NOTE: These pages are emended extracts from two papers I delivered at Acadia University in April, 2000. The audience, though different from the Chapter, (they were a group of dissident Baptists!) had faced some of the same history with ‘organizational mentality’.

I. EXISTING CONDITIONS
Once the dust, of modernity had settled, we now survey the landscape, looking for points of recognition. I offer just a few of these landmarks, but they are important ones because they become the social landscape upon which we live. They constitute what social geographers call the ‘goal-ranges’, that is the carrying capacities of an environment, the ranges of states that allow a society to continue its existence. Put simply, if there is no water, settlement, or continuation of settlement is doomed. Continually in tension with these goal ranges are what the same folk call the ‘reference values’, that is the values we prize highly and organize ourselves around. They are always in tension, and the nature of the balance between them allows, or disallows the health of the society. Let this be a metaphor, a helpful way of understanding these ‘existing conditions’. In my perspective, they consist of the following, and I offer here a brief summary, by no means comprehensive:
A. There is a loss of a system of values. By this I mean the loss of dominant what political observers called the ‘Liberal consensus’, which was based on certain, rather positive views of the human being. This is no longer viable in our culture. The political tradition which began in the sixteenth century based on individual human value, reason and basic goodness¹ - however naive it might appear now - has almost evaporated. Has liberalism’s doctrine of toleration now drowned in a tide of its own success? At the moment, no one seems to be showing the way, and in times of such crisis, people will be easily led.
B. We are dominated now by the vast power of the ‘market’, which is essentially an illusory social construction. It has to do with language, which, in turn has to do with the quality of society and social grouping within which language is used - our moral communities. Several years ago Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, two sociologists, published an influential book called, The Social Construction of Reality,² a distinctly optimistic vision, partly because of its moral neutrality. Four years ago John R. Searle, a philosopher, published his book The Construction of Social Reality,³ which was implicitly less optimistic. Searle implied that we too quickly become slaves to our own constructs. He was approaching social reality from the perspective of our use of language, especially what has come to be known as ‘speech-act theory’. What this means is simply this: With language we create social and institutional facts by which we live. The chair at the end of meeting states, ‘This meeting is adjourned.’ and a social fact is created. It is based on an utterance, the assumptions of which all present generally agree upon. It is also called ‘performative language’.
What is created is an illusion based on common agreement. We take something and in specific contexts it becomes something else which we value. Searle’s most common example is that we take paper, process it in particular ways, print on it and all agree that it has value. We call that paper money. Now if we can do it with paper, we can do it with other elements as well. Paper money is relatively new in the west. Other cultures use rocks, sea shells, even coconuts or beads as symbols of value. Our culture is shifting from paper money, first to plastic, and now to the invisible electronic impulse flashing through a sliver of silicon. This we declare to be of value. In fact we declare it to be of such value that our stock-markets indices rise and fall at enormous rates, and billions of dollars (our ultimate symbol of value) ‘change hands’ or simply disappear. It is this piece of social magic which has dominated our news channels over the past several weeks. It is as though we are hearing thunderings from Olympus, and fear that the gods are angry because we have not demonstrated our dedication by investing in the right stocks, or remained faithful in times of trouble.
C. Directly relevant to this is the new role that ‘business’ plays in our everyday lives. The term ‘business’ has now come to be such an intrusive part of our vocabulary, and our daily lives that it appears indispensable for all of us. It has taken on the status of a new religion, and has its converts, worshipers, high priests, Theology, temples - even its sects (the day-traders). Like many religions, it is rife with cognitive dissonance. In spite of its appearance of firmness and stability, of hidden, inflexible laws, I find it highly amusing that the demise of one of Canada’s most promising - and at the time, the largest - mining companies was attributed simply to a ‘string of bad luck.’ Did you ever really need to know what the four or five sections of the Globe and Mail tell you about the business world each day? This is symptomatic of a replacement of values.
