Category: Living

Mark recently posted an essay speaking to the notion that it is incompetence which makes banking a reviled profession, much more so than any moral failings on the part of its participants.

“What makes banking truly disreputable is not that some of its practitioners have moral failings, but that large numbers of its practitioners are inept: mediocrity, not malevolence, is the dirty secret of the sector.”

I wholeheartedly agree with him, although his digression in his article, in which he mused about the relationship between people who are moral and people who are competent – which he wrote as an aside – was, I think, actually the core of the essay.  Having been a banker now for just shy of 25 years – it’s funny to think that Mark met me just a few years into my career – what he wrote in that aside struck a painful chord.  What I have found is that banking seems to attract the worst people: those who are fully, truly inept, not just at banking, but at life itself.  The problem is that very, very few people understand and appreciate what banking is, but – to quote a famous bank robber –  banks are where the money is.  It’s actually not true; banks are not, in fact where the money “is”, it’s just a kind of transit station that all money has to pass through at some point.  But because all money does have to pass through banks, banks get to “see” all the money, and morally inept people see that and think “gosh, if only I could skim a bit from the top”.  And not just morally inept people: clever morally inept people.

An old friend of mine once said the worst insult she could give to a person was to say that they meant well, that they had a good heart: the implication of course being that while they meant well, they were functionally too stupid to do anything useful about it.  I’m actually of a different vein: give me a transparently dim but good hearted person any day over a clever person without morals.  I’ve met many such people – heck, I’ve dated a few, because I’m a little too optimistic about what’s inside people’s hearts most of the time – and they are the real devils.  If I say you’re clever, then you know I think you’re evil, and you have been warned.

The thing about clever people, though, is that the modestly clever people are caught out by complexity.  Indeed, that’s where banking regulation has historically played a good and fine role: banks deal with the most complex human problem that we’ve created for ourselves, the dynamic expression of social value embodied in the exchanges we make amongst ourselves for goods, services, information, and labour, and while modestly clever people can invent things (CLOs, CDOs, CDO squareds, flavours of ETFs, alternative Tier I capital, contingent capital instruments – you get the picture), eventually the complexity of the system and the tendency of highly complex systems to generate completely random and unforeseen outcomes quickly means that modestly clever people blow up eventually.  This has been my experience, at Washington Mutual, at the British global megabank that should have failed but didn’t because they paid the Qataris to bail them out, at the asset manager that Mark and I both worked for.  The market – money – is too complex to allow the modestly clever to last for long.

The really evil ones, though – the truly clever – on some level know that the system will catch them out.  They live in fear of that moment of chaos which will catch them.  Some of them check out of banking, realizing that it is a game that they will eventually lose; most of those, though, are attracted to other shiny objects than simple wealth or power.  They like drugs more, say, or sex, or they realize they can play other, simpler games (like art or charity or real estate) and they won’t face the same risk of losing.  I don’t mind those so much; given that I’m not interested in other, simpler games, they can go do what they like.  As a manager in banking, I’ve spent countless hours of coaching and mentoring such truly clever people to get them out of the building, away from the complex, dynamic, and accelerating machine that is the money system, that teaches humanity what value means to itself.  Eliminating their corruption is a good thing; when I’m in senior enough roles, I can do a lot of good by doing so.

But enough of the truly clever – not incompetent, as Mark calls them – but the clever and the perverse, get through the gates to make banking terrifying and, actually, to attract more of them to the system (until recently, when the Internet offered even more opportunities to the clever and perverse: think WeWork).  These are the people who end up managing most banks.  Their cleverness lies in embedding themselves in the transit station of banking like a leech, but unlike a leech – which sucks until it can’t eat any more – they devote most of their energy to listening to when their host is becoming aware of their scam.  Then they detatch, and reattach at another bank, and resume their gorging.  Their success lures other clever young people – men and women both, although there is something about masculinity that seems to make such leeching more tempting – to join the feast.  Most of the joiners will end up being just modestly clever, and will either be caught out and fail or they will lose the internal political games and get stuck at a low level.  But some will succeed, their ears tuned for the faint but feared signs of discovery, and end up repeating the process.

Oddly, I think banking has always been this way.  There’s a reason Christ overturned the money lenders’ tables outside the temple in Jerusalem; there’s a reason Muhammed condemned usurers to hell: it’s because the truly clever hive into banking.  But there are very few intelligent people in banking – intelligence being not the ability to solve puzzles for one’s sole benefit as cleverness is, but being the ability to self-reflect that puzzle solving ability onto one’s own struggle for purpose and meaning.  Clever people are barren; they serve no purpose except to feed their own hedonism.  Cleverness is not incompetence, though – rather, it is problem solving without reflection, without recursion.  Clever people are, in essence, computers without any ghost in the system: they can’t recognize that they are part of a whole, and at the same time, cannot see their own needs or desires or attractions as part of a larger system.  Intelligent people, on the other hand, recognize that doing themselves good is inherently barren: we all will die.  Serving our needs is inherently meaningless, and an intelligent person sees that and reflects and seeks to find – maybe impossibly – some meaning to serve.  And real intelligence continues to self-reflect – it recurses on itself, it challenges the notion of meaning that first comes to mind, it dives deeper and deeper and refuses to accept even a complex and well-articulated notion of meaning, no matter how tempting it is.  I find it interesting, in fact, that some of the “smartest” people who have made fortunes in banking while also being philosophers – David Ricardo, say, or John Maynard Keynes – have produced only morally vacant thought.  Only Spinoza has managed to combine a stint in the business with a truly insightful moral philosophy – and he remains the most humanistic of the early Enlightenment thinkers.  Intelligent bankers are rare, but they can exist.

In any event, what’s been astonishing to me in the last few years – as I took a break from banking for a few years, and then returned – is how many intelligent people there are on earth who look at banking and both marvel at and revile it.  I’ve had great conversations with lots of them, and usually by the end they see what I see, this marvelous complex and oh-so-very human construction, this money system which encapsulates everything there is about being human – self-aware, social, connected, afraid, exchanging, sharing, taking, giving, and doing it at levels beyond our own awareness.  But at the end they see the same thing Mark sees: the system is run by clever, and many truly clever people, who are not that intelligent at all.  Intelligent people can see that – and when you connect intelligent people with senior, very clever bankers, the very clever bankers quail and retract.

Mark was very kind in his essay in reference to me, actually far too kind – but his choice of title was spot on.  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly stars Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach, respectively.  Most people want to identify with Clint Eastwood – after all, he gets away in the end and is tall and handsome.  But he’s also forced to understand his own motivations, and he reflects on them, and he acts based on those reflections.  The battle scene where he is confronted by the alcoholic Union captain who can’t stand the sight of the slaughter he must by duty create gives me chills every time I see it – and I watch the film annually at least.  On the other hand, most people would think Lee Van Cleef is the kind of banker in the story – and he is enormously clever, ultimately to his detriment, and an earlier scene reveals the depth of his depravity as he takes advantage of the Confederate losers of the war without consideration or remorse.  Most of us, however, are really like Eli Wallach.  We stumble through life, trying to win at a game here and there – a career, a relationship, an investment – while at the same time forgetting that the system that contains us – the human system, the system which embraces everything we do, including the planet that cradles us while we’ve been growing through our infancy and often shitting the crib while doing so – remembers our every act and is preparing for its revenge, or rather, the feedback loop that teaches us the moral lesson. The truly clever fear this; they’re listening for it and are on guard.  The good, well, they listen too, and they actually hear, and reflect, and incorporate, and change.  But most of us just stumble.

