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Davos identifies the next major global theme: Include the Excluded – or else

Jim Wallis describes himself as a faith-based activist, a “recovering Catholic” who believes deeply in values and spirituality. Founder of the multi-denominational Sojourners (sojo.net) he is a regular at World Economic Forum’s annual meetings and did the closing address last year. This morning he chaired a deeply insightful session called “Stop to Think: Who Matters?” Not the kind of question you’d previously have expected Davos Man (or Woman) to be asking themselves – but one that moving smartly up the agenda. The full house was treated to a thought-provoking hour, after which I stole a few minutes with Jim. Here’s the result.  – AH 

ALEC HOGG: Jim Wallis from Sojourners has just facilitated/chaired/inspired a great session, called ‘Stop to think who matters here, in Davos’. What was interesting was that you said this was probably the most inclusive grouping anywhere on earth, and here we’re talking about those who are excluded from society. Does any of this get back to them?

JIM WALLIS: Well, I gave the closing remarks last year, here at Davos and that’s what I said. I said we have heard a good bit this week about the excluded. We had sessions. Bono was here. Bill Gates was talking. I said ‘this is all good, but let’s be honest about who we are here’. Look around the room. This is, I would say, the most included group of people on the planet – the most included’. The moral test is ‘how do the most included interact with the world’s excluded’ and many of them afterwards were just asking ‘I’m thinking about it but I don’t think of myself as the included’ and that was really true, but hard to hear.

ALEC HOGG: This session was to look at exactly, those excluded. Does everybody on earth matter? I think anyone who was in the room would realise that is the case, but in many parts of the world (and perhaps we could use an example from your country – Ferguson), it hasn’t been the case.


JIM WALLIS:
Well, that’s where I started today with this panel. Everybody would say ‘of course, all lives matter’. Our philosophical, religious, and moral sensibilities would all say that but in fact, many people don’t matter. When we say ‘black lives matter’, it’s a hashtag. It’s a movement. Die-ins are happening all over the country, protest movements around that phrase ‘black lives matter’ because young black men haven’t mattered in the country and the criminal justice system has treated them very differently than my young white sons. That’s just a fact. Now that’s been brought to national attention and so, you have to bring things to attention of people whose lives aren’t mattering because we say ‘all lives matter’ but that just isn’t what’s happening on the street. Ferguson is a parable. Jesus told parables or stories that have messages, so Ferguson (to me) is a parable now about how young black men are treated so differently than young white men are. Jim Wallis from Sojourners has just facilitated/chaired/inspired a great session, called ‘Stop to think who matters here, in Davos’. What was interesting was that you said this was probably the most inclusive grouping anywhere on earth, and here we’re talking about those who are excluded from society. Does any of this get back to them?

JIM WALLIS: Well, I gave the closing remarks last year, here at Davos and that’s what I said. I said we have heard a good bit this week about the excluded. We had sessions. Bono was here. Bill Gates was talking. I said ‘this is all good, but let’s be honest about who we are here’. Look around the room. This is, I would say, the most included group of people on the planet – the most included’. The moral test is ‘how do the most included interact with the world’s excluded’ and many of them afterwards were just asking ‘I’m thinking about it but I don’t think of myself as the included’ and that was really true, but hard to hear.

ALEC HOGG: This session was to look at exactly, those excluded. Does everybody on earth matter? I think anyone who was in the room would realise that is the case, but in many parts of the world (and perhaps we could use an example from your country – Ferguson), it hasn’t been the case.

JIM WALLIS: Well, that’s where I started today with this panel. Everybody would say ‘of course, all lives matter’. Our philosophical, religious, and moral sensibilities would all say that but in fact, many people don’t matter. When we say ‘black lives matter’, it’s a hashtag. It’s a movement. Die-ins are happening all over the country, protest movements around that phrase ‘black lives matter’ because young black men haven’t mattered in the country and the criminal justice system has treated them very differently than my young white sons. That’s just a fact. Now that’s been brought to national attention and so, you have to bring things to attention of people whose lives aren’t mattering because we say ‘all lives matter’ but that just isn’t what’s happening on the street. Ferguson is a parable. Jesus told parables or stories that have messages, so Ferguson (to me) is a parable now about how young black men are treated so differently than young white men are.

