5

You know what I need? I need to describe my kitchen.

“You have a nice kitchen.”

I have the nicest kitchen, Keynes. Not large, but beautifully refinished, every inch designed to my specifications and paid for with a scarily large chunk of our savings, back when we assumed I’d get tenure. Back when Ed assumed, anyway. Now he says, on the bright side, it will boost the house’s resale value.

“That is a terrible bright side.”

Yes, it is. Nonetheless, I love my kitchen. I can’t help it. The green crackled tile. The smooth gray floor-squares. The underhanging open-faced cabinets the contractor handmade from wood he told us had been shipped from Vermont all the way to Spokane before it was shipped back to us, though why he told us this I have no idea. Was it supposed to make the wood seem more exotic because it was shipped around a lot? Or were we supposed to think all that shipping constituted some extra effort on his part? Maybe he was trying to make us feel bad about polluting the environment with all that shipping, because he really didn’t want to have to build those cabinets. I had to insist. But then he was very proud of them once they were done. I remember Ed saying that a lot of the pleasure he, Ed, took from the finished cabinets was seeing how proud the contractor was of the job he’d done, the special method he’d used for fitting the sides together and so on, and how he, the contractor, wouldn’t have done that work or felt that satisfaction if I hadn’t pushed him. Probably Ed said that in response to my asking if I’d been too pushy. That seems like the sort of question I would ask and the sort of answer Ed would give me.

White upper cabinets we picked out at the cabinet store. Chrome pulls we picked out after way too many visits to the pulls store. The revelation that in Late Capitalism we have entire stores that sell nothing but pulls for cabinets and drawers.

I mean it isn’t entirely fancy. We kept the old stove and refrigerator because they weren’t that old and worked fine. We kept the old windows, which are very old, because they’re beautiful. In fact, when I think about the kitchen, when I put myself inside it and inhabit the feeling of being in that room, which I’m doing now as part of an ancient rhetorical method for remembering speeches, but which also seems to calm me down—what’s really most memorable isn’t the fancy kitchen it ended up being, but the history that was hidden under the ugly kitchen we’d had before. The hidden house we discovered along the way. Four different layers of linoleum, because previous owners had just added a new layer without bothering to pull up the old ones. Those ancient electrical cords they found hanging in the walls, like something Thomas Edison had personally installed. Most amazingly, the hidden window behind the old cabinet on the west wall, which I suppose we knew about ahead of time, since it’s right there on the outside of the house, but still, when they actually uncovered it, when they knocked out the cabinet and it let light into the house for the first time in who knows how long—that was exciting. Like digging up treasure. And it opened just fine!

Then studying the floor beneath the hidden window, the real wood floor at last unburdened of all that linoleum, they figured out that the window had not originally been part of the kitchen at all, but that this little section had once been a powder room, probably opening onto the dining room rather than the kitchen. Which explained the hidden window’s frosted glass. But it turned out that that wall, the section of the west wall where the powder room had been, wasn’t quite flush with the rest of that side of the kitchen, it was a little pushed out from the rest—since it had once been a different room—which meant that in order to hang the new cabinets and put in the new counter they had to strip the whole wall down to brick and build a two-by-two wood frame over it. Which was a smart solution, I thought, all things considered. Our contractors were smart guys. Also funny—I liked them. We all did. Thank goodness, too, since they were there almost every day for weeks. They would show up in the morning in their work boots with their thermoses and it was like having friends over, old funny friends. Old funny friends who redo your kitchen.

One day while they were working, while Ed was out mowing, two old ladies pulled up outside. I heard Ed talking to someone and saw a black SUV at the curb, then he called me out to introduce me. Two laughing sisters who’d lived in the house as children, forty or fifty years ago, in town for a family reunion. We couldn’t invite them in, because the construction guys had their gear everywhere, so they sat in their car while we talked and talked. They had stories about everything. We figured out how various features had changed since they’d lived there, a closet where a door used to be, the coal chute in the basement. At some point the sister in the driver’s seat said, “Is the combination to the wall safe still . . .” then rattled off three numbers, and Ed instantly freaked out. He’d been trying to crack that little round wall safe since we’d moved in. Ali had decided it was filled with either jewelry or a treasure map or skeletal remains. So the sister in the passenger seat pulled out a scrap of paper and the other sister wrote down the combination she still remembered after forty or fifty years, all of us laughing the whole time, because who could believe it? But sure enough, later when Ed tried it out: voilà! The only thing inside was a note with the safe’s combination, probably left by the previous owner and accidentally locked in there by the real estate agent, but still, it was exciting.

