Beyond Rivalry

Bill Gorton: "How did you go bankrupt?"

Mike Campbell: "Gradually, and then suddenly."

-- Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises

At the conservative estimate of $4.6165 trillion, so far (including the Citi bailout) (Bloomberg estimates the bailout even higher, at over $7 trillion already, which is $24,000 for every person in the country), the bailout would cost more in inflation-adjusted costs than:

the Marshall Plan,

the Louisiana Purchase,

the Race to the Moon,

the 1980s S&L Crisis,

the Korean War,

The New Deal,

the Invasion of Iraq,

the Vietnam War,

and NASA [hope that doesn't include The Race to the Moon ...],

which together total $3.92 trillion.

"The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II: Original Cost [to U.S.]: $288 billion, Inflation-Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion."

More scary details here, courtesy Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture

Yes, taxpayers could get some of the money back (the Chrysler 1.5 billion bailout loan in the early 1980s was repaid in full with interest) (maybe), but even if taxpayers are on the hook for only $1-2 trillion, that's still between $3,200 and $6,500 per every man, woman, and child in the country.

Others suggest we should look at the cost of the bailout in terms of GDP, or in terms of national net worth. (And Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, in his recent 'What To Do' essay, talks about the viability of solutions in terms of GDP.)

Doing the latter, one commenters says that the $4.6 trillion "is still quite modest. As a percent of total national net worth (government and non-governmental assets minus liabilities) it's less than 4 percent." (No idea where those figures come from.)

Another commenter crunches more numbers (with caveats, and sources, listed) to determine government expenditures inflation-adjusted as a percentage of time-relative annual GDPs:

the Marshall Plan (1947): $115.3 billion/$1,574.5 billion GDP in 1947 = 7.3% of 1947's GDP

the Race to the Moon (1961-69): $237 billion/$3,191.1 billion GDP in 1965 = 7.4% of 1965's GDP

S&L Crisis (1986-91): $256 billion/$6,742.7 billion GDP in 1988 = 3.8% of 1988's GDP

Korean War (1950-53): $454 billion/$1,915.0 billion GDP in 1951 = 23.7% of 1951's GDP

The New Deal (1933-36): $500 billion (Est)/$704.2 billion GDP in 1934 = 71% of 1934's GDP

Invasion of Iraq (2003-08): $597 billion/$10,989.5 billion GDP in 2005 = 5.4% of 2005's GDP

Vietnam War (1965-75): $698 billion/$3,771.9 billion GDP in 1970 = 18.5% of 1970's GDP

NASA (1958-2008): $851.2 billion/$5,423.8 billion GDP in 1983 = 15.7% of 1983's GDP

which total 153% of annual GDP relative to year of expenditure

In terms of GDP, the current bailouts (2008) -- estimated, conservatively, to cost $4,616.5 billion (or $11,523.9 billion GDP in 2007) -- would be 40.1% of 2007's GDP, a little less than the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined, but quite a bit less than the New Deal.

I wish my calculator went up to a billion, much less a trillion ....

Woman killed by husband's coffin (11 Nov.)

God's Facebook Wall (12 Nov.)

Apparent 6th severed foot found in British Columbia (12 Nov)

Two Dead in Argument Over 'Bama-LSU Game (10 Nov.)

The Essential 007: A Recap of all 22 Bond Movies (13 Nov.)

Unregulated Credit Default Swaps Led to Weakness (31 Oct.)

Exxon Mobil: Biggest profit in history (30 Oct.)

The age when children begin attempting to appear racially colour-blind (27 Oct)

The Quest for the Perfect Morning Routine: The first in a series on lifehacking, at Slate (12 Nov): "The advice here is not my own, but I have clicked on it."

