After the Future

Belief and Cash Value

I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately. I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because of its open-endedness, its aptness for the way we actually live and think about the world. It's somewhat simplistic to say that for James 'truth' is what works, but it points us in the right direction. Truth is what has 'cash value'; it's what you have confidence enough in to act on. It's never identical to the Real. At best it gives us a working model for or a map of the 'Real'.

But there is a Real--even if our models of it are only better or worse approximations. There is an ontological foundation behind the models. aka, the "appearances". There's a difference between saying that we cannot know the Real and that there is no Real. There's a difference between saying that all our models about the Real are social constructions on one hand, and that all our constructions of the Real are ontologically groundless or arbitrary or merely serve ideological purposes on the other. Some models are better than others, and what makes them better is the degree to which they align with the Real or are out of alignment with it. 

We are acculturated into working models for how the world around us works, but we should never assume that the model is the Real. It's just something that allows us to navigate in the Real. And over time we individually or collectively make revisions in the model, or we replace it with another one because it works better or because it delivers benefits the older one did not. This is the way science works, but it's also the way we  live our lives if we're sane. Delusion is persistence in the use of a model that no longer works. 

We humans have the understandable tendency to persist in the habits of mind formed by the model we grew up with and got comfortable with. We fear change and we often fear losing something that is precious to us. The mistake fear makes is to think that the 'model' and the 'Real' are the same thing, that to lose the first is to lose the second. But it's liberating when you come to understand that's just not true, that our loss of one model does not mean the rejection of what it modeled, but that we have a need for a better model, one that accounts for the data--for our experience--in a richer more robust way. It is only important that we strive to be in the best possible alignment with the Real. When the old model becomes an obstacle to that, it must be discarded. 

The problem with modern materialistic Liberalism is not that it is misaligned with the Real, but that it filters out too much of it. It privileges the objective and what is given to the senses, and it dismisses as "subjective" what is given to the heart and to the spirit. It scoffs at the idea that the poets, not flat-souled technocrats, should be the true legislators of humanity, because they are the flat-souled technocrats who have no idea how spiritually impoverished their worldview is.

Our culture is in deep need of renewal, and that will only happen when, to use Iain McGilchrist's analogy from Nietzsche, the "Emissary"--the technocracy--once again serves the "Master"--the artists, prophets, and philosophers through whom the depths of Real are disclosed. If human beings are both angels and beasts, the problem with Liberalism is its hypertrophying of what is real about the second and hypotrophying the first. This leads to the kind of imbalances that we are suffering in the U.S. today, but also in every developed society in which the spiritual dimension of our humanity has become hypotrophied and trivialized, i.e., as having no 'cash value'. 

But materialist Liberals are better aligned with the Real than reactionary conservatives. Materialist Liberals navigate in a world that is shaped by the materialist presuppositions, as inadequate as those might be, that shape our dominant and now rather rickety social imaginary. Materialist Liberalism's social imaginary is our model of the Real, whether we feel comfortable within its constraints or not. And so it's what we use until something better replaces it. Reactionary conservatives are right in their critique of the spiritual poverty of a materialist social imaginary, but they fail to persuade because they don't provide a model that works better, if by working better we mean balances the spiritual with the material, the angel with the beast.  

It's this pragmatic view of truth that has been at the heart of my critique of Conservatism. Conservatives too often persist in habits of mind that are no longer adapted to the world that we live in. Liberals are not the cause of the changes that conservatives lament. They are not to blame. They are not bad people. They are people who simply went with the flow rather than to have resisted it. And most live perfectly decent lives within its limitations.

Early Liberals saw that the old premodern model wasn't working very well, and it really wasn't. The Thirty Years War de-legitimated for good reason confessional allegiances. Something better needed to be found. And they developed a new model that brought us levels of material property and technological advancement unimaginable within the premodern social imaginary. But it left behind much that was valuable, and, as I've been writing here for years, the task for us going forward is to retrieve much of what has been left behind. But retrieval in not reaction. Retrieval accepts the world given to us by materialistic Liberalism, and seeks now to spiritually enrich it. 