And all of this, the people, the whole process made me aware of our house in an entirely different way. Of how really old it was, how many lifetimes had been lived there. So I ended up loving my kitchen not just for how nice it is now, but because in fixing it up, in digging out all the nasty linoleum and freeing the hidden window and dealing with the weird old pipes the plumber found in the basement ceiling, through all of that I grew to care about the house more. The antipathy I’d felt toward the ugly kitchen we’d originally moved into was replaced by respect for the many kitchens it had previously been. I developed an uncharacteristically sentimental, borderline gushy feeling that in fixing it up I had done something nice for the kitchen, something caring for the kitchen, and that we were all in it together now, this journey of life, just me and Ed and the kitchen. The years would pass and we would look out for each other. We would cook countless meals together, bake holiday cakes and pies together, see Ali off to college, grandkids would one day run in and out from the dining room—Slow down! Slow down!—and through it all the kitchen would remain not only beautiful but happy. A happy kitchen. A well-cared-for kitchen. Which has now been reduced to its resale value.

Are you really going to mourn your kitchen? That’s what you’re going to mourn?

One upside to living in the apocalypse is that it puts your problems into perspective.

It’s not just a kitchen, though. The kitchen is metonymic.

And also, yes, I am allowed to mourn my kitchen.

If these days most economists tend to dismiss “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” as either frivolous or deeply flawed, this is because they suffer from what I would call a failure of imagination. They think the sole purpose of writing is to convey information, and they refuse to acknowledge that any effort at writing, even the driest assemblage of mathematical models and stilted prose, has not only logical and informative aspects but also aspects of performance and persuasion, and therefore its purpose is not limited only to the facts and figures it conveys. There is, in other words, a rhetorical side to economics. Rhetorical not in the sense of a question that you’re not supposed to answer, but in the sense of belonging to the art of rhetoric, an art that economists, like most people, tend to look down upon—“That’s all just rhetoric!”—as if rhetoric is some horrible thing.

Rhetoric is not a horrible thing, ladies and gentlemen, though it does have one of the longest-running bad reputations in all of human history. People have been pooh-poohing rhetoric since Plato called it “the art of clever speeches,” and even earlier, from the origins of democracy itself. For they were born together, democracy and rhetoric. They were invented at the same time, by the same person, a guy named Cleisthenes. I mean, he didn’t invent them, but that’s where Western history marks the spot. The irony being that we think of democracy as this very good thing, the embodiment of freedom and equality, while conveniently forgetting that rhetoric—the shaping of public opinion—which we’re quick to call a bad thing, is the only way democracy actually works. It was the birth of democracy that turned speech-making into a career, and the original careerists of democratic speech-making were called the Sophists, from which term we derive the word “sophistry,” which is even more universally maligned than “rhetoric.” It means, or has come to mean, manipulative, deceptive language. “Clever speeches.” It’s a slur built right into the English language, like “shysters” but without the racist overtones.

Whereas the ancient Greeks preferred to treat their Sophists with the racist overtones, because you see the original Sophists were not native Athenians but itinerant scholars, foreigners­—­a fact often overlooked, but very much worth bearing in mind. Unlike most Athenians, the Sophists had traveled the world. They knew that Athenian ideas of truth and virtue were different from the ideas of truth and virtue in other places, and this knowledge, this understanding that the Athenian way was not the only way, that cultural truths were relative and contingent, this intellectual open-mindedness was deeply annoying to dogmatic xenophobic Athenians, like Plato, who was a total elitist, by the way, and hated democracy, because he thought average people were too dumb to make their own decisions and ought to be governed by philosophers, because philosophers alone understand “essential truths.” Apparently he never met anyone from our philosophy department. But is it any wonder, then, that Plato hated the Sophists, who taught that truth was specific to each situation and determined through language and argument rather than inherited from the gods?

Not that the Sophists were perfect. They didn’t always help their own case. It didn’t help that they got filthy rich off their lessons, for example, and at least one of them—­Gorgias—advertised that his speeches could convince anyone to believe anything, which is not exactly the sort of claim that builds trust.

