12
Banker, Philosopher, Trickster, Writer
The social imaginary … [is] the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life.
—John Thompson
As The Market has emerged in the past few centuries to become both the summit and the hub of society, it has in no way restricted itself to the “economic” realm. Its language, images, values, and assumptions have seeped throughout the entire culture to permeate the ways we think and live. It has begun to shape us in ways that elude our awareness. A useful way to think about this saturation is by means of what historians of culture and religion call the “social imaginary.”1 As briefly described in Chapter 3, this consists of the cluster of patterns through which people envision their collective existence. A social imaginary functions largely on the pre-reflective level, and therefore differs from a “worldview” which informs a more cognitive awareness. My point here is that what might be characterized as a market-shaped social imaginary has grown and enlarged its scope during the past three centuries, especially but not exclusively in America. In this chapter we will chart its progress from banking to philosophizing to literature.
Philosophy
In the early nineteenth century there lived and thrived in upstate New York a small-scale banker named Alexander Bryan Johnson. Born in England in 1786, he immigrated with his mother to the United States when he was fifteen years old, following his father who had arrived four years earlier and who had established a successful general store in Utica. Young Alexander was fully aware of his newcomer status, and strove to improve himself through wide reading as he worked first in the family store, then as a lawyer, and finally as a banker.
Johnson’s life would not merit a single paragraph in an American history text based on his banking career. He was successful at it, but only moderately in comparison to the financial titans, like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who would rise with the Gilded Age. Johnson, however, displayed a singular quality that makes his story a unique one. In addition to his assiduous attention to his ledgers and his clients, he nourished an avid interest in philosophy and wrote three books on the subject. These books, which attracted rather little interest at the time, provide us two hundred years later with invaluable evidence of how a “banking mentality” had already begun to leach into and shape the everyday life of the young republic.
In terms of his formal religious affiliation, Johnson was at first, like Adam Smith, a Presbyterian. It was the denomination of his wife Abigail, who as it happens, was the granddaughter of President John Adams. Later, however, when the local Presbyterian fathers and brethren censured him for using the mail on Sunday, in violation of their strict Sabbath observance principles, he joined the more forbearing Episcopal Church. But Johnson’s real outlook on life was derived from neither latter-day Calvinism nor low-church Anglicanism. It was shaped by his extensive experience with checks, mortgages, and currency. He held forth on these views as a frequent lecturer participating in an active lyceum movement. These discourses and his philosophical writings display a mindset that was soon to become the unofficial but operational “religion” of the modern market society. Johnson was both its harbinger and an early champion.
There is another feature of Johnson’s thinking which, after so many years of obscurity, has made him interesting to the current generation of philosophers: the avid attention, indeed almost obsessive at times, which he devoted to language. From the middle of the twentieth century, American and Continental philosophers, from the logical positivists to Ludwig Wittgenstein, have been engaged in what has been termed “the linguistic turn.” And in this respect Johnson can resemble a long-forgotten, faded family photograph discovered in an attic—a forgotten ancestor who suddenly seems to have said something important and relevant after all.
Johnson was fully aware of the admixture of categories that characterized his lectures and writings. Yale historian Jean-Christophe Agnew, in an excellent article on Johnson, quotes the Utica banker as saying of himself, “The labors of the counting room and the study were constantly intermingled and often the sheet of a treatise in hand and a current balance sheet might be seen on the table together.” As Agnew quips, “Johnson’s writings were nothing if not inter-textual,” and then goes on to conclude that this intertextuality foreshadowed a central aspect of American market culture.2
So, just what is it about Johnson’s homespun philosophy that proves so prognostic? Handling so much paper money and so many bonds in his banker’s office, Brown was struck by the fact that currency has almost no intrinsic value at all. Take it to a bank for exchange, and all you get is more paper, or at best coins, whose inherent worth is a fraction of the numbers stamped on them. The value of any form of money is entirely projected on it by those who accept it for payment for real physical goods and services—for land or horses or restaurant meals. The worth of money, he decided, is wholly a function of its usefulness. Absent the willingness of human beings to attribute real value to it, it is not worth the paper it is printed on, so to speak.
So far we can easily follow the course of Brown’s thinking. It is probably ingrained in the mental habits of those who routinely handle large amounts of money. Who has not watched with at least temporary fascination as a bank clerk shuffles through stacks of twenties, or even hundred-dollar bills, with indifference? It is when Brown makes his next move that we have to observe carefully, as we might watch a seasoned cardsharp flip over jacks and aces, or a magician shift the shells under which a bean is hidden. Brown now suggests that in all important respects, words are like money. They have no intrinsic value or significance, only that which custom and everyday use allots them. As Agnew characterizes Brown’s view, “Words were like mirrors: social conventions that were empty in themselves but that possessed as many potential meanings as the objects placed before them.”3
From this premise it was only one short step for Brown to deduce his conclusions. First, that since language was so chimerical; it was a mistake to look to words to help us understand ourselves or our world. But second, and also because words are so devoid of substantive significance, we may deploy them to charm, persuade, even flatter people without any sense of guilt. Words are there to be used.
