Category: Living

We walk steadily uphill together.  The peak is only 2km from the car park, but we have 530m to climb, which takes us 50 minutes.  Although the sun is bright, the breeze is fresh and cool, streaming off the Atlantic, to our west.  Our body heat – generated step-by-step, stride-by-stride, as we slowly rise, higher and higher, along the narrow quartz-strewn path up the mountain – soaks us in sweat.  I can feel the water drips running down my face, back and legs.  I lick the salty residue from my lips.

Errigal is fully exposed to the weather.  There is no shelter, no hiding place.  My ears fill with the steady pulse of the wind.  A small passing cloud coats us, briefly, with snowflakes, cooling and cleansing our faces as they melt on impact.  We reach the summit: we sit, we drink water and the pace of our heartbeats starts to slow.  We admire the views, which are spectacular.  This is a great place for a good conversation, but when we stop talking there are no other human sounds audible, only the gentle hum of nature.

Descending is easier on the lungs but harder on the knee and ankle joints, our leg muscles no longer stretching out to propel us upwards, but tightening and tensing, holding us back from slipping on loose rock, keeping us balanced as we drop back towards the moorland below.  The wind becomes gentler – now a modest breeze that tickles the skin – and quieter too.  We can hear the call of birds, an occasional car in the distance, and the steady trickle of brackish water in a mountain stream, that makes its way down the slope, skipping over the rocks, alongside us.

Two days later, now alone, I walk across the dunes to the beach.  The wind wraps around me, in my ears and eyes and hair, surrounding me with the sound of the sea, exfoliating my skin with minute particles of salt and sand, flavouring my journey.  The grass is spongy and springy: no need for walking boots here, light trainers will suffice.  The dunes rise and fall, like giant molehills, but the walking is fast and easy.  Where the path is sheltered from the wind the sun warms my face – the air temperature today is higher than average for mid-May – confirming that Spring has arrived.  Earlier this morning I heard a cuckoo.

The beach curves around the coastline.  To reach the far end will take me 25 minutes at a brisk pace.  I take off my shoes and feel the fine sand, firm and moist on the soles of my feet, and I hear the cries of gulls above the rushing of the air, and the rhythmic patterns of the waves blown repeatedly against the shore.  If I were to look closely, I would see flecks of white everywhere – sheep in the fields, shells in the sand, birds on the wing, foam on the waves and clouds in the heavens – and I could enjoy the endlessly variegated blues of the sea and sky, but my senses are already overwhelmed by the white noise of the wind and ocean in my ears.  My head is full of their vast sound.

Prompted by powerful sensations, my mind engages, searching its archives, making connections with previously stored experience.  It replays the lyrics of a song:

I am drawn to the western shore
Where the light moves bright upon the tide
To the lullaby and the ceaseless roar
And the songs that never die

My memory links the words, the tune, the image of a shell on the cover of the compact disc, with this moment, this place, this feeling.  For me, this is the western shore that will always be the subject of the song, this is the beach where the light will dance on the surface of the sea, these will be the connections that will never die.

It is time to swim; or, rather, to confront the waves as they surge relentlessly from the north-west, knocking me over, plunging me under, my eyes stung, my mouth, ears and nose cleansed by brine.  My skin is everywhere taut and alert, stimulated by the force and temperature of the water, strong and cold – very cold – wrapping me, rolling me, pushing me down and lifting me up.  When I manage to empty my ears of saline, and lift my head into the sunshine, once again I feel the wind across my face and hear the sea.  The horizon line recedes into the silence of empty space, but the tidal flow advances incessantly in full voice.

The ceaseless roar of the wind and the lullaby of the ocean will stay with me forever, but the song does not remain the same.  Amid the repetitions – wave after wave, gust after gust – are countless minor variations: subtle changes according to the direction of the jet stream and water currents, the gravitational pull of the moon through its cycle and the rotation of the seasons: variations of tone, of pace, of rhythm, of melody, each asserting its unique individuality through minor differences, while also reinforcing their shared characteristics within the soundscape.  The music of the beach – repeated patterns, marginal deviations – is unlike anything else, but it mostly reminds me of Philip Glass: no, not the 1975 opera, but the piano études.

A few weeks previously I had attended a musical event at Tate Modern, during which an orchestra of professional musicians was joined by a choir and a band both comprised of people who are or have recently been homeless, to perform together.  My friend who works at With One Voice – the international arts and homelessness movement, which organised the event – had encouraged me to come and listen.  They played Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ blood never failed me yet continuously, from 8pm in the evening until 8am the next morning.  The sung lyric – recorded by an unknown homeless man, in 1971 – lasts for about 25 seconds, which means that the tape loop plays approximately 1728 times during the performance, with the instrumental and vocal accompaniments providing a series of musical variations around this repetitious central theme.

It was a truly immersive experience.  Initially my attention was centred on the recorded song but was then diverted by the changing combinations of instruments and voices performing live.  After some time, as these became familiar, predictable, anticipated, my attention shifted to the subtle changes – intentional or mistaken – introduced by the performers.  Then, as both theme and variations became routine, the experience became more hypnotic: the music was everywhere in the room, but it was also nowhere special; it enveloped me, filling my head, but it allowed my mind to wander, to search for connected memories, to bring to the surface of my consciousness thoughts and feelings that otherwise might remain submerged beneath the routine busyness of my conscious life.

After three hours, my physical reception of the music had transformed my sense of place and time: I was suspended in a moment in which all regular distractions were absent.  The experience – swimming attentively in sounds – was mesmeric and visceral.   In today’s world, music is ever-present but always in the background, lulling us without really bothering us, providing comfort but never touching us.  Listening to recorded music is a very different experience, a second-order pleasure.  To feel the music on our skin we need to be in the presence of the performers.

Our memories work mysteriously, unpredictably, unreliably, surprisingly, suggestively.  These profoundly physical experiences – climbing the steep mountain path, splashing in the cold, cold sea, and listening to the meditative music performance – reminded me of an essay by Montaigne, On the art of conference, which is in Book III of the collected Essays.  I did not have either of my printed copies to hand, so I re-read it on an electronic device, which feels different and slightly inauthentic.   But the quality of the writing was as I remembered.  Montaigne writes:

The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is conversation; I find the use of it more sweet than of any other action of life; and for that reason it is that, if I were now compelled to choose, I should sooner, I think consent to lose my sight than my hearing or speech.

I was struck by this remark, since I am sure that most of us would, if we were now compelled to choose, consent to lose our hearing or speech than our sight.  Montaigne makes an unexpected choice, but – as always – he has cogent reasons.  He values conversation above the reading of books because it engages us more fully.  “When anyone contradicts me”, he writes, “he raises my attention, not my anger.”  And later, “’tis a dull and hurtful pleasure to have to do with people who admire us and approve of all we say.”