I can still remember when I first saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; it was on Maine public television, starting at 11pm on a Friday night, and while I was planning to watch Cinemax at 11:30, once the movie started I couldn’t change the channel: I was hooked.  I knew that what I needed to be in life was the Man with No Name – Clint Eastwood – but I also knew, if I reflected on it, if I turned my own intellect with honesty towards my heart, that I was Tuco, Eli Wallach.  I knew that I would be balancing on the box at the end, hoping that the Man with No Name would shoot the rope, and hoping that when I fell I wouldn’t crack my head on the fortune, knowing that I probably would.  I’ve been balancing there ever since.  I’m not clever – not truly, not modestly, barely intelligently.  I’m human.  Forgive me.

Facebook is attempting to create an online currency for the internet, the libra, which I find enormously entertaining because Libra is my astrological sign.  I’m sure some branding consultant figured that the symbolic meaning of the sign – it being the sign of the scales, the historical symbol of money changers, perhaps appropriate given that I am proudly a banker – would subconsciously resonate, thus earning themselves a hefty fee (to be paid, surely, in dollars).  This may be because I’m a Libran, but the name struck me as being pleasingly non-“crypto”: in a world where blockchain solves all the worlds problems, but comes at a cost of bearing up with newspeaky words like “bitcoin” or “ethereum” or the like, the idea of using libras to buy in-app purchases seems, well, vaguely adorable.

The mainstream press coverage of the libra concept has focused, naturally, on the incongruity of placing trust in a store of value managed by perhaps the world’s least trustworthy individual, Mark Zuckerberg, who seems convinced that maintaining a menacing, narcissistic public face as a kind of youngish cyber James Bond villain is a good idea.  Financial writers have had a field day describing this as the beginning of the end of money as we know it, the dawn of a new era of money, the initiation of the live world of blockchain taking over every nook and cranny of our lives.  My favorite financial columnist, Matt Levine, has basically summed it up as “blockchain blockchain blockchain blah blah blah.” An old colleague of mine has tried whipping up a scare wave on LinkedIn, describing the financial distortions that will evolve as the Libra Foundation – the organization which will manage the libra currency, again named by Zuckerberg with his usual flair for the sinister; the libra as unit is cute, but the Libra Foundation as manager is awfully close to being SPECTRE – periodically buys or sells trillions of dollars or euros or yuan of government bonds which will back the currency – more on that in a bit.  Central bankers, meanwhile, have started to focus on what, exactly, this does mean, with Mark Carney – the George Clooney of central bankers – stating that if well-designed, the Libra Foundation which will manage the libra will have access to pound sterling deposit facilities at the UK central bank.

First, a quick explanation of what I understand as the theory behind the whole shebang.  Libras will be backed by a pool of central bank deposits (to the extent central banks allow it), government bonds, and short-term bank deposits in a basket of currencies representing the rough balance of what people buy into when they purchase libras.  Libras will then be used to denominate purchasable goods and services on Facebook and other platforms that buy into the Libra Foundation instead of, or alongside, purchases denominated in dollars or euros or rubles or leks or what have you.  The Libra Foundation will allow individuals to buy libras with their local currency, which will then be usable on any platform which accepts libras for payment, with the real-world money that’s used to purchase libras then being used by the Libra Foundation to buy said low-risk central bank deposits, government bonds, et al. I haven’t read the whitepaper yet to understand how the basket of currencies will be managed, but I’m assuming it will be something similar to how the IMF manages special drawing rights (SDRs) – some kind of a formula based on the relative weights of the currencies used to purchase the libras, subject to some overarching balancing equation based on liquidity, blah blah.  Of course, libra transactions will be blockchain registered – which for those of us in the real world means nothing, because blockchain is just a handshake mechanism which isn’t terribly different in a metaphysical way from how any wire transfer works in the current world, only it uses some nifty programming to distribute the verification of the transactions which are currently subject to centralized verification in modern central bank systems and SWIFT, the existing private sector standard for institutional payment transfers.  But because it’s “blockchained”, it’s now meta-officially blessed.  Blockchain, after all, is the new metaphysical endorsement of moral certainty.  Right – to quote Matt Levine, blah blah blah.

In any event, what’s interesting is that the libra will be, in effect, a currency not tied to a state, and thus value becomes disconnected from the state in an essential way: in theory – or rather, on Facebook and on other sites which join the Libra Foundation – individuals will buy and sell things to one another with “value” defined by the number of libras, which themselves have “value” equal to an increment of a floating collection of governmental value.  The Libra Foundation will fund itself via the float – the interest paid on the collection of interest-bearing very low risk securities and deposits it holds, although it’s not clear what will happen if the trend towards negative interest rates which already sucks in a good portion of OECD country debt continue to accelerate.  People will be able to convert their libras to the underlying currency basket at a rate which will float based on the underlying currency basket that the Libra Foundation manages, presumably with some bid-offer which again will be a source of income for the Libra Foundation (seriously, the more you say it, the more evil it sounds).

For financey-types among the readership, this will probably sound like an amalgam of several concepts.  To my ear, it feels a lot like the original concept of the Bank of England, which most people forget was a private corporation – not an instrument of state – for most of its existence.  They accepted deposits in specie – gold or silver – and used that specie to buy government bonds bearing a rate of interest.  Depositors then could use “bank notes” – essentially promises of the Bank of England to convert the note back into a given amount of specie – to exchange value amongst themselves.  In a physically defined world, this was much more convenient than carrying around sacks of coins or gold bars, and thus most people came to prefer exchanging notes.  Meanwhile, the Bank of England had to make a profit for its shareholders; just sitting on gold didn’t earn anything (and, indeed, it cost money to store the gold safely: visit the Bank’s building on Threadneedle Street and think about what it cost to build that pile).  So the Bank took most of the gold and bought interest-bearing bonds issued by the English crown, or by buying the notes of other banks at a discount and redeeming them at maturity for par.

This, indeed, is exactly the same as the Libra Foundation proposal.  The kicker for libras seems to be that, just as in the 17th century, people were finding that the inconvenience of paying in gold was hampering their ability to accelerate finance and investment in the physical world, people are finding that banking in the 21st century is too inconvenient in the now virtual world of the internet.  On a certain level, there may be some merit to that: a recent Financial Times article on the inconvenience of the German banking sector, with the result being that the author found it almost impossible to use a UK bank card to get cash, pay for dinner, or the like, shows that there remain areas of personal purchase power which are effectively prohibitively inefficient.  To the extent that people on Facebook and other sites find it challenging to use their existing dollars and euros and rubles to pay for things online, the proposal – in essence, “give me a bunch of your real world cash and I’ll give you a different, but still valuable and convertible, cash that’s completely efficient to use in the virtual world, and I’ll also let you convert back to real world cash in a convenient and seemless (sort of – I’ll still charge a vig) way” – this argument makes sense.  Again, it’s no different than what the Bank of England did in the seventeenth century, and the Swedish Rijksbank did even earlier.

