Back Just in Time... For the Decline

It’s been a while since my last posting here at HinterNet... frankly, the pace of domestic (that is, U.S.) and world events have outpaced one’s ability to write intelligently about them. Of course, there has been intelligent writing about everything from the recent elections in the United States to the mess that has come to define the Democratic Republic of Congo. But things are happening too fast to make a lot of cogent predictions or analysis as a whole, perhaps.

But I hope that I’ve come back to this blog just in time... to witness the decline of the world as we know it.

The media tends to embrace if not promote the unsettled, the uncertain, the tragic. This shades one’s analysis and predictions towards the pessimistic. But it is also hard not to be have a very negative view these days, particularly if that view is from the U.S., where this blogger is currently based. Obama’s victory in the U.S. elections may not mean that much in the long perspective — he’s got a lot of problems to deal with right off the bat, and as he himself noted in his victory speech:

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term...”

In other words, don’t expect a miracle. Problems such as the current economic crisis are not “solvable” through the policies of one president, perhaps not even one government. The complexity of the economic crisis, in fact, may elude any “policy-driven” solutions at all.

Which brings us to our topic for today: the economic situation. There’s a lot of talk about “fixing” the economy. There’s also been talk about declines in “growth”. But a detached observer might note (as others have in the past) that constant growth in any system — economic or otherwise — is unrealistic.

But wait, you say — this blog is supposed to be about business and culture! Well, yes, and the current crisis is actually one of culture, not economics. Despite what you may have read in your economics textbook, the “dismal science” is not necessarily based on some kind of eternal “natural law”. Sure, the desire for profit may seem like a basic part of our human makeup. But as the social critic and commentator Alex Schein has noted, no other animal beside the human would amass more than it could sanely consume. That is, tigers eat deer and will hunt deer down for their next meal — but they won’t make a pile of deer carcasses that’s the bigger than their neighbors. Only humans seem to feel the need to have the biggest house on the block, the most cars, the largest collection of shoes. The economics of unbridled acquisitiveness is unnatural.

Again, we have been living in an age of unnatural accumulation of wealth — and there is virtually nothing like that kind of extreme accumulative activity in the natural world. The current economic crisis stems partly from this unnatural behavior we’ve been engaged in.

Again, this blog is about business and culture, and it’s important to understand that what we’re talking about is that the roots of economic decision-making in culture.

To continue with our discussion... Schein also notes that the kind of accumulative activity our culture has been based on is grounded in the artificial construct or assumption that “2 is somehow greater than 1, and 3 is even better, and so on”. This, too, is unnatural, since it leads to a kind of infinite regress, a world where even too much is still not enough. It’s the same culture construct that’s led to such peculiar ideas as “constant growth”.

Then there’s the problem of money. There’s nothing like money in the natural world; that is, in the real world, everything is tangible, readily usable, of clear utility. For animals, there is no money — there are things: things to eat, things for building nests, and so on.

Indeed, no living entity would spend time engaged in pursuing something that essentially, intrinsically has no real value. Of course, money was designed to facilitate exchange and has allowed humans to create a whole world of commerce, at a scale that could never have happened with a barter system.

But in our culture, money — the abstract value of a piece of paper — has taken on a grotesque life of its own. We have absurd ideas such as “net worth”; what does that really mean? Today, it’s not even about what all that accumulated money could purchase or do. In the old days, even in the worse days of the “Gilded Age” of excessive wealth, at least those rich folks did something with their money — they’ve left a legacy of magnificent buildings, for example, that grace the streets of cities like New York and Chicago. But today, being rich is often simply about having the lofty numerical statistics after one’s name. If “net worth” is the key element to modern identity, what happens if you lose your net worth? Do you become “worthless”?

The current crisis in part stems from the problems related to the purchase of houses. When the housing bubble was in its expansion phase, houses quickly and dramatically rose in price and monetary value. But what happened was the commodification of houses: as they rose in monetary value, they became commodities we kept our stuff in, not our homes. Indeed, we knew that this was happening because of the perverted emphasis in the real estate business on the phrase “buying a home” the overuse of that word “home” indicated, in fact, just how much the actual concept of a home had been lost.

Culture, commodification, crisis. Stay tuned...