If money is now society’s religion, does it then follow that economists are the clergy of the modern age? If so, writer Will Self proclaims himself a heretic.
In her classic work on the social function of taboos, Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote this:
“Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for evaluating worth; ritual standardises 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 specialised type of ritual.”
The equation between a reverence for money and the worshipping of false gods goes back at least as far as the Old Testament, and probably a lot further. But …. continue