So far, so uninteresting.  In fact it’s more than uninteresting from a financial perspective.  It actually represents a step backward: private currencies are four hundred years old, and over that time, the inherent risks of such a system resulted in the nationalization of those currencies because private banks couldn’t be trusted to buy totally safe instruments.  Even when they thought they were – when, for example, the Bank of England bought only British government debt – the government itself would do something like, oh, fight a horrifically destructive war against Napoleon, come close to losing, and people would want their gold back.  My ex-colleague on LinkedIn imagined something similar to this, where a stampede of libra holders all seeking to convert back to, say, dollars, would force the Libra Foundation to dump all of its holdings on the market, driving down the value of government bonds and creating a spiral where libras would convert to fewer dollars, the remaining libra holders would panic further and try to convert more, resulting in more government bond sales, etc.  Eventually the poor saps at the back of the line would get nothing and would be forced to exchange their now-worthless libras for anything, presumably leaving only Facebook able to accept them for payment against online advertising…

… which gets me to my real point about what makes money reliable as an exchange of value.  At some point, every government with a private currency system reaches the point described above.  In the US, it happened during the Civil War; indeed, war is the constant theme in the point at which a money system requires transformation.  At some point, there is a crisis of confidence in the currency, and people rush to exchange their now-doubtful notes (or bank accounts) denominated in shaky currency X into less-doubtful notes in safe currency Y, or into gold, or into other physical and mobile goods which will retain value.

Interesting but relevant aside: back when I was working for the incompetent global megabank, and has some modest oversight responsibilities for our African treasury operations, I visited Johannesburg rather often, and was struck by the number of really expensive cars – Maseratis, Porsches, and especially Mercedes and Audis and BMWs.  Houses, meanwhile, were incredibly cheap on a dollar-adjusted basis.  An Audi costs the same for Audi to make no matter where it is sold – let’s say the base model A4, which was everywhere, is $50,000.  People were paid much less on a dollar-equivalent basis than in the US – the average bank employee probably made around $25,000 after tax, versus the equivalent in the US of maybe $60,000 – but in the US, they’d drive a Corolla; in Johannesburg, they’d drive a Mercedes C-Class.  Then again, their flat in South Africa would cost maybe $40,000, while the US person was buying their house for $250,000 or more.  It made no sense until the head of the South African bank’s treasury operation explained it: most people in Johannesburg were anticipating some kind of Zimbabwe like collapse.  In that event, the escape plan for everyone was to drive to Botswana – well known as the Switzerland of sub-Saharan Africa – and since at that moment, they’d need to take as much value as possible with them, they put far more of their savings into a fancy car than into their immovable home.  It made perfect sense.

So to return to the main thread: every currency (including gold, mind you; gold also has had panic attacks in the past when large quantities of it suddenly hit the market, say when Spain looted the Incan and Aztec stores and dumped it overnight on the market in the 16th century, or when the roughly contemporaneous California, Australian, South African, and Yukon gold rushes did the same in the mid to late 19th century) eventually hits a crisis moment.  And when it does, either one of two things happens: either a strong, ideally hegemonic state power forces people to accept the currency as valid, or hyperinflation destroys the currency and it gets replaces by an exogenous alternative.  For most of historical time, the exogenous alternative was some form of relatively difficult to corrupt base metal – gold, silver, or electrum, which is just an alloy of the two – but for the past few hundred years first the pound sterling, then the dollar, have emerged as replacements.  Uneasy replacements, it should be added: there’s a reason gold is now worth a heck of a lot more than it was twenty years ago.  But what I want to emphasize is the role of the power of the state in enforcing the currency as a means of exchange.  It comes in two directions: one is taxation, and the other is the naked exercise of violence, of the state’s rough oligopoly on the use of violence without consequence.  They are, of course, related.  And we’re standing in a moment, due – to repeat a theme of mine – to the emergence of abundance onto the human scene, where violence may not be as relevant as in the past.

On an American dollar, it quaintly states “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.”  What that means is that the state – with all the power it has, of police, of war, of violence – will recognize the use of the dollar to extinguish tax obligations to the state, and just as importantly, it will recognize its use in the world of law, which has behind it the threat of the application of the state’s ability to compel via force, to extinguish private obligations as well.  That is to say, if someone gives you notes with face value of $10,000 to pay off a contractual obligation that has a reasonable and legally demonstrable value of $10,000, the state will compel you to accept those notes as payment to extinguish the liability.  You don’t have a choice.  You might want something else – libras, euros, cows, cowrie shells, Green Stamps, frequent flier miles – but the US government and its agents will compel you to accept the notes that are imprinted with that statement – “This note” etc etc – and will then cease to recognize any further obligation of the person who paid you using the currency.  It’s a political statement: this is government imposing itself at the most primal root of human relations, of basic exchange and definition of value.  You might want to value things differently, but the power of the state – with the gun, with the weight of tradition and history but most and, really, only importantly with its relative oligopoly of violence – will compel you to accept its definition of value.

Weak states can’t do this – Weimar Germany couldn’t; Mugabe’s Zimbabwe couldn’t – but strong states can.  A victorious Union could in the wake of the Civil War, when “greenbacks” were forced into circulation as a means of paying the government’s debts incurred in winning the war.  A victorious United Kingdom could do so in the wake of finally defeating the Napoleonic empire, as it suspended payments of specie against presentment of Bank of England notes until it finally had accumulated enough specie and, more important, prestige and trust to make such exchanges irrelevant.  I have a sense that Zuckerberg – I’m sorry, I mean Facebook – whoops, I mean the Libra Foundation will be a test state, much like all sorts of startup countries (the US in 1789, England in 1694, Canada in 1934) who test their ability to enforce a notion of value.

What’s fascinating is the idea that this startup will not be a state, but it will simply be a collection of online exchange platforms.  I suppose there is a kind of compulsion available to such a platform, namely the dreaded “network effect”: once a network is used by a critical mass of the population, the rest of the population can’t avoid it.  The compulsion now becomes not something of violence, but something of, for lack of a better word, virtual shaming.  Either accept libras or be shunned from the network; since being shunned from the network is akin to the ancient Greek notion of exile, containing at once the loss of identity and meaning, it is so horrid to contemplate that nearly all will accept the value proposition, as it were.  It makes the name “libras” even more compelling: fundamentally, this is a return to the ancient idea of membership as the only means of creating identify, and thus of creating value.  It rejects the medieval but inherited into modern notion of identity being linked to nation, nation being the primal source of violence and control and, thus, of enforcement of value.

But I return in my mind to South Africa.  I have a sense that what will really happen will be an inefficiency.  There will be some good that will be viewed as portable across borders – in this case the border between the virtual and the real, the real being maybe more porous and in flux than before, but still an “other” relative to the virtual.  Some kind of good will emerge as the online equivalent of the Maserati in Johannesburg: a mobile object into which the citizens of the online world can have an escape hatch into an alternative world of value.  Goods in the Libra Foundation would will trade at a discount to those goods which have the capacity to cross the border.  And in the real world, as the threat or lack thereof of violence of the state varies and changes, and as the value of dollars and rubles and pesos and rands and gold varies, even these will become simply markers of relative violence, of virtual versus real violence.

One of the smartest bankers I ever worked with once pitched a capital raise to the bank I worked for which failed (excuse me: the bank that I know failed.  I’ve worked for other banks since, all of which retain the option of failure).  My CEO, who was incompetent to a rather extraordinary degree, advised by the guy who has been spinning up LinkedIn panic about libras, listened to the pitch, and at the end said, well, if the world is as bad as you think, what would we use all the equity we raise to buy?  The smart banker said, in the best line I’ve ever heard in my career – “well, easy: shotguns and canned goods.”

I’m not sure I’m that pessimistic.  And I think we have constructed a world of truly human proportions, with human resiliency, and I’m amazed at how resilient we really are, even when we’re damaged by traumas ranging from divorce, to war, to suicide, to emotional homicide.  I look to the goods that can cross worlds, of the virtual, the real, the worlds of the mind and of the heart.  I’m investing in relationships.  I’m investing in people.  You, my son, I’m investing in you.

