One
of the key doctrines for the Puritans and their Yankee offspring is that
material blessings are a sign of God’s favor towards a person or an entire
country. The corollary of this is that
the wealthiest (i.e., the most favored by God) should be the religious leaders
of the community. It has taken nearly
400 years, but now Yankee society is nearing the fulfilment of this ideal of
theirs regarding wealth and religious leadership:
. . .
Corporations
across the political spectrum have taken an outsize role in identity formation,
functioning the way, say, a church service or other ritualistic gathering once
did. A well-meaning left-wing college student might choose to spend her money
on companies whose values align with her own, choosing to buy her sandwich from
Starbucks (or, more likely, an independently-run, sustainable, fair-trade
equivalent) instead of Chick Fil-A. But every time she goes there, or tweets
her support of this or that brand, she reinforces her own identity, both to
herself and others, as a member of a group with particular and specific values.
So, too, the right-wing “free speech” activist, who may choose to patronize
censorship-free platforms like the chat application Discord, or use, as the
Daily Stormer did, hosting platforms like Cloudflare.
Critics
of either set of behaviors might dismiss either set of spending choices as “virtue-signaling”:
the process of performing “good” behavior to achieve a higher status within
a given targeted group. But, in practice, the reinforcement the company
provides — demanding the spending of money as a ritualistic as well as
transactional act, fostering communal interactions with its fans on social
media — is less unilateral. It’s not just virtue-signaling, but
virtue-creating.
In
this, corporate identity functions as a kind of religion, at least in the sense
understood by 19th century French social scientist Émile Durkheim, who
envisioned religion’s function ultimately as a kind of social glue fostered
through the affirmation of one’s own identity, in which people "feel bound
to one another because of their common beliefs.” Consumption, in other words,
has replaced community.
In
such a paradigm, where corporations and “branding” mediate our own sense of
self and contribute to the affirmation of our values, is it really such a
surprise that they have also become, more than ever, self-proclaimed arbiters
of the public good? In an increasingly fragmented society, where
the largest “religious” group in America is the religiously “unaffiliated,”
where even religious faith is increasingly decentralized, corporations have become the closest thing many
people have to religious bodies. For all of the power of the Christian right as
an umbrella movement, we
no longer have a unifying cultural body like, say, mainline Protestantism
was a century ago. Our own consumerism and corporate loyalty is the closest
thing some see as a way of expressing faith.
It’s
difficult to say whether that’s necessarily a good or a bad thing. It is as
much a result of wider cultural forces than its cause — no more or less than
KLM’s decision to run a pro-LGBTQ ad or Google’s choice to fire a sexist
employee. But it’s worth comparing Airbnb, Google, or any other corporation
whose stated morality can easily change with what’s trending on Twitter, with
its polar opposite in terms of approach to public opinion: the Catholic Church,
a body that has, by and large, steadfastly resisted altering its doctrines to
reflect a given cultural mood, even when many of its members might like it to.
Both
sets of institutions — and both approaches to morality — have their pros and
cons. But, when it comes to conflating corporations’ business decisions with
their moral stances, we cannot afford to overlook the extent to which they
reflect, and reinforce, capitalism as a major religious, as well as economic,
force in American society.
We
affirm our values — and identity — at the shopping till as much as, or more
than, the altar.
Source: Tara Burton, ‘Are corporations becoming the
new arbiters of public morality?’, 17 Aug. 2017, https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/17/16162226/corporations-replacing-churches-americas-conscience,
opened 24 Aug. 2017
The
CEO-pastor and oversized-business-corporation-as-Church are the latest gifts to
the South and the other States from New England ideology. But, fresh off caving to corporate threats in
North Carolina and Texas over something as morally uncomplicated as who belongs
in what bathroom, does the South have the will to withstand this latest
large-scale attack on Christian tradition by the neo-Puritan corporate
oligarchy of ‘self-proclaimed arbiters of the public good’? Or will Southerners quietly and unthinkingly
complete their transition to homo
economicus?
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
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