A work of art can open a window that allows us to get a better view of the challenges of our own time. For example, a Flemish Renaissance painting portraying the ancient Greek myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus provides unique insights into the excesses of the market economy, as well as recent efforts to rein them in.
PARIS – Balancing corporate social responsibility (CSR), which implies a long-term vision of how businesses can contribute to the broader social good, with a company’s daily operations is a formidable task. To understand this dynamic, and the challenges that it poses, we would do well to ditch the spreadsheets and seek insight in a sixteenth-century Flemish Renaissance masterpiece: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Viewed from the right perspective, Bruegel’s portrayal of the ancient Greek myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus provides unique insights into the excesses of the market economy, as well as recent efforts to rein them in.
Imprisoned on the island of Crete, Daedalus constructs wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Despite his father’s instructions not to fly too high or too low, Icarus flies so close to the sun that his wings melt, and he falls into the sea and drowns (the painting depicts a pair of white legs disappearing into the water). The moral of the tale is straightforward: hubris can be fatal.
It is tempting to draw parallels between Milton Friedman and Icarus. Generations of business students have been bottle-fed the Friedman doctrine: the social responsibility of business is to maximize profits. The ideas of Friedman and the rest of the Chicago school of economics helped create the freewheeling capitalism of postwar Western economies. But the 2008 global financial crisis, coupled with rapid global warming, marked the end of the dominant consensus that “the business of business is business.”
PARIS – Balancing corporate social responsibility (CSR), which implies a long-term vision of how businesses can contribute to the broader social good, with a company’s daily operations is a formidable task. To understand this dynamic, and the challenges that it poses, we would do well to ditch the spreadsheets and seek insight in a sixteenth-century Flemish Renaissance masterpiece: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Viewed from the right perspective, Bruegel’s portrayal of the ancient Greek myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus provides unique insights into the excesses of the market economy, as well as recent efforts to rein them in.
Imprisoned on the island of Crete, Daedalus constructs wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Despite his father’s instructions not to fly too high or too low, Icarus flies so close to the sun that his wings melt, and he falls into the sea and drowns (the painting depicts a pair of white legs disappearing into the water). The moral of the tale is straightforward: hubris can be fatal.
It is tempting to draw parallels between Milton Friedman and Icarus. Generations of business students have been bottle-fed the Friedman doctrine: the social responsibility of business is to maximize profits. The ideas of Friedman and the rest of the Chicago school of economics helped create the freewheeling capitalism of postwar Western economies. But the 2008 global financial crisis, coupled with rapid global warming, marked the end of the dominant consensus that “the business of business is business.”