D. A fourth point of recognition is the development of a new system of values and for lack of anything else, it is centred around accumulation and expansion - collectively known as greed. Globalization is not a new phenomenon. What is new is the way it is accomplished. Legend has it that twenty three hundred years ago Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon, sat down somewhere in the deserts of Persia and wept. He wept, not for the countless dead his campaigns in the east had left in their wake, the innumerable number of women raped and enslaved, the hordes of children left fatherless, the burning cities and destroyed empires. He wept because he knew of no more worlds left to conquer.
It is no accident that throughout the literature of business run the names of the old classical heroes of warfare and conquest who set examples for leadership and accumulation.
E. Accompanying all of these is the loss of the value of ‘human being’. This is experienced in the deep sense of alienation in so many people from the institutions that once nourished them. It is also seen in the debasement of language. And by this I am not talking about poor grammar, but of something far deeper.
Jacques Éllul, in his book The Technological Society⁴ , spoke of ‘the humiliation of the Word’, and by this he did not mean the passing of books, or the decline of role of the Bible in culture. He meant something quite different, and probably more important. It was a lament over the debasement of discourse. Discourse had been displaced by what he called ‘technique’ a belief in the validity, indeed moral superiority of the rational and technical approach to life. Michael Halliday, a sociolinguist, writes well, ‘Language does not consist of sentences; it consists of text, or discourse - the exchange of meanings in interpersonal contexts of one kind or another.’⁵ You see, communication, in its truest form, presupposes, even demands a moral community. The sharing of information - a dominant pastime in the technological age in which we live - does not.
Communication at the latter level quickly becomes decontextualised. But what is more serious, is that it this practice is an (unconscious) admission that the moral community on which it was founded, had collapsed.
F. The other point of recognition which goes along with all of these others is the dominance of a cultural attitude of ‘instrumental activism’. This is the notion of technique which Ellul expounded in his book The Technological Society.⁶ The unfounded belief that we can fix anything. This is seen partly, but importantly, in our use of the language of technology to describe what were once social and community institutions. Medical Arts become Health Sciences. The Body Politic becomes the Social and Political structure, to name but two examples. It is inevitable that our perceptions of life change according to the material we have at our disposal from which to create our metaphors of living. In these cases, industrial, mechanical and technical. But there is more to it than this. Let me quote again from Ellul:
Public opinion...is completely oriented in favour of technique;
only technical phenomena interest the modern [human]. The
machine has made itself the master of the heart and brain both
of the average person and the mob. What excites the crowd?
Performance, whether performance in sports or economic
performance, in reality they are the same thing. Technique
is the instrument of performance. What is important is to go
higher and faster; the object of the performance means little.
The act is sufficient unto itself. The modern person can think
only in terms of figures, and the higher the figures, the
greater the satisfaction. One looks for nothing beyond the
marvelous escape mechanism that technique has allowed,
to offset the very repercussions caused by the life technique forces
one to lead. One is reduced, in the process, to near nullity.⁷
One of the serious side-effects in this scenario, of course, is that with the dominance of technique in the social air, the only problems deemed worth tackling become the technical ones. So all of life becomes reduced to a struggle to overcome our technical shortcomings, not only in the mechanical or material sense, but also in the social sense. Obviously, lost in the shuffle are the spiritual, the emotional problems - unless they can be understood only in terms of technique. Unless we can find a way to fix things, or, unless we can find a way to express our problems in terms of technique, we have failed.
In the light of a recognition of many of these factors, there is a tendency towards de-centralization on the part of non-bureaucrats, or at the very least a growing sense of disatisfaction with centralization. But, strangely enough, all of this is accompanied by an increase of activity from the ‘centre’.
When the storm-clouds began to gather, it was Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act 1, Scene 2), who said:
Brutus would rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
is like to lay upon us.
I suppose that we must remind ourselves that this is always a choice.
