If you always do what you’ve always done, a popular saying
nowadays has it, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. Most people
accept that readily enough in the abstract.
It’s when they attempt to apply this logic to their own lives and
thinking that they get tripped up, because self-defeating patterns very often
arise from a mismatch between basic presuppositions about the world and the
world as it’s actually experienced, and confronting that mismatch is not an
easy thing. It’s usually much simpler to insist that it’s different this time,
and repeat the same failed strategy yet again.
The logic of speculative bubbles is a case in point. The
next time you read some online pundit insisting that a new era has dawned, that
the old rules of economics have been stood on their head, and that some asset
class or other that’s been rising steadily for a while now is certain to keep
on zooming upwards for the foreseeable future, he’s wrong. It really is that
simple. Any of my readers who haven’t
been hiding under a rock for the last fifteen years or so saw that same
rhetoric deployed to promote the tech stock bubble, the housing bubble, and an
assortment of commodity bubbles, not least the recent and now rapidly deflating
bubble in gold; those who know their way around economic history can find the
same rhetoric being waved around every bubble since the Dutch tulip mania of
the 17th century.
If human beings were in fact rational actors, as one of the
more popular schools of economics these days likes to insist, investors would
react to the next appearance of that well-worn rhetoric by pulling out every
dollar they can’t afford to lose. In the
real world, of course, things don’t work that way. When the Federal Reserve’s current orgy of
quantitative easing finally does what it’s supposed to do and kicks off a
gargantuan speculative bubble—yes, that’s what it’s supposed to do; Greenspan’s
easy-money policy a decade ago succeeded in blowing a bubble big enough to
cushion the downside of the tech-stock crash, and Bernanke’s pretty clearly
working off the same playbook—it’s a safe bet that investors will stampede into
the bubble, “it’s different this time” will once again become the mantra du
jour, and the same cycle of boom and bust will repeat itself with mathematical
precision.
Grasp the hidden logic behind bubble economics and you can
see the mistaken presuppositions that drive that cycle. It’s an article of
faith in today’s industrial economies, buoyed by three centuries of economic growth driven by fossil fuels, that
money ought to make money, and that having a certain amount of money invested
ought therefore to guarantee a stable income. It so happens that this isn’t
always true. In 1929, for example, overinvestment and overproduction during the
boom years of the 1920s left very few sectors in the US economy able to pay
accustomed rates of return on investment, but investors weren’t willing to come
to terms with this unwelcome reality. The result was a huge pool of funds
seeking any investment that would promise a return heftier than the economy
would support; modest increases in stock values started pulling that pool into
the stock market, kicking off a feedback loop that ended with Black Friday and
the Great Depression.
That same pattern on a vaster scale is what’s driving the
latest round of bubbles. In the United
States and most of the other established industrial nations, the returns on
investing in the production of goods and services are too small to support
investors in the style to which past decades accustomed them; the result is a
pool of funds almost immeasurably larger than the one that created the 1929
boom and bust, sloshing through the global economy in search of any investment
that will yield a bigger than average return. Because the real economy of goods
and services is dependent on such awkward necessities as energy and raw
materials, which are in turn subject to accelerating depletion curves, the
problem’s only going to get worse, but those who hope to make a living or a
fortune from their investments aren’t exactly eager to learn this. Thus the
increasingly frantic efforts to inflate the global economy by means of
speculative excess; the alternative is to accept the fact that an entire way of
life based on money making money has passed its pull date.
That’s the kind of awkwardness that tends to pop up when the
world shifts, and a pattern of behavior that used to be adaptive stops working.
To get past the misguided but seductive insistence that “it’s different this
time,” in turn, the habit of morphological thinking discussed in an
earlier post is essential. 1920s-era investment trusts are not the
same thing as tech-stock mutual funds, mortgage-backed securities, or whatever
boondoggle will be at the center of the next big speculative bubble, any more
than a porpoise is the same thing as a bat; put them side by side, though, and
the common features will teach you things that you can’t learn any other way.
All this is by way of introduction to another bit of
comparative morphology, one that many of my readers may find even more
upsetting than the ones I’ve covered already. I’m sorry to say that can’t be
helped. Last week we talked about the shape of time, the various abstract
notions of history’s direction that every human culture uses to make sense of
the world its members experience; such notions are exactly the sort of basic presupposition
about the world that I discussed earlier in this post, and when the course of
events begins to move in directions that a culture’s notion of the shape of
time can’t explain, the result is quite commonly the sort of self-defeating
cycle discussed earlier. That’s the situation we’re in here and now, and what
makes it worse is that the shapes of time that define history for most people
nowadays have very different origins and functions than most of us think.
To unravel the resulting tangle, in turn, it’s necessary to
glance back to two thinkers whose relevance to modern thought is rarely
recognized. To meet the first of them,
we’ll need to go back exactly sixteen centuries to the year 413 CE. The place is the city of Hippo, in what was
then the province of Numidia and is now the nation of Algeria; more precisely,
it’s the residence of the Bishop of Hippo, a man named Augustine, who was just
then in the process of giving the Western world what would be, for the next
millennium or so, its definitive shape of time.