The country’s getting that now. It’s a whole new story being told, and what the young people of Ferguson have gotten to know… I’ve been out there and spent some time with them and they came to DC and met with the President, and a bunch of us met the President with some of us and some of them afterwards, and they’re changing the conversation. They really are changing the conversation in the country. Some of them were drifting six months ago – just drifting in St. Lewis and now they’re leading and they’re self-teaching about social movements. It’s really, an impressive thing.

ALEC HOGG: If they’re changing the conversation about social movements, what about the conversation on income inequality/wealth inequality?

JIM WALLIS: When you ask these kids of Ferguson what they want, it’s interesting. They don’t say ‘I want better sentencing laws’ or ‘better police behaviour’. They want that too, but they say things like ‘I want an education. I want a job. I want a family’. One kid said to me ‘I can’t greenlight anything. I want to be able to greenlight something’. Inequality in our country is growing. In the developed world, inequality is on the rise. How do we deal with that? That’s what we talked about here today. How do we really change that conversation about inequality? It isn’t just poverty per se. It’s the huge distance between a few and so many others, so that’s where we have to start and not just ‘how the rich can help those who are poor’. How do we change the conversation?

ALEC HOGG: An interesting point. In 1776, when your country was born there was a book, called ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that Adam Smith wrote. In there, his thesis was ‘every person wants to improve. Everybody wants an education’, so it’s nothing new. Two-hundred-and-fifty years on, we still try to find ways around it. Are there solutions?

JIM WALLIS: In the previous book, ‘The Moral Sentiments’ before the ‘Wealth of Nations’ book, he talked about ‘where there is no moral framework for a society, the market can’t function’ and Joseph Schumpeter who was clearly, a capitalist said ‘where there’s no ethics, the market finally takes over everything and finally, itself’, which is what the 2008 crisis was. The market just took over everything so Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter talked about the necessity of a moral conversation for capitalism to work. I was in a session yesterday with businesspeople who were talking about what it means to be servant leaders. That’s a very interesting conversation for people who are here.

ALEC HOGG: You closed Davos last year. You did the closing ceremony – the closing discussion. After that, no doubt you had conversations with people who are here or who were here last year. Do you think you moved them or have you seen, subsequently, bumping into them now that there is a change in approach?

JIM WALLIS: I wouldn’t keep coming back if I didn’t hope for that kind of change. I don’t want Davos to be just the values discussion every year – the value seminar. What I say to people is… Last time, I said ‘a lot of you want a cup of coffee’. There aren’t many clerics around here, so I call those my Davos confessionals where they say ‘I have some moral qualms about this’ or ‘I’m from a Catholic background’. I’m not religious now, but there’s moral dis-ease. Then we have these sessions in the morning around the values council and it’s almost like our Davos devotional. Some people come here and it’s not pushback. They’re saying ‘how do we do this and how do we go deeper’. Last year was the altar call at the end of Davos and Klaus said ‘we want you to give us a call’. People weren’t talking. They weren’t interacting. They were leaving and Francis Kahn from the NIH (National Health) told me that people had their heads bowed at the end.

Afterwards, what I hear is ‘I was inspired by this session or this walk, this plenary, this walk in the snow’ and I say ‘how do you implement that back home where you work and where you live’ and influence. Often, I hear ‘I can’t do that back home. I can’t implement that’. The Values Council is really working on that. How do we really create safe spaces in companies for this values conversation? If we don’t do that, then Davos becomes this energising values discussion, but it has to change behaviour and decision-making in businesses.

ALEC HOGG: Jim Wallis is the President and Founder of Sojourners – sojo.com – and he’s a faith-based activist/Davos veteran and it’s a privilege as always, to have a chat.

JIM WALLIS: It’s great to see you, too. It’s sojo.net and it’s a place where people are having these conversations, so I welcome people to come and join us.

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