Wednesday, September 26, 2012

On Teachers

There is much that has been said and written about teachers and teaching. And although much of it is complete rubbish, at least from my never modest point of view, it is certainly reasonable to argue that, despite the essential nature of the need to continue training our upcoming generations of citizens, there are still significant flaws of a systemic kind in the institution of School, which will ensure that folks will continue to hold forth, for the worse and, on the odd occasion, for the better, about teachers and teaching.
            No matter what anyone says, though, there are two things that remain absolutely bedrock true in my experience of the world: 1) Teachers are amazing people; and the village that raised me was populated by such as these; and 2) I was never a very good student, by everybody’s standards.

When I was growing up in the burbs of the US east coast, our next-door neighbors were the T… family, first generation immigrants from Greece who spoke English poorly, but who had a work ethic and a desire to succeed second to none. I remember that my parents left for work every morning around 6:30 or 7:00 am, so getting myself ready for school was typically given over to my own Self-motivation, which is even nowadays a somewhat dicey affair. It was predictable, then, that somewhere around the age of 10-11 a morning came where my own S-m (motivation of the self-starting sort) was not au rendezvous, and I decided in a moment of youthful existential enthusiasm that on that day I would not be going to school, which was about a 15-20 minute walk from the house. So, following an apparent (and certainly at that time unbeknownst to me) telephonic colloquium and collaboration between my stepmother and our neighbor, who was clearly ratting me out on the telephone behind my back, believe it or not, Mrs. T, the Greek immigrant neighbor with the poor English, came over to our house, came in the kitchen door, and threatened, in her version of English, to paddle me if I did not get my S-m into gear and hie my hinter hence (literally translated = get my butt on the road) to school! And then, in the face of my still struggling and clearly underwhelmed Self-motivation, she proceeded to provide the external power source for this wanna-be self-affirming 10 year-old—she grabbed me by the ear and marched me the entire way to school, by the ear, even sitting me down in my classroom chair!
            Now some folks might have some reservations about this manner of motivating young people to get their schooling, but I am still thankful to this simple immigrant lady, to Mrs. T, because she valued education enough to make us both get uncomfortably involved in mine that morning. She did not take any guff off of a snot-nosed 10 year-old throwing a temper tantrum. For my modestly educated immigrant neighbor it was education first, last, and always… tantrums, if tantrums there must be, come after school.

Our other neighbor, from across the street, was Mrs. B…, my English teacher in the 6th grade. I remember to this day how her classroom was laid out – there was a blackboard to the front and to the side of the classroom, the opposite side was a bank of windows, and the cloakroom was at the back of the room. (The classroom geography is significant to this memory!). My desk was right at the front of the room, next to the teacher’s desk, so she could “keep an eye on me” (apparently I was a sometimes distracted kid…). Anyway… Mrs. B… was at the side board showing us how to diagram prepositional phrases (Really…!), and I obviously was not paying any attention whatsoever. In fact, I was actually looking, with my head resting on my hand (you know that ‘bored kid’ posture), in exactly the other direction, at two things: Inside there were Debbie’s 6th grade legs; and framing those juvenile legs were the bank of windows, which were drawing me toward the Outside, where the bells of Freedom were busy ringing for the rest of the world. At some point during my grammar-hour musings, Mrs. B…, finally perceiving that I was (as usual) paying more attention to Debbie’s legs and beyond than to otherwise undoubtedly fascinating prepositional phrases and sentence diagrams, actually threw the rather compact grammar book at the back of my head from across the room. What really sticks in my mind, though, is that her aim was right on the money—she absolutely nailed me with that book on the first shot, then sent me off to stand in the cloak-room!
            I spent more time in Mrs. B…’s cloak-room (the old-school equivalent to modern time-out) than in her English classroom. Yet I have grown up to torture my own university students with disobliging reflections about dangling participles and split infinitives in their academic writing, and I know that several of my former students of ancient Greek have never fully recovered from being forced to diagram their sentences on the white board in Greek, in order to learn that Meaning derives from functions of language, which are not at all magical, but grammatical.