So thoughtful conservatives were not wrong in recognizing that important dimensions of human experience were lost in the shift to modernity. If there are aspects of the Real that they know about and which are not part of the contemporary social imaginary, they must work to develop a model that delivers a robust account that has advantages the materialist Liberal model lacks. I don't see anybody on the Right who is doing that in a way that maps a way forward. I think a big part of that is because those who are temperamentally inclined toward the Right don't believe there is a way forward; they believe "progress" is a liberal delusion. Nevertheless, my challenge to religious conservatives is hold fast to the Real that has been filtered out by modern habits of thinking, but to trust in their belief that God is Good, and that because he is our movement in history is toward the Good. 

For this reason I think of myself as a political progressive. I believe that there is a movement in history toward the Good, that the arc of history does in fact bend toward justice. Nevertheless I do not consider myself a Liberal because I think that Liberalism no longer works. Look around you. Is the world given to us by liberalism working?  It brought some short-term advantages, and it's understandable that some of the West's best minds explored its possibilities, but that Liberal model no longer works. It is deeply, profoundly inadequate. 

As I've written here frequently before, the Liberalism that was the child of the Enlightenment and the source of the optimistic republicanism of 1776, 1789, 1848, the revolutionism of the Paris Commune, and so many others died in Western Europe after by World War I. Bolshevism in Russia morphed into an authoritarianism that had nothing to do with the spirit of '89. This progressive idealism died in the U.S. during the 1960s, (when we said Bye Bye to Miss American Pie). And it died officially during the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China, and everywhere else where the Jacobin spirit of 1789 was its inspiration. It had a good two-hundred year run, but now we're at a very interesting point in history. We're in a cultural/historical slack tide.

Neoliberal ideology has filled the political vacuum for want of anything better, but anything goes and who knows where it's going. It's going to be a rocky ride, and we have to trust in our ability to adapt, and to realize that to cling to habits of mind that no longer work will not preserve order, but rather lead to more suffering and to a more destructive collapse. Better to adapt, to go with the flow, and try to manage things to mitigate the inevitable transitional suffering as best we can. We need to be prudent, but not fearful. Fear almost always inclines us to make the wrong choice. 

***

We take for granted the solidity of world around us, and yet we also understand, even if only abstractly, that the way we experience it is profoundly shaped by our acculturation. Our experience of the world is shaped by habits of perception and thinking that enhance or filter out aspects of the Real. At any given moment, we only experience and understand what our acculturation has programed us to see or understand. Our habits change when we are forced to adapt to changes in our environment. We resist the change, but sooner or later we make it when we come to understand that we receive benefits from the change that our current habits prevent. This is Pragamtism 101.

We change our habits because we discover the benefit of the change on our own or because we imitate those whom we notice are thriving because they have already made the change. And when our habits change, as they did when the medieval model broke down to make way for the modern, our experience changes. This is not a process that moves quickly. It happens slowly from generation to generation. But the world given to the French peasant in the 18th Century has more in common with his contemporary in China than it does to the French bourgeois information worker employed in a glass tower in Paris.

The biggest cultural gulf is not defined by whether one is Asian or European, Christian or Hindu, but by whether one's habits of mind are modern or premodern. We are now moving into another transition in which the differences will be defined by whether one's mind continues to be shaped by modern habits or by whatever the New Thing, the no-longer-modern modeling of the Real will be. Many are living intensely aware of our being in this slack tide, and it's not easy to flourish in such a time, but it's interesting.

And so because we are now living at a time when the modern model has broken down, we live with modern habits of mind for want of better ones. And so those of us who recognize this, especially if we are Christians, have a special opportunity and responsibility to develop new habits of mind that are both inspired by the spirit of the gospel but which also have  "cash value" in the Jamesian sense, that model the Real in a way that works. The biblical term for cash value  is "fruits".