And despite my sun sign, I’ll refrain for the time being from any accounts denominated in libras.

In the autumn of 1998, I departed from the asset management division of one global bank and arrived at the asset management division of another global bank.  I didn’t know for sure at the time, but it later turned out – as I hoped it would – that I had moved to a much better job at a much better firm: a spring in the fall.  After a couple of weeks, I was asked to travel to San Francisco to meet some of my new colleagues at the US headquarters.  Thus, it came to pass, just over twenty years ago, very early on a Monday morning in mid-December, on a trading floor high up on Fremont Street, I was first introduced to Peter Freilinger.

I think it is fair to say that during the first months of our acquaintance there was an element of caution from both parties.  In part this was due to some irritating but humdrum office politics, in particular the behaviour of a member of the senior management team, who proved to be an obstacle to the development of a constructive working relationship between us and, in due course, sabotaged each of our careers at the firm.  However, in part this was also due to the hesitation that is all but inevitable when the formerly precocious meets the currently precocious: we circled each other, mostly respectfully but also a little warily.  Time passed, we both changed jobs, Peter moved from one country to another, the financial crisis came and went, and as we become older, we also grew wiser: eventually respect won out over wariness, and we became friends.

Over the years, I discovered that he is a good banker in both senses of the word “good”: technically, he exhibits a very high level of proficiency across a wide range of skills and tasks; at the same time, he reflects carefully on the ethical dimensions of his work and takes his responsibilities – to colleagues, clients and wider society – seriously.  This combination is rare; not as rare as some of the lurid representations of the financial services industry served up by Hollywood might lead one to believe, but nonetheless rare enough to be prized when we stumble across it.   I saw in Peter the combination of competence and conscience that I admire; and, I suppose, he saw something similar in me: let’s call it elective affinity.

I want to say more about the importance of skill in the financial services sector, but first a short digression.  While it seems straightforward to distinguish the two different senses of the word “good” – one meaning highly proficient, the other meaning morally commendable – I find myself repeatedly drawn to the view that someone who demonstrates high levels of skill at a given task should also be expected to behave well, to treat others with respect, to honour the highest values of the culture of which they are part.   I find myself drawn to this view despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary.   I know that Maradona is one of the most gifted footballers in the history of the sport and, at the same time, was a cheat and a tax evader, with a drug habit and some unpleasant political views.   I know that Richard Wagner’s music is glorious, but that his opinions were odious.  I know that the sublime often emerges from the slime.  Despite what I know, I am tempted to think that someone being good at something creates a justifiable expectation of their being a good person too; that excellence in the particular should be accompanied by excellence in general.

There is a contrary view, namely that those who expend significant emotional and physical energy becoming very good at certain skills or tasks, can’t also be expected to have the capacity to invest in being a good person; that the pursuit of excellence in sport, or the arts, or at work, necessarily breeds a certain selfishness and competitiveness, which sit uneasily with the cultivation of good character.  This view would claim not just that being very good at something is perfectly consistent with being a bad person, but that being very good at something is more likely than not a predictor of bad character.  I find this idea troubling, not least because it seems to provide some people a ready-made excuse to indulge the less admirable aspects of their personalities.

It might be that there just is no correlation between the two senses of “good”, that one’s being very good at some skill or activity is not consistently indicative – one way or the other – of the quality of one’s character.  In “Science as a Vocation”, Max Weber makes the point that today there is no credible reason for us to assume a common source for the values of truth, goodness and beauty.  It is the fate of those who live in the modern world, Weber suggests, to be forced to acknowledge the reality of the “evil genius”, the “ugly truth” and the “flowers of evil”.  Kant, we should remember, wrote three critiques, not one.  Even so, despite all that I know, I remain attracted by the idea that excellence, at its most excellent, forms a unity.

End of digression.  Back to banking.

The financial services industry is not popular.  The scorn and loathing its practitioners attracted a decade ago, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, has waned somewhat but there is no sign of the emergence of affection or admiration for bankers from among the non-bankers.  Rather, they continue to be portrayed as greedy and irresponsible, over-paid and unrepentant, privatising the upside gains while socialising the downside costs.  I do not want to deny that there is an ugly side to the industry: during my career in finance I have met – and sometimes worked with – people who were dishonest, mean, selfish, vindictive or cowardly.  What I do want to deny is that this is the main problem with the financial services industry.   What makes banking truly disreputable is not that some of its practitioners have moral failings, but that large numbers of its practitioners are inept: mediocrity, not malevolence, is the dirty secret of the sector.

Let’s put moral judgement aside and focus instead on competence.  Within the financial services industry there is a wide range of roles, which require a wide range of skills: some are fairly technical, requiring high levels of numeracy or analytical ability, others call for skills in communication, team leadership, project management, technology and operations management.  Almost all roles require a good level of interpersonal skills, not least to ensure that risks in one part of the business are well understood by people working in other parts of the business.  Given the generous levels of remuneration that are widely available in the sector, firms should be able to hire and retain individuals who can evidence one or more of these skills, and who are willing to work hard to improve their skills-sets in some of the other areas.  From the point of view of capability, then, the financial services industry should have a reputation for technical excellence: good bankers should be plentiful.  But they are not.  There are some individuals who are outstanding but, in my experience, they are notable for their rarity.  In the financial services industry, the mean, median and mode for technical quality are all lower than they should be.

Further, those who rise to the top tend not to be the best: merit is a less reliable predictor of career success than endurance, combined with patronage.  The route to advancement in many firms is to hang around for long enough – and to hang out with the right people – rather than to demonstrate consistently high performance.  Some of this can be attributed to office politics, of the kind that Peter and I suffered from back in the day.  But much is due to the growing role of regulation in the sector.   The more rules there are to follow the more the industry becomes fixated on compliance rather than excellence: making sure things are not done wrong, rather than making sure they are done well.  Being compliant is mostly a low hurdle, but it quickly becomes the standard beyond which there is little reward for effort: the sector congregates just above the regulatory line, and the excellent is crowded out by the acceptable.  The good-enough has become the enemy of the best.

There is, for sure, an important role for regulation in the financial services industry.  Banking needs rules as much as do baseball and cricket.  Unlike team sports, however, there is a strong tendency in corporate life for rules quickly to become norms rather than constraints.  By which I mean, in sport the players take account of the existing rules and are forced to adapt their playing style quickly to changes in the rules, but no-one thinks that they should be rewarded just for following them.  In banking, following the rules is sometimes regarded as good enough because it has become the new standard of performative assessment: “we didn’t get fined by the regulator this year” is viewed as a more important measure of success than “ we did a really good job for our customers”.

There are people working in finance who care about the quality of their work, who want their customers to be pleased by the quality of the service they received and the level of price they were asked to pay for it; who want their colleagues to be well-trained, well-motivated, well-treated and well-compensated for their work; who think hard about how they can improve the products they provide, to the benefits of all the stakeholders of the business (shareholders, for sure, but creditors, clients and other partners, broadly construed, too); who consider the wider social impact of their company’s activities and practices, and who care that their firm is making a sustained positive contribution to the well-being of the community; and who, for reasons of personal pride, like to challenge themselves to work harder and achieve better results, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year.  There are some good people working in finance, but often they get disheartened, swamped by the preparedness of many of their colleagues to settle for far less, for just about good enough, for the complacency of being merely compliant.

