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We no longer have any sympathy today with the concept of “free will.” We know only too well what it is—the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind “accountable” in his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him…. I give here only the psychology of making men accountable. Everywhere accountability is sought, it is usually the instinct for punishing and judging which seeks it. One has deprived becoming of its innocence if being in this or that state is traced back to will, to intentions, to accountable acts: the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty. The whole of the old-style psychology, the psychology of will, has as its precondition the desire of its authors—the priests at the head of the ancient communities—to create for themselves a right to ordain punishments, or their desire to create for God a right to do so…. Men were thought of as “free” so that they could become guilty; consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness (whereby the most fundamental falsification in psychologicis was made into the very principle of psychology)…. Today, when we have started to move in the reverse direction, when we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions, and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with “punishment” and “guilt” by means of the concept of the “moral world order.” Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics.
CLARENCE DARROW
The State of Illinois v.
Nathan Leopold & Richard Loeb, 1924
[Nathan Leopold] became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your Honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was a man of a wonderful intellect—the most original philosopher of the last century. Nietzsche believed that sometime the superman would be born, that evolution was working toward the superman. He wrote one book which was a criticism of all moral codes as the world understands them—a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. He wrote on the will to power. Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way that he was influenced.
Nietzsche’s attitude is but a philosophical dream—containing more or less truth—that was not meant by anyone to be applied to life.
Here is a boy at sixteen or seventeen becoming obsessed with these doctrines. There isn’t any question about the facts. It was not a casual bit of philosophy with him; it was his life. He believed in a superman. He and Dickie Loeb were the supermen. The ordinary commands of society were not for him.
Is there any question about what was responsible for him?
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But what if Hitler had ordered his tanks to destroy the Allied forces at Dunkirk on May 24? How might his decision have affected the course and outcome of the war?
Adolf Hitler was in fine spirits and good humor on the morning of May 24, 1940. His Panzer divisions were within fifteen miles of what was left of the defeated British Army trapped near the French port of Dunkirk. He believed that decisive victory was at hand. But at Charleville, in the headquarters of Army Group A, which had carried out the advance, he was astonished to learn that his commander in chief, Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt, wasn’t planning to continue the attack. The general assumed that the British had nowhere to go and that bombardment by the Luftwaffe would soon compel its surrender. He wanted his tanks in good repair for their deployment south against the French.
Hitler momentarily wavered. He decided to speak with the commander in chief of the army, Walther von Brauchitsch, and the chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, both of whom disagreed with Rundstedt. They advised Hitler to destroy the British Army without hesitation. Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s designated successor, agreed. His mind made up, Hitler overruled Rundstedt and ordered the tanks into Dunkirk. It was a one-sided contest. The British and their Allies had left most of their heavy armor behind in the headlong retreat. They had few munitions, little food, and no hope of relief or of holding out.
On May 28, Lord Gort, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, sought permission to surrender from the small war cabinet summoned by Winston Churchill, the new prime minister. Churchill reluctantly gave his permission. That same day, Belgium capitulated to Germany and soon afterward, devoid of allies and its own forces disintegrating, so did France. At midnight on May 28, the guns fell silent as a temporary armistice took effect on the Western Front. The Allied troops not killed or seriously wounded in the last, fruitless defense of Dunkirk were herded into long, miserable columns and marched into German captivity. It was a defeat unparalleled in British history.
Back in London, the war cabinet, in session almost continuously in recent days, held tense debates about Britain’s next move. Despite the odds, Churchill remained defiant, arguing that it was better to go down fighting than to capitulate cravenly. This made little sense to the other politicians present—Neville Chamberlain, the former prime minister and current leader of the Conservative Party; Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary; and Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, leader and deputy leader, respectively, of the Labour Party. Dismissing Churchill as overly emotional, the war cabinet seized on an opening that had arisen three days earlier, on May 25, when Lord Halifax had been approached by Signor Bastianini, the Italian ambassador in London. Well aware of the hopeless British plight on the channel coast, Bastianini had raised the possibility of a negotiated end to the war brokered by Benito Mussolini. Although Churchill remained reluctant, Lord Halifax’s argument convinced the other members of the war cabinet. The army was lost, the air force still weak. No help could be expected from the United States. Continuing hostilities would probably result in pointless destruction, quite possibly in a German invasion of Britain. A negotiated end could prevent the relentless bombing of British cities and a potential German occupation. Not least in Lord Halifax’s considerations was the thought that the empire might still be salvaged. Chamberlain’s voice was decisive in support of Lord Halifax. Attlee and Greenwood, new to the government, fell into line. Isolated, Churchill considered resigning but, unwilling to reveal the split in the government, agreed to Halifax’s proposal with the heaviest of hearts. He knew it meant the end of everything he had stood for, his own political demise, and, most likely, disaster for his country.
Mussolini lost no time in orchestrating a conference in Brussels on June 2 and 3. The four powers that had met at the Munich Conference at the end of September 1938, when Britain and France had chosen to cede part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler instead of deciding to fight him, returned to the negotiating table. While Mussolini preened with self-importance in brokering the peace deal, he had mixed feelings about its potential outcome. He was sure of some territorial gains for Italy at the expense of Britain’s presence in the Mediterranean, but he would owe these gains to German strength, not to Italian victories in the Europe-wide war he had wanted. The triumph was entirely Hitler’s. And the victor, bestriding the conference in Brussels, left no one, least of all Mussolini, in doubt of his achievement—and his total mastery of Western and Central Europe.
Before the Brussels Conference, Hitler had stipulated three preconditions for acceding to negotiations. Churchill must be replaced as prime minister and denied participation in the peace talks. Forced to hand in his resignation, Churchill and his immediate family fled into exile to Canada the following day. Secondly, neither the British nor French navies were to be moved from their present positions. The third condition demanded the signing of the peace agreement in two locations. The British would sign at the war memorial on the Somme, where Hitler had fought and been wounded in 1916, while the French would sign in the same railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, where the armistice to end the Great War—the ultimate German humiliation from Hitler’s point of view—had been approved in 1918. On the other hand, the German dictator was prepared to provide assurances in advance that, with territorial adjustments, the British Empire and French colonial possessions would be allowed to remain in existence.
Hitler drove a hard bargain in the negotiations. Despite Halifax’s reassurances, once Britain entered negotiations, there was no way back. Morale at home had sunk drastically following Dunkirk. The nation had lost its fighting spirit. Halifax and newly reinstated Prime Minister Chamberlain, Britain’s representatives in Brussels, bowed to the inevitable. Significant territorial concessions were unavoidable. Even the Channel Islands and the Shetlands, close to the British mainland, now passed into German possession. The free state of Eire, nominally still neutral, agreed to the stationing of German troops in Dublin and granted use of Irish airfields to the Luftwaffe, which meant that Britain was no longer militarily defensible.
Although Hitler permitted the British Empire to survive, he reduced it to a mere semblance of what it had once been. British rights in the oil fields of the Middle East were to be ceded to Germany, along with the mandated territories in the region and control over the Suez Canal. Backed by his bellicose foreign minister, Ribbentrop, Hitler insisted on acquiring a swathe of British, French, and Belgian colonies in Africa, establishing German rule over much of the African continent. With Malta, Gibraltar, Algeria, and Tunisia in Mussolini’s hands—his part of the spoils from the Brussels Conference—the Axis powers now dominated the entire Mediterranean.
The complete subservience of the defeated Western democracies to the German Reich was most unmistakably advertised with the disbandment of the French and British navies. France was divided into two zones: the northern part of the country placed under direct German supervision, the southern part left nominally independent under a puppet government based in Vichy. The French had initially walked out of the Brussels Conference and attempted to rally an already battered army to return to the fight, but German troops had easily quashed the short-lived military resistance and occupied Paris. At that, the French had fully capitulated.
Hitler claimed to be treating Great Britain, a country he said he much admired, more generously. There would be no German occupation. Britain would remain independent—at least nominally—and retain her (truncated) empire. But he insisted on a government sympathetic to German interests. Immediately following the Brussels Conference, Chamberlain pleaded illness—he would indeed become seriously ill and die of cancer later in the year—as a pretext for stepping down. The former prime minister David Lloyd George, who had presided over Britain’s victory in the Great War, was persuaded to form a puppet government. (Lloyd George had admired Hitler upon first meeting him in 1936.) Halifax remained as foreign secretary; Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader recently freed from prison, accepted the newly created post of Minister of the Interior. Other German sympathizers filled the remaining cabinet posts. Ribbentrop advocated forcing the abdication of King George VI and the restoration of his brother, the pro-German Edward VIII, to the throne. The ceremonies took place at the end of June when George VI was placed under house arrest at Balmoral. By the end of the summer of 1940, Great Britain had become a satellite of Germany.
