During the course of a rather spirited email exchange on the topic of the current Occupy protests, a philanthropy colleague of mine simply and firmly stated: “US banks nuked our economy.” My colleague made this statement as a way of saying that this core truth was to a large extent animating the Occupy protests. (Witness the fact that a celebrity chef recently compared US banks to WWII-era despotic leaders.) On first blush my colleague’s statement seemed very densely packed to me. Because of its density I’ve had to sit with it for several days. I guess I was hoping that it would simply unpack itself if I waited long enough. Well, the wait was worth it because I think a bit of unpacking has indeed taken place. This post is an attempt to capture (as best as possible) this unpacking process.
What first came out of this “suitcase” for me was this thought: “Man, banks are being portrayed as real monsters.” I began wondering if over the course of time others have not made similar statements along the lines of:
- Banks have stoned our economy
- Banks have sling and arrowed our economy (with apologies to the Bard)
- Banks have powder kegged our economy
- Banks have dynamited our economy
Maybe in the not-too-distant future we’ll hear people saying, “Banks hydrogen fuel celled our economy.” I wonder what Jesus muttered to himself as he threw the moneychangers out of the Temple.
All this to say that banks—or some form of banks—have been around since the beginning of history. Heck, they may have been around even before that. Did not many of the writings contained within Sumerian clay tablets (going back as far as the 26th century BC) in essence represent inventory or bank ledgers?
I began wondering about this bank—monster—societal destruction pattern across time. My free association took me to a book I read several years ago by Elaine Graham entitled Representations of the Post/Human—Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (2002, Rutgers University Press). Graham’s book so captured my imagination that I took the time to write an executive summary (use the Contact Us link above to request a copy). Graham talks about how there have been monsters across the ages. The monster (or other) really is an archetypal figure. Whereas the monster archetype is atemporal and universal, the monster figure proper has to be manifested temporally and locally. This leads to a monster genealogy if you will. Graham goes into the genealogy of the monster in her book in some detail. As an example, she points to the golem legend of ancient Jewish faith as an early version of the Frankenstein myth. “As with Frankenstein’s creature,” so says Graham, “the golem’s shifting identity shows forth the fault lines between the things culture has chosen to call persons and those it calls machines. Here’s Graham’s simple genealogy of the golem tradition:
- Ancient golem = reflections on the origins of the universe
- Medieval golem = reflections on the workings of automata
- Modern golem = reflections on what it means to be human within multiple contexts: national identity, religious identity, psychological self, cyborgism, human as machine, transhumanism, technoenchantment, etc.
So, taking our cue from Graham, lets assume that modern-day banks (mainly here in the US, but possibly abroad) are some form of golem, some form of monster, some form of other. If we accept this assumption then what possibly could this monstrous presence tell us?
The presence of the monster accomplishes two things simultaneously: 1) it shows us the boundary between what society takes to be human and what society takes to be inhuman, that is to say, the machine, or the robot, or the cyborg, and, 2) it tends to indicate that this boundary has been transgressed in some way. The monster simultaneously shows us the problem, that is to say, the transgression, and the solution, that is to say, a point in the future when the transgression has become a normal part of the societal fabric. Cultural cognitive mappers such as Graham, and the research team of Laszlo, Artigiani, Combs and Csányi (see their book Changing Visions—Human Cognitive Maps: Past, Present, and Future (1996, Praeger)) look for the presence of monsters or others as a way of mapping out these shifting boundaries separating the human from the machine.
I’m currently reading a fascinating book by the neurologist Elkhonon Goldberg entitled The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World (2009, Oxford University Press). At about the two-thirds point, Goldberg has this to say:
We are entering an unprecedented era in the development of human society ruled overwhelmingly by information processing. Bill Gates refers to this as the advent of the knowledge-based society. As we move into the twenty-first century and beyond, the attributes of social attractiveness will reflect the prerequisites of success in an increasingly information-driven society. Sharp will be beautiful. Being perceived as “dumb” will be more socially damning than being perceived as “ugly.” In this [newly emerging] social context, any credible approach to the preservation of cognitive well-being will be met with a public sense of approval and urgency.
Goldberg is in effect talking about the shift from an economy dominated by back workers to an economy dominated by brainworkers. Many others have discussed this topic. As examples, see Jeremy Rifkin’s prophetic book End of Work (1995, Tarcher Penguin) (executive summary available), or Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002, Basic Books). In his book The Trap (2007, Henry Holt & Co.), Daniel Brook uses Mickey Klaus’ book The End of Equality as a backdrop when he tell us:
Inequality is dangerous for social and political reasons…. As Franklin Roosevelt and Justice Brandeis explained, when inequality grows too great, individual freedom and even democracy itself are imperiled.
