Views on the US election from a Brussels hospital

Overhearing two nurses in the hospital lounge

They were taking a short break from their caring duties, the empty sandwich boxes on the table testifying to a quick lunch. They briefly interrupted their conversation for a kindly nod while I sat down with my book about the 18^th C painter Watteau,  cautiously handling my right arm in a sling (1).

“She did seem more competent than him. More responsible. How can they trust that guy?” the youngest nurse wondered.

The elder nurse shrugged : “it’s always the big shots with the biggest mouths that win.”  

The youngest nodded vigorously “yeah, like that bunga bunga guy in Italy. I never understood how the Italians could put up so long with him. “ She fiddled with her smartphone “ hey , look here , photos from his apartment in New York – 'the interior architect wanted to recreate a Versailles atmosphere'  - jeezes,  does that guy think he’s Louis XIV or what? “

Flashing a weary smile, the elder nurse replied “well, he sure has the puffy pride to match. But we’d better hurry now, time’s up”

Contemplating a picture of Louis XIV

I was reading about Watteau’s pictures of unheroic, introverted soldiers– an interiority far removed from the pump & circumstance of the Versailles court. But showing Watteau in context, the book also explained about his contemporary, Louis XIV, who with his reckless wars caused hundreds of thousands people to die and plunged France into a deep debt crisis.

So, sitting in that hospital lounge, plunged into art history, I was quite startled by the nurse’s comparison of a 21^st Century, democratically chosen US president with an 18^th Century  French autocrat. 

But contemplating the famous Louis XIV portrait (by Hyacinthe Rigaud) , I couldn’t but conclude: yes, indeed, there’s the same conceit, the same narcissism, the same strutting on the stage.The same quest for personal glorification.

Does this mean that Democracy cannot do a better job at protecting us from the sense of entitlement of these strutting males than the Ancien Régime? 

A horribly defeatist thought – which I must & will banish. (But then again, pugnacious Putin was democratically chosen, too)   

A jubilant Reagonomics enthusiast

In a financial paper I read an illuminating interview with a jubilant Arthur Laffer (former economic advisor to Ronald Reagan). At last again a man to his liking in the White House! “This is brilliant, especially since the Republicans also control the Congress. This means lower taxes, abolishing Obamacare, scrapping the Dodd-Frank banking regulation”

Aha, so that’s why Wall Street kept its nerves – greed is gonna be good again! 

Elsewhere I read about how leading conservative business men are eagerly lining up to offer their services to the new president “he may have said some rash things during the campaign, but he’s a real business man, he’ll take our sound business advise”. 

It will be interesting to see what happens: lower taxes combined with higher infrastructure spending, higher import tariffs on, say , Chinese imports, higher inflation, a soaring budget deficit (with the snubbed Chinese probably  less inclined to continue financing it).  After an initial boost to growth, how can this recipe durably boost standards of living? Will this bring back factory jobs to the US? (And what about the rest of the world). Will this bring the lower & middle classes what they hope for? 

Will the new administration care at all?  Or shall we find the winners rather among the above mentioned leading conservative business men, including the new president (who, so I read, owes his fortune more to inherited wealth & relations than to superior business acumen & entrepreneurship).

On the ethical & social front, too, it will be interesting (and scary) to see what will happen.  Indeed, how convenient for the new president to buy the loyalty of the evangelicals by pursuing their agenda.

So, now what?

How to domesticate globalisation and complexity? Why can’t we have more responsible politicians addressing the current discontents & fears, without resorting to the usual political party-mantra’s? Why must reckless, self-interested, conceited politicians take the lead - irresponsible politicians who cater to our most dangerous instincts.

Can we no longer escape a clash of extreme standpoints?  Have we perhaps reached such a level of bewildering complexity & frustration that we now all just recoil and massively reject nuance and gradualism? 

But if change cannot be gradual, it will come with a bang.  We only need to look at the 1^st half of the 20th century to be very afraid of that.  

 

           1) Explanatory Note : on what I was doing in that hospital, overhearing a political conversation and contemplating a picture of Louis XIV.