Jamesian Pragmatism brackets questions about metaphysics, but it recognizes the central role that belief plays in shaping the world we work in and think about. So I consider myself a Jamesian Pragmatist when it comes to understanding the real world we live in, but I combine that with a Christian Neoplatonic metaphyisics concerning the ontological grounding of the Real. The Real is real, and while it transcends our models of it, it provides an ontological foundation for those models.

If the test for any belief system is its 'cash value', the burden on Christians is to prove that its beliefs deliver. It has to deliver meaning that makes sense in the real world that we live in, and it also must help us to be productive in the world in a way that has advantages that others would notice and imitate. It happened in the Roman world as that world slowly disintegrated; it could happen in the modern Liberal world as it continues its disintegration. I accept, in a Jamesian key, that the best we can do is develop working models that map reality in ways that work. Do we have enough faith in our model to actually live by it and shape our life by it? Can we be ruthlessly honest about whether it is working for us or not?

***

If the 19th Century was a time when the Western social imaginary--its model of the real shifted from mind-dominated model to a matter-dominated model, we've been undergoing a shift, at least in some precincts of the culture from matter to mind. We see it in popular culture in the way that “believing” no longer has the pejorative connotations it once had. It’s possible now to entertain metaphysical questions in a way that it was not even thirty years ago. That much of it feeds a spiritual narcissism that is hard to take seriously because it just isn't is beside the point. There's an openness to a new story, a new grand narrative, a new Jamesian model if it can deliver cash value. 

Since Kant, metaphysics has been suspect; it was perceived by the mainstream of western thought to be about believing something rather than really knowing it, and “believing” until recently was considered a weakness of mind. And for lots of people whose habits of mind are still modern, it still is. But one of the pillars of the postmodern critique of modern rationality has been that most of what we think we know is really only what we believe. Our truths—even scientific facts like our model for the atom—are just provisional maps that have meaning only insofar as they work, i.e., have  explanatory power that allows you to work with them, but they make no pretense of understanding the 'thisness' of the atom. That's open to different interpretations, and I would say the same is true for biological evolution. It's for now a provisional map; it works, but no one can claim to know with certainty the 'thisness' of evolution. What we know about it is open to different interpretations. 

The postmodern thinkers recognize this, and while I don't buy into the nihilism that many of them think is the ineluctable consequence of their critique, I find what they say interesting because their mood of "deconstruction" reflects accurately the spirit of our decomposing age. I have the same relation with Marxism. I find much value in its critique of capital, but I reject the materialistic metaphysics and its prescription for a cure. Marxism gives us a good map for understanding how capital works; it gives us a deeply inadequate model for something better. 

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said. Can we show that there is more 'cash value' in our model?  And such a project starts by acknowledging the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture. 

‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another. And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

Now I don’t want to equate this popular idea of believing with the deeper and more mysterious phenomenon we recognize as religious faith, which has a cognitive dimension that the popular idea of believing does not, but it bears a family relationship to it. It can have heuristic value. The practical benefits of belief have a long heritage from St. Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, to Pascal’s “wager” to the pragmatism of William James, to the prescriptions of our current health care professionals who have noticed that people who have religious practices live happier, healthier lives. 

This is just another way of saying that the metanarrative precedes the ethical. What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. Whatever narrative we ultimately choose to model the Real for us opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to. But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply long for. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. Even nihilism. If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals. 

So I hope  I can count on the flexibility and adaptability of my readers as I try to make my case for the plausibility of my beliefs. And I hope I've made the  case today for the idea that there are worse things that you can do than to believe something.  And if 'belief' is where it's at, why not loosen it up a little, get wild and crazy and see if it works. The worst that can happen is that it won't, and then we'll make the necessary adjustment. But anything is better than the thing we have now, which just isn't working. The bottom line is whether your beliefs lead you to  live a fruitful life or one that is sterile and puerile.