The momentous changes imposed lasting consequences on the balance of world power. Churchill tried, but failed, to set up a government in exile in Canada. For the maneuver to have had any chance of success, Churchill would have needed not only the support of the Canadians, but also that of the Americans. The Roosevelt Administration, under increasing pressure from an expanding isolationist lobby, let it be known in Ottawa that it was not prepared to back Churchill. Soon it became abundantly plain that U.S. interests would be confined to the American hemisphere. Staying out of the war was the crucial task. The United States continued its rearmament in case a German-dominated Europe should at some point seek to attack America. But with Britain and France defeated, American interests lay squarely at home. There was to be no provocation of Hitler, no attempt to engage in a conflict in the Atlantic. Roosevelt looked to secure a naval agreement with Hitler that provided for the demilitarization of the western Atlantic, leaving the American navy to concentrate on the looming danger from Japan in the Pacific.
The prospect had become more menacing since Japan’s leaders had seized the moment of British and French collapse in Europe to launch military strikes to the south, subjugating Indochina, Thailand, and the Dutch East Indies in only six weeks. The offensive gave Japan control over precious oil resources and deprived Britain of the power to protect its route to India.
In Berlin, Hitler lost no time. With his western flank secured, he turned his attention to the project that he’d had in mind for almost twenty years: a war to destroy the Soviet Union and with it what he saw as its wellspring of “Jewish Bolshevism.” His military leaders dissuaded him from an immediate attack: an invasion in August and September was judged too risky in view of a possibly early onset of winter. In any event, assembling and mobilizing the army would simply take too long; after the western offensive, many of the motorized units needed an extended period of repair. The invasion was therefore postponed until the following spring.
German planners worried that the chance of upheaval in the Balkans might disrupt preparations for the eastern operation already known as “Barbarossa.” But by the autumn of 1940, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey had fallen under the sway of the Axis powers, and when the German invasion of the Soviet Union began in May 1941, the Wehrmacht advanced so rapidly on all fronts that it soon captured Leningrad, Ukraine, and the industrial region of the Donets Basin. By early August, German forces reached Moscow. Stalin fled from the city, leading to the complete demoralization of a Soviet population further threatened by the news that Japanese forces attacking through Mongolia and into Siberia had prompted the Red Army’s headlong retreat from its eastern front. Forced back on the Central Asian republics, the Stalin regime saw no other option but to sue for terms. The subsequent territorial subtractions made the calamitous concessions of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 look like minor losses. Most important, the oil of the Caucasus now fell to Germany. So did the granary of Ukraine. Added to the enormous resources that Germany already controlled and ruthlessly exploited in Western Europe, the Russian acquisitions placed in its hands the economy of the defeated European continent.
Japan also had greatly extended its material resources by virtue of its brutal occupation of much of Southeast Asia. Deprived of assistance from the Allies, Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek felt compelled to accept the harsh terms that the Japanese sought to impose. These included China’s joining the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the euphemism chosen by Japan to designate the huge area of its newly captured “living space.”
By this time—the spring of 1942—the United States had accelerated its rearmament program. Aware that a showdown with the dominant Axis powers could not be indefinitely postponed, Roosevelt nonetheless continued to do everything necessary to avoid confrontation, both in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. The President had to prepare his nation’s defenses and to try to persuade an isolationist public that war would eventually visit the United States. American scientists meanwhile worked feverishly on a project that the country’s military chiefs considered decisive in the coming war—so long as the United States could develop it faster than the Germans. But with their newly won resources, the Germans were making rapid progress toward the making of both atomic weapons and the long-range interballistic missiles that could deliver them. Before much longer, New York and Washington would stand in the shadow of Germany’s nuclear weapons.
May 1945: It is now five years since Hitler overrode Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt’s advice. In Germania (the former Berlin), British leaders, along with dignitaries from the entire European continent, have recently attended the celebration of Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday on April 20, which included the largest military march ever witnessed on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. In Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Matsuoka Yosuke—mastermind of the triumphant conquests of 1940 and 1941—welcome the state visit of Wang Ching-wei, the leader of the puppet Chinese administration that has been in place for the last four years. A number of Indian princelings—viceroys installed by Japanese arms in the former heart of the British Empire—are additional guests of honor.
In both Southeast Asia and on the European continent, millions of once free people are reduced to slavery, forced to labor for their Japanese and German masters. The degradation of the humiliated Chinese defies description; tens of thousands of Slavs in Europe have been transported in cattle wagons to huge slave labor camps within the Arctic Circle and on the borders of Siberia. What has happened to the Jews remains unclear. They have completely disappeared from sight, rounded up by the Germans and their collaborators in the occupied territories of Western Europe and shipped off eastward—most likely, it seems, to the northernmost outreaches of the former Soviet Union. No one is sure of their subsequent fate. Terrible rumors circulated by underground resistance movements and intercepted by American intelligence indicate that up to eleven million have been exterminated. A few remarkable reports suggest that they have been killed in specially designed gas chambers, their bodies incinerated in industrial-style complexes built for that purpose in the region of Minsk, Kowno, Riga, and the woods outside Moscow. But no one credits such stories. They are too fantastic to be believed.
Money is like fire, second only to God as the greatest of man’s inventions and the maker of cities and the builder of civilizations. Known as the fifth element, money raises armies and moves mountains, builds castles and launches ships, shapes the land and plows the sea, digs canals and plants orchards, and gives men the power to govern other men.
Since the invention of money three thousand years ago in Asia Minor, men have struggled to obtain as much of it as possible in whatever form it happened to take: gold bars, cowry shells, silver slugs, copper coins, paper notes. Money has never stayed in the same hands for very long, and the stories of its comings and goings over the course of time provide the drama to Western mythology and literature. Behind the stories lies the more important tale of the endless struggle between great nations, large institutions, and powerful personalities to control the production and distribution of wealth—to determine the definition of money itself.
The history of money encompasses three distinct revolutionary transformations: the invention of the coin, the creation of paper bills, and the shift into electronic currency. Nearly three thousand years ago, in a remote part of Anatolia then known as Lydia, the first revolution brought about the coin. Lydia was a small country lacking the agricultural output to feed the massive armies that sustained the large neighboring kingdoms of Mesopotamia. The Lydians scrounged their livings by selling jewelry and other luxury goods to the Persian Empire. In the seventh century bc, the merchant kings of Lydia began using nuggets of gold and silver in their trade, and, to mark the metal’s purity, they pressed a seal onto the surface of the nuggets, thereby flattening them slightly and inadvertently inventing coins.
Before the coin, kingdoms derived their power from agriculture and conquest; rulers needed nothing more to govern than a strong army and a credible priesthood. The dissemination of coins established markets and created a whole new source of energy that spread around the world and gradually destroyed the great tributary empires of history. Money took away power from priests and armies; it had the transformative ability to turn gold into democracy. With this commercial innovation, Lydia became the richest country in the classical world and the name of its king, Croesus, a synonym for great wealth.
Compared with the physical force of the military and the spiritual authority of religion, money offered a third and completely novel way to organize society. Without regard to rank, class, or standing, anyone with the proper coin could buy a goat or a turnip, a jug of wine or a basket of fish, a parcel of land for a vineyard or a pinch of salt to flavor dinner.
The second revolution in the history of money, taking place over the five hundred years from the beginnings of the Renaissance to the coming of the Industrial Revolution, resulted in the modern capitalist system. The movement originated in the banks of Italy, eventually establishing the paper currencies that banks issued for use in daily commerce. More fluid than its metallic predecessor, paper money hastened the end of feudalism, eliminated the privileges of heredity, and shifted economic power from land ownership to stocks, bonds, and corporations. The financial innovations promoted the rise of mercantile and banking families, among them the Medici, in a new social order where cleverness in business outbid prowess on the battlefield or the glory of a noble name. Such a rearrangement gave rise to the artistic, architectural, and literary expression for which the Renaissance is better remembered today than for its commercial genius.
The voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World and Vasco da Gama to India inaugurated the great mercantile age of international commerce. For the first time in history, ships crisscrossed the high seas and called at ports on almost every continent in a global network of trade. Within two centuries, the routes became firmly established, and many competitors fought to convey the spices and silks from Asia and Europe, slaves from Africa, and silver and sugar from America. Control of the trade passed from Portugal and Spain to England, Holland, and other European nations. But in the second half of the eighteenth century, a new road to riches was opened by industrial production in England.
The making of money passed from the merchants to the industrialists, who first manufactured textiles and proceeded quickly to steel and other metals. As was noticed by Karl Marx, the foremost critic of industrial capitalism, power and wealth were in the hands of those who controlled the “means of production”—the factory owners. The arrangement continued into the twentieth century with production centering on consumer goods as well as on the armaments for the wars that dominated the era.
Europe’s industrialized countries could not maintain their monopoly on production, which migrated to North America. By the end of the century, Brazil and India could out-produce their former colonial masters, while computers and textiles could be manufactured more cheaply in Malaysia, Mexico, and China than in Germany or the United States.
The most dramatic shift has been the relatively recent transformation of currency. Beginning in the twentieth century, the currencies of the colonial powers—the only money that really mattered—were tied to gold. By the end of the century, there were nearly two hundred national currencies, from the ubiquitous U.S. dollar to local currencies with no circulation outside the area controlled by their own national governments.
