NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER, JAN.26, 2003

Do I ideas matter? Of course they do. But we don’t usually think about ideas mattering to the business bottom line, profit and loss. Marjorie Cooper, a professor of marketing at Baylor University, recently showed that arcane philosophical ideas actually have cash value. Or perhaps I should say, cash costs. Prof. Cooper lists some of the core post-modern ideas and asks, how do post-modern ideas show up in business practice, and how do they affect the bottom line?

You’ve heard of the post-modernists, of course. These are the people who don’t believe in categories such as truth, goodness or beauty. These moral relativists perfected the brilliant rhetorical device of scare quotes: quotation marks around a word to scare people away from using the word. Truth, in post-modern hands, becomes "truth." There is no "real" truth, just your truth, my truth and Larry King Live’s truth. We’re supposed to snicker whenever anybody says "beauty," because we all know that "beauty" is just a word with no objective meaning. A Shakespeare sonnet is no more beautiful than the latest rap "music" "lyrics"; Monet’s waterlillies are no more beautiful than the latest modern "art" "painting." And "good," well, you can kiss that one good-bye.

The only category post-modernists truly respect is Power. Language is a "weapon of violence" used by those in power to impose their will on others, according to Michel Foucault, one of the "bright lights" in the post-modern "intellectual" firmament. Whoever has the power, defines the categories. Post-modernists dream of the day when they and their leftist allies can obtain enough power to strip words of their bourgeouis "meanings." Then and only then, can words be redefined in the service of "justice" for the "oppressed" and "marginalized." The power struggle is the only thing that is "real," and obtaining political power allows the "good guys" to create "legitimate" meanings. In this way, post-modernism provides both justification and motivation for power lust.

Anyhow, Marjorie Cooper, being a professor of a phillistine subject like marketing is not convinced by this new-fangled "philosophy." She points out that one concrete consequence of post-modernism is that people no longer have categories with which to think. If you can’t classify things as good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, it is hard to make sense of the world. Putting things into boxes labelled, "good for me" or "good, provisionally, until something better comes along" is not the same as putting them in boxes labelled Good. The post-modernists know this, but try to pretend this only brings about the desirable results of moral humilty and personal tolerance.

Well, Miss Marjorie isn’t having any of that. Like a good bottom line kind of person, she asks herself, does the loss of categories of thought have any impact on profit and loss for business?

She cites numerous studies that have attempted to estimate the costs of internal fraud, including employee theft. Someone unsympathetic with business might claim that defrauding businesses isn’t a big deal. Maybe the employees believe they are creating their own system of just wages. After all, one man’s "fraud" is another man’s "justice."

But when an employee helps himself to the firm’s assets, more than the bottom line suffers. So do the other employees, the firm’s consumers and the firm’s stockholders. Just so you know this isn’t chump change, research estimates the annual cost of internal fraud to be somewhere between the annual GDP of Bulgaria ($50 billion) and the GDP of Taiwan ($400 billion)! That’s an awful lot of money to write off with scare quotes.

She traces an even more troubling problem to post-modernism: a loss of cause and effect thinking. As you can see from the many scare quotes in previous paragraphs, it is difficult to think clearly without some categories of thought. If every category is fluid, and open to redefinition at all times, it is difficult to even formulate a coherent thought, much less develop a course of action.

But business people have to act, make plans, and evaluate their successes and failures. Prof. Cooper reports on research suggesting that many people in business have lost the ability to do even the most elementary cause and effect thinking. For instance, one of the best documented causes of poor executive decision-making, is the problem of managers rushing to judgement. She asks the very provocative question, why do so many highly trained people behave so foolishly. (Don’t worry. This is an actual quotation, not a post-modern scare tactic.) "Does it never occur to them to do the analysis needed to make good decisions?"

Another cause of failed decisions is very simple: managers make decisions based on failure-prone tactics. She cites research showing that many managers make the same mistakes over and over again. They evidently do not learn from mistakes. This is the most basic kind of cost from losing cause and effect thinking.

Post-modern philosophers, safely esconced in their ivory towers, do not have to be accountable to anyone for the harm their ideas might cause. Not so in the rough and tumble world of business. Lying to yourself and others, refusing to think clearly: these behaviors have real costs.

Of course, there is another, simpler way to look at it. Post-modernist rubbish produces deliberate self-deception, lying, cheating and stealing. These behaviors cost businesses plenty of money. We could just observe what generations of natural law thinkers, inside and outside of the Church have always taught: sin is not cost-effective.

Someday, when the post-modern rubble has finally been cleared away by clear thinking, our children will be astonished that anyone could have ever doubted it.