A city for sale, and doomed when it finds a buyer.
—Jugurtha, commentary on Rome, c. 104 b.c.
Twenty years ago it was still possible to believe that the rest of the world wished to become as much like the United States as time, money and circumstance would permit, that everybody’s image of the future looked like an American postcard. Other countries might not wish to own quite so splendid a military establishment, and maybe they wouldn’t have the resources to support three television networks and two divisions of the National Football League, but presumably they wanted all the toys in all the windows on Fifth Avenue. Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box—complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a McDonald’s hamburger franchise, a row of Marriott hotels and a First Amendment.
The familiar assumptions no longer bear quite so comforting a relation to facts. During the last three or four years I have noticed that when traveling in Europe or Asia, or in conversation with foreign visitors in Washington and New York, I meet relatively few people who set much store by the example of the United States. Their indifference has nothing to do with ideology. They admire the precepts of freedom as well as the proofs of the American economic triumph. They watch reruns of Dallas, wear blue jeans, drink Coke, and go out of their way to praise American movies, American flags and American rock songs. They show little affection for Communist systems of government or belief. Nobody denounces the evils of American imperialism; nobody preaches Marxist sermons. Without prior consultation, and probably without meaning to do so, the travelers from abroad make a more subtle observation. They conceive of the United States as a market they can exploit rather than as an ideal to which they can safely aspire. They speak of America as if it were the Old World not the New—the past, not the future.
In the winter of 1987, at a quasi-diplomatic function coincident with yet another conference on the precarious American trade balance, I met a man from Turin who observed that although an Italian automobile worker earned less money than an American automobile worker, at least his countryman had a job (unlike the 13,000 workers let go by General Motors the previous autumn); certainly he retained more of his income as savings and held higher hopes for his children. On the same occasion a woman from Singapore expressed her doubts as a question. She had spent the afternoon shopping on Fifth Avenue and had been impressed by the prices of luxury—$4,000 for a watch at Tiffany’s, $750 for a silk nightgown at Saks, $150 for a forty-five minute consultation with the exercise director at Elizabeth Arden.
“How can America stand on the side of the future,” she asked, “when it sets the example of eating the future?”
She wondered why Americans didn’t restrain their appetite for the world’s cash. Why borrow so much—from the Japanese, from schoolchildren, from Europeans, from anybody and everybody willing to bankroll a third and fourth mortgage on the American dream—for no other reason than to finance the consumption of superfluous goods? At the end of 1986 the total consumer debt (mortgages, junk bonds, credit card balances) reached $7 trillion, as opposed to a total money supply within the United States (what the Federal Reserve denominates as M-1) of $700 billion. During the five or six years prior to 1986 consumer spending doubled ($300 billion to $600 billion), and the Americans sold to foreign buyers assets worth $1 trillion in land, corporate equity, buildings, bank debt and manufacturing capacity. By the spring of 1987, the rates of default on mortgages and personal credit card debt had arrived at an all-time high.
We stood near a high window of a new office building in midtown Manhattan, admiring the view to the south. Across the Hudson River we could see the glittering lights of a real-estate deal in the mud flats of New Jersey. I thought of the city’s undeniable opulence, of the condominiums decorating the Atlantic coast from Hoboken to the Florida Keys; I thought of the thousand and one success stories smiling from the pages of the magazines on the nation’s newsstands, of ballplayers earning $1 million a year and television commercials selling for $600,000 a minute, of the optimistic voices in Wall Street and Washington promising bigger and better and more. For a moment I could imagine a nation as rich, happy and prosperous as the America seen in the postcards.
But then I thought of the men and women asleep in the streets of the opulent city, of contracts canceled and farms foreclosed, of thousands of not-so-successful stories of people fired by AT&T, GM and CBS, of an economy geared to the mechanics of fraud and a permanent state of war. I thought of George Amory, and of the countless others like him, desperately trying to keep up appearances, glad to abandon the claims to their freedom for another twenty minutes on Park Avenue, willing to eat the future (or anything else presented to them) in order to deny, with John C. Calhoun and the doomed Confederacy, their fear of sinking in the world.
I have suggested in these notes that we have allowed money to become an end in itself and made of our mistake a child’s religion.132 A similar clutching at the straws of money was evident in Rome during the first century b.c. and in France just prior to the revolution of 1789. Observing the transformation of the Roman Republic into an empire, the historian Sallust attributed the wish for despotism to, among other causes, “unequal distribution of wealth, exorbitant veterans’ demands, depopulation of the countryside, high unemployment of citizens, debt-ridden farmers, bread and circuses, costly military ventures, oppressive taxes for some, and a government controlled by wealth.”
The summary stands as a fair description of some of our own circumstances, and as a reasonable approximation of some others, but as premonition it is surpassed by the remarks of the bookseller Ruault in Paris in 1786. His letter to his brother bears extended quotation:
Money there must be, and there’s an end to it; money for expenditure known and unknown; money for the ordinary and for the extraordinary; money for the five or six kings reigning in France who dip so generously into the public treasury; money for the king of Paris, the king of finance, the king of war, the king of the fleet, the king of foreign affairs, and the King of all these kings, who, they say, would be the thriftiest of them all if it weren’t for his wife, his brothers, his cousins, and so forth . . .
