Gotham Diary:
Wishful Thinking
June 2017 (I)
6, 7 and 9 June
Tuesday 6th
Taking off this week as well was a very tempting prospect. My daughter and I had so many rich conversations during her visit last week that my mind feels too turbid for plain speaking. Work on the writing project seems more urgent than ever, also as a result of those conversations. Watching my seven year-old grandson was an irresistible invitation to try to remember what it was like to be his age — a momentous year for me. Although I have a few bundles of memories from earlier times, it seems that my life as me really began in 1955. But here I am.
I’ve just read something that surprised me but that seemed so obvious and true that I felt dumb for not having known it before:
It’s interesting that the world of rumors and gossip is a world of wish fulfillment.
That’s James C Scott in an interview at Gastronomica that filtered through The Browser. More than any other statement on the subject, it explains both why gossip is so persistent and why it meets with such persistent disapproval. But the most important thing about it is that it says what gossip is.
A lot of what I’m reading in the Times and elsewhere feels like gossip. The topic is always the same: Grump’s inevitable self-destruction. Commentators and, if not reporters themselves, then the editors behind them seem to be hugging this eventuality with a mad glee. Perhaps it will “come true.” In which case, I hope that we won’t be remembering the admonition to be careful what you ask for. Whatever happens, this particular strand of wishful thinking has certainly distracted everyone’s attention from the fact that the liberal élite platform, at least as imagined both by the liberal élite and by its enemies, has not been altered very much (if at all) since its defeat in November’s election. As the administration has dismantled bits of it, there has been no indication that, if restored to power, the liberal élite would not simply restore the status quo ante. Talk about dumb.
And yet I don’t waste much time waiting for the liberal élite to come up with better ideas. I am hoping for something more like a conversion experience, in which broad swathes of smart people come to understand that the role of the market in society requires major alteration. The first thing to say is that it requires preservation, so that markets stop killing the social environments that cannot flourish without them. The second thing is to demand enhanced property rights for ordinary people while capping or otherwise limiting the amount of property — particularly property in assets other than cash — that extraordinarily wealthy people can expect to be protected by society. How much is too much? Reading another piece via The Browser, Hamilton Nolan’s astringent report on hedge fund managers in Las Vegas, I wondered if excess might not be measured at the point (not that there is a point) where possession shades into risk. At first glance, this might seem too personal and idiosyncratic to serve as a measure, but societies everywhere are equipped with rough intuitive standards.
The third thing is to strip corporations and other business organizations of their “natural person” status. The fourth thing is to replace federal regulation of almost everything with multi-state or regional compacts. In connection with this, the local must be prioritized. Local food is an obvious preference. Why not, in the age of the 3-D printer, local shoes? The idea that it’s fine to ship goods around the world in search of savings that will accrue only to the largest organizations — global baleen whales — is junk. We also have to stop making stuff that can’t be fixed. Why, and, more important, by whom, were the virtues of local production and routine repair deprecated? And what are the real benefits?
Those are a few market-centered planks that are, as I say, intended to make markets more constructive (if only by creating more jobs). Markets need to be removed from at least two nodes of human growth and health: education and medicine. Perhaps what I mean is that markets in commerce need to be replaced by markets in information. (That’s what schools really are, anyway, or what they ought to be.) Both fields currently shoulder bloated administrations that would shrink pretty quickly if money were no longer the object that it is of medical and educational operations.
Until I see more evidence of new thinking on the side that I’m rooting for, I’m happy to watch Grump & Co expose the old ideas for the shabby leftovers and workarounds that they are.
***
Wednesday 7th
Not too long ago — okay, a couple of centuries — Western Europe was governed by religious ideals. The influence of religion itself was always somewhat conflicted, because neither emperors nor popes ever managed to overpower the other once and for all, and their quarrels eventually fractured religious solidarity beyond hope of repair (we call this break the Reformation). The fighting over which religious ideals, and how interpreted, would regulate civil life inevitably tarnished the prestige of religion. On the eve of modern times, educated Europeans sifted general principles of right and wrong from finer points of theological dogma (we call this abstraction the Enlightenment).
