It's still too early to tell what the overall impact of the Internet will be in the new millennium. It could end up being mostly an interactive version of cable television, delivering information and entertainment, as well as advertising, to households with a speed and specificity that was impossible beforehand. Or the Internet could end up becoming the evolution of the telephone, enabling people to have immediate, inexpensive access both to other individuals anywhere and to large groups of people everywhere.
It's more likely that the principle value of the Internet will its role in e-commerce. Instead of your home being one stop on the FedEx route, the Internet may make it seem like you have your own FedEx driver, out all day picking up exactly what you want. In fact, the Internet may it seem like you have your own factories, producing goods that reflect your precise needs and tastes.
My own guess is that the Internet will change our lives both more than we can imagine and less than we think. It has already begun to transform the way we purchase goods, receive information, and communicate with each other. It will not change, however, the basic motivations that cause us to engage in these activities. In other words, the Internet will change the way we as human beings meet our needs, but it will not change what we need as human beings. And in the long run, whether and how this new technology helps us meet our need for love, hope, contentment, joy, meaning, intimacy and purpose will determine its usefulness to us. In that sense, the Internet clearly falls somewhere between the invention of fire and shelter on the one hand, and the development of stealth technology and the motorized can opener on the other.
Even so, the Internet has already made a significant impact on our lives, even in the language we use to describe our daily routines. Stanley Bing recently described in Forbes magazine what he calls "adayinthe life.com." He writes:
Experience this wide wonderful world, but don't miss its web page! Good morning.com! The www.sun.org is pouring through the venetianblinds.com and the kids are getting ready to head off for school.edu and you don't want to miss your train.net/ personal/ontime.or-else.html! It's easy to be enthusiastic about thewaythingsaregoing. com/recently. Before, we had to basically just live life as it www.formerly.was/before.net. Now everything has a page I can immediately goto.com in order to extend the informationbase.fun.edu//howboutthat.html. The world is my domain. Life is my URL. And I'm with the program.exe/youbet/andhow/24-7.
The Internet has not only changed the way we speak. It has also changed the way we do business. But it has done so in ways that often defy conventional investment strategies. Take the case of a company called Reel.com, an on-line company started with $7.5 million in venture capital and the not very novel idea of selling videos over the Internet. Evan Schwartz describes the fate of Reel.com in his book Digital Darwinism. The creators of Reel.com decided that they would sell copies of the megahit Titanic for $10 per copy when the video was released, despite the fact that the videos would cost them $15 each to buy wholesale from the producer. Reel.com spent several million of their start-up dollars promoting their website and the Titanic offer.
Not surprisingly, hundreds of thousands of fans flocked to the Reelcom website to buy the video. And the company started losing about $600,000 a week until it had lost nearly all of the $7.5 million it had raised initially. But, just before the company went bankrupt, a giant video rental chain called Hollywood Entertainment decided to buy Reel.com for $100 million. Go figure. "All I know is that I made a lot of money from that deal," says one of the initial investors.
Indeed. And it's real money-no pun intended. But the hyper-valuation of Internet stocks, many of which like Reel.com are losing money by the buckets-ful, poses in a new way the question of what makes a company valuable over the long term. In the new economics, is Yahoo! actually worth more than Ford Motor Company, or were the 1990s so profitable that too much money is now chasing too few investment opportunities? Schwartz's view is that stockholders will eventually discover (or remember) that "profits are what makes corporations valuable-not just revenue alone, not hits, not page views, not mentions in the press, not the buzz among financial analysts, not the amount of free shrimp offered at trade show events Profits-and we're talking real profits. Net income. Earnings per share. Sooner or later the bottom line will end up being the bottom line."
The long run may well prove Schwartz correct, although that doesn't mean lots of Internet entrepreneurs won't get enormously wealthy in the short run. Which leads to the parable that the Internet poses to you and me: what's the bottom line for us? How do we judge whether or not we are creating real value in our own lives and in our world? After all, that's mainly why we come to church-not to find out how we can have the most fun possible in the next 24 hours, or make the most acquaintances possible in the next week, or make the biggest splash politically or philanthropically in the next month. It's not that there is anything wrong with having fun or meeting people or having an impact. But focusing on those things won't necessarily create the most value in our lives over the long run. And that's why we are here: to explore together how we can create maximum value in our lives and in our world over the long run.
So what is the bottom line, for you and me? In other words, what is the standard we can use to determine whether our approach to life will help us meet our long-term need for love, hope, contentment, joy, meaning, intimacy and purpose? What's the bottom line?