What is true finance is probably true of many other sectors of the economy, especially those that have recently undergone a significant increase in the volume and complexity of regulatory oversight.  This is not just a problem for bankers.  But it is a problem – a very real problem – for bankers, and for everyone else too because, as we learned a decade ago, what goes on in the banks ends up impacting us all.  Ever more regulation leads to an ever greater focus on compliance, which leads in turn to the abandonment of excellence in favour of acceptability; those who get ahead are those who keep their heads down, instead of those who take on the risk of leading their teams into new and better values and practices.

There are ugly people everywhere – that is, people whose behaviour is morally ugly – who deserve to be exposed and held to account.  Finance has its fair share but, in my experience, it is not unique in this regard.  However, if we want the financial services sector to work better we need to pay less attention to these miscreants, and to focus instead on rooting out the lazy and the mediocre; and we need to identify and celebrate the good bankers, who work hard, with skill and conviction, doing a good job for their customers and for society more widely.  All of which is a long and roundabout way of saying, that while we must continue to recognise that the word “good” has two separate and equally important meanings, we should also acknowledge that in some spheres of life, such as banking, the pursuit of technical proficiency – that is, the development of products that are reliable and effective, delivered to customers in a professional and responsible way – is at the same time a moral good.

I have fond memories of Gordy – he was such an attentive and loyal dog.  We lived together for less than a week, and yet he learned my habits – seeking me out in the basement where my own dog rarely ventures.  Tobey was a younger pup at the time, always eager to chase and play.  His behaviour changed in Gordy’s presence – as if he took clues from the wise Gordy.  Maybe Gordy ‘told’ Tobey that being a dog was more than just enjoying the fresh air of the farm.  Gordy seemed to live for me – for people and especially Peter – as if ‘to be’ in each other’s presence was the greatest, most valuable good of all.  

In his youth, Gordy suffered from hardship and neglect.  He knew scarcity, was rescued, and eventually Peter adopted him.  I’m trying not to anthropomorphize him – still, I strongly sensed Gordy’s gratitude emanating from his every gesture.  During that week, I could feel his mood – his ‘acknowledging’ that he was at the mercy of his ‘humans’, and yet his complete acceptance of this ‘state of affairs’.  Peter and Gordy had developed a pact – an implicit ‘social’ contract between an aware owner and a sentient ‘owned’.  More importantly, they formed a pack  – a collaborative group interested in meeting each other’s needs.  I suspect that it is precisely this ‘aura’ of welcomed interdependence that made Gordy’s death hit Peter so hard.  

My own dog Tobey is not so solicitous.  In general, he behaves as if only pure abundance exists in the world.  We wanted him free to run about and only somewhat disciplined.  Yet even without training, he can easily sense his ‘humans’ emotional states.  If someone feels despair – or any form of emotional unease – he calms right down and stands guard, offering his body warmth as comfort.  I could argued that Tobey has a dog’s ‘good life’ – he runs free in our fields and has never needed for anything.  Yet even before conception, he was ‘engineered’ to suit our ‘human’ needs – to be hypo-allergenic (poddle), medium size (golden), intelligent (poodle) and pleasant with families (golden).  We paid dearly for this ‘design’ – he didn’t randomly happen!  Moreover, we bought him explicitly to be my companion – to ‘be’ the warm ‘thing’ I would hug when I needed comfort during a tougher time of my life.  Maybe it was already in his temperament, or maybe he learned that I needed from him.  Either ways, he knows exactly what is expected of him.  

Given a sample size of 2, I can’t hardly deduce general conclusions.  But both Gordy and Tobey showed how their ‘education’ – their formative experiences – shaped their behaviours later in life.  I could have described many more examples, or even tales from the lives of countless human individuals.  But speaking of humans would have been less clear – for my point is that past and present circumstances shape everyday instincts.  As humans, we imagine ourselves so much better because of our words, our verbal reasoning, and moral justifications.  And yet, as Nietzsche declared, “By far the greatest part of our spirit’s activity remains unconscious and unfelt.”  Both Gordy and Tobey – as sentient but non-verbal creatures – live without the added layer of verbal reasoning.  Nonetheless, they understand and interact with the world in complex ways – even forming strong habits – all without using any systems of symbolic meaning.  (That I assume – for I have never been in the mind of a dog to ‘know’ for sure!)

Still, in rationalizing our ethnocentricity, human beings often feel superior to all others sentient but non-verbal creatures because we have this very unique ability to create common symbolic systems.  Through them – languages and mathematics being great examples of symbolic systems – humans can collaborate and share their subjectivity in complex ways.  As Peter shows with his innovation function, these points of connection – between individual consciousness, mediated by shared symbolic systems – allows the creation of more understanding (or at least, the potential for it!).  Rationality is our human competitive advantage over other species – or at least, our most distinctive feature.  Yet symbolic systems are our ‘edge’, our weapon.  For without intersubjectivity, the connections Peter assumes in his function would not happen.  And indeed, since language is created by its usage amongst a population, we may lack the vocabulary to describe ‘emerging’ phenomenas.  Like you said in the [4] – we may not have the vocabulary to comprehend what is going on!  

As a species, we ignore all forms of beings whose consciousness we do not understand (mostly because it doesn’t resemble our own).  Of course, I generalize – not everyone is oblivion to other minds, and even different forms of ‘mind’.  Dog owners – or at least I – often wonders what goes on in the mind of their furry friend.  While I don’t think that Tobey has the capacity to formulate a mental thought such as “I want a carrot, Mommy” – I still know that cognition is still ‘in-there’, for he sits next to the island when I indeed cut carrots.  Therefore, he sensed his desire, he located the opportunity – most probably through scent – and exhibited the behaviour most likely to have his desire fulfilled – remembering past experiences.  

My point here is that ‘consciousness’ need not be a verbalized state of mind!  Sentience, which is Peter’s favourite word, is broader than what we usually refer to when we think of our rational, linguistically-mediated, mental consciousness.  Sentience is defined as the capacity to feel, perceive and experience subjectively – subjectivity here being best understood as using one’s own sensorial apparatus (whatever that happens to be).  Scholars of phenomenology, the study of subjective experiences, talk of intentionality – the consciousness ‘of’ something.  Consciousness is not a ‘thing’ – it’s more like a ‘prism’ through which our sentience feels, perceives and experiences.  I haven’t delved deeply enough into phenomenology to assess if that ‘prism’ needs to be ‘mediated’ by symbolic system.  My personal gut-feeling is NO!  To be ‘conscious of’ something doesn’t require ‘words’ per say.  I can see the beauty of the mountains and feels the awe.  I can actually be left speechless faced with such beautiful or sublime sight!  Therefore, ‘consciousness’ need not be mediated through symbolic systems – and hence maybe doesn’t even need to be restricted to human beings!  

This question seems to big to thoroughly explore herein.  It seems a matter of definition – as in: what features does consciousness requires to be called ‘consciousness’?  Is it sentience?  It is awareness?  Is it apprehension?  Comprehension?  The ability to describe ‘consciousness of’ to someone else?  Each of these words have distinct though related meanings – and yet I cannot be sure that you, dear reader, will grasp the nuances that I am trying to get at. (For I’m not sure that I do either!)  

