Transforming Money

Intimations of a New Economic Story

2010-10-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

Intimations of a New Economic Story

Given the very real tragedy of our current economy, we need a new economic story that dispels faulty assumptions about growth, the environment and our natural resources, and transforms the anti-social power of self-interested behavior along with the extractive practice of over-accumulation.

The new economic story is rooted in the incontrovertible reality of interdependence—social, ecological, and spiritual. At the same time, the new story honors cultural freedom and equality in matters political. The story embraces the value of dynamic tensions inherent in this construction. The new economic story restores to money its original purpose, to be put at the service of people who can use it to serve others, and eliminates the use of money solely to make more money. An essential part of the story is money as differentiated transactional functions—purchase, loan, and gift. Each of these functions has its own qualities that support not only the continual circulation of money, but also its renewal. The story assumes that economic activity will generate surplus capital, some appropriate portion of which will be reinvested in entrepreneurial innovation and some significant portion will be returned as gift to regenerate culture.

The story is based upon an understanding that all economic activity is actually initiated by gift, just as each of our breathing lives is supported at the outset by the gift of nourishment. That fluid gift is transformed through human development into capacities for new ideas and recognition of the needs of others. This is a snapshot of how a healthy culture contributes to economic renewal. Lending helps implement those economic ideas and the money is quickened by the use of loan (or gift) proceeds for purchase.

So the story portrays economic self-renewal through the continual flow and transformation of money through transactions. Economic life is actually managed collaboratively or associatively by representatives of all the parties affected by it. Thus, in the new story everyone’s basic needs are present, and through the circulation of money our interdependence becomes transparent and life-affirming. It is fully integrated. It is not only possible but also necessary for our survival. This is the new economic story characterized—nothing more than an intimation. It will take tremendous will, steadfastness of purpose, and an endless supply of social tact and grace to bring about this transformation. But first it is important to understand the intentions of the story itself, so it can support coherent action and be told compellingly to others.

Digging deeper into the current economic story surfaces lots of apparently disconnected pieces. The story is laden with an abundance of impenetrable shadow elements and sorely lacking in the brilliant light of the possible. The story the media tells includes, but is not limited to: free markets as the primary approach to the world’s problems; the benefit of competition regardless of its consequences; and, the inevitability of inequity and the value of accumulated wealth. The more I hear the story the more fictional, even cynical, it appears as the evidence of its rampant and unethical self-interest accumulates. I also suspect I am not alone in suffering dissonance as I live within a storied system that appears to be crumbling, while working to support the emergence of a new one, or, at least, one that operates on a drastically revised set of principles.

To see this emergence as a transformation rather than replacement of the old presents a problem. Transformation assumes an interconnected inter-influential world in which the potential new forms must lie somewhere within the existing one. To see this potential requires acceptance of it all, even the shadows. However, the economic story I tell myself is neither one of good versus bad, nor of suspended judgment. It is instead one that transforms: assumptions about to direct experience of; power over to responsibility with; and, self-interest into service to.

Most of the stories I am told about economics are based upon the dynamic of polarities, the haves and have-nots, management and labor, supply and demand, red and blue. This model of dualistic thinking has a long history in Western culture, but it no longer serves if the non-material world of thoughts, feelings, and intentions is to be taken seriously. To this day we are still teaching that our world is constructed around managing polarities. Faucets run hot and cold, batteries have positive and negative poles, gender is defined as male or female—a small sample. At a material level these dualities serve as nothing more than identifiers or locators. They really have very little to do with how we make meaning out of experience; instead, meaning emerges through the interaction of multiple polarities. When we sense temperature, or electric current, or the human psyche, we are looking at indicator-concepts that acknowledge a field created through the co-presence and movement of polarities. For example, though I am male, I am aware of both masculine and feminine qualities that operate within my character and inform my interactions with the world.

If we are to have a new economic story, it will require a shift in thinking that sees money in the same light—as an indicator-concept, an energetic field, which is not a thing or commodity but rather a circulating measure and store of value which itself arises from the relationship between unused resources and unmet needs in economic life. The essential point is: If we are to transform the current economic story to a new one, whether you agree with my telling of it or not, we are going to have to change our thinking to include the notion that every material matter has a non-material counterpart; and, further, that each of us stands as measure of the dynamic energy field that arises from their constant interactions. How we choose to act as economic beings, individually or collaboratively, can transform the economic story, and at the same time, bring positive change to culture and the processes of governance as a by-product. Such is the power of story.

John Bloom
© 2010

Money and Social Transformation

2010-08-30T23:33:00.000-07:00

Money and Social Transformation

Money gets us what we want when we want it, if we have it. Its power seems unquestionable, dominating, and to a degree, subject to the laws of physics. It can move at the speed of electrons and in the form of waves. Cell phone technology seems destined to eliminate the friction from its transactional pathways. The economic value created through these energy fields, which we measure in money, has been compromised by the desire to accumulate. In the stories we tell about money, net worth or wealth is a metric of success that fails to indicate money’s ethical basis — one that ignores the process of how the accumulation happened and what it produced along the way. Storing money has trumped using it as an end in itself, and wealth accrues to the individual without regard to the commonwealth.

It seems absurd to accept as valid the idea of accumulating that which is inherently circulatory in nature: currency. But money, like physics, is subject to the dominant materialist world view. Despite this, a different view is emerging. Just as physicists push the boundaries of science to the metaphysical, so do we need to reframe the boundaries of economic life to include the values of spirit. Just as the stories of good that wealth has done tend to be told in the warmth of human interest and responsibility, we need a new economic story that invites and assumes the presence of our spirit, our capacity for ethical action, in our work with money and with each other — as individuals, as groups, as organizations, as communities.

I have been struggling to understand the state of ethical standards played out by those who apparently created financial instruments designed to fail, sold them to clients who bought them in good faith, then “won” big bets on the instruments failing through derivatives and hedging. Only a market economy that operates devoid of human values other than winning and greed could produce such an endeavor. This is only one of many such examples from current financial practices frequently in the news and in our lives. One good result of the unfolding saga of financial misdealings is an awakening sense that there is something wrong in the system, something deeper and more flawed than policy, something so off human equilibrium that it surfaces as flagrant inequity.

At RSF Social Finance, the way we describe the current condition of mainstream finance is complex, opaque, anonymous, and based on short-term outcomes. As antidote, we strive for all financial transactions to be direct, transparent, personal, and based on long-term relationships. This is more than just a complementary formulation; it is an approach to healing. It also represents a set of intentions that are the basis of the new economic story and a renewed ethic of social transformation.

One of the aspects of Rudolf Steiner’s work that inspires RSF is his framing of economic thinking in a broader social context that is as transformative as it is challenging to grasp. He developed this approach in response to the self-interested, competitive, and nationalistic forces that gave rise to World War I. In 1922, he proposed that all economics needed to be reconsidered as one world economy, and that political boundaries were irrelevant to the flow of economic life. He presaged the recognition of ecological limits and the altruistic notion that economic activity in any one place affects and is affected by the rest of the world. This is an imagination of circulation rather than accumulation. His version of a world economy was the complete opposite of how corporate “globalization” colonizes the local.

Steiner’s imagination of society, sometimes referred to as threefold commonwealth, divided all social life into three sectors: cultural-spiritual, rights, and economic. Steiner’s insight and innovation was to say that if the three ideals of the French Revolution — liberty, equality, and fraternity — were each rightfully applied to the appropriate sectors, social life would find its equilibrium, its life-affirming essence, not through conflict, but rather through a new kind of engaged conscious citizenship. Freedom was the guiding principle for the cultural-spiritual; equality that for rights; brotherhood (what we call interdependence or mutuality) for economics. This is a basic framework that has enormous implications for how we practice our daily lives and organize society – particularly in the realm of money. But how does one develop a sense for one’s economic self operating interdependently at the same time as one’s spirit self works in freedom? How can we see each other as equals in forming agreements and at the same moment see each other as not necessarily equal in the realm of thinking (spirit)? This takes discipline, attention, and forgiveness. Steiner was always encouraging self-development, deepened self-awareness, and interest and understanding for each other. Understanding who we are as individuals, and how we create our agreements to work together to help others thrive, is one way to put threefolding into practice.

For better or worse, money is my mirror. As I reflect on my relationship to and uses of it, I see my values (spiritual-cultural) practiced or not, the agreements I have made as between equals or not (rights), and whether I have actually added value to the economy by meeting others’ real needs (economic). Through this reflective process I can own my thoughts and actions and work to change myself. This I am free to do. I am not free to change somebody else. I also participate in our financial system and it is therefore also a part of me — like it or not. It is also reasonable to think that whatever change I can make for myself does actually change the financial system, even if the rules, laws, policies, and those seeking to control them for private benefit make it seem an overwhelming challenge. But, this is part of the new economic story.

What if we practice direct, transparent, personal financial transactions as a way of reestablishing equilibrium in social life, including all three sectors? What if we understood that direct means that we remove layers of intermediation in our economic life and actually bring producers, consumers and distributors together in association to set price and determine best use of natural resources? What if we understood transparency as a process that means all parties to the transactions are operating in full and honest disclosure and thus feel equal in the agreement process? What if our transactions were done in a spirit of interest in and a sense of long-term responsibility for each other? In doing so, might we not transform the way we work with money and bring about social transformation at the same time?

The inquiry here is purposeful beyond a series of leading questions. It is also an invitation to and proposal for a process that is at the heart of the new economic story. The old one has in many ways already failed us by the ecological disasters left in its wake and for want of speaking to our deepest humanity. The new one, threefold in nature, speaks to our longing for meaning, connection, and community in a way that is direct, transparent, and personal — and one that welcomes the presence and practice of spiritual values.

John Bloom
©2010

More on the Intersection of Money and Spirit

2010-06-25T11:20:00.001-07:00

More on the Intersection of Money and Spirit

As I write about the intersection of money and spirit, I realize I have been conditioned throughout my biography to consider them as discrete—and it is thus a challenge and transformative indiscretion to speak of a connection. I do not think it would be fair to characterize money and spirit as being in opposition, as they often are. Such a polarity would dishonor the genius that devised money in the first place. So, let me make a bold statement: Money is an inspired invention to account for and store value in order to free up enterprising people to serve each other and communities in the realm of economics.

As a device, money circulates so that individuals (and organizations) have the resources to bring their particular capacities into the economy for the overall well-being of the community (however one might want to define that). One result is that people’s material needs are met, but that is only the tangible part of an economy. One might say the spirit of money lives on, not in the objects that denote it such as paper bills and coins, but rather in how it passes hands, with what understanding and agreements, and through what transactional rituals. For example, if I look at my economic self, I imagine that my personal inspiration, that which motivates me, adds value to the circulation of money, because of my intention of service. It is also an essential part of my process to be as sure as possible that the other party’s needs are met. This requires an additional reflective, evaluative, loop-closing step in the transaction process—all of which might come under the descriptive heading of reciprocity. This transactional process goes beyond any document commemorating the agreement to a living recognition of each other and the value of the relationship. In other words, through our transactions we become part of each other’s stories. This is a radically different construction of a transaction and we are conditioned to understand. And, the speed at which I am able to transact, to get done what I need, helps to perpetuate the conditioning.

The power of money to subjugate rather than free us was at the center of Keith Haring’s monumental mural installation entitled the 10 Commandments (1985). Haring’s genius was to communicate a lot through limited graphic means. He did not set out to illustrate the biblical commandments literally. Instead, he based the paintings on his recollected experience of them as they play out in contemporary society. For example, he rather pointedly illustrated to degree to which money had become a false idol. We see the hand from above (a reuse of the early medieval trope of referencing God through the hand) tantalizing those hands below with $0 bill. The hands from below are trembling, clamoring for the money though it has no value. The work is a direct commentary on how money has become a thing and an article of faith unto itself, devoid of spirit, and instead surrounded with projection of power, angst, and self-interest. It is no wonder that this and its accompanying paintings made people uncomfortable. The simplicity, accuracy, and directness of the critique can leave one unnerved and with two primary responses—denial, or a thorough renegotiation of one’s relationship to money. In a second panel, the notions of money and media are conflated as a kind of double currency which is exercising power over the imitative behavior of the figures. One could assume that the television (as the stand-in for all media) has assumed the role of the god-like hand in the first panel.