In the four decades on either side of 1800, Western Europe was overcome by a dust cloud. A cloud of meta-dust, perhaps. We know what happened — revolutions, cotton mills — but the causal chains linking events are too fine and too numerous for us to trace. (We call disagreements about these chicken-and-egg problems Academics; perhaps they will be solved by Big Data.) The relationship between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution becomes more complex and obscure — like the depths of a Mandelbrot set — the harder we look for it. It’s enough to know that, when the cloud blew away, an entirely new model of society was in vogue. It was the original souped-up hot rod, a machine that was lubricated by money.
Lubricated, not fueled. The fuel was still labor, whether or not people were doing the work. Money, by making the engine run so much more smoothly, enabled vastly increased levels of production. The idea that society itself was a machine quickly filled the vacuum left by violent religious partisanship, and almost everybody hailed this development as a good thing. Some passionate people complained that the new arrangement was soulless (we call them Romantics), but they piped down when it became clear that the new money paid, often handsomely, for their operas, art exhibits, and volumes of verse. It turned out that everybody could be taught the language of money. Some people had a lot more money than others, and large fortunes allowed their owners to lead lives on what seemed (and seems) different planes of existence, but for everyday purposes, your money was as good as anybody else’s — regardless of whether you were. Among its many other perceived benefits, the lubricant and language of money put an almost complete stop to persecutions of all kinds.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that we have taken the language of money as far as it will go before it kills us.
***
The complexities of religious discourse that characterized pre-modern Europe were replaced by a new simplicity that may have reflected the ubiquitous steam engine. Just as a piston cycled back and forth in a cylinder, so the discussion of money settled into a two-stroke argument about something called capitalism. Capitalists argue that they know best how to put money to use. Their opponents point to periodic breakdowns in the wisdom of capitalists, breakdowns that cause the modern equivalents of plague and famine. These opponents are almost always called socialists. Their record is not very inspiring, either. If the world of capitalism is sometimes too colorful and exciting, socialism can be awfully dull and drab. Whereas capitalists think of nothing but money, socialists are obsessed by control.
Amazingly, we are still having this argument! It makes one long for a Certs mint. Society is not a machine. Human interactions are not mechanical. Human institutions do not hum along like dynamos. Society is fractal, always teetering on the edge of chaos. It depends entirely on the inertia, on the predictability and security of stability, for its continuance. Call those into question, and our relationships fray, our fears overwhelm us. We cannot be as free and open to chance as capitalists believe; nor can we be trained against our will to follow the party line. We need order, but an order that allows us to believe in something better. At no time in history has this order been realized as widely as it was in the postwar West, when jobs not only seemed to be plentiful but also promised workers a means of propelling their children into greater prosperity. The best job was one that allowed you to make sure that your children wouldn’t have to do it.
For very good reasons, it could not last. The postwar model of prosperity has gone forever and will never be replaced; nor is this a bad thing. It was built on subtle but significant misconceptions, most notably that blue-collar laborers were genuine workers. They weren’t. They were proto-robots, prototypes to be replaced by genuine machines. Genuine, truly human prosperity does not and ought not rest on the prevalence of assembly lines. Another mistake was that modern industry requires big machines — and the fortunes to pay for them. It did, but it no longer does. Almost everything about the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath has been transitory. For decent occupations that allow us to imagine and implement improvements, we are going to have to fashion a post-industrial environment, perhaps one that revives not only pre-modern artisanal practices but a more extensively moral social life. The capitalists and the socialists are arguing about a vanished world. Let’s stop choosing sides.
