Money (23 page)

The mischievous god granted his wish, and at first Midas was delighted. He broke off a twig, and it turned to gold! He picked up a clod: it turned to gold too! He picked an apple—and all at once it became as golden as the famous apples of the Hesperides! So intoxicated was the avaricious old king with his amazing new power that “his mind could scarcely grasp its own hopes, dreaming of all things turned to gold.”
³
He ordered up a splendid banquet to celebrate his good fortune. But here, things started to go wrong. He grasped a crust of bread to eat—but it turned to solid gold. He mixed wine to drink—but as it passed his lips, it turned to molten gold. In later versions of the myth, Midas even made the fatal mistake of kissing his dear daughter—and turning her to cold and inert gold. Cursing his foolish error, “rich and yet wretched, he sought to flee his wealth, and hated what he but now had prayed for.”
⁴
He begged the gods to take back their terrible gift—and, luckily for him, Dionysus took pity on him. He instructed Midas to go to the source of the River Pactolus in Lydia, and plunge his head and body into the water to wash away his powers. This Midas did, and so lost his now-detested gift. In doing so he transferred it to the river itself, which thereby became the source of the gold and silver alloy from which the earliest coins were made—the source, in other words, of the questionable invention of coined money for the rest of mankind.

The central theme of this myth is money’s intrinsic tendency to reduce everything to a single dimension by weighing it in the balance of universal economic value. Like the money he craves, Midas’ touch reduces the enormous variety of life and nature—the twig, the apple, his bread, his wine, even his fellow human beings and his family—to a single, lifeless substance. Where in nature there is variety of substance—and in traditional society, many dimensions of social worth—monetary society imposes an artificial monotony. The inexorable logic of money, the Greeks realised, was to put a price on everything, and to make everyone think of everything first and foremost in terms of a single dimension. By itself, a universally applicable concept of economic value was in one sense exhilarating, just as it is today. A single metric that can serve as the criterion for any decision does wonders for the organisation of a complex economy. But for the Greeks it was also a source of unease. Could it really be right for money to solve not only the humdrum problem of how many chickens to bring to market, but also the social dilemma of whom one’s daughter should marry—let alone the cosmic question of whether one was living in accordance with the divine order of the universe? Aristophanes tried the traditional method of disarming discomfort with comedy when he had the old hand Heracles explain to Dionysus that these days crossing the River Styx to enter Hades required payment up front, in cash.
⁵
Even in the Underworld, money had become the organising power.

The myth of Midas is less ambiguous, however. The universal application of the new concept of economic value brings with it a major problem: the lack of any intrinsic limit to consumption, accumulation, and the quest for status. Midas did not just want some gold. He wanted everything he touched to turn to gold, because only then could he be sure that come what might he would be richer than anyone else: the best that a man can attain in life. Traditional society had intrinsic limits—limits defined by the immutable social obligations owed by peasants to chieftains, chieftains to priests, and so on. Monetary society, the Greeks feared, had none. There is no intrinsic limit to the accumulation of wealth; and since status
in monetary society is by its nature relative, not absolute, monetary society constantly risks degenerating into an unending one-upmanship. “No one ever gets their fill of you,” says Aristophanes’ hero Chremylus to the god Wealth: “There can be too much of everything else”—from an abstract virtue like manliness to something as earthily concrete as humble lentil soup—“but no one ever gets his fill of you. If someone gets his hands on thirteen talents, he hankers all the more to get sixteen; and if he achieves that, he wants forty, or else he says life isn’t worth living.”
⁶
And what is even worse, the Greeks feared, the lack of a limit to the imperative to get money may lead to a lack of limits to what people will do to get it. In this respect, Midas was a special case—opportunity fell into his lap. But in the real world, where passing satyrs do not grant wishes, the incentives to try anything to get unlimited wealth would surely, the Greeks feared, be unlimited as well.