My cycling days are over (my heart sinks as I type this).  Neither caution nor a fluorescent yellow helmet & vest could shield me from another accident. It happened on a lovely autumn Saturday, while I was cycling on a quiet road along a park. All of a sudden a car materialised where it shouldn’t have been – cutting a corner. So I braked violently, my wheel slipping on one of those lovely gleaming yellow autumn leaves. I was projected forward and made a brutal smack on the tarmac, right on the tip of my elbow. Then a second smack on my head, luckily amortized by the helmet.

 I sat on the ground, dazed for a moment. Then I did manage to scramble back on my feet. The car driver had braked too and got out of his car, apologetic & full of concern.  Picking up my bike, he inquired whether I was ok.  I thought I was, hoping it was just a bruised elbow, just a matter of pulling myself together. I let the chauffeur drive off and tried to mount my bike again  – a sharp pain in my elbow signalled this was not a good idea. I called C, whose phone battery was apparently down.  So I walked all the way home, an hour’s walk, a miserable walk, bike at hand.  Home at last I took off my jacket and saw a swelling the size of a giant premium pear. 

Only then I realized I had to concede defeat.  Again a broken limb, only 4 years after the previous accident. No way to escape from the rational conclusion: henceforth no more cycling for me in Brussels..

Arriving at the hospital, I felt crushed and most of all ashamed, having to call upon their services again with a broken limb.  But praise be (again, too) to this hospital staff – friendly, professional, efficient.  They gave me a provisional plaster on Saturday and swiftly arranged for an operation the next Tuesday so as to mend me again. 

Despite all the inevitable pain & discomfort linked to the accident and the surgery – this hospital stay was also an uplifting reminder that diversity doesn’t need to be the fateful menace to social cohesion, as it has come to be perceived in these perplexing times. Far from me to pitch the Ixelles hospital as a social Utopia in the middle of “hellhole Brussels” (infamous epithet coined by the future US president). But the fact remains that I’ve been treated there (again) with outstanding kindness & professionalism by a staggeringly diverse hospital staff, all working together harmoniously.

Apart from the swift action of the emergency doctor with an Arab sounding name and the unflappable calm of the surgeon of German descent , I’d like to mention specifically the hilarious sense of humour of the anesthesiologist – a black female doctor who managed to make me shake with laughter while I lay helplessly on the operating table, waiting to be put to sleep.

And heartfelt thanks, too,  to the quiet male nurse of Mediterranean descent who all along a miserable night refilled the drip with glucose and painkillers and assuaged my worst nightly fears. Not to forget the Asian nurse who taught me how to put my arm in a sling without breaking it again. 

Meanwhile, in Brussels

At the office, working

What’s that noise? Won’t it ever stop?  I was getting ever more irritated – Friday afternoon, still many loose ends to tie up, many more mails to send before I could call it a day. And then that darned noise! 

The noise outside continued – the roar of helicopters flying over, the screeching of police sirens further off, the honking of horns signalling a mega traffic jam in the making.   

Furiously I hit the keyboard – tapping out futile messages of projects progressing, workgroups working and figures being figured out.

Meanwhile, a few kilometres to the south , a possibly historical treaty was being negotiated – with an immediate impact on the fate of hundreds of thousands of people, and with intractable future consequences.

I paused, thinking deeply – perhaps I should first do a call with X to avoid springing the workgroup’s conclusions on him during the meeting with Y and Z?  And how to avoid that A would come meddling again and re-write the whole proposal? I sighed – attention shattered once again by the noise outside.

Meanwhile, a few kilometres to the north , an impressive special police force had gathered to assault the hiding place of the “most wanted terrorist of Europe”. 

At home, reading

"Poor man!", I chuckled, reading about an industrious duke at the Byzantine court, just before its fall.

Poor man, being laughed at by generations of historians for going about his business...  

In 1453 a Loukas Notaras wrote a convoluted obsequious letter to try and get hold of two high offices for his sons.  Written in the best Byzantine style, the letter was perfectly adapted to the complex bureaucracy of his time. 

Meanwhile, “the city was being encircled, […] and the new giant cannon [brought up] which was to bring down the walls”.  