When Alzheimer's Hits at 40 in the WSJ (14 Nov.)

and

"I don't remember a whole lot about that period; I appear to have bought a couple of truly depressing sweaters, the kind you only wear when all you really want is to curl up under the bed for several years..." (The Likeness, p. 47, Tana French)

(Photo: Recent Drinking: Ironstone Cabernet Franc 2004)

"Then, last week, I went to see an acupuncturist as a last resort for back pain I’ve had for over a year. The woman asked me how old I was. When I told her I was 42, she said, “You look so old! I thought you were much older.” I would have been offended, but I felt like she was saying what I felt and that the back pain was making this true. My face evidently was showing tough times too. She promised to fix me—that remains to be seen—and, as I was leaving, she said, You need to change your life today. Go outside. Not so much sitting anymore. You need to be happy, find a way. I walked out thinking I’d gone to a therapist or a fortune-teller. I felt sick for a few hours after that, possibly more from what she’d said than from the needles, and when I woke from a nap, I went directly to the animal shelter." -- Hard Times Dog by Colette LaBouff Atkinson

U.S. Economic Timeline: All on one sheet, which Good magazine is distributing through Starbucks stores. Brief review of GDP, the national debt and the national deficit, business cycles (booms and busts), recession - stagflation - inflation, etc.

"You can't model human behavior with math."

-- Frank Partnoy, a former derivatives broker and corporate securities attorney, who now teaches law at the University of San Diego, explaining why investments made up of unreliable mortgage loans failed to eliminate the risk inherent in the loans.

A 12-minute clip on 60 Minutes explains the financial mess we're in.

Partnoy sums it up succinctly towards the end of the clip:

"As bad as the mortgage crisis has been, 94 percent of all Americans are still paying off their loans. The problem is Wall Street placed its huge bets and side bets with all of those fancy securities on the 6 percent who are not. 'We wouldn't be in any of this trouble right now if we had just had underlying investments in mortgages. We wouldn't be in any trouble right now,' says Partnoy." The problem he says, is the side bets on the mortgages, which were operating in an unregulated environment.

Seems sort of fitting, after thoughts on wanting, to offer (someone else's) thoughts on having. Plus, it showed up in my RSS feeder this morning and I liked it.

At Get Rich Slowly, JD writes an interesting post on having. Having stuff.  A few excerpts:

"'You know why you can't get rid of Stuff, don't you?' Kris had asked.

"'Because I want it,' I said.

"'You think you want it,' she said. 'You like the idea of having certain things, but you don't actually use them. You've got dozens of books stacked in the guest room. They've been there since the last time you purged Stuff a year ago. Have you needed any of those books in that time?'

"'No,' I said.

"After I told my friend Amy Jo about our clutter conversation last week, she shared her own thoughts. 'We each have so many interests, and certain things — like books — keep us connected to those interests, or give us the illusion that they do,' she said.

"'But they also clog up our lives and make us less efficient at doing what we are and what we want to do right now. It's hard to let go of the things that we believe represent parts of ourselves, or we hope represent us. In many cases, these things represent who we were or wished to be at one time — not who we are right now.'"

I've become adept at preventing new Stuff from entering my life, but it's difficult for me to part with the Stuff I already own. This is a very First World problem, and in a way it makes me feel guilty. We're trained not to be wasteful. That’s not a bad thing, but I think it can prevent us from making smart decisions."

And one of the comments, from RDS, echoes this:

"I believe that we are the first generation in the history of the world in which just about every member of our society struggles with managing the vast amount of stuff that we own. Many of us think of all of our stuff as assets. In truth, I suspect that much of it could more accurately be classified as liabilities."

Nancy Hitt again, at Preaching Peace, writing about gifts, money, punitive damages, the culture of transaction, in the context of paying a craftsman for repair of a church organ.

What particularly interests me:

"It has become clearer to me of late why it's such an uphill climb to help people release transactional and penal understandings of what Jesus was doing on that cross.  It's not only that we need to relearn our atonement theology. It's the warp and woof of culture in which we struggle to embrace something other than the party line that hampers us.  When I was confronted with the anger of the church toward our craftsman, I was disillusioned. How could we, as a church, make a logical case for our punitive response being 'right'? Considering Jesus teachings seemed like the thing to do, but I was told in no uncertain terms, 'Don't ask what Jesus would do. I'm sure he's just as fed up as I am!'  Clearly, the dissonance between the Truth and our desires was not even apparent to us. The idea that a gift is freely given, without strings, without a desire for a return on the investment, is almost impossible for us to consider. It's much easier to work out a system of exchange wherein we know the score and can control our destiny -- and that of others."