Several years after graduating high school I was very surprised to discover that one of my high school teachers, whom I had had for only one class—and that was a Typing class to boot (--how much interaction does a student actually have with the Typing teacher, after all?!), absolutely “got” me. He had written in my class evaluation that, while I was bright enough on the whole, in classes that did not interest me I would only do the barest minimum of work to get by with a passing grade. Somehow, magically, this one-time teacher of mine had seen the ‘pattern’ of student-me—that I only did well in classes that interested me. Frankly, that pattern has not changed a whit in all these years.
            My high school Typing teacher correctly (and very perceptively) saw that my pre-Nietzschean Will was at work in the process of my education; because although most of the classes in the curriculum I had to take were compulsory, I still refused to engage my full efforts in subjects that had no interest for me, compulsory or not. As I reconstruct through my adult eyes this teacher’s vision of younger-me, it seems that he must have seen a perfectly regulated hot or cold student – ‘A’s and ‘C’s… nothing in between. Judging myself by what I remember of my efforts and interests, I am of course interpreting my high school ‘B’s as simply ‘C’s gone wrong.

My high school PE teachers, who were also our athletic coaches, and most of whom were ex-US marine corps, really saved my hash in high school. I absolutely know this. I was not a punk or delinquent, nor a bad kid, just an unsupervised and therefore undirected source of vital energy. And my high school PE teachers took the initiative to direct that energy into sports—both in school and after school. But they also instilled in us the sense of an old-timey military code of honor… that we were to conduct ourselves well, honorably, because we had become role models for the younger ones. Not only were we scholar-athletes, but we were in training to become America’s future defenders… we were the next generation of the brave and the free. My high school PE teachers did not leave me the leisure, materially or morally, to go off and diffuse all my energy into ‘trouble’, which, as I look back, was actually quite a likely possibility.

These teachers of my memory were simply people; they had problems and private lives, just like everyone else. But these teaching-people were in our neighborhood, they were our neighbors, they were the guardian angels of our village who lived in our village; and, although most of them were not intimate friends of my family and never would become so, all of them watched over all of us. All of them were involved, day-by-day, every day, in the job of training up America’s next generations in the way they should go.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

On Faith in God; or, The Character of God…

Let us suppose, for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of it, that it were possible to reflect on things such as God and the Gods without facing accusations of being an atheist or some other sort of evil human being. This is not simply a theoretical question of possibility, nor a Straw Man, because I was once invited to participate in a formal Public Debate with a church pastor, who absolutely assured me, a university professor of Ethics, that it was impossible to be moral without also believing in God. His insinuation, of course, was unmistakable—that because I challenge the traditional ideas about God, I cannot be moral; but he only strongly implied this during the Debate, so I deduced that some sense of common decency must have been keeping him from just shouting out in this public venue that I was an infidel and destined to burn in the lowest fires of where-ever….! This church pastor was in fact arguing for a world in which any Human Reflection, when pointed toward the Idea of God, is and should be considered an immoral act!

Anyway… our present Reflection on the character of God and the Gods is ‘immoral’ in precisely this way. In the sense of our church pastor, though, I am probably even a worse infidel than one who simply questions whether He/She/It/They exist—such questions hold little interest for me at this point because, at the end of the day, conversations about the existence of things invisible, such as souls and demons, gods and angels, are conventionally typecast and therefore wearying in their predictability. Rather, I think I must be for my church pastor an infidel of an entirely more pernicious sort, which is due, I am sure, to a Nietzschean sensibility deeply rooted in my education; because I dare to wonder (in an Aristotelian kind of way) about one of the ‘accouterments’ that has long been associated with religious thinking—about one of the qualities of character that has been traditionally wrapped around the Concept of Deity—about Duty. The conventional conversation revolves around man’s duty to God; but my wonder is whether Gods have any Obligation to the world of men? Do Gods have a sense of Duty vis-à-vis men?

