably good money, but clearly it's the doing that thrills them. I can hear it in the way they talk about the lessons they've learned, the challenges they've overcome, and what's ahead that is going to test them. They speak with much of the same kind of affection that comes through when we share family adventure stories with each other. Their achievement is meaningful as the result of doing, and the doing is meaningful in the context of complex environment which is communal as well as commercial.

The Story of Elzeard Bouffier, The Most Extraordinary Character I Ever Met, and The Man Who Planted Hope and Reaped Happiness is another title of Giono's tale. It's almost too easy to believe all this beautiful story relates, but the idea of a person absorbed in a great project, a grand doing, and transforming thereby a desert into a place of life is no fiction. So many real-life benefactors have already blessed us, many intentionally, many in the pursuit of what is possible and good.

In the story, M. Bouffier is thinking not of the many people who will find homes and refreshment in a rejuvenated land, but of the land itself, abused by exploitation. 'It was his opinion that this land was dying from want to trees,' in need, that is, of the kind of long-term, small scale generosity that he, seed by seed, could supply, each tree itself carrying on and extending the giving. I imagine him wordlessly addressing the earth as 'you' as well as the seeds, saplings, and trees he planted to live intimately with it. He sought nothing but good work.

When I think of this character, I am moved to address him, along with his land and his trees, in the 2nd person: you model for me what I find wonderful in the drama of human beings on this planet. It is this that God-in-love adores in the Beloved, and so do I.