An Atheist’s Reflection on Our Society Without Religion
Christopher Bradburn 2012
Corporate culture is an ugly culture, it has become the anthesis of all founding religious ethics. It is so because it strives to undermine the very revolutionary values religions were conceived by. Religion from its conception is marked as a counter to the extremes of social injustice and corruption of the moral life. Christianity comes out of Roman imperialism and its collapse therefrom just as Islam comes out of the Arabian Peninsula’s patriarchy of the 7th century.
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| Mr. Fish |
The Virtue of the Heart and the Enlightenment of Peace
Loving one’s neighbor, giving to the poor, sharing what you have, being compassionate, being sympathetic and empathetic, being modest and wanting little, not being greedy or jealous. But a few virtues a good culture will nurture. To assess a culture totally void of any of these virtues will be found a lifeless and faceless culture. For even in the very hellish periods of human history, some if not all the above virtues can be found emanating from the hearts and relations of people. Indeed, if history is truly well read beyond even its tiresomely repetitive route, one will always find virtues told from the scriptures. History is repetitive and shows us how foolish we are to ignore its patterns of death and hate. Yet, the human heart with all its burdens of fear and capacity to hate still prevails as one affiliated with love, with compassion, with sacrifice, with empathy and tenderness. The heart has been mythically affixed to love and believed so for millennia more as proof to that little burn, that subtle tightening of the heart when the heart’s needs are displaced. The conscience, as subtle as the heart’s burn, tingles and trembles in sight of what we feel is right or wrong. The world cannot allow the rigid division of rights and wrongs, though the human conscience with the knots of the heart can help direct us to what is true. Cultures have emanated from the virtues of the human heart, the heart’s tingle and conscience’s tremble have been collectively remembered by the ages. A good culture recalls the aged memory of its shared collective and engenders the virtues told and felt as customs, music, tradition, norms, rituals, cuisine, the dinner table, community. The virtues of the heart take these forms among cultures because they cannot be taught....
See founding rhetoric of American society, one built on justice, on equality, on fairness and freedom from the shackles of Aristocratic Europe. Certainly, a culture that to this day founded on the heart’s displacement of feudalism, for want of emancipation. Both political parties in America still wield the voices of those hearty revolutionaries in 18th century America, alas be they only voices, they are nonetheless, voices of a cultural dream; a virtue.
Corporate culture has no capacity to amalgamate with these human feelings. Its incapacity for nuance, for empathy, for justice, for love, in the end makes it a truly worthless culture. It is based on dubious ideals of rationalism. Corporate culture comes out of the liberal enlightenment tradition which progresses on the premise that all societies will act similarly if conditions of self interest are available. It assumes that cultures will eventually take on an homogenous form with the extension of capitalism as it stands as the only system to settle our needs and desires. The rewards of capitalism will trump any conflict and ambiguity that differing cultures wield as the rewards of capitalism is a goal of all rational human beings. So religiously do the proprietors of capitalism believe corporate culture as the only ‘rational’ culture, they ascribe it to ‘eventually’ affording world peace; “As well as promising prosperity, for many these developments offered hope that a solution to the problem of war was at hand. In Western policymaking circles it became commonplace to link liberal institutions in economy and politics to peaceful interstate relations (Barkawi 2001, pg.1).
The essence of corporate culture is not new, this is an ancient trend of societies who disregard the helpless, vulnerable and poor in service of the rich; it is an ancient story of inequality. Though perhaps no time in history has an imperial culture assumed itself as makers of world peace, corporate culture is based non-the-less on unequal distributions of wealth. Like the measurement of economics, plainly it formulates 'Who gets what' in society. Corporate culture entails giving most of the world's riches to its corporations and the purveyors whom own them, they do this by distributing to the common what is already theirs, with profit. That is why our contemporary capitalist system is most starkly characterised by the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. For the corporation, like the aristocracy of empire, enough is never enough until their greed severs people from their most elementary needs. This ethic is harboured by corporate and imperial culture alike historically illustrating the failing of the human condition. That is why religious submission is embraced, people need the security and belonging from a common and as displaced from imperial culture; people are willing to submit to a common good and the sacrifices that entails. Religion gives that hope by reminding people of the sacred and guiding those who want to live morally as citizens of a common. Whether they do it well or not is a conflicting matter, never the less; religions come out of virtue.