It is amazing to me how much our respect for the Idea of God has diminished since the High Middle Ages. The Idea of the new-world God, the One which is articulated for the ‘three great monotheistic religions’, and which we have conceptually identified as titular Supreme Being of the modern world, is both pampered and immoral, and therefore ultimately unsatisfying.
We pamper this new-world God-Idea in that we refuse systematically to make him carry the burden or blame for any of the ‘bad stuff’ that happens in the world, i.e., disasters, devastating illnesses, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, great storms, and other formidable crisis-events of nature. Religious thinkers, in a twist of sophistry worthy of the great Scholastic-era pedants, like generally to blame such events on the Evil One, thereby blaming One invisible ‘critter’ and acquitting Another. It is obviously too difficult for a simple philosopher and infidel to tell the difference between all these invisible ‘critters’… For the run-of-the-mill, generally thoughtful but not necessarily religious kinds of thinker, though, who have learned to ‘secularize’ natural events, we seem to have acquired the populist knack of thinking of men as Nietzschean camels – as beasts of burden; and our burden is to lug around on our metaphorical backs the ‘bad stuff that happens in the world’ as moralized baggage—the world is become a morality tale, a day-time soap opera replete with the eternal questions: what did you learn from this crisis that happened to you? what from that? I guess that will teach me to…! Every moment of our time spent in the new-world is a teaching/learning moment, because we are functionally alone to walk through the days of our lives. If we can- will- are not able to detect the Hand of God (either the good One or the bad One) in the world, thus tracing the causal burden to He/She/It/They, and if we do not learn some point of moral edification from the events and circumstances of our own life, then we will be left with simply having to endure in complete ignorance and impotence the ‘bad stuff’ that happens to us.
We have also morally neutered this new-world God, making Him, finally, immoral. There is no moral accountability that we attach to this Creature-Idea we have named God; so “It” can use all the resources of knowledge, the unfathomable power of the world and all the planetary systems, to move and manipulate the world of men without giving Itself away.  Unlimited power and no need to render accounts, and still It fails to indicate clearly to Men either what It wishes to achieve with all the Sound and the Fury unchained on this planet, or what the more general game plan is for Men and this their world. In this respect, the new-world God is significantly inferior, both conceptually and morally, to the old-world pagan conception of God and the Gods.

In 468 B.C. a lyric poet named Bacchylides, nephew of the very famous poet, Simonides, wrote a splendid celebratory ode (Epinicia 3) for Hiero tyrannos on the occasion of his chariot-race victory in the Olympic games. By way of honoring this King Hiero, Bacchylides tells the story of another, former great king, called King Croesus. It is this Croesus story ‘behind’ the Hiero story that is relevant to our present reflection; because like this victorious Hiero of Syracuse, the historical Croesus of Lydia was both a princely contributor to the temple of Apollo in Delphi, and he was also clearly rewarded by the Gods in exchange for his generous support of the temple. In other words, we learn in this story that the old-world pagan Gods, Zeus and Apollo to be precise, actually reach out to and reward really and truly the pious conduct of Croesus, who has been an active supporter of the Apollonian temple. There is the premise of a fundamental duty-based reciprocity from Gods to men.
            In the story, Bacchylides tells us of Croesus and of the fall of his empire, Lydia. We learn that Zeus had destined Sardis (a city located in Lydia) to be captured by the Persian army, and that instead of waiting patiently for himself and his family to be captured and lead into slavery by the Persians, King Croesus had a great pyre built up in front of his palace; and climbing up upon the pyre with his ‘inconsolably weeping’ wife and daughters, Croesus orders a slave to kindle the wooden structure. But even as the slave is setting spark to kindle, Croesus has not yet finished with the God; for he lifts his hands and his voice to the ‘steep’ heavens and bitterly ‘screams’ at the God, specifically Apollo, about His personal failure to uphold justice in the relationship between Himself and this pious king, i.e., the ‘I got your back and you got my back’ sort of justice—(the Greek is lovely, and you can download Greek fonts here for free): Ὑπέρβιε δαῖμον, ποῦ θεῶν ἐστιν χάρις? (Hyperbie daimon, pou theon estin charis?). Of course, the narrow bond of obligation between Apollo and Croesus also bespeaks the broader duty-bound relationship between Gods and men, not just from men to Gods, but more importantly in the light of this reflection, from Gods to men.
            So ode-ifies Bacchylides: “‘Outrageous deity, where is the thanks (recognition of duty or obligation) from the gods? Where is lord Apollo? [40] …What was hated is loved. To die is sweetest.’ So Croesus spoke, and he bid the slave with the delicate step to kindle the wooden structure. […] But when the flashing force of terrible fire began to shoot through the wood, [55] Zeus set a dark rain-cloud over it, and began to quench the golden flame. Nothing is unbelievable which is brought about by the gods' ambition.”
            Now what is exactly happening here in this story? Croesus holds that Apollo, the God, has a debt toward him, a man, because this man had not only recognized his debt toward the temple of the God, but he had always been faithful to pay that debt. Unfortunately the story goes that Apollo was off busy somewhere else, perhaps neglecting other faithful supporters, so in a deus-ex-machina moment, Zeus steps in with his dark rain-cloud and saves the day. Then, says Bacchylides, after Zeus has squared the justice issue, Apollo finally decides to show up, “and brings the old man to live among the Hyperboreans, [60] along with his slender-ankled daughters, because of his piety, since of all mortals he sent the greatest gifts to holy Pytho.”

