The Idol That Degrades Institutions
And Devours The Rest of Us
I know that for some people this might come as a shock but there are some institutions where money should not be the highest goal. In fact we call them institutions because they are not businesses or enterprises. There was and should be a different animating spirit at the top of the hierarchy to achieve unique goals only possible through that institution.
Should those unique contributions to society be subverted—no substitution is possible. It will need to be painstakingly rebuilt from the ground up. There is no rain-check, no do-over, no remediation for society and no make-up work that fixes the incalculable losses incurred by hundreds of thousands of people, even millions, deprived of that service.
In 1944, Oswald Garrison Villard took his pen in hand, and with the wisdom gleaned from forty-seven years inside the newspaper trade, lamented the descent of journalism from an honored profession to…a mere business.
He painted a bleak picture of the future; the ongoing consolidation of dailies into monopolies and chain ownerships combined with the absurdly high cost of a start-up made it an almost foregone conclusion that the tasks of telling the truth to the American people and holding the powerful accountable would henceforth reside in the laps of the privileged class.
Kenneth H. Ashworth, a lifelong insider to the the world of academia made a similar comment, in 1979, when he articulated the problems of American higher education in the language of business.
It’s time the higher-education community policed itself and addressed such abuses as dishonesty in packaging and labeling, the production of shoddy results, planned obsolescences, and living off government subsidies in pursuit of the profit motive, criticisms usually leveled at business corporations.
Had higher education been turned into a business as well? Its commodities; hollowed out “credentials” on the one hand and research for hire to corporations and government on the other hand, the societal cost of which is beginning to make its presence felt throughout the entire food chain.
What happened to the highminded pursuit of truth wedded to high standards and aims to develop the whole person as the ideal of a university education? Are these just distant memories?
It certainly isn’t just Villard and Ashworth who are worried that the foremost ordering principle for these sacred trusts appears to have been replaced by the profit motive. The ultimate purpose or the highest principle served by an entity permeates everything in an organization, guiding and directing every decision.
The elevation of profit to the highest principle and the subordination of truth in these two institutions has virtually destroyed them— if trust is an indicator of health.
Why haven’t you been told? To be quite honest it is not the job of the press, as mistress to the corporate/banking interests to clue you in on the TRUE problems of society. Their job, as I have repeatedly stated, is to magnifiy the pseudo-problems and BURY the important ones.
Ashworth keenly observed that the times in higher education were not unlike what took place in Rome when unethical building practices were commonplace.
Foundation stones that were chipped or damaged during transport were “made whole” by affixing the broken pieces back in place with wax; only much later was evidence of the fraud observable to the public through a collapsed building or random stones breaking off onto the streets.
This widespead deceit lead to the practice of stones being certified with the imprint sine cera, “without wax,” a sorry indictment of the untrustworthiness manifest in the culture.
Unfortunately, we too can see the disintigration of society caused by the delayed effects of “waxed” stones all around us. Incompetence through grade inflation; fringe ideologies passed off as serious scholarship, and grinding debt slavery the cost of obtaining a degree; the very opposite of the promise of freedom through knowledge.
The media hasn’t faired much better. Not content to simply sacrifice the truth in the service of their rich friends effectively poisoning political discourse; they add insult to injury by becoming the very mechanism through which the ruling elite ruin the lives and reputations of those who dare speak the truth.
If ever a culture needed a new imprint of “sine cera,” it’s ours—and yet we need much more.
How do we address this?
Slay the idol… before it devours you
Let’s look to the book of Exodus for a few keys. The oppressed Hebrews, mostly spectators during the first nine plagues visited upon Pharoah and his people, are now up to bat, for the last plague. They are asked to become participants and to act in faith before the angel of the Lord passes through the land slaying the firstborn of man and beast.
To avoid judgment, the Hebrews are required to sacrifice a lamb and place the blood on the doorpost. They are told to eat in haste and be ready to leave on short notice, for the lamb was considered a god in Eygpt and the blood on the doorpost an obvious sign of insurrection.
One can imagine the fear of reprisal come morning if God did not make good on his promise. With this final act of faith the people were made ready to leave tyrannical Eygpt.
Do we want to be free of tyranny? We must similarly act in faith and willingly slay the idol of mammon that so prevades this country.
How can we speak to our generation if our hearts are still chained to our own cultural gods?
As Richard Weaver notes in Ethics and Rhetoric,
Whenever a culture tends to institutionalize and divinize its creations, it begins to levy an excessive tribute upon the human beings for whom these things exist.
In other words, the more something is consider unquestionably right and good [capitalism], the greater the danger of becoming idolatrous and ultimately extracting sacrifice from the people.
Weaver explains that in the Middle ages, the end result of the church being venerated above reproach was the insane cruelty visited upon those deemed heretics and blasphemers. Beware the tyrannical cost of your idols, those things once deem precious that have passed beyond the pale of criticism.
The profit motive has seeped into journalism, academia, the medical system and even the church. A corrupting influence within so many important institutions does not occur without society paying a steep price.
In our time, the more we end up worshiping the profit motive at all cost, the more we sacrifice extended family, the connectedness of hometowns, hours of leisure, the nurture and well-being of the children, health, perhaps our own integrity, and even the person we might have become had we not sacrificed all to the next highest pay grade.
Insidiously, in the end the tyrannical system makes us—the commodity. Our data to be sold, our lives to be culled like cattle, our children to be used for medical experimentation.
It makes perfect sense to slay your idol before that idol makes a sacrifice of you…but that doesn’t make it easy.
Once slain, perhaps then we can get to the work of restoring truth and integrity to the highest place in our own lives and the compromised and failing institutions which surrround us.
Let’s sharpen that knife…and cut ourselves free.
[1] Oswald Garrison Villard, The Disappearing Daily, 1944
[2] Kenneth H Ashworth, American Higher Education in Decline, 1979
Each person that begins to act authentically "without wax," who refuses to do the "waxed" thing; that action that feels phony; out of alignment with their beliefs, with which they are not proud, grows the heart of this movement daily. Noble souls proceed despite the difficult consequences that could result from their actions and remain unmoved. It may seem small, even trivial but each small action trains the will to respond to a higher principle strengthening the will for the next act. It's the little things that do us in all the time. Thank God for rebellious English barons!!!
I haven't read Weaver (yet), but I want to raise a point in defense of the Middle Ages: with the exception of the Spanish Inquisition (which was under the control of the Spanish crown and also was in power during the Renaissance), the church in the Middle Ages kept careful records of the judicial proceedings of the Inquisition. Generally, the ecclesiastical courts were considered more lenient that the civil courts, to the point where people commonly appealed to trial by the church to escape from the civil courts. And people convicted of heresy were often guilty of violent crimes as well. During an age when capital punishment was common, the Inquisition, over a period of 150 years, on continents around the globe, executed around two to four thousand people. Around 20 people a year, world-wide, and that includes violent offenders. I'm not excusing it, but it is not a darker period of history than any year in the 20th or 21st centuries.
I believe that the common understanding of the Middle Ages is mostly propaganda, in fact the most successful propaganda campaign in history, to date. This is the foundation of the Progress myth and the Conquest of Nature ideology. They had to discredit the past, as you said in the book, citing Orwell. "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their own history." It's been done to us before. Thank God for having the ability to fight it now. We need more rebels. C.S. Lewis is a great one if people want to recapture a sense of the medieval mind. It was a place of light.