She speaks also of the cultural expectations of gift-giving: "There is a host of unwritten expectations that are attached to money. Apparently, if I purchase a gift, I have a reasonable cultural expectation of a return on that gift. At the very least, I should receive a thank-you note of some sort. I may also expect it to be used in a particular way, and to be recognized as the beneficent provider."

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, here, here, here and here.)

Chapter 7, Modernity, Postmodernity and Beyond

There's a lot of content in this chapter, and quite a lot that I couldn't assent to or felt wasn't consistent with what I know of mimetic theory (which, obviously, is a lot less than Girard knows!). It's very hard to articulate those differences -- my brain gets a little unhinged trying to follow the logic that some other part of me intuits, accurately or not -- and I may not be able to go into much detail there.

Finishing the book, I felt as I always do when reading Girard or listening to him in a video or audiotape: I have so many different questions from the ones he's addressing or is asked to respond to!

For instance, in chapter 6 he says that in myths there"always seems to be a good cause for hating the victim, but in reality it is a spurious, illusory cause." He never says in this book or anywhere else I've read/heard whether it's possible to be a victim and be guilty. Are no victims guilty or hate-able? Are we all innocent? To clear this up seems fundamental to me. I'm thinking in part of the mob violence incidents that go on all the time -- granted, the charges often seem trumped up and rationalised (or not even) by the perpetrators, but sometimes the victim actually has killed another person or done the crime of which they are accused -- It seems different to me to say that that person doesn't deserve to be attacked by a mob or killed for their crime than to say that they are innocent. Is there a way to be guilty of what one is accused and still innocent (in the eyes of God, perhaps)? Even the idea of accusation (at least the mimetic accusatory gesture) in mimetic theory is seen as Satanic. So this is very unclear to me. I easily understand that we are all perpetrators; what I don't understand is how we are all innocent victims. Or is Girard saying that innocence or guilt simply doesn't matter for the mechanism -- perhaps some are guilty of what they're accused of, but others are not (for one, Jesus) and they will be seen as guilty anyway, because they have to be seen as guilty for the mechanism to work?

That's just one clarification I'd like made. There are dozens more, several about issues he addresses in chapter 7. And then there are real-life scenarios I'd like him to explore, to help me see where the mimesis is, how the doubles are similar, whether the seeming self-sacrifice is Christlike or simply mimetic, i.e., done in a spirit of competition to seem better (more sacrificial) than the other. I have a lot of questions about the "good" uses of the mimetic mechanism to hold violence at bay. And so on. And on.

Anyway, here are my notes on chapter 7, the final chapter.

** Apocalypse (more about how we're to fare now that the mimetic mechanism has been revealed)

"For me, any understanding of the contemporary world is mediated by the reading of Matthew 24. The most important part is the sentence 'where the corpse lies, the vultures shall gather' ... because it seems to be a decomposition of the mimetic mechanism. The mechanism is visible, but it doesn't work.  ... Any great Christian experience is apocalyptic because what one realizes is that after the decomposition of the sacrificial order there is nothing standing between ourselves and our possible destruction. How this will materialize, I don't really know."

The Anti-Christ is nothing but "the ideology that attempts to outchristianize Christianity, that imitates Christianity in a spirit of rivalry. ... You can foresee the shape of what the Anti-Christ is going to be in the future: a super-victimary machine that will keep on sacrificing in the name of the victim."

Wow.

