Thus much of this will make
Black white, foul fair, wrong right,
Base noble, old young, coward valiant.
. . . Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck sick men’s pillows from below their heads.
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench. This is it
That makes the wappened widow wed again;
She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again.
— William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, IV, iii
The complex mechanisms of the modern world depend as certainly on the faith in money as the structures of the medieval world depended on faith in God. The gold, grain and credit markets are always open—if not in New York or London, then in Geneva, Bombay or Hong Kong. Money circles the globe literally at the speed of light, shifting with the aplomb of angels through the time zones, simultaneously tracing its intricate figures in a thousand computer terminals. It takes an enormous act of faith to assign meaning—much less health, happiness, life itself—to an abstraction seen fleetingly on a screen. As opposed to an object that can be firmly grasped—jewels, furs, paintings, gold coins—credit consists of nothing more substantial than a promise to pay. The flesh becomes word, and the numbers turn into poetic metaphors.
Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the world’s wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief. To the extent that a society employs an intrinsically worthless medium of exchange—paper, numbers on a screen—its wealth becomes greater, but so also does its credulity. Make the numbers big enough, and then make them immanent, like God, in all the world’s phenomena, and people will believe almost anything.109
During the 1960s I spent a good deal of time traveling around the country in one or another of the press entourages that attend the comings in and goings out of the nation’s more prominent citizens. Assigned for a period of months in 1965 to the White House press corps, I occasionally went with President Johnson to his ranch in Texas. Attached to the late Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign in the spring of 1968, I listened to him make airport speeches in half the states in the Union. At random intervals, I accompanied the presidents of oil and automobile companies in their stately progress through the provinces of their corporate holdings. It always surprised me to discover that most of the other reporters on these journeys, sometimes as many as forty or fifty print and television correspondents, were afraid of airplanes. Because they were so often in the air, frequently in bad weather en route to obscure destinations, they figured that sooner or later the odds were bound to catch up with them and that somebody other than the managing editor would punish them for their presumption.
I remember a correspondent for The Washington Post once confiding that his habitual feeling of dread left him in only two circumstances—when he was aboard Air Force One with the president of the United States, and when he was on a corporate aircraft in the presence of an individual who either owned or controlled assets in excess of $500 million. I asked him why this was so, and he said he hadn’t thought much about it, but he enjoyed a similar peace of mind when riding in stretch limousines. We had boarded a commercial flight for New York after leaving the season’s candidate to the comforts of a weekend in California. Somewhere over Missouri, the gentleman from the Post ordered his fourth Scotch and said that not even God would dare strike down the president of the United States or the chief executive officer of Mobil Oil.110
Several years later I heard a variant of the same superstition attributed to Robert Vesco, the swindler and friend of Richard Nixon who, in the early 1970s, stole $750 million from the Fund of Funds. The story might be exaggerated or apocryphal, but it was told to me by a man who represented himself as a witness to the incident. As follows:
Some months before Vesco fled the country in 1975 (taking up residence in Costa Rica to escape federal prosecution for criminal fraud) he was riding in a plane that encountered rough weather on its approach to LaGuardia Airport. Vesco owned the plane, and as it circled over New Jersey in a delayed holding pattern, he dissolved into gibbering terror. Pushing through the door to the cockpit, Vesco told the pilot to get the managers of the airport on the radio.
“Tell them I’ll buy it,” he said. “Tell them that if they let me land, I’ll pay whatever they ask. You understand? I want to buy the fucking place.”