The old-world idea that the Gods have a duty-bound obligation to men is not limited to the pagan Greek poets, however, but can also be also found in the Hebrew Bible, for example in Psalm 82. In this intriguing Psalm, Asaph gives us something rather unique in the history of poetic literature—a job description for Gods.
            The narrator begins by setting the song-plot: God takes his place in the council of the Gods in order to pass judgment. In this song it is clear that the Judging God is displeased with His divine Companions, and so He asks them a fairly blunt (some might say, blatantly ill-mannered) question: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?” Not dissimilar to the neglectful Apollo of Bacchylides’ ode, these Canaanite Gods are clearly not very nice either, or else They have just had a very poor work ethic. It is at this point in the song that the Judging God delivers Himself of the ‘job description’ for Gods in Their relationships with men, which has four parts.
1.     “Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
2.     maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
3.     Rescue the weak and the needy;
4.     deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Then the Judge proceeds to remind the heavenly Cohort that although they are Gods (verse 6), and children of the Most High, if They do not want to ‘do the God-job’, then, He says to Them, “you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.” This One imagines no reward for a (God-)job poorly done.

Those days are long gone when a man could understand and respect the Idea of a Self-respecting God—a God with character. Instead, in our world-become-modern all we have to play with is an anemic cardboard cut-out character/caricature Deity; and this One is never far from His band of earthly authoritarians, who are neither Gods that they should understand the generous nature of the job (per Asaph), nor respectful of the type of duty-bound obligations that once bound Gods to men and vice-versa (per Bacchylides).
            The only way to demonstrate that the titular Supreme Being of the modern imagination is not a God of the pampered and immoral cardboard cut-out sort, and therefore not inferior to the old pagan conception of God and the Gods, would perhaps be to do the following…

·      Every time something bad happens to us, let us ‘scream’ out at God and put the blame squarely at His feet. We should then look for a black rain cloud to pass over and put out the fire.
o   Nota Bene: Bring your own watering can just in case.
·      For the vulnerable and defenseless, let them raise their hands to the sky and ‘scream’ out at God, and remind Him that He has a responsibility toward us men to protect and defend, for we wander the world in darkness. We should then look to be hidden in a cleft in the rocks.
o   Nota Bene: Wear climbing shoes and bring your own ropes.
·      Let us remind ourselves that God is in the business of looking after our interests, if we have looked after His interests.
·      Let us hold God accountable for the things, great and small, that are good and evil in the world.

If this does not persuade us of the emptiness in our ‘steep’ heavens, then nothing will.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

On Masks.


 

We are often told, or perhaps we just overhear it in other’s conversations, that we should just try to be ourselves, that this is what is really important in Life. But what precisely is this Self that is me, which everyone says we should be?