What is Corporate Culture?
Like the 18th century enlightenment before the ‘modernised’ version of late, the influential few thought they found a way of life that needn’t be burdened by the nuance of real culture, that is, culture crafted out of human relations. The ambiguity of culture clumsily seen by purveyors of the liberal enlightenment, was called upon as dysfunctional by virtue of its politics, and by a culture’s politics they mean to say; its ambiguity.
Indeed, human relations are very ambiguous and fraught with conflict and non alignment. Culture in many respects represents the clash between human societies, the fears, the reflections, the admirations, the love and hate we all have for those whom we see as different to us, those whom we do not understand and those we fear. It was culture and politics that was blamed for the Napoleonic wars that helped engender the beginnings of the liberal enlightenment of Britain’s imperial agenda, though it were the World Wars that engrained it further by America’s rise to power. American hegemony and its present empire comes out of bearing enlightenment ideals, that is, a way of living without the ambiguity of culture. As the culture of empire it stands as an arrogant culture by nature, and reflects itself contemptuously against the rest of our global common. The liberal enlightenment and its modern corporate curators cease to recognise that there is a social common whose existence is held up by self sacrifice and empathy for one’s neighbor, be they next door, or those who thread one’s clothes a million miles a way. Indeed, the liberal enlightenment, and in particular the American sort of late is harbored on an idea that there is enough of everything to go around. That it is ok to be self interested and selfish because all the world’s desires can be met. Indeed American styled capitalism is
DEPENDENT on self interest expressed through mass consumption of things we don’t need. Economic growth is premised on nothing less than infinite consumption. To satisfy only one’s needs would quite literally bring our current economic system to collapse! The infinite part of consumption comes out of desire and excess; both things religions had destined as ‘sinful’. It assumes we all want and live for the same thing and therefore assumes culture should be homogenous. It became corporate culture because all the things the liberal enlightenment promises is distributed through corporations; those who uphold American styled capitalism. The career, the wages, the insurance, the entertainment, the home, the health, the food and most dubiously; one’s happiness. As a culture, we have accepted that corporations should provide us these things, not our state, our neighbor or our community. True, the global peace it promises is undoubtedly difficult to hope for coming merely from ‘loving one’s neighbor’, though corporate culture based on desire and infinite consumption, by economic virtue at the very least, makes for a far less peaceful system to society in the end.
Culture of Empire
It is easy for the rich to assume a corporate culture based on a homogenous enlightenment. Those who can afford the secular and inclusive ideals of corporate culture can easily believe themselves enlightened because they are a top of the cultural hierarchy. These are the richest and most powerful among the global common. They have forgotten the revolutionary origins of religion, they have forgotten how religion was born out of extreme social injustice and unbearable inequality that marks today’s liberal capitalism so blatantly. They forgot their own origins coming out of religious ideals for equality and fairness; of loving one’s neighbor. Inequality seen most disturbingly between the West and the South but no less shameful are the inequalities within Western countries themselves in our urban peripheries. Like all the empires of history; whose imperial core attest themselves as superior by their wealth and power, all believed themselves enlightened. Those of the Third World or, the majority world can hardly attest to corporate culture because they’re being essentially exploited for the livelihood of those whom live richly. To tell the poor, or those excluded from corporate culture by a lack of means, that they are living an irrational culture as external from the corporate sort; is vindictive. These are the fringe people of empire, those who cannot afford the corporate dreams, and those whom suffer from corporate culture’s contempt the most.
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| Adbusters. |
It is this very contempt for one’s culture that strengthens the disempowered cultures, as they reflect themselves against a richer more powerful community, they harden themselves as a protective mechanism. This marks the origins of the world's religions.
Culture vs. The Common
Corporate culture is one at the expense of a common, rather founded in the idea of individual sphereism, that is, a world that revolves around ‘The Me’. It is a culture of greed.