As befitting even a crooked financier, Vesco’s faith in money was perhaps excessive but certainly not atypical. The power of money is so obvious that its acolytes come to think of it as omnipotent. Wherever they look they can point to its victory: well-known criminals ride through the streets in limousines, dishonest politicians hold offices of public trust, whores inspire the love of princes and the adoration of gossip columnists. From these meager observations the faithful make a child’s religion. Holding himself in low esteem, uncomfortably aware of his precarious grasp on other people’s attention, the man besotted by a faith in money believes that if it can buy everything worth having, that if it can prolong life, win elections, relieve suffering, make hydrogen bombs, declare war, hire assassins and go south in the winter, then surely it can grant him the patents of respect and triumph over so small a trifle as death. Just as the aborigine imagines himself safe from harm within the sanctuary of his idol, or a child believes he controls the world by magical wish, so the plutocrat deems himself immortal within the precincts of his money.111
Like most superstitions, the religious faith in money has some basis in fact. When Andy Warhol was shot twice by one of his deranged film stars in June 1968 the ambulance drivers didn’t recognize him for a celebrity. They picked him up at his New York “Factory,” on a poor but trendy street, and on the way to the hospital, thinking him as worthless as everything else in the neighborhood, they didn’t feel compelled to hurry. Warhol noticed that the ambulance was stopping for red lights and mumbled something about the urgency of his wound. For an extra $15, the drivers said, they would turn on the siren.
The chapter on death in the artist’s book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol consists, almost in its entirety, of these words: “I’m so sorry to hear about it. I just thought that things were magic and that it would never happen.”
We live among the miracles of scientific invention, making common use of lasers, penicillin, computers, nuclear energy and genetic engineering. But none of these wonders stirs the poetic imagination. We feel the glory of revelation only when presented to the embodiment of unutterable wealth. Some years ago at El Morocco, a New York nightclub known for the profligacy of its wastrel clientele, I was sitting with a group of people who kept staring at a dough-faced man dozing at a table near the band. Not recognizing the gentleman, I asked why he was the object of such intense veneration. I was told he was the grandson of a Chicago grain merchant who had received, in the summer of 1887, a tip on the commodity exchange and so founded a great fortune. Nobody knew what else to say about him. Apparently he had accomplished nothing in his life other than to spend the income from a substantial trust fund. A woman said he was known to be rude; another woman said she had seen him once before, at a party with circus motif in Southampton, offering his drink to an elephant. The gentleman in question might as well have been carved in wood. Obviously he had been anointed by God; his fortune had come to him from the divine cloud of unknowing that also had descended upon the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Mellons and last week’s winner of the New Jersey lottery. In the United States fortunes have their own histories. It is the money, not the achievement, that echoes down the halls of the generations. Point out a lineal descendant of Thomas Jefferson or Ralph Waldo Emerson and the fellow will scarcely merit a glance.
Our American assumption that money rules the world is as fundamental among its titular enemies as among its devoted friends. The socialist believes that money is malign, that only the power of the state can hold it safely in check; the capitalist believes that money must be set free, that only in the hands of enlightened individuals will it bestow the gifts of property and production. Neither the socialist nor the capitalist believes that money can be safely left in the custody of ordinary, probably heathen and unwashed, human beings.
If money were not perceived as somehow divine, then why should it rouse the passions of the people who blame the world’s suffering on “the rich,” “the interests,” “the monopolists,” “the oil companies,” “the Jews,” “the robber barons,” “the nabobs,” or “the banks”? The zealots who rage against the evils of wealth bear witness to their faith by the fervor of their blasphemy. Nothing so damages a socialist’s faith as the experience of meeting a rich man. He cannot bear the disappointment. Expecting to come face-to-face with Satan, he finds himself introduced to a small and frightened clerk worried about his stomach or his will.112
Despite our ceaseless murmuring about money, we prefer not to know too much about its nature or mechanics. We would rather believe in mysteries—in stock prices that rise from $10 to $100 in the space of a week, in the making of instantaneous stars out of salesgirls found by a film producer in a drugstore—and we suspect that if we inquire too closely our questions might be construed as acts of impiety. People absorbed with their own money worries can count to the penny the sums of their unhappiness, but about the larger movements of money they remain as innocent as squirrels.
