Why going back to the office is a religious act
Gathering in offices is a relatively recent human activity, writes George Pitcher, but being incorporated is profoundly theological as well as commercial
“What news on the Rialto?” asks Shylock in one of the dodgier scenes in The Merchant of Venice. Dodgy because Antonio’s anti-semitism becomes apparent a few lines later when Shylock reveals the title character has spat on him on the famously beautiful bridge across the Grand Canal.
The Rialto was pretty much brand new when Shakespeare completed the play in 1599. It was where the merchant traders of the Mediterranean gathered to do business and to shoot the breeze. In that sense it was a commodities exchange and, given its porticos and benches, something of a late-medieval serviced office space.
This was how business had been conducted since the ancients. The Egyptian port traders on the Nile would recognise the markets of the Rialto. The Greeks had the agora – the business, social and political centre of its city-states. The Roman forum had the same purpose. Commercial and social exchange were collective, outdoor activities.
It was only the Industrial Revolution of western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and the mass migration of population from rural to urban areas, with the consolidation of capitalism in cities, that created the indoor office for company staff.
Three or four centuries later, we’re asking what offices are for. The worldwide lockdowns of the past year’s pandemic has formalised working from home, to the extent that it has spawned its own acronym: WFH. But technology has been undermining the commercial office space for three decades.
Conscious that it’s vulgar to quote one’s own books, I hesitate (only momentarily, mind) to note that I wrote a chapter in one called The Death of Spin in 2003, titled “What are companies for?”, in which I alluded to the historical social purpose of the office:
… to provide identity and purpose for the individual and, most specifically, [be] a place for men to go during daylight hours, in uniform, to play displacement war games and latterly for women to find a post-liberation fulfilment beyond the rearing of children (ditto the uniform).
That was written shortly after the dot-com boom-and-bust and, for a while, the commuting population returned to working in phallocentric towers in places such as the City, Docklands, Frankfurt and New York. Now, 20 years on, an enforced absence is raising irresistible questions again as to why we should need to dress up and go to a high-rent hi-rise to perform professional or trade functions.
An aberration
But powerful voices seek to quell dissent from the old order. Merchant bank colossus Goldman Sachs’ CEO, David Solomon, last week called remote working an “aberration”:
“I do think for a business like ours, which is an innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture, this is not ideal for us. And it’s not a new normal. It’s an aberration that we’re going to correct as soon as possible.”
And prime minister Boris Johnson chimed in shortly afterwards to talk down the new normal of Zoom, Teams and Meets, “or what have you”:
“I don’t believe it. Not for a moment. In a few short months, if all goes to plan, we in the UK are going to be reopening our economy. And then, believe me, the British people will be consumed once again with their desire for the genuine face-to-face meeting that makes all the difference to the deal or whatever it is.”
The former sounds like vested interest – have we checked Goldman’s commercial property portfolio lately? - if not a sentimental attachment to its dystopian praetorium in London’s Fleet Street blocks that used to accommodate the Telegraph and Express newspapers. The latter sounds like a failure of imagination and a wistful yearning to have somewhere to go to escape wives and children.
And yet… There is a sense in which being collective provides a sense of self-identity that transcends a simple brand name and a professional practice. It goes beyond the simply tribal – a lawyer seeking the company of other like-minded lawyers. There is something ontological about office life and, as such, something religious.
Religious buildings have historically performed the role of defining the being of their attendees. Not for nothing have synagogues been more than places of worship. The Hebrew etymology points to “house of assembly”. While they are consecrated places of prayer and for the reading of the Tanakh, the entire Hebrew Bible of which the Torah forms a part, synagogues are not necessary for Jewish worship, which can happen wherever 10 Jews (a minyan) assemble.
Otherwise, they can be food halls with kosher kitchens, schools and libraries and day centres for the elderly and infirm. In short, the synagogue is a locus in which to be socially and culturally, as well as religiously, identified as a Jew.
For Christians, churches have rather squandered their medieval roles as communal hubs, in favour of Sunday worship. There is little need for the rood-screens now, which used to separate the chancel from a nave that could be used for livestock shelter and trading. But the role of collective assembly is deep-rooted in Christian theology.
Throughout Pauline epistolic theology runs the corporeal theme of the body of the risen Christ, of which confessing disciples are members. This means that the Church doesn’t come together just as a commune of worship, but as the presence of the living Christ in the world. And it’s the act of communion that re-members that broken body for its real presence in the world.
That is centrally why the act of interpreting last year’s first lock-down as a lock-up amounted to an abomination on the part of the Church’s senior leadership. Mealy-mouthing that we were “finding new ways to be church”, while live-streaming from a kitchen, is spectacularly to miss the point of the core purpose of collective gathering, which every time it happens is a resurrection.
Incorporation in Christ
And the commercial world borrows from the sacramental. That Pauline theology speaks of our Incorporation in Christ – we are, literally (and the theology means that), the corporate presence of Christ. The linguistics should not be lost on us: Companies are incorporated and so they have no meaning beyond the human resource that they congregate. Alternatively, if they are not “incorporating” they cease to exist (just as a church does).
There is a danger to imputing religious meaning to what, in the secular sense, we call corporate life. Too many of us worship (and sacrifice) at false altars – there is an idolatry inherent in those temples to Mammon that rise in cities’ financial districts. It is precisely the worship of money, or the profit motive over the prophetic, that is the root of evil, rather than the currencies themselves.
But any form of collective incorporation is arguably healthier than the kind of individualism that arose out of the Enlightenment from thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Social Contract and which became formalised into economic policy by Milton Friedman and then released with, yes, religious fervour by latterday politicians such as Margaret Thatcher.
So a return to offices this summer, on crowded commuter trains, may not simply serve the interests of commercial property portfolios and politicians trying to kick-start the economy. It may also serve a deeper human economy, one which prospers most fruitfully when it incorporates.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.