TheMillerCircle.org

For those of us who grew up during the early post WW II America, today’s iteration of our country not only doesn’t feel right, but we have a sense that we have changed the coin of the realm, all for the worse. We can trace the history of our discomfort. It began, as William Pfaff points out, when our model for America started to deviate from a path we thought would last forever. The culture we remember had good paying jobs, a rising middle class,affordable  higher education and expectations of improved living conditions and better income expectations for our children, even going so far as to include a reduced hourly work week. Then the bubble began to burst. Coming out of academic schools of business and economics, but particularly from Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics, with momentum beginning in the 1970s, a new model for America emerged, with a greater emphasis on corporate wealth and profits, using the label “free market economy,” as a code word for giving sway to corporatist ideology. The corporations that used to pride themselves on the “gold watch” for retirees, went through a religious epiphany and converted their highest aspirations to worship at the altar of the “golden parachute” for the CEO and corporate executives. Huge corporate profits became the new coin of the realm, and the stock market soared.  Leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, the savings and loan scandal, the technology bubble and our current fiscal meltdown, did not deter the march towards a country increasingly dominated by the financial sector, in which making lots of money was the new holy grail that emerged, without an appropriate antidote or a diagnostic strategy. No one seemed to question whether the pursuit of wealth was healthy for the country or those that engaged in  it.   Indeed, the pathological state of greed was welcomed as the new model for all Americans: if you feel your middle class lifestyle is shrinking in its benefits, go into the financial service sector and finally make some real money–that was the implicit message of those dragging us into this new direction.  Hedge funds, private equity firms and increasingly larger investment banks could generate huge profits out of small changes in the price of currency or through the securitization of assets, wrapped up in such a way that no one understood them, least of all the CEOs who derived  huge salaries from them. Selling short, a mechanism that didn’t build anything or launch an enterprise, gave unseemly profits that were absurdly easy to generate and, in some cases, created billionaires overnight.

Those in the financial sector who could turn profits with ease, began to view manufacturing as a primitive way of making a living and manufacturing began to decline rapidly, converting good paying workers’ jobs into subsistence employment, with a rapidly fading middle class. Moving manufacturing to other countries provided higher corporate profits with the additional benefit of diminishing the influence of labor unions, as giant companies like Walmart  organized and carried out union-busting practices.  The middle class that rose to prominence through the GI bill and the good paying jobs in the manufacturing sector, proved to be a single generational event and by the late 1990s, people were beginning to talk about a return of America to the “gilded age” of the late 19th Century. During the Bush administration hard numbers about income disparity and excessive profiteering in the financial sector  provided proof of the “Gilded Age” assertion.

So what is it about the need for obscene profits, or money,  that drives people into acts that collectively destroy the social fabric of a country? Writing in the Times, professor Richard Seaford speculates that it was the Greeks who introduced us to money, as they were the first culture known to us which  generated that foreshadowed the current greed state of America.  In Seaford’s book “Money and the Early Greek Mind” (2004), he suggests, that at the end of the seventh century BC, polis, or the city-states of Greece, were the first society in history (with the possible exception of China) to develop and use money; by the end of the 6th century BC, coinage was broadly present throughout Greece.   Thus Greece presents us with its own cultural control for the same folks with and without the cultural impact of  money.

We know today that money is the single most desirable thing we can have and people such as Bernie Madoff will stop at nothing to acquire large sums of  it. If you don’t have much money, you dream about how a sudden sizable sum could solve your desperate financial problems.  The fading middle class of America dreams and invests in lotteries to fulfill the unkept promise of America. Few would disagree that the financial sector of America is infected with nothing less than the desire to make more and more money and use it as a tool for greater and greater influence. It was eventually that way too for the Greeks, but for them, there was an earlier culture that can serve as our control in the precoinage society of Homer (eighth century BC?).  For the Greeks, money generated new behavior and new thinking. The sage Solon and Aristotle commented on the influence of money and the issue surfaces in Aristophanes’ “Wealth,”  a comedy that Seaford argues is the first text on economics. Aristophanes’ work describes the homogenizing influence of money where everything happens for money’s sake as it rises to a state of social omnipotence: one can have enough sex, loaves of bread, music, dessert, or honor, cakes, manliness and so forth, but money is different–you can never have enough. The more money Greeks generated, the more they wanted, as they fell victim to the insidious desire for the never ending quest for more. Every other tangible asset had limits except for money. For the postcoinage Greeks, as for us, lots of money tended to produce a form of self-inflicted isolation, which only intensified the drive to make more money.  Seaford argues that Greek tragedy was impacted by money, with Midas transforming everything he touched into gold. The Greeks also had a myth that may be relevant for us in the time of global climate change (from Seaford’s article): “exploitation of nature produces pathological insatiability, the unlimited need for a source of income that sacrifices the future and self-destruction.”