The question remains, how might we reclaim the spiritual in money (and in ourselves) at the intersection of the two? Let me recount a brief interlude I had with my son recently when he asked me for some money. As I gave him the bills, he asked if there were any strings attached. Before I launched into the whole derivation of the expression from the world of marionettes, I found myself saying: “The money has no strings attached, it is the string.” This was met by the usual look of consternation. What I meant by the statement is that as money circulates, it carries with it intentions, agreements (hopefully), and a glimmer of the history of human consciousness. This string image is about what connects rather than controls or (in the case of marionettes, manipulates) us. This is a picture of interdependence. Of course, one can attach “strings” to money in the form of expectations or demands, but this comes with an obligation to make those expectations transparent and for the agreements to be accepted from a place of equality. Even if we create our own currencies and exchange systems, we will never escape the necessity of multi-lateral agreements as a basis for circulation.

Reclamation can begin with asking how I can use my money in a way that increases the value to all parties in the transaction. Engaging in the reflective processes needed to know this for oneself, and then with the others will help to locate one at the intersection of money and spirit; the intangible aspects of transactions will then be enlivened alongside the ones traditionally accounted for. Keith Haring portrays the shadow side of our relationship to money. His works serve as a kind of warning. Painted 25 years ago they seem prescient. However, engaging in a transformative process is worth the effort and can help with renegotiating one’s relationship with money, to see the spirit in it.

John Bloom

Towards an Economics of Place

2010-02-05T15:26:00.000-08:00

Towards an Economics of Place

When the old man first came to the plains there was a rolling sea of grass, and a lone tree, so the story goes, where they settled the town. They put up a few stores, facing the west and the setting sun like so many tombstones, which is quite a bit what a country store has in mind. You have the high, flat slab at the front, with a few lines of fading inscription, and then the sagging mound of the store, the contents, in the shadow behind. Later, if the town lasts, they put through some tracks, with a water tank for the whistle stop, and if it rained, now and then, they’d put up the monument. That’s the way these elevators, these great plains monoliths, strike me. There’s a simple reason for grain elevators, as there is for everything, but the force behind the reason, the reason for the reason, is the land and the sky. There’s too much sky out here, for one thing, too much horizontal, too many lines without stops, so that the exclamation, the perpendicular, had to come. Anyone who was born and raised on the plains knows that the high false front on the Feed Store, and the white water tower, are not a question of vanity. It’s a problem of being. Of knowing you are there.
—Wright Morris, The Home Place*

Introduction
As humans, our character is formed by where we live even as we inherit the privilege of reshaping our place in our image and to our needs. Sometimes place is so much a part of us that our inner landscape, a quality of soul, mirrors the outer. Our physical environment is an inherent part of our individuality; it is part of our language, world view, diet, and relationships. Add to this the reality of the “we,” whether family, community, or region—and the particularities of geography. How do these factors roll into the character and economy of place?
Let’s look at the example of the Pueblo peoples and their dwelling places in New Mexico. They have continuously inhabited these places for over 3,000 years. The interior living spaces in the pueblos, such as Chaco Canyon, were very tight quarters, a kind of counterbalance to the spaciousness of the open high desert landscape. One could say that pueblo architecture itself arose out of an economy of space, the inherent structural expression of stone masonry, pole pine, and adobe—all materials in proximity. Community life was framed around the practice of culture and meeting the needs of the residents, whether that was food locally cultivated or captured, or spirit as embodied in the Kachinas. The harvest, celebrated in corn ceremonies, was an expression of spirit manifest through nature and the work of agriculture. This integrative way acknowledged the spirit in economy, the economy in community, the community in spirit. The economics of place was a reality because it would have been unimaginable for it to be any other way, and it worked. In some ways it was the work.

There was, of course, trade between pueblos. There were clear trade routes north-south and east-west connecting local to regions, yet trade was both in materials and in the spirit of gifting. The Zia, now adapted as the emblem of State of New Mexico, combines the elements of sun, the spirits of direction, the circle of culture, and the paths of trade—essence of place: spirit, organized culture, and economy.

While there is a kind of material resource logic to an economy of place, there is also a spiritual geography of place that finds its expression in how people connect to and draw strength from place, transform it according to some mysterious yet lawful interactive imperative, then proceed to create an economic life from it and in it, and are shaped by it.

However, we have so organized our economies in modern life that, especially as city dwellers, we live in disconnect from the nature that so generously provides for us. Commerce, based its market reach imperative, has worked very hard to replace all aspects of local economies, in the guise of convenience and low price. Instead, we are consumers of nature, food and landscape, while happily producing culture. We are workers in the field of consciousness, sowing and harvesting capital; our awareness of the deeper sources of our strength—natural resources, the labor of farming, connection to spirit—is fainting away. Reestablishing an economics of place has the potential for healing this disconnect, for reinstating our reciprocal relationship with the natural world that includes restorative as well as transformative processes.

Framing Questions
What is a place-based economy? Where and how does such an economy emerge? Out of what social need and geographic determinants? What is the relationship between the character of place and the character of the people that inhabit it? Is there value in being able to directly influence, and be influenced by, place-based economic activity? What kind of a regionalized or localized system results from a place-based approach? What is gained and what is lost in “relocalization.”

These questions are fundamental to an understanding of economics from a grass-roots perspective, yet are often overridden by the homogenizing effect of globalization. One might make an assumption that all economies are place-based when considered as composed of three primary aspects—natural resources, labor, and capital. The three can only come together in the specifics of one place at one moment in time. Each intersection informs our sense of present, place, and community; yet collectively, the results of these intersections are part of a fluid global aggregation of local activity.

A second assumption is that natural resources are not in and of themselves economic. Instead they belong to the commons as it has come to be called. It is not until someone begins to transform those natural resources that they move into the economic sector. In the framework of the commons (refer to the work of the 2009 Nobel Prize winner in economics Dr. Elinor Ostrom), the issue is not ownership, but rather how it is determined who has the right to use the resources. Natural resources cannot be anything other than rooted in place, and are thus a tap root for all place-based economic activity.

An Inquiry into an Economics of Place
Two recent short passages will highlight some of the issues. The first is from the New York Times [October 15, 2009, p. A3] in an article titled, “Stock Exchange Shrinks as Rivals Take Over Trades,” by Graham Bowley: “Once the undisputed capital of capital, the city [NY] is struggling to retain its dominance in finance as the industry globalizes. ‘Wall Street’ seems to be no longer a place, but a vast, worldwide network of money and information.”

The second is from an essay by Wendell Berry, “Nature as Measure,” reprinted in the recent collection Bringing It to the Table [Counterpoint: Berkeley, 2009, pp. 8-9]: “On all farms, farmers would undertake to know responsibly where they are and to ‘consult the genius of the place.’…When we adopt nature as measure [of economic life], we require practice that is locally knowledgeable. The particular farm, that is, must not be treated as any farm. And the particular knowledge of particular places is beyond the competence of any centralized power or authority. Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of a particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods they know and love, in company of neighbors they know and love.”

The contrast between the two is intentionally stark. The point that Bowley so eloquently makes is that Wall Street has become more a reputational currency as a name for transactions that actually are happening across a decentralized global field. Of course, that reputation originated in the physical reality of activity of investment banks located on Wall Street. However, the state of market-trade technology has eliminated any need for a true physical center of gravity or action. Thus the emergence of newer smaller more flexible trading exchanges linked via the web. One could argue that something more than speed has been gained by replacing the physical marketplace with the “netspace” for conducting trade. The new media in its virtual character may be truer to the fluctuating virtual values of publicly-traded stocks and derivatives than the older broker-dealer floor transactions. E-technology has also allowed for such rapid transactions that paper trails and conventional accounting techniques are no longer adequate and, even after the fact, can shed no light on the real transaction histories. Such is the levity and opacity of virtual activity, which is also disconnected from place and the accountability that comes with place. By this I mean, that when one sees a person with whom one has transacted trades day-in-and-day out, I would hope one would feel accountable to that person or organization, and be more likely to operate ethically.

What might Wendell Berry mean by the ‘genius of place’ as a starting point for a measure of economy? To begin, there is a literary tradition around the Latin phrase ‘genius loci’ and Alexander Pope, the early 18th century British poet penned the line “Consult the genius of place in all…” in his Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington. The indication here is that there is something of a character or being of place that plays a role, if one is open to it, in determining what happens in that place. One one hand, this may not reconcile with those who hold that nature is no more that physical substances that we can measure and weigh, or that man’s purpose and right is the control of nature. On the other hand, I would like to suggest that nature is full of life forces, a culture so to speak, that we are part of—we are within it as participant, not outside it as onlooker. We are in no way separate from the air we breathe, or water we drink. The logical extension of the participant stream would be to say that as we use up our natural resources we are also using ourselves up. As bizarre as this may sound, this is one way to grasp the phenomena of our current ecological condition.So what is the character of the culture or spirit of place of which we are a part? And, how might we know it? This character is woven of many threads each of which is a study unto itself. Place has geology, latitude and longitude, pre-historic and natural history, anthropology, ecology, natural resources, energetic or magnetic properties, meteorology, and other threads that in constellation identify a place’s particularity. Without looking at the tapestry woven of these threads, it is difficult to understand the economy of place. Place is in a many ways a permeably-bounded system and the economy within it is something of the interweaving or circulatory life force of materials and service in support of human endeavor that percolate within it. Place looks different, deeper and more compelling when considered as an exercise in phenomenology. The boundaries remain permeable because excess production or population move beyond current boundaries, and new ideas, people, and needs flow in.This approach to a picture forming, or phenomenological, process is a useful tool in understanding a place-based economy. For example, one could surmise that at its birth all economic life was place-based. Even though hunters may have traveled far to gather food, their purpose was to return home with it. Beginning in 15th century Europe, with the evolution of ever more efficient transport, sophisticated weapons, and the development of mercantilism, the dominant cultures who created them also possessed the wealth to procure and a taste for that which was foreign and not place-based at all—whether Africans to sell into slavery or spices from the “Spice Islands.” In some ways the drive to accumulate capital, and thus political and cultural power, devalued the sense of local and regional and, even, human identity. The dislocations and ruptures of the colonial project spelled the near end of place-based economies and the wisdom that was indigenous to them. The pace of this transformation accelerated even more with the emergence of the global marketplace following World War II. Long-sustaining village economies were subverted to produce for the world market. This conversion left (and is still leaving) local famine, poverty, and illness in the wake of global profiteering. Indonesia is a prime example. Nutritious red rice varieties were sacrificed for the more aesthetic but less nourishing exportable version of white rice.This is a painful and oft replicated economic story to retell, and re-awakening local or regional economies could feel like a wish to return to pre-colonial days. It is not. Instead, it is a plea to exercise our capacity to reconnect with place and its economy, to produce locally and regionally where possible, to recreate regional communication media as information exchange, to know place anew even if it is not as healthy, stable, or friendly as we might like.

What is needed is re-cultivation of human wisdom connected to and within the breadth of nature. One of the greatest challenges is human encounter; interest in the other is not much celebrated these days. That wisdom will be a guide and measure (in Wendell Berry’s term) to an economy of place, whether one’s vocation requires working in agriculture or civiculture. The natural consequence of a deep understanding of place is an awareness of living consciously within the reciprocity and interdependence of a healthy, life-supporting, and enlivening economic life. We become where we are when we know our place in it.

John Bloom
© 2009

*Wright Morris, The Home Place, (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1970, pp. 75-76. First published, 1948)

Getting the Price Right

2010-01-03T19:04:00.000-08:00

Getting the Price Right: The Transformative Value of Associative Economics

“The Price is Right” is one of the longest running television game shows in the relatively short history of the medium. The show’s capacity to draw audiences, I assume, is based upon the viewer’s pride in knowing the MSRP [manufacturer’s suggested retail price] of everything, and then seeing if the contestants know it too. The show capitalizes one of the essential functions of television in that products that might normally be advertised for a hefty fee are instead featured as the content and focus of the program itself. Talk about product placement! Viewers are turned into vicarious contestants, their consumer-selves tantalized and tested. Forget that assumptions about what constitutes the right price—how it was derived, what it represents, its turnkey effect in the economy—are subsumed in the afterglow of consumer desire to acquire.

Given that the program was first broadcast in 1956, it would seem that its producers took quite seriously the following dictum from the Art Directors Club Annual No. 34 of 1955: “It is now the business of advertising to manufacture customers in the comfort of their own homes.” That defined a profound intention for commerce in the emergent medium of TV. I think it is fair to say that fifty-four years later that intention has transformed culture and extended its reach into the depths of identity formation. For a consumer culture, price is queen, not just for a day, but every day.

A manufacturer’s suggested retail price, finding its source in the capitalist maxim of charging what the traffic will bear, is designed to play on the conditioned desires of the consumer. It is a positioning game-show in and of itself for which the latest manifestation is the technology driven idea of “dynamic pricing.” This behaviorist approach to price setting is charged with the need for sales, profit, and shareholder benefit. As a consequence, it tends to be devoid of concern for the costs or consequences to human and natural ecological systems.