Incidentally, if any of you are interested, you should look up the ancient female rhetorician Aspasia from Miletus, who was a contemporary of Gorgias, but is much, much more interesting. She was partner to the statesman Pericles—not concubine, partner—and a teacher to Socrates, Plato’s own beloved teacher, at a time when such roles for women simply did not exist. Evidence suggests it was actually Aspasia who invented the method of argumentation-by-questioning that became known to history as the Socratic method, that bedrock chestnut of the patriarchal Western intellectual tradition. Behind every great man, there’s a great woman’s rhetorical method. Unfortunately, none of Aspasia’s own writing survived, so we are stuck with what men said about her. History being whatever the say-ers say, of course. Of course of course. A horse is a horse. Where was I.

Rhetoric got a bad reputation via the Sophists, for legitimate and less legitimate reasons, which led a Sophist named Isocrates to introduce a moral grounding to their relativism by tying rhetoric to the ideals of wisdom and pragmatism: even though we could not actually know the truth about anything, still a kind of truth could be arrived at by considering all the available opinions, and a wise rhetorician was someone who weighed all the information in order to make decisions that were more or less the best available. I think of this as the birth of pragmatism in the Western intellectual tradition. Unfortunately, it did little to curb rhetoric’s feud with the philosophers. Plato’s protégé, Aristotle, thought Isocrates was full of crap. He zings him: “Just because most people don’t act rationally doesn’t mean they shouldn’t or don’t need to.” Isocrates zings back: “I’d rather form reasonable opinions about useful things than claim precise knowledge of things that are totally useless.” Is it better to be right or to be useful? That is an argument philosophy and rhetoric have been having ever since.

And no, before you ask, I do not think that all of this belongs in my talk tomorrow, or even most of it, though I’ll want to include at least the part about Cleisthenes, and how rhetoric and democracy go hand in hand. But the point to most of the rest is simply that I am enjoying myself thinking about all of this: the history of rhetoric, the history of ideas. Feminist heroines and patriarchal feuds. It’s all so much simpler, so much more stimulating and less exhausting than having to revisit, re-digest, and restructure in my mind the argument of a book I hate thinking about and sometimes regret having written. In fact, I wish I could just switch topics tomorrow without telling anyone and spend the whole time talking about the history of rhetoric instead.

Actually.

I mean, what’s the worst they could do?

Of the Sophists, it’s Isocrates who becomes the important figure down the line. While Aristotle at this point gets forgotten for centuries, Isocrates is a major influence on all the Roman rhetoricians, like Cicero and Quintilian, who build on his idea of “wisdom” to propose a rhetoric centered on the orator perfectus, or vir bonus dicendi peritus, the good person who speaks well. The basic idea being that speaking well is a form of goodness, and that to speak well and eloquently you don’t need “essential truths,” but you do have to be a good person and care about the right things. There’s a kind of optimism built into this, as well as a hometown conservatism, the assumption that Roman values were the right values, perhaps more so for Quintilian than for Cicero, since Quintilian ended up rich while Cicero ended up with his severed head hung in the middle of Rome. But aside from that, there’s also an optimism, the belief that people are essentially good—however you define “good”—and therefore only goodness will persuade them. Good will out! This optimism then becoming, in turn, a model for much of what we think of as the Western liberal mindset. It inspired us in the early days of Obama, then depressed us when Republicans walked all over him. And it’s the attitude John Maynard Keynes adopts in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” if in fact I stick to the original plan tomorrow and need to connect this Rhetoric portion of my speech—still here in the kitchen!—back to the subject overall.

That subject being economists and how, in wanting to believe that the work they are doing is “scientific,” aimed at truth by establishing facts and proofs rather than an ongoing negotiation of provisional truths through persuasion—in failing, in other words, to recognize, or at least to emphasize, the narrative and rhetorical context in which their writing and modeling take place, or the basic fact that they are effectively, inescapably, telling stories—a point that the very smart and interesting economist Deirdre McCloskey made back in the early ’90s, but which I also arrived at entirely on my own, though unfortunately much later, because none of my professors or advisors ever mentioned McCloskey to me, either because they’d never read her work or for some reason thought I wouldn’t need to—but the—what was I saying? Why economists, failing to understand the rhetorical nature of their work, therefore have also misunderstood Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” along with the entire way of thinking about rhetorical purpose that his essay implies. And a corollary question, which has been hovering in the background this whole time, which I’ve mostly been blowing past but suddenly find myself needing to answer, as I listen to myself go on and on, which is how anyone attending this talk tomorrow could possibly care about any of this.