This is fortunate for the army of stockbrokers, tipsters, loan officers and insurance salesmen that feeds on the national religion in the manner of locusts feeding on an orange grove. Year after year the country’s most eminent economists make predictions consistently ridiculed by events; year after year the brokerage firms sell hundreds of millions of shares in companies that go nowhere but down; year after year the editors of investment newsletters charge handsome fees for advice that is as worthless as the geopolitical advice published in the academic quarterlies. Nobody minds very much because it is understood that learned gentlemen speak and write an unintelligible language not unlike church Latin. It doesn’t matter if they prove to be wrong because it is understood that they are in the business of mumbling prayers. Their function is ceremonial, and to the extent that the worship of money becomes more extensive among larger sectors of the population their presence becomes increasingly imperative—as directors of corporations, as counselors in the White House, as holy men publishing sermons in the newspapers.113
Never were these gentlemen more urgently or more pointlessly consulted than during the stock market panic in the autumn of 1987. On Monday, October 19, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 508 points, and before nightfall the newspapers had proclaimed the end of the world. The calamity descended upon the multitude in Wall Street with the force of biblical revelation. It was as if the Antichrist had worked an anti-miracle, which, within a matter of hours, converted the nation’s most devout capitalists into faithful socialists.
Before the markets opened on Monday, the financial operatives employed in the money trades believed themselves to be standing on safe and hallowed ground when reciting the catechism of their belief in unfettered free enterprise. If asked to make after-dinner speeches they would have said (unhesitatingly and with unctuous rectitude) that it was the government’s duty to mind its own business, lower taxes, stay off the backs of the people and leave the markets—the free and life-giving markets—well enough alone.
For seven years they had embraced the claptrap economic theory of the Reagan administration and born witness to the moral beauty of capitalism unbound. By noon Monday, nobody was singing any more hymns to Mammon. Before the awful day ended roughly $1 trillion of net worth had vanished as mysteriously as the last unicorn, and the lamps of faith had been extinguished in the electronic twinkling of ten thousand computer terminals.
Nobody, of course, knew where or why the money had gone, but clearly somebody had to say something. For the rest of the week oracles of all denominations—learned economists, alarmed portfolio managers, former Treasury officials—hurried in and out of the media issuing statements of solemn reassurance.
The effect was comic. Swindling financiers who had stolen fortunes behind the screens of insider trading were seen preaching the virtues of fiscal integrity. Chairmen of brokerage firms bloated with the fees skimmed off merger and takeover deals hastened to assure their audiences (i.e., the customers they had so smilingly gulled) that the economy was “fundamentally sound,” that the banks were as safe as South African gold and that their salesmen were still “bullish on America.”
The princes of Wall Street distributed the blame for their misfortunes far more generously and evenhandedly than they were accustomed to distributing profits. Giving voice to rumors drifting through the news, they assigned the fault to the trade and budget deficits, the Germans, Washington, government spending, national debt, lack of leadership, the Japanese, the arbitrageurs, mindless greed (somebody else’s, not their own), programmed trades, the futures index and the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Together with the recriminations, the apostasy continued throughout the week. The speeches and excuses became increasingly preposterous as stock prices—heedless of even the most responsible advice—drifted further downward into the abyss. Without notable exception, the ci-devant believers in the blessed wonder of Reaganomics recanted their faith in the free market. Capitalism, it turned out, wasn’t the fairy godmother or magic wand it had been made out to be in the songs and legends of the Reagan administration. No, capitalism wasn’t like that at all. As a matter of fact, capitalism on a bad day could be downright mean. Bust was as much a part of its nature as boom. What markets could give, markets could take away.
By Friday afternoon nearly everybody with access to a microphone or an editorial page had forsworn his or her allegiance to what, only a month before, had been advertised as “the entrepreneurial spirit.” By terrified and nonpartisan consent the authorities agreed it was time for the government to regulate debt, manage the economy, fix the international monetary system, raise taxes and do whatever was necessary (even if it meant getting back on the backs of the people) to restore the confidence of the American public. So fervent was the hope of rescue, and so rapid was the conversion to the new socioeconomic faith, that over the course of the week the only speculations that improved in value were those in government bonds.
The October panic in the stock markets proved the nonideological character of the American faith in money. No economic theory, no political conviction, no wall of rhetoric or line of thought can survive a loss of 500 points on the Dow. Against manifestations of such divine magnitude, any secular wisdom is a faint and paltry thing, as light as apple blossoms and as thin as straw.
The devastation brought about by the mere flickering procession of numbers through the world’s computer screens—first in Tokyo and then in London and New York—also proved how precariously the world’s credit is balanced on the scale of superstition. What is true is what enough people believe to be true, and facts often matter less than rumors.