What if, instead of being a unilaterally manipulated mystery, price setting became a social process that took into account ecological stewardship and all the needs of the people affected by it? What if a price actually could be tied to the true costs of an object’s production and distribution—including real wages, environmental restoration and other constructive supply chain practices? What might this associative price-setting process look like and how would it practiced?

One functioning and accessible example can be found in Community Supported Agriculture [CSA]. Though CSA now refers to a wide range of financial arrangements between eaters (consumers) and farmers, it originated in Europe in the context of biodynamic farming. Further, it is significant that both the farming and the economics of it were based upon Rudolf Steiner’s insights and share a set of deep core values about the presence and purpose of spirit in our practical activities. In its archetypal form, a CSA is an association created between an enterprising farmer and a community that is committed to supporting the farmer in his or her vocation, with the production and distribution of food to the “shareholders” during the growing season a by-product of the relationship. Digging into the assumptions lodged in this statement unearths some radical concepts about farming as a livelihood that are in many ways diametrically opposed to the way most of our food reaches our tables. First and foremost in the association, there is a direct and personal relationship between the farmer and the eater. Second (and central to this article), the annual (not seasonal) share price is set by the association in conversation over the needs of the farm and farmer. The budgetary outcome is to be able to maintain and develop the farm, to take care of the farmer’s personal needs like health insurance, and also cover the costs of producing, harvesting and transporting the food. The math is simple: if the total budget is $100,000 for the year and the farmer can grow enough food for 100 shares, the share is $1,000. The association can take this an additional step and ask if some members could pay more so that some could pay less. The result is that the farmer is no longer at the whim or mercy of the marketplace. There are no distributor costs added; in fact, there are absolutely no externalized costs anywhere in the system.

What is created as well is that the association serves as a community of shared risk. If there is a drought and no food can be produced in any given season, the farmer will still have the income to carry on and prepare for the next season. This is an innovative picture of sustainability in which the eater/consumer is not paying for the food, but rather providing support for the farmer so that she can both steward the fertility of the soil and grow the food. Price and pricing are no mystery in this model. Instead the price is both right and real—the result of transparency, social engagement, long-term relationship, and the collaborative process called association.

CSA is a working successful example, and the model is transportable to other arenas in which there is an entrepreneur who can provide products or services for a community. Mutuality is at the heart of the practice, and price serves everyone’s needs, not just the manufacturer. The deep value structure in associative pricing is that as we become more effective in meeting real human needs through economic activity, the benefits of that activity will be equitable. It is appropriate to mention the rise of cooperative business practices and the rapid growth of fair trade, among other innovations, as further indicators of a fundamental shift toward a more associative view. Though differing in corporate structure, they represent multi-stakeholder community-based visions. They share the challenges of scalability and have had some successes, while recognizing the primacy of human values as essential to healthy economies. I would ask: What are the limits of community and enterprise working in association? And, what are the long-term consequences of not getting the price right? I am 99 44/100% sure that associative economic practices could transform the way the world works with money.

© John Bloom, 2009

The DNA of Social Finance

2009-09-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

The DNA of Social Finance

The course of social finance is enlivened by transparency and trust. These essential elements of agreements between people are central to the value of financial transactions—and are in many ways inseparable from each other. What I mean by this is that transparency leads naturally to trust and vice-versa in a constant dance through time. I would add that the healthy circulatory system of money, even on a global scale, is built or carried by the dynamic present in transparency and trust. Consider the opposite where they are not present—circulation stops, economies falter, wealth is extracted, self-interest reigns, poverty results. This may seem a stark contrast, but a poignant one given the current state of the economy in which unemployment and foreclosures are rising increasing while investment houses continue to post impenetrable values.

Transparency and trust emanate from human experience, and are therefore quite individualized in their practice or find expression in the behavioral patterns of a particular culture. They are also deeply connected to the need for accountability and dependability. Most people want to know that whatever motivated a transaction in the first place will be recognized and respected by the other party to it. For example, if I agree to lend money to you, I need to know that the money will be used as expected and returned as per the understanding. I also need to know that if the scenario does not play out as planned and there is significant change, you would come back to renegotiate the agreement or return the funds. This epitomizes the tandem connection of trust and transparency, and is a measure of a healthy financial transaction—one that frees the lender to focus on other activities and the borrower to progress with the planned project while remaining connected through the lender-borrower partnership. If you cannot find out where the money you loaned went to, or the borrower feels no responsibility to the lender, something is broken in the flow of both money and human relationships. Accountability has both a human aspect in the context of relationship, and a financial one in the context of tracking and measuring the movement of the money itself.

The salient characteristic of social finance is that these two threads, the human and the financial, are recognized and worked with as inextricably linked. Every financial transaction has an effect on human beings, and every human being affects the quality of the world through how he or she works with money. This is a fully rounded concept of interdependence as it includes the perceptual and behavioral dynamic along with the more traditional economic one of interchange and efficiencies in the production and consumption of goods and services.

If trust and transparency are central to the vitality of financial circulation, serve a bridging function between the social and the financial, then what actually is the deeper motivating force that begins, sustains or augments that circulation? What if we could consider that social finance has the double helical structure of DNA, with the major strand being human actions and needs, and the secondary strand, the creation of money in its many forms. That they come into a dynamic relationship is inevitable in economic life and is epitomized by the tension between self-interest and community-interest. Add to this, movement through time and place. In this imagination, the pulsing dance between transparency and trust bridges the two strands and naturally gives rise to a vortex-like spiraling movement. But what of the motivating force? I would argue that the prime mover is human intention. It is the element that moves with the currency, the flow of money. It represents the energetic investment of people into the circulation, the rhythmic movement of value as it is generated, destroyed, and recreated anew within the whole economic process. Of course, one can make the case for the shadow side, the adverse effect of bad intentions or unethical practice. But, if we can understand social finance from the perspective of the elegant architecture of DNA with its life-building capacity, we might also see how social finance can serve as a restorative and healing force in economic life.

John Bloom © 2009

From Prime Mover to Freedom: Spirit Matters in Giving

2009-09-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

From Prime Mover to Freedom: Spirit Matters in Giving

If I could accomplish one change in the field of economics in this lifetime, it would be that gifts and philanthropy are understood as essential to a healthy economy, and even more so as the prime mover of all economic activity. I think I can make the case for this with two examples.

First, each of us is born into a gift economy; that is, our physical needs for nourishment and care are met through the gifts bestowed by parents without expectation of recompense. So we begin life in gift which we then develop, through education and other life experience, into capacities to serve others and meet our own needs. From a spiritual perspective this means that what we absorb as gift, we able to give back to the world through our own intentions and work. Of course, this is a reductivist picture, but pare away all we are conditioned to think about work and vocation, what, why, and how we get paid, the disintegration of experience that results from the division of labor. The result is a mega-bundle of gifts and needs waiting to be orchestrated into economic circulation through capacities, needs, and relationships.

The second argument for gift as the prime mover is its necessary role in cultivating all those human gift-capacities up to point where they have value in the world of exchange and transactions. The function of the intimate parental gift so essential to early life is taken up more broadly by a culture (it takes a village) in how it transfers wisdom across generations. Culture would become stultified if there were no research and development, no evolving story, no place for experimentation and failure, and no avenue for new ideas to percolate and find their way into daily life. Since such experimentation is pre-production, it naturally absorbs money rather than producing it. Education, defined through this laboratory function, will never generate profit. Quite the opposite is true. It depends upon gift to fulfill its mission of fostering human capacities and fomenting new ideas and insights.

In the real economy, the one that includes both spiritual and material dimensions, there is circulation of human and material gifts. Clearly both have value in economic terms—if you accept my argument—and they also have an interesting relationship brought into sharp focus in the field of philanthropy. Consider the following from Lewis Hyde’s seminal book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property:

Gift exchange is connected to faith because both are disinterested. Faith does not look out. No one by himself controls the cycle of gifts he participates in; each, instead, surrenders to the spirit of the gift in order for it to move. Therefore the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control. If this were not so, if the donor calculated his return, the gift would be pulled out of the whole and into the personal ego, where it loses its power. We say that a man gives faithfully when he participates disinterestedly in a circulation he does not control but which nonetheless supports his life.

Understanding the full dimension of this release of control is vital to the human part of gift circulation. Of course, there are the legal and tax issues that condition the circulation. Donors can only take a tax deduction if they have given up control to a qualified charity and have received no goods or services in return. That is one level of exchange, and relevant only to donors that can take advantage of the tax code. But, what about gift intention? Is that something that can really be given up or given over, even if the gift is truly released? Is this something of what Hyde refers to in the element of faith? And, what exactly might he mean by disinterested since most donors are anything but disinterested? Can one be disinterested and interested at the same time? The answer is—of course—if one looks at the spiritual dimension as one in which the gift actually carries the giver and receiver into a deeper destiny relationship (this is the interested part), and at the same time is given over for charitable purposes as determined by the receiver (this is the disinterested part).

So what arises for the donor by truly giving up control of a gift? When the donor gives up control, he, she, or they are at the same time released from the gift, freed by it. Sometime this is expressed as a kind of relief, a feeling of well being or buoyancy, and sometimes a kind of grief. These are all transformative moments, moments in which, as the whirling dervishes practice in the moments of halting stillness, new insights and consciousness can happen. The deep inner knowledge and process that led up to the moment of the gift giving, up to the moment of willing release of control, is also a moment of a renewed spiritual freedom.

One metamorphic aspect of money is that when a financial gift is made to a charitable entity, that gift money is transformed very quickly into purchase money. That which was “surplus” for the giver is given new life in the rapid economic circulation of the day-to-day economy. It supports the development of human capacities and a kind of spiritual freedom that is essential to the purposes of education, research, the arts, and other cultural endeavors in a free society. What a change it would be for philanthropy if it were to be practiced as an integral part of daily transactions rather than as something one does after accumulating “enough” to give away. In cultures where there is no such wealth accumulation, gift is essential to survival. Without gift, life withers; without gift, culture stagnates; without gift, economy languishes. The analysis is simple. The solution, the release of stored up wisdom and wealth—surrendering to the spirit of gift, is one critical way to recognize and engage what is desperately needed for the future.

John Bloom
© 2009

From Transaction to Transformation: Spirit Matters in Lending

2009-08-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

From Transaction to Transformation: Spirit Matters in Lending

It is one thing to say that money has a spiritual dimension, to speak of it as energy or a force. It is another matter to recognize and understand how important and practical this perspective is as we act within the economy. A brief inquiry into the presence of spirit in our financial transactions is a risky venture. Nonetheless, I am compelled to take the risk because of the upside potential for transforming how we see and work money.

Consider looking at experience this way: there is what we perceive with our senses, for example a color or texture, which we could call “matter”; then, there is our interpretation of that sensation, our sympathies and antipathies, which we could call “soul” activity; then, there is recognizing within that experience something of its lasting essence, such that we might recognize another occurrence of it though it may be in a different color or form, which we could call “spiritual” activity. For example, how do we know that a loan is a loan no matter whether it is called credit or investment? Given this architecture of experience, might there be a tripartite view that clarifies and integrates matter, soul, and spirit in the realm of financial transactions? What place does each of the three take in the transactional process?

For this essay, I have chosen to focus on loans and the lending-borrowing transaction, though one could equally apply the approach to purchases and giving. What gives rise to lending is a combination of lender’s available capital coupled with a need for that capital to realize an economically viable idea. One could say that the lender recognizes a borrower’s entrepreneurial capacity to make good use of the money. The money passes hands, a material matter in auditing terms, as a result of an agreement, with the transaction accounted for in debits and credits, assets and liabilities. However, the process that led up to the agreement, that is, how enough trust was established between the lender and borrower to make the agreement possible is not such a simple one. The lender and the borrower each have their conditions for trust, their deeper purposes and intentions. Of course, transparency is a critical part of this discovery process, as are intuition, character and social impact. The reality is that the lender and borrower are bound in relationship over the period of the loan; they have to take and maintain a long-term interest in each other, and support each other’s success. This mutual trust, formalized in the loan agreement is something of the soul aspect of the loan. Imagine, lenders have made loans because the constellation of people and intentions around the loan project felt right, even if the numbers didn’t quite justify the transaction.

What is the spiritual aspect of a loan? The money makes possible entrepreneurial initiative that would not have been possible otherwise—this is the essence of a healthy capital economy. The entrepreneurial initiative itself is framed upon ideas, which, though they may be inspired by material circumstances, are not dependent on them. And within the structures of those ideas, the entrepreneur recognizes and serves the presence of others’ economic needs. This capacity for perceiving what is, and what is not yet, (anticipating need) demonstrates creative, imaginative, and in some cases intuitive, capacities, and is also why enterprise so often leads cultural transformation.