II. WHAT QUESTIONS DO WE ASK?
Existing conditions seem not only likely, but depressing, and I can only resort to that overworked word, crisis, to describe what I think the existing conditions are. Now social scientists have studied times of crisis in human experience and can offer us some valuable insights. They construct models of human behaviour. These models are not real in the sense that in every case they will be replicated. They are rather ‘typical’, and helpful ways of looking at situations which do recur. Daniel Bar Tal, an Israeli psychologist and psychiatrist, writes of the ‘Masada Syndrome’.⁸ He was writing of organizations and countries which, at a time of perceived threat (a ‘crisis’), and dominated by a sense of being alone against a hostile world, develop a collective psychological state, almost a pathology, which has serious consequences for the members of that state or society. For example, its language is simplified to reflect a dichotomy between the ‘us’ on the inside, and the ‘them’ on the outside. Within the group, its perceptions are equally simple and members will be willing to sacrifice to unheard of limits for ‘the cause’. Borders, entrances and exits are closely controlled, as are the borders, entrances and exits of its members. The dominant pressure on the inside is one towards conformity.
Victor Turner, a Chicago anthropologist, writes of ‘social dramas’ in his books The Ritual Passage,⁹ and Dramas, Fields and Metaphors¹⁰ . He breaks down human crises into four identifiable stages, [1] the breach, which causes a rift or destabilising of an existing order; [2] the crisis, in which the situation reaches its highest level of stress; [3] the redressive action, or liminal phase in which an assessment of the situation is undertaken and behaviour is modified; and, finally, [4] the reintegration, during which phase a way of living with the crisis is evolved. This might not result in what we as westerners love, a happy ending. In Turner’s analytical model stage three, the time of redressive action, is the most interesting. At such times, the participants in a crisis (‘social drama’) resort to ‘root paradigms of behaviour’, that is, exemplars whom they believe strengthen them through the crisis. Such root paradigms are immediate, and elusive responses to times of social drama, yet they reflect the deepest sense of values in the person or group involved in the drama. Turner goes on to show how Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, realised he would be murdered. So he organized his last days around the Jesus in the Passion story, even to the point of sharing a supper with twelve of his diocesan bishops. His root paradigm was the suffering Christ. Think of the Biblical prophets under challenge and stress - they all begin to sound like Moses. In Lent we reflected on the closing days of Jesus ministry, and through the story comes one image on whom he patterned his end, the Suffering Servant of Isa. 40-55. Now, if this model of understanding has any validity - and it is certainly persuasive - in times of crisis, the question is not so much, ‘What do we do?’ but rather ‘What do we become?’ If we understand ourselves to be in a crisis of some kind, how do we reshape our lives? What root paradigms of behaviour do we adopt? How can we Be?
A Biblical story found in 1 Samuel 8-10, and a familiar one. It is such a good parable! It is the story of the people’s and elders’ request of Samuel for a king. It is a perfect illustration of Turner’s model of social drama. Clearly it involves [1] a breach of an existing order, caused by the incursions of the Philistines into the Hill Country (1 Sam. 1-4). This is a continuation of the story from Judges 13 on; the breach develops into [2] a crisis with the utter defeat of the tribal army at Aphek, and the loss of the Ark of the Covenant; in 1 Sam. 8-10 we are in the stage of [3] redressive action, in which the people and elders are seeking a form of being to deal with the crisis. Their choice is to opt for a ‘root paradigm of behaviour’ in the person of a king - and all that goes with that. This, in turn creates a serious debate between the people, Samuel and God in which [4] the stage of integration is reached. Finally, God and Samuel grant them their request, and suggest they learn to live with the consequences. For them, things will never be the same again.
In this story an entire way of life is changed, from village-centred, clan-oriented, limited good, to the centralization of power in one system, and the control exercised over the whole by that system. In times of such crisis there are always choices, the way of life, and the way of death, as the Bible puts it, and we must learn to tell the difference. From this point on in the Bible there is a judgment hanging over this experiment in kingship, and the final verdict is that it failed.
Now change of course, is important, and we ignore social and cultural change at our peril. But we must be discriminating in how we embrace it. Within a context of change and crisis we always have choices. The most popular is to be like the culture - give us a king, just like the other nations. It is an immediate reaction, and often seems to miss the implications of what it demands. It is a seductive possibility. Somehow, while we were looking elsewhere; while we were absorbed by a variety of problems and issues in the Convention, something has been slipped under the front door - an entire package of organizational changes which accompany our request, and this looks so attractive. In the rush for change and ‘refocusing’ or ‘reorganization’ no one has bothered to stop and ask, Why?