To a large extent the stock markets depend on the willingness of all involved—seller as well as buyer—to suspend the faculty of thought. Consider the modus operandi of the Wall Street tout. Invariably he has acquired his information from a secondary source, from a man who heard it from a friend who knows the president of the company. He never has the word from the primary source (from the mergers and acquisitions department of Merrill Lynch, say, or a dishonest arbitrageur), because if he had that kind of news he would not need to sell it in the pages of a newsletter. Instead he would make a discreet fortune and retire to a villa on the Côte d’Azur. What would be the point of whispering in corners? Why concern oneself with a dog-eared map on which a drowned ship captain once marked a faint cross?
The buyers neglect to ask themselves such questions; if they did, they wouldn’t be buyers, and the tout wouldn’t find it worth his time to trouble them with dreams. The distance of the primary source gives the tout a theatrical space in which to set up his lights and scenery. The buyer never meets the man who knows, and so he remains free to imagine a figure of his own invention. If he met the authority in question, he might become frightened; he might recognize him as an accountant in a shabby suit or as an old politician sick with drink and half-remembered lies.
The tout needs only to judge the precise distance at which the buyer begins to see visions not unlike those vouchsafed to early Christian saints. The distances vary according to the buyer’s temperament and the kind of information being offered for sale. Some buyers prefer to know nothing; others need to equip themselves with the complexity of childish detail—the performance of the horse in the mud, the price earnings ratio, the rumors in Japan, the Javanese theory known only to the intimates of George Bush.
None of these things matter very much. All of them can be rearranged as the occasion demands. They don’t matter because the transaction always takes place in the realm of magic—in the dark grove of the imagination where all things remain possible, where death and time never intrude upon the idiot dancing. The most convincing touts succumb to their own seductions. They come to believe in the divine origins of their information, and they forget that they overheard the conversation in a men’s room, or that the senator was talking about something else, or that yesterday’s horse finished seventh.114
The credulity of the rich accounts for the ease with which they can be persuaded to invest in nonexistent oil wells and fraudulent tax shelters. Following a rhythm as regular as the reports of holiday traffic, newspapers every few weeks publish stories that begin with questions such as the one asked by The Wall Street Journal in October 1982: “San Diego—Why did hundreds of affluent, well-educated and successful investors turn over millions of dollars to J. David Dominelli?” Or with statements such as the one in The New York Times of May 15, 1981: “For 28 years, the police and prosecutors in eight countries have been compiling dossiers on a man who now calls himself Eduardo Rabi—while he was living in penthouses in New York, riding antique Rolls-Royces in South America, gambling in the casinos of Monte Carlo, mixing with the best society in Paraguay and Uruguay, and allegedly getting away with $60 million in swindles.”
The stories never lack for humor, and almost always the sting turns on the same conjuror’s trick. The swindler poses as a man of immense wealth, and the mark, no matter how well off, imagines that the man richer than himself stands that much nearer the godhead. Among the well-known people gulled by various swindlers over the last two or three years I can remember Alexander Haig, Norman Lear, Giscard d’Estaing, Woody Allen, Dick Cavett and Erica Jong. The aforementioned J. David Dominelli, otherwise known as “Captain Money,” set up his Ponzi scheme with no more than a few hundred dollars in the basement of a Mexican restaurant in La Jolla. Within five years the scheme attracted $200 million, and Captain Money, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, didn’t know how to shut down the flow of cash. He bought everything he could think of—three jet aircraft, dozens of $100,000 sports cars, racehorses worth $650,000, ski condos in Colorado and beach property in Del Mar—but still the customers kept coming. The richer the captain seemed, the more desperately the suckers wanted to deal themselves into the catastrophe. The current passion for mergers and acquisitions, many of them financed with instruments of debt known as junk bonds, rests on what a literary critic might call the finance of the absurd. The collapse of the Penn Square Bank in Oklahoma City in 1982 followed from the credulity of bankers in the habit of making $20 million loans while drinking champagne from cowboy boots.115
Among the public demonstrations of the credulous state of mind, none of which I am aware proved as convincing or as humorous as the Senate’s confirmation of the late Nelson Rockefeller as vice president of the United States. Rockefeller had been appointed to that office by Gerald Ford, and in November 1974, on television and in full view of a nation still alarmed by Richard Nixon’s plundering of the public trust, the Senate Rules Committee had to decide whether the candidate deserved the confidence of his countrymen.