In economic thinking the spiritual world of ideas is made practical through the world of physical matter. How we find value in the world of lending is a matter of the degree to which the lender’s feelings and perceptions are tuned to the intentions and capabilities of the entrepreneur. The loan transaction becomes a vessel for the shared purpose and vision of lender and borrower. Transforming how we work with loan money is catalyzed when we embrace these inter-personal relationships and recognize how the entrepreneur’s work brings spiritual activity into the world.

John Bloom
© 2009

From Self-reliance to Collaboration: Economic Interdependence

2009-07-01T15:49:00.001-07:00

From Self-reliance to Collaboration: Economic Interdependence

Imagine the state I would be in if others were not growing food, making clothes, and, developing the technology to publish this post. I would likely have to dig my own Victory Garden, or live as Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond in the nineteenth century. I would have to become self-reliant. This American Transcendentalist value runs deep in the American identity along side the more entrepreneurial attachment to marketplace opportunities. This could be seen as a bifurcated identity until one considers that self-reliance is linked to the freedom of spirit and individuality, while enterprise is tied to an economic precept that recognizes the need to meet others’ material needs across the spectrum of social life. Thus, the individual that provides solely for herself is not economic at all. As soon as an individual begins to provide for others based upon productive capacities, she becomes an economic citizen. This does not mean that the individual leaves her spirit behind. Rather she brings her spirit, her capacity for insight and innovation with her to serve others in an economy.

The relationship between the individual and the whole of economic life is complicated. For example, if what Rudolf Steiner articulated, here simplified, in the early twentieth century as a basic economic principle is operative—that the degree to which we are working to meet the needs of others’ our own needs will be met—then Adam Smith’s eighteenth century concept of self-interest as a prime economic motivator is no longer appropriate. Smith’s theory, as articulated in The Wealth of Nations, is an economic philosophy that lives on as myth in laissez-faire economies and more recently in so-called free markets. As an evolutionary stage, self-interest seems removed from what is called for now.

From an economic perspective, we live in a completely interdependent world. We can know the global economy just by looking at the labels in our clothes, but we have not yet transformed the deeper human dimensions of interdependence that would compel us to alleviate global poverty or preclude the abuse of our financial system. In some ways, the social technology of money and financial systems, reduced as they are to electronic currents (or currencies), has evolved beyond our moral and ethical capacities to work with it in a healthy way. Competition that pits me against others in search of limited resources is basically anti-social. This is the mindset, and I would say soul condition, awaiting transformation.

Consider the research of evolutionary biologist Elizabet Sahtouris. In 1997, in “The Biology of Globalization” (Perspectives on Business and Global Change), she wrote: The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization—its economy—is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization. What she is pointing to, based upon her research, is that organisms achieve healthy sustainability only after they have passed through the competition stage to one of cooperation, or collaboration. Yet our economics still remains fundamentally about competition. The myth of self-interest, and the cogent arguments made for perpetuating that myth seem to ring hollow in light of Sahtouris’s findings.

The technology of economic collaboration, built instinctively into the fabric of intact communities, needs to be rediscovered as part of new or emergent communities. This technology depends upon understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each community member. However, here is the challenge. Our culture has taught us well (through the constructs of self-reliance and self-interest) how to project our strengths. But, it has also taught us how to protect our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities in preparing for a competitive winner-take-all economic environment. When we see our own vulnerabilities personified in others’ poverty or homelessness, it can be a painful awakening. To truly collaborate with another person, no less one organization with another, to have power with the other partners requires that we acknowledge and embrace the full economy of strengths and weaknesses, and further recognize that it will call upon the power of compassion in a non-linear exchange process. This imagination then begins to look and feel like an economics for the twenty-first century, an economics that requires new social technologies, capacities, consciousness, and means of exchange that complement the strengths and failings of our national currencies. We are not only interdependent in our economic world, but we are also thoroughly entangled in it. We need an art of economics that imagines this complex reality, and a science of economics that can comprehend the humanity in it.

John Bloom©2009

From Expectation to Affirmation: an Inquiry into Transparency and Trust

2009-05-04T15:39:00.000-07:00

From Expectation to Affirmation: an Inquiry into Transparency and Trust

The concept of transparency seems to be at the forefront of every discussion about our economy of late, and the majority of those discussions presume that the reader or listener knows what transparency means. I confess to being bothered by such presumptions—thus, this inquiry into transparency. It is an abstract concept, but one essential to our relationships and economic life. I hope one outcome of this brief inquiry is a deepened understanding of what is often the root cause of the call for transparency, namely, mistrust. Further, that transparency, understood in its full implications, can transform mistrust into a new and conscious trust, an essential ingredient for healing our economy and opening us up to a positive imagination for the future.

Transparency and trust are inextricably linked in human affairs, though transparency is best understood as a means not an end; and, trust is not a thing but rather a desirable multi-faceted (my assumption) state of being that guides our actions.

What does transparency mean then in the context of finances? Most of us experience transparency in simple physics terms as we gaze out our windows to see the world with varying degrees of clarity. If we are moved the clear the film away in order to have a fuller, less mediated view, we are pointing to a process based upon increased visibility. In finances, if you cannot perceive or track what is going on with the transactions and “the numbers,” seeking disclosure through auditing would be the parallel to window cleaning. The purpose and outcome would be to trust what you see.

But there are questions about finances that reach deeper than visibility and delve into the realm of assumptions. This is where transparency is no longer solely about facts or appearances, but rather about the conceptual aspects that drive the numbers and transactions. This quality of transparency is about making the invisible, visible—not what or how much, but rather the why of transactions. Of course, formulating and exposing assumptions takes us into the realm of values and judgment, and more importantly into the realm of reciprocity. By this I mean that transparency is a two-way process. We look out the window, while the rest of world can equally look in at us. Digging into the assumptions behind financial transactions, our own values and assumptions arise quite naturally as expectations about what we absorb of and reflect upon the information. Once we are comfortable with the assumptions and the resultant numbers, another level of trust emerges, one not as much tied to visibility, as it is to a quality of reciprocity. After all, the numbers represent human economic activity, and we expect to be able to see into that activity through the transactional agreement or accounting of it. This is no small feat. What hopefully becomes apparent through the reciprocal exploration is an affirmation of assumed values and intentions—a moment of deeper trust. Without this affirmation, unresolved expectations can lead to a kind of quiet conflict common to but often unaddressed in financial considerations.

Transparency and trust take another leap when there is an affirmation of mutual intentions among all parties to the transaction. This commonality of intention represents the possibility of a third level of trust that reaches through reciprocity and beyond agreement to a sense of shared vision, or appreciation of a common purpose. This level of trust engages a kind of idealism and engenders all manner of economic initiative and innovation.

In a way, there are three forms of trust that accompany financial transactions: trust in matter, or the observable; trust in others, their truth or integrity; and trust in spirit, or common intention. While transparency may on some levels feel like a right, as it is primarily treated in our current political debate on economics, it is also a vehicle for reaching trust in the three realms of matter, relationships, and common destiny. Thus the practice of transparency in finance, with full respect for the rights of privacy and safety, is an essential tool for transforming our economic future.

John Bloom ©2009

Reimagine Money

2009-04-30T22:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

I encourage you to check out and subscribe to the new Reimagine Money blog at www.rsfsocialfinance.org/blog. I will be posting articles there along with interesting postings from others that are inquiring into the worlld of money and financial transactions. Once my postings have aged on the reimagine money blog I will be posting them here so they remain accessible.

John Bloom

I Object: Nothing Personal to My Credit

2008-12-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

I Object: Nothing Personal to My Credit

I recently received a notification from my credit card company that my interest rate would soon be raised to prime plus 18.99%, meaning an effective rate of 24.99%. I was first furious, then insulted, then humiliated, then called to action. The current effective rate on my balance is 9.99%. Why I carry a balance is a much longer story than I want to tell here. And, to a degree it is irrelevant except that I do not think I am in any way alone in having such debt. I am sure I am one of many, many who also received this notification. The alarm letter meant I no longer have the privilege of being a detached observer of the economic news that is sweeping across the country. I could no longer hold on to the illusion that as a good bill paying citizen I was immune from the bank nightmare.

Some context may be helpful here. I pay attention to the state of fiscal affairs. I work in a financial organization (RSF Social Finance) where we pay attention to trends in the market, in the real economy, and to the world of credit, though we, as a public charity, work outside regulated bank functions. I understand the origins of credit, of debt and money, and how problematic and overleveraged the financial system is. In contrast to this broken and impenetrable system, RSF’s mission is change how we work with money and financing, to recognize the spirit in and behind it. Because of this, I also understand how valuable money can be, how real investment is effective in supporting initiative and building community, and how deeply rooted in feelings financial transactions are.

In many ways money reflects the architecture of human experience—both inner and outer spaces. This may appear a sweeping statement. But architecture, especially buildings, very much conditions our experience of space, and, the transition from outside to inside, the peristyles and portals, the light and darkness. The ancient Greek temple is an illuminating example. Usually devoted to a particular god, each temple also had a treasury at its center, the inner sanctum, the protected space. This is religion, or mythic beliefs and their statuary expressions, co-housed with sacrificial material offerings, mostly gold and other precious goods. If one can accept this structure also as metaphor for personal experience—that we house within us our own treasury of gifts and offerings which we protect and use as resource at the same time—then one can see how money, as we have come to know it in modern times, is still connected to each person’s inner sanctum within the temple of individuality. We know only too well from daily experience how money connects us to the outer world of materials, relationships, and values.

The letter from the credit card company caused an unusual rupture for me in the flow between inner and outer world. I felt as if a predator had entered and mistaken me for the wrong person. Actually, this touches on one of the central points of this article. The letter was generated as part of a bank strategy. It had absolutely nothing to do with me, my history of twenty years as a good timely paying customer, or my pride. Of course, I got on the phone to what they call customer service and entered yet another space and degree of absurdity. I asked why I would have received this letter and was told (and I am not making this up) that the bank had had numerous losses and that it was costing the bank much more than it had in the past to access the money to extend me credit. I think this script was designed to make me feel sympathetic to the bank, that it was the victim. I knew about the losses. The whole world knew and knows about the losses and the bailouts. How could it be that charging me a lot more interest on my debt would solve the bank’s financial problems resulting from bad loans and investments it had made? Why should I, an already good and long-standing customer, feel responsible? Further, I responded to the customer service provider that the line about the increased cost of funds was patently false. I also knew that she had not crafted the script. Her final position was that the bank had the right at its discretion to raise the fees. True enough. There was no argument from me on that. I explained that I would be disappointed to take my business elsewhere after twenty years.

Finally I asked if I could speak with a manager. This was an extraordinary moment, a revelation of the depth of personal objectification. She said that she could transfer me to the Balance Retention Unit. Not customer retention, or client service. I was nothing more than a balance to them—loyalty, consistency, credit-worthiness be damned. When I reached the Unit, the conversation changed, though the absurdity of the earlier phase didn’t seem to matter much to them. The fascinating outcome was an accommodating interest rate at 7.99%, or two hundred basis points lower that it had been previously, and I remain their customer. Somewhere common sense prevailed. But I have this sense of disquiet and concern about all the other people who received the same letter I had. How had they responded? Fear? Resignation? Indignation? What if they could not convince the company to forego the increase? What if they were already paying 22.99%?

This was the awakened insight. From the credit card perspective, I/we are nothing more than potential and real balances. This objectification somehow makes it okay to charge predatory rates. It makes it okay to justify the changes under false pretenses, and to somehow make me responsible for the bank officers’ irresponsible lending practices. The credit card company demonstrated to me the use of what I call “irrationalization” to maintain its totally impersonal and opaque position. I am object. I object. Balance retention masks a reality that is drastically out of balance.

This story is as much about what is wrong with our financial system as it is about my credit. Any invention of the mind (in this case money and debt) that is managed in order to dehumanize its users needs a new set of ethical practices that might take a cue from the ancient temples and the origins of money in Western civilization. There can be a quality of offering in and through every financial transaction. I can become more conscious of the intentions in my financial behavior, or more aware of the work and economic efforts of others to make the transactions possible at all. But first I, and others who have not already suffered enough, have to wake up to the pain and inequity that have grown within the system even as I have participated willingly, if not wisely, in it.

John Bloom
© 2008

An Inquiry into Transformation through Financial Transactions

2008-10-01T20:14:00.000-07:00

An Inquiry into Transformation through Financial Transactions

Introduction
The warbles in old windows tell a story of transformation. Looking through them, notice the distortions they create in the way the world appears, and the imperfections themselves. In our internal process of reconciling the perceptions, we are augmenting our own development. In this case, our own transformation is tied to the transformation of the medium itself.

