Part One: Living Wittily in an Interconnected World of Grey Areas.
Social media is buzzing, at least amongst ethical shoppers, about the announced linkage between Sainsbury's, Nectar Card and The Daily Mail. Part of the consternation and ethical uneasiness is that many who shop at Sainsbury's, myself included, are happy to do business with them, but very unhappy for that link to be pulled into sponsorship of a tabloid newspaper we oppose for its racism, sexism and blatant pervasive prejudices in its reporting.
When this was reported one of my Facebook friends posted it on her Facebook page, saying she was horrified not only at this development, but the rationale of Sainsbury's in entertaining such an explicit link at all with the Daily Mail. I commented on her post, offering what I thought might be the rationale. The following string developed between myself and another friend who knows a lot about the inside mechanisms and commercial and ethical complexities of large companies doing business with each other.
The following is a verbatim account of our interaction. Follow it through and I'll then attempt some reflection on the unwelcome moral realities that frustrate our intentional support of just practices and ethical standards in market and media.
ME As a marketing ploy it only works if there are a lot of Daily Mail readers, which is also worrying. And an encouragement to non Mail readers to become Mail readers and swallow their toxins in lethal doses. The rationale of greed is almost an oxymoron, as greed is unthinking and rationale presupposes that reason is in gear.
Friend I'm not a Mail reader... surprised? Lol. Aren't Sainsburys, the Mail, Argos, and many others, not just member companies of the third party loyalty scheme provider Nectar? Oxfam is also a member
ME You're right - but it disnae help reduce my concern at the linkage between companies I trade with and the Daily Mail. It does however make it harder to protest with any consistency or confidence.
Friend It's that world of grey that we live in. I have withdrawn support for plenty of other things, but in a world that is not transparent, not black and white, and with so much outsourcing and company mergers, this is becoming increasingly tricky. Almost always it's the people at a local level who suffer through job losses when demand drops, far removed from the disconnected decision-makers. That makes me sad.
ME Yes, so I wonder what we do with that powerful conscience-funded sadness at an obvious injustice and an elusive perpetrator? That I think is an important theological and ethical question - how to harness sadness at injustice, to pull us towards actions aimed at life improvement for those caught up in unjust machinations.
Where to start from, in seeking a creative conduit for that moral energy we experience as sadness of conscience, an unease of both mind and heart, an inner dissonance caused by our moral values requiring of us some active response? There is an imperative to do something, but what, and to whom. The problem arises every time we encounter the realities of an interconnected world where those we do business with are implicated with other businesses whose stock in trade and very different values we deplore?
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