The committee couldn’t get beyond the miracle of Rockefeller’s fortune. The senators learned that he possessed $218 million, which was still a lot of money in 1974, and even the skeptics among them prostrated themselves like slaves staring into pharaoh’s golden face.
Not a single senator could bring himself to ask a hard question. So great is the American belief in money that when such a man as Rockefeller reveals his net worth even the blasphemous feel moved to worship. They forget what they know about themselves and what they have observed in others; their reason fails them, and they retreat to the limits of consciousness prevailing in 3000 b.c.
The presence of money in large sums impresses the feeling of holy dread even on people supposedly indifferent to its radiance. In New York in the late 1970s I knew a banker who at least had the wit to understand that when the numbers passed six figures he lost touch with his critical intelligence. He was employed as a vice president in the uptown office of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and every day at 10 a.m. the clerks in the Wall Street office displayed on a closed-circuit television system the bank’s outstanding debt, foreign exchange positions and current cash balance. The numbers appeared on a screen, but my friend, drinking coffee with the senior management and trying very hard to seem wise, hadn’t the faintest conception of what they meant. He might as well have been looking at Druidic runes or Linear B.
Although expressed in a different mode, the same unspoken regard for the mystery of cash characterizes the technique of the successful borrower of bank funds. He knows he must pretend he doesn’t need the loan. Even if he is destitute, even if he stands in imminent peril of losing wife, children, house and reputation, he must affect a well-bred indifference to the petty details of the deal under discussion. He has a better chance of borrowing $10 million than $10,000 (the latter sum being so small as to raise the specter of need), but only if he keeps his composure and preserves a manner bordering on contempt.
It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don’t know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetized DNA that is the breath of life.
The senior bank management, of course, looks upon borrowers as pilgrims come to make confession. The ceaseless signing of documents and forms reminds people of their existence as functions of a divine arithmetic and integers derived from an economic first cause. One of my uncles, a man of firm New England upbringing, liked to say that he chose the profession of banking “because, goddamnit, people have to tell you the goddamn truth.” He expected his customers to make an honest disclosure—not only of their financial assets but also of their conduct.116 Over the years I have known a good many people too abashed to ask impious questions about the condition of their own holdings and accounts. They imagine that the trust officer will reproach them for their wastefulness and folly, chastising them for having committed the unpardonable sin of placing a higher value on life than on property. The society knows of no ritual so solemn as the opening of a safety deposit box after the death of one of its wealthier citizens. Men in dark suits—executor, lawyer, accountant, auditor, heir—enter the vault in attitudes of profound reverence. Nobody speaks as the sacred box is withdrawn from its crypt in the wall and borne, silently and slowly, to the lighted table on which, as if at an altar, the attending clergy examine its entrails. If the estate is believed to be large enough to warrant the analogue of a high mass, the state taxing authority sends an agent (i.e., a papal nuncio) to duly note the presence of every bond, deed, certificate and jewel. The naming of the objects, in voices hushed with wonder, is equivalent to the singing of the Magnificat. The society knows no more exalted an anthem of praise.117
Conversely, I once knew a man who, when feeling intimidated by the trustees of his estate, pictured them in goatskins shaking feathered rattles and wearing crowns of reindeer horns. The image relieved him of his anxiety. Instead of a reproving conscience he saw before him bookkeepers so terrified of the god in the vault that they dared not speak in the vernacular.