The transparency of window glass is a given; its solidity is not. Glass is created by superheating sand (silicone dioxide) until it is liquified. Though it may then be rolled into window pane in a form that appears solid, the transformation process actually continues as its substance remains not fixed but rather as a liquid in hyper slow.

Of course, glassification occurred first in nature through volcanic activity—witness obsidian—before it became utilitarian. Such metamorphic processes are continual everywhere in nature and human nature, in the physical world as well as that of thoughts and imagination. One might consider transformation something of a phenomenon in the same way as light and other natural systems. We experience them directly, depend upon them, but cannot quantify without qualification.

So to understand transformation, to find a way to mark its presence and progress, it has to be considered from a vantage point outside an input-output or linear relationship. Instead, I propose that it be considered, metaphorically speaking, as an evolutionary journey taken through a multiplicity of pathways across the co-functions of space and time.

As has been noted in the study of plant development from seed through maturation and returning to seed, transformation may look a particular way, take on a particular shape, at a certain moment, and look different moments or many years later. The challenge, of course, is discerning the metamorphic principle that links the two moments of observational intervention. In some cases it may be obvious, in others not at all. The journey itself has a direction and purpose: some of which is evident from the start; some of which emerges through the process; and some of which can only be recognized by others affected by it and by chosen signifiers of change.

Financial Transactions—Purchase, Loan, Gift
While money is an expression of processes of human nature rather than nature as in the case of plants, observing its uses in the whole context of interactions and transactions yields a subtle imagination of transformation. Though a dollar bill’s physical nature may not change (with the exception of a bit of wear and tear) as it circulates, its qualities change according to use and according to the effects and consequences of what it makes possible by way of human activity. Thus, there is an active correlation between financial transactions and transformative process. My purpose is to outline a framework by which the phenomenon of transformation can be measured.

Purchase
Take the case of financial transactions. In a purchase transaction, money is exchanged for goods or services. The input and output are immediate and in some ways inseparable. The transaction happens between two parties—buyer and seller. But a somewhat mysterious third element is present at the moment of transaction—value in the form of price. To stay with this view, suppose the same object is sold again. Another exchange happens, and while the object is essentially the same, likely a different value emerges from or drops into the transaction. Anyone who has purchased a new car and then sold it knows the reality of this picture. So, the question is: What happened to the value or price between purchase transactions? We can follow the object as it was exchanged over space and time. We can document who had it, where it was, how it was used. We can document the moment of transactions and the value at the time of the transactions, but what do we make of the change in value? The famous art historian Walter Benjamin wrote about the “aura” that accrued to works of art over time as way of explaining both the intellectual and, in some cases, the financial value of the work. Ideas have currency as do things. Is that aura attached to the work of art, projected onto the work as a function of perception on the part of the exchanging partners, or reflective of some market standard? The “price” becomes relative to perceived value weighed against what anyone is willing to pay for it.

The point of this inquiry is nothing other than a way to point to the complexity of transactional phenomena, and to say that value, while it is perhaps a great and highly subjective mystery, is also a functional indicator of transformation. Each transaction is a moment in which the material (the physical exchange) and non-material (value) come together in space and time, and are accounted for in a measurable way. The material effect, one could say, is entirely in the foreground, but residing within the non-material is the contextual background—individual, psychological, relational, social, historical, cultural, and on—in short, everything that led up to the moment of transaction and that will flow from it. One could, with adequate time and appropriate tools, attempt to look through each transaction to observe this confluence as phenomenon. This would be the peak of transparency in financial purchase transactions, a window into their interiority and exteriority, but through window that is itself in slow flux.

Loan
The essence of a loan transaction is the quality of agreement between the parties to be in financial relationship over a period of time. While input and output are clearly related—a loan is made to support some capacity, activity, or project happening—they are stretched out over time as the output comes into being. The agreement sets the ground rules and sets in motion the rules of loan performance. The transaction is based on trust which is in turn reflected in and maintained by both parties living up to the agreement and by communicating progress. There are other dimensions of transparency in a loan relationship. One is to make the source of the loan funds visible to the borrower, to bring the investor into view, and then to make the borrower visible to investor. This level of transparency increases the social value and impact of the loan simply because more people are aware or conscious of what their money is doing or where the money came from. For example, I definitely feel more responsible and accountable if I know whose money I am using, especially if I see them every day.

If transparency in a loan transaction leads to trust and hopefully sustainability of a project, and the transaction was perceived to be transparent, then what is the internal change created by that transparency for each of the parties to the transactions?
1. None
2. Increased confidence in the relationship with the other party
3. Trust in the other person

Over what time period?
1. Immediately
2. In the first year or two
3. At the term of the loan

Further, if the investor(s) becomes visible to the borrower, how does that shift the perceptions or feelings of the borrower about the transaction?
1. No change
2. More responsible to repay the loan
3. More commitment for the loan to bring about the intended purpose or impact

Gift
The gift transaction is another matter altogether. Input and output cannot be tied in any direct logical or temporal relationship. A gift transaction is usually generated by an individual with resources recognizing a need by another human being or charitable organization. Once there is an agreement to make a gift, an agreement through which the intentions of both the donor and recipient become visible, the donor is actually giving up control of the funds. While the agreement was likely created based on trust, that trust is not controlled by language in the agreement (except in context of a restricted gift). Instead it is maintained by keeping the donor informed of the actions of the receiver even though generally there is no direct tracking that can link dollar given to dollar spent. For example, if I make a capital gift to a school, the gift is used up right away to pay the contractor, but in the space created generations of children will be educated. What the gift “purchased” is predictable, but what the gift made possible is not. Who knows how long it will be before one of those children becomes a successful social entrepreneur (for example). One could suppose that this is but one, among many, outcome of the gift, along with what unfolds in all those other children’s lives. A gift has a kind of infinite and broadcast impact because its output operates outside of predictable space-time logic.

Thus the quality of transparency in a gift transaction is far more in service to what passes through the transparent substance rather than on the substance itself. The terms of transparency which are so clearly negotiated and documented in the loan are rendered irrelevant in a gift because of the release of control. The issue of control, the degree to which the gift is truly released, semi-released, or not at all, is correlated to the impact and transformation affected by the gift. Every serious development officer or gift solicitor will tell you that the control issue or expectations (“strings attached”) is often the most challenging part of any gift transaction.

If the release of control is a measure of the impact of gift, then one could ask of both parties to the gift:

1. Were the expectations of the donor/receiver transparent, translucent, or opaque?

2. For the donor:
Were you able to truly give up control of the gift?
Did you give with some reservations?
Did you give despite your doubts about the receiver?

3. For the receiver:
Did you feel that the donor made the gift without strings attached?
Did you leave the transaction knowing that the donor had some specific expectations?
Did you sense the donor was giving out of obligation?

Given the nature of the gift transaction, how could one create an agreement around that which is unpredictable, except by agreeing to the value of unpredictability itself. The value that emerges in a gift transaction is particularly complicated primarily because what motivates the transaction from the donor’s perspective does not usually arise from any direct material need of their own, but rather from recognizing the material need of another. By recognizing that need and making a gift to support it without control, maybe without being asked, the money creates potential outside of time but toward the future. Simply because it will bring into being something that would possibly not have happened without it, it will have impact and transformative power.

Conclusion—Transparency as a Metric of Transformation
To understand the material aspect of a phenomenon, one first has to consider its non-material (or spiritual, if you will) aspects. We cannot see light; we see by it or because of it. We assume its presence by what it makes present to our eyes. Money itself is an accounting system, a measure of value woven into the phenomenon of a transactional web of circulation that could be considered global in scope.

If transparency in financial transactions is key to a deep awareness of value and the values of the participants, and this awareness is a baseline for impact and transformation, then one can assume that assessing the level of transparency in a transaction would at minimum point to whether there is potential for transformation and change in consciousness about money and its uses by either or both parties, since that is an endgame of social finance. Science defines three degrees of transparency: transparent is a level in which the vast majority of light passes through the substance being measured; translucent means that some light passes through; opaque means no light passes through. The implications for what can then be seen through the substance follow the same logic.

As the level of transparency in financial transactions leads to the awareness of the implications and lives of the parties to the transactions, their human dimensions, then awareness or interest mark the beginning of potentially transformative process. There are identifiable and measurable stages of progression through transformation which begins with awareness, moves to interest, to engagement, to digestion or comprehension, to integration. Each is an indicator of progress, thus each can be marked by a small set of questions which lead to self-assessment—after all who knows better whether I have changed than me—and the observations of the partners to the transaction. One could then use the framework of transparency as a foundation for that inquiry. I would ask: What was the degree of transparency in the financial transaction? Then, what transformation, identified through the stages of awareness, was made possible by the transparency of that transaction? Hopefully there is a rudimentary framework for answering those questions.

John Bloom
©2008

Faith, Hope, and Love: Elements of an Appreciative Economy

2008-09-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

Faith, Hope, and Love: Elements of an Appreciative Economy

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Introduction
My economic behavior is governed by many things—mine and others’ needs, desires, available resources and products, social value, and moral and ethical currents, to name a few. Much depends upon my presence of mind, how much I can slow my inner processes down to evaluate the circumstances, my strength to assess the source of desire, resist where I should, and then understand the reality of how one pays for the transaction, whether credit, cash or other means of exchange. Imagine, if you will, all these transactions happening in an appreciative economy, one that values the warmth of recognition, inspiration, and relationships, supported rather than driven by economic activity. In an appreciative economy, money makes compassion more economically feasible than greed.

Financial transactions constitute a subset of broader economic activity. They are elements in the landscape of exchange. They have their qualities that I will explore from the perspectives of faith, hope, and love—not terms we normally associate with money. In the passage from Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot situates these concept-percepts in the soul as part of an inner dialogue: “I said to my soul…” They are connected to each other, yet each has its own characteristic gesture. I am motivated to engage in financial transactions for many of the reasons indicated. But, not all financial transactions are the same. For example, the same dollar can be used for a purchase, a loan, or a gift. Each use or function is distinguished by the degree of attention I pay to relationship and time. Just as the soul gestures of faith, hope, and love are distinct from each other, so too are the archetypal qualities of those transactions. But the two are connected as I experience them. By understanding how those qualities and their soul gestures are active in financial transactions, it is my hope that to offer some inner reflective tools for bringing more consciousness to money and its uses toward an evolving appreciative economy.

Faith
What do I mean by faith? The word denotes religious practices, but I would like to frame it from the perspective of a quality of soul. What is behind faith? And, how is it constructed such that I can recognize its presence regardless of a specific outer form or expression? First, my assessment is that faith, if not simply presumed by tradition, is built upon a complex of outer and inner inquiries and experiences over time. One superficial example is how one develops faith in a brand product. The first encounter is with the product and what the manufacturer and advertisers “promise” about how it will perform. That message is then either confirmed or contradicted by my experience with the product. Over time, I no longer have to evaluate whether or not I want to buy the product. If experience continually confirms the promise, the product has earned my loyalty and thus my faith in its value. The selection of that particular product is now part of my habit life, and of course makes my shopping time more efficient.

The point is that faith develops over time. It has an inherent historical framework, and usually a point of reference such as a body of religious knowledge or a consumer need. These kinds of faith are quite different in their degree of depth and the power they hold. Brand allegiance is not all that deep, or there would not be so much money spent on maintaining it. By contrast, imagine casually suggesting to someone that they change their religion. Religion has a body of knowledge, values and practices that have such cultural and historical reach that some are considered borne by blood. This could be considered a form of cell or tissue memory, a kind of atavistic presence that reaches well into the past.

Loan transactions share something of this historical aspect in the sense that I take a loan in order to accomplish something, purchase a house, for example, and then pay for the use of those funds over time—whatever the agreement established at the time. While I am writing the monthly check in the present, the true reference is to the historical event. Hopefully, as part of the loan origination, there was a great deal of due diligence done by both parties to the transaction. I want to know who is lending me the money, what the exact terms of the agreement are, and what the remedies are should they be needed. And the lender is likely asking me about my creditworthiness, my financial history, where I work and how much I make, etc. The purpose of this “dance” is to validate the history and intentions of the borrower (what I will do with the money), and to determine, based on that historical picture, whether or not the future will be consistent enough with that history in order to assure the success of the loan. In other words, does the lender have faith enough in me and the activity I want to finance to make the loan? And, do I as a borrower have enough faith in my ability to honor my loan commitment?

Loan transactions are based in faith, regardless of how objective the loan process may appear.

