The trials of Conrad Black have only just begun. Even if he’s acquitted at the end of his current case, he’ll still have to return to court again and again in a series of civil proceedings. He may not lose his freedom, but he will certainly lose a great deal of wealth, time, prestige, and influence. Of all the hardships this will create for Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, the worst will be the shattering of the religious illusions upon which they’ve erected their confidence and pride. Make no mistake, Black and Amiel are profoundly religious people. Their religion is money, and it’s failing them.
Religion is power
In Escape from Evil (The Free Press, 1975), Ernest Becker, a professor of cultural anthropology, argues that money is religious in the deepest sense of the word. Religion, for Becker, is all about power, the power to escape the doom beating in the heart of the human condition. Our fear of death, both in its ultimate form and in its lesser manifestations, such as humiliation and disease, rules the myriad realms of our unconscious minds. Religion is a rebellion against our underworld sovereign, a declaration of independence from his bleak tyrannies. It doesn’t matter whether our rebellion is couched in secular or otherworldly terms: the purpose it serves is always the same. Like all other religions, money is an insurrection aimed at overthrowing our own mortality.
Becker traces the origins of money back to the rise of kingship and priesthoods in early societies. In tribal societies, the fear of death motivated communal rituals designed to affirm the powers of life, giving order to chaos and ensuring the security of the community. Chiefs and shamans were selected as focuses of these rituals, as living representatives of unseen spirits. Through their ritual actions they would gather and redistribute material and spiritual resources throughout the tribe. As time went on, they began monopolizing both types of resources, keeping the greater share while distributing meager scraps to the rest of the community. This led to the decline of tribal societies and the rise of kings, priesthoods, and states. With the growth of the state, most people lost the ability to directly participate in the rituals that had once given them a sense of cosmic significance. Money emerged to fill this spiritual vacuum by becoming a new ritual focus.
Money is religion
The earliest currencies, such as shark’s teeth, feathers, and gold, were power fetishes. Shark’s teeth possessed ferocity; feathers contained the freedom of flight; and gold radiated the fires of the sun. Gold was particularly useful, as it could be easily moulded into the shapes of other objects, thereby claiming their spiritual power. This gave rise to coins, which allowed money to become standardized, which in turn allowed money to replace the older barter systems of exchange. The earliest coins were minted in temples and issued by priests. Money soon became a way to emulate the power and lifestyles of kings and priests, and to thereby participate in their life-giving rituals.
Money was uniquely suited to this role. Becker quotes Mary Douglas’s book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (British Penguin Books, 1966): “Money provides a fixed, external, recognizable sign for what would be confused, contradictable operations: ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardizes situations, and so helps to evaluate them. Money makes a link between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialized type of ritual.”
Money is the stairway
Money is perhaps the most powerful ritual, as it grabs hold of the most tangible kinds of social power. As money evolved, otherworldly religions lost their hold on our collective imagination. Today, money doesn’t just buy a stairway to Heaven, it is a stairway to Heaven, to the exclusion of almost all others. This is reflected in our architecture. A society’s highest structures reflect its most important spiritual values. Cathedrals, once the tallest buildings in the western world, are now dwarfed by corporate skyscrapers. We need only look at the sycophantic covers of business magazines to see that the lords of the corporate order—like Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and, at one time, Conrad Black—are widely celebrated as living embodiments of amoral and yet implicitly divine energies.
Black and Amiel were perfect devotees. Their ostentatious lifestyles, their right-wing political beliefs, and their scandalous business ethics were governed by their faith in money as the true source of life-giving power. Mammon is, however, a fickle and vicious god, as they’re discovering to their dismay.
While it’s easy to laugh at their comeuppance, it’s also short-sighted. Whether we want to admit it or not, we’re all in money’s congregation; it’s impossible to be otherwise in a world where money is by far the most authoritative ritual, and where every other religion is struggling to simply stay alive. Black and Amiel may be among money’s most conspicuous sacrifices, but they’re far from the only ones.
Like so many other gods before it, money has become demonic. Rather than rebelling against death, it’s become death’s avatar, condemning the greater part of humanity to despair and consuming the very ecosystems that make human life possible. Even so, faith dies hard. Terrified of being swept away by the maelstrom of our fears, and having nothing else to hold onto, we cling evermore tightly to our gods, even as they slaughter us. Capitalists and economists, the kings and priests of our social order, are money’s most ardent fanatics, and, like all fanatics they’ll sacrifice everything, including the biosphere itself, for their faith.
So, mock Black and Amiel if you must, but remember that we’re heading to the same altar, and that the sacrificial knives cutting their flesh will slash as deeply through yours and mine, and, given time, everyone else’s, too.
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