One (or at least, I) can immediately envision the scenario of people who feel they are well-meaning who will do anything to ensure that the human race is not destroyed and who will see to it that victims are saved -- even if they have to yell and scream at the perpetrators and their allies, even if they have to use propaganda against the perpetrators, even if they have to expel, dehumanise, or destroy the perpetrators. The only thing they (we) won't do is recognise that they/we are the perpetrators, that they/we can't save humanity by destroying those who don't agree with us, those who are so clearly wrong and who are so clearly destroying everything we love. I can imagine that, and, it's been tried.

"Ideologies are not violent per se, rather it is man who is violent. Ideologies provide the grand narrative which covers up our victimary tendency. They are mythical happy endings to our histories of persecution. ... The Cross has destroyed one and for all the cathartic power of the scapegoat mechanism. Consequently, the Gospel does not provide a happy ending to our history. It simply shows us two options ... : either we imitate Christ, giving up all our mimetic violence, or we run the risk of self-destruction. The apocalyptic feeling is based on that risk."

Later, he speaks about this again:

"[T]he more there is an opening in the world where ritual is dead, the more dangerous this world becomes. It has both positive aspects, in the sense that there is less sacrifice, and negative aspects, in that there is an unleashing of mimetic rivalry. As I said, we live in a world where we take care of victims in a way no other society or historical time ever did, but we are also in a world that kills more people than ever, so we have the feeling that both the 'good' and the 'bad' are increasing all the time. If we have a theory of culture, it has to account for this extraordinary ambivalence of our society." 

He suggests that the world is, paradoxically (as secularism increases, as the Bible has been abandoned by most) becoming ever more Christian, in a way: "Because the victimary principle of the defence of the victims has become holy*: it is the absolute. One will never see anyone attacking it. They do not even have to mention it. So we can say we are all believers in the innocence of the victims, which is at the core of Christianity. ... Of course, very often Christian principles are prevailing in a caricaturist form, whereby the defence of the victims entails new persecutions! One can persecute today only in the name of being against persecution. One can only persecute persecutors. You just have to prove that your opponent is a persecutor in order to justify your own desire to persecute." (Earlier, in chapter 6, Girard has briefly made a distinction between sacred (God of violence) and holy (God of non-violence), which I'm not sure obtains here. I don't read it to obtain.)

Our acceptance of the persecution of those who are seen to persecute 'victims' is what has become largely invisible to us; this is what has become so fundamental that we don't even notice it anymore ("they do not even have to mention it") -- it's assumed that victims are sacred and that to defend them is sacred; this is what is behind mob violence (or mob justice, as some have it) and its justification. 

As Girard says a bit later, in talking about why we are still so violent in these many days since the Christian revelation: "Man has a tendency to relapse into the sacred, prompting violence to defend any idea of principle seen simply as sacred." 

And, finally, "The compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity. We will always be mimetic; but we do not have to engage automatically in mimetic rivalries."

** Individualism in the Modern (post-1500) World

"Regarding the emergence of the modern individual, I would say that it is important not to completely dismiss this as being exclusively an illusion of mimetic desire. This is a very important point. Undoubtedly, ... there is a real individual. This is the one who goes against the crowd for reasons that aren't rooted in the negative aspects of mimetic desire. ... The Christian individual contradicts the crowd; he or she doesn't join the multitude in the scapegoat  resolution of the mimetic crisis, and moreover denounces the very scapegoat mechanism as a murder through the declaration of the innocence of the victim."

But there are also individuals who are not autonomous, whose judgments are not their own. "In other words, it is to do with fashion: no one is conventional today, everybody wants to be more original than the next person. The only way modernity can be defined is the universalization of internal mediation [i.e. desire that is influenced or created by peers], for one doesn't have areas of life that would keep people apart from each other, and that would mean that the construction of our beliefs and identity cannot but have strong mimetic components." 

** Kathecon: Holding Back Violence with Violence

Girard suggests that at least in the U.S., social mobility helps to reduce violent mimesis. He also seems to feel that the U.S. and other western countries have found other means to reduce violence mimesis and maintain stability without resorting to hierarchies (which offer fewer opportunities for internal mediation and more for external mediation, which is not so conflictual because comparisons are made with people who we know will never be our equals).