Private Man and Public Man. It is an obvious entry into our reflection to consider that, generally speaking, there are two MEs wandering around the world. (Good Grief! As if ONE of me weren’t enough…). Anyway… to the great dismay of many, there are actually two meandering MEs. There is the Me that fusses around the house fixing reluctantly flushing toilets, and using rather colorful language to encourage the reluctance away; the Me that sings silly, not to say completely inane ditties to the dog and the wife (albeit not necessarily always in that order); the Me that wanders around the house, bewhiskered and hair hirsute, clad in warm flannel-y house pants with black & white polar bears on them … thinking about some book in hand or muttering about things I’ve forgotten to do. This is the Me at home, the Me that is not for public consumption, the Private Man.
Then there is the Me that stands in front of the classroom correctly shoed (for the most part anyway) and trousered (the polar-bear pants become a wishful and wistful Distant Thought…); the shaved version of Me that has generally managed to put some orderliness to hair; that uses more formal language to convey more formal concepts to rapt audiences of youthful disciples of philosophy (this may actually be the Me-in-a-dream variation of Me); the Me that saves the silly ditties for the more appropriate private and therefore captive audience. This is the Civic Me, the Me for public consumption, the Public Man.
So, at the very least, there is one same individuum, but two masks, two personae.

Self (le soi/moi, das Selbst). Amidst this growing collection of apparent Selves, I am mindful that I have somewhere asked the (for me) rhetorical question: “what is man if not himself a nexus drifting toward forgetfulness, if not himself an elusive apparition in the time continuum… a junction of converging lifecurrents?” So for the sheer playfulness of it, let us pretend for a moment that, behind the Masks, both Public and Private, I am/have no fixed Self, no immutable and stable ‘thing’ that is just simply Me, no real ‘thing’ or ‘essence’ that corresponds to the idea of Who, when I am asked to respond to the question, ‘Who do you think you are?”
In reality, this question is rather tricky to answer. It would not be accurate to say that I am trying to find my ‘center’, as we used to say in the days of Nietzsche-inspired hippy-ism—the (conceptual) center does not hold here for Self; so it is neither truly, nor even metaphorically, possible for me to get ‘centered’. Nor is it truthful for me to say that I am the Sum of my days (the clear end-times of my own personal History), but rather, that each fleeting day is making its own particular little contribution to each of my preceding days. For there does not seem to be any fixed or permanent underpinning to Me that collects and stockpiles all my days together in one place, but rather just a flowing transience that is the Me-locus (location, geography) where events happen, for a very brief while, in terms of this Me. And while it is undeniably true that there is this Body-locus, which right now lives and teaches philosophy in this place, it is equally accurate to affirm that I am more than the simple material presence of my body parts in this time and in this space.
There is also another element of Me, which lives within the apertures of my body—a rather mysterious and complex Mental Persona, yet a third mask, a psychological vitality called Mind. This Mind-Me is the interpreter of the world that is rushing into Body-Me, non-stop, through the data-collecting tools that are my Skin, Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Mouth; it is the Mind-Me that endlessly organizes the information collected by my body, that shows Me ways of making sense of my passage through space and time and the continuum of the World of Men, and that translates and thus transforms inchoate and muddled information into choate meaning.

It is certainly true, for the most part, to say that an infant begins its life as a rather passive ‘knowledge-gathering animal’, accepting all the randomness of information that comes its way. This is the way education happens for the very young and the young. However, as the child grows in knowledge and understanding, discernment and judgment follow on the heels of information; and the child learns to separate out (aus-legen for readers of German hermeneutics) among the pieces of the world and among the shards of interpretation that have been fed to him – the child begins to grow into an awareness of the shifting and transient ‘edges’ of a self/not-self sort, it begins to lay out and knit together the first interlaces in its own personal weave. This marks the beginnings of the child’s move toward autonomy, independence, and personal freedom—toward it-self. In the process of child-becoming-adult, educators normally expect a certain degree of “seeing” to begin taking place – of a partial but ever-increasing understanding about where an individual’s personal weave can fit into the greater tapestry of the entire world that is given to us. ‘You “see”, don’t you?’ is really a loaded question; and Nietzsche was right to see in us, in the creation of Self, the work of an artist. So in its most fulfilled and authentic form (existentially speaking), a human life is the creation of Self as Life-Art.