[Ed. This is a revised version of a post of the same title from 2014. ]

Stephanie Kelton, Big Gummint, Central Banks, and the American Future

An MMT view of the monetary system changes the way we think about what it means for currency-issuing nations to “live within their means.” It asks us to think in terms of real resource constraints—inflation—rather than perceived financial constraints. It teaches us to ask not “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you resource it?” It shows us that if we have the technological know-how and the available resources—the people, the factories, the equipment, and the raw materials—to put a man on the moon or embark on a Green New Deal to tackle climate change, then funding to carry out those missions can always be made available. Coming up with the money is the easy part. Managing the inflation risk is the critical challenge. More than any other economic approach, MMT places inflation at the center of the debate over spending limits. It also offers a more sophisticated array of techniques for managing inflationary pressures than what we have today.

Kelton The Deficit Myth (pp. 234-35). 

I've been reading Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth, and it's one of the best things out there to clarify why Bernie was right and why the Clinton/Obama/Biden/Pelosi wing of the party was wrong--not to mention all Republicans of the Paul Ryan ilk. The federal deficit isn't really a deficit, and anybody who uses the term "deficit spending" pejoratively to justify cutting entitlements or to resist spending on programs like Medicare for All is either ignorant or cynical.

Every time some smart-ass journalist asks a Sanders or a Warren how they are going to "pay for it", they are asking a political, not an economic question. It's political because most Americans think that the federal budget is essentially the same as a business or family budget where expenses have to be covered by revenues. It's just not how it really works. But politicians need  to justify their programs in terms that economically unsophisticated Americans can feel comfortable with. So they feel compelled to come up with some pretext to justify their program by analogy to the household budget. 

The Republicans might come up with some ridiculous pretext to justify their tax cuts by saying that they will stimulate the economy, which in turn will increase tax revenues that will pay for them. But it's been proven time and again with Reagan, Bush, and now Trump that these cuts only increase the so-called deficit. But each time the Republicans want their tax cut, they bring out their demonstrably false trickle down argument. But even so, the problem with the Republican tax cuts is not that they increase the deficit, but that they aggravate egregious concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of so relatively few.

But even Democrats buy into the 'deficit myth'. Bill Clinton did when he worked so diligently to balance the budget by cutting entitlements, and even now we see the influence of this myth when Nancy Pelosi insists on  "PAYGO". The U.S. is not in debt to the Bank of China, as Obama once said. The U.S. is not Greece or Venezuela or Bangladesh. As long as the U.S. has a vibrant productive economy and it has what Kelton calls monetary sovereignty, the government cannot run out of money or default--unless it chooses to, by for instance not raising the debt limit. Everybody--Democrats included-- who thinks that we have a defecit problem or that we are burdening future generations with debt is buying into an ideology that makes no sense after the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system in 1971.

Since then, the U.S. and other countries with fiat currencies can print as much money as they want, and the only limiting factor is inflation. That's a real limiting factor, but running "deficits" is not inflationary if managed competently. China isn't going to call in its chits, and the government isn't going to default so long as the U.S economy remains vibrant and productive. There are no economic reasons for Social Security to run out of money or for not funding universal healthcare or a robust program to renew the national infrastructure. The obstacles for achieving all these things and more are political not economic. The challenge is not lack of money, but lack of imagination and political will. 

For many Fiscal Puritans, the phrase "fiat currency" connotes an immoral profligacy. You can't just create money out of thin air, right? Money has to be grounded in something, like gold. Just letting it be whatever a government wants it to be is just wrong. This kind of Fiscal Puritanism runs strong in the American collective psyche, but it is the primary cause of the aforementioned lack of imagination that insists on focusing on delusional moralistic problems rather than real ones. Running the federal government like a business is a false analogy; it simply does not reflect how the economy works in countries with strong economies like the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, the U.K. and others that have monetary sovereignty. 

I am not going to rehearse all Kelton's arguments here, but there is no more withering, easily understood critique than hers to be found of the Neoliberalism that has dominated the elite thinking of the Washington Consensus whose destructive ideology has played a major role in creating the conditions that allowed for the rise of Donald Trump.