The impact of excessive accumulation, consumption, and competition for status remains a widespread concern today. Contemporary thinkers identify a number of potential culprits. “Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life,” laments the American philosopher Michael Sandel in his meditation on
What Money Can’t Buy
: “[i]t is time to ask whether we want to live this way.”
⁷
Markets, in other words, are the problem—and we must consciously decide the parts they should and should not reach.
How Much Is Enough?
ask the British thinkers Robert and Edward Skidelsky in the title of their recent book, before arguing that only a substantive ethical conception of what a good life consists of can answer that eternal question; hoping that the market mechanism will impose limits on itself is a pipe dream.
⁸
What we need is to be specific about what we think is good and bad, and then have the moral fibre to stick to our judgement. Neuroscientists, and the economists who follow their research, explain that both Sandel’s and the Skidelskys’ questions are futile. Markets and ethics are froth. Competition for status is hard-wired into the human brain—a physical trait evolved to give us an edge in a world where the best mates and the most food mean the survival
of one’s genes. Evolution is the problem—and there is hardly much point in worrying about that.
⁹

The Greek suspicion of the lack of limits to acquisitiveness, to ambition, and to what people will do to fulfil them, shows that this debate is not modern at all. And the Greeks’ greater proximity to the invention of money gave them a different perspective on it. It is neither markets, morals, nor man himself that is the problem: it is money. It is the particular set of ideas and conventions that make up the most precocious social technology ever invented that is the source of this lack of limits. Life in monetary society, the Greeks understood, inextricably involves a commitment to the idea of universal economic value, to conventions of calculating that value, and to the possibility of its decentralised transfer from one person to another. It is precisely these ideas which distinguish it from earlier ways of organising social and economic life. And once these ideas have been admitted, the rest follows automatically. Since there is no intrinsic limit to economic value, there is no fixed point of reference in monetary society. It is from this set of ideas that the constant imperialism of markets, the ceaseless carousel of status competition, and the insatiability of the desire for money flow.

From this prognosis of the inevitable consequences of allowing money free rein flowed the Greeks’ conclusion that far from being a viable—even an ideal—mode of organising society, money was in fact self-contradictory. Aristotle adduced the story of Midas as the mythical expression of nominalism: the fact that economic value is a social contrivance rather than a natural property. Monetary wealth, he argued, differs from an abundance of real, useful, physical things like food or firewood precisely in this respect: it only has value—indeed, it can only exist—in society. Take away its social context and one would quickly discover that money is wealth “of such a kind that a man may be well supplied with it and yet die of hunger, like the famous Midas in the legend.”
¹⁰
But the myth is also a cautionary tale. Money and its value rely on other people: but it is precisely Midas’ ability to turn everything to gold—the universal application of the idea of economic value—which ends up isolating him from everyone else. So there is a paradox at the heart of money. It is a
social technology which depends on other people. Yet it is a social technology which isolates us from other people, by transforming the rich and varied ecology of human relationships into the mechanical and monotonous clockwork of financial relationships.

The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—which form the pinnacle of classical Greek art and thought—are endlessly absorbed with exposing the flaws in this extravagant undertaking. Time and again, the tragedians present protagonists who yearn for, and achieve, money and power—but at the cost of isolation from their community and their family. On some of the most terrible occasions, the connection to money’s inexorable logic is made explicit. When, in Aeschylus’ treatment of the famous myth of the
Seven Against Thebes
, the protagonist Eteocles finally resolves to go out and fight his own brother for their inheritance, the chorus beg him not to. It will be, they warn, a duel to the death between flesh and blood—“a sin against the natural order that will never fade”—and all for the sake of money.
¹¹
“Cast out the root of this evil desire!” they plead.
¹²
But Eteocles explains he cannot help himself. The curse of his father, he says, is whispering in his ear a piece of advice—advice that captures everything that the Greeks most feared about monetary society: “profit first, the natural order afterwards.”
¹³

Money’s ability to deliver personal freedom—from traditional social obligations, even from family obligations—was an exhilarating prospect. The Greeks knew that as well as anyone today who has had to endure the wrong end of the class system or the miseries of a stifling family hierarchy. Its promise to do so without destroying the stability and security created by these ancient institutions of political and personal security sounds almost too good to be true. And in the end, as the self-destructive heroes of the classical tragedians and the foolish Midas alone amidst all his gold testify, it is.

