Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Doubtful mandarins ...

... Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse.

You can draw up a list of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Lak-shmi Mittal – and there’s not an MBA between them.

Yet the MBA industry continues to grow, and business schools provide vital income to academic institutions: 500,000 people around the world now graduate each year with an MBA, 150,000 of those in the United States, creating their own management class within global business.

On another note, hasn't anyone actually read Revelation?

3 comments:

  1. Overlooking the seemingly ironic segue between the article focusing on the outlook for MBAs and your question about reading Revelation, I would offer some random thoughts in the form of four comments with questions (but I would add the caveat that my creative misreading of what you have asked may be to blame for my comments):
    (1) Too many people claim to have read Revelation (along with the rest of the Holy Bible). How many really have read it? (See comment #2 below.)
    (2) Too many people offer too many different interpretations of Revelation. Does anyone really believe that Revelation can be accurately interpreted? (See comment #4 below.)
    (3) Too many people with secular humanist mindsets appropriate tidbits from Revelation for their own purposes? Do these people appreciate the delicious irony of their appropriation of apocalyptic diction? (This question is less rhetorical, which means the overwhelming evidence is against the possibility that they have embraced or understood the irony.)
    (4) Too much in Revelation remains completely incomprehensible to me (and, for that matter, so does much of William Blake's The Four Zoas and other longer works, but I digress too much). I rather suspect that I will not "get" the message of Revelation until it comes to me quite after the fact, and that kind of belated comprehension might be of little use to me.
    Well, those are some random thoughts on your question about Revelation. (You will note that I cannot get too worked up about the plight of MBAs because I rather suspect something larger and more problematic ought to be our focus, though I am amused by the article's author's political spin on the problem.)

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  2. I have read Revelation - more than once,actually. But that was many years ago when I was studying theology. I liked it and I think your comparison of it to Blake is quite apt. I think one just reads books like that and doesn;t try to figure them out. You just bask in the imagery as it were and live, for a time, in a strange visionary world. Though you do take something away with you, that stays with you always.

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  3. Yes, reading such texts leaves me with an ineffable emotional and intellectual experience. If I were more of a thoroughly convinced believer (instead of a hopeful though impressed skeptic) I might think of the Revelation and Blake reading experiences as analogous to personally encountering God, which I expect would also be inexplicable though not particularly dramatic (i.e., I'm not expecting any sort of burning bush event). By the way, I am absolutely convinced that Blake--notwithstanding his madness and his genius--was regularly in contact with the God.

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