I have some hope that in the post-Trump reconstruction of American political institutions that we will find a way to reset to pre-Reagan when there was actually a consensus built around the legitimacy of the New Deal. We actually had a social democracy there for a while, but after 1980 the Neoliberals came to dominate elite thinking, and everything went badly wrong. It is astonishing how many smart people who should have known better--and who I think wanted to act in good faith--could be taken in by the Neoliberal con. Hopefully books like Kelton's and the emergence of the Sanders/Warren/AOC wing of the party will change that permanently. 

The challenge for them is rhetorical rather than technical: how to persuade most Americans that deficit spending is ok. That's a heavy lift because it just seems wrong. It's counter-intuitive, and it goes against everybody's common sense and experience about how money works in their personal lives. If we as individual households, businesses, and even state and local governments have to balance our expenditures with revenues, why shouldn't the federal government? If it doesn't, it should. . .  right? That's one point of resistance. The other is Americans' mistrust of big government and their discomfort with giving it too much power. This is a legitimate concern, but big gummint--bigness in general--is here to stay. The question is whether in the future ordinary Americans can make bigness work in their interests rather than in the interests of the oligarchs. 

***

Anybody who has read this blog over the years knows that I like to frame issues in loosely dialectical terms, as presenting polarities and then seeking to reconcile them. The fundamental polarity at work in the American political psyche pertaining here is Jefferson vs. Hamilton. The Jeffersonian impulse was carried mainly by Democrats through the 19th century, and the Hamiltonian impulse was carried by the Federalists, then the Whigs, and finally by the Republicans. None of us is completely Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, but we lean one way or the other with recessive traits of the other manifesting from time to time. Yankees lean toward Hamilton; Southerners toward Jefferson.

Jeffersonians define freedom primarily in terms of freedom from big government and big concentrations of wealth and power in institutions like central banks. Hamilton wanted the U.S. to be a world economic and military power, and he saw a strong central government and a central bank as playing a critical role in effecting this rise to power. Hamilton won early on, but the Jeffersonians dominated the decades in the early 19th Century running up to the Civil War--although among Southerners Hamiltonian recessive traits emerged with their support for the war with Mexico and their fantasies of imperial expansion into the rest of Latin America. The Hamiltonian legacy was developed by his Whig heirs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

I think of Lincoln, a Whig-turned-Republican, as a Hamilton-dominant politico with recessive Jeffersonian traits. His greatness lies in his efforts to reconcile both, as so beautifully articulated at Gettysburg, but after him, the Republican Party became the vehicle for Hamilton-dominant thinking between the Civil War and WWI. Equality ideals were forgotten as Social Darwinism took hold in the North and Jim Crowe in the South.

By the second decade of the 20th Century, the heretofore Jeffersonian southern Democrats like Woodrow Wilson morphed into Hamiltonians in supporting the WWI and in bringing back the one thing truly anathema to Jeffersonians--the central bank. The Federal Reserve was created on his watch in 1913. By the time FDR took office, the only members of the Democratic party interested in invoking Jefferson were southern segregationists who looked for any pretext to stymie the federal government from interfering with their post-reconstruction apartheid system. In the late 19th Century Republican phase, the U.S. became a world economic power; in the post-Wilson Democratic phase, it became both a world economic and military power. The Party of Jefferson had become assimilated into the Party of Hamilton. 

There were, of course, the cranks like those in the John Birch society who were ok with the big business part of the Hamiltonian legacy, but were appalled that big gummint accompanied it. They were Jeffersonians of convenience like the Southern oligarchs. They hated a big government that would restrict them with regulations and anti-trust laws from doing as they please. They were the country-club Hamiltonians who saw FDR as a traitor to his class. But nobody in the power establishment took those cranks seriously until Ronald Reagan made it ok to be a Neoliberal. And we came to see that crankiness normalized through the efforts of the Koch Brothers and others who fund right-wing think tanks whose sole goal is to give a kind of intellectual legitimacy to ideas that are crudely designed to justify the dominance of the 1%.