If even a secular religion can be defined as those sets of attitudes people take for granted, then it is by their unquestioning adherence to the rule of money that Americans make good the proofs of their faith. The people of medieval Europe didn’t think of Christianity as one of several theologies among which they could pick and choose as if doctrines were scarves on sale at Bloomingdale’s. The evidence of faith was simply what one did and said, the way one lived one’s life. People might not always act in accordance with the tenets of the faith—murder, lechery and avarice being as popular in the twelfth century as in the twentieth—but the presiding superstitions seemed as immutable as the seasons. Similarly, modern Americans find it impossible to conceive of a world in which money doesn’t have the last word. The bottom line is synonymous with the judgment of God, and the contemporary businessman who fails to earn $1 million a year can feel as riven with guilt as the medieval knight-at-arms denied the rites of absolution. When they don’t know what to do about any of the thousand and one evils that plague mankind, Americans scatter incense or rose petals—that is, they “throw money at the problem.” The money almost always fails to work the expected miracle because it is intended not as a specific remedy but as a votive offering.
The feeling of pious awe that obtains within the sanctuaries of the nation’s banks also permeates its better department stores. The sumptuousness of the ornament in Bergdorf Goodman or the Trump Tower is meant to inspire in the congregation the attitude of reverence once prompted by stained glass windows and the music of a brass choir. The faithful go shopping in much the spirit that Christians once stopped to pray at wayside shrines. Mothers tell their daughters that if they feel depressed, the best thing to do is buy a new dress. No matter how small or frivolous the object, the buying of something new lifts the spirit and bears witness to the miracle of cash. The transaction comforts people with a presentiment of salvation and with a sense of having acknowledged the perfection of a supernatural design.
The feasts of consumption thus become rituals of communion. The faithful consume goods and services as if they were partaking of the body and blood of Christ. The more costly the substance consumed—a dress by Valentino, an ounce of cocaine, a cruise around the world priced at $265,000 for three months—the more perfectly the communicant enters into a union with God. An advertisement published in 1986 in Time magazine by Pioneer Electronics (manufacturers of the Pioneer SX-V500 Audio/Video Quartz-Synthesizer Non-Switching Receiver) displayed the photograph of an obviously rich and self-satisfied young man standing in front of a priceless painting and apparently listening, on the Pioneer SX-V500, to a Mozart piano concerto. Echoing the words of the Eucharist, the copy read: “Mozart died to bring me pleasure.”
Perceived as sacraments, the acts of consumption acquire a spiritual meaning not always apparent to a European, a moralist or a bookkeeper. Nothing is superfluous and everything counts. Because it is a matter of eating God, the consumption of gossip or Vuitton suitcases is as devout a proof of piety as the consumption of toilet water, tofu, tennis balls and trips to Florida. The products contain symbolic properties not dissimilar to those the Catholic Church assigns to wafer and wine. Taken in appropriate quantity and with a decent regard for ruinous expense, the products bestow health, long life, status, sexual prowess, intelligence, national security, happiness and peace of mind—all the blessings that devout Christians expect from the gift of God.
The mystical nature of American consumption accounts for its joylessness. We spend a great deal of time in stores, but if we don’t seem to take much pleasure in our buying, it’s because we’re engaged in the acts of sacrifice and self-definition. Abashed in the presence of expensive merchandise, we recognize ourselves (in Tiffany’s, Bergdorf Goodman or Rallye Motors) as suppliants admitted to a shrine.
Just as the rat in the behaviorist’s maze comes to love not the cheese at the end of his labor but the lever that works the mechanics of his reward, so also the people who come to prefer the touch of money to any object or experience for which money can be exchanged. Money itself embodies all the pleasurable states of feeling into which it can be transferred. The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin. He appreciated the damage done to people who allowed their faith in money to outbid all other claims on their humanity, which is why, one hundred years later and despite the absurdity of much of his political writing, revolutions continue to be mounted in his name.
“Money,” Marx said, “is the visible deity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposite, the universal confusion and inversion of things.” He also said that “the divine power of money resides in its essence as the alienated and exteriorized species-life of men. It is the alienated power of humanity.” These somewhat cryptic remarks describe the same sleight of hand to which Shakespeare alludes in Timon of Athens. Because the workings of the international economy require that all forms of wealth and property become subordinate to the rule of money, they must also become alienated from any other measurement of value.
