When Useless Meets Useful

This post has nothing to do with Australia, except perhaps a title--and the liberal arts, for which we are in Australia. The post rather comes from the rich landscape of Conversations with Dad. My parents are here visiting and my dad and I have had chances to spend hours talking.

Today he was reading to me from Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. The author, Michael Lewis, writes with clarity and delightful anecdote about the world economic crash-and-burns after 2008. We started out laughing from the belly about some of the anecdotes: the Greek monks from Mt. Athos who found a deed in their cellars to a worthless lake, and traded it shrewdly for government property, making a total of something like 2 billion dollars; the Ireland of the middle 2000s in which the Irish investment bankers decided to sell each other Ireland; the Ireland full of investors not willing to listen to anyone who warned them of the bubble and the insane bank loans; the Icelandic fishermen who left an industry that fed the nation and all became investment bankers, buying up pieces of Europe with bubble-money...not to mention what was going on in the Giant Speculation Bubble that was the U.S. Of course the U.S. did it all on a huge scale, like the food portions in Bob's Big Boy restaurants...a far cry from the 'moral people who can sustain a democracy' that De Tocqueville saw in his American travels, people one can still find in small towns in Minnesota and Wyoming, the people who are quietly footing part of the bill for the bust.

Ireland as a political entity, perhaps in an interesting flip on cultural stereotypes, was 'more honest' about the whole thing, Lewis claims. "In the U.S., the big shots got richer as the banks went down; in Ireland, the big shots went down with the banks."

Then we got serious, leaving the Asterix-level cultural funnies, and wondered about what would cause an economic world 'built on nothing firmer than people's expectations' or 'the belief that one can bring the future into the present.'

I have often, since childhood, looking out the window of our car as we passed through different countries, mysterious in their infrastructure, wondered how it all went together. It seemed overwhelming, inexplicable...as business and economics has always seemed to me. I prefer the things that are ascertainable to a single human--like a farm, or a gunmaker, or a florist, or a writer. I have a deep aversion to big systems that are too hard for one person, or one village, to understand, much less have any say about. I am a distributionist by nature, not by education.

Some old friends once assuaged some of my anxiety as I looked at the huge oil rigs off the coast of Santa Barbara, up close from a kayak. We were surfing the waves created by the huge things, but they frightened me. I was told, "A single person can't encompass, or understand, let alone make systems like this...it takes a community of some sort."

Yes, systems, large and small, are built by human community. The largeness might be fine if we weren't ignoring original sin. The systems built in smaller communities, at one time, could be held accountable by the aunts down the street, or the priest in the village church, or the mullah, or the families--to some extent. Sin, the hedging of morals, has always destroyed much of what was built by honest people over centuries. What happens when you have dishonest, shrewd monks? What happens when the 'respectable members of communities' are busily, quietly, wrestling money from the old people in the town?

And as the systems get larger, and less attached to real commodities (like fish or wheat or clothes spun for one's neighbors, or the things freely given by God to evil and good alike, the things God asked Adam to mix his sweat with as a prescriptive for his sin) the ability and temptation to hedge on one's moral accountability to the community becomes overwhelming. When Google is one of the wealthiest, largest companies in the world, our communities are built on nothing firmer than electrical currents traveling in the air, nothing more than people's virtual expectations making money...and how does a community of human beings hold each other accountable when that community (Google, for instance) is comprised of billions of people? It seems just too easy for one to imagine a back door through which an Enronesque thief or even a shadow-controller could easily slip.

I asked my dad, as we talked about the Ireland Bank Bust as an nuclear-bomb-level example of the Emperor's New Clothes, and the Icelandic fishermen-become-bankers, what the whole thing is built on..."What's the bottom of the food chain?" I asked, looking for the plankton of human economics.

"Wheat, oil, water..."

Basic things, but perhaps there is something more basic, I wondered. I thought of how the busts came from duplicity and greed; of how Ireland went from a healthy economy to a disaster in a matter of a couple of years; of how Greek doctors were all somehow making, for tax evasion purposes, twelve thousand euros a year and beauticians in Greece were taking higher pensions for 'dangerous occupation.' These countries had wheat, so to speak. They had a form of health for the common good, where culture can be built and that fruitful leisure can exist that made Troy a legend in the world of barbaric megarons, the culture that creates not only beauty but also invents good products and saves lives. What were they missing on a large scale, in the most important economic and political offices in Dublin and Athens? It seems to me that they were missing moral people, people who were both moral and who could think and speak well, who could see fearlessly the big and true picture.

Yes, the most important commodity in this post-bust world, in a world that is barreling towards giant systems, global systems that are harder and harder to hold accountable, are people who can be trusted, people who can think critically and philosophically see the ends of human activities, of human beings, and can articulate these ends. They are people whose rhetoric is honest and built on truth, and effective, people wise as serpents but with the heart for the common good. They are not neo-cons working towards American hegemony or Greek monks working towards a lavish meal in the back of the monastery, or investment bankers listening only to their own desires, and thinking a la Edward Bernays that greed somehow helps the economy.

They are not specialists at heart, but use specialties they gain to work for the common good. They are not modern dualists who think that the material world can be separated in a radical way morally, spiritually, or practically, from theological and philosophical truth, from the lessons in Austen and Dostoyevski.

The greatest commodity, the most useful element of the next few decades, is truly the generations of young people who are formed and educated to think liberally--which has, ironically, paradoxically, at its heart an end that is intransitive--where the end is not like 'the carpenter planes the wood' but rather 'the rose blooms.' When the human good is made an end, you get good humans--and they, in the end, are the most useful of all.