In ancient Greece, this scepticism about money was not just idle philosophising: it was the stuff of live political debate. In the immediate aftermath of money’s invention, the contrast between monetary and
traditional society was a stark one. Where money’s negative social and political consequences were felt to outweigh the positive ones, dissatisfaction spilled out from the symposium and the academy to the council chamber and the battleground. And although it was the exquisitely cultured artists and thinkers of Athens who articulated the most sophisticated critique of monetary society, the most visceral and negative practical reaction came from Athens’ great ideological opponent, Sparta. In one sense, this was no surprise: Sparta was a martial, totalitarian state, clearly made of sterner stuff than the self-proclaimed “school of Greece.”
¹⁴
Indeed, to some contemporaries Sparta’s constitution seemed dangerously fanatical. This was a state, after all, in which special officials exterminated babies deemed insufficiently strong to cope with Sparta’s militaristic ethos, and then subjected the survivors to strict indoctrination from the age of seven. Children were separated from their families from the age of twelve and the institution of the family was actively suppressed in favour of communal living in military-style messes and unquestioning obedience to the state for both men and women. There was, most unusually for the ancient world, legal equality of the sexes; but there also existed a rigid caste system in which an underclass of peasants were subject to the most barbaric terrorisation by the true-born elite.
¹⁵

But to many ancient thinkers it was precisely this ultra-disciplined civic life, steeped in convention, tradition, and blind prejudice, that made Sparta what one eminent historian has called “the most important historical model of an ideal society.”
¹⁶
The Spartans themselves certainly thought so. The fact that their constitution had survived, allegedly unchanged, for more than four centuries was in their eyes irrefutable evidence—evidence amply corroborated by their victory over Athens in the defining war of the late fifth century
BC.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Sparta’s reaction to the undesirable aspects of money was more extreme than that of her democratic rival. After all, what use could the ideal state have for a social innovation like money? Was not the truest freedom the sort guaranteed by membership of one’s mess, one’s tribe, and, ultimately, the Spartan state? And what was stability if not a constitution unaltered for four hundred
years? The conclusion was obvious: the ideal state had no need of this invention. Confident in the perfection of its traditional social architecture, Sparta eschewed the use of money. So when, at a critical juncture in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans won a decisive victory over Athens’ ally, democratic Mantinea, they added a third and novel humiliation to the usual ancient practices of razing the defeated city to the ground and forcibly resettling its surviving inhabitants. They abolished the use of money. In a sense, this strategy of obliteration was the most enlightened part of their policy. Eradicating money was merely bringing Mantinea into line with the ideal state that had just defeated it: perhaps the earliest known example of post-conflict international development assistance.

The Spartans believed that the only real way to master money’s defects was to get rid of it and to revert to traditional society. It is a strategy for dealing with money’s shortcomings that has proved periodically popular over the centuries. In the ancient world, even Athens’ greatest philosopher, Plato, expressed his admiration. Whilst he stopped short of abolishing money altogether in his utopian
Republic
, he ordained that money should be strictly regulated, subject to rigorous exchange controls, and should not be used at all by the highest caste of citizens.
¹⁷
But on its own terms the rationale for the Spartan strategy has always made perfect sense. If society’s non-monetary institutions were well enough designed then money would be obsolete. Of course, it is always possible that, no matter how perfect a state’s institutions, its irritatingly imperfect human citizens might mess everything up. As a result, the Spartan strategy has proved most popular in those traditions which believe mankind to be fundamentally good—with the Western, socialist tradition foremost amongst them.