On May 16, 1972, the Chicago “money pit” opened as the first currency futures market. With the help of computers and satellites, money moved around the world at an accelerated speed, its Promethean energy finally and fully unbound. The money supply of dollars measured in printed currency and bank deposits grew from about $750 billion in 1972 to ten times that amount—$7.5 trillion—by 2007. The largest market in the world, the currency exchange has a daily turnover of more than $3 trillion dollars—more than the entire gross domestic product of China for a year. A single trading center such as the City of London oversees currency trading with a total annual value that surpasses the combined gross national product of the whole world.
The volume of transactions measured in trillions is hard to conceptualize. If converted to one-dollar bills, a sum of $3 trillion dollars would weigh more than a fleet of seventy-one steel ships each with weights equal to the Titanic. But the new money needs no fleet of ships to transport it around the world. It travels at the speed of light in the form of electronic impulses; dollars flow from Singapore to Zurich, yen floods the central bank of Congo, and South African rands become Canadian dollars.
The currency market differs from all others in an even more fundamental way. In other markets, merchants exchange goods for money; but in the currency market, traders exchange the money of one country for the money of another, with no other goods involved in the transaction. They do not need to discuss metric versus American measurements, preferred voltage, or shipping lines; they need only haggle about the asking price. The only quantity is money. Without the need to plant and harvest crops or to manufacture and ship goods, the currency market suffers no delays; its transactions are instantaneous and electronic, the purest exchange of all.
With currencies fluctuating on an open market integrated by computers and satellites, no single center need dominate the market the way a few major centers dominate the exchange of stocks, commodities, and insurance. Today, information from the financial world can reach a German businessman in Singapore at the same moment it reaches a French stockbroker vacationing on a cruise ship in the Caribbean or an eccentric billionaire in the Australian outback. At any second of the day, thousands of traders stand poised to react, and even more computers stand ready to buy and sell as soon as the numbers match the statistically programmed algorithm. The virtually simultaneous decisions of people throughout the world generate a large supply of electronic money fluttering like a skittish flock of birds that take flight in a moment, all headed in the same direction and able to change course on the proverbial dime, alighting here and there before taking off for another pond or field on the other side of the world.
The pack mentality of traders increases the mass and power of the floating corpus of money circling the world. The greater weight of energy amplifies the importance of any movement the market makes. Unable to step lightly, the traders resemble a herd of nervous wildebeests. A brief alarm suddenly becomes a major stampede from the dollar to the Swiss franc and the euro. While intangible moods, intuitions, and prejudices often drive these rapid movements of currency, shifts in the market also reflect the trust that investors have in the leaders of a country at any particular moment. They trusted Ronald Regan to act a certain way, and consequently, the dollar traded at higher levels during his presidency than the objective data would otherwise have warranted. International investors lacked that kind of confidence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, causing the dollar to decline and resulting in an impressive rise in the value of commodities such as gold and oil. While the nearly mythical subprime mortgage market is to blame for much of today’s economic woes, the problems with real estate represent a much larger and more global erosion of faith in the American dollar.
The invisible market where dollars rise and fall never opens or closes; it simply and blindly pulses. It does not distinguish night from day, never takes a siesta or a lunch break. When the banks close in Sydney for the night, the offices are opening for business in Mumbai. When the trading houses shut down for a national holiday in Shanghai, the offices in London and New York continue to hum and thrive. After thirty centuries immobilized in metal coins and paper bills, money is finally free.
In the third phase in the history of money, currency has neither form nor figure. Its electronic movement wields far more power than the largest banks or corporations; its erratic will forces politicians of the strongest national economies to bow in humble submission. The more a currency is traded, the less control any single government has over it. The U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have relatively little influence over the value of the dollar compared with the Thai government’s control of the baht.
Financiers, not national governments, run today’s global market. This new class of moneymen control massive amounts of currency through brokerage houses, banks, pension plans, and insurance agencies. Unlike their predecessors, they do not move spices, silk, or slaves around the world, nor do they manage the production of missiles, DVDs, or microwave ovens. They regulate the flow of money or, more accurately, define the form of money. Liberated from the constraints of metal and paper, these financiers move money from one national currency to another, from stocks into bonds, from mortgages into mutual funds.
From its first appearance in world history, money has forged new institutions and ways of life by corroding earlier systems. It has become the defining variable not only of commercial relations, but of all types of relations, from religious and political to sexual and familial. Each technological innovation in currency, from the invention of coinage in Lydia three millennia ago to its current incarnation as blips of electronic light, has further expanded money’s role in our lives.
History has suggested that neither the government nor the market is capable of regulating money. From Nero to George W. Bush, government officials and financiers have tried to control money for their own short-term benefit. Roman emperors in the third century reduced the silver content of coins to pay the cost of a growing army and bureaucracy; French bankers in the eighteenth century issued worthless paper money and stock to the unsuspecting public in order to prop up a failing monarchy. The novel monetary systems initially improve the economic situation, but eventually—when the intoxication wears off and the bills come due—reality returns and the house of cards falls down.
In the global economy that is still emerging, the power of money will supersede that of any nation, combination of nations, or international organization now in existence. The newly ascended financial elites hold no brief or loyalty for any particular country, and the third revolution in the history of money threatens to erode the value of kinship, religion, occupation, and citizenship as the defining components of civic and social life. As near at hand as a credit card, a telephone, or a computer, the capricious cloud of money can seem as far beyond our control as the tides. An incorporeal concentration of humankind’s most basic desires, fears, and faiths, money surfaces briefly as a sequence of digits on a computer screen before evaporating again into the thin air that dreams are made of.
Today, virtual worlds are graphically rich, geographically massive, and heavily populated. In one world, Lord of the Rings Online, my wife and her girlfriends run around as elves and fight demons while chatting about sick kids and nutty husbands. Although the game is much more sophisticated than MUD, the essential features of the virtual world are the same: you use a character to navigate an immersive landscape that offers challenges in the form of monsters and quests. When you log off, the world remains, a canvas for collective storytelling.
There are obvious differences between a virtual world and our world. In a virtual world, there are dragons and elves and magic. But while the dragons are fantasy, the society is real. There’s not a single theory of human behavior violated by humans interacting virtually. People talk the same way, love the same way, shop the same way. Reputations, norms, prices, groups, and networks all work the same way as they do in the real world. The realism of these online societies has made them hugely popular. Gartner Research says that 80 percent of active Web users will, by 2012, have some sort of “avatar”—some sort of virtual character—in some sort of online world. That’s over 100 million people.
Contrary to the stereotype that fantasy gamers are all fat kids in their moms’ basements, most players are in their twenties and thirties. They’re not isolated; they connect with friends and family online every night. They’re not stupid; they develop sharp strategic and tactical acumen to win games in virtual worlds.
Why would people give up their real lives for fantasy lives? For the vast majority of people in today’s economy, life is pretty boring. In the real world, workers often perform tedious tasks that fail to give them a sense of meaning. Virtual worlds provide these people with tasks that have significance: the dragons must be killed, the villages must be saved.
One of the things that remains undisturbed in the transition from the real to the virtual world is the market. Money, we are told in Economics 101, has three characteristics: it is a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. All three services have been needed in every virtual world built to date. By containing permanent items that characters can own and trade, all virtual worlds either have by design, or evolve, a currency. This currency is used for exchange, for accounting, and for saving up.
Because the virtual currency serves these useful purposes, it has value. Nevermind that it’s virtual. The euro was a virtual currency for three years, existing only in databases, yet no one treated their euro accounts as valueless. Most value is virtual. The dollar is a virtual good: it only has value because we say it does. This is unsettling in the same way that atomic physics is unsettling. The first time you realize that your desk is made up of billions of little particles with vast reaches of empty space between them, you have a moment of unease. Lifting your elbows slowly off the surface, you think, what if the thing falls apart or explodes? Yet after a few moments of watching your desk remain utterly desk-like, solid, and reliable, you forget about the physics and put your elbows down again. In a similar way, the first time you realize that most things in the economy, and especially its money, have value only because of a social convention, you freeze, thinking, my God, what if the lady at Kroger refuses to accept my twenty-dollar bill? Where will I get my six-packs? But then she cheerfully takes your money, just like always, and you relax.
Once you accept that the dollar is virtual and yet has real value, you can accept that virtual goods and virtual money can have value too. If supply and demand work the same way in modern Manhattan as they did in ancient Athens—and I believe they do—then it’s no surprise that they operate as advertised in fantasy environments like Middle Earth and the Outer Galaxy. Things have value because people value them, and if people value magic wands and purple ponies, those things have value.