Finance has grown so powerful, so proud, so despotic that one must believe it can go no higher and must infallibly perish before many years have passed. When finance is honored, says Montesquieu, the state is lost. A fearful revolution is very imminent; we are very, very close to it, at any minute we are going to reach a violent crisis. Things cannot go on longer as they have been, that is self-evident. There is nothing but speculation, finance, banking, discount, borrowing, wagering, and payment. Every head is glued to money, crazy with speculation. A little patience, and we may see some pretty goings-on in 1800! In the meanwhile, though, we must live and contrive not to be carried away by the coming debacle.
Farewell, dear friends, do not take my prophesies too much to heart. Curl yourselves up tightly in your little den, let the madmen get on with their folly, and let us try to remain simple spectators when the hollow mountain, that groans beneath the weight of all these thousands of brainless fools who are crawling over it, finally comes crashing down.
Historical analogies deserve to be regarded with suspicion, but it is easy enough to imagine the American envoys in Paris in the evening hours of the eighteenth century reserving similar judgments about the perfection of the ancien régime and the loveliness of the court at Versailles. Not unlike the contemporary American plutocracy in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, the French aristocracy employed an army of hairdressers, upholsterers, cabinetmakers, cooks, fencing masters and tennis instructors. Marie Antoinette, known to the salon gossips as “Madame Deficit,” was in the habit of paying her dress designers $1 million a year, a sum that the wives of important Hollywood movie producers might regard as a trifle low. The Americans had come to borrow money for their revolution, and I am sure they were polite. I can imagine Ben Franklin complimenting the queen for a pair of shoes that cost $16,000, or Thomas Jefferson saying to the Comte d’Artois that it was a pity the comte had lost $1.5 million the previous evening at cards. I also can imagine Franklin and Jefferson thinking that neither the shoes nor the card game would have made much sense in Philadelphia.133
A good many intelligent and well-meaning people have remarked on the pathologies of wealth that I have described in these notes, and quite a few of them have suggested possible methods of rousing the American enterprise from its stupefying dream. As yet, however, these voices have not rallied a constituency likely to accomplish the task at hand, probably because the exhortations rely too heavily on the chanting of the word, “leadership.”
The statement that America lacks leadership has by now become so safe and meaningless that it appears in every speechwriter’s lexicon of unassailable truth. No properly outfitted presidential candidate would think of showing up at a supermarket or press conference without a list of mournful remarks about the nation’s loss of leadership. So also every corporate magnate, cab driver and newspaper columnist pressed for a few weighty words on the topic of the American destiny—all agree that only leadership can rescue the nation from folly and ruin.
Having made the announcement, the speaker usually mentions one of several stock examples thought to possess the correct sheen of significance. Depending on the mood and the occasion, he refers to the trade or the moral deficit, to illiteracy in the schools, to the mindless self-dealing characteristic not only of the credit markets but also of the media. All present nod their heads and know they have been made wise.
Of course, says the choir of alarmed voices gathered in ballroom or town square—leadership. By God, it’s leadership that’s missing. We can send a man to the moon but we can’t balance the budget or clean up the wreckage in Detroit, and do you know why? For the same reason the country is being governed by a pack of fools. Because leadership has gone out of our lives.
This ceremonial repetition of the word has an ennobling effect because nobody knows what it means. Most ladies and gentlemen who mourn the passing of the nation’s leaders wouldn’t know a leader if they saw one. If they had the bad luck to come across a leader, they would find that he might demand something from them, and this impertinence would put an abrupt and indignant end to their wish for his return. When Christ showed up in Jerusalem saying the kind of thing leaders have an awkward habit of saying, the authorities nailed him to a cross.
It never occurs to editorial writers that leaders practicing leadership might insist on renunciations which—if carried beyond the elementary lessons of giving up cigarettes and the third whiskey before dinner—might seriously interfere with everybody’s habitual round of pleasure and hypocrisy. The voices in the ballroom want the kind of leadership that makes a brave show in the world but doesn’t cost much more than the annual fees charged by Home Box Office or the Council on Foreign Relations. This is another way of saying they would prefer, no matter how loud their protests to the contrary, as little leadership as possible.
The disingenuousness of the lament becomes apparent in the context of the supporting adjectives. The mourners speak of leadership as if it were an innate quality or skill, vaguely comparable to a talent for playing the piano or solving crossword puzzles. They think of it as a function of personality, a gift akin to a despot’s cruelty or a saleman’s winning smile. When casting around for exemplary proofs of leadership, they mention military commanders and football coaches. Probably it is safe to assume that the man most people have in mind for the job would bear a comforting resemblance to Muammar Qaddafi. A man of lighter color and broader education, of course, but still a handsome, authoritarian fellow who plays polo, commands the unswerving loyalty of his troops and brooks no seditious gabbling on the part of a liberal press.