Nouns and Verbs. Reflecting upon a murky idea found in the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, one of Nietzsche’s later contributions to the Great Conversation of Ideas is that individuals should continually strive, each and every day, to think themselves into creation. Now while it is accurate to say that we derive the initial contours of our-Self from the particular cultural soup into which we are plunged at birth, and which gives us the rudiments of language, relationships, and values, that soup does not determine finally who we ‘are’ nor who we ‘can be’ through our becoming. Who we can be in the world flows out of continual acts of our own willing and doing; and the Self we create is both measured by and limited by, the strength of our desire to sculpt our-Selves into an Image that we dream or envision. This is the psychological import of Nietzsche’s Will to Power – and this Willing lies at the heart of our own personal Affirmation of our-Self. So it is more helpful as well as more accurate philosophically speaking, to understand our-Self not as Noun-idea, as some substantive, fixed ‘thing’ that is some-Thing in and of it-self, but rather as Verb-process, as active and doing—as striving and struggling to be truly Quick (a verbal idea, as in ‘the quick and the dead’) in all the minutes of our days, paying attention to create our-Selves dynamically beautiful during each of the days that attend us.
It is also Nietzsche’s contention that in the individual’s creation of its personal weave pattern, there is no room to incorporate materially into our design the various tag-along creatures left-over from our western mythological heritage, such as the Soul or the Un- or Sub-conscious, not because philosophers think to disprove their existence (some do, others do not), but rather because such creatures, and whether or not they truly exist, are finally irrelevant to the living-out of our days. Obviously, we may believe all the things we wish about things mythological; but all our beliefs do not change either the uncompromising reality concerning the fleeting seconds of our life, the sheer insubstantiality of each of the days through which we journey, or the absolute incumbency that rests with each individual to do the job of creating himself by himself. The reality surrounding our ‘situation’ is quite down-to-earth: if I do not create my-Self, then a self at the heart of this fleeting shape of Me will not be quickened into existence; and this version of Me will never experience the flight of creation into the beauty of Life-Art. At the end of such a body-life, because the labor of weaving a personal and therefore substantial and quickening history into a work of art has been neglected, there will be nothing more significant than a dead body in the casket; and the Greater Art-history of Men will be the poorer for it. More is the pity.

Hide and Seek. Finally, in addition to de- and con-fining purposes, masks are also for hiding. In the study of ancient philosophy, for instance, Socrates is the de facto mask behind which Plato hides himself. This has created untold confusion in Plato studies, because Socrates is the protagonist that Plato puts on stage; and yet it is only with the greatest difficulty that philosophers make their arguments trying to separate Socrates the philosopher, and his individual thought, from Plato the philosopher and his individual thought—or is Plato’s Socrates really just the vocal platform for Plato’s own ideas? Quite messy stuff all in all; but it makes all the more pertinent the high questions of philosophy: What is real about the world? And how do I fit into that picture?

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Predators of a Moneyed Sort

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson after him, former US presidents both (2nd and 3rd respectively), were committed to the idea of educating all the citizens of the young United States, because they were persuaded that the more general diffusion of learning would have the effect of fragmenting political and social power, which always seems, when seen through History’s prism, to want to coagulate around wealth and birthright. On September 15, 1813 John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that by the broad dissemination of learning, “Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts (Jefferson Correspondence, Vol. XIII, p. 400).”
            A little earlier in the same letter (XIII, p. 375) Adams also expresses sympathy with the following sentiment: “The conclusion of the whole [speaking of an anonymous work that Adams had received] is that an aristocracy of bank paper is as bad as the nobility of France or England. I most assuredly will not controvert this point with this man.”
            So we are reflecting on two ideas – 1) that We the People, of philosophical necessity, must dare to darken the corridors of knowledge and learning so that Power cannot not just simply be passed down according to Wealth and Inheritance; and 2) that an Aristocracy of finances is no different from any notion of Old World Nobility – both are exceptionalist (read neo-conservatively = elitist), neither is naturally committed to the philosophical idea of We the People, and neither concept of aristocracy is based on Intrinsic Merit. The aristoi (the best) in this sense are not necessarily the best in virtue nor in personal achievement nor in excellence, but are rather those who control the Wealth.

