It has been a privilege, over the past few months, to consult for Citizens ZA, a non-partisan, non-profit organisation that promotes active citizenship.
My role as project manager was to coordinate events and manage relationships with stakeholders, including the Catholic Church and the European Union’s technical assistance team. And I must say, something came alive in that time.
In a highly digitised world of automation, software and AI, something special is slowly eroding. Those who have maintained it will soon stand out, and might one day be regarded as possessing a superpower. However, talking about this eroding principle is difficult because it is ethereal amid a hardened world of work. Nevertheless, I am talking about care as a moral principle.
There is a world of difference in our energy and the decisions we make when we care about what we do and about the people for whom and with whom we work. Yes, work is judged on outcomes and therefore tends towards a clinical, consequentialist ethic, but the journey to the outcomes matters more to people than the outcomes themselves. The journey is what we remember, and what endures long after the work is done and the outcomes are forgotten.
My realisation about care might be a function of age, which I am loath to admit, or a consequence of the times, the zeitgeist, and of being a software engineer. Yes, we set up governance frameworks; yes, there are policies and processes, most of them managed and enforced by cold, unfeeling instruments; and yes, we are apt to write reports with AI, knowing they might be summarised with AI, but send them nonetheless to tick the boxes. All of this, however, erodes our sensitivity and capacity for caring.
Thinkers have long discussed care as fundamental to our moral life. Alongside the view of morality as adherence to strict rules, Carol Gilligan proposed a different voice in moral reasoning, one sensitive to relationships, connection and context. This is roughly what I will call care. It is through the membrane of care that our experiences are filtered, leaving a residue of thought from which our lives take shape.
Without care, we are at risk of moral corruption, and of corrupting others, even as we tick every box. The work could be done, but the windows into our souls would remain shut, leaving no room for spiritual communion. And without the meeting of souls, and the exploration of one another as ancient beings — only accessible through care — work becomes a shameful end in itself rather than a means of realising God’s plans in a sea of cosmic potential.
It is with this in mind that I now think about work and, by extension, the elections ahead of us. Yes, we see the manifestos. More than that, however, I am squinting to find leaders in whom the membrane of care remains intact, despite strenuously filtering the toxic political waters. My first criterion is whether they care; and only after can I look at capability, track record, and the rest.
Go vote!
