Corporate Retail and the Winter Tithe
A quick cut-and-paste of a question put to my friends on NewAthens.org.
Monday, 2008-12-15 | New Athens
| "Difficile est saturam non scribere." |
So, Christmas being upon us, I've been reflecting recently on why exactly we tithe.
Tithing is the human habit of paying a meaningful percentage (historically 10%, hence the word) of one's annual income to a group whose decision-making procedures have nothing to do with you. A tithe is different from a tax because a.) the percentage of your annual income is meaningful, but not back-breaking (a tax is, by definition, burdensome) and b.) a tax is compulsory, whereas people tithe voluntarily.
The temptation, since we associate the tithe with the middle ages, is to say that people in the western world tithe because, like the border collie who runs in circles around people because it cannot forget the hundreds of generation of herding instinct imprinted upon its cells, we simply cannot break our Medieval habits.
I don't buy that, however. Mostly I don't buy it because tithing to Mother Church was itself deduced from the descriptions provided in the apostolic books and letters of what we would call communes: long before any pope issued any bull that instructed people to voluntarily pay him approximately 10% of their annual wealth, the great, great, great grandparents of the Evangelists had been tithing to...whom or whatever...in exactly the same loosely-defined manner in which we contemporary Americans pay our annual tithe to Mega Corporate retail.
So the question "whence the tithing instinct", since it can be resolved neither by medievalists nor by gospel scholars, devolves to classicists who, I suspect (but cannot confirm), would pass the buck one step further, into the penumbra of Greek antiquity and on into the reeking blackness of what amounts to pre-history. By which I mean to say, "the question falls to anthropologists."
Which means, for those of you unfamiliar with anthropology and the methods of anthropologists, that the question is up for grabs: whoever comes up with the most germane answer gets the prize.
So why is there this hard-wired tithing instinct? Why are humans (generally) compelled to annual contribute a portion of our income to institutions that exclude us from everything except for their long, dark shadows?