Can we not see in Brown’s down-home ruminations a portent not only of William James’s truth-is-what-works pragmatism, but of the consummate adroitness with which Madison Avenue employs symbols, words, and images to cajole prospective customers into parting with their coins? At an even deeper level, can we not also see the beginnings of a culture in which, by this point, the relentless metrics of the monetary have filtered into our thinking about virtually everything, from family life to politics and from education to spirituality and art?
In retrospect, it can be seen that Johnson was not a mere flash in the American philosophical pan. It was not long after he died that William James, sometimes considered the greatest American philosopher, devised his enduring contribution of “pragmatism”—in simple terms, the argument that ideas are true insofar as they are useful. In his many writings on this subject, James often employed the metaphor of “cash-value” to make the idea clear to the ordinary reader. James was strongly criticized by his contemporary thinkers for injecting this crass note into philosophical thinking. Some contended that the “cash-value” concept not only trivialized his ideas but was not suited to the essence of pragmatism. The debate has continued in our own day. The British philosopher A. J. Ayer sardonically called the cash-value metaphor “more vivid than precise.”4 Although James was aware that his metaphor troubled many, he continued to use it. His point, not too different from Johnson’s, was that ideas as such have no inherent truth or value. They reveal their value only in the realm of experience.
My point here is not to make a judgment on whether James’s metaphor was helpful or not in illuminating his philosophy, but to suggest that Johnson’s ideas, although they were peripheral in his time, still reverberate today. William James is no minor figure in our intellectual history. The underlying social imaginary of the market has shaped even the core tradition of American thought.
Enter the Trickster
Consider the sales strategies of a Madison Avenue branding wizard, the great showman P. T. Barnum, or a TV revivalist who instructs viewers to place their hands on their screens to be cured of ailments like backache. Is there an essential difference? The overlapping tactics employed by the ingenious priests of The Market, by showbiz hucksters, and by Elmer Gantry-like hawkers of religion have intrigued observers of American culture for a long time. In the field of religious studies, the figure of the “trickster” provides an inviting vehicle for comparing them. Jokes, pranks, cunning, playful deceits: these are some of the artifices in the well-stocked bag that students of mythology and folk religion uncover in the trickster, an archetype to be found in virtually every known religion, whether high or low. The trickster can be a god or demi-god, an animal, or a human being. Specific characteristics vary from one tradition to the next, but the trickster is always smart, cagey, and creative—and a source of jokes and ruses that flout convention and normal rules of decorum. Examples of this character range from Loki of Norse folklore to the coyote of Native American stories. The slick gambits of Reynaud the Fox gave the word “foxy” its meaning in English as guileful and cunning. Some tricksters have been plucked from popular yarns and cast into more formal roles. Shakespeare put one, Puck or Robin Goodfellow, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The composer Richard Strauss celebrated another in his tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.
Some biblical scholars assert that the Hebrew patriarch Jacob is best understood as a trickster.5 He cheats his brother Esau out of his legitimate heritage by taking advantage of their blind father, Isaac. Later he hoodwinks his father-in-law Laban—who has already tricked him into working for seven years to win the hand of Rachel, only to end up with her older sister Leah, whom the Bible describes as cross-eyed. Tricksters delight in tricking other tricksters.
Jacob is a particularly good example of the trickster type because, even though he lies and swindles, we are clearly meant to esteem him for his spunk and inventiveness. And this is true of nearly all tricksters. We may shake our heads at their unseemly antics, but we smile and indulge them, maybe even admire them. This may be because the trickster is often, if not always, serving some good purpose. Or more likely it is because, given the unfairness and uncertainty of life, he exhibits at least one way of beating misfortune at its own game.
American literature has produced more than one world-class trickster. At about the same time that Alexander Bryan Johnson was thumbing through account books and ruminating on the pecuniary nature of language, someone else in that same burned-over region of upstate New York was pondering a closely related subject. The man who would become America’s greatest novelist, Herman Melville, moved with his family to Lansingburgh, a few miles north of Troy, in 1830. He wrote short stories and novels, some successful, some not. His Moby Dick, although not a smash hit at the time of its publication in 1851, is now viewed by many critics as the prototypical American saga and a perceptive parable of the American spirit.