Spending time in the company of others, who question, challenge, counter-suggest, oppose, examine, cajole and tease us, is a great sensory pleasure as well as the cornerstone of friendship.  It is not just their company – their being-with-us – that matters, but their constructive resistance – their being-against-us – that counts.  We need our friends to be present, to hear their voices immediately in our ears, not mediated by some form of information communication technology; we need to feel them on our skin, to be touched in our hearts.  Their engagement with us is both a comfort and a stimulant: they remind us who we are and that we are alive.

These are the moments that feed our memories, creating reserves of happiness and goodwill upon which we can draw when we are alone, or separated, or simply reliant on mediated communication using electronic messages.  Like letter writing in an earlier age, the use of text and email today is a valuable lifeline, keeping us connected to our network of friendships; but it is always only a poor substitute for being with them in the same room.       Nothing can recreate the pleasure of the immediate, real, physical presence of a friend.  Montaigne is right to say that conversation is sweet; a glass or two of wine shared during conversation makes it sweeter still.

I chose not to stay at Tate Modern for the full twelve-hour performance.  After three hours I made my way home, tired from the effort of paying close attention, but rewarded and renewed by the physical and psychological demands of the task.   It is not a great piece of music; not as good as Philip Glass for sure.  Even so, the value of the experience – the lesson in listening – was evident.  The next morning, I woke early, walked back to the gallery and heard the final hour.  When the orchestra and choir finally stopped, their marathon performance over, the silence was immense.   I will remember this event for a long time, not because of the brilliance of the playing, nor the aesthetic qualities of what was played, but because of the message – creating one musical voice from the elite and the excluded – and because the telling of this story was itself an exercise in effort and endurance.  I was there and I was fully absorbed by my experience of others making music.

Listening, done well, is hard work, like walking up a mountain, like plunging into the ocean.  It makes demands on our reserves of energy as well as on the acuity of our senses.  We do not learn much from chatter, but we can learn to listen better and to sense the depths that lie beneath the surface of language.  We can train ourselves to hear more.  In the immediacy of the company of friends we develop the ability to hear the subtle variations of unpredictability as well as the regular repetitions of consistency; it becomes possible for us to be robust as well as to be gentle; we are able to ascend to greater heights of shared understanding and respect.  Friendship is a labour of the senses and of the memory.

 

The tasting notes told me to expect a “sparkling body with stone-fruit acidity, kumquat, honeydew melon and jasmine notes and a floral finish”, all of which sounds delicious.  What, I wondered, could provoke such a diverse and abundant medley of flavours?

I am no expert on wine, merely an enthusiast for the phenomenological enjoyment of wine-drinking, particularly in good company with well-prepared, flavoursome food.  A bottle shared is a pleasure doubled.  Or, in the words of the Chinese poet Li Bai, whose lyrics Mahler used in his song-cycle, Das Lied von der Erde: “A full glass of wine at the proper moment / Is worth more than all the riches of the world”.

I know that Californian chardonnay is sometimes said to taste of melon, and a little research informed me that rosé from Provence also has that reputation.  Jasmine, by contrast, is more often associated with dry white wine from cooler regions, German grown riesling being a good exemplar.  Yet it is another grape varietal altogether –viognier – from which connoisseurs most reliably find a hint of stone-fruit.  A combination of three different grapes, potentially from three different regions, might therefore be required to produce this complex balance of flavours; and, less we forget, we also have been promised kumquat.

The trick, however, is to gather not grapes from the vine but beans from the bush.  More particularly, to secure some Ethiopian coffee from Werka Wuri, a washing station located in the Gedeb Woreda, a small district in the region near the town of Yirgacheffe, internationally famous for coffees abounding with floral and citric flavours.  In the Gedio language, werka translates as “gold” and wuri as “high altitude”, so I am reliably informed by Caravan Coffee Roasters, from whom I obtained my beans, with their enticing description.

I repeat, I am no expert on wine:  I am not confident that I could distinguish a Californian chardonnay from an Australian, nor that I could pick a Rhone viognier from a marsanne, but I am sure – very sure – that I can distinguish a glass of wine from a cup of coffee, despite the fact that the tasting notes might be almost identical.

My point here is not to mock the writers of tasting notes: I am sure that some drinkers – better trained, more alert than me – regularly distinguish these flavours in both wine and coffee.  What interests me is that our sensory faculties function in such a way that two radically different experiences of taste can be appropriately – that is to say, competently and credibly – described using a shared vocabulary, without anyone thinking that drinking hot black coffee and chilled white wine are otherwise similar.

Our experience of wine and coffee – and of food and drink more generally – is almost always the product of two rather different forms of sensory experience: taste and smell.  Although we refer to tasting notes, wine tastings, and the cultivation of good taste, much of the richness and precision of our experience of wine comes from not from our mouths but from our noses.  We sense more variety, discriminate more finely, remember more clearly that which we smell compared to that which we taste.  The knowledgeable drinker always uses their nose first, when the wine is poured.   That said, to leave the wine in the glass, smelled but not tasted, would be an unconscionable waste.  The gourmet engages both nose and mouth, takes times to notice the range, intensity and balance of the sensations they produce, and finds pleasure in the apprehension of the world’s rich bounty through the combination of their messages.

The receptor cells on our tongues – and in the sides and roof of our mouths – can detect five main types of taste: bitter, salty, savoury (umami), sour and sweet.  While these provide important high-level information about what we are about to consume, they offer us a very limited vocabulary with which to discuss the finer points of wine consumption.  Our mouths can also provide us with information about a drink’s viscosity – important for our appreciation of port – its effervescence – important for champagne – and its tannic qualities – important for my fellow drinkers of barolo – all of which is valuable, but hardly sufficient to sustain a meaningful conversation about the relative merits of one vintage compared to another, or of an unusual but pleasantly striking paring of wine and food.

If we think that “terroir” matters, we must educate our noses.  Our olfactory neurones are stimulated by molecules from our drink entering the front of our noses, directly, and from the back, via our mouths.  These molecules provide detailed information about their source material, which is transmitted to the brain through our limbic system, which connects our sense of smell closely with our emotions and our memories.  Smelling is, by comparison with tasting, more detailed, more intimate and more memorable.  It is also more amenable to training and refinement: almost everyone can easily identify sweet tastes on the tongue, but it takes practice and concentration to distinguish stone-fruits on the nose.

We start with a basic ability to discriminate tastes and smells.  From an evolutionary point of view, these senses functions to protect us from forms of ingestion that would be harmful, but like other evolved capabilities, they provide us in addition the opportunity to enhance our enjoyment of being in the world.  What is needed to prevent harm can also be put into service to create pleasure.   Just as our ability to see colours or hear pitch varies from person to person, so too, owing to the individual physical qualities of our sense receptors and neurone system, we all start with our own distinctive appreciation of taste and smell.  But we are all able to develop these faculties, to improve our detection of the sensory qualities in the glass – and on the plate – and to store memories of smells and flavours, which we can draw upon to make comparisons with new experiences.

