Modern Society Archives - Page 3 of 21

Do The Eloi And Morlocks Trade?

“I grieved to think how brief the dream of human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”

That is the traveler in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Leaping forward in time, the traveler discovers a world in which the pastoral Eloi are living lives of rustic comfort, eating the fruit of the land with nary a bit of toil or sweat. Meanwhile, the terrifying Morlock, using vast machines to provide air to their subterranean lair, venture forth under the cover of darkness to feast on the Eloi.

Wells’ earth of the future is a rather unattractive place. That is, after all, his intention. As is his wont, Wells uses this science fiction tale to moralize about the evil economic system in Britain in 1895. Enraptured by the ideas of the Social Darwinists, Wells’ sets his mind wandering over how both humans and society will evolve in the global survival of the fittest. One of the most well-known socialists of his age, Wells unsurprisingly imagines a future where the lifestyle of the rich become ever more indolent and the wretched poor are gradually forced out of sight into the underground to work the machines. The Morlocks eating the Eloi is little more than a morbid revenge fantasy. A century and a quarter later, it is rather obvious Wells’ Social Darwinist predictions were comically wrong.

He should have known better.

Read the rest at Adam Smith Works

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A Brave New Financial World

How can the Federal Reserve help you today?

A few years ago, such a question would have been rather odd. The Federal Reserve was created a little over a century ago as an independent government agency with a rather small mandate: manage the money supply. It was an important, but limited, role. In normal times, the Fed existed to ensure the money supply grew at a reasonable rate. In times of crisis, the Fed would become the Lender of Last Resort, lending funds to solvent banks to get them through a crisis.

But, times have changed. The Fed, no longer tied to the mast, is here to take your order.

This new world is magnificently described in Lev Menand’s The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis. With impeccable brevity and precision, Menand details how the Fed has abandoned its historical mission, appropriating to itself a new mandate and powers of dubious legality. None of this has been done in secret. Its actions have been front page news, Congress has aided and abetted the unbinding, and as James Pierce noted in 1990, it was all predictable:

“The nation likely will drift into a situation in which its central bank will be expanding its regulatory and safety-net coverage, vainly trying to protect everything in the interest of protecting ‘banks.’ The tremendous power it will come to wield not only will be harmful to the structure of the financial system but also will make the Fed an even more formidable foe to those inside and outside the government who believe that it is too powerful already.”

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

The Tedious Tropic of Cancer

“Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Hi, my name is Jim, and I am an enemy to the human race.

I first heard about the book Tropic of Cancer way back in high school or college when I learned that it was a book that was banned from being imported into the United States because it was obscene. When it was finally published in the United States in 1961, a series of obscenity lawsuits were brought against stores selling it. The lower court rulings were all over the place, the best being (as noted in that ever-valuable resource Wikipedia!) a court opinion in Pennsylvania that Tropic of Cancer is“not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” The US Supreme Court eventually ruled the book was not obscene, so you are now free to read it at will.

I was never tempted to read it.

There I was blissfully unaware that reading this book was in my future, when on a trip to the California Coast with the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator we stumbled upon a quirky place in Big Sur. Right off the highway, there is a sign for The Henry Miller Memorial Library. Having nothing better to do than explore quirky places, we stopped, and discovered it is the Platonic Ideal of quirky places to stop. One part bookstore, one part event space, and one part bizarre art exhibit of that type of art which involves throwing a bunch of random items in a small space and pretending it all means something. (Look a broken typewriter next to a broken piano!) The books for sale aren’t just on shelves; many of them are bagged and hanging on buildings and trees. Describing this place is hopeless. Fortunately, you can visit their website and click on the video which is appropriately amateur-hour in quality and filled with lots of high-falutin voice-overs. Go ahead, and look. I’ll wait until you get back.

Amazingly weird, right? If you are ever in the area, you really need to stop; it is truly worth a bit of time to admire the oddity of the place. Once you are visiting a place like that, you just have to buy a book to bring the visit to fruition and if you are going to buy a book from the Henry Miller Memorial Library, I suppose it really should be Tropic of Cancer. And then once you bought a book to memorialize the visit, it really needs to be read. So, I tossed it on my “Six Books I Have Never Read but I Solemnly Swear to Myself that I Will Read This Year” List.

I have now read Tropic of Cancer so that you don’t have to.

First off, you can freely ignore all that obscenity talk. It is not surprising that once upon a time in these United States a book like this would have been considered obscene. Now? The latest pop fiction thriller has more sex than Tropic of Cancer. Way more. The average rom-com is far more sex-infused that this book. The only way I can imagine anyone thinking this book is particular obscene is if you only approve of sex scenes in which the participants have bathed in the last year. I suppose if you don’t like to see naughty words being tiresomely repeatedly deployed for shock value, the book is also obscene.

Second, you don’t read this book for the plot. A bunch of grungy people hanging out in Paris. Because nobody does anything productive, and alcohol is clearly the primary product need, they sometimes have a hard time getting food or shelter. “Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odor of the germicide stifles me. A pungent, acrid odor that seems to invade every pore of my body.” “’Oh, you,’ says Bessie. ‘You’re just a worn-out satyr. You don’t know the meaning of passion. When you get an erection you think you’re passionate.’” “But about the smell of rancid butter….There are good associations too.” And so on, ad nauseam.

So how does a book like this get Karl Shapiro calling Miller “The Greatest Living Artist” and Bob Dylan listing it among books he really likes and all the other similar accolades from all the Beautiful People?