At the Musée des Beaux Arts, looking

“The ploughman may have heard the splash” (2), [….] but ploughed calmly on (3).

Restrained notes

1. Judith Herrin “Byzantium, the surprising life of a medieval empire”, p 184
2. WH Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts"
3. Flemish proverb

heroic materialism - the sequel

In the previous episode our contemplative economist left New York thoroughly humbled and humiliated. In the face of such display of wealth and success, who would still dare to doubt the superiority of this system, driven by “the deep selfishness of competition” (1) and supported by mathematico-financial wizardry.

The success of free market capitalism may well lay in its smart, illusion-less exploitation of humankind’s selfish urges: innovation and productivity apparently thrive best when spurred on by self-interest. The US success is furthermore propelled by the Americans’ perpetual optimism and urge to action (2).
Whereas centrally planned economies are said to suffer from a certain naïveté: an unwarranted belief in people being productive & innovative also when there’s no personal gain and an equally unwarranted belief in some central intelligence which through rational calculations would be able to steer the economy as a whole.

Animal spirits (3) , selfish greed and even speculation may be great drivers for economic enterprise – think of the 19th C railway mania, the 1990s dotcom and telecom bubbles: without the greedy thirst for great riches, no one would have been ready to venture his capital for these hazardous enterprises.
And though these bubbles in the end ruined the speculators (especially the naive ones who joined the gold-rush last) they did add to society’s tangible wealth (railway-systems, internet & telecom innovation etc).

But of course, free market apologists usually gloss over the social costs associated with the wild mood-swings, the booms and busts, so typical of untrammeled free markets. They also neglect to point out that unrestricted free enterprise can be unrestrictedly selfish and irresponsible . In short, public institutions and regulation are needed to temper the mood swings and especially to make sure that individual greed works at the profit of society as a whole.

And that’s where it went spectacularly wrong over the last decades. An absolute belief in free markets and in auto-regulation by the private sector made us forget that greed never ever regulates itself . A sacred awe for the sophisticated mathematical models of high finance made us forget that mathematics never ever rein in greed. Statistical confidence intervals lulled us into sleep, making us forget that a statistically improbable event, however improbable, is still not impossible.
Finance no longer humbly supported real economic enterprise but had become a self-feeding industry (the financial sector has been the fastest growing industry over the last 20 years, representing an ever growing share of world economic output)(4) .

In the end, this whole disastrous “liquidity and credit crisis” , replete with sophisticated instruments whose outcome can only be calculated by complex mathematical models, is nothing more than the result of a vicious circle of human vices. A shrewd insight in human nature would have done more to prevent it all that the most advanced of quantitative models.

It was the toxic combination of over-optimism, greed and moral hazard (+ plain stupidity?) that got us into this mess. The mathematic-financial wizardry then diligently worked towards amplifying it all and towards distributing its effects all over the globe(5) (6) .

And either governments (ie all of us) will now bail out the troubled financial institutions (at great cost, we speak of more than 700 bln dollars) or else those financial institutions will auto-destruct by an exaggerated fear of lending to each other (now belatedly overcompensating for the complete evaporation of any sense of credit or liquidity risk beforehand).
And though some might cheer at the demise of great and mighty financial institutions, the sad truth is that when they go – people’s savings go, credit goes and we all might as well go back to growing vegetables on a plot of land.

And the culprits? Can they be identified? Will they be punished for their irresponsible greed? Hmmm, the clever ones undoubtedly got out in time, taking with them all the money they made. Laughing all the way from their shaky bank to their lavish homes.

And what are they doing with those heaps of cash? Well, this week while the financial world was burning, stocks and bonds tumbling – millions were forked out for Golden Calves and Sharks at an auction of Damien Hirst works.