Virtual items actually trade for real money all the time (even though it is usually against the rules to do so). In World of Warcraft, an immensely popular virtual world with ten million players worldwide, people use an in-game currency called “gold” to buy armor, horses, and potions. Since earning gold is time-consuming, American and European players buy currency from enterprising businessmen who have set up sweatshops called “gold farms.” Julian Dibbell, writing for the New York Times, visited several gold farms in Nanjing, where he found young men working twelve-hour shifts around the clock, earning virtual gold for resale. The boss gathers the gold and sells it for real money on online retail sites to rich, time-starved Americans and Europeans. The sweatshop workers earn thirty cents an hour for playing a game all day, the boss makes his real-world profit, and the rich American gamer gets his virtual gold.
While solid numbers are hard to come by, World of Warcraft gold has consistently been valued above the Japanese yen. The gross throughput appears to be more than $1 billion per year. That is, more than $1 billion of real money is spent for virtual money every year. Because of this trade, we can calculate the value of all virtual economic transactions: the trade of virtual gold for dollars tells us what a gold piece is worth, in the same way that trading yen for dollars does. Expressed in terms of its real-world value, the fantasy economy has a GDP of $7-12 billion, comparable in size to those of countries like Jamaica, Guinea, and Nicaragua.
Virtual economies are based on behavior that’s completely normal. In some instances, this behavior has led to court cases where one player sues another for damages: Jones used his game character to steal a magic wand worth $7,000, and Smith wants compensation. Virtual worlds have even caused murder and suicide. A man in Korea played a game so long that he died of exhaustion—dead right there at the keyboard, expired in pursuit of castles in the virtual clouds.
The seriousness of these outcomes suggests that money is more than simply a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. Money is also a way of keeping score. When I throw a football to my friend, it becomes a medium of exchange since I trade my right to throw it for her promise to throw it back to me. When my team scores a touchdown, the football becomes a unit of account: you earn six points each time you put it in the end zone. And when my team holds the football, choosing to keep it for a longer period of time in order to run out the clock, it becomes a store of value. More than just a tool, the football is an instrument for gauging progress toward a designated goal.
Money, footballs, and diamonds are fetishes to which human society attaches value far beyond mere use. In their subjective theory of value, economists have shown that the price of diamonds is driven by supply and demand, not “usefulness.” But economists have not applied the same reasoning to money. Don’t we all know people whose sole objective in life is to accumulate as much money as possible, and thereby win? Don’t companies encourage this kind of attitude and culture? When economist Robert Frank writes of the Winner-Take-All Society, he thinks he’s deploying a metaphor about our economy, but he’s not. An economy is a game: a designed goal environment with an uncertain outcome. The laws of a country design its economy, and money is the game’s standard of victory.
The brokers who jumped off buildings in 1929 were shocked to be losers. Why did they jump? Every “ruined” stock trader no doubt still had access to human capital—connections, know-how, intuition—that fairly quickly he could have turned into a handsome salary. He wouldn’t be super-rich anymore, but he’d have food to eat, a home to live in, and clothes to wear. Despite being “ruined,” a Wall Street trader in 1929 would still have more material wealth than all the people in Kansas whom he’d impoverished with his margin trading. The trader killed himself not because he was hungry but because he couldn’t stand being a loser in the game of Manhattan Money Madness.
The collapsed Korean gamer is no different from the self-defenestrated Wall Streeter. They’re both people who died for fear of losing an economic game. But the purpose of designing games is to help people have fun. It is not fun to die. Surely we can design economic games in which everyone has fun all the time and nobody gets killed. The game industry is in fact well advanced down that road. To designers, the purpose of money is to generate fun. Here’s an example: designers could give money to everybody in a virtual world. If you do nothing more than pick a virtual flower in a virtual field, there will be some merchant somewhere who will buy it from you. It’s tremendously easy to make money in virtual economies since there’s always something to do for pay, no matter your age, sex, or skills. Nobody is ever unemployed. Designers build it that way because they have found that people have more fun in an economy where everybody earns money all the time, almost without effort.
The game industry understands what economists don’t: that money is an entertainment object. Driven by the ever growing demand for livable fantasies, this industry is feverishly exploring the different ways money can be used to entertain players within a structured goal environment. If virtual economies have the potential to contribute a large portion of our GDP, children will eventually grow up treating virtual and real economies as more or less comparable systems. As the line between the virtual and real worlds disappears, people will begin to wonder why money is easy to earn in one economy and difficult in another. They will ask why the real-world economy can’t be more fun.
Albert Camus believed that the modern world confronted us with the task of Sisyphus: push a huge stone toward the top of a hill, watch it roll back down, and trudge to the bottom to push again. Repeat ad infinitum. There’s no advancement, no achievement, no glory, no meaning. In today’s economy, countless people perform tedious, Sisyphean tasks just to make a living.
Given a chance to redesign, the needed changes are obvious. First, lower the hills and shrink the rocks. Let people roll the rocks over the hills. Reward their achievement with money. Let them buy better-looking clothes. When they are ready for another challenge, give them a larger rock and a taller hill. Make sure that the goal is attainable: you don’t want to frustrate people or they will quit the game. On the other hand, if you keep the same small rocks and low hills, the players will become bored. Gradually escalate the difficulty, providing rewards for each completed challenge and varying the circumstances to prevent boredom: let them push a rock through a swamp, around a tree, or over your mother-in-law’s Volvo. Let people form groups to push as a team, and the players will create a community, a human village that faces each challenge together and succeeds against the odds.
Why should we continue to play a game we don’t enjoy? Why don’t we design something else? There’s no difference between a game developer and a government. Both serve polities and communities of interest. Both issue judgments and rulings. Both form policies that design economies. Eventually, people who play games in virtual worlds will start to ask, “Why can’t the world be more fun?” Money—“real” money—is about to become an object of game design.
hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting that design might cover their face.
By usura, Pound meant usury, or the lending of money at an interest—not just an exorbitantly high rate of interest, as in the modern usage of the word usury, but any interest at all. He goes on:
with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall… no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature.
In the 1920s, Pound had come to believe, as many still do, that international banking was a source of great evil. He used the Italian word usura because it was in Italy that the story had begun. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a web of credit was spun out across Europe, northward to London, east as far as Constantinople, west to Barcelona, south to Naples and Cyprus. At the heart of this dark web of usura lay Florence. But in the same period, and above all in the century that followed, the Tuscan city also produced some of the finest painting and architecture the world has ever seen. Never had stone blocks been cut more smoothly, never were finer paradises painted on church walls. Pound, it seems, got it wrong. With usura we have the Renaissance, no less.
Usury alters things. With interest rates, money is no longer a simple and stable metal commodity that just happens to have been chosen as a means of exchange. Projected through time, it multiplies, and this without any toil on the part of the usurer. Everything becomes more fluid. A man can borrow money, buy a loom, sell his wool at a high price, change his station in life. Another man can borrow money, buy the first man’s wool, ship it abroad, and sell it at an even higher price. He moves up the social scale. Or if he is unlucky, or foolish, he is ruined. Meanwhile, the usurer, the banker, grows richer and richer. We can’t even know how rich, because money can be moved and hidden, and gains on financial transactions are hard to trace. It’s pointless to count his sheep and cattle or to measure how much land he owns. Who will make him pay his tithe? Who will make him pay his taxes? Who will persuade him to pay some attention to his soul when life has become so interesting? With usury, things are getting out of hand.
Contro natura! thunders the Church—against nature. In Dante’s hell, sodomites and usurers are punished in the same place, the third ditch of the seventh circle where flakes of burning ash sift on an unnatural landscape of scorching sand for all eternity. The sodomites are forced to exist (how can we say live?) in an unnatural perpetual motion. The usurers are forced to sit unnaturally still, as they did at their accounts. Only their hands move rapidly and unnaturally, as once they moved counting coins or writing bills that have no currency beyond the grave.
The other inmates of that infernal ditch are the blasphemers; it is unnatural to take the name of your Creator in vain. None of these three sins is considered such today. If a man, today, negotiates a mortgage with a client in the afternoon, has sex with his male lover in the evening, and blurts out, “Christ Almighty!” when the alarm starts him from sleep in the morning, we have no difficulty thinking of him as a decent kind of fellow. Or at least not in the West. In an Islamic state, all three actions are punishable. For the Qur’an will no more permit the lending of money at an interest than it will allow Salman Rushdie to deride the name of Muhammad, or two consenting males to make love. Usury makes money “copulate,” said the theologians, quoting Aristotle. Which is unnatural.
If you still find this concept hard to grasp, you’re in good company. “Go back a little way,” Dante’s pilgrim poet begs his guide Virgil as they hurry through hell, “to where you told me that usury offends God’s goodness, and untie that knot for me.” He can’t quite see it. Summarizing Thomas Aquinas, Virgil explains that, “Nature takes its course from heavenly intellect,” and that, “Human toil, as far as it is able, follows nature, as the pupil does his master, so that it is God’s grandchild, as it were.” In short, God creates work to complete man’s nature. Refusing work—growing rich without moving a finger—the usurer rejects nature, rejects the way God has chosen for him, insults God’s grandchild.