Some of these other means are the legal system, judicial institutions, technology, and free market economic competition. Girard seems to see the 'free market' as a 'good' while he also admits that "this mimetic competition produces high doses of resentment, that might be socially 'stored' and could become harmful at some point." (Later, he notes that "if it is true that inequality is growing between the First and Third World countries, [violence] is bound to become explosive.") About technology, Girard again finds it to be useful to "diminish the impact of mimetic impulses" though "it also increases the power and possible harmful actions of aggression and violence." (Yeah.)

Antonello and Castro Rocha push Girard quite a bit about the sacrificial nature of the free market economic system: "Econometrics is the calculation of the tolerable number of sacrifices in a given market. Could we say that economy and market are founded on the principles of exclusion?"  Girard says that's excessive; he believes (as does Eric Gans, he says) that globalization "produces wealth and helps in stabilizing society" and that it has no "central agency." He takes it even farther:

"For me, globalization is mainly the abolition not only of sacrifice, properly speaking, but also of the entire sacrificial order. It is the encompassing spread of Christian ethics and epistemology in relation to every sphere of human activity." 

He would have to elaborate much more thoroughly here for me to see how this is true, either that globalization abolishes the sacrificial order, or that it's a system run by a Christian ethic. All he does say, after more pushing, is "I am not claiming that our world is not unstable, and above all, I am not saying at all that ours is an ideal world! I think it is a very fragile one, and still very unjust, but it has elements of stability that replace the external mediation once provided by the sacred order."

When the questioners insist that "the market appears as a system which produces a 'tolerable' amount of victims," Girard responds that "it also saves more victims than any previous historical movement ever did! One cannot balance these accounts, and balance them against what? We do not have a clear model to compare with. It is the first time in world history that a society cannot be compared with any other since ours is the first to encompass the whole planet."

He goes on to say that "I don't think we can fully equate the victims of a system as complex as the global market with the deliberate slaughtering of a human being by other human beings involved in sacrificial rituals. The market is not a technical apparatus devised to kill people" like the Nazi gas chambers were.

Maybe they're not equivalent, but if the economic system isn't set up intentionally to sacrifice -- or if through meconnaissance, the mechanism is covered in a cloud of unknowing -- are we saying that it can't possibly be involved in sacrificial ritual?  I feel Girard is being thick here, very narrowly defining the idea of a sacrificial system (technical apparatus? devised?) and unwilling to consider how an economic system can be sacrificial.

Particularly as he then goes on to speak of economics as completely religious (i.e., sacrificial) in origin! (More on that in a moment)

Still speaking of economics, he says that "the kathecon [containing nature] of these systems still relies on false transcendence, and they are inevitably bound to produce injustice and violence, but we live in a world where the Satanic power of the mimetic mechanism is unleashed, so we have to take into account that this system is also protecting us, albeit temporarily, from the explosion of even greater violence. ... I am not an advocate of globalization or the so-called new international order. I am just trying to see the complexity of the contemporary situation without reducing it either to an irresponsible celebration or to a complete condemnation." 

Then he talks about Roberto Calasso's idea that "economics was born within a sacred space." Girard says that

"In our society religion has been completely subsumed by economics, but precisely because economics springs from a religious matrix. It is nothing but the secularized form of religious ritual." 

I ask again, then how can economics be devoid of sacrifice?

Originally, "trade was really an offering to the foreigner, in order to placate the foriegn god, who was seen as a possible threat. ... Even etymologically the word money is related to the goddess Juno Moneta and her temple, in whose proximity coins were minted." 

In a paragraph about mass media, Girard has a bit to say about the TV show "Seinfeld," "which uses mimetic mechanisms constantly and depicts its characters as puppets of mimetic desire." It gets away with it for the same reason Shakespeare did: it gets close enough to painful social truths that people identify with the characters, without fully understanding the mechanism; "they recognize something that is very common and very true, but they cannot define it."

