Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business

by Eden Collinsworth

Overview

A PopSugar Best Book of the Year

To call these unsettling times is an understatement: our political leaders are less and less respectable; in business, cheating, lying, and stealing are hazily defined; and in daily life, technology permits us to act in ways inconceivable without it. Yet somehow, people still draw lines between what is acceptable and what is not. In Behaving Badly, Eden Collinsworth speaks with a wide range of figures—from experts to everyday people—to parse out the parameters of modern morality.
 
In her quest, she squares off with, among others, a neuroscientist who explains why we’re not necessarily designed to be good; a CEO fired for blowing the whistle on his multinational corporation; and the cheerfully unrepen­tant founder of a website facilitating affairs for married people. Fearless, timely, and always thought-provoking, Behaving Badly takes us on an unforgettable journey through the treacherous territory of right and wrong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101970812
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eden Collinsworth is a former media executive and business consultant. She was president of Arbor House Publishing Co. and founder of the Los Angeles–based monthly lifestyle magazine Buzz, before becoming a vice president at Hearst Corporation. She served as the chief of staff at the EastWest Institute, a global think tank; in 2011—after writing a best-selling book in China for Chinese businesspeople on Western deportment—she launched Collinsworth & Associates, a Beijing-based consulting company, which specialized in intercultural communi­cation. The author of I Stand Corrected: How Teaching Western Manners in China Became Its Own Unforgettable Lesson, she currently lives in London.

www.edencollinsworth.com

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
—attributed to William James, nineteenth-century American philosopher, psychologist, and author

It began as a lively conversation.
 
That was before disagreement made itself known and caused tempers to flare. Manners were breached. One person stormed out of the room. Another was reduced to tears.
 
My mother—European by birth and old-world in her convictions—was an extremely correct woman, the kind who became confused when someone who didn’t know her well nonetheless called her by her first name. When I phoned to debrief her about my friends’ bad behavior, she was embarrassed for me.
 
“And this took place in your apartment?” she asked, trying to get her bearings. “What on earth caused such a scene?”
 
“We were talking about morality,” I told her.
 
“I can’t imagine why you would encourage that kind of discussion,” she said, more accusation than query.
 
“It wasn’t me” was my childish claim before ignominiously placing the blame on my dinner guests. “Someone said some­thing, and the next thing I knew, it was out of my control.”
 
Always and immaculately in control, my mother told me that it is the obligation of the guests to ensure that the host has no regrets for having invited them but it is the duty of the host to make sure the guests are not made uncomfortable in conversation. The fault, she informed me, was entirely mine for allowing provocation to introduce itself at the dining table. Bad behavior should never be given an opportunity to declare itself, she said, and not to lose sight of the broader issue, she reminded me that moral conduct must always hold its ground.
 
My mother was right.
 
But how is one sure what constitutes bad behavior, given the shifting tectonic plates under that defining issue? More fun­damentally, where does one find solid moral ground on what is proving to be the porous bedrock of our twenty-first century?
 
“Civility clears a path toward morality” was how my mother concluded our phone conversation, as if it were all I needed to know.
 
No single generation can claim a peerless contribution to ethical behavior, but in my mother’s time morality was a rule book: some parts enshrined as decent behavior; others, implicit. Sins were laid bare and bad behavior had far-reaching and lasting consequences.
 
That is no longer the case. What were clearly designated ethics have been blurred: in politics, with our leaders, for whom we have less and less respect but are willing, more and more, to accept that their bad deeds have mitigating factors; with the Wall-Street-take-all mentality in business, where it has become difficult to define cheating, lying, and stealing; in popular entertainment, with morally prismatic antiheroes operating in a stylish gray zone; and in our daily lives, whose churning tech­nology grants permission to act in ways we would not neces­sarily act without it. For the first time in history, we have the skills and the knowledge to modify ourselves, both biologically and digitally, yet we struggle with the fundamental conceit of living successfully in the here and now with our fellow humans.
 
In this unsettling era, moral variables are being shaped less by ideals than by global markets, so perhaps we should remind ourselves who is holding the checkbook. In the 1920s, British firms owned 40 percent of the global stock of foreign direct investment; by the 1960s, America had assumed the mantle. Despite its growing pains from recent state-dictated reforms, China—whose economy in the last twenty-five years has quintupled—is likely to be next.
 
The population of China is 1.3 billion (compared with America’s 318.9 million). Its culture—formed over two and a half millennia—embraces a Confucian perspective, which is in stark contrast to the linear rationalism attributed to Western belief. Confucius’s analects concentrate on the practical rather than the theoretical; they advise against reducing morality to a universal truth. Unlike the West, where Judeo-Christian ethics designate a nonnegotiable right and wrong, the Chinese do not adhere to absolutes. This means that one in five of the world’s current population believes that there is no single way of being wrong and many ways of being right.
 