The relation between people is given over to an object, to something external to human feeling, need or expression. People no longer act as intermediaries between themselves; they rely on the intervention of a power outside and above themselves—that is, on money. Objects (or individuals) retain their value only insofar as they represent money. Once separated from the intermediary of money (i.e., once divorced from God), objects and individuals lose their value. Money becomes the divine Other precisely because it can transform all human and natural qualities into their opposites, because, in Shakespeare’s language, it can make “foul fair, wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.” By assigning the right of definition to a power other than ourselves, we abdicate our human offices in favor of “this yellow slave,” that “will knit and break religions, bless the accursed, make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves and give them title, knee and approbation.”
Prior to the age of big-time capitalism money had value because it represented objects. Invert the equation and the objects, like the people, retain their value only to the extent they represent money. By assigning to money the powers that properly belong to human intellect and imagination, the devotees thwart or suppress their attempts at love, compassion, art and thought. They revolve like marionettes around the embodiment of great wealth made manifest in persons or institutions. Whether employed as authors, call girls or presidents of corporations, they learn to value themselves in proportion to the money others will pay for their labors. The subsequent dissolutions of self remove, as if by surgery, the faculties of intellect and will. The moment of astonishment, which has something in common with the ecstasy of religious self-abasement, reduces people to a sense of their futility and worthlessness. The paralysis of thought can last for a few hours or several days; among people in the more advanced phases of the disorder it can last for many years, sometimes for an entire life.
It is, of course, nothing new to say that an inordinate love of money results in predictably high yields of stupidity and despair. The Bible is explicit on the point; so are any number of secular writers, among them Juvenal, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens and Freud. If it could be seen as architecture or heard as music, mankind’s worship of money might invite comparison with Chartres Cathedral or the Mass in B minor. No other labor of the human imagination embraces so many talents and behaviors, not a few of them psychotic. The offerings placed on the altars of wealth display so bewildering an infinity of forms that a true and diligent expounder of the faith would need to account not only for the price of a matched set of ICBMs but also for the cost of the orange trees at Versailles, Anne of Austria’s black pearls, the diplomacy of George III and the diamond in the ear of the last Krupp.
Even so, I think it fair to say that the current ardor of the American faith in money easily surpasses the degrees of intensity achieved by other societies in other times and places. Money means so many things to us—spiritual as well as temporal—that we are at a loss to know how to hold its majesty at bay.
The arriviste theologians in Massachusetts assumed they had been granted what they called a “special appointment,” and knew they would suffer the punishment of ecclesiastical foreclosure if they failed to make good on the deal and bungled the subdivision of New Jerusalem. If America failed, the cosmos failed. Not only would Americans have nowhere to go, but the whole scheme of salvation—laws of nature, history and science; the ground of being; the rigging of human thought—would all come loose and blow away in the wind.
Henry Adams in his autobiography remarks that although the Americans weren’t much good as materialists they had been so “deflected by the pursuit of money” that they could turn “in no other direction.” The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace. Men remain free to rise or fall in the world, and if they fail it must be because they willed it so. Visible signs of wealth testify to an inward state of grace, and without at least some of these talismans posted in one’s house or on one’s person an American loses all hope of demonstrating to himself the theorem of his happiness. Seeing is believing, and if an American success is to count for anything in the world it must be clothed in the raiment of property. As often as not it isn’t the money itself that means anything; it is the use of money as the currency of the soul.
Against the faith in money, other men in other times and places have raised up countervailing faiths in family, honor, religion, intellect and social class. The merchant princes of medieval Europe would have looked upon the American devotion as sterile cupidity; the ancient Greeks would have regarded it as a form of insanity. Even now, in the last decades of a century commonly defined as American, a good many societies both in Europe and Asia manage to balance the desire for wealth against the other claims of the human spirit. An Englishman of modest means can remain more or less content with the distinction of an aristocratic name or the consolation of a flourishing garden; the Germans show obscure university professors the deference accorded by Americans only to celebrity; the Soviets honor the holding of political power; in France a rich man is a rich man, to whom everybody grants the substantial powers that his riches command but to whom nobody grants the respect due to a member of the National Academy. But in the United States a rich man is perceived as being necessarily both good and wise, which is an absurdity that would be seen as such not only by a Frenchman but also by a Russian.118 Not that Americans are greedier than the French, or less intellectual than Germans, or more venal than Russians, but to what other tribunal can an anxious and supposedly egalitarian people submit their definitions of the good, the true and the beautiful if not to the judgment of the bottom line?
