Epitaph for Steve Jobs: Too great to be good?

NEW YORK (RNS) The death of Apple founder and creative genius Steve Jobs has prompted the kind of veneration usually reserved for saints, inspired by his almost religious idealism and the lofty goals he had for technology and himself. Not to mention the flat-out awesomeness of his products. Everything about Apple and Jobs seemed to […]

NEW YORK (RNS) The death of Apple founder and creative genius Steve Jobs has prompted the kind of veneration usually reserved for saints, inspired by his almost religious idealism and the lofty goals he had for technology and himself.

Not to mention the flat-out awesomeness of his products.

Everything about Apple and Jobs seemed to project a religious sensibility, even the hope of redemption. The company logo, as Christian author Andy Crouch wrote in his homage to Jobs, used “the very archetype of human fallenness and failure — the bitten fruit — and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.”


Some have called Jobs “a profound theologian” and a “patron saint of entrepreneurial church leaders.” He was an icon, one said, whose “product introductions were not unlike the pope appearing at his Vatican window to bless his followers on Christmas.”

One Catholic theologian likened him to the founder of Western monasticism, St. Benedict, though Jobs’ most apparent religious connection was to the monastic Buddhism he experienced while traveling in India years ago. To the end, Jobs walked barefoot around the office; at home he lived amid a Zen-like minimalism that he dogmatically incorporated into Apple products.

The cancer that took his life accentuated his monklike bearing, as did his almost clerical dress — a uniform of black turtleneck and jeans, “speaking of a piety and commitment to his purpose,” as one writer put it.

Even the cover of The New Yorker portrays Jobs at the pearly gates, with St. Peter using an iPad to check him in.

Yet not everyone sees him as St. Steve of Silicon Valley. Some commentators quickly noted that Jobs was also so demanding and obsessive in his quest for perfection that he was often described as a “tyrant.” He publicly ridiculed competitors as “bozos,” and many of his own staff were afraid to find themselves riding an elevator with him.

Especially in his early years, he put the company’s success over spending time with his family, and he pushed his own employees to match his sacrifices.

“They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while,” Jobs said in a 2004 interview with Businessweek. “Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be.”


Jobs even disdained the kind of philanthropy that has burnished the reputations of his super-rich peers, like Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. He had no record of charitable giving, believing that his company was enough of a legacy.

“He was a jerk,” Gene Marks wrote at Forbes, adding, with the admiration of a fellow entrepreneur: “Good for him.” Writing at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher praised Jobs as “a creative genius.” But, he said, “in the end, I bet Bill Gates will have proved the better man.”

So was Steve Jobs a saint or a jerk? Maybe it’s not an either/or scenario.

If greatness and goodness are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the history of actual saints (of the canonized variety) offers plenty of tales of holy men and women who were as hard-driving as Jobs and just as brusque.

St. Jerome, for example, the great fourth-century translator of the Bible, was notoriously testy. His disagreement with longtime friend Rufinus over certain points of theology prompted Jerome to say that Rufinus snorted like a pig and walked like a tortoise.

St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, could be withering in his criticism of the men under his command, and St. Catherine of Siena had no qualms about telling off the pope in the strongest terms.


Even Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the modern touchstone for sanctity, could be a sharp-tongued taskmaster. “Is this not a humiliation for you that I, at my age, can take a regular meal and do a full day’s work — and you live with the name of the poor yet enjoy a lazy life?” she wrote to sisters whom she deemed insufficiently industrious.

Ouch.

“That’s like Steve Jobs telling someone the prototype you presented isn’t up to snuff,” said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of “My Life with the Saints.”

“Saints were sometimes difficult people to be around because of their high standards.”

What set Jobs (and the saints) apart from bright-but-flawed stars of sports, entertainment or commerce is that Jobs was obsessed with creating beauty and making the world a better place. If satisfying his impressive ego was part of that drive, his ideals still channeled a missionary impulse, focusing on others rather than on personal enrichment.

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe,” Jobs once said. “We do things where we feel we can make a significant contribution. And our primary goal here is … not to be the biggest or the richest.”

If Jobs’ critics cannot reconcile his greatness with his prickly personality, perhaps it’s because we tend to equate goodness with “niceness,” and being nice with being moral. That makes the easy charge of hypocrisy inevitable because for a genius or a saint, the distance between achievements and personal conduct will always be greater than for ordinary mortals.

Jobs’ devotees face a similar challenge, as they naturally want the man who changed their daily lives so intimately and profoundly to be as good as he was great.


But maybe Apple’s fans ought to be happy with the products Jobs designed, and be glad they didn’t have to work for the great man himself. As they like to say in religious communities, the true martyrs are the ones who have to live with the saints.

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