Jefferson's vision for America was obsoletized by the Industrial Revolution and by the emergence of the U.S. as a world military power after WWI, and yet his influence lingers in positive and negative ways. We are Jeffersonians when we feel inspired by the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. We are Jeffersonians when we feel uncomfortable not just with how the central U.S. government has grown into this massive surveillance state with hundreds of military bases throughout the world, but also with the way Wall Street and huge concentrations of corporate power and wealth have come to dominate the economic sphere. And we are Jeffersonians when we are appalled at how huge concentrations of corporate power meld with political power.

But we are Jeffersonians in the negative sense when we think naively that our freedoms only thrive to the degree that big government stays out of our lives. Bigness in the private and public sectors is a real problem, but you deal with it by making it accountable, and big government is the only means to keep huge, amoral corporate powers in check. And that requires a vigilant citizenry, not the morally complacent citizenry that lets a quasi-authoritarian crackpot like Trump get elected. 

We need to keep those positive aspects of the Jeffersonian imagination of America alive, but we need to realize that we live in a world that is shaped primarily by forces that Hamilton celebrated and are now out of balance. The question before us now is how to effect a political coincidentia oppositorum, i.e., to achieve Jeffersonian ideals using Hamiltonian means. In other words bigness is here to stay, and to wish it away is delusional, and to the degree that bigness leads to greater levels of inequality and unfreedom, it must be resisted by harnessing it. For me the question is whether a new leadership can emerge from the Trump chaos that has an imagination of an American future that embodies what is best about both the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian legacies. 

The challenge is to manage bigness in such a way that the huge concentrations of wealth and political power don't accrue to the 1%--or the 20% for that matter. The challenge before us is to harness American economic power to enact policies that solve the problems of inequality and concentrations of wealth and power--not just in this country, but throughout the world. Going forward, the only real solutions are global solutions.

That might seem kind of unrealistic because it seems to require a mentality and an imagination of future possibility that is so not  who we are now. But if we live in this Hamilton-dominant imagination of America at the moment, I believe that our recessive Jeffersonianism--the most positive aspects of it articulated in the Declaration--can emerge as a balancing, integrating factor. Right now we are in chaos; we are anything but integrated and balanced. The thing to be feared is that we will embrace any kind illiberal order as an alternative to the chaos, but that just creates other imbalances that kick the basic problem down the road.  

If there is not an aggressive assertion of political will from progressives, the illiberal Right will win by default. Obama was a decent president, but he was a timid technocrat, and his timidity and his acquiescence to the Washington Consensus aggravated the conditions that promoted Trump's emergence. If Biden is another Obama, expect someone to emerge on the Right who will have learned from Trump. He willl have learned how easy it is to do egregiously illegal, unconstitutional things that can be tied up in the courts for years while he bends government institutions to his authoritarian will. If the courts finally decide against him, he will ignore them as Andrew Jackson did. It doesn't matter what the courts decide if the executive branch won't enforce it. But there's a good chance courts will support a post-Trump authoritarianism because Mitch McConnell has been stacking the federal courts with right-wing ideologues. 

For now at least I'm going to allow myself to embrace the more optimistic possibilities for an American future, and hope that Trump's absurd, chaotic presidency has created a sense of urgency that make something new possible, and that out of his chaos something new and better can be born. I believe something better is possible even if such a possibly poses an enormous challenge to our collective political imagination.

As Kelton's book points out, we have the resources, the Hamiltonian means, to do very good things. The only question is whether we will be hamstrung by, on the one hand, a tight-assed Fiscal Puritanism, the kind we see on display with Mitch McConnell and the Republicans who just hate the idea of extending unemployment benefits during a pandemic; and on the other hand, by a widespread moral lassitude and ignorance among ordinary Americans that allowed a ridiculous figure like Trump to take the White House in the first place.