***
Friday 9th
Merely as an object, the book is interesting. The Studio, by John Gregory Dunne. It was my father’s — and my father did not keep books. He does not appear to have bought this one; there is no price on the dust jacket, but the words, “Book Club Edition,” instead. My father did not belong to any book clubs. Someone must have given it to him. A friend who thought he might be interested in a book about Twentieth Century Fox, because he had a seat on the board of directors for nine years, 1968-1977. How do I know that it was those years? Because that’s what it says on the Elephant Prod. In 1968, Dunne was granted unusual access to behind-the-scenes scenes at the film studio. His account begins with a board meeting at the Waldorf Astoria, before shifting to Hollywood, and for half a second I wondered if my father would be named. Had he been, I’m sure that it would have been brought to my attention when the book came out, in the following year. Instead, the book languished on the shelf of my father’s books, before coming to me when he died in 1985.
Every now and then I would pick up The Studio and try to figure out what it is. A novel? Not a novel? The dust jacket calls it a “cinéma-vérité study of Hollywood at work.” So it’s a movie, only in words. I would forget this until the next time I picked up The Studio. I thought about giving it away. It was, after all, one of my father’s books. I had not found his books, many of them about swindlers, to be particularly congenial. Or well written. Now, I knew that John Gregory Dunne was a serious writer, but I had him pegged as a man’s man, like the very irritating Norman Mailer. On the other hand, The Studio is a thin book. Until yesterday, it was in the storage unit. For a whole bunch of reasons, I brought it home, and finally opened it up to read it.
Are you still wondering what the Elephant Prod is?
I have told the story many times, but not here, it seems. One sunny afternoon in Houston, a car with a driver pulled up to the front walk of my father’s house. Perhaps it was a limousine, but it was probably a less ostentatious Continental. The passenger, who rang the doorbell, was expected. It was Dennis Stanfill, the president of Twentieth Century Fox. My father and I received him in the living room. His visit was as brief as politeness permitted, but as it was also ceremonial in nature we did not feel slighted. He had come to present my father with a token of the studio’s esteem, and in thanks for his years of service on the board of directors. I forget how the ceremony played out, but Mr Stanfill conveyed, I think without actually handling, a decorated box. Within the box, nestled in satin lining, was a brass rod with a sort of crook at the end. It was very shiny, and it was supposed to look like gold, but its value was symbolic: it was a prop. From the movies! From The King and I, to be exact. A clip-on badge identified the object and the reason for its presentation to my father. Unlike the Elephant Prod, which is still resplendent, the badge has tarnished badly and is almost impossible to read.
To my discerning eye, the Prod’s design elements were Gothic Revival, not remotely South Asian. It came with a bracket for mounting on the wall, and we showed the thing off to everybody who came through the house. I quipped that there was a factory in Burbank (my little joke) that produced elephant prods in volume. This was not supposed to be funny, really; it was just my way of signalling bewilderment: what kind of trophy is a movie prop? Beneath this bewilderment coiled a darker discomfort with the nature of sitting on a board of directors. My father was not asked to sit on boards because he was a self-assertive, opinionated sort of man. How noble was the service thus rewarded?
More to the point, does the Elephant Prod appear in the picture? To look at it, you would think that it’s a sort of scepter, something that Yul Brynner’s King ought to brandish every now and then. Does he? Although The King and I was the first movie that I saw twice, and although I was made to pipe “Hello, Young Lovers” whenever my mother thought that she could inflict cheap entertainment on cocktails guests, the movie no longer appeals to me very much. (It seems to have been disillusioning to realize that “Shall We Dance?” is a polka, not a waltz.) In any case, I have been unable to peel my eyes while watching the DVD for flashes of brass.
My stepmother was very proud of the Elephant Prod. My sister wanted it, too. It was settled that my stepmother would have it for life. By the time she died, my sister had lost interest, so the executor left it with me. I have not mounted it on the wall; it leans in a corner of the living room that is easily overlooked. Every time I do notice it, I think that I had better put it in a closet somewhere. You could hurt somebody with it.
For a while after Dennis Stanfill’s visit, I feared that Der Rosenkavalier would be ruined for me, but it wasn’t.
Bon week-end à tous!