Keynes?

“Yes?”

You’re still here.

“Behind you. Beside the refrigerator.”

Can you tell me why anyone would attend this talk tomorrow?

“Curiosity, I suppose. Intellectual stimulation.”

I am having trouble imagining why someone would want to venture out in the middle of the day, in the middle of the workweek, to sit in an auditorium and watch me talk about these things.

“Entertainment? Edification? Personal growth?”

I mean, who are these people?

“I . . . hm.”

Don’t they have anything better to do?

Keynes?

“Yes.”

I’ve just had what may turn out to be the most depressing thought of the entire night.

“Oh dear.”

I don’t even want to form this thought out loud in my head.

“Yet I feel confident that you almost certainly will.”

What if this is the future your essay was predicting, where no one has to work so instead they spend their days sitting in auditoriums watching failed academics present their untenured theories on optimism?

Keynes?

“Still here.”

Does the situation of my being a failed academic with an inconsequential book and a bleak future speaking tomorrow to a room full of people with nothing better to do resemble, in any way, the future you predicted? Because it does not resemble the future that I predicted for myself.

“Which was what?”

Exactly.

“You mean you don’t know?”

I mean I never quite spelled it out for myself.

“Perhaps that was the problem.”

At least I don’t remember doing so. I have a terrible memory when it comes to my own life, particularly when it comes to large existential abstract questions like “What did you think your life would be, back when you were young and were thinking ahead to the person you would be now?” Mostly my younger self just followed her instincts, I think. Followed instincts and latched on to whatever opportunities presented themselves. Looking back, it’s easy to pretend that I chose the path that led here, but I know it was more passive than that. I didn’t lack courage, but what I really had was a sort of faith in the future that resembled, more than anything, a total absence of strategy. I was ready to be steered. It wasn’t books or ideas that steered me, though. It wasn’t goals and plans. It wasn’t anything I discovered on my own that brought me here. It was people who I met at different times in different places. I won’t say at the right or wrong times, just times. Maggie. Evelyn. Even Ed, in his way. And it was something about me, too, of course. The oddities of who I am. The person I’ve been, if not always, then from very far back. It was that wandering Abby with her peculiar predilections occasionally stumbling upon someone who showed her what it was like to live with purpose. It was people with purpose, or with what looked to me like purpose, providing models of how to meaningfully exist in this world. I suppose that was the future I pictured for myself: meaningful presence. Somehow, someday, I would become myself for the world, and someday, somehow, that would matter.

“Well,” says Keynes, “to answer your original question regarding how economists have tended to take my predictions, in case you want to wrap that up before heading too far in this new self-reflective and potentially very depressing direction, I believe a large part of your original point was that I was not earnestly predicting anything at all.”

Keynes, who did not believe economists could know the future, or else they’d all be filthy rich. Who speculated in the stock market, yes, but often lost. Who—more importantly—saw economics as a perpetual work in progress, its purposes not Platonic, not dealing with “essential truths,” but rather Isocratic, seeking “reasonable opinions about useful things.” For whom economics was a place to try things out, to risk and fail. Whose own thinking was always evolving, and who, when charged with inconsistency, quipped, “When I get new evidence I change my mind. What do you do?” Keynes whose most famous idea was that governments should use policy and investment to solve short-run problems instead of waiting for free markets to fix them in the long run. Whose most famous quote was “In the long run, we are all dead.” Who said, less famously, though I have a sticky note of it stuck to the wall in my office, “There is no reason why we should not feel ourselves free to be bold, to be open, to experiment, to take action, to try the possibilities of things.” Does anyone seriously think this man, who had no children or grandchildren but was deeply invested in improving people’s lives here and now, wrote “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” because he was really concerned with what the world would look like in a hundred years?

So what was he up to, then?

The answer to that, ladies and gentlemen, currently awaits us in my office.

Which is upstairs.