Hope
When I say that I hope for something—someone’s good health, or for something to happen—I am projecting an intention out into the future. Hope is future bearing. To attach specific outcomes or a time frame to it changes it from hope into an expectation. And, I have a different relationship to each, though I am not always clear in conveying which one I am actually inwardly holding. Pure hope is nothing but an open ended imagination that may inspire me or others, but leaves me or others free to act upon that hope or not. After all it is my hope, not theirs. This inner freedom is not of the political sort; it has nothing to do with rights or agreements. Instead, it arises from a spiritual, moral, or ethical place which only I can access or know for myself. Therefore, if I listen to my own hope and decide to realize it through my own volition, I have made a commitment or agreement with myself. It moves from hope to a kind of duty. If someone else responds to my stated hope, they also enter this same process for themselves. While it may be quite gratifying for me, I also have to realize that I have no control over the other person’s process. They have taken it up out their own inner freedom and for their own reasons.

Thus, hope has a deeply philanthropic aspect to it. When I make a financial gift, say to a charity, it only becomes a gift because I have given up any control of the money. If the gift comes with expectations or restrictions, it is still a gift but not a truly free one. The standard acknowledgment line which states that you have received no goods or services in return for the gift is a simple expression of this deeper principle. One might say that a gift has a spiritual value in reciprocity for the sacrifice of any material value. (Tax benefits aside!)

The aspect of freedom is paramount for a gift. If I make a gift based on an intention and in freedom, and it is received in freedom and with recognition of that intention, then something quite new has happened in the realm of transactions—a kind of destiny moment in which two parties are aligned, but totally out of free choice.

And, the true gift aspect of a gift tends to operate outside the rational basis of time. When I make a gift to a charity, that gift is usually quickly transformed into purchase by the charity—to pay salaries, rent, buy equipment or whatever. However, the gift element remains in the capacity of the charity to benefit lives. This aspect cannot be predicted. In educating a child, one does not know what capacity that individual will bring to the world, or when it may emerge. However, it is pretty likely that the educational process itself can be credited with having contributed to building that capacity. So a gift is entirely future bearing.

Gift transactions are based in hope regardless of the level of negotiation and agreement it might take to secure the gift.

Love
Just the thought of trying to delimit love as a soul capacity seems daunting. Love is one of those overly sentimentalized terms and everyone has his or her associations connected to it for better or worse. Despite its frequency and demotic use—Robert Indiana’s memorializing it in sculptural form, and its use in scoring tennis games come to mind—it has endured because of the deep significance of what it represents for our survival as a species. The Greek philosophers worked hard at identifying some its many aspects from the physical to the spiritual, and teasing out its rightful place in our consciousness and the qualities of our relationships.

Love is so central to my well being, so critical to the buoyancy of my life, that its presence is ever-present. And in a way that is just the point. Love and the practice of love are relatively meaningless except in the present. Love is the tool by which I fully engage in the world and know what is coming toward me from the world, sometimes long before I can make sense of that knowing in my head. The practice of love is also the generator of the energetic field that I have around me that unconsciously interacts and exchanges with others. Love is essentially connected with our being rather than our doing. It is a capacity of feeling that helps us to be awake to and interested in others and their needs. Because it is so linked with my presence, I should not, in the ideal, need to summon it as a force from some shadowed depths. It is instead a matter of my being awake to it as it speaks through my decisions and actions.

Thus, when I am making purchases, exchanging money for goods or services, it is neither faith nor hope that is qualitatively present, but rather, love. Purchases have no historical or future reference. The value is solely in the equality of exchange at the time. As I know only too well when reselling anything, the value may be very different in the next exchange. As opposed to loans and gifts, purchases happen very quickly and often in isolation. If I were to slow any of them down, all the variables that made that transaction possible might come into view: the thinking that went into the creation of the product; the labor that went into its production; the market that made it available; the vendor actually selling it; then the need that I have; the work that went into earning the money to make the purchase; my values…and so on. Suddenly, the purchase exchange represents the whole of our interdependent economic life encapsulated in one moment. There are potential challenges in this process. Because as a typical consumer I am seeking a good deal, I would have to be blind to the consequences of cheap labor, externalized costs, and environmental damage that allowed the price to be so low. If I were to slow down some purchases, I might actually be awakened to the mistreatment of people and animals that made such an advantageous price possible. I would be confronted with the discrepancy between my espoused values and how I practice them. If I am really paying attention to my authentic voice that actually knows and practices out of love, I would have to reconsider the purchase and maybe not even make it. Love arises from taking a deep interest in the reality I create for myself, from the empathic attention I pay to the needs of others, and from my ability to actively forgive that which might otherwise feel like an insult coming toward me.

As I use money to purchase material goods to meet my needs, I am being informed more or less consciously by a part of my constitution formed during my infancy, one might say pre-consciously. By this statement, I mean that at birth we are fully dependent upon our mothers (or surrogates) for our nurturance and nutrition. The quality of feeling that was connected with that process on the parent’s part—the joy, the stress—are experienced as an associated part of the nurturance and thus become an integral part of our economic self. On one hand this could seem absurd, on the other it might help us to understand why money and how we use it, especially in the realm of purchase, is such a mystery to us, why we do not like to talk about it, and why it brings up all sorts of issues, particularly around the concept of what is enough. What need is really being met as we purchase to meet our needs (or, dare I say it, wants)? And, we purchase with such frequency, that we are hard put to have the time to pay consciousness to the process.

The practice of love, in the deepest sense of its meaning, is one way to bring healing through the consummation of purchase transactions.

Closing
The primary purpose of this inquiry is to connect qualities of soul to the qualities of financial transactions. I am asking myself, and the reader, to take a deeper look at our economic life, to recognize that how we are with our transactions inwardly is just as important as how we conduct them outwardly. It is a step toward integrating espoused and practiced values through our finances, a step toward reawakening the sacredness of our economic life. In the passage from the Four Quartets, what T.S. Eliot is urging the audience to do is to set aside all assumptions, cultural conditioning, and expectations—whether about the future (hope), present (love), or past (faith)—and for each of us to live into what our soul has to tell us. When the soul inquiry we carry is about money and financial transactions, our place in them and their place in us, we may very well be in the frontier of transformative exploration: “So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” The practice of faith, hope and love in financial transactions will then also invite that kind of transformation in others—as they experience the expression of my inner values and are touched by their own.

John Bloom
©2008

A Window into Transparency: the Desire for Connection through Finance

2008-08-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

A Window into Transparency: the Desire for Connection through Finance

I have a friend who began his career in the Netherlands at a small family bank, which had relationships with clients that went back some two hundred plus years. He saw the bank’s balance sheet from one of its earliest years in the 18th Century, and found a name of a trading firm that was still a client. This is really a long-term relationship—an unlikely scenario in today’s banking and finance world. His assessment of why the continuity and success of the financial relationship: The trust and accountability that comes of living in the same community, seeing each other at the market, and the awareness that failing to pay the loan could have consequences for neighbors and the local economy.

This story came to mind, because recently I read an article in the New York Times (July 19, 2008, B1, B6) under the “Your Money” header titled, “When the Banker Knows Your Mother” by Ron Lieber. The article is an inquiry into the value of community banking in the face of recent banking disasters, such as the failure of IndyMac in Pasadena, and the disconnected and impersonal aspects of purely on-line banking. The article indicated that the challenge for local banks is to match the interest rates of their more space-based than place-based competitors. But, risk is also an issue. When asked about the risk of his community bank, the president Mr. R. Michael S. Menzies replied, “The first loss we take here is my personal loss. It’s my personal equity in the bank, my personal reputation in a community I’ve lived in most of my life. I’m not just dealing with other people’s money, so it’s a whole different level of responsibility.” In the opaque, distant, and mostly digital world of current finance, this kind of thinking and willingness to take personal and community responsibility strike a harmonious chord in my heart, and, also bespeak social and community values that offset “advantageous” interest.

Risk and money, especially when it is my money, opens up a host of questions around tolerance, desire, greed, and, hopefully, higher social purposes. In this vulnerable state, transparency of intention and action operate as a tonic, as does access to knowing the people with whom I have entrusted my money and their ethics. Transparency is a window into the other side of financial transactions. Current risk-reward models run the gamut from casino-like with high risk and high reward (hedge funds, derivatives, even casinos themselves) to simple low interest no-risk insured savings accounts. The story is always based on the assumed validity of the risk-reward model as motivation for material gain. In fact, we have developed a whole rationale around risk and reward which basically rewards, even celebrates risk, and treats reward as a kind of compensation for having given up other uses of the capital.

In the venture capital model, the investor is tying his or her fortunes to the success of the entrepreneur; while the entrepreneur in some (but not all) cases is likely working toward exit strategy or buy out, yet another form or reward. The end goal of all this risk-reward activity is the generation and extraction of capital from the economic process. One positive of the venture capital model is that the investing is actually directly in the project and the work itself. It is based upon the faith that the investor has in the success of the undertaking and the abilities of the entrepreneur. Transparency is inherent in this structure, as it is in many ways a co-creative process between the funders and entrepreneur, at least at the outset. However, this cohesion is ruptured, for example, when the company goes public and the shares are traded for their perceived value—that is, the next round of investors are paying the original investors for the shares. Little to none of that money actually goes directly into the company itself. At this moment the risk-reward model is disengaged with any real value and is then delivered into the prestidigitation of publicly-traded on Wall Street.

In an economic world that turns on self-interest, the calculated risk sits with the owner of the money. As a result of this self-interested imperative, investment and kindred financial activities have gone from enabling new capacities on the part of entrepreneurs (direct investment) to extracting capital from the capital system itself (indirect investment). Extraction is the means, accumulation the end. The concentration of wealth effects another significant result, restriction of the flow of useful money. Money that could bring about cultural renewal and innovation, is instead tied up in real estate and other material goods.

One could read this as a judgment of wealth. It is not. Wealth is critically important to everyone, though it may feel different or in fact be different depending upon perception and cultural norms. It is, however, an argument in favor of circulation rather than accumulation, in favor of direct transactions rather than indirect, transparency over the impenetrability and weight of Wall Street, so beautifully portrayed in 1915 by photographer and film-maker Paul Strand.

Easton Bank & Trust, featured in the NYT article, is but one example of a more human-scale localized financial organization, a model of money serving community through real relationships. In many ways, credit unions and cooperative bank share this quality of community and accessibility. However, there is another economic form which addresses the question of risk in a deeply social and innovative way. It is neither banking nor investment, but rather it is a community-centered financing structure, as direct, personal, and transparent as imaginable. By its very nature, it is designed to support, indeed assure, a vocation along with production and distribution of goods, free of the adverse competitive pressures of the marketplace. There is no betting; and, the risk-reward model is turned inside out and upside down. The model, as practiced in the United States, is called community supported agriculture [CSA]. About twenty-five years ago the first such economic association was started on the East Coast of the US, having been previously implemented in Northern Europe. Today there are well over two thousand such groups in operation, though not all are equally true to the original associative intention.

The concept of the community supported agriculture is transferrable to other contexts, and in fact has been applied to medical practices already. But for clarity, I will describe it as applied in community farming. First and foremost the farmer identifies, develops, or adopts a community that is interested in connecting with the farm, the farmer’s values and practices, and the joy of being a partner in the economic life of the farm. Then, the farmer determines how much food he or she can grow and thus how many families can be fed based on seasonal output. Based on the number of shares that can be grown, the farmer puts together an annual budget that encompasses all of the farm activity including purchasing of seeds, equipment, health insurance, facilities and farm maintenance and other living costs for the whole year (not just the growing season). In the interest of engagement and transparency, the farmers may even invite members of the community to participate in the formation of the budget. This total budget is then divided by the number of shares to arrive at the cost per share. This “price” is thus arrived at in an associative manner in the sense that all the parties to setting the price have brought their needs and perspectives into the process—somewhat akin to fair trade practices.

The benefits to this process are many. The social and community ones are self-evident. However, the economic advantages bear further discussion for what they represent as the opposite of the opaque world of conventional finance and pricing schema. First, the farmer is free to farm as he or she best knows how, without the pressures of the market-based competitive economy, or the demand for the return of capital. Second, because there is a direct connection between the farmer and the shareholders, there is no middle distribution or wholesale system to add to the cost, or reduce what the farmer might receive. The most interesting part of all, and the part that takes the most education for those new to it, is that the risk of farm or crop failure is shared across the entire community. The shareholders pay for the cost of the year for the farmer to farm, and receive food as a by-product say seven months out of the year. If there is a drought year, or some other blight, the farmers are still supported by the share income, and will thrive to farm another season. The shareholders bear that risk. In a bounteous year, the shareholders receive more than they expect. What this means is that the shareholders are not consumers in opposition to a producer; rather, they are co-producers. Neither are they paying in any direct way for the food or treating the farmer’s labor as a commodity. The beauty is that the farmer’s livelihood is not subject to the vagaries of market forces and the rising tide of climate chaos.