But I’ll still go out and stake a few claims:  

• • • Gordy and Tobey can be said to be ‘conscious of’ their surroundings – but their animality means that their ‘being in the world’ has a different subjective experience than the ‘human-form’ of ‘being-in-the-world’.  This ‘consciousness of environment’ could also extend to plants – for they somehow must ‘know’ when to bloom.  To rocks, I’m not sure.  But to Earth as a whole – certainly !  For this ‘learning through feedback loops’ as Peter described implies that the Earth ‘apprehends’ its component parts and their interactions. [Note: I purposefully used the verb ‘to apprehend’ – which meaning is closer to perception or ‘felt’  and ‘intuited’ awareness.]
    • Our close relationship with dogs implies that we can connect across different ‘types’ of ‘consciousness of’.  Dogs and humans have co-existed long enough to have evolved together – the dogs getting our food scraps and advising us of predators in return.  Dog and man have also developed ways to interact, even communicate.  Arguably, with enough desire to ‘apprehend’ other forms of ‘being-in-the-world’, we can ‘comprehend’ other forms of consciousness – even if only partially.  [Note: Maybe I’m using ‘to comprehend’ a bit loosely here, but I mean: “To grasp or understand into/with our own minds” these other ways in which it is possible to grasp or understand.]

I meant this essay to be an echo of Peter’s Adolescence.  I feel that I failed in addressing its key points – and might try again at some later date.  But since this entry is already long, I’ll simply echo its title for now:

I personally do not remember the moment that my magical childhood ended.  It must have been at the age of eight, as my parents told me that they were separating.  From this life-altering event, I must have concluded that life is not only pure joy – and that ‘what is’ not always ‘what appears’ to be.  Yet, with the hindsight provided by writing my memoir, I don’t think that their separation was so traumatic.  I had sensed their malaise probably long before they verbalized it to each other.  As children do – apt as they are to perceive their surroundings in pre-rational, pre-verbal fashion – I understood clearly their silences, all that they meant by what they left unsaid.  Maybe I was particularly sensitive to this ‘intuitive’ way of being ‘conscious of’ .  Maybe every child starts there – with non-verbal sentience – before they learn their land’s language, symbolic system and cultural references.  

I’m currently in Austria, looking at the majestic Alps.  It’s been interesting to immerse ourselves into a foreign land – for people speak German here and use different signs and symbols.  I’ve felt like a child again.  Looking at displays on the highways and relearning the words for ‘warning’, ‘room’, and ‘day’.  I didn’t come prepared but I still picked up quite a bit of German, especially in embedding ourselves with Walter’s long-lost relatives.  It is surprising how much context and gestures provide much more ‘meaning’ than we assume when we are immerse in a symbolic meaning that we already share.  

After childhood, when we move from this intuitive learning to a more rational one, we tend to ‘get lost’ inside our heads.  Our mental states tends to get centerstage – often in the most self-absorbed ways.  An adolescent’s wants, needs and desires are so ‘important’ that ‘consciousness of environment’ is largely absent, or at least severely skewed by selection or confirmation biases.  Humanity, as a whole, might very well be in this ‘era’ of its development.  After all, our global culture pursues self-pleasuring and group status, all the while discounting future cost.  Some are so oblivious, so concerted by how their image is outwardly represented, that they fall off cliffs in the pursuit of the perfect selfie!  

Adolescence is marked by developing rationality, but refusing the use it.  For the adolescent can comprehend many things – arguably he or she can learn anything that they are interested in.  The brain plasticity – from which consciousness emerges ‘somehow’ – peaks at some point in the early twenties.  Therefore, adolescence is a period of rapid expansion of consciousness – at least potentially!  For the only real limits of an adolescent’s learning ability is ‘access to information’ and ‘interest’.  However, adolescents are known to care only selectively! 

Moreover, the period of adolescence is characterized by the crisis of self-identification.  Who am I? What am I? What am I meant to be or do?  To answer these questions, adolescents explore – almost recklessly.  They throw authorities out the windows – in our metaphor, that would be religions as well as traditions.  They are overly concerned with their belonging to a group – maybe that could explain the rise of nationalism in the 20th century.  In their interactions with their peers, adolescents either refuse to engage – dismissal of others and their point-of-views – or connect so completely that they want to merge with the object of their idolatry.  And there is no such thing as ‘enough’ – though that characteristic might be a remnant of childhood…

Hence, I think Peter’s analogy is instructive.  Adolescents eventually emerge of a period of chaos, more self-aware then they were when they left childhood.  They have tested and developed values.  They have integrated their cultural demands, and chosen to accept, reject or modify the roles expected of them.  Maybe adolescents, more than at any other period’s of one’s life, learn how to think and judge adequately – based on their own understanding and the symbolic systems they share with others.  Adulthood is not the same amongst all individuals, but it is somewhat defined by a ‘balancing act’ between competing goals, demands and desires.  If adulthood is about pursuing multiples objectives, then adolescence is about exploring all that could matter and decide what actually does matter…  

If indeed, we – humanity – are deeply steeped into this tumultuous period, we are bound for tall highs and deep lows.  Like Peter, I am optimistic that “in the end, all will be well.”  But like Keynes said: “In the end, we are all dead.”  The current ‘Us’ – me as I am today – care about the next half-century, because that will be the one I live most intensely (God willing).  

So if our humanity is really in its adolescent phase, I will do my part.  I will give words and concepts to what I sense intuitively – giving a verbal form to what I am ‘conscious of’.  I will bring to the fore of rationality all that I am sentient of, with as child-like sensitivity as I can.  I will interest myself with my environment and my education, expanding and sharing my understanding of myself, others and the world – testing my ideas against those of others.  I will do so such that our inter-subjectivity corpus of knowledge more realistically represent reality – with objectivity becoming understood as the mere consensus of subjective consciousnesses in a constantly emerging dialogue.  I will rebel against dogmas and establish new norms – not only  by living through example but also verbalizing how and why.  

I was silent in high school – minding my own business and hoping not to be noticed.  But I have faith now that the person that I am is an important part of this whole called Earth.  I am insignificant only insofar as I reject my significance – as one psyche experimenting with the ‘prism’ of consciousness.  As an individual, I have survived adolescence – so maybe I can help humanity do the same!  

As sometimes happens, after I wrote my last essay, I started noticing more things in the media on the same subject – or at least, which shared some of the themes I’d been writing about.  (I’m fully aware that that’s just a classic instance of selection bias at work in what my eye catches when I surf the internet, by the way.)  There was an essay in the New York Times yesterday, for example, on how we can now realize a luxury, vacation-filled form of communism, the way the pre-purge Trotskyites imagined it – written with slightly more verbal elan than the Trotskyites ever managed but with less intellectual rigor and a kind of winking po-mo materialistic-but-trying-to-mock-it-as-a-lame-fade style, which, as a proper Trotskyite (the kind that would have been shot by the NKVD in a boarding house in San Francisco in 1937), really cheesed me off.  Separately, there have been a number of articles across the internet questioning whether or not we have any hope of actually “halting” or reversing climate change, or whether we need to accept the fact that the climate has and will continue to change.  One article sent by a friend took an apocalyptic view; another was more balanced but still took the point that “the world is changing and we need to think of it as undergoing change, not somehow as a project we can reverse or overcome”.

It’s a problem in modern economics and environmental studies – both of which are more related than most of their practitioners realize – that the writing is just dreadful, so I’m not providing links to the articles above, simply out of a desire to not waste your time or offend your aesthetic sensibility, dear reader.  But my essay had three primary points, each of which kept getting echoed in the online postings of the last week:

(a) we are living in a post-scarcity era, yet our economic systems and even our ways of imagining economics remain stuck in concepts which are only sensical in the presence of scarcity;

(b) we also seem to have crossed the threshold where the technology we initially built to surpass the limits of scarcity have created a new environment of existential threat; but,

(c) we’re building and assimilating technology so fast at this point, that it seems highly unlikely that we’re truly facing a physically existential threat – although all of the above factors mean we are at a kind of psychological and intellectual inflection point.

