Distractions by Martin Royackers SJ, Volume 14 #1

My Neat, Ordered and Manageable World

I have no RRSPs, insurance policies, credit cards, or even personal chequing accounts. For some years Revenue Canada had my name and was sending me income tax forms, but they eventually stopped after I simply wrote zero under the income category and mailed the forms back, well before April 30. Belonging to a religious order has its perks.

However, I have lost my innocence. We are establishing marketing cooperatives for several farming communities here in Jamaica and, for a variety of reasons, their books ended up in chaos. With a feeling of some self-sacrifice, I undertook to teach myself our computer accounting program and discover the mysteries of bank reconciliations, balance sheets and accounts receivable.

I know people who love doing books, who seem to be born to be accountants or managers or MBAs, and I have looked at them with the same supercilious incomprehension with which Mr. Thoreau looked at his neighbours in Concord. But I have been seduced. Whatever virtue may have accrued to my past ignorance is gone. I tasted the apple, or in this case the IBM clone with its accounting program, and I liked it.

Delving into the co-ops' accounts transported me into a new and cleaner universe and made me realize how messy the world outside is. Inside the computer program, the world is neat, ordered and manageable. The world outside is a network of interpersonal relationships fraught with conflict, misunderstanding and emotion. Other people are unpredictable. Even we ourselves are unpredictable. Who can tell when one will be seized by anger, love, boredom, shame? The human condition consists of a grabbag of vain dreams, impure motives and quiet desperation, and seems seldom to move in any direction but a circle. In fact, clear direction or purpose seems to be notably absent from the universe as a whole. Progress is a comforting theory with little empirical support.

But in front of the computer screen, I no longer wonder about the meaning of life. A man's income must exceed his expenses, or what's a heaven for? I generate daily, monthly and quarterly reports, detailing profit and loss, assets and liabilities, cash inflows and outflows. And they all have a bottom line. The vague existential anxiety that religious people call the hope of salvation has no place in the world of accounts. If the bottom line is not what it should be, we'll raise prices, lower costs or eliminate waste that crept in under past gentler and less efficient management. Enervating doubts about the goal and value of my life are gone. A profit gladdens my heart, and a loss inspires me to greater zeal.

My little cybercosm elevates me above the discomforts of interpersonal existence. Other people are now bytes of memory to be manipulated, evaluated and classified. They may persist in living their messy lives in the virtual reality of the flesh, but I know their accounts are in order and their cheques reconciled.

Now that I have become a manager, my prayers tend to be a little more perfunctory. Once they are finished, I run over the day's accounts in my mind, wondering if there are untapped markets, or whether we are overpaying the labourers. I have probably become a little more abrupt with people, who insist on obtruding their petty personal problems into the important business of making a profit. Now I can look down with condescension on those naïfs who don't understand the real world. I have finally become a citizen of modernity.

Is this how Adam felt? When he ate of the tree of knowledge, did he become, for one glorious moment, a manager? Did he experience the exhilaration of knowing reality not as an oppressive mystery but as a controllable set of data and figures? True, things turned out badly for Adam, but that was before the managers inherited the earth.

Now I have reached another crossroads. The accounts are all in perfect order, the co-ops are making a small profit, and a new manager is being hired--young, cleancut and hopefully as zealous as I. It will be a wrench to give up the job. I have toyed with the thought of continuing in my new direction and living my life in harmony with the world around me. Many clergy rise to high positions by virtue of a zest for administering accounts. But hard as it is, I think I will give up management. What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

While I somewhat regret my loss of innocence, which like virginity can't be regained, on the whole I am grateful for my belated experience of the modern world. I will be able to respond with wisdom and compassion the next time somebody comes to me and says, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have been a manager." For I have had to say the same thing myself.

Martin Royackers SJ works in a rural development project in Annotto Bay, Jamaica. He was Compass's managing editor from 1990 to 1994 and is now its Jamaica correspondent.