At this moment of our incursion into History, it would seem that the metaphors are mixing anew—because, as others have once said, in this best of times and worst of times that we are busy with, a very deep philosophical Winter of our discontent is settling in for the long haul. Our Times, currently, are being made toxic by a steady climate of financial (and other) warfare and woe. Now I do not wish to diminish any sort of human suffering, but a Karl Marx would suggest that economic imbalance and woe has been the hallmark of human exchange ever since the first cave-fellow started bartering with his neighbor. According to Marx, Injustice was born the day one cave-fellow decided to overcharge the other because of some odd notion whereby one believes that over and above the material parity (and therefore fairness or justice) in the exchange, one also has some inalienable right to an additional ‘added value’, which we add on additionally, arbitrarily, to the basic or inherent value of an item. We call this additionally added-on value, profit. Marx was pretty persuaded that, in the end, both parties left the bartering table winterfied in discontent, because by paying more than the real or actual worth of the item (i.e., the item + the additionally added-on value or profit), each bartering cave-fellow pretty much thought that he had gotten the short end of the stick in the deal—that the deal was therefore no deal. This, in turn, engendered in both parties at least the psychological sense of personal devalue or insufficiency, even if perhaps not the material presence of any lack.
In the news we regularly hear about the European nations that are in economic difficulty. Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, of course, are in dire straights; and the language of bankruptcy and the withdrawal of Greece from the Euro zone is on all the media lips. There was a collective “Ça, alors!” from the French when France’s S&P note was downgraded, then the media pundits floated the possibility that Germany’s credit rating was maybe, perhaps, potentially, and possibly being threatened with a downgrade (GASP! or OMG! for the younger philosophers)—all was a-flutter & a-twitter for the coterie of bankers and financers, because it actually became imaginable that Germany might not perhaps be as ‘sound’ an investment, at this juncture, as it was Tuesday morning last! What a relief when S&P changed their mind!
But what does all this mean to the Phrontisterion philosopher who is gazing at this world (apparently) coming apart at the seams? Our media journalists tell us in the flood of news concerning the woes of these European countries that a downgrade in their S&P note means that the cost for them to borrow money from banks and other financial institutions is going to increase. So, the more dismal a country’s financial troubles become, the more it gets to pay in interest costs (i.e., profits) the Princes of Finance to borrow the money to get out of the hole—the deeper the hole, the happier and wealthier become the Princes of Finance…and the crankier it seems, which in turn drives up the borrowing rates! The Logic of Money seems to be fundamentally emotional – because the cost of borrowing money increases as one’s need for that money increases. As was suggested above (talking about cave-fellows), this situation is not new. By way of anecdote, I remember reading in some interminable history on the Wars of France that one of the French kings, who was busy trying to get on with the business of waging war with the Dutch on his northern borders, had to keep leaving the battlefield to go back to Paris for meetings (and dinners!) because some financier, from whom he was borrowing money to pay his soldiers and to keep his canonniers in shot and powder, did not think the king’s S&P rating was keen enough to keep lending against the increases in the price of shot and powder. Voilà a simple example of kings of countries bending the knee to princes of finance in the name of supply and demand economics.