** Democracy -- Apathy instead of Conflict?

Elena Pulcini and Jean-Michel Oughourlian both think that "contemporary democray is dominated by conformism, which is produced by 'the passion for equality,' and which engenders apathy and indifference instead of conflict." Oughourlian feels that "contemporary individuals aren't strong enough to have mimetic desire. They aren't passionate about anything." Girard used to believe this could never be but now is more open to the idea:

"Consumption society, which was 'invented' partially to cope with mimetic aggressive behaviour, has eventually created these socially indifferent human beings unable to communicate with each other and mainly concerned with what is strictly accountable in their life, in the sense of self-interest.  This is a radical form of nihilism ...."

** Gifts and Generosity

Pulcini speaks of the emergence of a homo reciprocus, where gift-giving will be the center of social activity. Girard is wary of this, both because the act of generosity she's talking about (dépense) has its origins in an orgiastic victimary mechanism and because "the notion of gift, as everybody knows, is extremely ambiguous, because of the reciprocity it implies; any form of mimetic reciprocity may trigger negative effects. The paroxysm of gift-giving is clear in the phenomenon of the potlatch as described by Marcel Mauss, which is nothing but a ritualized form of mimetic rivalry on a social scale: what is important is not the object that you offer, but the humiliation that you want to inflict on the rival tribe. ... I think we should move towards an ethics of generosity, but going beyond the notion of gift. ... A good relationship cannot be anything but reciprocal. This reciprocity should be spontaneous. If there is an obligation, it means that we are approaching bad reciprocity."

Interestingly, it is right here that Girard brings up Matthew 5:39. where Jesus instructs us that if someone strikes us on one cheek, we should turn the other cheek to him also. He says that Jesus isn't advocating masochism but is warning of the danger of bad reciprocity, of the escalation of violent mimesis. I've heard this instruction and the others with it explicated differently, as advocating shaming the other by offering even more than is demanded (the other cheek, the inner cloak, to walk more miles) in order by our sacrifice to somehow 'show' the other the error of his ways. That rendering seems to me to be similar to the 'gift' one gives the rival in order to humiliate him or her.

Another ongoing series: News stories in which some group is labelled 'the victim' of a group, abstraction, or individual. I think it's educational and interesting to notice who or what are identified as victims and perpetrators in the media.

Recently,

People who tend not to know their rights are the victims: "'They're (collection agencies) very creative sometimes, and unfortunately, the consumers who tend not to know their rights under the Fair Credit Collections Act are the victims.'" [14 July]

Stamp vending machines are the victims: "'The stamp vending machines are the victims of technology, competition and aging parts,'" said Ray Daiutolo, a U.S. Postal Service spokesman. ... Consumers are buying postage on the Postal Service's Web site, and through its 'stamps by phone' and 'stamps by fax' services. People also can find stamps at most grocery stores, and some banks offer them at their ATMs." [18 July]

Students who borrow money to go to college, textile workers who lose their jobs to Chinese imports and kids who want to play baseball in fields near their homes are the victims of corporate welfare, according the to book Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) (2007) by David Kay Johnston. [20 July, The Charleston Gazette]  

Filipino women and families are the victims in the continuous oil price increases: Activists in the Philippines pelted the main office of Pilipinas Shell in Makati City with slippers to protest rising oil prices: "'We protest against the profit-hungry oil giants to save our families from hunger. ... The Big Three [Shell, Petron, and Chevron], aided by the Oil Deregulation Law and the Arroyo government's callousness, are unstoppable in amassing more billions by dictating the price of oil in the local market.'" [21 July]

An item or two at the dinner table are the victims of a synchronised swimmer practicing her moves: Twelve-year-old swimmer Madeleine "Hines attributes her success to practice, practice, practice and more practice. 'It's kind of hard to turn it off when we're learning our routine,' Hines said. Her mother recalled scenes at the dinner table where an item or two are the victims of Hines swinging her arms." [23 July]