Learning requires us to attend closely to what our noses are telling us, and this is not always easy.  Several years ago, I attended a wine tasting event in California.  After four whites, we tasted four reds, one of which puzzled many of us.  It was hard to put into words what was wrong, but what we saw in the glass and what we felt in our mouths and noses were incongruent.  Characteristically, we gave priority to our vision, and tried to think of a red grape from the region that might have that lightness, that hint of butter, that suggestion of oak, which the wine presented.  Finally, the host confessed that we were drinking a fifth white – a local chardonnay – that had been dyed to look like a red wine.   He assured us that if we had been blind-folded we would have picked the grape, but we had all allowed our sight-perception to over-rule our tasting memories: a trick of the eye causing a failure to remember.

All this proves – some might say – is that we should read the label on the bottle, which will tell us where the wine came from, which grapes were used, the year that it was made, the approximate alcohol content and, perhaps, some tasting notes that will prepare us to discern flavours that some other, more knowledgeable person, thinks are there.  What is the reward for all the investment of time and energy – because paying attention to our senses of taste and smell in a sustained way over many years, must consume a considerable amount of intellectual energy – that it takes to educate our palate?  Why not simply rely on others to tell us what to expect, what to enjoy, what to look out for?

The quick answer is that relying on others to tell us what to experience is almost always a bad idea, particularly once we get beyond early childhood.  I am happy to defer to the expertise of horticulturalists and oenologists about the cultivation of vines and the technical production of wine, and to neurologists and philosophers about the way in which the brain interprets the sensory information sent from the tongue and nostrils.  I am not happy – not at all – to defer to anyone else when it comes to what I feel when I smell and taste the wine from my glass.  My experience of the world is my experience: I am its owner, I am its authority.  I want to understand it better, more thoughtfully, more deeply, but this is work that only I can do.

There are two reasons to think that relying wholly on the taste judgments of others is a mistake.  (I say “wholly”, because the process of improving our taste involves listening to and learning from the judgments of others: connoisseurship cannot be learned from books but requires practice and – at least to a certain extent – apprenticeship.)  One reason concerns the role of the memory in the cultivation of our sense of personal identity, which in turn plays a central role in the development of our sense of happiness in life.  I will return to this point in a later text.  A second reason concerns the intrinsic pleasure of drinking wine (or drinking coffee, or eating flavoursome food), preferably in the company of others.  If we are to participate fully in our own lives, and to share the lives of others, we need to be able to develop our own ability to capture the full flavour of the world.

There are some who drink to forget, for whom the principal pleasure of alcohol consumption is the alcohol itself:  it numbs the senses, dulls the memory, takes away the pains of living, at least for a while.  This is a way life to be avoided, to be pitied.   But it would be a mistake – albeit one made seductive by the dogmas of religion and the prohibition movement – to assume that modest consumption is always the prelude to over-indulgence, to argue that the only responsible attitude to pleasure is to avoid it entirely from fear of excess.  Too little can be as bad as too much.  As Aristotle taught, the virtuous life is lived at the mean, with just the right amount, taken in just the right way, and for just the right reasons.

Much of the pleasure of drinking is social, reminding us of another of Aristotle’s great themes: friendship.  When we share wine and food in the company of others, we jointly connect our senses – of smell and taste – with our shared world.  Drinking and dining together provides us a means of opening our minds and our hearts, alerting us to the great range of taste combinations in the world, and to the pleasure of discovering how these combinations are perceived by others, whose tastes overlap, but also differ in interesting ways from our own.  Wine reveals to us to the variety that is in the world and, at the same time reminds us of our common humanity, that everywhere others also take great pleasure from exploring variety.  By becoming more alert to the richness of our own experience we are better placed to understand, and respect, the wealth of experience of others.

There is an old Latin saying, in vino veritas: in wine there is truth.  Conventionally this is taken to mean that because the consumption of wine lowers our sense of restraint, reduces our control of impulse, that under its influence we are more likely to say what we really think, or to disclose information that we might otherwise have kept to ourselves.   I suggest that there is another meaning to this saying, perhaps more profound, which is that in our experience of educating our taste we come closer to the truth of the world.  Not only do we learn to embrace more attentively the precious fruits of the earth, but we become better able to share more deeply with our drinking companions the qualities of these sensations: we come closer to the truth about our habitats and our friendships.

Now, it’s time for me to see if I can find that hint of kumquat …

I am in a strange place, on the cusp of paralysis. I want to write, so very much. But I don’t feel competent enough. How can I write, philosophy no less, without having read the entire canon of human thought?

 

At first, I dismissed this question as absurd! Even with complete devotion to reading for the rest of my days, I will not have enough time to digest all the texts in existence today.  Even if I limit myself to the last few centuries, the goal is still not SMART at all!  Yet, I feel obliged to give it due consideration.  How can I stand on the shoulders of giants if I don’t know what my predecessors stood for?

 

I’ll premise this essay by saying that I am reading a lot – more than ever!   But I am not like Peter, who reads at break-neck speed.  I am a slow reader – I actually hear the sound of the words.  In just a couple of months, I’ll delve deeper in the study of Philosophy – starting another BA this summer.  It will take me at least 5 years to complete this endeavor. So good student that I am, I am reading ahead!  I find most of the texts I read fascinating – even those that I don’t quite understand. Still, I perceive within myself a tension.  When I don’t write, I feel the nagging impression that I am hiding in the voice of others.  I wonder: am I looking in books for the answers that I can only find within?

 

Previously, I’ve studied economics.  It was post-crisis and I wanted to know what had brought our society to the edge of the precipice.  My university wasn’t a particularly good one – we only derived equations!  We assumed cetis paribusand perfect information – which obviously made our discipline approximate at best, but most likely unrealistic.  We held firmly to the scientific method – thus we put more efforts on understanding the mathematics than in the evaluation of the assumptions and limitations of our theories.  But I’m still grateful for the drudgery, ‘cause it got me over the edge into the rest of my life!

 

Now, I’m aware that within philosophy, there is also an analytical tradition.  Its aims is to apply rigorous and argumentative methods to the study of the ‘objects of philosophy’ (ie: reality, knowledge, reason, morality, and experience or consciousness, even language).  However, the extent of analytical rigor actually created dead-ends. As it turns out, there is a very limited range of logical conclusions that can be reached without starting from arbitrary premises.  Therefore, analytical philosophers have now turned to arguing – amongst themselves – over the meaning embedded in the primary texts written by their predecessors.

 

Indeed, philosophical writing nowadays falls into two categories: original thoughts and derivative – though maybe highly insightful – analysis.  Most of the philosophical literature is of the second type – and might be very interesting – but the first category includes the works that I read as I initially explore this strange land of philosophy.