When we look for guidance on these matters, we find that religion has always been something of a mixed bag. In the Jewish tradition, for example, it sometimes seems that the bottom line is mere obedience: strict conformity to the law and to the commandments of God. But at its best and most spiritual, the bottom line for Judaism is faithfulness-not merely to the commands of God, but to the call of God. In the words of the prophet Micah, the bottom line is whether an individual acts justly, loves mercy, and walks humbly with God. As we were reminded again during the Days of Awe, which commenced with Rosh Hashana and concluded this past Monday with Yom Kippur, the Jewish faith has discovered the most enduring issue faced by women and men is not one of comfort or convenience or even achievement, but of character. It's about who we are on the inside, about trying to be faithful to ideas that move us and ideals that transform us, about acting with compassion and loving with abandon. It's about falling short in our efforts, then being forgiven and trying again. Over the long run, the way to create value in our lives is to be faithful: to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.
In a similar way, the Christian tradition has also focused at times on a very strict bottom line, the standard of belief in a specific creed, which has caused much of the dividing and sub-dividing in the various branches of the Christian church. The fractiousness has been driven by the question of precisely what one must believe in order to be saved. The virgin birth? The divinity of Jesus? The inerrancy of the Bible? The infallibility of the Pope? All of the above? Any two out of the four?
Fortunately, at its best, the Christian tradition also has a more enduring and more spiritual bottom line. It's called-to use the old Christian term-discipleship, which is another way of saying that the bottom line is whether Christians live like Jesus did. And how was that? It was a very simple formula: love god, Jesus said, and love your neighbors-especially when they are lonely, or lost, or weary, or in pain. Especially when they stand alone in this world. Who is a neighbor, we might ask, as an attorney once asked Jesus? Anyone who needs your help, he responded. The people who will be greatest in the Kingdom of God are those who commit themselves to others, especially those in need. The bottom line for the Christian tradition is discipleship: to live as Jesus did.
Most of us are less familiar with the Buddhist tradition, but it too sometimes suffers from a narrow-minded-perhaps I should say empty-minded-sense of its bottom line. One popular view is that the goal of Buddhist practice is emptiness: to empty our minds of all the things we usually think about, and to meditate on nothing for awhile. For many of us, this sounds less like nirvana than like hell. But Buddhism also has a deeper, more spiritual goal. Emptiness is not an end in itself, but a means whereby we can be open to our true selves and to the world around us. Meditation enables us to see clearly with precision and gentleness. It's about what Buddhists call mindfulness: paying attention to what is here, now. The goal of this attentive openness-the bottom line, if you will-is to act with compassion: compassion toward ourselves and our shortcomings, compassion toward others and their narrow-mindedness, compassion toward the world in its brokenness.
So what is the bottom line for you and me, the standard we can use to judge the value of our lives? This is not a Christian church, nor a Jewish synagogue, nor a Buddhist temple. And many of us are here precisely because those places often do not embody the best of their traditions. Indeed, they do often focus on mere obedience, belief, and emptiness. We who gather here seek another way of being faithful and compassionate, one that is more personal and flexible, more responsive to what we need. In that sense, we have something in common with the Internet entrepreneurs. We are each trying to move beyond the past and forge new ways of creating value.
Which is where we return to the parable. Schwartz is only half right. While it's true that the bottom line will eventually be the bottom line, the companies that flourish are not the ones who focus only on making a profit. The companies that do best over the long haul focus not just on profits but on meeting the needs of people: their customers, their employees, as well the needs of their community and the environment. Whatever else it might take for a business to create value over the long run, it takes at least this: people must come first.
There is a similar minimum requirement in the realm of our deeper need. Whatever forms of worship and service we undertake to meet our need for love and purpose and hope and meaning, we must do at least this: be faithful to God's call to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly; love our neighbors, especially those who are needy and alone; and respond with compassion toward ourselves and others. Over the long haul, that's the bottom line.
Allow me to put the issue in a different context. My daughter Zoë is now six years old; she just started the first grade. And these new developments that you and I struggle to come to terms with are part of the only world she has ever known. She's comfortable in it. I don't worry for a moment whether she'll be able to adapt to whatever changes come her way, to find her own way to meet her everyday needs. Yet as the pace of change and the turbulence of life increases, so too does the danger of losing her way in a deeper sense.
What I do worry about, what sometimes keeps me awake in the night, is whether she will find a way to meet her need for love and acceptance and hope and purpose. Whatever else changes, that need will endure, and it's much more difficult to meet than the need for food and shelter. That's one reason I am part of this church, and I think it's important for Zoë as well. In the words of our closing hymn, this is "a place of love and gladness, a source of strength to face each doubt and sadness, where every dream is known and understood." At its best, this church is for all of us "a place of perfect freedom to follow truth wherever it may lead, to celebrate the best there is within us, and find the best in every faith and creed." For me, that's the bottom line. Copyright AllSouls 1999.