247. A Dream of World Peace

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For peace in the world human beings need to develop a gentler, less grasping nature, right?  A deeper love of their fellow man.   A recognition that all men, not just men of their tribe or nation, are their brothers.

Well, that certainly would do it.  But not, I think, as well as its opposite, development of a more grasping nature, a more intelligently grasping nature.  A deeper love of money.   A recognition that all men, not just men of their tribe or nation, are their trading partners.

We have a wonderful illustration of this at the moment, with John Kerry bristling in the face of Vladimir Putin and half the foreign ministers in the European Union saying, "Hey, wait a minute.  We do business with Russia!" 

How different from the Cold War when nobody did business with Russia, and everybody could cheer our foreign ministers on.  When Russia, doing business with nobody, faced no deterrent other than what was in our silos. 

It's the great discovery of our time, that economic sanctions work.  Do them right (we're learning) and they change the behavior of nations (South Africa, Myanmar, Serbia, Iran).   The very threat of them changes behavior.   And the more dependent economies become on trade with other economies the better sanctions will work.  It's possible now to dream of economies so interdependent that war will be unthinkable. 

And it all depends on the profit motive.  The good sin, greed.  Anger becomes the bad sin.  People sore enough at other people to make war against them are put in their place.  "What are you trying to do, strangle the golden goose?"  Foreign ideological systems, evil empires, become golden geese.  As China now is.   As we are to China.  "Launch against suppliers like that? Bomb that kind of market?"

Of course there are problems.  We've got these angry cries for justice.  Rage against oppression.  Zeal for liberation.  High ideals in general.  "Life should be better than this.  Why stick in the old mud?  Why not the best?"  Somebody is always trying to break out, or secede, or realize their independent destiny. 

Well, that's anger.  And, if you're going to have peace, it's got to give way to greed. 

The trouble is, anger is so much easier to romanticize than greed.  Nobody was angrier at England than the Highland chiefs, and nobody fared better in English literature.  Freedom-loving, brave-hearted, mountain-air-breathing fighters for Scottish independence, that's what Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, and Ossian saw. 

And what did the Lowland merchants see, when they looked up from their ledgers?  A lot of crazy, illiterate, innumerate warlords unfit for civilized life.  Wreckers of the organized state.  Wreckers of the balance sheet.  And so at war with each other that they'd never be able to rule the independent state they bagpiped about.

And the descendants of those merchants, like me, what do they see?  I see desert warlords.  With more vegetation around them.  Same clan crap.  Same violence.  And same weakness confronting a country, like England, that knows how to organize its violence.  Go the angry Highlanders' way and you'll get one foolish, uncomprehending (of enemy capabilities, of new weapons, of logistics) war after another.  The wars will be multiple because angry romantics are so bad at learning from experience.   (What they're good at is repeating a failed rising.  You know, 1698, Bonnie Dundee, getting their asses shot off; 1715, Bobbin' John Mar, getting more shot off; 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, getting a record number shot off.)

Well, that's anger for you.  Greed now.  Down in the Lowlands it has our merchants casting a beady eye on their 1707 accounts.  Red ink getting redder.  Go with the Highlanders — liberty, honor, pride, Scottishness, self-determination, independence — and you're on your uppers.  Go against them, join with Britain, and you're in clover.  You've got a line under your losses, a big black line.  You've got a market for 50% of your exports.  And you're hooked into a system that's going someplace.

Was it ever going someplace!  Wealth from all over the world was, in the next 200 years, going to roll into industrializing England at an astonishing rate.  And the Scots would play a big part in it, far out of proportion to their numbers.  But best of all, for the point here, they were at peace with the British.  More than at peace.  They were snuggling in bed with them.  Pockets bulging.  And that's the way it's been, ever since the commercial side won and joined Scotland to England to make what was at the time "the greatest free trade area in the world."

There it is, the road to world peace, seen when we first got on it.  The one paved with gold.  A road like those in heaven, a road like the one Mammon admired so, before he fell.

What a problem, though, getting a Peace Through Lucre campaign going.  Peace Through Might is so far ahead.  They've got the uniforms and the ribbons and the statues, they've got the ceremonies, the carrier decks, the slogans, they've got the models, the Caesars, and oh Lord the rewards, the final prizes, the Pax this and the Pax that, beginning with the Pax Romana.

What do we money people have?  Right now the example of Scotland.  Joined maybe by Switzerland.  Those banks.  On the outside maybe a Scandinavian country or two.  And the prize, the terminus?  Can there be a Pax Caledonia?

We're where William James was in 1906. He was trying to find an equivalent in the moral sphere to all the heart-lift in the military sphere, the "manliness," the "cohesiveness," the "tenacity," the "health and vigor," the sight of human nature "at its highest dynamic."  We're trying to find an equivalent in the commercial sphere.  God help us.

And it's got to be competitive, this equivalent to the  "strong life."  And we, classed among James's "clerks and teachers," are going to have to build it out of books and diagrams and blackboard demonstrations.  The wimp life.  Ending in a vision of what?  For James, a "pleasure economy."  Everybody peacefully enjoying the world's material comforts.  

There's so much to be said against that.  “It is the preoccupation with possessions," Bertrand Russell warns us, "that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”  And he's only at the end of a long line.  "Things," said Goethe, make us their "slaves."  They get in the saddle and "ride mankind" (Emerson).  What else can you say after Jesus said, "Love of money is the root of all evil"?  What good does it do you to "gain the whole world and lose your own soul?"

So greed, to nobody's surprise, is going to be a hard sell.  And there's not much to recommend our usual tricks.  We (or our PR people) can rename some of our functionaries.  We can make the people in charge of a "financial sector" into "theater commanders."  We can encourage colorful nicknames for those commanders (SEC Chairman, Treasury Secretary, World Bank President), something to match "Bull" and "Stonewall."  We might even have a "Light Horse Harry," or an "Iron Duke."  For the lower bureaucrats we could find names with more animal force, like poilu ("the hairy ones") or "Rough Riders." But none of that is going to get us very far.

Maybe greed is an impossible sell.  People know a bad bargain when they see one.   They'll certainly be suspicious of this one.  You give up spirituality and freedom and honor and vigor and nobility and justice and equality, all your great causes, all your high ideals, and all you get is peace.

And even if you get peace you're still not home.  You've got to fix up your vocabulary.  How are you going to use the word "moral"?  You've got world peace, something everybody has longed for, something that, for some, appears as "mankind's greatest good."  And what name will you give to those who brought it to you?  To their motives?  To their characters?  To their souls?  Remember, you're looking at Wall Street.

Oh, it's so hard to call those guys "moral."   They may be smart and shrewd and realistic and foresighted and yes, with the help of their kind in the State Department, they may be socially responsible, making the world's interest their interest, but are they really moral? 

It's the pain of questions like that that makes us realize that there is a prior question: Do I really care?  Do I have to have a higher compliment-word?  Why aren't "smart" and "prudent" and "realistic" and "foresighted" and "socially responsible" good enough?  What, here, is the difference between somebody who has all those virtues and somebody who is "moral"?

As far as I'm concerned, I'm ready to put "moral" in a class with "art" and "philosopher," words that cast auras, words that we can drop from our vocabulary without much loss.