March 9

Next up in my never-ending Victorian novel project is George Gissing's The Whirlpool, and in reading William Greenslade's Introduction to the Everyman paperback, I was startled by the parallels between Gissing's concerns and ours:

Gissing saw....that English society in the 1980s was in the grip of energies which were barely understood, in an increasingly specialised, complex culture....From the mid-1880s gambling in stocks and profit-taking were rife as never before. Large-scale foreign speculation in securities had markedly increased as over-valued shares were acquired by legions of new trust companies. In 1890 Baring Brothers, a leading merchant bank, narrowly avoided collapse. Then, as now, financial scandal was never long out of the headlines.

In the opening chapters of The Whirlpool Gissing allows full rein to the career of speculative finance. The novel openly flaunts the spectacle of uncertainty and instability which accompanies it; its consequences spill out across moral and legal boundaries as money threatens to assume a life of its own....Gissing gives us a world founded upon, but tripped up by, so-called 'securities'....[He] allows us to sense the slippery, hazardous texture of life at the heart of the imperial state....The whirlpool, which eventually engulfs almost every character in the novel is, above all, a condition of modernity.

As an interpretation of how finance has shaped our world from Gissing's day to this, I doubt you could do better than this mammoth Etay Zwick essay from The Point. I have read it twice and am still learning from it. Here are some highlights:

The reality is that business elites promote the stock market far more than the stock market promotes economic growth.

Today a corporation’s success often depends on how much credit it can raise—that is, on how successfully it can sell the promise of future success.

Today, as in all barbarian societies, the desire for esteem has eclipsed the instinct to produce....Why would one bother producing things today, when the jobs producing nothing pay better—not only in cash, but also in prestige?

Perhaps the most troubling feature of the white-collar mindset is that it conceives of work—not just manual work but any kind of work, and especially its own—as irksome, pointless, an interference with life’s pleasures....work is simply something one has to do.

Instead of evaluating ourselves through our projects, self-esteem comes to depend on successfully selling others an image of our value. Promotions come to those who can sell themselves as the future of a company.

The Wall Street worker may look self-assured, comforted by personal displays of status and absorbed in professional projects. But....the trader conceals both a secret detachment from his professional persona—a feeling that he either ought to be or actually is quite different from the person his work demands him to be—and a fear of being called out for his faltering commitment to the lifestyle and profession. Culturally, this means the trader will take on every aspect of the business lifestyle—the clothing, the cars, the eating habits and the attitude toward peers, the market, and the rest of the world....One doesn’t want to be marked as lacking the right attributes for “succeeding.”

The hiring strategy of financial firms further confirms that they are not selling a product, or even a service requiring skills or experience. What they have to sell is, literally, their salesmen—whose highly publicized “intellect” and “natural talent” secure the trust of clientele despite the poor track record of their expensive advice.

Flexibility is the new cultural imperative—and job insecurity the new background to everyday life. In the twentieth century, finance introduced an era of white-collar employment; now it ushers in an era of temporary work—a post-career era. Even full-time jobs no longer provide financial security, and the aspiration of a long-term career (with any company at all, even resigning oneself to “less fulfilling” jobs) appears increasingly whimsical. Today, the average American will hold more than ten different jobs over the course of his lifetime. Deprived of what Richard Sennett called the “gift of organized time,” he can no longer set goals for long-term personal development. His life feels less like a narrative that he is slowly articulating than a series of discontinuous episodes largely determined by forces beyond his control. At the very least, living a good life would seem to require: (1) the ability to deepen and develop one’s personal relationships and (2) a sense of ownership over one’s existence. In the post-career era, there is little prospect for either. The average American can only play out the temporary roles the world has chosen for him—roles that feel shallow, fleeting and not his own.

The barbarian does not abide by rules; indeed, it is a point of pride that he knows his way around them. No matter what regulations are passed, the barbarian will figure out a way to make money from them.

At the best of times, Wall Street provides white noise amidst entrepreneurs’ and workers’ attempts to actualize their ambitions and projects. We are still learning what happens at the worst of times.

http://www.thepointmag.com/archive/predatory-habits/

Among notables born on this date are cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, essayist William Cobbett, novelists Vita Sackville-West and Keri Hulme (New Zealand), crime novelist Mickey Spillane, Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, jazzman Ornette Coleman, rocker Robin Trower, journalist Michael Kinsley, composer Samuel Barber, pop singer Keely Smith, chess master Bobby Fischer, and actors Will Geer, Del Close, Raul Julia, and Juliette Binoche. I remember playing a "difficult" Ornette Coleman cut for a class of fifth-graders who, not cued by me that they were not "supposed" to like it, loved it: "We love Free Jazz!" (I wish Ornette could have been there.) The temptation to use cultural artifacts only as a marker of group membership is stronger than ever nowadays, which is clearly unfortunate when our potential responses to them are so much more diverse than that. One reason I "cover the waterfront" here at PMD is a conscious desire not to fall into that trap. One cannot avoid belonging to cultural groups, but one can try to avoid exclusivism and "Not Our Kind" thinking. And if your herd is dictating your every move, as on Wall Street, it's probably time for a different set of friends.