Where does that leave the rest of us?
 
We in the West would like to believe that individual free­dom determines our choices, but in reality we are ruled by our culture and the prevailing time in which we live. Since he was old enough to understand my words, I tried to teach my son the difference between right and wrong, but the plain fact is that his take on morality wasn’t instilled by me as much as it was dictated by the profound changes during the course of his life: changes brought about by advancements in technology and science I don’t fully understand and my mother could not have imagined.

Are these changes pointing us in the right moral direc­tion? I’m not sure. I asked others. It turns out that most of them aren’t sure either, and I decided that the question was worthy of more investigation. I thought that, if I spent a year trying to discover where and how morality is changing, I might be able to chart where it’s going.
 
I’m not an obvious navigator for this kind of exploration: a peripatetic career has moved me in disparate directions, none toward advanced academic degrees. And although I have lived in different countries, my life has unfolded in cities. Those who live in cities have a tendency to circulate within the confines of their socioeconomic class or occupational orbits, so there’s a good chance I have a narrower outlook than is ideal for what I’m proposing to do. That said, I shall do my best to avoid prejudices, marshaling the facts as they are, not as I wish them to be.
 
Here are a few more disclosures: I admire those of faith but believe that religion should be kept far away from as many non-spiritual things as humanly possible. I have an abiding affec­tion for the offbeat, but I aspire—however imperfectly—to civility. I can’t imagine an absolute moral man or woman, nor can I understand why anyone would wish that state of absolute being. In fact, I’m inclined to agree with Henry David Tho­reau, whose suggestion is not to be too moral a being. “You may cheat yourself out of much life so,” he warned.
 
From this information, you are likely to decide that I’ve wandered to the far ends of orthodoxy and that this makes me a willful person. That could be. But mine is not the kind of will­fulness that challenges the necessity of morality or the purpose of ethics. Nietzsche—the “God Is Dead” nihilist—insisted that “man has connected all things in existence with morals, and dressed up the world in a garb of ethical significance. The day will come when all this will be . . . utterly valueless.”
 
I’m sorry, but no. Morality is at the core of who we are, and ethics enable us to function in societal groups. So, no, my intention here is not to argue whether there is a need for moral­ity but to map its landscape.
 
Perhaps you are already of one mind or the other about what constitutes moral behavior or—like me—in possession of an inward sense of what is fundamentally good or bad but not sure how either applies anymore. For the purpose of this endeavor, we might think of ourselves as flaneurs, strolling down the broad avenues of history, pausing to ask the ethi­cal standard-bearers how they judged good behavior. We have begun this journey with a question, and there’s no guarantee that we won’t end with one, but along the way it seems only fair that we give bad behavior an opportunity to explain itself.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part 1 Confronting the Unreliable Provenance of Morals

1 Wherein I Begin with the Definition of the Word 9

2 According to a Convicted Murderer, It Has to Do with Character 16

3 A Neuroscientist Explains the Evolutionary Origins of Morality 27

4 A Brief History of Mankind's Attempts to Rein in Bad Behavior 40

Part 2 Morality's Scorecard

5 The Editor of the Financial Times Provides a Cost-Benefit Analysis of Principles 51

6 Instructions on How Not to Cheat 61

7 Pros and Cons of Doing the Right Thing 72

8 The Law: Tools of Control, or Instruments of Enlightenment? 79

9 The Political Function of Ethics 90

Part 3 Sex as Moral Provocateur

10 Monogamy (Not So Much Anymore) 101

11 The Screen as a Siren 116

12 Testosterone: Morality's Enemy, as Well as Its Hero 127

13 Immoral Women: Or Just Those Having a Better Time? 138

Part 4 Taking the Bother out of Morality

14 Celebrities as Standard-Bearers 149

15 Reality Redefined 158

16 The Web Wonders What's So Great About the Truth 163

17 Ethically Sanitized Warfare 171

18 Immorality's Black Sun 182

Part 5 The Future, or Something Like It

19 The Moral Vagaries of Making Babies 193

20 Mapping a Post-gay Culture 198

21 Is It Progress if We Barter with Ethics? 205

22 Programming Morality in Robots (They'll Show Us How) 211

23 So Who, Exactly, Gets to Set the New Rules? 224

24 Wherein I Conclude by Looking Forward 232

Epilogue 238

Notes and Additional Reading 245

Acknowledgments 253

Editorial Reviews

Rarely does a voice cut through all the noise and deliver a brand new take on the world as we know it, but Eden Collinsworth does just that.”
—Newsweek

“Written with brio and great charm. . . . An implausibly entertaining romp through the ethical questions of our time.”
—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

“Has technology changed what we believe is right? . . . [Eden Collinsworth] enlists both the famous and infamous to unravel how we make moral choices in an ethical flexible era.”
—The Economist Radio

