Since it's Sunday, it's worth bringing back a gorgeous little essay recently posted by Andrew Crouch. He takes seriously an idea easy to deride — that Steve Jobs offers a desperate world a faith: the cult of the Mac. Of Apple.
As Crouch says:
As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.
Crouch goes on to quote Jobs speaking about his cancer diagnosis in a famous speech, and, implicitly, about his faith.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Yes, it's an elegant statement — perhaps we shouldn't be surprised! As Crouch says, it is "the gospel of a secular age."
If religion is anything, it is alive today even in the lives of perhaps thirty-million Americans who consider themselves non-religious. Many of those people use Apple products, and buy Apple stock. Some even work for Apple.
We can make fun of the cult of Mac. It is a religion. But as William James, the psychologist and empirist of faith, and the author of Varieties of Religious Experience, said, at the end of the day, we can only judge a religion by its fruits. And Apple's fruits have been very good…
Kit Stolz 