I’ve been wrestling especially with the third point, mostly because I don’t like the idea of being predictive about the future and I’m crossing that predictive line with such a statement.  I’m willing to make observations about the present which are unconventional if supported by historical data – both causal and what I’d call “field based”, that is, judgments which aren’t rooted in cause and effect but which show a field of related and sometimes correlated trend vectors which point to an obvious basis for current conditions.  I’m really reluctant to draw that forward, even though as a human being you kind of have to because you’re trying to position yourself for “the good life”, as Mark and Viktoria keep reminding me, at all times.  We can disagree on what the good life consists of, but we’re all trying to achieve it, and to either get closer to the goal of the good life or maintain a good life that we’ve already discovered.  So you have to project, if only to then be able to evaluate different choices against a backdrop of what you think the future may be while you ignore the fact that you have a poor and blinkered view of what “choice” and “possibility” actually are and you’re ultimately stumbling about in a dark of your own creation.

But I don’t think it’s particularly interesting to note that we are building and assimilating technology incredibly quickly, faster than ever before.  It’s not even interesting to note why: communication is now essentially free (other than due to self- or societally-imposed censorship barriers), transportation of the goods and service providers required to create interesting new stuff is also essentially free (especially in terms of time), and there are lots more of us clever hominids around to have ideas and see where they go.  So if the equation that leads to the quantum of innovation in a given period is something like:

Innovation = ∫ f(population, lifespan) • g(proximity) d(f(), g())/dt

Inserting some numbers into the above, we’ve gone from less than a bit less than a billion people, to nearly eight billion people (increasing by call it a factor of 10).  By proximity, I mean both physical closeness and the proximity of ideas or of values.  Initially we were separated in space and with immense time costs to overcome, but now with almost no separation materially in space (factor of 10⁴, meaning it’s literally at least 10,000 times faster for two human beings to interact via trade or the like than pre-industrial times) and with time compressed in terms of the time used to connect and share information as well (at least a factor of 10⁴ and rising), it’s an almost supercritical implosion of ideas and people and the things we share amongst ourselves.   Even the number of years of life in which we can share amongst ourselves has vastly increased and thus the idea of “usable lifetime” has doubled – small change compared to the other accelerations but still material.  In other words, we’ve increased the potential for innovation by something like 2×10⁹in roughly two hundred years.[1]

That’s a pretty big shift in potential.  We have 2 billion times the creative capacity for innovation over a given period of time (call it a year, or a decade) as a species as we had in 1750, if I’m roughly correct on these orders of magnitude.  Unsurprisingly, it would seem, we’ve not only gone to the moon, split the atom (for good and for ill), cured or found preventative mechanisms for most of the diseases that used to kill us, continue to raise more food than anyone thought possible, and managed so far to not kill ourselves – either intentionally through war or unintentionally via poisoning the planet beyond recognition.

It’s that last bit that has media articles focused on risks and the potential for some kind of accelerating Venus greenhouse effect planetary spiral (albeit in the face of 4 billion years of evidence to the contrary), but I’d argue even there, our innovation and potential as a learning species is coming to the fore.  In all developed economies, the birthrate is now comfortably below replacement; that’s a kind of learning as the species becomes accustomed to abundance.  With expanding lifespans and material plenty, we’d be idiotic to continue to reproduce at pre-modern levels, and sure enough, we don’t.  As we reproduce at lower levels, which, demographically speaking, compensates for the expanding lifespans by not overly stressing population growth in the moment, we demonstrate the system’s ability to learn.[2]

So our capacity for innovation has exploded, like nothing ever seen before in the history of the species, and we seem to be initiating a strange combination of changes – societal and technological – which are tuning us as a species to the new condition of both abundance and innovative potential.  We’ve not completely lost our chance with the planet, either, although we might have to get used to a bit of a stampede as we all migrate to northern Manitoba and deal with some not insignificant and probably quite violent shifts along the way towards dealing with a planet which will take millennia to cool down again.  As a species obviously capable of violence, it should surprise no one that – even as we learn (hopefully) less violent ways of collectively navigating change, we’ll engage in a lot of killing one another along the way.

I hope I’m not coming across either as optimistic or callous.  I’m not optimistic about the future simply because the capacity for narcissism in us as individuals means the future will be awful no matter what happens to the environment, or to our ability to solve cancer or create new diseases, or what have you.  Our own selfishness – our individual inability to love for its own sake – will ensure that on any given day in the future, most of us will wake up and struggle to hold back tears of despair for a race so God-forsaken as ours, while others of us wake up, snort a couple lines, and spend another day viewing other individuals as objects for their own consumption.  And while I think too much in terms of statistical dynamics, which often risks allowing one to ignore the individual souls who are affected by the processes of complex systems such as the system of human society, or the linked systems of humanity and the non-human natural environment of our planet, I also am choked up every day, trying to deal with the terrifying duality of an effective learning system being built on the backs of individuals who suffer, who are confused, who harm one another with a kind of smug contempt, who are ground down into dust, who die without a viable hope other than the myths we invented back before we knew how to live with abundance.

One (again poorly written) essay I read recently, riffed on the idea that, if the planet (or our species, which to us is the same thing) were to be destroyed at a time certain in the future, our very notion of time would change.  Public figures often talk about needing to do things to preserve our way of life – or at least, life itself – for our grandchildren or what have you, but the essay raised the question “well, what if we knew there would be no grandchildren – we’d all be dead from an asteroid in 30 years?”.  They used this to introduce what should be an intuitive thought, that we’re motivated at a certain base level not by preserving life for our grandchildren, but we’re preserving life for the idea of the species continuing to have children ad infinitum.  We cherish that idea of the species living far more than we acknowledge – preferring to hide behind the vaguely recognizable faces of as-yet-unborn-but-surely-imaginable children of our children’s children.

Where I’m optimistic is for the species, and for the system we call Earth.  We – and this is a collective we, humanity and its host – seem to be getting better and better at learning and responding to one another.  The system seems to be holding up well; Earth is getting deadlier to us at an individual level, which is good in terms of thinking about how a learning system should work (bad for individuals, obviously), and collectively, the system is getting more innovative, and we’re even starting to get less damaging with our innovation (read about changes in mining pollution from pre-1970 times to today and tell me that’s not true).  There are more of us – but we’re somehow hearing a kind of system feedback, and we’re responding in our collective individual lives, leading us to have fewer children as we live longer and face a more challenging existential environment.

This is a different concept than worrying about “mankind on earth” or even about my grandkids.  I struggle with what I’ve imposed on my son in terms of how his life will be able to unfold, beginning as it did in a specific moment in May, 2012.  I’m mostly not worried about the long-term effect of his parents’ divorce on him; he’s been loved and he so clearly understands what that love means, in the varying ways we both show to him, that that side of him, the side that will discover and add new meaning to what love can be, will be fine.  No, I worry about the choices he might be forced to make, about him being potentially the first generation to live confronted with the full effect of abundance while being stuck with a human set of wiring that has its breakpoints, whether around social jealousy or the power of chemical addiction.  And I’m worried about what I’ll tell him about those choices, and about the why at the heart of the matter: why his mother and I had him.  We made a great decision, I know – but will I be able to express why?

