Money
Just as the number of people on earth has increased vastly in modern times, so has the amount of money. Just as it is hard to fathom what it means for billions of people to be living on earth—a lot of food being raised to mouths and beds being made and steps taken and questions asked—it is hard to fathom the enormous amounts of money that are in circulation, numbers that dwarf mere millions. The higher the numbers get, the more numbing they become. We sense infinity and begin to nod off.
One word that stayed with me from childhood and overhearing adult discussions of money was the phrase tight-fisted. I pictured a man (men were more about money than women) clutching a bunch of dollars so that the bills became crinkled and sweaty. The person’s fingers could not be pried open. The man had a crazy, vicious look in his eyes. This is my money, his eyes said, and no one is taking it from me. His eyes made me feel that people could die from the ill effects of money, both those who had it and those who did not.
Those eyes had nothing to do with the supposed value that went along with money, the sense of money gauging the worth of manufactures, creatures, plants, buildings, health, and imaginative creations. The look was more primal than someone appraising something or assigning a hypothetical value. The look was both fierce and bleak. Money was to be hoarded and existed in its own right. It was not a means but an end. It possessed a potency that mocked sex or physical strength.
Modern times have witnessed a strange dance with money. There has been a letting go, a relaxation of the hoarding instinct, the awareness that things go better if more money is available and that governments must accept that responsibility. Whether the point of view is cynical or realistic or both, the masses need to have money to spend, so the rich can make more money. At the same time, there cannot be too much money since that devalues money. At the same time, the primal instincts of the rich—“This is my money”—must be honored. At the same time, there is the feeling that money is like water coming out of a faucet. Like water, it just exists, a given fact of sustaining life. At the same time, money exists in small denominations—nickels and dimes. People carry around spare change. They ponder the fact that the pump price of gasoline has gone up two cents or down two cents. They drive from one gasoline station to another, using up more gasoline in the process.
All this tugging about money drives people crazy. Like water, money finds its way into every inch of human feeling. Credit cards have multiplied those feelings. There is so much to desire. There is so much to want. There are so many needs (which may be wants). At the same time, the rich keep upping their wealth and creating greater divides between the mere wage earners and the manipulative accumulators. Those divides were always there—peasants and nobles—but the large-scale, centralized economics of modern times, in effect, made a peasant’s life untenable. The cities beckoned, places where any peasant supposedly could become a noble thanks to the money that the cities thrived on—a fairy tale come true. Fairy tales remain, however, just that—not true.
Where people have no shared values, money easily suggests itself as one: a price is a price and a sale is a sale. Since everyone has to deal with money, it is a bond of sorts. In any society which places commerce at its center (as modern societies have), money acts as a unifier. Yet money is not a value in the sense that love or honesty or devotion or kindness or faith or piety is a value. As a friend of mine is fond of saying when I give him some praise, “Can I bank that?” At the end of the getting-and-spending-day, those with lots of money can feel free to jeer, for, supple as it is, money is also hard and fast and seems to banish the conundrums and blind alleys of subjectivity. The endless exchanges of money grant a seeming solidity to human relations. Love may be blind and unrequited. Money offers tit for tat.
As values are proposed and discarded (last year’s model), the cult of getting a bargain flourishes. That the goods may be shoddy, not particularly necessary, and marked up substantially to begin with is irrelevant. What matters is the sense that the consumer has come out ahead. The enormous weight of constant tallying which rests on every head in modern societies seems eased by bargain hunting. Not everyone loves his fellow man or God or justice but it is a very rare person who does not love a bargain. The prospect of saving money on purchases (as opposed to saving by not making purchases) keeps everyone moving. A huge retail store like Walmart resembles a latter day Inferno where everyone is goaded every inglorious, fluorescent day. “Three dollars off!” “Three dollars!” Here lies passion. Here lies justification.
How much is enough? No one knows, but even to ask this question disturbs, since it raises the specter of personal limitation. Everyone has the right to accrue as much stuff as possible and do with it as they please. For modern times, money has the semblance of eternity. There is no counting house nor is there a day of reckoning. Those who have accumulated vast amounts often are reckoned as sages, since they possess something that has an ultimate value in our brief lives. Though more is a witless word, the lash of money on each person’s back speaks to the bitter sting of experience. As it occupies our psyches, money is always hard earned, an inherent social debility coming at the expense of our frail humanity. In the background, an uneasy feeling hums—money will outlast its users. Each day, we mock ourselves.
Chilling.
Baron, this applies to each column (I read them to my wife, Julie) : provocative, insightful, eloquent, caring, and so very very important.
Thank you. Jack Ridl