Here as elsewhere, historical context matters. By
Augustine’s time, the Roman Empire’s control of the Mediterranean world had
been established for so long that most of its citizens assumed that it would be
around forever. Troubles at the periphery were common enough, but the thought that
something could disrupt the whole imperial system was all but unthinkable. The distinctive shape of time accepted by
nearly everyone in the late Roman world contributed mightily to that habit of
thought. To most of the people of the
Empire in that age, history was the process by which an original state of chaos
was reduced to stable order under the rule of a benevolent despot. What Jupiter
had done to the Titans or, in terms of the new Christian faith, God had done to
Satan and his minions, Rome had done to the nations, and peripheral troubles
were no more a threat to Rome than to her divine equivalents.
The problem with this confident civil faith was that history
stopped cooperating. In 410, after a long series of increasingly desperate
struggles against Germanic invaders, the legions crumpled, and the Visigoth
king Alaric and his army swept into Italy and sacked Rome. Only Alaric’s willingness to be bought off
kept the city from remaining in his hands for the long haul. The psychological
and cultural impact of the defeat was immense, but of equal if not greater
concern to the Bishop of Hippo was the uncomfortable fact that the empire’s
remaining Pagans were pointing out that the beginning of Rome’s troubles
coincided, with an awkward degree of exactness, with the prohibition of the old
Pagan cults. Since Rome had abandoned
the gods, they suggested, the gods were returning the favor.
Augustine’s response is contained in The City of
God, one of the masterpieces of late Latin prose and the book that
more than any other defined the shape of medieval European thought. The notion
that divine power guarantees the success or survival of earthly kingdoms,
Augustine argued, is a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between
humanity and God. The inscrutable providence of God brings disasters down on
the good as well as the wicked, and neither cities nor empires are exempt from
the same incomprehensible law. Ordinary
history thus has no moral order or meaning.
The place of moral order and meaning in time is found
instead in sacred history, which has a distinctive linear shape of its own.
That shape begins in perfection, in the Garden of Eden; disaster intervenes, in
the form of original sin, and humanity tumbles down into the fallen world. From
that point on, there are two histories of the world, one sacred and one
secular. The secular history is the long and pointless tale of stupidity,
violence and suffering that fills the history books; the sacred history is the
story of God’s dealings with a small minority of human beings—the patriarchs,
the Jewish people, the apostles, the Christian church—who are assigned certain
roles in a preexisting narrative. Eventually the fallen world will be
obliterated, most of its inhabitants will be condemned to a divine boot in the
face forever, and those few who happen to be on the right side will be restored
to Eden’s perfection, at which point the story ends.
Those of my readers who are familiar with the main currents
of European and American Christianity already know that story, of course. 1600
years after Augustine’s time, his vision of time remains official in most Christian churches. What’s
more, it can be found in a great many places that would angrily reject any claim
of intellectual influence from Christianity.
Goodness at the beginning; a catastrophic fall brought about by a
misguided human choice; a plunge into the history we know, which has no
redeeming features whatsoever; a righteous remnant set apart from history who
serve as an example of the blessed alternative; a redeeming doctrine that
brings the promise of future joy to those few who embrace it; and sometime
soon, the final cataclysm that will sweep away the fallen world and all its
evils, so that the redeemed few can be restored to the goodness of the
beginning: where else have we heard this story?
Pick up any neoprimitivist book by Daniel Quinn, John
Zerzan, Derrick Jensen, or their peers, to cite one example out of many, and
you’ll find that the names have been changed but the story hasn’t. Eden is called the hunter-gatherer lifestyle,
the Fall is the invention of agriculture, the righteous remnant consists of
surviving hunter-gatherer peoples, the redeeming doctrine is set forth in the
book you’re reading, and Armageddon is the imminent collapse of industrial
civilization, after which humanity will be restored to the hunter-gatherer
paradise forever: it’s the same narrative, point for point. Look elsewhere in
contemporary popular culture and you’ll find scores if not hundreds of
ideologies that follow the same pattern; from radical feminists whose Eden
consists of Goddess-worshipping Neolithic matriarchies straight through to Tea
Party supporters whose Eden consists of pre-1960s America seen through
intensely rose-colored glasses, the song remains the same.
This is where morphological thinking becomes as necessary as
it is difficult. Most people can quickly learn to spot the standard elements of
Augustine’s narrative in any belief system they themselves don’t accept; add a
six-pack or two of good beer and it can turn into a lively party game, in which
characters, situations, and events out of The City of God
can be spotted hiding in a dizzying assortment of contemporary ideologies. The fun stops abruptly, though, when one or
more of the players realize that his or her own beliefs follow the same
script. One of the things that sets the
Augustinian shape of time apart from most other shapes of time is that it
assumes its own uniqueness; while it might be possible to imagine a version in
which there are several different Edens, Falls, righteous remnants, sacred
histories, redeeming revelations, final cataclysms, and New Jerusalems
descending from the skies, in practice this never seems to happen. Each such
narrative presents itself, and is accepted by its believers, as uniquely true
and unrelated to any other version of the same narrative.