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But there’s no need to catalogue the merits of a more egalitarian economy, Klaus concludes, since equality is just not possible anymore [in this newly emerging information-driven society]. While only 30 percent of American jobs require a college degree, Klaus dismisses the prospect that we could make the remaining 70 percent pay a living wage. Klaus explains, “For an American autoworker, a strong back was once a valuable attribute,” but today only “brainworkers” can demand decent wages.
[This led to President Clinton’s] prescription: create more brainworkers. “You want to reverse income inequality in this country,” Clinton said in a 1994 speech, “there is an education premium, and we had better give it to every American who is willing to take it. That is the only way to do it.” While this rhetoric sounds compassionate, it is little different from Reagan redefining poverty as a personal shame rather than a national one. Clinton’s rhetoric subtly shifted responsibility for inequality from society to the individual.
Citing the work of economist James K. Galbraith, Brook calls the above what it is: “lottery liberalism.” Brook simply states, “[G]iving out more lottery tickets—college degrees—simply means creating more losers.”
So, I would suggest that the monster is now among us as a way of demarcating the back worker from the brainworker in an “unprecedented era in the development of human society ruled overwhelmingly by information processing” (quoting Goldberg from above).
David Anderegg talks about the above topic in his book Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them (2007, Penguin) (executive summary available). Anderegg argues that nerds (like Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jerry Yang of Yahoo.com fame) are being scapegoated and bullied, and, as a result, are being turned into monsters. Consider this excerpt from my summary of Anderegg’s book:
Anderegg mentions that nerd-bashing can be looked at as “avenging the family honor: Making [nerds] miserable now … because they will end up billionaires later anyway.” According to Anderegg, many anti-nerd families express anger as a way of covering up the anxiety they feel over whether they can keep up with the demands of a workplace that is becoming more and more technologically sophisticated. “For people who do not enjoy precision,” writes Anderegg, “the temptation is always there to pathologize people who do.”
Bottom line: people are attacking the nerd, the monster, the brainworker because they themselves are worried—with good reason—that they will not be able to make the jump to an economy focused on information processing. As the above authors point out—Rifkin, Brook, Florida, and Anderegg—there simply are not enough brainworker jobs to go around. And now that the US competes with brainworkers from all over the world, the pot of available brainworker jobs continues to shrink. To pull a concept from petroleum geology, we have hit “peak back” (at least in most developed nations) and we are on a down-slope ride. Sure, we’ll hit a “back worker reserve” from time to time, but ultimately we will have to go through the painful process of moving over to a brainworker economy. I would suggest that focusing on the monster and not what the monster represents is a process of denial in an otherwise painful mourning process: mourning the loss of a back worker economy and going through the economic and psychological carnage such a loss will inevitably bring. Will we successfully go through the other stages of mourning and ultimately normalize the monster? hard to say. I would suggest that this process may take many years—perhaps two or three generations out.
At the least, if my attempts here at cultural cognitive mapping are even roughly correct, such crude maps should allow us to begin the process of locating the anger expressed by the statement “US banks destroyed our economy” within a grief framework, an overall process, I would argue, that has the potential to bring about understanding, insight, and planning. I do not have any solutions but maybe this unpacking process will start the discussion. I do agree with Rifkin when he says in End of Work that the not-for-profit sector (along with its social economy) has the largest potential to soak up the growing reserve of un- or underemployment. And I do agree with Brook: simply handing out college degree lottery tickets (a ticket that happens to be very costly these days) is not the answer. And who knows what monsters lurk just up ahead. Maybe we’ll hear someone emphatically state: “The One World Order Bank neutrinoed our world economy.”
Postscript: As I prepared to post this blog entry, I finished the book by Goldberg mentioned above—The New Executive Brain. In the epilogue, Goldberg suggests that as the individual mind develops, so too the social mind. This parallel leads to interesting conclusions. I’ll end with the example contained in this excerpt from Goldberg’s book:
The transition from the thalamic [e.g., the mid-brain regions of the brain] to the cortical principles of cerebral organization parallels the transition from the macronational to the microregional pattern of social organization as elements of a global network. In this analogy, the nationstates are moudules—autonomous, relatively self-contained entities with interactions regimented and restricted to institutional channels.
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Microunits based on strictly economic factors and interrelated through the flows of trade, finance, and communications may emerge as a different type of unit of the evolving new order. This is the conclusion reached by Kenchi Ohmae in The End of the Nation State. The proliferation of multinational corporations promotes this type of organization. The evolution of the brain teaches us the lesson that a high degree of complexity cannot be handled by rigidly organized systems.