 

So I’ve been reading Nietzsche.  And I’ve wondered: What makes him a philosopher? Is it because Bertrand Russell included him in his book History of Philosophy?  As such, he has been accepted as an ‘initiate’ by other community-members. But to belong in a discipline, one must first write about the ‘objects of philosophy’.  In philosophy, do methods matter as much as in the sciences? Again, reading Nietzsche, one must clearly answer ‘No!’, he writes cryptically, allegorically, mostly without clear argumentation.  Most of his writing wouldn’t be accepted as an undergraduate final paper – and yet he has something to say !!!  Thus is philosophy more defined by the value of its insights?  Some say that philosophers impact the world by introducing new ‘Ways of Seeing’ it.

 

Indeed, in some deep way, philosophy studies ideas – in and of themselves – as well as their impact on man.  Ideas are not these ‘abstract’ things floating in the ether – like Plato suggested.  They live in us!  In fact, philosophy addresses how mankind regards the very concepts which he cannot separate from himself.

 

Philosophy starts by asking: What are we?  What is reality?  Where do we belong in the world?  As an answer, one might draw this:

 

But we’ll observe that philosophy is nowhere in that diagram.  Thus, is philosophy the mere asking of questions for which we know too well that the reason we propose answers is actually to see ‘_whatever is_’ differently than before? If so, than all we have to do is follow Socrates…

 

I believe that ideas deeply affect man’s understanding of himself, his duties, his purpose – both individually and collectively.  How we think of ourselves and our place in the world actually affects our behavior – even delimiting what we can perceive (through confirmation bias for example) and what we consider possible.  It would be too crude to say that ‘thoughts shape reality’ – for thinking does not ‘cause’ existence in the way that we usually understand causality.  But on some level, (my) philosophy aims to explain all the ways in which ‘ideas’ ripple into the fabric of our lives.  Is this the goal of all philosophers?  Maybe not.  Still, the practice of philosophy allows me to postulate this as my research orientation.

 

I can do that because philosophy is a conceptual study – using thought-experiments instead of a physical apparatus to ‘prove’ or falsify hypotheses.  As such, someone new like me – though deep in my own way – might offer a meaningful contribution.  Or, a rereading of philosophers like Plato or Aristotle can be as relevant today than 2’500 years ago.  There are gems hidden in both Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism and Skepticism.  We can’t literally transpose these insights into our 21st century society, because man’s conception of himself has changed over time.  And voila! Why should one read the key texts of philosophy written over millennia?  Because it is not only history that changed.  It is not only our way of living into our environment that evolved over centuries.  Crucially, the way we think of ourselves – which is actually distinct from, but interwoven with, what we think about – has changed with intellectual discoveries. By that I mean, the ideas we host within ourselves to abstractly represent ‘how the world is’ AREactually changing over time.  Ideas are not these fixed ‘abstract things’ waiting to emerge in consciousness.

 

Somewhere else, I’ll argue that a sensitivity to the evolution of man’s understanding of himself is actually crucial to the ‘doing’ of philosophy.  ‘Crucial’ is maybe not ‘essential’ but particularly useful in order to gain a vantage point from which to observe this strange land of thoughts and ideas.  I have Peter who gifted me Charles Taylor’s The Secular Ageto thank for that particular insight.

 

So here I am, feeling like I am moving into this strange place – where reading and writing meets in a swirl of tension and unconscious thinking.

 

On the reading front, my ever-expanding reading list is daunting!  And I’m kinda looking for a way to cut corners… but that’s counter-productive!  I cannot deny that men’s discourses react to one another – and as such, primary texts are embedded in a rich web of socio-historical context.  Yes, I believe that ideas grow in the particular ‘climate’ of their time and place. As intellectuals, philosophers reflect on the historical challenges of their days.  Their texts embody thoughts and ideas that – in themselves – can be ‘grasped’ or understood by people of other eras.  Written language, while that too evolves, is still permanent enoughto carry one’s ideas forward into time and space.

 

I’ll compare Western philosophy to a tree, taking roots in Ancient Greece and ever since growing limbs.  Its branches are different schools of thoughts, ‘growing out of and becoming distinct from’ the trunk – and yet still made from that same love of wisdom.   Every new branch – every thought – may keep changing: grow, be added on, or become brittle and wither.  But until it is forgotten, it will always be part of that illustrious tree.  But one’s philosophical contribution can also be a seedling, whose seed has spawned independent of tradition – though it is still made from that same love of wisdom.

 

When I read, I honor the tree – the traditions. When I write, I grow into my own shape – which may graft itself onto the tree or be a distinct entity altogether. All I know is that I am less interested in writing about the tree than in ‘being’ a tree.

 

I have a calling to write – of that I am sure. But what?  That question can truly stymies me.  Until I am sitting before my blank page, I do not know what will emerge. However, I know that form matters. Randomly, I discovered that John T. Lysaker, in Philosophy, Writing and the Character of Thought, makes the simple claim that the way we choose to write – in aphorisms, in personal essays, in scholarly articles, in systematic treatises – not only shapes ‘how a thought is expressed’ (and eventually perceived by a reader) but also ‘what emerges as thought’ in the first place.

 

Thus, choosing a genre and a tone for a particular project becomes fundamental.  And challenging because I have no way to know how my literary choices will affect the thoughts that emerge.  Only practice will enlighten.  Only the actual act of philosophizing – argumentatively or not, in fiction or non-fiction, etc… – will allow V’s ‘way to see’ to emerge with time.

 

Everyday that I sit at my screen, I rely on the flow of writing.  First because letters, words and sentences need to line up, one after another.  But mostly because of that mystical thing called ‘the state of flow’ – the energized focus which allow creation to occur.   As writer, we are constrained by language – like Ursula LeGuin said: “Words are my Matter” – yet the flow is indispensable, because it is the unconscious and non-verbal that I shape into becoming a shareable thing.

 

It is with humility that I accept how much I cannot control the writing process.  I know that reading feeds my soul – that integrating ideas within my understanding may contribute, in unforeseeable ways, to my own growth as an intellectual. I’ve also made peace with the fact that philosophy dwells in the territory of unknown unknowns.  It includes – but is not delimited by – the bringing to consciousness and methodical evaluation of all that we take for granted.  A tall order already, and it is merely the first few steps toward unknown discoveries.

 

For this pursuit – to which I am committing – I know that I must ‘Be Brave. Show Up. And Speak Honestly’.  Only with ‘Praxis’ will I fight my paralysis.  I advance with my fears in check, for I know that I have things to say.  Still, I can’t silence that nagging voice that says: “Who are you?  You are not yet initiated!”

 

Thus dared to write Viktoria.

I wrote in my last essay in passing about a belief I have, that value will become decoupled from money in the foreseeable future.  What that decoupling will consist of was left unstated, but I got a couple of requests for more detail, and then I read a collection of essays, The Wisdom of Money by a French philsopher and writer, Pascal Bruckner, and what struck me about the book – which examines recent historical and contemporary attitudes towards “money” in modern capitalist societies – was how money, wealth, and the measurement of relative value is almost universally conflated when people think about money.  And that made the strange lock mechanism that is my thought process shift, and twist, and align, and I realized I was ready to describe what I meant by “decoupling.”