So, in answer to the question What shall/should we be? the answer seems to echo back, The Organizational Human, the Manager. Organizational language now appears where it had no place before - Chief Executive Officer is a term applied to the Leaders of educational institutions (Rather than ‘Principal’ - among scholars). Alongside this general expectation is a more pointed one which affects pastors, counselors and chaplains. The literature that I have read recently puts many of these into the role of a new breed of human being, new to me, that is, until very recently, the Project Manager. Key words now enter our theological vocabulary, like efficiency, progress, goal orientation, purpose-driven, etc. We want a king to fight our battles for us.
Some preliminary observations: [1] this approach to life, the organizational-management approach is based on an understanding of human relationships and the way we live together as a machine; [2] it is therefore antithetical in a fundamental way, to the inner life of the soul; [3] all organizations carry within them the seeds of their own destruction.
Let us look now, briefly at this organizational mentality and its dangers. Its values are evident. Microsoft is efficient, wealthy and big. But this says nothing about its goodness, its humanity or morality, as a recent court decision has demonstrated. In fact, in the final analysis, these notions are irrelevant to its progress. This overview is ‘typical’ in the academic sense. Namely, it presents a model of human behaviour with which understanding is made easier. It does not describe one organization, but a set of behaviours which make up the organizational mentality.
III. ORGANIZATIONAL MENTALITY
A. Description of Organizational Mentality
You must understand that these characteristics are self-definitions, from writers who embrace the organizational mentality, and not its critics. And so, to the ‘ways of the king’ (1 Sam. 8.11).¹¹
1. Organizational mentality involves an all-embracing way of thinking. It is essentially totalitarian in its thinking. From one of the standard text-books on ‘organizational mentality’ comes the following comment:
Organizational Integration is achieved primarily by aligning
and integrating the goals of individuals with the objectives of
the organization...The socialization process achieves
organizational integration by...undoing the individual’s
previously held goals and creating new ones that come
closer to those valued by the organization.¹²
2. Organizational mentality is goal-oriented, and expects its members to be thus inclined: From the perspective of the individual, the socialization process [that is, of the organization] is related to career development.¹³ Further, the authors state:
Whether the goal is to make a profit, provide education, foster
religion, improve health care, put a person on the moon, get
a candidate elected, or build a new football stadium, organizations
get the job done. Organizations are characterized by their
goal-directed behaviour.¹⁴
Now of course, organizations cannot tell you how to be or become except in their own terms. They cannot handle grief, joy, sorrow, pain, or fulfillment. They cannot save. The trouble is that often they think they can.
3. Organizational mentality places efficiency high on its list of values. This hardly needs illustrating, but because of the nature of the beast, an organization that is not efficient, above all else, ceases to be competitive, and is in danger of dying. But efficiency is more than this, it inevitably relates the desired results to the overall costs of the organization’s existence. The balance must always be in favour of the output.
The measures of efficiency include the rate of return on
capital or assets; unit cost, scrappage and waste; downtime;
occupancy rates; and cost per patient, per student or per client.
Measures of efficiency must inevitably be in ratio terms; the
ratios of benefit to cost, output or time are the general forms
of these measures.¹⁵
For fellowship of believers, which is more used to language of service and sacrifice, such a world-view seems alien, and such an implied evaluation of the role of the human in this world is close to obscene.
4. Organizational mentality regards expansion and growth as the desired end of its activity. Within the mythology of the organizational world - which becomes a kind of closed system of values - only those organizations which achieve (as opposed to serve) are honoured, and only those serving organizations which can be subsumed under the credo of the organizational mentality can be understood.
5. Organizational mentality sees the preservation of the organization as its greatest good. Leaders must know how to influence individuals and groups to accept and pursue organizational objectives, often at the expense of personal objectives.¹⁶
6. Organizational mentality regards itself as rational, scientific, objective, therefore true. It even embraces the notion of ‘self-correction’ as a hallmark of its scientific approach to behavioural and management knowledge.¹⁷ One must speculate, According to what standards is the organization ‘corrected’? Certainly not those of morality and self-giving.