My problem with this situation is philosophical in nature, because, although I generally keep my own financial house in order, it is evident from this analysis that I must not be a very insightful economist; for I cannot find a reasonable defense for Predation of this sort. Now the principle at work in this type of logic is obviously Predation, and it is a Predation that goes straight for the jugular vein. Scenario One: Greece has no particular economic woes, but just needs a little regular jingle in the pocket to keep the Hinges of State lubricated (her S&P rating is high); so Bankers and Investors lend money cheaply. Stately Pockets are a-jingle, Bankers and Investors are making profits from the interests on their loans – everyone is happy.
            Scenario Two: Greece has significant economic difficulties (for any and all possible reasons, so her credit rating is downgraded), and the Hinges of State are rusted completely closed; so although Bankers and Investors continue to agree to lend money (albeit under increasing duress), they significantly boost their lending rates and shorten repayment times. Let’s pretend I’m Greece, and let’s do the math. I have a BIG debt [debt-1] because I am a big thing called a State and I have to pay for all the state employees like police and military, in addition to all my infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, metros, buses, public buildings, hospitals, museums, airports, ships, etc. I don’t have quite enough jingle in my coffers to cover all my immediate BIG debt payments and costs, because things get more and more expensive as we go along, so I borrow money to cover that debt (which means I acquire debt-2 to make the payments on debt-1); but I now also have to pay interest on debt-2, which means that while I still have the equivalent of debt-1 (although d-1 is now paid off by the acquisition of debt-2), I must now also pay whatever higher interest the Bankers and Investors are requiring for the borrowing of debt-2.  So I now have d-2 + high interest rates.
One learns from uncritical Bright-Lights of the media that the justification for the higher interest on debt-2 is that, in Scenario Two, Greece has less ‘credibility’ because it has significant liquidity problems (and isn’t it just so obvious that Greece has no collateral to guarantee its debt!), and therefore has to keep borrowing additional money to pay its debtors. The Lenders and Investors have become skeptical that Greece will actually be able to pay back its full debt (d-2 + higher interest rates + additional short-term loans, etc.), either entirely or on time (this explains the cyclical downgrade of the S&P rating), a skepticism that is otherwise well-justified because these same Lenders and Investors did the math before lending to Greece, and they know that the interest payment alone for Greece, not to speak of the debt itself, is phenomenal, and pretty much beyond the possibility of repayment by mere mortals, even though they be such as these illustrious Guardians of Olympus.

So what have we learned from this philosopher’s doing of the math? One: he should not quit his day job. Two: the Lenders and Investors always make money, and they are making a ton of money in this situation – we must not forget that, for such as these, Interest equals Profit, including for those Lenders and Investors who are presently speculating on the successes and failures of the various European states. Three: that the more money Lenders and Investors lend and invest (whose money is this anyway?), and therefore the more profit they make, the grumpier they become and the more they charge for lending and investing. Four: that Lenders and Investors do not seem to be interested in Big Ideas, neither in the idea of working out the kinks in a Democracy, nor in the idea of the Greek State, nor even in the more complex idea of whether this particular incarnation of Greece fails or succeeds as a national entity. These Lenders and Investors are interested only in guaranteeing good returns on their investments. Five: that Lenders and Investors consider themselves above and beyond the interests of ordinary men and states.

And, finally, Six: that in the world of ideas the philosophes of America’s youth, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, have lost this battle for an idea—soundly. The American Revolution of the 18th century had its fifteen minutes in the Light of men’s Reason thanks to the Founding Fathers; the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, although still on life support in some places, is in America mostly just resting on its laurels under some shade tree; and Wall Street financialization, the Tacit Revolution of the 20th century, has carried the day, chucking out on its way the ideas and principles of Old Glory’s philosophes while We the People forgot to pay attention. We are become a Nation of philosophical Foundlings, for while We the People were out working hard trying to scratch out a living, the –cracy of the People was exchanged for a –cracy of the Pluts.
In our version of a brave New World, Wealth has come to trump Education; and the Aristocracy of bank paper in which we live, breathe, and have our being is, in truth, no different from the nobility of Old Europe – it is neither committed to the philosophical idea of We the People, nor even interested in personal virtue, or personal achievement, or personal excellence. So the winner is: Wealth, and its devotees who harvest and consume the fruit of other men’s labor.

Is it still time for We the People of the United States of America to charm these new Financial Aristocrats back into the safely of our philosophical keep? Or is that page of America’s history forever turned?