While the Greeks had money, they didn’t have capitalism. Under the latter system, constant innovation is a precondition for survival and change is a driving force that continuously modifies the culture–the cost of living increase every year is a driving  force reflecting this dynamic quest for money and that alone insures the perpetuity of change, but it shadows in the face of the current hyper-drive for wealth.  With an ever-changing dynamic culture driven by economics and money, our culture is in danger of leaving nothing behind for the ossified fossil record of our social existence. We create few objects of stability and continuity. What will be the antiquity of our culture? Will anyone in the future be able to comprehend it? Aristotle maintained that using money to make money, in contrast to other forms of economic activity, is unlimited and unnatural. Seaford points out that the “unlimitedness” of money acquisition, accelerated by the modern deregulatory changes of the last few decades, has produced a generation whose money-seeking behavior has changed the world and certainly changed the culture of our time. We have destroyed limits and coupled that singular rush with a lack of individual creativity, adopting a herd mentality, driving us to generate wealth and produce the homogenized world the Greeks warned us about,  where buildings look the same, no matter where they are located (Holiday Inns throughout the world). Other “unlimitedness” includes the income difference between the rich and poor, about which we seem helpless to solve, executive salaries and the price of a product now unrelated to its cultural value, as long as it costs a lot more than seems sensible (the price of beer driven by huge advertising costs). The images we see on television, of fabulous cars, beautiful men and women living under exotic circumstances are moments of hyper-reality reflecting the influence of money on our culture. We paint a visual dream state stimulated by what we see on our television sets that can never be realized but serves to fan the flames for more money.

Where we once had limits on wealth (through a progressive  tax schedule), the removal of these limits under Ronald Reagan  has created the world we live in today, where science can be ignored and things as threatening as our own continuity of life on our small blue planet can be set aside in order to pursue more money and make ourselves more isolated. Aristotle said that “bad is of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans surmised, and good is of the limited.” At least the Greeks could comment on the degradation of their culture by money. How far do you think you would get today by warning against making too much money in today’s iteration of America? After all money remains as the holy grail of many Americans, especially those in charge of the financial sector. We grew up in a culture where limits were put on the amount of money one could make–not real limits per se–but limits based on the fact that you could be taxed up to 90% of your wealth if you had enough of it in the 1950s. That taxation on wealth produced limits on money that allowed us to evolve towards a more interesting culture, where one valued education, cultural creativity and intellectual growth. The Socratic method of dialogue had value in arguments and education. It was not that rigid limits were put in place on income, but people desirous of wild wealth had to ask whether the additional effort required to attain it was worth it: many concluded that it wasn’t. And, what did they do in their spare time?  For one thing they read books. Would-be entrepreneurs  thought that if the government was going to get 90% of their extra wealth, why should they bother? I knew people in that era who exactly felt that way. In retrospect, given the conditions we have in our culture today, I view that as a sign of a healthy cultural stabilization–making too much money was bad–look at what the indefatigable pursuit of money got us beforehand–The Great Depression, an event where Americans starved. And here we are today on the threshold of another deep financial crisis. The only people doing well today are those that are picking up where they left off, pursuing their insatiable appetite for money, using new devices such as high frequency trading. Most of the recent huge profits by Goldman Sachs were generated because they had fast computers for trading, a mechanism not available to most investors and another unethical (and hopefully soon to be illegal) device favoring the rich. No one in their right mind trusts Wall Street anymore. Today, in the pursuit of money, those other priorities have been eliminated and massive wealth continues to drive our culture into one of isolationism amongst ourselves.  Robert Scheer, a former financial reporter and now editor of Digg,  points out that Bernie Madoff was not an abberation on Wall Street–he was merely exhibit A–a close friend of the SEC chairman and a founder and chairman of NASDAQ! Madoff merely took advantage of the completely unregulated financial system and, as an insider, he know how to pluck the strings to avoid detection. The sub-prime mortgages that were securitized and sold to buyers, many of whom had no idea what was in them, were also Madoff-like victims, but that kind of fraud is how the modern money changers continue to make money, when in fact, they should be in jail.

America today lives in Aristotle’s state of “unlimitedness” and nowhere is this state of mind more apparent than how we are facing the threat of global climate change and the loss of species. Biologists argue that we are well into the sixth mass extinction, which like global climate change, can be attributed to the activities of Homo sapiens. So far we are unable to deflect our drive to remain in our state of unlimitedness, which speaks essentially about how far our political and social structure has become preoccupied with money, even to the sake of our own survival. But in the postcoinage era of Greece, people killed family members to preserve their wealth. Perhaps the ultra-rich believe they can use their money to formulate a survival plan–so they still need more. Seaford describes how his colleague Gilbert Murray, a professor of Greek at Oxford, gave a radio broadcast after the second World War, in 1953,  in which he attempted to use ancient Greece as an inspiration for a more just future for the world. Although he was pessimistic about Europe at the time, after living through two World Wars in quick succession, he urged support for the high aspirations at work in the modern world where he said “there is waiting across the Atlantic a greater Rome which may at the best establish a true world peace, and will at worst maintain in an ocean of barbarism a large and enduring island of  true Hellenic life.” What was he smoking? We now know that such an optimistic view of America was short-sighted and unattainable. If the Greeks gave us greed for money, we showed them how to put it into hyper-drive!

RFM