B. Immediate Costs of Organizational Mentality
1. The absorption of the human individual. I have already quoted Ellul to the effect that ‘technique’ reduces the individual to a nullity, but again, we must realise that this is part of the organizational culture.¹⁸
2. The inevitable development of a hierarchy. Within the organizational world view there must be someone to tell others what to do. The pedigree and the mythology of the organizational mentality, i.e. the military, demands such a structure.
3. The moral sense is subordinated to political expediency. This is often in the face of what is assumed and said. Organizations, because they are totalitarian in outlook, because they absorb the individual, and think of themselves as so important, think of themselves as moral, whereas they are thoroughly political. They deal with power distribution (usually unequal), and thrive on the achievement of balance between affiliated groups, so that no one is able to destroy the subtle equilibrium within the organization. As with technique, problems become understood and tackled as political problems, rather than moral ones.¹⁹ This I have experienced both on this continent and in Europe.
C. Historical Observation
This Organizational mentality which is based on modern management theory and practice is a relatively new phenomenon. Historians of management techniques have traced it back to the organization of the Pennsylvania Railroad in post-civil war United States. It may come as a surprise to us to learn that by 1869, the largest corporation (and reputedly the most successful) in the world was the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before the expansion of industry in the 19th century ‘organizational management’, if such a thing existed, was the domain of one institution within society, namely the military. This link goes back in history beyond the times of Julius Caesar to Sargon the Great in the third millennium BC, that is, five hundred years before Abraham.
Merchandising (rather than ‘business’) up until the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment period was a matter of personal contacts and influence-peddling. The ‘states’ up until the 18th century were still run as vast domains of patronage, and the treatises written about the state and the running of the state, such as Macchiavelli’s The Prince, dealt primarily with the way to run such organizations based on patronage²⁰ and influence. On the other hand, Macchiavelli’s Art of War was in a tradition going back to Vegetius’s Strategmata, and Polybius’s De Rerum Militarii, which were documents of management and highly skilled organization - but applied only to armies. No one thought of applying such tactics to the state or to business. And certainly no one thought of applying such tactics to government and life of caring communities. This does not come until the mid 20th century. What does happen - and this is common with the adoption of strong conceptual metaphors - is that the state and business become the servants of the military, and the process of militarization takes place. The whole of society then becomes subsumed under one dominant theme. One of the historical ironies of the development of this in societies and countries, was that those who wielded the most power through the introduction of militarization had more to fear from their own subjects than they ever from an enemy.²¹ But, to quote Thomas Paine, ‘A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it the superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable defence of custom.’²² The alternatives to the encouragement of a military, or organizational ethos, is the messier involvement of the whole dhmoß (people). It may not be the most controllable or efficient way to get things done, but it is the most human.
There are conceptual metaphors through which we view reality, and by which we understand reality.²³ They are ways of understanding our lives and our experience of life in pictures, as it were. Life is a struggle, is one such metaphor. The church is an army, is another.²⁴ These foundational metaphors are to be taken seriously. The most immediate effect is upon our language, and by virtue of this language use, on our behaviour. In a recent reaction to the brutal behaviour of members of the Los Angeles Police Department, observers and participants noted that the change in attitude, and hence behaviour, came when the police were told they were in a war on crime. Forms of address, vocabulary, dress, and weapons were thus militarized. Attitudes change dramatically. Perceived ‘enemies’ were dehumanized, and the brutality increased alarmingly. The foundational metaphor of much modern church life is linked to notions of the organization. We are urged to become communities of ‘mission statements’, of ‘goals amd objectives’ (often very unrealistic). The language and attitudes efficiency and management dominate our living together and the literature we are encouraged to read. What we should realise is that this foundational/conceptual metaphor is of very recent construction. It is part the social reality that we have constructed. What we should also realise is that it is not permanent, nor is it inviolable. It can be changed.