At its core, Bruckner’s argument – and most discussions of money in our current Pinketty era of inequality – perpetuates a core confusion.  That is, they collapse the very different concepts of the pursuit of wealth and the process of translating labor or intellectual effort into money. That is, they posit that when we pursue wealth,we actually pursue the accumulation of money.  This creates a definitive confusion, which I think most of us experience when we try to talk about “money.”  On the one hand, when we rail against value disparity, we are talking not about the normatively false differentiation of value between a CEO and a schoolteacher, but rather about the different amount of moneythey make.  And when we talk about money itself, we rarely clarify what role it is playing at a given moment – that is, is it a store of value, a transmission device of relative value between actually realizable goods and services, or is it a point-in-time comparator between different value regimes as it expresses itself against other forms of money or value transmission devices or potential stores of value.

Bruckner regularly conflates meaning across these three dimensions, and he’s smart enough to occasionally realize what he’s doing, but by and large he can’t escape his own confusion.  I don’t find any fault in this; he’s doing what we all do, and if he were extremely precise in his understanding, I think the essays would suffer in their role of trying to understand how we have come to have a fraught relationship between ourselves, both as individuals and as members of overlapping societies of people, and money as a dynamic social construct.  But our relationship is going through a time of massive transition, just as the information revolution is destroying long-held notions of “society” – built-in geographical spaces and subject to normative constructs of race and dialect – and creating instead dynamically created and destroyed “societies” which exist and die both in time, space, and virtually.

It should be no surprise that money – existing as a means to allow societies to transmit within themselves commonly held notions of value, to store and move that value through time and space, and to convert that value in trade and in competition with other societies, depending on its role at any moment as store, transmission medium, or comparator – would need to go through a similar redefinition.  Money is, after all, the supreme abstract creation of any given society; its use is in effect the purest mirror of the norms and expectations of a society, far more natural a portrait than anything put on canvas or sculpted in stone or bronze.  Perhaps only the law as a construct can match it, but even that has a kind of conscious intent to it; money, on the other hand – as revealed by the inability of economists and philosophers to pin down a common way of discussing it but nevertheless being forced to observe it and comment on it – is an unconscious abstract. It is defined by its use, which is itself defined only indirectly, through how society chooses to use it.

As a monolithic and reliably static notion of “society” breaks down, however, it’s not surprising to see money as a construct also start to fragment.  Take, for example, money in the form of a store of value.  Fundamentally, money no longer plays a role in storing value except in small quantities and for very short periods of time.  Rather, ownership interests are the primary store of value.  Equity – be it in the classic legal form of common stock, or the very traditional older form of real estate title, or ownership of unique items of artistic or cultural value – has more or less completely replaced money and money equivalents (bonds, which are nothing more than rights to future money) as value stores. And we observe this in financial markets, where equity valuations are now decoupled entirely from any future money generation and instead are based on newly ephemeral concepts such as brand value, the ability of an enterprise to accumulate data or user hits, or in the case of real assets, the likelihood of future demand value increasing due to population, decay of existing stock, or scarcity.

This phenomenon has been observed in the financial press but only indirectly through the recognition that “equity valuations” no longer reference dividends or cash flow, and that accounting profit and loss (which defines enterprise value in terms of money as a unit of account and reference to a primary unit of value) no longer drive the actual market price of a company.  That valuation decoupling is what allows the value of financial assets to skyrocket without any noticeably impact on the prices of use goods – but the idea that the reference point no longer serves as reference point has largely been ignored.

What I’d posit is that the market for ownership of real assets now exists in a separate society, consisting of a defined set of actors – mostly corporate actors, including pension funds, mutual funds, and other cooperative players which dip into the world of “real” individuals, but also including some individuals who by virtue of their ownership of sufficient assets or access to intangibles now largely express value in this separate world.  This society always existed to some extent but is now more or less completely decoupled from the actual requirements for survival and daily living.  Oddly, many of the “real” people – you know, physical people named Larry or Melanie or Greg – live lives which look very much like “ordinary” middle class people.  They might have better houses or better cars, but they aren’t living like the robber barons of the last time we went through this round of wealth accumulation, where the Rockefellers and their ilk constructed the estates and ranches of the New World – or married into or bought the formerly feudal estates of the old world.  They have no pressure, as do the rest of us, to budget carefully, but by and large their wealth lives in a world fully decoupled from the items that they might purchase in the “real” world.

The only time most of us come up against this world is when we purchase an equity object like a house – indeed, a home purchase is effectively the only time most of us encounter this new decoupled world of value storage.  And fewer and fewer of us are encountering that world, because like all value store objects today, the valuation in terms of value of money in its role as a short-term value exchange item gallops ever higher. Our use-value wages, the prices of use goods (food, clothing, immediate shelter such as a room overnight or a monthly rent, Legos), have remained largely constant, which is a good thing when you think about it because we’re humans, temporal, real, concrete – massive disruptions in prices have a consequently massive emotional and physical impact (ask the people of Venezuela).  But the end result is that there has already opened up a world where the same unit of account has almost entirely eliminated its ability to play a role in intermediating transactions between two distinct societies, the society of entities who own future ownership value and the society of individuals who exchange current use value.

With this decoupling, I’m increasingly of the opinion that the society of owner-value transactors will develop a much more direct barter economy.  Why bother converting into the unit that describes use-value when it’s so much easier to trade ownership interests directly for one another? Indeed, even temporarily using the unit of account of use-value makes one’s wealth dead for a period of time, and no one wants that.  There is even historical precedent for this, albeit the inverse of what I think will occur today in a world of informational efficiency.  Throughout much of the Middle Ages, coins and bills of exchange were only used to facilitate trade over distances (confined to luxury goods in large measure or in goods used in war, ie., state goods), while use-value exchange was conducted entirely in kind.  “Money” only existed in the real world when real estate or civil and state penalties were involved (including levies for war); only then would the “average” citizen encounter pricing in the form of shillings or pounds. Prices in pounds, indeed, would be absurd to most people, much as the idea of exchanging pre-IPO non-SEC registered ownership interests in Uber or Pinterest or whatever non-publically tradable ownership right would be absurd to most people.

In that historical world, “money” existed only for those large purchases between state or quasi-state actors who would deal in items which implied ownership or the potential for future ownership in productive assets, and it existed because the ability to exchange in kind was limited due to the spatial and geographical limitations on transfer.  In our modern de-materialized world, fully abstracted, there are no limits to transfer, and few limits on information – the only differentiations are on demand preferences and opportunity sets.  Similarly, in the medieval world, small-scale transactions were extraordinarily limited in variety, making barter and in-kind exchange actually quite simple – whereas today, individuals are faced with effectively limitless choice, even among those living at or below the poverty level.  In-kind exchange is impossible when choices are unlimited and in constant flux, making an intermediary descriptor of stable valuation in the form of a dollar essential.