In the CSA model, risk and reward are actually separated from each other and reconfigured to support the vocation of the farmer. In conventional investing, reward and risk are linked through input and output of the money system. The borrower or investee uses the money for production and leverages the marketplace to repay the investor. In the community supported system, the point of the entrepreneur (farmer) is not one of economic gain, but rather of sustainability and a mission to heal the earth and cultivate soil fertility. This interest in matters beyond self-interest permeates the associative form and raises the commitment of community members to also rise above self-interest.

CSA is an associative community-centered financing model that needs no corporate or legal structure to operate. It is instead, a self-governing economic community which determines its agreements in light of the farmers and members needs. In some senses “enoughness” and sustainability are built into the model, and the money simply serves this end. It is also a completely transparent, personal and direct form of economic relationships that has a localized base and a capacity for self-renewal. I would hope for and imagine that all economic activity will someday operate within this associative approach, though scale will always be a challenge. Associating in this modality meets the rising need to connect in community through finances in a very simple and immediate way. It is a picture of the future of economic activity that returns money to its role as a means toward local and sustainable community.

That the New York Times would publish an article addressing the value of local and personal in the context of “Your Money” is significant. It points to not only a rising need for connection, but also the legitimacy of deeply human relational values that are the foundation of trust. What has been betrayed by the recent financial and banking disasters is this fundamental need for trust. Thus, any financial form that fosters transparency is to be celebrated for the healing it brings to our economic consciousness.

John Bloom
©2008

Tribute Paid: At the Intersection of Spirit and Money

2008-06-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

Tribute Paid: At the Intersection of Spirit and Money

The realms of spirit and religion, as engaged as they are with the non-material world, still have to find a way to work in a world that trades in money. That religious organizations can be tax-exempt in the United States is proof enough of that. And in Germany, tax dollars actually flow through the government to support the churches. While this is definitely not an essay on the separation of church and state, it is about the intersection of religious or spiritual practice, a private matter, and the world of money, which tends to be a public matter. Cultures treat these matters in ways that reflect their belief systems and political agreements, and there are many variants. While one could make a life study of this topic, my hope is that two perspectives, conveyed in two paintings and a poem, will shed a little light on those differences as stimulus for considering our own inherited or consciously developed assumptions, beliefs, and agreements.

I will open with an episode from the New Testament. In the Gospel of Matthew 17:24, Peter, confronted by the tax collector, tells him that they are planning on paying their tax. When Peter reports this, Jesus establishes through logical inquiry, that he and Peter have no real obligation to pay the tax. However, in order “not to give offense to them,” Jesus instructs Peter to catch a fish in whose mouth he would find a coin to pay their tax.

This scene, Tribute Money, was famously rendered by Masaccio as one of his many frescos in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria della Carmine in Florence, 1426-1428. In this panoramic rendition, Peter is on the left taking the coin from the fish’s mouth. We also see Peter paying the tax on the right side of the painting in a kind of time-sweep of narration. The aesthetic magic of this filmic representation served as a pale reminder of the quiet miracle in the biblical sequence. That the coin was found in the mouth of a fish is laden with Christian symbolism. But at the time Christianity was nascent. Jesus understood the revolutionary nature of the new religious impulse he was bringing to humanity, birthed as it was out of Judaism an in the context of the, not yet Holy, Roman Empire. He knew that he had his enemies and detractors in both camps, and was careful to distinguish political treachery from more innocent spiritually-motivated behavior. In this frame of reference, money and taxes are the stuff of politics.

The politics of taxes comes up again later in Matthew in 22:17-22. But this time, the outcome is quite different. When Jesus is approached by another tax collector, he responds to the disingenuous question of whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, by first asking to see the money-piece (as illustrated here) required for the tax. He then asks whose likeness and inscription is on the coin. The tax collector answers that it is Caesar’s. After castigating the collector for being a hypocrite, Jesus then speaks his oft quoted line: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” He could identify the hypocrisy because he knew that the collector’s own religious practice would not really have him subject to Caesar’s tax, but that he and his fellow Pharisees and Herodites had in some ways already sold out to the state. Jesus also knew that the question was part of an entrapment scheme to frame him as an enemy of the regime. The collectors, caught off guard by the validity of his statements, were disappointed in their attempt and left him. Jesus understood the distinction between matters of state and spirit, and understood that each has different terms of engagement.

In this oil painting from 1518 (now in the Dresden Gallery, Germany), Titian renders the moment of the transactional conversation from 22:17 in a highly editorial manner. The Herodian character is painted in a darker smokier palette and the distribution of light does not follow pictorial logic. Jesus seems to emanate his own light. Neither is he actually touching the money (filthy lucre as it became). What strikes me as essential, however, is that Jesus is looking directly into the other man’s eyes and thus establishes an energetic dynamic quite separate]from the hand-to-hand transaction below. This kind of intense eye contact is not a common part of financial transactions, as far as I remember or practice. It speaks to a quality of engagement that directly touches the other party (for better or worse) and, in doing so, validates the level of relationship essential to bringing a new consciousness to money. As Titian portrayed it, Jesus’ gaze was disarming and served to unmask the deceit of the other—the power of spirit over the power of money, the rule of moral law over the laws of the state.

This moral force looks a little different in the poem Deciding by William Stafford. He wrote from a far more modern and less doctrinal vantage point. Further, he was awake to a nuance of an Americas consciousness that moves beyond the duality of heaven and earth, spirit and matter, even good and evil, as played out in the scenes from the Gospel of Matthew. Here is Stafford’s poem:

One mine the Indians worked had
gold so good they left it there
for God to keep.

At night sometimes you think
your way that far, that deep,
or almost.

You hold all things or not, depending
not on greed but whether they suit what
life begins to mean.

Like those workers you study what moves,
what stays. You bow, and then, like them,
you know—

What’s God, what’s world, what’s gold.

To make the comparison between money and gold requires an imaginative leap; but in the context of the poem, gold is a kind of currency. It clearly has value as a precious metal. In the myth of Midas, in which everything he touches turns to gold including his daughter, gold is a deep materialistic curse. But, it also has an equally long history of representing consciousness as an alchemical transformation from the base metal lead. Stafford takes us past the duality into a kind of triptychal configuration that identifies the spiritual (God), the material (world) and, then, a third place (gold) that actually embodies the potential for both in its physicality and aura. It is the genius of this poem to name an inner capacity of the miners for knowing how to transcend the simple duality, and instead to exercise being in both places at once—and thus in the third place. Jesus was an exemplar and teacher of this conscious capacity to see both what belongs to the world and what belongs in the realm of spirit, and beyond that to be able to discern and name when the two are out of integrity. This kind of knowing is intuitional in nature, and worthy of being emulated even in if one is likely to fail.

Money calls upon our lower or desire nature, what Stafford points to as greed, because it is associated with the realms of rights and power, and is synonymous with access to material goods and services. Through government issued currency, the state regulates the financial transactional sector to a degree, especially interest rates, and thus also gains denomination over taxation. Taxation is a material part of a citizen’s participation in the commonwealth, a required gift as a share of the cost of government. Further, because we are so dependent upon money and the marketplace to provide for us in our evolved citified culture, money carries with it dominion over our sense of well being, our sense of self-sufficiency—a place dangerously close to our identity and spirit.

Given this, it is not surprising to find a sense of well-being and abundance present in some of the so-called poorest communities, provided that the sense of community itself is intact; a gift economy is the true currency and taxes are irrelevant. This somewhat idyllic picture points to the presence of spirit in the care people have and practice for each other. The eye-to-eye gaze depicted by Titian is one level of communitas or communion that Jesus was already practicing with his disciples. How the money changes hands is another level, one often less attended to because of money’s the long materialistic history, and perpetuated by our own inherited assumptions about it. Like the alchemists and the miners, we have an opportunity to transform money, not by being ruled by our desire nature, but rather by seeing that it is connected to our intentions whether moral-ethical or disingenuous. Money is both material and spiritual. Our task is to find that third place where both realities are always present and potent, and yet remain integrated.

John Bloom
©2008

The Touchstone and the Labyrinth: A Step into the Mystery of Money

2008-06-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

Classic labyrinth at Lifebridge Foundation, Rosendale, NY

The Touchstone and the Labyrinth: A Step into the Mystery of Money

There are occasions when a mix of metaphors actually generates new meaning, though I was scolded often enough the practice by my English teachers. In my recollection, though, they never mentioned that there might be value and meaning in understanding and finding language for a real spiritual world and my place in it as part of conventional discourse, as challenging as that might be. Of course, forgiveness is in order since I was being taught at a time when science held objective knowledge of the material world as an article of faith. So, I learned to live with that myth along with the ongoing wonder and mystery of experience.

Now, from a pathway through the visual arts whose purpose artist Paul Klee said is “to make the invisible visible,” I have come to recognize money as a medium of expression, as a social technology, and one that also makes the invisible visible by bringing together value with material goods. Money taps as deeply into the human interior as it circulates widely about the world. While it is not a hard stretch to see that spirit and matter coalesce in nature, it is a more complicated proposition to see that spirit and matter coalesce in human nature. As a human invention and intervention money is an exemplar of and living laboratory for this play between interiority and exteriority—one aspect of spirit and matter. Money is linked to our material needs and our participation in economic life, and yet what it represents is entirely abstract, non-material and, to a degree, faith based. Value is thus a big player in the mystery drama of money.

A mystery is by definition enigmatic, and tracing back to the invisible from the visible is an exercise fraught with ambiguity. However, I hope that a step, taken with humility may shed some light on the experience of money’s mystery. This inquiry explores two ancient objects, the labyrinth and the touchstone. Both have come to serve as symbols of and metaphors for the physical and experiential aspect of money. The labyrinth hosts the personal pilgrimage, the journey one takes reflectively while moving through one’s life path. The touchstone is used to measure the quality or purity of gold (as well as silver and other alloys) by applying dilutions of acid—the acid test, literally. Both objects denote material meaning and purpose, and both have come through connotation to be used as metaphors for experience. In combination they speak to me of the mystery, the inside out of money.

Those who have walked a labyrinth with an open heart know the power of the experience. Its path is a ritual journey from the threshold at the entrance to a more metaphoric threshold at the center—a path of discovery and self knowledge. Walking the path, one feels part of some deep archetypal world filled with energetic and intuitional processes. As one comes to the center, there is no further one can travel on the horizontal plane of the earth. Instead, the journey turns vertical traveling from the gravitation stillness of the feet through the earth and up through the uprightness of the spine toward the sky. It is on the vertical axis that one turns to commence the outward journey.

It is a beautiful and powerful moment, that merging of vertical and horizontal. It is a private journey in which my inner and outer self meet each other, and through integration make meaning together. The center of the labyrinth is, in concentrated and magnified form, an imagination of many moments I experience each day as I move about the world aware of myself and myself in relation to others, in conversations and interactions as I and we. Such transactions (and I mean this in the highest sense) happen parallel to or across the plane of the earth. However, there is another element to a transaction that has more of a vertical quality. As one is in conversation with another, meaning arises (or descends, both vertical actions) out of mutual understanding. It is almost as if it transcends the two individuals present. This meaning is carried inwardly as it is transformed into understanding, and then outwardly as it moves to action. In a financial transaction, the third element, the meaning so to speak, to the transaction is value. Again, it arises (or descends) at the moment of the transactional agreement, then disappears until such time as the object being traded is the subject of another transaction. Thus, like language, money is both a medium of exchange (horizontal) and a measure of value (vertical)—a kind of mathematical metric of meaning.

The labyrinth is an ancient form or figure found nearly everywhere in the world, across many cultures, and in many variations of design, scale, and formulation. The form is emblematic in and of itself, and serves as a framework for ritual; it is both container and contained, design and process. Labyrinths are remarkably simple in a certain way, as are many archetypal forms. There was a practical necessity for the simplicity. They were carved into stone as soft as sandstone and as hard as granite. These ancient petroglyphs look sometimes like a cosmic fingerprint, sometimes like a map of the human brain. Where they were constructed to be walked, they emanate an invitation to the journey.

Stone is a currency of labyrinths. Most are built with stone or stone tiles, thus each stone contributes to the energetic pathos of the form. The path of the labyrinth is one of consciousness, a spiritual journey bounded by the materiality of the mineral world. It is a fascinating relationship between the spiritual and the material; each requires the other to have whole meaning. And, it is through the physical and metaphysical uprightness of the human being that both are recognized and realized as a confluence of nature and human nature.