Still, this is only half the story. Those of my readers who know their way around
the history of ideas, or have tried the aforementioned party game themselves,
will have noticed that a significant number of popular ideas about history
don’t fit the narrative of fall and redemption Augustine set out. This is where
the second of our two thinkers comes into the tale. His name was Joachim of
Flores, and he was an Italian mystic of the twelfth century CE. Like Augustine of Hippo, he was a writer,
though his prose was as murky as Augustine’s was brilliant, and nobody other
than historians of medieval thought reads his books nowadays. Even so, he had
an impact on the future as significant as Augustine’s: he’s the person who
kicked down the barrier between sacred and secular history that Augustine put
so much effort into building, and created the shape of time that the cultural
mainstream occupies to this day.
To Joachim, sacred history was not limited to a paradise
before time, a paradise after it, and the thread of the righteous remnant and
the redeeming doctrine linking the two.
He saw sacred history unfolding all around him in the events of his own
time. His vision divided all of history into three great ages, governed by the
three persons of the Christian trinity: the Age of Law governed by the Father,
which ran from the Fall to the crucifixion of Jesus; the Age of Love governed
by the Son, which ran from the crucifixion to the year 1260; and the Age of
Liberty governed by the Holy Spirit, which would run from 1260 to the end of
the world.
What made Joachim’s vision different from any of the
visionary histories that came before it—and there were plenty of those in the
Middle Ages—was that it was a story of progress. The Age of Love, as Joachim
envisioned it, was a great improvement on the Age of Law, and the approaching
Age of Liberty would be an improvement on the Age of Love; in the third age, he
taught, the Church would wither away, and people would live together in perfect
peace and harmony, with no need for political or religious institutions. To the
church authorities of Joachim’s time, steeped in the Augustinian vision, all
this was heresy; to the radicals of the age, it was manna from heaven, and
nearly every revolutionary ideology in Europe from the thirteenth to the
seventeenth centuries drew heavily on Joachimist ideas.
That guaranteed that Joachim’s narrative would percolate out
just as enthusiastically as Augustine’s did, influencing at least as many
apparently secular ideologies. Pick up a copy of Hegel’s Philosophy of
History, for example, a hugely influential work in 19th-century
European thought; if you can get past the man’s famously unreadable prose,
you’ll find a version of history that copies Joachim’s plot exactly but changes
the names of all the characters. Hegel’s
version of history begins in Asia and ends in Germany; there are three ages,
Oriental, Classical, and German, and the improvement that plops a One Way sign
on history is the increase of freedom, which is the way that the absolute
Spirit reveals its essential Idea in history.
"The East knew and to the present day knows only that one is free;
the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German world knows that all
are free," Hegel wrote. "The
first political form therefore which we observe in history, is despotism; the
second democracy and aristocracy, the third monarchy." (If this last point
seems a bit odd to my readers, this may be because they aren’t ambitious
professors angling for patronage from the royal house of Prussia.)
More generally, look at all the sets of three more or less
ascending ages to be found in modern thinking about time. The division of
prehistory into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age is as much a
reflection of this habit as the division of history into Ancient, Medieval, and
Modern periods. No matter how many scholars point out the complete irrelevance
of these schemes, they remain stuck in place in popular culture and education,
because they bolster the contemporary belief that our own time is the
culmination of all previous history, the point from which the future will leap
forward along its predestined track toward the future we like to think we
deserve.
Put two compelling visions of the shape of time in a
culture, and you can count on any number of fusions and confusions between
them. Marxism, interestingly enough, is among the best examples of this. Karl
Marx himself was a thoughtful student of Hegel’s philosophy, and the theory he
presents in his own writings is correspondingly Joachimist: history is a progressive series of
ages—feudal, mercantile, capitalist, socialist, communist—in which each age
represents an improvement on the ones before it, while falling painfully short
of the ones still to come. Friedrich Engels, who finished the second and third
volumes of Capital after Marx’s death, was heavily
influenced by his Lutheran childhood and brought in the standard hardware of
the Augustinian vision, with primitive Communism as Eden and so forth. The
result is a rich ambiguity that allows committed Marxists to find adaptive
responses to most of the curveballs history might throw their way.
For the great difference between the Augustinian and
Joachimist visions is precisely the kind of historical events to which they
tend to be adaptive. Augustine’s vision was crafted in a civilization in
decline, and it turned out to be extremely well suited to that context: from
within Augustine’s shape of time, the messy disintegration of the Roman world
was just another meaningless blip on the screen of secular history, of no real
importance to those who knew that the history that mattered was the struggle
between Christ and Satan for each human soul. That way of thinking about time
made it possible for believers to keep going through times of unrelenting
bleakness and horror.
Joachim of Flores, by contrast, lived during the zenith of
the Middle Ages, before the onset of the 14th-century subsistence crisis that
reached its culmination with the arrival of the Black Death. His was an age
that could look back on several centuries of successful expansion, and thought
it could expect more of the same in the years immediately ahead. His way of
thinking about time was thus as well suited to ages of relative improvement as
Augustine’s was to ages of relative decline.
