The recent developments in the world of finance have prompted a flood of expert opinion, advice, explanation, analysis and interpretation in the media. Some of it has been refreshingly open (a bit like a good laugh at a funeral), much more of it confusing and self-deceptive.
Estimates of the length of the recovery period started at 6 months when the first news of sub-prime mortgages leaked. As the money markets began to reveal their true nature (devoid of any sense of commonwealth) and homes and jobs began to slide into the crater, the estimates stretched to a year, perhaps two. Then the merchant banks began to face their financial bankruptcy (being amoral, they couldn’t own up to their moral bankruptcy) and now we hear that it will be a tough five years before we are back to economic health.
We aren’t going to get back what we had. We aren’t going back to the world we (thought) we knew. Thank God.
The Polynesians have a saying to describe a certain frame of mind, a frame of mind well (but not exclusively) represented by our experts. It is “standing on a whale fishing for minnows.” That’s the attitude of modern western humanity.
Human beings live and communicate meaning and value through metaphor. Our neural faculties create metaphorical representations of the world of existence so that we can exist together, meet each other, negotiate our freedoms and responsibilities in this otherwise unknowable universe.
The insecurity of our tenure is such that we gravitate toward quantitative metaphors that create reassuring feelings of certainty and exactness (a sort of binary comfort). We represent the reality of our analogue existence as an infinitely complicated set of binary metaphors.
The one-legged (incomplete and imbalanced) Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick becomes obsessed (a binary relationship) with finding and destroying the great analogue whale – nature, water, the unconscious, feeling, intuition, awe – Moby Dick. Its skin is a mass of white scar tissue - experience, power - perpetually wounded, perpetually renewed.
Ahab acts out of the belief that he can make things certain, that he can destroy his destroyer, that he can avenge externally his own wound of partialness by killing something which is whole. It is his Nemesis.
Money is a metaphor, the dominant metaphor of our time. We live and assess value by the dictates of the financial ‘bottom line’.
We think it’s a whale.
It’s a minnow. We’re standing on the whale.
Metaphor is the bottom line. Without it we don’t know anything about ourselves or the world of existence. Money and numbers are metaphors for a small part of our experience, quite useful in their place. They haven’t worked so well as metaphors for education, medicine, science, religion, sexual relations, parenting, or human society and individuals.
Now here comes a leviathon of unarticulated, unconsciously suppressed, emotionally charged metaphor in the manifold forms of social unrest, psychic disturbance, tribal fanaticism (religious, patriotic, football-hooliganian), sexual obsession, etc, etc, surfacing beneath our little boat.
It will best be met with quiet humble attention and a willingness to swim. Whether we like it or not. Whether we agree with it or not. It won’t be quantified, analyzed, domesticated, lectured to, tricked, or ambushed; nor will it be sold for blubber and ambergris. And it won’t go away and it won’t leave us alone.
It is us.
It’s life span can’t be represented in years, it’s health in statistics.
Ahab Beware Ahab.