This then may be the free market’s ultimate justice : those who made millions by selling stinking Mortgage Backed Securities to unsuspecting investors may now be splurging that money on Dead Animals in Formaldehyde…. (7)

 
This was yet another solid Footnotes-Backed-Post!
(1) Elizabeth Gaskell – North and South. The week that one of the world’s leading brokers went bust and that the US government had to bail out the world’s largest insurer, the week that panic gripped the financial markets, raising the specter of a total collapse of the global financial system in the wake of “the immense speculations that had come to light in making a bad end in America”. That week our contemplative economist contemplated all worst case scenarios and, though partially choked by fear, was even more enchanted by the uncanny parallels between this unfolding 21st century financial panic and a 19th century economic bust as described with such insight & empathy in Gaskell’s 1855 novel …
(2) Some even venture to say that American optimism and hyperactivity (easily apt to veer into mania) are linked to a gene-variant typical for migrants who left everything behind to start a new life : American mania – when more is not enough
(3) John Maynard Keynes – the only economist with a keen sense of metaphor (frequenting Virginia Woolf may have helped) was also equipped with a good deal of psychological insight. He wrote: “Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive […] can only be taken as a result of animal spirits – of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. “
(4) JMK : “speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation”
(5) Bubbles are nothing new – every decade has had its shameful example – but the sheer vastness of this particular boom&bust is mind-boggling.
(6) *** Over-optimism & greed of prospective home-owners: house price are rising, good, they will go on rising! So if I borrow and buy a house now, even if I haven’t got the means, I can sell on my house at a higher price later so , yay let’s go and get a mortgage even I can’t really pay the interests. *** Over-optimism & greed of lenders: oh, a whole new consumer-segment to tap! Let’s go and offer them mortgages – never mind they’re not the most creditworthy borrowers, those mortgages are backed with a house , so we can always sell that one if the borrower can no longer pay what’s due. And who cares about people thus losing their home*** Moral hazard --- oh all those low quality & high risk loans we’re getting on our books – no reason at all to limit that activity, since I can bundle them all in a security, call it a Mortgage Backed Security, get a mathematico-financial smokescreen to make it all look safe and then sell it on to staid investors too impressed with the sophistication of these instruments to critically look into what’s behind it all.
(7) Each epoch has the artists it deserves - our shallow, greedy, manic free-market era definitely deserves Damien Hirst. Actually, Hirst may be an essential part of today's financial eco-system, offering expedient ways to evacuate the system's excess money.

How I came to understand the present world's plight after reading a 1957 essay (followed by some frivolously dubious notes)

Yep, trust me to find illumination about current affairs in a 1957 essay.

The fifties! Of all decades the one that seems to be the most self-delusionary…
Just think of the sheer innocent bliss of those fifties images …. those pictures of happy healthy families (man woman boy girl) driving gaily in a Chevrolet to a promising future. Or those magazine-illustrations presenting the spoils of technology (from plane to fridge) in cozy techno-colors. Yes, the fifties …. home to a wholesome society without worries. Well, I suppose the world needed a cheerier self-image, after the horrors of the preceding decades ….

So, at first sight, not the epoch where one would go looking for thoughts relevant to the present perplexities of a globalizing world. But then again, the fifties were also the decade that had to come to terms with the globally destructive potential of the atomic bomb, the decade that massively succumbed to the global reach of television.
So after all, perhaps I should not have been that surprised to find this uncannily prescient analysis of globalization in a 1957 essay by Hannah Arendt on the existential thinker Karl Jaspers (1).

“for the first time in history all peoples on earth have a common present” she writes. But “this common factual present is not based on a common past” – it is the result of the evolution in technology and communications and it is accompanied by a negative solidarity only, due to the common vulnerability to ‘weapons of mass destruction’. So how can all those peoples, condemned to a common present, but without a common past and without shared traditions, build a common future? What could possibly be a positive, shared project?

Here it is worth noting that Arendt , for all her 'worldliness' and political savvy , has a huge blind spot for all things economic. (2) Unless of course it is this blogger who, in the spirit of the times, is brainwashed by economic doctrine. But anyway – the point I want to make is that enlightened economic self-interest has proven to be a more powerful common project for people of the most different backgrounds and persuasions (3) than any ideology.

And while globalization is still often associated with big bad western multinationals imposing their ways & wares all over the world, there’s no denying that many non-western countries now have firmly taken the economic initiative themselves , not only producing strong domestic growth but also massively investing their surplus savings abroad, in the best global-capitalist tradition. Just think of those Chinese and Indian companies taking over Westerns companies. Or take the topical example of the filthily rich sovereign wealth funds (Asian and Middle Eastern) that are now bailing out icons of western capitalism such as Citigroup and Merril Lynch by injecting billions of dollars in them.