To embrace corporate culture is to accept the willingness that one will only be satisfied by consuming, it is a displacement from a world of the present to a world of an illusioned future. Corporate culture is one of dreams, of illusion and entertainment where happiness can be bought and sadness is a failure. It is a culture of spectacle and narratives imagined, where fact and truth are matters to be manufactured to what people want to hear. Where Disneyland is an ambition, with Mercedes, with Apple, with Abercrombie & Fitch, with L’Oreal, where what one has is testament to one’s character, not what one does. Brands are your medals of right and worth. It is a culture of non reality, one based on lies and trickery and yet, a very appealing culture, one in fact that most of us, who can afford to, have embraced. It is its unaccountable quality that makes corporate culture so appealing, its ability to have us think only of ourselves while living in a noisy, colourful, passive society. One where your actions bear no relation to anyone or anything around you. Where advertisements and tabloids are the new sermons of how one should model oneself as a human citizen. Where rich people are prophets and to believe in anything other than yourself is an act of the irrational.
Culture Usurpation
Corporate culture hijacks real culture and usurps the qualities we hold dear and sacred against us. It does so by exploiting our vulnerability to these qualities. Corporate culture cannot engender the virtues of those relationships, rather they must profit from them. To seem legitimate corporate culture must give a fake personna, its deficiency to nurture these virtues is upheld instead by images.
The extent to which corporate culture has already hijacked much of our own culture is frightening.
Monsanto, whom wants to usurp the world’s food supply to then redistribute back to us, does this most effectively by usurping cultures themselves. In Punjab, one of India’s most fertile regions, Monsanto uses culture usurpation of the sacred Sikh Gurus to sell its products. “Even gods, goddesses, and saints were not spared” ,Vandana Shiva observes, “Monsanto sells its products using the image of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion” (Shiva 2000, pg. 10).
Come the Copenhagen summit, a meeting of the world’s political leaders to discuss the frightening degradation of the planet that corporations themselves have engendered. The main sponsor of the event was Coca Cola who has a wicked record of stealing India’s water from local food systems and forcing farmers to relocate. They have also been accused of using pesticides in its waters and crops exceeding the amount allowed under Indian law threatening both public health and groundwaters (Shiva, 2005). Yet it audaciously sponsors a summit that represents people’s and culture’s fear for the degradation of their environment that marks our cultures so intimately.
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| Adbusters. |
I reflect also as I write this in Copenhagen Airpot. ‘Joe and the Juice’ is a corporate juicing retailer. It sells juice. It bears a Hip Hop theme with Hip Hop background music and dudes making juice dressed in New York Hip Hop clothing. So ironic is this scene that it’s using the once underground Hip Hop culture of 1970s New York to sell its juice to those who attest to Hip Hop culture. Joe and the Juice has nothing to do with Hip Hop, but rather has everything to do with making money through means of selling juice. Hip Hop came out of a disenfranchised urban African American tradition whom themselves have been totally excluded from the trippings of American capitalism. The culture of Hip Hop came out of that exclusion and the confrontation against it. Hip Hop has appealed to millions of people, both those excluded from and well integrated in corporate culture. Corporations, and in this circumstance; Joe and the Juice are selling Hip Hop as a commodity, as a lifestyle to be bought.
As I reflect further down the terminal, one is struck by the homogenous corporate cafes of the world, whom like Monsanto in Punjab, use the images of culture as a tool. Pictures of historical Italian peasants, dubious images of stylized french bourgeois culture, African farmers in the wild south, Latin street parties, romanticized images of Seattle and New York urbanism are ubiquitous with nearly all corporate cafes. They usurp these cultures in a grotesquely romantic form and sell it as an experience. Often the corporate cafes sell bad quality coffee as profit margins shadow the coffee it’s selling in the first place. Corporate cafes are not interested in coffee, as Joe and the Juice isn’t interested in juice, Monsanto in food and Coke in water; rather they use these ingredients as a means to make profit. They are selling a dream, an illusion and use the West’s insatiable want for coffee and romantic pre-industrial ideas to sell a bad quality product, expensively. All the while, behind the images and lights, they enslave the peasants they’re often romanticizing to sell them cheap coffee beans. When Starbucks says, “We promise perfection”, they are meekly trying to uphold a lie. They’re feebly stating it all over their shops because they feel the need to hide the fact they’re serving our common’s ingredients badly. Their recent drop in sales is proving people’s distaste for their lie.