I’m not at all bothered by this bifurcation of exchange societies; it is what it is. Historically, I’m pretty confident that the world of ownership exchange will periodically be destroyed, because human beings show an amazing capacity for slaughtering one another in war and revolution.  The losers in such events invariably – although not obviously – are the holders of ownership interests; the markets, state structures, and exchange norms upon which they depend to make ownership worth owning are the prime casualties of war, even if the most obvious casualties are the people who own nothing who are killed.  I don’t like the fact that the ownership class – owing to a different but no less human yet inexhaustible demand for pleasure and satiation and the sensation of control and power – tend to misuse their wealth, to take advantage of the bifurcated worlds to occasionally translate their ownership value into baroque displays of use value, but “not liking” that fact doesn’t mean I’m exercised about it.  Humanity, in a word, sucks; to get upset by it does nothing but upset ones digestion.  It certainly doesn’t result in a change in human nature.

Ah, there’s a term I’ve been avoiding – but now that I am forty-four, I am completely convinced that there is a human tendency – not an absolute behavioral imperative, but definitely a tendency – towards selfishness and narcissism.  I’ve seen too much of it in others, including those who purport to being “enlightened” or “awake” or “conscious”, to think otherwise.  And that includes me, and I make no pretence of thinking that I’m particularly enlightened at all.  I think about morality – the art and science of how we value one another as intangible and indefinable objects, or beings, or worlds – but that doesn’t make me moral. If anything, it just focuses a lens on my own immorality and failings.  I see in myself my own tendencies towards selfishness and bias, and while I might try to rise above them, I see every day how I find new ways to wallow in my own desires. Human nature is to fool oneself.

And human nature has very little to do with money.  Money is simply an expression of how we value things within our worlds, our societies – the clusters of human beings that share a critical mass of commonalities such that they create the ability to define a clear and internally understood notion of purpose and meaning.  Money is created wherever such communities form – which is why online “communities” of gamers take so readily to the creation of in-game money forms, and readily exchange real-world dollars for them – and I think that will only proliferate, only it will increasingly involve exchanges of real world goods as well as online virtual stuff.  But the more isolated money circulation pools that are created – whether it be of ownership value exchange, or online virtual rights exchanges, or scrip among small businesses in a given community, or in-kind exchange in areas where state decay or local hyperinflation induce it – the more every such community will still want what’s called a numeraire currency, a comparator object – that third function of “money” – that facilitates cross-border transactions by providing a stable and more or less universally acknowledged denominator.

In our world today, that is the dollar – and I see no reason why it will be anything but that in the future, mostly because the United States remains the place which, unique among nations, seems able to balance the seeming contradiction of dynamically creating societies while at the same time facilitating both ownership rights and the ability to create new notions of what is own-able, and yet can proliferate choice among use objects without limit.  In every other country that I’ve lived in (with the exception of Canada, but proximity may prove the concept here), either a lingering sense of the stasis of tradition, or the inescapable lure of the will-to-power of the totalitarian state (or both, China), effectively means that the equilibrium that seems to exist in the dollar economy doesn’t and can’t exist in other potential comparator units of account.

My father and I once had a long argument about what makes a country, and I said a “country” is by definition a coherent body of law coupled with the infrastructure to enforce it.  It’s not a geographical construct – although often that infrastructure requires geographical coherence to enforce the law consistently and efficiently.  It’s also not a people, or a race, or a group of people united by common cause.  In that regard, Rome was truly the first country, coming about at a time when geography supplied ample limits to its ability to enforce its law, but defined truly by the concept of “citizenship” and the legal rights that entailed.  Because of what money does – as store of value, as transmission of value, and as comparator of different conceptions of value – it needs to have some connection to legal rights to “work” in a sustainable way.  The only major currency in the world that has that linkage is that of the United States.

And that, in its way, has made the philosophical concept of money that much harder.  With the numeraire currency also effectively the sole currency for ownership value, and with the US economy being the one that produces most of the economic research and financial innovation, with American economists consistently producing the most research into monetary theory and what limited bits of the philosophy of value that get produced, it takes a supreme act of self-consciousness and self-criticism to examine a system in which the researcher has been embedded since birth, in language, transactional norms, and in observable history.

Bruckner, on the other hand, is from France, a country which has lost its currency – excuse the multifaceted meaning of that phrase – while being unable to lose a kind of quintessential need to impose a single definition of “society” and “culture” on itself, in a way which American society couldn’t care less about.  It’s unsurprising that coming from such a place, Bruckner would be able to identify the tension points in what money is today, even if he can’t escape the linguistic, cultural, and academic ambiguity when one starts to use the term “money” with rigor.  But I think understanding the next stages of evolution for money’s role in society – and for understanding what forms money will take in fulfilling those roles – we as humanity will need to become more self-conscious, will need to be aware of how we can abuse the notion of money even as we acknowledge the fact that we’ll continue to abuse it.  Complaining about inequality or about wealth accumulation or the like will get us no where; thinking about what we want money to do for us, as opposed to how much or what kind of money we want, is the only path forward.

That’s a facile way to end, however.  Ultimately, there is no path “forward” – at least so far as I can tell.  Unless we see an evolution of human motivations that shifts definitively away from the unconscious bias towards physical and emotional gratification, we’ll just cycle back and forth between a now fairly routine rotation of money as value store, money as use value representation, and money as translator. The path forward would decouple value from money entirely, and release “value” into the space spiritual. Our physical use needs would be recognized as secondary, and our representations of value – and our most diligent and imperative needs to trade that value – would be based on a set of moral needs which would have little, if anything, to do with simply gratification.

My sense – especially reinforced over the past few years, of both self-criticism but especially a kind of observational critique of those who claim spiritual truth – is that we are quite some distance from that.  That is to say, that particular decoupling of value and money is not in our foreseeable future.  In our lifetimes – and in the “lifetimes” described by the modern press, enamored of the time scales of the internet where today’s world is declared obsolete once the IPO gets past the employee lockup date – we have nothing to look forward to except the proliferation of money spaces, and a resulting dissolution of the money concepts of ownership value storage and use value exchange.  The authors of this site are trying to live by example for our children (and everyone’s children, frankly) for what a more complete decoupling might look like.  We are neither optimistic, nor are we declaring defeat.  Pragmatically, we just continue to live, and write, and reflect.

