Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (26 page)

Then there is the matter of income. Institutions spare their members the humiliations and terrors of the sole trader. Their ability to pool capital, distribute it between projects and let it accumulate over decades enables them to survive lean periods and make adequate investments in research, marketing, recruitment and technology.

Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.

Scale has a similar impact on recruitment. Wealthy institutions can attract the best members of a generation, rather than just the blindly devoted or the irrationally committed. They can appeal to the large and psychologically healthy pool of candidates who care as much about garnering esteem and material comfort as they do about bettering the lot of mankind.

Consider the respective careers of Thomas Aquinas and
Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of the differences between their fates came down to the relative mental stability of the two men, but a good share of Aquinas's equanimity must also be attributed to the benevolent spiritual and material atmosphere he benefited from, first at the University of Paris, where he was Regent Master, and then at the theological college he helped to found in Naples. Nietzsche felt he lived by contrast (and in his own words) ‘like a wild animal hunted out of every lair'. His life's project – to replace Christian morality with a secular ideology revolving around philosophy, music and art – found no favour with nineteenth-century German academia, forcing the philosopher into nomadic exile. Although he is frequently celebrated as a supreme exemplar of heroic individualism, the philosopher would in truth have appreciated nothing more than to exchange his isolation for a collegial establishment which could have lent his ideas a greater weight in the world.

Institutions have the added benefit of being able to offer permanent status to individuals simply on the basis of their membership, saving them from having to earn it on their own, over and over again, year by year. A lone thinker may be near the end of his or her life – or even, like Nietzsche, long dead – before the public notices that a good idea has sprung from someone without corporate status. Within an institution, all members can tap into a reputation built up by illustrious forebears and reinforced by elegant buildings and sleek bureaucratic processes. They can take on an ancient title – priest or archdeacon, professor or minister – and make use, for
genuine ends, of the resources and lustre stored within a structure that is larger and more enduring than themselves.

Many would no doubt argue that modern society must already have all the institutions it needs. In practice, however, those who are drawn to what Catholicism has termed
cura animarum
, ‘the care of souls', but who feel unable to effect this care in religious ways, are all too likely to end up compromised for want of a coherent network of colleagues, a tolerable income and a stable and dignified professional structure within which to operate. It is a measure of how deeply ingrained the problem is that we would even now struggle to give Nietzsche a professional home.

3.
Another useful feature of institutions is their ability to coalesce the efforts of their members through a shared visual vocabulary. Here again, the strategies of religions and commercial
corporations overlap. While the sight of a cross emblazoned on the side of an ecclesiastical building or a lamb embroidered on an altar cloth has frequently prompted the observation that Christianity was an early and adept practitioner of the same kind of ‘
branding' that our modern corporations specialize in, the truth is, of course, the reverse: it is the corporations that have faithfully adopted the lessons in identity pioneered by religions.

The most important function of a brand is to promote consistency. Institutions trust that the appearance of their logo, whether on a remote mountainside or on top of a skyscraper, on a bedsheet or on a cloak, will instantly communicate the reliable presence of a particular set of values and act as a promise of uniformity and quality.

The enemy of branding is local variation. Here too we sense a certain tension between Romantic and institutional values, for whereas
Romanticism appreciates the charms of the particular and the regional, the home-made and the spontaneous, institutions cannot forget the hazards of provincial initiatives. Instead of touching improvements on the rules of the centre, they see only depressing deviations from minimal standards. They are reminded of corruption, laziness, degeneracy and the abandonment of initial ambitions. To stamp out eccentricities, the training manual for new staff of the
McDonald's Corporation runs to 300 pages, providing instructions for every imaginable action and transaction: there are rules about where the employee's name badge must be placed, what sort of smile each customer must be treated to and precisely how much mayonnaise should be added to the underside of every top bun. The hamburger company has little faith in what the members of its workforce will do if left to their own devices.

In this, at least, McDonald's has much in common with the Catholic Church, which has similarly spent a good deal of its history struggling to ensure a regularity of service across a vast and scattered labour force. Taken collectively, its edicts – specifying details down to what sort of wine should be used at Holy Communion and what colour priests' shoes ought to be – indicate extreme concern about the standards of its peripheral branches. Following the Fourth Council of the Lateran, convoked by Pope Innocent III in 1213, the Church decreed (with evident irritation over the frequency with which even such basic rules were being broken) that ‘clerics shall not attend the performance of mimes, entertainers or actors. They shall not visit taverns except in case of necessity, namely when on a journey. They are forbidden to play dice or games of chance or be present at them.' And lest some be tempted to show flair in their hairstyles, it was added that ‘they must always have a shaved crown and tonsure'.

Heavy-handed though such decrees may have been, they helped to establish and enforce the consistent standards of ritual and performance that the faithful came to expect from the Church, and that all of us have in turn come to expect from corporations.

It is a singularly regrettable feature of the modern world that while some of the most trivial of our requirements (for shampoo and moisturizers, for example, as well as pasta sauce and sunglasses) are met by superlatively managed brands, our essential needs are left in the disorganized and unpredictable care of lone actors. For a telling illustration of the practical effects of
branding and the quality control it is typically accompanied by, we need only compare the fragmented, highly variable field of
psychotherapy with the elegantly discharged ritual of confession within the Catholic faith. Confession, well regimented in its every particular since the latter part of the fourteenth century, thanks to a stream of papal edicts and Vatican-issued manuals, is an epitome of the sort of reliable global service industry that would become the norm for consumer goods only in the mid-twentieth century. Everything from the positioning of the confessional box to the tone of voice used by the priest is governed by explicit rules, designed to assure all Catholics from Melbourne to Anchorage that their expectations for a redemptive examination of their soul will be met. No such provisions apply to our closest secular equivalent. Psychotherapy as currently practised lacks any consistency of setting or even any benchmarks for such apparently small yet critical details as the wording of the message on the therapist's answering machine, his or her dress code and the appearance of the consulting room. Patients are left to endure a run of local quirks, from encounters with their therapists' pets or children to gurgling pipework and bric-a-brac furnishings.