A Dangerous Culture
The corporation buys the right to distribute our culture back to us. It owns the brands and controls the careers you aspire to and so it owns your dreams. It tells you what you’re worth, what is right and what is wrong. It does so because it has obscured truth to what you want to hear. And we have accepted it. By accepting corporate culture we must also accept that everything can be bought and sold, we must accept that life is a commodity and that nothing is sacred. We must accept that one’s individualism comes from the contempt of other people, animals and nature. During the 1992 debate of Cargill entry into India, see one of America’s monolith food corporations, the chief executive said “We bring Indian farmers smart technologies, which prevent bees from usurping pollen” (Shiva 2000, pg. 16). To Cargill, bees are thieves of their products! This frightening ethic comes out of the commodification of life which corporate culture is so virulently extended by. Nothing is sacred including life itself under corporate culture and this according to Karl Polanyi in his master piece, ‘The Great Transformation’ (1944), is capitalism’s most dangerous characteristic. It entails that we accept we are immortal and that nature is something to be mastered and conquered. Money is everything, it is the only virtue of corporate culture and one that all must submit to; that is its enlightened ethic.
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| Mr Fish. |
This makes it a dangerous culture, one built on illusion, on money, on the self where nothing else is respected. It is dangerous because it allows one to be blind. It allows one to forget, to ignore how one’s position in the world comes not without consequence. Religions were premised on the knowledge that everything one does indeed comes with a consequence and therefore, we must be prepared to confront those potential consequences before we act if we want to live morally. See Karma, Ubuntu and “Reap what one sows” as ancient ethics born from this. The danger in corporate culture is that consequences are made unaccountable because we are given the right not to care, not to look. How our food comes to us, how your petrol fills your car, how our banks are full of money, how we’re dressed, how our immigrants that build and clean our roads are housed and treated. As a citizen of corporate culture, we do not care because we don’t have to. All the virtues from the Bibles and Korans are missing. No longer are you required to go to a temple to be reminded of the sacrifice required from you for a just society. Indeed, from our passive submission to corporate culture, those religions are now commodified and teach the dreamy, illusionary virtues of corporate culture. Nothing is sacred and when nothing is sacred, the world becomes ugly and wretched while we bask in ourselves.
The Betrayal of Culture
Until... Until those who were never included in corporate culture. Those who could never afford the dreams. Those who were dissatisfied with non truths and lies, those who were finally betrayed by corporate culture rear their heads. When corporate culture couldn’t care for a sick brother and lets him die instead because the family couldn’t afford the corporate bills; a typical theme in America’s health ‘care’ system. Or when people like Mark ‘X’ in USA was fired from his job because it was being sent over to China. His automotive factory job, granted to him from the corporate culture he embraced, was taken from him because they realised prison labour in China will make the company more money (Hedges). Mark sits alone and says feebly to a journalist, “They seem to have this attitude that a person’s success is based on how much money they have, and that is not the case...” (Goodman, 2012). How meek, how pathetic in the face of corporate elites for such a man to criticize a corporation for usurping his job. We want more money, stupid! Mark soon retreats from corporate culture. He was betrayed.
Or when our corporate culture confronts another, lesser culture. Corporate culture promises more jobs, more livelihoods, more dreams. It does so at the expense of those ancient cultures that have for years, been exploited and mocked by other contemptuous cultures of 18th & 19th century European Empire. These people are weary of corporate culture but embrace it out of despair. Then, in hastened brutality, corporate culture subjects these people to desecrating on their sacred. In central Africa, when forced to embrace corporate culture, they soon commodify their lands, “It is a long-standing tradition in many African countries to frown upon the selling of land. When land is snapped up by large agribusiness interests in these countries, it is experienced as a brutal violation of this tradition, one that compromises the lives and livelihoods of entire generations to come”. (Grain, 2012)
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| Mr. Fish |
Like Mark in USA, the sacred is mocked and desecrated; these people retreat from corporate culture. What culture these and billions of others excluded from corporate culture embrace is a matter of historical chance.
Though, that tightened heart and trembling conscious that those in corporate culture have learnt to forget, suddenly becomes ever present. The sacred is returned, it is strengthened, often in a religiously oppressive manner, yet, a sacred one no less. Families and friends become nurtured as trust is fostered nowhere else. The poor often holds these sacred when the world has ignored and forgotten them. They often find trust, and community and culture elsewhere, not always in holy or truthful places but one marked most virulently as an excluded class of the corporate culture. The ugliest culture.