A few years later, in 1857, Melville published another novelistic probe into the soul of his native land. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade is set, like Moby Dick, on a ship—this time not a whaler but a Mississippi riverboat. It includes an oddball who clumps about on a wooden leg like Ahab, the obsessed captain of the Pequod, and a congeries of other characters meant to represent a motley, cosmopolitan culture. Melville christens the lumbering side-wheeler Fidele, a none-too-subtle hint of the book’s theme—the persistence of trust and indeed credulity in his fellow citizens of the new republic, and perhaps of the whole world. The author is similarly not-too-subtle in naming his characters; they include a Frank Goodman, a Charlie Noble, and even a Pitch. The names suggest a medieval morality play. At one point, his peg-legged character refers to the vessel as a “ship of fools.” Later, another character described only as a philanthropist says that “life is a pic-nic en costume; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool.”6
The Confidence Man unfolds a satirical series of incidents in which passenger after passenger is fleeced by one smooth swindler after another. Melville, who, like Dostoyevsky, got some of his ideas from reading newspapers and magazines, had seen the accounts of a well-dressed gentleman named William Thompson, who was arrested in 1849 and eventually shipped to Sing Sing for a series of petty thefts—mostly of watches willingly handed to him by strangers after he asked for their confidence. His escapades were even the basis of a farce called The Confidence Man, staged by theater owner William Burton. A commentator at the time wrote in the Weekly Herald that Thompson was no worse a con man than the financiers on Wall Street, who were pulling off their con “on a large scale.”7 The novel Melville published (hardly accidentally) on April Fools’ Day of 1857 more than hints at exactly the same point.
But the novel is much more layered, and as the story blossoms the reader begins to ask, “exactly who is conning whom?” Eventually, in an ingenious feat of literary legerdemain, Melville causes readers to perceive that, throughout the yarn, we too have been taken in. Indeed our whole lives are spent in a big, carnival sideshow tent, or a Wall Street, that stretches from coast to coast, where everyone seems, just as on the Fidele, to be hoodwinking everyone else.
No one knew this better than P. T. Barnum, who was thriving then as a showman, a business man, and one of the smoothest confidence men who ever turned a trick. He did so well at all of these callings because he saw clearly what most people discern only through a glass darkly; namely, that at some level people know they are being tricked, and even enjoy it. The mark who pays good money to squeeze into a sideshow to gawk at a dog-headed boy or to watch a woman being sawed in half either knows or suspects he is being taken in. But he enters willingly into the charade.
We are all actors in the costume picnic and passengers on the ship of fools. And Melville does not exempt himself from this floating festival of knavery. He is, after all, a writer of fiction, and fiction is at one level a tissue of lies, with its reader a willing accomplice. Yet in a chapter written as an aside to the reader, he explains how fiction can satisfy readers looking not only for more entertainment, but even “for more reality, than real life itself can show.” In real life, people mask their authentic selves for the sake of propriety, but characters in a novel are not so constrained. He then makes the connection to religion, which is just as much a web of falsehoods, perhaps, but performs the function of revealing truths that are not apparent to human eyes. “It is with fiction as with religion,” Melville concludes: “it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”8 One is reminded of Saint Paul’s observation that “we are regarded as deceivers, yet true” (2 Corinthians 6:8).
Here then is a book about something that The Market and biblical religion share, and that Melville with impressive sensitivity saw. A superficial reading of The Confidence Man might easily suggest a sour and even cynical view of human nature. But Melville is going much deeper. Raised in a Presbyterian family and never too far from a Calvinist view of human nature, he was aware of the capacity for self-deception that lurks stubbornly in the heart of human beings. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s fatal flaw is that he sees all evil incarnate in the white whale that has robbed him of his leg. Striving to eradicate it in its cosmic entirety, he sends his whole ship to the bottom. But Melville is also mindful of the enduring, if sometimes dim, hope for redemption. He believes that all of us on the global Fidele need faith, and that, one way or another, we will find it.
Melville severely qualifies his Calvinism, however. His point is that, instead of ignoring or denying the savage within us, we need to be aware of it and in touch with it. He also speculates about an understanding of God that Calvin would have found totally unacceptable. Researchers have found a manuscript version of a chapter in The Confidence Man that Melville eventually did not include. In it, the novelist speculates that even God, whom he calls “the author of authors,” cannot escape the contradictions and conundrums of the human condition. We are all in this together. Successive drafts show that Melville kept revising the wording of this idea but eventually discarded it altogether, perhaps concluding that it would offend the devout and damage sales of the book. Like a skilled trickster and confidence man, he kept a high card tucked inside his vest.
I am sorry Melville consigned this chapter to the scrap can. It might indeed have seemed impious to some readers in his day. But many more recent schools of religious thought would not have reacted so negatively. “Process theology,” for example, the movement based on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, teaches that God has not yet reached—and may not even want—the perfections attributed to him by classical theologians. This would mean that God shares some of the limitations of finitude with which humans struggle. In an earlier chapter, we explored the argument advanced by Abraham Joshua Heschel, in The Prophets, that the biblical God is not anthropomorphic but anthropopathic—meaning that God shares the feelings, both joyful and painful, of human beings. Some Christian theologians suggest that Christ’s self-emptying, or kenosis, described by Paul (Philippians 2:6–7), is evidence that God, although he possesses all the divine perfections, sets them aside in the Incarnation and fully shares the restrictions that finitude imposes on human beings. I think Melville would have agreed.