About a month ago, I got into a more heated discussion than I would have liked with someone.  We were in a group, having spent some time in a meeting earlier and out for that sort of dinner you have to bond with people at work, and this person – a woman in her mid thirties, upwardly mobile, successful, entrepreneurial – brought up her notion that banking would be eliminated by the rise of “blockchain.”  Her argument was pretty much what I’ve come to expect for intelligent people who use the word “blockchain” in a generic kind of way: a basic understanding – or more precisely, an intuition – that there is something fundamentally new about cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or Ethereum or the like, and a similarly instinctual understanding that when something so fundamentally new comes along in our new world of reductio ad absurdum et acceleratum, chances are, our world will be disrupted.  Being roughly millennial, and having no real direct experience with banking beyond (as she admitted) her credit card, her checking account, and making payments with her phone, she took these two quite accurate intuitions and extrapolated out into the destruction of an industry which strikes her as antiquated, consumer-unfriendly, and monopolistic.

She was wrong about her observations, though, especially given that she is American and therefore faces American banks.  American banks are only antiquated, consumer-unfriendly, and monopolistic if you’re extraordinarily lazy or if you require certain specialized international banking services that trap you with banks with global scale who act much like their oligopolistic cousins in the rest of the world.  Otherwise, you have your pick of incredibly low-cost, incredibly competitive, and groundbreaking banks which ruthlessly compete for your business and are in living terror of the other 4000 banks and hundreds of quasi-banks trying to steal it away from them.  She was also wrong about what she called “blockchain,” which is simply a distributed, secure, and private ledger system which cryptocurrencies use to ensure the reliability and value of their currency.  The thing is, banking itself is also a distributed, secure, and private ledger system; each bank is a secure and private ledger keeping track of your (electronic) money, and enabling the periodic conversion of that private money into public banknotes or tax payments.  Arguing that banking would be replaced by blockchain, and thus will be destroyed, is like arguing that US “generally-accepted accounting principles” will be replaced by International Financial Reporting Standards.  Yes, Virginia, banks may employ blockchain to manage their internal ledgers and to communicate amongst themselves about their various ledger systems; but banks will still exist.

In any event, things got heated because of two things.  First, I have a strong sense that I was viewed as “mansplaining” – which I probably was.  In this #MeToo era, the rules of rhetoric have changed, particularly when you’re viewed as belonging to a privileged class: I’m white, male, middle-aged, and in banking, while she was white (no points there), female (subject to historical power factors which are still to be adequately addressed), young (in the eyes of youth, always a disadvantage – I speak from memory here), and in the non-profit sector (even if you’re making money in the non-profit sector, you still get to revel in the fact that your excrement is noticeably less pungent).  In that discussion, therefore, even if I had valid objections, I had to navigate a much different debating minefield, and I doubt that I did so particularly well.  I’m learning, but I’m not nearly fluent enough in the new art of persuasion to pretend that I can compete.

The other problem, though, only occurred to me after about ten minutes of verbal serve and volley.  It’s not that I thought she was necessarily pointing in the wrong direction with her logic: indeed, I agree with her fundamental intuition that the massive expansion of information technology will, eventually, transform how we think of the concept of “value” which has historically become bound to our monetary units of exchange and the system that enables it to be exchanged.  I don’t think blockchain will be the answer – for one, the computing power required to continually verify individual transactions seems to expand exponentially given the current instantiation of a distributed ledger system, which means it’s not sustainable as a technology – but I do think we’re on the verge in the next generation or so of a fundamental decoupling of “value” from a monolithic concept of “money.”  And that will change banking, or eliminate the need for it entirely, and in so doing it will bankrupt many individuals who have relied on banking as a source of power, as a place for storage of value, and as a means of usurping others who don’t understand it as a system.  I’m both excited and a little nervous about that day coming, but I was in total agreement with my younger, female, non-profit friend about it being not too far over the horizon.

What got me annoyed, and ended up with me moving away from simple point-counterpoint discussion and into verbal smackdown, was my perception that my discussion partner simply didn’t care about moving to that next level.  She was content – in my perception, smugly so – to sit back on her two primary insights, that blockchain is new and disruptive, and that new and disruptive things tend to destroy the industries that they disrupt.  Blockchain is disruptive, it’s about money, banks are all about money, ergo banks will die, and now let’s talk about how great it is to be in a non-profit.  Not that I don’t want to talk about how great it is to be in a non-profit – I’m on two boards and have spent a lot of my banking career working for institutions which are not profit oriented – but hold on sister: just because I shouldn’t mansplain doesn’t mean you get to assert patently incorrect statements and move on.  Granted, you’re young and vivacious and are a master of the new rhetorical norms, but even Alcibiades had to answer to the old guy at the post-symposium dinner party.

I’ve been this way for a long time.  I can remember a study group at Georgetown when I was a way-too-young, way-too-angry sixteen year old freshman from Maine, where I verbally eviscerated some rich kid from New Jersey about the plot of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, her searing memoir of growing up in the West Indies, doubly a slave, first born of the descendants of slaves and now enslaved to a tourist economy that only offered jobs as waiters and maids and cooks to the rich visitors from their former colonial master countries.  The kid talked about how the standard of living in Aruba and Bermuda and Jamaica was only made better by integration into the global economy – not a false point, obviously – and, my Maine roots, my memories of New Jersey fathers looking at me at the mall wearing my fast food garb during the summers like I was a lesser being as they casually ordered for their brood and then yelled at me for taking too long, asking my friends to talk slower because they couldn’t understand their Maine downeast accents, all of it came roaring into play as I told the kid that he lacked both perspective and intelligence, and then gave a three-minute lecture on what it was like to come from the periphery, to have to watch the money come in every summer and leave every fall, to read the New York Times on your break and realize no one who read that paper cared about where you were from except to wonder how the lobster would taste there next July.

That came back to me, talking to the blockchain woman.

It comes back to me despite the fact that I still feel like I’m wrong about most things, despite the fact that listening to the blockchain woman made me think of new things and learn new things.  Even New Jersey boy at Georgetown made good points: without tourism, Maine would basically be northern Manitoba, and if you ask the people who drag themselves into Winnipeg – stabbiest city in North America – to get away from the black flies, mosquitoes, flooding, winter, and lack of everything but especially opportunity to be a valued human being, you don’t want to be northern Manitoba.  Tourism – and some government-subsidized shipbuilding and a few legacy businesses and the odd entrepreneur – is what allows Mainers to raise their children and hope they can be more.  It’s what allowed me to realize a dream and work away from Maine, in the world, in understanding and developing a view and perspective on the world, for the last twenty-five years.

New Jersey rich kid, in other words, had a good point to make, and I took it in, much though it annoys me to this day to admit its provenance.  And the blockchain woman was making a fundamentally good point: we live in a disruptive age.  I need to take that intuition, well stated by her, and apply it to all the things I think about, that Viktoria and Mark and I write about.  And, dammit, I’m doing that, and it’s been fruitful, and I’m playing with new ideas because of it.  Lots of those ideas are, candidly, terrifying, but it would be intellectually dishonest not to play with them and explore them.

