“It is not wrong to surround yourself in luxury.” (Televised
Buick Commercial, Washington
DC 10/20/02 )
“In a self-proclaimed effort to elevate the status of Long
Island’s Catholic Church, Bishop William Murphy moved into a 5000 square foot
home in 2002 with nearly $1 million in new renovations and furnishings.” Before renovations, the structure had been
home to six nuns, two elderly, whom Bishop Murphy asked to find other
accommodations. (Washington 10/20/02 )
What are we to make of the world about us? For most of human history, the bulk of
normative messages, particularly those that instructed people about how to
live, were issued by figures of authority.
Kings, priests, imams, village chiefs and others endowed with authority
from their peers or from on high, instructed the masses about how to live
rightly. The authority figures were not
infallible, but the words they issued were made weighty by the authority they
held.
In the Information Age, links between authority and
information have become severely strained.
Information now comes from a bewildering number and variety of sources
whose authority cannot be verified. Each
person is free to examine information presented and to judge its value
following the guides of experience and conscience. But the great moral systems, those that form
consciences, are not providing the clear guidance that characterized earlier
eras.
What is it that emboldened a copywriter to proclaim that it
is not wrong to surround yourself in luxury?
Does s/he belong to an organized religion? Did s/he stop, even for an instant, to make a
mental reservation (“what I really mean is that it is ethically acceptable to
surround yourself with the marvelous interior of a new Buick”)? or to reach back to memories of family, church,
school lessons in morality when crafting this message?
What is it that induced General Motors Corporation to find
this commercial approach acceptable? Was
it an accurate reading of US
In an environment where structural links between traditional
authorities and information are fragile, where are we to get information we can
trust? Do we come to trust information
that is repeated over and over again, as though the repetition establishes the
authority of the source? How do we learn
to evaluate messages that fly into our space at breakneck speed, urging us to
behave this way or that?
Bishop Murphy invited nuns to leave a convent they had long
called home, and renovated the convent at significant cost to make a home for him. He did this apparently to improve the image
of the Catholic Church on Long Island . In whose eyes did the Church’s image need
improvement? Are there other ways that
the Church needs improvement? Was this
the most critical? How did the bishop
determine that this was in the best interests of the Catholic Church on Long Island ?
As the structural links between information and authority
have weakened, it has become difficult to trace the formation of a good
conscience, and easy to justify all sorts of behavior. The authoritative institutions (business
schools and seminaries among them) that helped guide us in the past by turning
out leaders who understood how the world worked are now struggling to clarify
their missions in a world whose interconnections are overwhelming us all.
Perhaps the traditional authorities will be renewed much as
St. Francis and his followers once renewed the Catholic Church. Or perhaps the proliferation of information
sources and the varying authority endowed them by the growing internet public
will humble the traditional authorities, encouraging them to seek an authority
in concert with subscribers, believers, colleagues and followers.
Meanwhile the current situation is discomforting. It leaves unanswered the question that in
earlier times would not have been asked:
Of the copywriter and the bishop, which is the other’s moral guide?
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