“Morality is a complicated subject, but Eden Collinsworth breaks it down. . . . Her analysis is surprisingly light and fun.”
—Bustle

“Fascinating. . . . A refreshing read.”
—Big Think

“Regardless of the era, vice is a tale as old as time, and author Eden Collinsworth works wonders to produce a fresh spin on one of the humanity’s oldest dichotomous positions, morality.”
—PopMatters

“Every day we see and hear stories of bad behavior in sports, business, and politics, in which bad people with no moral compass seem to succeed. . . . This extraordinary, thought-provoking book by Eden Collinsworth makes us stop and consider who we are and who we want to be.”
—Ed Rollins, former U.S. Presidential Advisor

“Eden Collinsworth doesn’t pull her punches as she explores the shifting moral landscape of our times. Behaving Badly is as insightful as it is hilarious.”
—Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

“Meticulously researched, historically grounded. . . . Morality and wit are a rare marriage, yet in sharing these stories—and telling her own, by far the most intriguing—they are marshaled into often hilarious lockstep.”
—Nancy Collins, journalist, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, and ABC News correspondent

“Collinsworth’s goal is to make readers think, and she not only succeeds in doing that, but does so in an entertaining manner.”
—Booklist

“A wide-ranging, breezy journey through a series of ethical minefields. . . . The author is always a genial guide through the moral thicket, and her companions underscore the provocative spirit of her quest.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Entertaining. . . . Taking a global view, [Collinsworth] maps the moral landscapes of Swiss bank accounts and the murky waters of Japanese business practices, and compares American and French perspectives on monogamy.”
—Publishers Weekly 

From the Publisher

02/06/2017
Collinsworth (I Stand Corrected), a business consultant and former media executive, conducts an entertaining, if overly discursive, study of ethical quagmires and moral gray areas in modern-day business, interpersonal, and military practices. Taking a global view, she maps the moral landscapes of Swiss bank accounts and the murky waters of Japanese business practices, and compares American and French perspectives on monogamy. Determined to leave no stone unturned, Collinsworth subscribes to “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort’s motivational newsletter and interviews a convicted murderer. She considers the “liberalization” of sexual mores via dating apps and wrestles with moral relativism: is it a necessary component of globalization, or the downfall of American society? Sometimes she makes an already expansive topic too wide in scope. Transitions are abrupt, and references to the Large Hadron Collider and Tiananmen Square are dropped in and quickly left behind for no discernible reason other than to cover as much ground as possible. She sets the scene for an interview with a Kurdish pop star and then fails to include a single word of it. Ending on a high note, Collinsworth speaks to 20-somethings who sound infinitely more reasonable than the so-called experts who dominate the rest of the book. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

05/15/2017
This book by former media executive and business consultant Collinsworth (I Stand Corrected) is surprisingly entertaining in spite of the inherent weight of its subject matter. Discussions on integrity, behavior, and even murder are brought forth with whimsy and often humor, which makes the work much more palatable than those written for a scholarly audience. While more approachable than many other works discussing modern morality, this offering is no less impactful. The discussion on murder, highlighted with a recounted interview with a convicted killer, is especially insightful and contemplative. Along with many other chapters, this prompts self-reflection without aspiring to a specific moralistic framework. VERDICT A compelling read for a wide audience.—Matthew Gallagher, Victoria, BC

Library Journal

2017-01-24
A nonscholarly discourse on manners, morality, ethics, and civility in these times of social upheaval.London-based author Collinsworth (I Stand Corrected: How Teaching Western Manners in China Became Its Own Unforgettable Lesson, 2014) has run a publishing house, founded a magazine, written a bestselling book on Western manners for Chinese businesspeople, served as a consultant on corporate communications matters, and lived and worked all over the world. Thus she has a lot of access and connections, and she uses experts in various fields to address tricky issues of morality in areas ranging from sexual infidelity to financial malfeasance to drone warfare. "Where," she asks, "does one find solid moral ground on what is proving to be the porous bedrock of our twenty-first century?" Toward the end, a friend asks about her "quixotic search for morality," and most readers will agree that there have been few clear answers to dozens of knotty questions. But the author is always a genial guide through the moral thicket, and her companions underscore the provocative spirit of her quest. It begins with a convicted murderer who has come late to the whole notion of morality, which plainly wasn't ingrained when he was involved in a couple of senseless killings. "As I grew in moral understanding, I began to realize what I had done," he says. If morality is learned behavior, different cultures teach different lessons, and there are different contexts where behaving badly might vary significantly in terms of consequences. One of the more interesting examples concerns an American whistleblower in a Japanese corporation who was shunned because the shame he brought to the company that expected his loyalty was considered worse than the corruption he had exposed. Collinsworth is at her best with gender issues in general and sexual mores in particular, as she shows how technology has altered the playing field. A wide-ranging, breezy journey through a series of ethical minefields.

Kirkus Reviews