My son’s offspring are literally not real and won’t be, likely, for a couple decades or more; I’m not worried about them yet as concrete beings.  On the other hand, the species, and the sentient-species / earth system that really makes up who we are, is very real. It is mine just as it is everyone’s, and I’m fascinated by it.  That system is having a bit of a growth spurt problem, but I’m not worried about that either – not merely because I have a vanishingly small impact on that system, but because even in its growing pains, it shows the unmistakeable signs of learning. Even as some lessons don’t get learned well or quickly (“hey, should we really burn 100 million years worth of carbon accumulation in 200 years?”), the act of learning is clearly taking place, including the painful discipline that results from getting things wrong for awhile.  That all makes sense to me.

When you center that process on a specific sentient individual, however, that’s where it becomes hard.  That’s where I worry.  Especially when you were part of the process to bring that sentient being into the world.

My dog passed away last summer, and I wrote about how I felt the need to state that I killed him, or had him killed.  I’ve come to realize both (a) I was right, and (b) I was wrong, and (c) the words I have available to me are so sparse, so impoverished, that capturing the full force of what I felt was impossible, so I simply need to be nicer to myself.  That being said, once you help a creature – a dog who otherwise would have been abandoned or put to sleep alone – you also condemn them to a new, future death.  Once you give birth – or you participate in a birth as a father – you do the same thing.  You’re not selecting the moment, and you’re not killing them outright (unless you’re a monster) – that is to say, their death, even if you bring it about out of kindness, is not your fault.  But calling into being a sentient creature, capable of giving and receiving love, capable of understanding the world on their own terms, also involves setting them on the path towards death without, fundamentally, asking for their input in the decision.  It was your choice, not theirs, and you have to own that, just as much as they will own the actual act of dying.  I helped bring my son into the world – which means I also condemned him to leave it someday.[3]

This is, I think, maybe the more fundamental existential demand of our emergence into abundance. Back when lives were properly nasty, brutish and short (Hobbes got it right for all of human existence up until around 1960 or so), we brought life into being unconsciously, and stared somewhat incomprehensibly at our offspring if – if – they asked us why.  We faced our mortality as if in a constant daily lottery, as did our children.  Any of us could die tomorrow, due to famine or accident or disease most likely, but lurking just around the corner was the imminence of death by war and crime (crime, interestingly, has been falling as a cause of death pretty much since we have archaeological records to infer it).  We brought our children into the world as both insurance and as a reaffirmation of our own existence in a world where scarcity and the fear created by that constantly challenged that existence.  But now, we don’t need children to affirm our life tomorrow – we know we’ll die, but in awhile, and most likely due to a “disease” which is really just the slow accumulation of our own poor nutrition choices or overindulgences. And since society runs, well, pretty efficiently, we don’t need children to care for us in retirement.  We might want companionship, but that’s existentially different from needing children to actually supply us with food and shelter in our post-working years.

As such, we’ve lost the answer to “why am I here, parents?”.  It used to be quite simple, if a bit selfish: “you’re here because we’ll need you, and if we’re being perfectly honest, we need a lot of you because most of you will die prior to full recovery of the cost of husbandry in a world cursed by scarcity”.  Now, when our children ask us why they exist, that answer is completely discredited. So we damn well better have an answer more compelling than “well, I was bored” or “your mom and I were acting out of a kind of societal habit” or “because maintaining a steady path of GDP increase requires a certain base level of population growth in an economy still dependent on resource distribution in an overall Ricardian framework of land and primary good scarcity.”

The primary philosophical impact of the end of existential insecurity – the beginning of abundance – is that it demands of us some clarity for not just why we’re here, but why we’re participating in others being here.  It’s terrifying because we can no longer hide behind a few static questions – “why am I here”, “what is the good life” – and instead we face an insistent demand for a dialogue, not between ideas in a Kantian dialectic, but an actual dialogue amongst sentient, and therefore unpredictable and limited but differently limited and thus not wholly intelligible, individuals.  And the dialogue then extends to include a learning discussion with nature as a whole, implicitly trying to discover whether our sentience makes us the adults, or whether the conjoined complexity of the earth makes it the mentor and reduces us, both as individuals and as a collective, to preschoolers – or whether we’re all just infants blindly searching.  It becomes a dialogue with those who brought me into being, and those who I bring into being, and that cradle of nature from which all of us sprang, about why we all chose to be here.

The existential terror of our time is facing that question without the crutch of fear, of the uncertainty of survival tomorrow or even today, giving us a morally justifiable way out of resolving the question.  It’s facing Sartre’s guilt over being alive in the midst of death, but just as much, facing our own confusion as to why our parents brought us into being, and looking at the future and telling all of them, too, yes, you’ll die, you were born (in a certain accurate way of saying it[4]) in order to die.  But that is no reason for despair, even though many of you may die painfully or willfully at the hands of others.  Fear – and despair – are easy but no longer credible cop-outs to that question now that abundance exists.

Until now, we’ve gotten a bit of a free ride.  It wasn’t free: we paid for it in scarcity, in famine, in plague, in war.  But now we have to look at ourselves – our system, the whole system, sentient us plus Earth that’s too complex to fathom or understand – and every day come up with a why.  Abundance is the signal that our childhood, as a species, as a planet, is over.

If you, reader, remember the moment when you first realized childhood was magical – that moment when you also realized it wasn’t truly real anymore, even if it had been when you were living it – you’ll probably remember thinking that adulthood remained an abject mystery.  You knew that something whole in childhood couldn’t be authentically felt any longer, but that the new – that thing that you were supposed to understand – seemed terrifyingly out of reach.  My response to that moment was a bit obsessively intellectual, and it’s taken me thirty years to claw back to a point where I can recover the body memory of being a child while still being ready to face what will, inevitably, come. Tying those loops together – tying together time before I was born and time after it, tying together nature and being human, tying cords of love and letting them bind or fail as they will – will never be easy.  But, dear reader – and my son, for whom I’ve always been writing – we’re here to learn. I wanted to bring you here to learn, and for you to teach me.  You’re doing great.

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[1]I know, the factor of 10 increase in population means that we have a physical impact on the environment greater than ever before.  And the impact of the technology required to reduce the physical separation of each of us means that we accelerate that impact even faster.  But, I’d argue, even a physical impact equation would not have the 10⁴multiplier associated with our communications. Innovation, in other words, travels at the speed of communication; environmental impact travels at the speed of a truck, or a pipeline, or a smokestack, and with a dissemination function (time to get plastic bag from factory to Great Pacific Trash Gyre to whale’s stomach) slowing it down from there.

[2]Demographics are fun and easy, by the way – you can set up your own world population model in an hour or so in Excel, and in a few more hours, build a fun model to test your own theories about birthrates, expanding lifespans, shifts in mortality trends, and you can even throw in some random variables for things like wars on the downside or sudden upticks in lifespan due to, say, a cure for cancer. Seriously, it’s fun!

And in other news, I still have no girlfriend.

[3]That doesn’t happen in relationships, oddly; we find someone already on that path, and we see if we’d like to walk together for awhile, and if it doesn’t work out, we resume separate journeys but, after all, that other individual didn’t send us on the path, and didn’t really even change our path.  They just made it more or less enjoyable while they walked nearby.  Topic for a different day, I suppose.

[4]Accurate but burdened by the poverty of language – I’m trying to learn from putting down Gordy.  But this is important as well: part of the existential fear of this transition to abundance, and the dialogue it forces on us, is that we can’t use simple language to have the conversation.  We need to rediscover the roots of where we came from back when we were pre-sentient – and we have to anticipate a dialogue at the level of the system as a whole for which we still lack any real tools.  Our language is both far more complex than anything existing in nature – and far less complex, and far to poor in complexity, to comprehend that nature taken as a whole.