Crucially, then, we must imagine a mind that believes that moral codes are based not on the well-being or otherwise of our fellow man—the poor are not mentioned here—but on metaphysics. The distance between believing that lending at an interest, however low, is always a sin, because it is unnatural, to the modern notion that interest rates are quite normal—but iniquitous when so high that they push a Third World country into poverty—might be one way of measuring the distance between fourteenth-century man and ourselves. That said, however, and granted the good faith of Aquinas and Dante, the sheer violence of the Church’s hostility to usury makes it hard to believe that priests and pope didn’t have some urgent, worldly interest in the matter. One’s “toil,” after all, in the medieval world, meant one’s station in life—miller, knight, butcher, peasant—which was largely fixed from birth. To refuse one’s station was to refuse the fixed order of society in which the Church had a considerable investment and to throw the world into turmoil.
One man who definitely rose above his station and would put his children and grandchildren in a position to rise even higher was Cosimo de’ Medici, whose own father, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, founded the family bank in 1397 and warned his son against the dangers of speculating in politics. In the thirteenth century, the Florentines had kicked out the ancient nobles and introduced a nine-man government elected by lot from among the wealthier property holders. And the government was re-elected every two months. So everybody who was anybody would have a taste of power, briefly, in order that no one should hold it permanently. As a system, this was as unworkable as it was idealistic. Rich men began to use their money to make sure the names they wanted were drawn for the government. Groups of supporters formed around them. Political conflicts developed. Sure enough, in 1433, Cosimo was arrested on a charge of treason. He had tried to rise above his station, buying the support of men in every quarter of the city, presumably with a view to controlling the city’s destiny.
Thanks to the opportunities for bribery that immense wealth brings, Cosimo escaped execution and got away with exile. A year later, when a government favorable to him and much in need of cash invited the banker back, he set about making sure that in the future, the ministers elected by lot would always be friendly. He abolished a law or two that made certain kinds of interest-bearing loans difficult, and he promoted people from the lower classes who would be loyal to him against other members of the city’s ruling oligarchy. So usury not only lifted Cosimo above his station, but others with him. Potentially, it was a social revolution.
Not that the banker was without a sense of guilt. Having “accumulated quite a bit on his conscience,” his biographer Vespasiano tells us, “as most men do who govern states and want to be ahead of the rest,” Cosimo consulted his bank’s client, Pope Eugenius, as to how God might “have mercy on him and preserve him in the enjoyment of his temporal goods.” Spend ten thousand florins restoring the monastery of San Marco, Eugenius replied. It was the first of a long and extremely generous series of renovations and investments in devotional art. Interestingly, Cosimo always made sure that the churchmen to whom he was giving were the purest and poorest, those whose prayers would be worth something up above. And he made sure that these humble ascetics accepted lavish, colorful paintings that a well-to-do Florentine could feel at home with: the three magi with their rich gifts and splendid clothes was a favorite. The Last Judgment was definitely not. In return for his generous donations, Cosimo was granted a papal bull absolving him from all sins, and he had the words of this bull engraved in stone in San Marco. “Never shall I be able to give God enough to set him down in my books as a debtor,” the banker remarked humbly of his huge outlay. Yet clearly that was the kind of relationship he would have preferred. Meantime, condemning usury and fearing the social and political consequences, the Church grew rich from the usurer’s need to buy forgiveness and respectability.
Yet it wasn’t enough for Cosimo to control Florence to be sure of enjoying his wealth, and it wasn’t enough to invest in church art to guarantee himself peace of mind. For Italy was indeed in turmoil and Florence constantly threatened. “No trace is here visible,” writes the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, “of that half religious loyalty by which the legitimate princes of the West were supported; personal popularity is the nearest approach we can find to it. Talent and calculation were the only means of advancement.” But what were talent and calculation without cash? The usurer, the banker, is more dangerous, more powerful, when the traditional structures of society have given way. There is nothing now to obstruct the progress of money. There is nothing more solid and reliable now than the golden florin of Florence, on which, in defiance of ancient hierarchies, no sovereign’s head is stamped, just the name Florentia on one side and the lily, emblem of the city, on the other. With no king on his coins, the banker is more or less obliged to be a kingmaker himself. He funds this or that side or is plundered by them. He either controls the fiscal system or he is taxed out of business. Needless to say, the literature of the time was full of attacks on the “lowborn pleb who rises from the depths to great prosperity.” Could anyone be more callous, wicked, and proud? “A couple of lengths of red cloth,” said Cosimo de’ Medici in one of his wryer moods, “and you have your nobleman.”
With money, you can change your social position, you can have women and go to heaven. This is the contradiction behind so much mental activity in the West. We love money and what we imagine it can do and buy; and at the same time we are haunted by a fear as old as Achilles: surely there must be some value that is beyond buying and selling, something beyond the art of exchange. Oh, but not something, please, that tells us that money is altogether evil, that the plague that took away my child is God’s punishment for my financial transactions. Such is the divided consciousness of the banker in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such the contradiction that over the years will encourage the cultivation of less disturbing and morally demanding non-monetary values—in philosophy, aesthetics, and love.
The real scandal of money, and particularly usury, as we have already said, is that it does not respect traditional hierarchies. The merest artisan can make a fortune and start strutting around in expensive crimson. The feudal order breaks down. But money once made notoriously seeks that which cannot—supposedly—be bought. Perhaps the first generation is happy to have acquired material wealth, but the second yearns for a distinction that is not based on money, a distinction that in the past only birth could give. In the end, the individual—even the richest—resists the idea that his worth is to be quantified in money terms, especially if it wasn’t he who earned the cash. So we come back to Achilles’ conviction, when he refused to accept money in return for his girlfriend Briseide, that human uniqueness has no price, and we arrive at the roots of every snobbery: I wish to be distinguished, but how?
Education is a good place to start. Money buys it, and it then generates a value that goes beyond money. Art achieves the same alchemy. “Money alone,” remarked the wondering Galeazzo Sforza when shown around the art treasures of the Palazzo Medici, “would not be able to compete with what has been done here.” Yet everything had been bought with money. So, ironically, the guilt which prompted the penitential gesture of commissioning devotional art eventually showed the way to a new form of social distinction, based on taste and style rather than cash. And at that point, guilt could be forgotten.
What was the proper education for a rich banker? Giovanni di Bicci had done no more than follow fashion when, at the end of the fourteenth century, he gave Cosimo his humanist tutors. Steeped in Cicero, the young man was seduced by the ideal of the noble leader. He wanted to be such a man. The Florentine constitution, with its system of election by lottery, forbade these ambitions, yet was so weak that, as we’ve seen, it more or less invited a rich man to spend his way to an ambiguous, covert sort of power.
Florence had stripped its feudal nobles of their privileges and didn’t want a return to the past. On the other hand, the expensive education Cosimo was giving his children was breeding aristocratic presumptions. Their life began to resemble that of noblemen. Is it possible, they must have started to wonder, to invent an aristocracy, a new, more sophisticated version of the crude old birthright—not simply and brutally to seize power, but to create, over two or three wealthy and well-read generations, a new hereditary privilege?
The future of Europe for centuries to come would depend on the answer to this question. And that answer, of course, is no. Money and culture do not amount to a divine right to pass on political power to one’s heirs. And yet… if sufficiently enlightened, if supported by effective propaganda, if interminably intermarried with others who had similar pretensions, or who had once been recognized as royal, perhaps the world might be convinced by an expensive parody, an ersatz aristocracy—especially if, at the end of the day and in the teeth of the evidence, the people enjoying the privileges were always willing to declare themselves ordinary citizens.
A key element in the process that transformed the usurer of the fourteenth century into the ersatz aristocrat exemplified by Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent in the late fifteenth was the rise of Platonism. Under Cosimo’s protection—a house and a salary—Marsilio Ficino translated the entire works of Plato into Latin in the 1460s. It was the first time they had all appeared in a form Western Christendom could read. Later to become a priest, Ficino added his own personal but crucial twist to Christian Platonism: the human soul, he decided, was “the center of nature,” the connecting link between the hierarchies of Platonic reality that placed inanimate material at the bottom and a world of ideal forms at the top. Through love and intellect, Ficino thought the human soul naturally strives upward, away from what is base and earthly, through the hierarchy to the pure light of perfect eternity, God.
Discussed by Florence’s best minds while celebrating Plato’s birthday every November 7 at the Medici villa at Careggi, such ideas came at exactly the right moment for the process of upward social transformation in which the Medici were involved. Apart from giving a new sense to courtly love poetry (the mind moving from profane to divine love), all education, refinement, and intellectual achievement could now be understood as essentially moral, involved in a process of striving toward the Divine. Certain secular activities, that is, could be imagined as partaking of the sacred, or at least as turned toward the sacred. Nothing good (and the dangerous implication is that we know instinctively what is good) was outside the Christian framework, at which point art and poetry need no longer turn so constantly to strictly Christian subject matter, because beauty itself is close to divinity and the human soul naturally leans toward it. Creativity, which is of God, is not, in this new and optimistic version of Platonism, denied to man, though few achieve it. But when achieved, it is essentially good. Even today, there are many who believe that art is necessarily on the right side and do not ask which bank sponsored it. Sponsored by Medici money, Botticelli can now use the same pretty model for a Madonna or for Venus. He can leave the lady’s clothes on or he can lift them off. Either way, the mind is being lifted spiritually. At this point, the gesture of penance implicit in almost all Cosimo’s patronage of the arts can be safely and happily forgotten. Art is always sacred. The rich banker has found a way of claiming a distinction that is not merely monetary, but without now admitting a humiliating sin. Penitence has morphed into taste.