W.H. Auden thought the most striking difference between Americans and Europeans was to be found in their different attitudes toward money. No European associates wealth with personal merit or poverty with personal failure. But to the American what is important is not so much the possession of money but the power to earn it “as a proof of one’s manhood.” Having proved he can earn money an American can safely throw it away—scattering it like confetti on chorus girls or like holy water on the founts of charity.119
No matter how bitter the lessons of their experience, people stunted by the faith in money insist on believing that it is something more than an utterly colorless abstraction or convenient arithmetic cipher. They imagine that it possesses an inherent spirit or substance. Wishing to assign to money a moral value, they resist the notion that money is neither good nor evil, the symbol, not the substance, of wealth. The devotees on the radical left attribute to it the sum of the world’s evil; believers on the reactionary right conceive of it as the store of the world’s virtue. Enthralled by the Dionysian beauty of cash, the faithful of all sects and denominations blur the distinction between money as a commodity and money as sacrament.
It is the blurring of this distinction, the unwillingness to recognize money as an arbitrary system of measurement, that inflicts so much suffering on people taught to accept price as a synonym for meaning. Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.
Deployed as a tool and understood as a secular product (comparable to wheat, coal or intelligence), money ranks as one of the primary materials with which mankind builds the architecture of civilization. Large numbers of people, many of them Americans, continue to use money in this manner, and the success of the American economy testifies both to their energy and their clarity of mind. Although a constant motif in American history and metaphysics, the dream of money never provided the impetus from which the country drew its greatest strengths. George Washington was obliged to borrow money to pay his travel to his first inauguration. Abraham Lincoln had little use for riches, and Thomas Jefferson died bankrupt. A genuine indifference to the radiance of money has been characteristic not only of the nation’s principal artists and scientists but also of the founders of its largest fortunes. Even the most humorless of the late nineteenth-century plutocrats seem to have taken money less seriously than their heirs and publicists. They understood that laissez-faire capitalism, like all economic systems, was amoral, a mechanism providing greater chances of liberty and prosperity to greater numbers of people than had been possible within feudal or mercantile systems. But for money itself they often expressed a gambler’s contempt. By and large they were interested in something else—in an idea, a contraption, a theory of combination or a geometry of markets. Money was something that followed with the luggage, a secondary proof of grace accumulating in the hall with the invitations to dinner and the requests for press interviews, with the flowers, the catering bills and the art collection. Neither John D. Rockefeller nor Henry Ford were impressed by the magical aspects of money.120 A similar indifference shows up in conversation with latter-day millionaires who have made their own fortunes; like highly paid athletes, the inventors of computer systems seem surprised that they should earn so much money for playing what they often describe as a game. Andrew Carnegie acknowledged the same primacy of mind over matter when he observed that the mere “amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry.”
Perceived as divinity—seeming to transform day into night, old into young, crime into philanthropy—money serves the totalitarian or oligarchic interest and urges men to embrace their longings for the demonic. Gouverneur Morris, brother to a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a friend to both Talleyrand and Marie Antoinette, looked at the extravagance in France under the ancien régime and recognized the result implicit in too fond a love of money. “Wealth,” he said, “tends to corrupt the mind and to nourish its love of power and to stimulate it to oppression. History proves this to be the spirit of opulence.”121
These two images of money—secular and divine—exist simultaneously in the minds of most men in most times and most places. The implacable enmity between the two factions gives rise to the argument that is the American dialectic. It is a question of emotional algebra, and on the balance of the fractions depends not only the happiness of individuals but also the destiny of nations. If the incumbent majority speaks the language of mutual faith and credit, it will form voluntary associations, endow universities, consign its capital not simply to the bond market but to the advance of human reason as well as the expansion of the public good. But if too many people hear in the whisper of bank notes the voice of God, then sooner or later (usually sooner) they lose so much of their humanity that the language of mutual faith breaks down into sullen chant. The believers in fairy gold, no matter how well-intentioned their tax-deductible gifts to the Metropolitan Opera, join the circle of an old and pagan dance.