So yes, economic gain does seem to be a common denominator and an inspirational project for many countries who – irrespective of faith, cultural traditions or political system, seem to want to acquire their stake in global capitalism. (4)

But let’s get back to Arendt’s more humanist ruminations about globalization (5). She writes: “the present realities […] insofar as they have brought us a global present without a common past, threaten to render irrelevant all traditions and all particular past histories". Then she goes on to wonder how peoples without a common past could ever forge a common positive project, could ever hope to understand each other?

And so she gets to the main point of Jaspers’ analysis of the possible further course of world history:
“the prerequisite for this mutual understanding would be the renunciation, […]of the binding authority and universal validity which tradition and past have always claimed”
All those particular traditions and values of the different regions have to be put into play in the present, have to be confronted in “a limitless communication” in their full diversity (6) .
But such free communication is only possible when “the great philosophical systems [are stripped ] of their dogmatic metaphysical claims, dissolved into trains of thought which meet and cross each other, communicate with each other and eventually retain only what is universally communicative”

So this destructive process (destruction of the absolute validity of a particular tradition, destruction of a single minded concentration on the own traditions) can even be “considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a [horrid] shallowness […]”

"a horrid shallowness" ... Yes, here is the full ambivalence of our global epoch exposed: we (the world’s peoples) are condemned to find a common ground if we do not want to go under in ethnic strife or in great cultural clashes. And this common ground can only be found through free communication where no party would impose its particular traditions as absolutely valid.

But the price for this all-inclusiveness, for this worldwide communication would be shallowness, the loss of the dimension of depth. And this does indeed seem to happen : the current nascent global culture takes a bit from all traditions but is on the whole frightfully frivolously fragmented. The internet does foster global communication and, hopefully, more mutual understanding amongst all peoples. But it is not because a European chats to a Chinese that the former will fathom the depths of Confucianism or that the latter will appreciate the refinements of the Italian Renaissance…

But perhaps the world needs periods of “shallowness”, periods of forgetting and unburdening to let free rein to spontaneous creativity and communication? Ah, a moot point …. isn’t it?



Footnotes dedicated to 1 or 2 facts and quite a few more dubious opinions

(1) Hannah Arendt (yes, she again) – in a 1957 essay on Karl Jaspers’s thinking about world history. “Karl Jaspers: citizen of the world?”
(2) I suppose she saw economic affairs as too determined by sheer necessity and by our base metabolic needs to deserve a place in her conception of the World. The World as a realm of freedom where men and women appear as autonomous citizens, freely acting and exchanging opinions.
(3) Take the US for instance – the project all immigrants share: the hope to realize their American dream. And it seems that the US is more successful in integrating its immigrants, united as citizens in a common quest to make money, than some European countries, who naively seem to hope that newcomers would partake in a citizenship based on shared cultural values and traditions. (my stance in this matter? Ambivalence ….. of course)
(4) My (ever wavering) opinion on this? The human being has (alas…) evolved as a competitive, aggressive animal that can’t sit still. So: better to direct those competitive urges into gung ho entrepreneurship than to dispense the animal energies in wars and bloodshed. Better to have aggressive CEO’s than blood-thirsty warlords. Provided of course there are laws and institutions to guarantee some minimal respect for the whole set of human rights (personal, labor and cultural). Also, I have nothing against “modern comforts” for all here on earth – if only people would still every once in a while sit quietly with a book, if only people would not wantonly squander all of the earth’s resources….
(5) Um, a phrase that may give me away – would I myself find then that economic preoccupations are not worthy of the humanist ideal?
(6) This concept of diversity of and communication between cultures (none of which can claim universal, dogmatic validity), is so eminently contemporary and post-modern, that I cannot understand why Karl Jaspers should be such a neglected thinker. Perhaps his writings were too hermetic? (and maybe it takes a luminous mind as Arendt’s to shed light on his thinking)