But to dig a little deeper at what wasn’t explicitly stated or perhaps even consciously meant, yet nevertheless seeps through: the process of raising yourself up, of becoming this refined, educated, artistic aristocrat was now no longer an evil thrusting above and beyond your proper medieval station. On the contrary, it was a sign of your upward aspiration toward the Divine. This was an attractive and soothing thought. It would galvanize Lorenzo into sponsoring, and himself engaging in, a range of lavish, public artistic projects, mainly secular, which were at once beautiful and politically convenient, in that they enhanced the city’s image and his own. A leader who sponsors and, as a poet, actually creates beautiful art cannot be a bad leader. A leader who employs the likes of Botticelli to make festival banners and carnival floats will not get a bad press from posterity. And the good citizen, the good Christian, must be a Platonist because only the Platonist appreciates and participates in this striving for the beautiful and better, this aestheticizing of public life. If he wasn’t a Platonist, that is, our philistine citizen might merely start counting the florins and making dry remarks about political self-interest.
Which brings us to the chief drawback of these exciting ideas: they had little to say about moneymaking and the price of things. The underlying contradiction here is quite different from Cosimo’s dilemma: how do I get my soul to heaven while amassing a fortune with supposedly sinful banking practices? The problem now is that while wealth is actually more important than ever—for how else can you get the best artists to paint for you, the best teachers for your children, a decent translation of Plato, and the wherewithal to throw a lavish party for a dead philosopher’s birthday?—nevertheless, the actual process of moneymaking is passed over as something base, something on the lowest level of the Platonic hierarchy, something the nobler soul would gladly leave behind in its struggle to be free from mere matter.
To this frame of mind, then, the complexities of accountancy, the intricate technicalities by which the sin of usury can be avoided are no longer things to dwell on with pleasure, as Cosimo doubtless did dwell on them—Cosimo, who said he would be a banker even if money could be made by waving a wand. No, now the cultured man, grandson of the banker, wants to wave whatever wand comes to hand and get the problem of a good income out of the way as soon as possible: by lending money to the duke of Milan at the highest possible rate of interest, for example; by getting the concession to collect import duties at key customs posts; or, most dramatically, in the case of the Medici bank, by the attempt to establish a monopoly in the mining and commerce of alum, a mineral essential to the wool trade and hence one of the most valuable raw materials of the time.
All of these ambitious projects failed drastically. The huge fortune that Cosimo built up in the first half of the fifteenth century was squandered in the second half, to the point that Lorenzo frequently had to hijack public funds to keep the business afloat. Rather than a banker muscling his way into political power, he was now a politician with his hands in the public coffers. But other Florentine banks declined too. This new generation of men were no longer interested in money, except to spend. And since spending, unlike usury or rising above one’s station, was hardly a sin, all the moral tension that had animated Cosimo and made his religious art commissions so fascinating and ambiguous in their genuine devotion and simultaneous eagerness to legitimize wealth and show it off, was also gone. The High Renaissance came at exactly the moment when usury was felt to be most sinful, yet was most diligently and anxiously practiced. After which, Michelangelo ushered in the mannerism and monumental magnificence that would characterize the vainglorious dynasties of the later Medici, men who declared themselves dukes rather than bankers—grand dukes even—men who understood art first and foremost as a propaganda tool, and who did everything they could to have their subjects forget that their power originated in the minds of two or three clever ancestors who had known how to make money copulate despite the Church’s prohibition.
But a heresy against this faith in hard work has stubbornly survived nearly two centuries’ preaching of the virtues of America’s civil religion. Its wayward adherents rarely ascend to pulpits or podiums. Instead, they are more likely to be found on subway platforms or in convenience stores standing in line to buy lottery tickets. While they may be hard workers, they know that labor alone is insufficient for success, that sometimes you have to catch a break. As Louis Hartz observed in his study The Liberal Tradition in America, a belief in “the breaks” has long been a safety valve to relieve the economic frustrations generated by a closed system of unevenly distributed merits and rewards. The lottery ticket, humble as it is, serves as a passport to a more fluid moral economy, where fate can be cruel or kind but is always arbitrary—where luck, as even Horatio Alger realized, matters more than pluck. And this culture of chance more closely resembles the world in which most people live than the one prescribed by the dominant mythology of success, which can aptly be called a culture of control.
The heresy owes its origins to the pagan goddess Fortuna, a deity who appears in the pantheons of many ancient societies. To imagine the contemporary lottery player paying homage to the goddess is not to dignify the prospect of poor people blowing grocery money on impossibly long odds, or to imply that government-sponsored gambling is an appropriate way to raise public revenues. But it does suggest that gambling is about more than mere money. Modern games of chance reenact ancient rituals of divination—casting lots, throwing pebbles, bones, shells, or dice—designed to provide glimpses of the sacred and to conjure luck or its spiritual equivalent, grace. Rather than the static and timeless cosmic order of orthodox monotheism, the sense of the sacred sought by diviners was a pluralist plentitude, symbolized in Western tradition by inconstant Fortuna and by similar figures in American Indian and African traditions.
These cross-cultural ingredients combined to create the syncretist stew that became the American culture of chance—a culture at ease with uncertainty, doubtful that diligence offers the only path to success, and suspicious of the idea that money means moral worth. For the bettors and believers who embrace this perspective, chance represents a portal of possibility, not a heresy to be demonized or a statistical probability to be managed. They are Fortuna’s children, and a glance at her career in the Old and New Worlds provides a perspective that is missing from most accounts of our history.
In ancient Rome, Fortuna began as a fertility goddess but soon came to embody prosperity in general, as well as a basic principle of potentiality. She merged with the older Greek divinity Tyche, whose devotee Palamedes, the mortal grandson of Poseidon, supposedly invented dice and dedicated the first pair, made from the ankle bones of hoofed animals, to her. The iconography of Fortuna linked her with emblems of abundance but also with uncertainty and ceaseless change: she carried a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables yet stood on a ball or turned a wheel that rotated her beneficiaries. “Changeable Fortune wanders abroad with aimless steps, abiding firm in no place; now she beams with joy, now she puts on a harsh mien, steadfast in her own fickleness,” Ovid wrote in his Tristia, after he had been forced into exile. “I, too, had my day, but that day was fleeting; my fire was but a straw, and short-lived.”
But Fortune did not fit well with Christian ideas of Providence. To early Christians, the divine plan unfolded as mysteriously as the fluctuations of luck, but however remote the planner or apparently perverse his decrees, his purpose was ultimately benign. Boethius, unjustly imprisoned in the sixth century after a distinguished public service career, endorsed this idea in the Consolation of Philosophy. “Well, here am I, stripped of my possessions and honors, my reputation ruined, punished because I tried to do good.… Why should uncertain Fortune control our lives?” Lady Philosophy appeared in Boethius’s story to explain that behind the apparent caprices of Fortune, divine Providence governs all things with “the rudder of goodness.” Chance was “an empty word,” Lady Philosophy said. After all, “what room can there be for random events since God keeps all things in order?”
This was the traditional Christian argument that would be repeated for centuries. Based on faith in a transcendent cosmic order, the lesson taught its students to look for the silver lining in clouds of gray. In Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” Theseus reminds his subjects after an extraordinary series of violent reversals of fortune that “the First Mover of the First Cause” determines all outcomes in accordance with an overarching plan. But even pious Christians sometimes found it difficult to submit to the perversities of fate. Fortuna, unlike Jehovah, could be propitiated through ritual, and her presence survived in the magical belief system that formed the foundation of the medieval church—the vernacular faith that sacraments and sacred artifacts could bring material luck in this world as well as spiritual luck, or grace, in the next.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, Protestant reformers assaulted these rituals as part of a broader war on the medieval culture of chance. Taking their cues from John Calvin, theologians disparaged Fortuna, deriding belief in her powers as a pagan excrescence on the Church. “There is no such thing as fortune or chance,” [emphasis in original] Calvin announced in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, as “even things seemingly most fortuitous”—a branch falling from a tree and killing a passing traveler, or wildly unequal divisions of wealth and poverty—are subject to divine will. Only by God’s “secret plan,” Calvin wrote, do “some distinguish themselves, while others remain contemptible.”