The Dionysos & Apollo Dilemma
On writing this piece it was expected that the ethics of religion would be confronted. No sympathy for religious fundamentalism or even rigid guides concerned with what is 'right & wrong' has been expressed here. Most religions have succumbed to this rigid bipolar world of morality likely marking its greatest failure. There is a certain amount of the irrational involved with religious submission. That's what 'Faith' is. To be led wholly by faith is worthless, though it has its virtue also. It is the belief that what one does will help to create a "Greater good" or "Truth". See it as you may, but those in the Occupy Movement made a wonderful case for faith. No one involved in the movement believed their protests would revolutionise our system of greed completely. Those protests weren't going to bring down the corporate state that is so unjust and against the global common to ferociously. Yet, they were there; they were there in front of our corporate oligarchs bearing witness to the unjustness. It gave rise to the 99% versus the 1% injustice. The encampments were brutally eradicated. People were hurt, people were arrested and punished and still the corporate state is left standing as strong as ever.
Had those people thought wholly of the rational, they would have stayed home. they wouldn't have camped in the cold to be abused by police. It took faith to get them there, faith in the idea that standing for the common good will somehow affect something. That the smallest moral actions they undertook in what they believed in so virulently would somehow make a difference. Somehow their actions would permeate somewhere within peoples conscious and if only slightly; make a difference to someone. That takes faith and an irrational step towards it.
See the religions of ancient Greece; the Dionysos vs. Apollo dilemma. Dionysos represents passion, ecstasy and pleasure. All of which the corporate state currently distributes to us en mass. Dionysos represents in many ways the child of us, the irrational and erratic. Too much indulgence in the cult of Dionysos would bring man and woman alike to infancy, selfishness, inversion and self destruction. This against Apollo who represents reason. Reason is what makes us functioning human citizens. Intelligence is its virtue, to live morally; caution and respect for the excess of Dionysos is essental. Our society, like the one our corporate culture is delivering to us; would collapse without the virtues of Apollo. But Dionysos is important, it's what makes us human, it's how we express our selves as living people, the rational can become repressive and does not deal with virtues of the heart. The explosion of Occupy was testament to the virtues of Dionysos, it beared witness to the irrational 'reason' of our corporate state.
Religions, including Christianity, is founded on this paradox; the parallels of Dionysos and Apollo. It recognises the destructive capacity of an unbalance between them. They guided people through story, metaphor and poetry to best understand this paradox and help us through the difficultly of doing so. These things can't be taught, they must be experienced and felt and that is why art plays such an important role in a moral society. The art coming from the Dionysos ethic; it is faith. Religions have become terrible instruments of this; they have failed the common as they've progressed, institutionalised and forgotten their origins and their use as guides. Historically though, religions came from these virtues and it should not be forgotten. One is not advising that we should become religious, but our society without those guides and culture are failing with their alternative. Religions, if truly well read; still has much to teach us.
This piece has been written to confront the push for 'Reason' expressed by our modern enlightenment. There has always been a conflict with the irrational, and this conflict rather than being dismissed; must be confronted as the old religions used to do. This call to reason whole heartedly; is what gave us our modern enlightenment; expressed rightly; as a failing of what religion in Europe had become. Though it has proved, as history has repeatedly; equally dangerous and corrosive to society.
The culture of 'tittytainment', or the pornograpisation of culture serving wholly our desires is troubling. It is a major facit of corporate culture. We have all embraced it somehow; including those involved in the Occupy Movement. Again, you see the virtues and conflict of the Dionysos versus Apollo dilemma. Like all religions esteemed of our ages, balance is essential and impossible to achieve alone. Where shall our new guides emanate from next, be they religious or from a reflection of nature itself ; our society is failing without them.
1) Goodman. A (20/10/2012), ‘DN! Exclusive: Live from Illinois Where Workers Demand Romney Visit Before Bain Sends Jobs to China’,
www.democracynow.org
2) Grain (19/09/2012), ‘Land Grabbing and Food Sovereignty in West and Central Africa’, grain.org
3) Barkawi. T, Laffey. M (2001), 'Introduction: The International Relations of Democracy, Liberalism, and War' in T. Barkawi & M. Laffey, 'Democracy, Liberalism, and War', (Colorado: Lynne Rienner Pub, Inc) ch.1, pp 1-24
4) Shiva. Vandana (2000), “Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of The Global Food Supply”, (New Delhi: India Research Press)