But I’m still left with this frustration that many people – not all, but the overweening majority – take their two or three TEDtalk intuitions and then start making their assertions.  They don’t then spend the time to listen, to explore, or to challenge those intuitions from as many angles as they can.  They start laying down conclusions instead of exploring potentials.  They are clever, they often position two or three ideas that I’d never think of, let alone juxtaposition against one another, and they make magical new potentials emerge.  But annoyingly, they then start to conclude.

I’ve talked a lot about recursion in these pages, and I think what bothers me most in these discussions is that these people, boldly concluding and asserting their way through powerpoints and after-work dinners, are wasting their own precious capacity for recursive thinking.  Consciousness, sentience, consists of layers upon layers of potential.  There is creativity – the ability to imagine and posit things which have never existed in reality but can exist within our capacity for abstraction.  There is analysis – the ability to take both concrete and abstract things and see how they interact, see how they cause or affect one another.  But then there is the third degree: recursion, the ability to take both creativity and analysis and apply it to the fruits of each, to continually dive and swim and force interactions time and time again.  It’s the counterpoint to concluding, to asserting: it’s the questioning and inversion of the conclusions, forcing them to stand on their heads and repeat what they said backward to see if it still makes sense, to see if it still works.

Looking back on my reading of late, which has been a bit immersed in works on consciousness and the structure of mind and its implications for the design of artificial intelligence systems, I’m actually shocked that the word “recursion” has very rarely (or at least, not that I’ve seen) come up.  I learned recursion when I was a pup computer programmer, working COBOL on mainframes in one of the few truly non-tourist supported companies in Portland (naturally it was bought by a competitor from Chattanooga not long after I left home).  It was a basic action for exploring data, and it’s become a kind of basic action for exploring everything for me.  If you come up with a concept, explore its implications, including the implications of the concept on the concept itself.  As a human being, if you think something about someone else, apply the same thought to yourself – what do you find?  What do you see?  If you judge someone, judge yourself through the same lens; if someone judges you, apply that lens to the other.  And repeat.  Look in the mirror, then return the gaze.  And repeat.

What annoyed me (to the point of becoming petulant) about the blockchain argument was the fact that the other person had a good idea but didn’t bother to apply her insight to the concept itself.  Yes, blockchain is disruptive – but so was fractional banking, and in fact, fractional banking was the original distributed privately secured ledger system.  Blockchain is banking in a semi-automated way – which, really, is banking, which itself is only semi-automated.  Blockchain is a new technology in the same way that computational data stacks replaced double entry hand written ledgers as a core tracking technology.  But looked at through that recursive lens, blockchain isn’t a new form of banking, it’s just a new technology for use in banking.  Banking, the exchange of value in fixed units defined socially and made abstract through the use of ledger systems to track possession by individuals or their proxies, hasn’t changed and won’t simply because it’s got a supposedly better software package: moving from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel didn’t change the world, even though macros in Visual Basic made it move faster than backslash keystroke commands.

The discussion I wanted to have with the blockchain woman was about what happens when we no longer require fixed units.  What if we had enough data – and enough instantaneous computational capability – to not require the exchange of unit quantities of dollars for goods and services, but instead could exchange goods and services – or potential future goods and potential future services – for themselves directly, without intermediation through units of currency?  We’ve constructed layers upon layers of systemic intermediation to allow us to exchange across time (bonds, stocks, deposits, interest paid or capital gains made on such instruments) and across location (currencies, differentiated value for similar goods in different places, markets, Amazon.com) and across societal perception (a man’s wage is greater than a woman’s for the same talent or skill or output, some goods are priced openly while others are priced in the dark).  Each of those layers allows for greater abstraction in the higher level of exchange, but it also allows for some information loss, and also allows for what really bothered the blockchain woman: the extraction of economic rent for the privelege of operating each exchange layer.  What if we could exchange with one another all the things that we want to represent materially in realtime with no intermediation – and thus no enrichment of bankers, only the utility cost of maintaining the master system?

Blockchain wouldn’t work for that; instead there would need to be a kind of universal and yet individually tunable and constantly updated price list, a kind of total menu of things and concepts and abstractions that could be exchanged at once.  Blockchain is just a lame, incredibly energy-exhaustive title insurance scheme; what I’m talking about is a way to exchange a Picasso for so many hours of my future writing output, or my new house in South Portland for a collection of old automobiles and model trains and a top-up of yardwork.  A single, universally valid exchange for all goods and services.  And if we had that, wouldn’t we be able to focus that much more time on the things that aren’t value-able, that cannot be conceived of in terms of value – like the value I put on the love I feel for my son, that I felt when I woke up in a motel in Blue River, British Columbia, and realized that at some point in the night my dog had curled up on the bed around me, the value I seek in writing this, in meeting Viktoria and Mark and realizing there is another soul interested in what I have to say and who will require notice of their own words?

That would be interesting.  And thinking of the implications – recursively, referencing the implications of the system over and over again – is terrifying.  There would be some of us who would simply try to get more “stuff” than anyone else – although arbitrage would close out most of that quickly, but not before some people had been taken advantage of and effectively enslaved themselves by selling more of their future potential output than they could ever recoup in terms of material well-being.  Some other of us would underutilize our potential and sit constantly realizing more value than they could spend – that wouldn’t be arbitraged away, it would just be a permanent waste.  The process of constantly updating and recognizing value – the menu-build algorithm – would need to be  made aware of all transactions at once – hence, I think, why some people look at blockchain as the building block of such a system, although again I see the energy demands as precluding that – and would also need to understand concepts of logistical transfer of goods, services, and people in a similarly constantly updated way, such that you can begin to see how all-consuming such a marketplace would look like.  Much, though, in the way that the market consumes most of what we experience in life today.

I’m sure anyone reading this can imagine further implications.  And you’ll start to see that the market which eliminates money is so all-consuming that it would by definition need to eliminate privacy, demand openness, in a way that most of us would be uncomfortable with – hence my own discomfort with it, even as I can imagine such a system emerging over time from our predilection for automation.  Indeed, what I see in such a world is the very opposite of trust, of acceptance, of love – it’s the elimination of trust in favor of complete openness so as to allow that master menu, that master algorithm of instantaneously transferable value, to be updated appropriately in realtime.

That, in fact, is how the argument about blockchain ended.  The woman talked for a bit about how banks were untrustworthy – throwing in an all-too-obvious Wells Fargo reference for good measure – and how blockchain would allow us all to trust one another by knowing that every transaction was verified instantaneously.  I told her that I thought quite the opposite: blockchain represented a material step towards the elimination of trust.  Trust requires the idea that you might be lied to.  You can’t lie when everything about you is already subject to the awareness of the blockchain.  She paused and said that was interesting.

Then I said it was also too energy inefficient, with blockchain mining already consuming some significant fraction of worldwide energy consumption and thus contributing to global warming.  Being a millennial, she agreed that global warming meant blockchain wasn’t the answer.  I sighed and asked for another beer.