It’s all about the Author Message. You have to wade through 238 pages of senseless aimless drivel to get to the chapter where Miller unfolds his Theory on Life. That is undoubtedly the chapter which causes all that weak-kneed swooning. It’s deep, man. Really Deep.

Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium.

And this:

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

How much more of this would you, Dear Reader, like to read?

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity—I belong to the earth!

I will give Miller this much: decades before all those 1950s Beat Writers plied their trade, Miller had already perfected the literary style. You can just imagine reading this while strung out on your drug of choice and saying, “Groovy, man. That’s deep. I want to be inhuman too.”

To what end does all this proceed? Miller wants to tell you how important his book is.

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.

Now that is an admirable remark. The book is 318 pages long, and if 317 pages are complete drivel, the book may still be a masterpiece because of that one great page. Surely you are not going to claim that there is nothing in those 318 pages, not a single scrap, fragment, or toenail (??) that is great. You need to read this book for that one great moment, buried deep in this book. Alas, Your Humble Narrator’s mining skills are not refined enough to have uncovered that one great page.

Poor Henry Miller. There is literally nothing in this book that Thoreau didn’t do better, much better, in Walden. There is nothing in this book that ever rises to the poetic heights of Whitman’s best lines. Tropic of Cancer is tired book rehashing Thoreau and Whitman, with a bunch of naughty words tossed in to shock the rubes.

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Hidden Revolutionaries: Tristram Shandy and Adam Smith

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations suffers from a familiarity bias in the modern world. It is difficult to get people excited about a book that explains how the division of labor leads to specialization and trade which then creates immense wealth. The shocking nature of the work is hidden from us because we all see this every day and thus think of it as nothing particularly revolutionary.

A good comparison is provided by Isaac Newton’s Principia. In that book Newton demonstrated that the same force that causes apples to fall from trees to the ground can explain planetary movements around the sun. The shocking nature of this is hard to underestimate. As Alexander Pope described it: “Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night./ God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Newton had turned the entire solar system into a giant machine, following regular laws of behavior. Yet, because everything in it seems so obvious now, few people today are rushing out to read Newton’s work.

In exactly the same way, Smith turned the idea of economic society into a giant machine. It may seem like uncoordinated specialization would lead to total chaos, but there is something akin to an invisible force which induces all the parts to work together into a harmonious whole. Society is not nearly as fractured and disorganized as it first appears.

The reason it is hard for us to see the revolutionary nature of Smith’s insight is that we do not always appreciate how the world looked to people before Adam Smith wrote. In other words, we can all profit from spending some time with Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in nine volumes between 1760 and 1767.

Read the rest at AdamSmithWorks

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How the Fed’s Hubris Has Contributed to Inflation

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

Milton Friedman’s statement from 1970 should not be controversial; if the amount of money goes up faster than the amount of stuff available to buy, then the inevitable result is higher prices.

Yet, to read recent discussions, one would be excused for thinking there is some great mystery surrounding the reason for inflation. I don’t think I have ever seen such a relatively simple issue clouded in so much confusion. The Federal Reserve, unfortunately, has worsened these misconceptions by misrepresenting the relationship between the money supply and overall economic well-being.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

Divided We Stand

I would humbly like to submit the following for your consideration as the new National Motto of these United States:

The Nation is Always in Decline

When was the era when people at the time believed that things were amazing? When was the era when everyone believed that things were as good as could be, that there were no issues of great national disagreement, when peace and happiness prevailed throughout the land?

One of the many advantages of reading Old Books is realizing how contemporary they often feel. Here, for example, are some passages describing the Great Divisions in Modern Society. For each of the four passages below, guess the date in which they were written:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.
Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.
So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.
But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

The above was a trick question. All four passages come from the same source. James Madison wrote all of them in 1787 in issue 10 of The Federalist Papers.

Look again at those four passages and ask which one is not something that people have said about contemporary society in the last year. Take the first one, for example, and see how trivially easy it is to apply each of its parts to modern society:

1. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion,
2. concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice;
3. an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions,
4. have, in turn, divided mankind into parties,
5. inflamed them with mutual animosity,
6. and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

Rather depressing isn’t it?

The solution? Madison again: “There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.”

Look at modern political discourse and there is no doubt which route is the more popular: somehow, some way, everyone seems to want to rid the nation of the causes of faction. We could all get along if only that other side no longer existed or at least if they were just better educated so they would have the right thoughts. Even if we can’t get rid of that other side completely, can’t we just get rid of the most extreme versions?

Madison, once again: “There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” The first of those options is undesirable; the second is impossible.

Madison’s solution was the US Constitution, which we can easily verify has done absolutely nothing to reduce the divisions of society. What the Constitution has done, remarkably well, is keep the nation intact. How? From Federalist 51 (also written by Madison): “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

That idea is absolute genius. If you want to control the effects of the division in the society, make sure that ambitious people will always have the means and opportunity to counteract the ambitions of their opponents.

Division and Strife is a feature, not a bug, of the American political order.

The problem, as one last quotation from Madison makes clear, is human nature: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

So, yes, the divisions in the current world of politics are the worst they have ever been. They are always the worst they have ever been. They always will be the worst they have ever been. Nostalgia is a powerful force making the past seem so much better than it was, but when you read the political documents of those earlier times, it is always quite stunning to realize how contemporary the complaints seem. And, if reading Madison hasn’t convinced you of that, try reading political discussion from 1861.

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