Predestination coupled with the Calvinist emphasis on the innate depravity of mankind preserved a sort of spiritual democracy since everyone was equally base in the sight of God. But when liberalizing theologians began to emphasize human beings’ capacity to save themselves, success started to mean the convergence of personal merit with the Providential plan, consecrating prosperity acquired through individual ambition. As early as 1653, when dissenting sects proliferated amid the English Civil War, a female sectarian confessed that she could not stand to see her neighbors prosper, as it meant they had prayed more than she had. For the upwardly mobile, as well as for the already prosperous, Providence surrounded affluence with an aura of sanctity.
But the continued precariousness of existence sustained a belief in Fortuna, and the need for propitiatory rites at her shrines, especially as the faith in paganistic Catholic rituals declined among English Protestants. Amid the changes wrought by the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the exploration of the New World, everyday life in the early modern era remained full of uncertainty. Crime and catastrophe abounded in places like London, where the high incidence of fire made reversals of fortune a routine event. In the mid-sixteenth century, one chronicler observed, “He which at one o’clock was worth five thousand pounds and, as the prophet saith, drank his wine in bowls of fine silver plate, had not by two o’clock so much as a wooden dish left to eat his meat in, nor a house to cover his sorrowful head.”
Early modern responses to the randomness of experience ranged widely, from the Calvinist denial of chance to the skeptical despair of Shakespeare’s Gloucester: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” Renaissance humanism denounced resigning oneself to chance. Secular individualists like Machiavelli argued that ingenious men might court Fortuna, adapt to her moods, and ultimately bend her to their will. Another individualist of the era, Hamlet, refuses “to suffer/the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and seeks vengeance against his father’s murderers.
Despite occasional revolts, faith in Fortune endured in a variety of ways, even in the language that people used to describe their circumstances. The word “happiness” has long been linguistically dependent on chance. The thirteenth-century English substantive “hap” derives from the old Norse “happ,” meaning “chance” or “good luck.” The verb “happen” and the adverb “haply” (by chance) emerged from this root in the fourteenth century, as did “happy,” which originally meant “prosperous” and by the sixteenth century had acquired the connotation of contentment. Happiness, in short, happens to you. Its incidence can be cultivated but never contrived, its blessings courted through the use of talismanic items like the amulets, charms, omens, and portents that pervaded early modern England. Suffused with hope and foreboding, these objects took the form of everything from base effluvia to mundane detritus: urine, graveyard dirt, pebbles, chicken feathers, fingernail clippings, glass beads, and cowrie shells.
In colonial America, the idea of Fortune flourished in all cultural strata: the indigenous, the enslaved, and the colonists themselves. French Jesuits in the late sixteenth century observed the Iroquois, the Huron, and the Seneca using caribou bones and peach pits to divine the will of the cosmos. In 1705, a Dutch trader in what is now Ghana noted that the natives consulted their gods “by a sort of Wild Nuts, which they pretend to take up by guess and let fall again.” The Africans who were enslaved and sold to American colonists would bring their divination rituals to the new continent. In fact, the development of the American culture of chance depended on the African presence in the population and the receptivity of American colonists—including the educated elite—to African beliefs. The prominent planter William Byrd regularly consulted a black conjurer, Old Abram, to keep him informed about the future progress of one of his amours. In the malarial bottomlands along the Chesapeake, Virginia planters like Byrd kept “fortune books” full of magical and astrological lore regarding the means of assuring luck in love, marriage, sex, health, and travel.
European, American Indian, and African conjuring traditions exerted a persistent fascination for the inhabitants of the New World as the facts on the ground remained fortuitous, unprovoked peril an everyday occurrence, and resignation to God’s plan sometimes difficult to sustain. In the emerging coastal cities, fortune-tellers thrived and “dream books” designed to crack oneiric codes with interpretive formulas proliferated. In the Southern colonies, high-stakes gambling mirrored the risky business of scratching out a living in a raw, new country. Games of chance provided early Americans with opportunities for recreational conjuring—a secular form of divination that still yielded clues to the cosmos and the gambler’s place in it.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the emerging worldview of the American gambler coincided with the revival of classical literature among the educated classes. Generations of Americans imbibed the lessons of ancient authors about the arbitrariness of fate. “Until he is dead, do not yet call a man happy, but only lucky,” wrote Herodotus. An ethic of Fortune persisted among the literate elite as well as among less articulate folk—a conviction that misfortune visited the worthy along with the licentious, that no necessary link existed between virtue and reward, and that the wisest course of action was stoic resignation to the decrees of fate.
From the stoic point of view, immunity to the vanities of wealth and honor improved one’s endurance of disappointment and even disaster. The pursuit of earthly good fortune, which in the Declaration of Independence would become the pursuit of happiness, was a fool’s errand. Happiness was fleeting and beyond human control. Fortune ruled all: blockheads grew rich, fools and fops were dear to women while men of wit and spirit languished. “Wisdom is often found guilty of folly, and ingenuity of error,” as a writer in the New York Weekly observed in 1796. Merit never guaranteed a reward, and good fortune remained as inscrutable as God’s grace.
Playing the hand one was dealt taught resignation but also hope. “Patience, and shuffle the cards,” Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote, and the phrase soon became a colloquial expression in English. This advice underwrote what became a foundational American myth—the possibility of starting over, even of reinventing the self—but it also resonated with religious longings for what centuries later the theologian Martin Buber would call “the grace of beginning again and ever again.” Despite the emphasis on Providence in Protestant Christianity, the ethic of Fortune remained consistent with much in both Jewish and Christian traditions, in particular the words of Ecclesiastes: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
Through the end of the eighteenth centu-ry, much of the British American population knew this passage and endorsed the worldview it articulated. Fortune’s adherents included farmers and artisans, goodwives and tavern wenches, orthodox Christians and enlightened stoics. Whatever their differences, they agreed that God’s ways were not our ways and that those who prospered in this world might well fry in the next. Jesus himself had advised his followers that they should take no thought of the morrow, for raiment or shelter, and should lose all in this world to gain salvation in the next—advice that could resonate with the gambler’s insouciant disregard for security.
Despite its durability, the ethic of Fortune faced unprecedented challenges during the second half of the eighteenth century. Even as they quoted Ecclesiastes, many literate British Americans embraced a new, secular model of the self as a rational, autonomous individual acting in harmony with natural laws. The older cosmology had included a mysterious realm only accessible through sacred play; the new cosmology, on the other hand, was more predictable, more pliable to human will. This vision of a well-ordered universe lay behind the rationalism of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as well as the United States Constitution.
The Protestant war on Fortune, declared by John Calvin centuries earlier, also allied itself with Newtonian science, whose practitioners were less interested in denying chance than in containing it. By the end of the eighteenth century, Jacob Bernoulli, Adolphe Quetelet, and other statisticians had developed modern probability theory, reducing chance to a predictable outlier or a standard deviation. Both statisticians and devotees of “rational religion” hastened the shift from a respectful and even fearful Renaissance vision of Fortune as a goddess to a modern, more confident understanding of chance as a condition to be managed. A calculating cast of mind assumed that mastery of circumstances depended on access to large quantities of information. Since gamblers lacked access to this information, calculators distrusted them. “Nature’s admonition is to avoid the dice altogether,” Bernoulli wrote. “Everyone who bets any part of his fortune, however small, on a mathematically fair game of chance acts irrationally.” In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was equally critical of gamblers, advancing the classic critique of lotteries: the house always wins.
As the culture of control spread, the appearance of a natural order and a regulated system concealed the arbitrariness of money as a measure of value. The concealment served the emerging stock markets, which were well suited to the deployment of statistics. Adept at anticipating aggregate movements of capital, successful stock traders searched for regularity rather than singularity, averages rather than divine miracles. In this, they typified the new calculating spirit of capitalism.
Meanwhile, educated Americans increasingly associated the culture of chance with backwardness, ignorance, and passivity. Conjuring and fortune-telling were pushed to the poorer, darker margins of the population. The process belonged to a recurring historical pattern that inclined the affluent to Providence and the lower classes to Fortune. As Fortuna acquired a darker hue, she became less respectable in the eyes of prosperous Americans, yet the very marginality of black conjurers gave them an exotic appeal: they could claim a secret knowledge unavailable to the dominant calculus of risk and profit.
Outside the circles of the educated elite, homage to Fortune survived. Those employed in hazardous occupations, such as sailors, felt no need to be furtive when visiting Fortuna’s shrines. When the fortune-teller Molly Pitcher of Boston died in 1813 at seventy-five, the local police records reported that, “Her fame as a fortune-teller was known throughout the world. No vessel arrived on the coast, but some of its hardy crew visited Molly.” She lived on a lonely road near High Rock with the bleached bones of a beached whale washed up at the gate of her cottage—an emblem of nature’s caprice. Molly peered into tea cups and read the leaves, but also eavesdropped on her clients’ conversations with her servant girl as they waited in her ante room. As always, those more vulnerable to Fortuna’s slings and arrows were more likely to beseech her aid; increasingly, the truly fortunate denied her existence by insisting that “you make your own luck.”