The sporting and military analogies establish a false comparison. Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint. Edmund Burke put the proposition as follows: “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”
This is the news that the ladies and gentlemen in the ball-room prefer not to hear. For good reason. The United States was founded upon the egalitarian premise of boundlessly expanding will and appetite—for goods, land, experience, wealth, fame. Envisioning a romantic panorama of man at play in the meadows of paradise (of man set free from constraints of laws and schools, free to constitute himself as his own government, free to declare himself a god), Americans unloosed their restless energies in a direction precisely opposite to the one indicated by Burke. By holding to the maxim that “nice guys finish last,” and choosing to look upon acts of self-denial as sure marks of “a loser,” we make the most deep-rooted human conflict the stuff of musical comedy.
If the ceaseless murmuring about leadership has failed to produce any demonstrable result, it is because the would-be saviors of the American enterprise address themselves to symptoms instead of causes.
Failing a war, revolution or economic collapse, too many interests align themselves with the inertia of money. The difficulty does not lend itself to economic tinkering. Efforts at the redistribution of wealth invariably lead to the same injustices under different letterheads, and except in times of war or illness, moral awakening is as hard to come by as a winning number in the New Jersey lottery. It is not a question of taxes, interest rates, tariffs, investment policy or monetary reform. It is the prior question of an attitude toward money that is synonymous with religious devotion.
The ancient writers referred to this superstition as the worship of Mammon, but the name of that old and melancholy idol has fallen into disfavor. The American media regard it as their patriotic duty to transform pagan enthusiasms once thought insane into glorious proofs of American freedom and enterprise. The mergers and acquisitions that now account for most of the trading on the stock exchanges bespeak a style of financial speculation comparable to the cathedral architecture of the High Gothic.
Almost every preacher or reform politician who ever has considered the problem of corrupt republics has observed, maybe not as succinctly as Montesquieu but invariably to the same point, that whereas monarchies fall by poverty, republics are brought to their ends by luxury. We know what is wrong with the American enterprise. The question remains as to whether enough people can agree to imagine some other way of awarding the prizes.134
Value is determined not by anything extraneous to human beings but by their desires. If we could let go our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place? In the fifteenth century mountain landscapes were thought to be as worthless as urban slums. Mountains in our own time seem infinitely precious, both as places of residence and images of spiritual well-being. Given the engines of destruction currently at work in the world, it is conceivable that in twenty years a glass of clear water might be worth more than an appearance on the Johnny Carson show.135
The task at hand is a task of the imagination. It has less to do with economics than it does with metaphor, less to do with the making of laws than with the making of words that allow men to see their immortality, not in monuments or weapons, but in their children.
Against the world’s weight, mankind possesses the greater energy of spirit formed by the mass of small but numberless acts of ordinary human beings going about the extraordinary business of telling the truth. The negotiations at every dinner table thus become as central to the human story as the discussions at Geneva; every hospital room bears witness to battles as critical to the human destiny as the battle fought at Gettysburg or Waterloo; every bedroom door opens into a desert or a garden.
In societies willing to earn the future instead of bidding up its price on a foreign market, the desire for life precedes the desire for profit. This elementary law of survival is bound to be denied as long as profit is believed to be a sacrament. Although we loot the world of its resources, we cannot think of anything to do with the spoils except to build the tombs of the national security state. Afraid of shadows, retreating further into the realm of increasingly gigantic symbols, we hope to keep ourselves safe from death by embracing, as if they were beloved toys, the images of death. By presuming the presence of nonexistent enemies, we adopt the hypochondriac’s device of staging an endless round of preemptive cures in order to postpone, perhaps indefinitely, our dying of natural causes.
People do not necessarily like to buy or rent other human beings. To do so they must repress too much of their own humanity, with the result that they become cold, rigid and scared. But what other choice do they have in a society in which the glorious name of profit justifies squalor, famine, dishonesty and war? The substitution of money for all other systems of value facilitates the attack on self, on culture, on country, on time past and time future.
We squander our fortune in order to become a nation deprived of the cultural and spiritual means to escape our confinement in a gilded cage. No matter how many objects we acquire, or how much experience we consume as if it were chocolate or Kleenex, we become smaller. As has been said more than once (but probably needs to be said yet again), it isn’t the money itself that causes the trouble, but rather the use of money as votive ritual and pagan ornament.
If the heat and light imprisoned in the brilliance of a diamond could be released and transformed into bread, roads or schools, the worth of the diamond would warm the lives of thousands of people. So also with the human possibility imprisoned in many other sterile monuments dedicated to the majesty of wealth—in cruise missiles and the frantic speculation on Wall Street; in the Trump Tower and Roone Arledge’s dramaturgy. Our dumb-struck awe in the presence of money’s glory reduces us to the stature of dwarfs. If we could perceive our veneration as an act of piety—as ritual rather than necessity—maybe we would not be so timid. Maybe we could laugh at our childishness and wean ourselves of our fear. If it were possible to define “wealth” as well-being, as a wealth of understanding or kindness or humor, and if it were possible to define “net worth” as human character, as the worth of what a man or woman does and thinks, then, together with the foolish king of Lydia, we might escape the prison of our golden wish.