IV. DEVELOPMENT OF AN ALTERNATIVE
Granted that we are individuals, how then do we create community? This is something which political thinkers of the 17th and 18th century struggled with as well. Having unleashed the notion of the individual on the world, how do we create workable societies? Both Hobbes and Spinoza shaped forms of ‘commonwealth’ in answer to this question. Quite different forms, as it turned out. Aristotle, in his Politics, had argued that the form of the state followed the patterns of nature. There were those who, by nature, were intended to rule - the land-owning males of Athens. There were those who, by nature, were intended to be ruled - foreigners, slaves and women. Spinoza came to an uneasy form of democracy with the warning that in such a society the commonwealth had more to fear from its own citizens than from its enemies.²⁵ Hobbes reverted to a rigid, centralised hierarchy in his book Leviathan. But this was also the question Rousseau asked in his book The Social Contract, published in 1762.
The problem is to find the form of association which will
defend and protect with the whole common force the person
and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting
himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and be free as
before. (p. 12)
The answer for Rousseau, and later for John Stuart Mill, was to introduce laws aimed at the protection of private property. But this is already based on a division within society of those who own and those who do not.
Let me use a musical parable. In the Gothic period of late medieval Europe, the dominant form of music was the chant, or on the popular level, the ballad. Whether sung by a chorus, or the lone baladeer, this music was one-voiced. All movement in the Gregorian chant is done in concert and almost automatically. Dangerous experiments with polyphony at the end of this period were banned by papal decree. But in the period of the Enlightenment, the individual asserted unique identity. Bach and Zelenka and their contemporaries experimented with an extension of madrigal, and created the fugue, and showed that dissidence did not automatically lead to discord. Dissidence could be accommodated, at least artisticaly. Now, if you listen to the opening ‘Kyrie’ of Mozart’s Mass in C minor, you will perhaps see what was possible artistically in answer to this question. There are in the opening bars at least ten lines of music for different instrumental and human voices. They move into the piece at different intervals like some grand fugue. Every one of those lines of music is different, each has its own voice, yet each contributes to the whole in such a way as to stun the listener with a great harmonic wash of sound. Mozart could do it with his music. The question is, Can we do it with ourselves? Rousseau further stated, the constitution of man is a work of nature...that of the state(or community) is a work of art (p. p. 73 Book 3, ch. xi)
V. COMMUNITY MENTALITY
It seems that in the final analysis, in response to our ‘existing conditions’, we do have a choice. Our ‘root paradign of behaviour’ can be the organizational manager, desperate to put things in order, to strengthen the borders of the organization, control its entrances and exits, and manage those on the inside.
Or, we could seek to create an alternative consciousness. It seems to me we have a choice between systems and civility, between contract or covenant. These choices are put before us not that we may become more efficient, but that we may become something better. In the age of alienation, and dehumanising structures what greater need is there than for communities of caring, for places where trust is fostered. We need to follow that messier path which is littered with the debris of human existence, and to respond to human needs, and to accept the human as we move along it. How would these communities look?
A. They would function at the micro-level - it is at the level of the local group, the Gathered community, and would not be distracted by demands of growth, whether implicit, or explicit. This, I know, is heresy in the modern age. Local groups are not to be regarded as the franchise outlets of the central organization. They can do much more than the central organization could ever dream of doing, and this is not because they are more ‘efficient’. But rather because of the other qualities of the life of faith which they can foster, simply because they are contexts of care and concern. Rousseau was bold enough to state that democracy is impossible in large nation-states. Every extension of the social tie, he states, means its relaxation; and, generally speaking, a small state is stronger in proportion than a great one.²⁶ I would suggest that ‘community’ and ‘fellowship’ - most desirable - are simply not possible with thousands of people.
B. They would operate at the personal, and not the organizational level - In our case, the spiritual and physical welfare of the person, and not the organizational agenda, is pre-eminent. Again, this is something which an organization is unable to conceive let alone do.
C. They would generate their own ethos - and they do. As communities of caring they develop what one writer has creatively called ‘porous borders’ - completely antithetical to the organizational mentality which wants to know who is in and who is out.
D. They would operate at the level of disengagement - I have written extensively on this topic in an article which will be published later this year in a collection of essays from within the Context Group of Biblical scholars²⁷ Although ‘disengagement’ has a negative sound to it - due in part to its growing popular usage in areas like aging, and school drop-outs. It has a very positive side to it as well. It is the right to maintain a critical distance from any and all structures which would stifle its ministry, from those powers which would damage the community by interference and manipulation.