During the early nineteenth century, as divination rituals took the recreational form of gambling, homage to Fortuna became more commonly confined to the alehouse. Its seedy habitat made gambling a convenient target for moralists. As religious revivals swept in waves across the landscape, an evangelical ethos began to envelop American culture, sanctioning more rigorous ideals of self-mastery. Critics of gamblers at first stressed the links between gambling and stock speculation, but gradually narrowed their focus to the moral plight of the individual gambler. As the historian Ann Fabian has observed, the gambler became the embodiment of illicit risk, implicitly cleansing the speculator of that taint. As Wall Street sanitized speculation as “investment,” and the mere manipulation of money through complex financial instruments became a path to self-made manhood, gambling continued to be stigmatized by society.
Mason Locke Weems, whose early biography of George Washington introduced American readers to the story of the cherry tree, condemned gambling’s effect on the “social body.” While he warned of the impact of gambling on the community, the cautionary tales he told concentrated on the gambler’s destruction of his family and himself. Weems’ gamblers refused to toil, pissed away their patrimony, courted public scorn, and committed suicide. Weems challenged his readers to show him “one single gambler, who has lived and died rich.” Even moralists like Weems had absorbed the idea that money measured personal worth. To be without it was to be nobody.
For reformers, gambling threatened the very existence of the self, especially if the self was defined through hard work. Gambling posed powerful temptations to laziness, as a Baltimore poet suggested in 1815 in “The Lottery”:
She seems to give to all who ask Without imposing labour’s task The idle as the busy bask Alike in the sunshine of her mask.
The poem presents the lottery as a traditional female temptress, a provocation to male anxiety and desire. With her false promises of easy money (her sunshine is only a mask), she threatens to entrap the unwary and drain them of their vital substance. The ethic of self-mastery, nurtured in the bosom of the bourgeois family, was the alternative to self-depletion.
But for every self-made man trudging on to his destiny, there was a shapeshifting confidence man trying to get rich quickly through manipulation and deception. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville compared American commerce to a “vast lottery” and marveled at Americans’ relish for risk. During these antebellum decades, Americans added bluffing and three-card draw to poker, strategies that let the gambler manipulate appearances but also start over, both of which appealed to shapeshifting tricksters in a country where people were encouraged to reinvent themselves. Speculators and gamblers, pretenders and posers, all swarmed at the feet of Fortuna. Yet by the 1850s, Fortune’s main role was to be a target of anti-gambling invective. As a Unitarian minister complained some years after the Civil War, “Fortune is still a goddess, and to her shrine throng the devotees of pleasure,” playing with “the dice-boxes of destiny,” and ignoring “the divine import of money.” Cash had become what it is today: a sacred cow.
Over the course of the next hundred years, Fortuna’s devotees included vagrant intellectuals and artists from William James to Robert Rauschenberg, who cultivated openness to cosmic possibility and enlarged the modern meaning of Fortune from mere money to pure potentiality. As always, followers of Fortune could also be found among the gamblers and other marginal types who constituted the sporting crowd. In recent decades, their numbers have dramatically increased as gambling has gone mainstream and become a major industry. Gambling revenues reached $84.7 billion in 2005, nearly double what they had been only ten years before, and mostly all from legal casinos and lotteries. The emergence of gambling as mass entertainment can be traced to several sources, including the willingness of cash-strapped state governments to substitute gambling revenues for taxation and the decline of job security among gamblers themselves—in a contingent labor market, where one can be dismissed for reasons having nothing to do with one’s performance, the disjunction between merit and reward is more painfully apparent than ever. If hard work gets you nowhere fast, why not have a fling with Fortune?
Without sentimentalizing gamblers, it is possible to imagine that some of them still sustain the alternative moral outlook encouraged by the sporting crowd for much of our history—the notion that a true gambler never passed up a bet at long odds or a loan request from a tapped-out friend. The gambler from this view could be an exemplar of the reckless generosity that the theologian Paul Tillich called “Holy Waste.” Few theologians of Fortune matched the eloquence of Harlem Pete, the author of a dream book published in 1949. “If you want to be rich, Give! If you want to be poor, Grasp! If you want abundance, Scatter! If you want to be needy, Hoard!” Neither Jesus nor Fortuna could have put it any better. The willingness to relinquish control over outcomes—to play—promoted the insouciance toward money that lies at the core of the culture of chance. This outlook arose from an insight common among Fortuna’s children: the recognition that you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you get.
Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond that world—the black world beyond the veil. Today it makes little difference to Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the soul-life of the land, he is today, and naturally will long remain, unthought of, half-forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and will and do for himself—and let no man dream that day will never come—then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race childhood. Today, the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, the veil of race. Few know of these problems; few who know notice them; and yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer—a field for somebody sometime to discover. Hither has the temptation of Hippomenes penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now indirectly and anon directly must influence the larger for good or ill, the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars. The old leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago. Into their places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid porters and artisans, the businessmen—all those with property and money. And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the other world, goes too the same inevitable change in ideals. The South laments today the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro—the faithful, courteous slave of other days with his incorruptible honesty and dignified humility. He is passing away just as surely as the old type of Southern gentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes—the sudden transformation of a fair far off ideal of freedom into the hard reality of breadwinning and the consequent deification of bread.
In the black world, the preacher and teacher embodied once the ideals of this people—the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but today the danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the mammonism of America be added the rising mammonism of the reborn South, and the mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding mammonism of its half-awakened black millions? Whither, then, is the new world quest of goodness and beauty and truth gone glimmering? Must this and that fair flower of freedom which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our fathers’ blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of gold—into lawless lust with Hippomenes?
]]> W. E. B. Du Bois, from The Souls of Black Folk. Raised by a single mother, Du Bois studied with William James and became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. Sociologist, poet, and historian, Du Bois emerged along with Booker T. Washington as one of the nation's most prolific proponents of racial equality.]]>The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of Mr. Dombey’s thoughts that Mr. Dombey was quite disconcerted.
“What is money, Paul?” he answered. “Money?”
“Yes,” said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his little chair, and turning the old face up towards Mr. Dombey’s; “What is money?”
Mr. Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms circulating—medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market, and so forth; but looking down at the little chair and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered, “Gold and silver and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?”
“Oh yes, I know what they are,” said Paul. “I don’t mean that, Papa. I mean what’s money after all?”
Heaven and earth, how old his face was as he turned it up again towards his father’s!
“What is money after all!” said Mr. Dombey, backing his chair a little that he might the better gaze in sheer amazement at the presumptuous atom that propounded such an inquiry.
“I mean, Papa, what can it do?” returned Paul, folding his arms (they were hardly long enough to fold), and looking at the fire, and up at him, and at the fire, and up at him again.
Mr. Dombey drew his chair back to its former place and patted him on the head. “You’ll know better by and by, my man,” he said. “Money, Paul, can do anything.” He took hold of the little hand and beat it softly against one of his own as he said so.
But Paul got his hand free as soon as he could, and rubbing it gently to and fro on the elbow of his chair, as if his wit were in the palm and he were sharpening it—and looking at the fire again as though the fire had been his adviser and prompter—repeated, after a short pause:
“Anything, Papa?”
“Yes. Anything—almost,” said Mr. Dombey.
“Anything means everything, don’t it, Papa?” asked his son, not observing, or possibly not understanding, the qualification.
“It includes it, yes,” said Mr. Dombey.
“Why didn’t money save me my Mama?” returned the child. “It isn’t cruel, is it?”
“Cruel!” said Mr. Dombey, settling his neckcloth and seeming to resent the idea. “No. A good thing can’t be cruel.”
“If it’s a good thing and can do anything,” said the little fellow, thoughtfully, as he looked back at the fire, “I wonder why it didn’t save me my Mama.”
He didn’t ask the question of his father this time. Perhaps he had seen, with a child’s quickness, that it had already made his father uncomfortable. But he repeated the thought aloud, as if it were quite an old one to him and had troubled him very much; and sat with his chin resting on his hand, still cogitating and looking for an explanation in the fire.
Mr. Dombey, having recovered from his surprise, not to say his alarm (for it was the very first occasion on which the child had ever broached the subject of his mother to him, though he had had him sitting by his side, in this same manner, evening after evening), expounded to him how that money, though a very potent spirit, never to be disparaged on any account whatever, could not keep people alive whose time was come to die; and how that we must all die, unfortunately, even in the city, though we were never so rich. But how that money caused us to be honoured, feared, respected, courted, and admired, and made us powerful and glorious in the eyes of all men, and how that it could, very often, even keep off death, for a long time together. How, for example, it had secured to his Mama the services of Mr. Pilkins, by which he, Paul, had often profited himself; likewise of the great Doctor Parker Peps, whom he had never known. And how it could do all that could be done. This, with more to the same purpose, Mr. Dombey instilled into the mind of his son, who listened attentively and seemed to understand the greater part of what was said to him.
“It can’t make me strong and quite well, either, Papa; can it?” asked Paul, after a short silence, rubbing his tiny hands.