As much as the mineral kingdom has provided the stones of our architecture, walls and ways, it has also provided a vein of metals and crystalline stones that were deemed precious for their properties; their perceived value has played out in complicated scenarios throughout history. Gold, of course, comes to mind. It has been mined from ancient times and has always had great value attached to it, for its beauty, durability, stability, malleability, and rarity. The now long ago stolen capstones of the Egyptian pyramids were made of gold—gold placed at the intersection of earth and heaven, of the material and spiritual. Gold serves as emblematic representative of the power of the pharaoh, ruler over all things material and the only earthly embodiment of the spiritual world and the afterlife.

At the same time, gold was used as the material of some of the earliest money in the Dead Sea and Mesopotamian regions for the sacred power it retained, even as materialism was rising. And, of course, a measure for the quality and purity of gold was needed as forms of metallic coinage came increasingly into use as a storage device for value in trade and exchange.

The storied touchstone, a stone of fine grained schist or jasper, has a long history of use by the assayers of the value and purity of gold. It was used as early as the fifth century BCE, and continues to be used to this day for the same purpose. The method is straightforward. The gold to be tested is swiped across the stone, next to one from gold of known purity. After an initial comparison, the test strip is lightly washed over with dilute acid which dissolves impurity and alloy metals, but not the gold. Through a progression of increasingly concentrated acid, the quality of the gold is determined. This is the science of the touchstone. Its poetry is as a litmus test or standard bearer of quality or tone, a metaphoric benchmark of value.

Both the touchstone and the labyrinth have a sense of ritual about them, ritual processes leading to revelation of outer value and inner worth, an alignment of the outer and inner. So they serve well in harmony to characterize some of the archetypal aspects of the money mystery.

But money has changed in recent years. It has become much less connected to the human experience as exemplified by the touchstone and the labyrinth. Just as we may be coming to a place of understanding something of its mystery by exploring the world of stones, its physical and metaphysical aspects, money has essentially jettisoned all physicality. It has been reduced to electronic pulse, a pure currency that moves invisibly and speedily. Our bank accounts are mere way stations, and our on-line accounts and ATM machines nothing more than meters for the comings and goings, credit and debits. There is no relevant test for the purity of the medium of exchange, and no time to journey with it through transactions. The touchstone and the labyrinth are about real experiential value, much as money has been throughout its history.

Recent currency has no real value, no reference point as found with the touchstone. We live, instead, with fiat currency which means that it has no standard or reference tied to the mineral world or otherwise. The United States officially left the gold standard in 1972 under President Nixon. Today’s money is simply made legal by governmental decree, meaning that it is actually a fiction declared as fact. So I am left with the question: Post the experiential and metaphoric relevance of the touchstone and the labyrinth, post a material basis for money itself, how to we go about understanding money in relation the human psyche? Where, or even how, does money reside in the mystery of the human being? What tools and senses are needed when the work at hand is no longer about making the invisible visible? Instead what seems at work in the impenetrability of Wall Street transactions such as sub-prime loans and other “exotic” financial instruments, is keeping the invisible invisible. The process for this is to use the language of visibility and count on the habit of continued belief in its truth, because it may be too painful and disruptive to do otherwise. Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” comes to mind, a story in which all the wisest counselors and courtiers convince the king that the new robes being made for him are the most magnificent, even though they do not appear at all. Of course, in Andersen’s story, it takes the innocence of the child’s voice to call out the truth in public and to lift the veil of illusion from the emperor’s eyes.

Though there seems no need for the touchstone to measure the quality of the coin, to test our mettle so to speak, the essence of the labyrinthine journey may be more important than ever. As money is increasingly reduced to nano units and moves ever faster, it will become increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of our experience in the world. For example, there will be less time to exercise the kinds of choices that are now the privilege of the conscious consumer. The moment of purchase could be almost simultaneous with the thought of the purchase. Thus, the spiritual self we come to know through the journey with all its gifts and foibles, desires and needs, will be, completely visible in the economic self that buys, sells, invests, and gives. We may already be there; but we are still able to operate under the cloak of rationalized invisibility. Where is that innocent child’s voice? And, when will we hear it?

John Bloom
©2008

Reforging Adam Smith: Currencies Beyond the Gates of Self-Interest

2008-04-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

Reforging Adam Smith: Currencies Beyond the Gates of Self-Interest

It seems the shadow of Adam Smith, and the motivating principle of self-interest he so eloquently articulated, still loom over our now adumbrated economy. Part of that principle indicates that if we are true to our natural instincts, we will recognize that our self-interest is served through our interest in others’ well-being. On the positive side, one can see the origins of modern philanthropy in this construct. But, what is one to make of self-interest as it applies to the Federal Reserve Bank bail out (granted through guarantees) of a major investment house whose fortunes were tied to the subprime loan market? From Smith, one would think that lenders have an interest in the success of their borrowers. Maybe some of the loan originators did have an interest, but all that disappeared as the loans were bundled, securitized, sold, and the extractive investors fed their needs in total disconnection from original purpose and relationship between lender and borrower. This looks more like a form of self-interest in which the predator harbors a natural interest in the survivability of its prey.

The shadow of Smith’s socio-economic theory is that an individual’s (or corporation’s) self-interest turns to greed and suffers from the condition of “neverenoughness.” In this light, it is important to note the strange-but-true rights of a corporation as equal to those of an individual. Both can celebrate the same freedoms and suffer the same diseases, and, then be cured according to their wealth, class status, and access to power. What to make of the bitter difference between the speed with which the Federal Reserve and JP Morgan responded to the financial crisis of one of their own (creditors) versus the glacial and heavily politicized response to the conditions of the debtors? This is the worst of self-interest, one that excludes “the other” for the benefit of the few—a strange kind of economic wealth-class protectionism. Likely this is not the benevolent self-interest that Smith had in mind. While this critique is not the primary focus of this article, it is essential backdrop; and, it would be hard to ignore the emergent irony when a captain of industry, such as Bill Gates, plays the Adam Smith card.

A friend recently sent me a transcript of Bill Gates’s Economic Forum Speech from Davos this last year. It is remarkable for several reasons, not the least of which is that Gates was looking at Adam Smith’s self-interest in a light that addresses and frames “the other” in terms of stark real economic need (in which he includes computer technology) rather than a more generalized interest in fellow human beings. He also suggests that capitalism can find a way to solve the poverty it has been a part of creating; at the same time, his analysis of wealth creation and its concentration is direct and pointed. His is, of course, a privileged view and he was speaking to a privileged audience. However, despite his inability to leave the market-driven, self-interested model and language behind, he was bringing renewed focus to what is essentially an altruistic concept—an awareness of interdependence, and the limitations of a free-market economy devoid of any ethic other than profit and shareholder value.

The following are excerpts from Bill Gates’s speech:

I believed that breakthroughs in technology could solve the key problems…but breakthroughs change lives only where people can afford to buy them—only where there is economic demand. And economic demand is not the same as economic need. There are billions of people who need the great inventions of the computer age, and many more basic needs as well. But they have no way of expressing their needs in ways that matter to markets. So they go without.
If we are going to have a serious chance of changing their lives, we will need another level of innovation. Not just technology innovation—we need system innovation.

Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Market incentives make that happen…We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

The genius of capitalism lies in its ability to make self-interest serve the wider interest…This system driven by self-interest is responsible for the great innovations that have improved the lives of billions. But to harness this power so it benefits everyone—we need to refine the system.

As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in helpful and sustainable ways, but only on behalf of those who can pay.

Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market forces. To make the system sustainable, we need to use profit incentives whenever we can. At the same time, profits are not always possible when business tries to serve the very poor. In such cases, there needs to be another market based incentive—and that incentive is recognition. Recognition enhances a company’s reputation and appeals to customers; above all, it attracts good people to the organization…The challenge is to design a system where market incentives, including profit and recognition, drive the change.

I like to call this new system creative capitalism…This hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others serves a much wider circle of people than can be reached by self-interest or caring alone.

System refinement and system innovation are always afoot in the capitalist-entrepreneurial mind set. But neither questions the basic assumptions of the system itself. I am not critiquing capitalism, but rather the interpretation of it that said at one time that laissez-faire and now free-markets is the only reasonable approach. This makes perfect sense if the people setting the rules are the ones most likely to benefit.

The abuses of the market and capital systems lie primarily in two arenas. The first and most obvious one is the economic sphere where the underlying purpose is meeting people’s material needs through the production of goods and services. In this arena, overproduction and overconsumption are the culprits motivated just as Gates indicated by market share and profit. The consequences of this are starkly visible in the wealth gap. The second and less blatant arena is the domain of rights. Contrary to the basic principle of equality in the rights realm, those who have benefited most in the economic sector also have an interest in influencing government, law, policy, and financial markets in self-serving ways. For example, the credit card industry or its hired representatives craft and marshal through Congress the new bankruptcy law. This is just one of many such aberrations of the rights process. For another perspective, it is interesting to look at who stands for free trade on one hand, and for fair trade on the other. Both are based on capitalist market models, yet their social outcomes are radically different. To be successful, fair trade necessitates an interest in the other.

It is significant that Gates is putting caring for others on a par with self-interest and, as the former has gotten short shrift in modern economic life except in the domain of philanthropy. But, does it make sense to try to meet the caring aspects through capitalism no matter how creative? I do not think there is an economics text which places caring in any economic framework. While our lives depend on it, it cannot be manufactured and it is “priceless.” And by the way, last I cared to reflect on it, caring seems like an infinitely renewable resource. The problem is the conventional tools of capitalism are not designed to sustain these deeply human life-sources. Gates is suggesting recognition as the motivational tool to get markets to support the needy. I would suggest that this would self-limit: The stockholders would only go so far with it, it would wear thin in time, and it would likely be misused to gain market share. These are, in the end, essential to the character and purpose of capital markets.

There are new or emerging tools to meet the economic needs of those outside the market economy, but they are not refinements of capitalism. Instead, they come under the general heading of complementary currencies. They are complementary because they are not meant to replace federal or governmental issued currencies; they are called currencies because they are a means of exchange in an interdependent self-governed economy. There are many forms of complementary currencies solving social problems in many places around the world. The stories are profound and empowering. ACCESS Foundation is a keeper of some of these stories as well as a resource for the field of complementary currencies. One system, called TimeBanks, is entirely based on time rather than money (www.timebanks.org). Such currencies are generated by the communities that will use them, and since they are under community control there can always be a sufficient amount. There is no purpose or value in restricting the circulation. They could be used to offset the problem that the cartoonist B. Smallen so cleverly pokes fun at in this emergency room scene—the admissions person asks the patient to wait while they find a market solution. He reminds us that market solutions are not the answer to every socio-economic problem, just as technology can never solve moral dilemmas.

Complementary currencies are rooted in ancient traditions of gift exchange and community life. They are now re-emerging in new forms which call upon the human faculties of trust and community-spirit, faculties which we do not get to practice very often in an economic context. And yes, they are entirely dependent upon the new computer-based technologies for recording, tracking and portability. So, in this sense, Bill Gates is both right and to be appreciated. Technology at its best is a means, not an end. The blessing is that there are social entrepreneurs who are using that technology as part of solving the deeper systemic human problems that economic science has found intractable. Organizations developing complementary currencies need more time, more support, and more buy-in, so to speak. Their genius is that they are based upon the most timeless and effective concept in economic life: matching unused resources with unmet needs. This is not about manufacturing 3000 choices for each commodity to please the consumer market; rather, this is about making efficient use of what rises up from an inexhaustible (so far) resource—caring.

Fortunately, Gates did not mention Smith’s proverbial invisible hand. It would have attached market forces to a divine purpose that even the grand designer might have found offensive. But to elevate and celebrate caring as an economic reality is a gift and opportunity for a whole new dialogue, one that looks beyond “creative capitalism” to a more decentralized and localized economic interdependence and pluralistic means of exchange. Capitalism is not wrong, just limited. We need more and different meta-capital tools that incorporate the real need for and economic value of the intangibles that support, rather than suppress, the human spirit and its cultural expressions.

John Bloom
© 2008

A Degenerative and Regenerative Economics of Philanthropy and Gift

2008-03-02T22:46:00.001-08:00

A Degenerative and Regenerative Economics of Philanthropy and Gift

One of the mysterious characteristics of a gift is that it increases in value when it is received. Value is, of course, a multilayered phenomenon and complicated subject, but it can also be simple, personal, and direct. Suppose it is winter, and you have an infrequently-worn warm coat in your closet. If you were to give that coat to someone who has none, then the value of that coat has increased drastically because of its increased usefulness, regardless of its original cost or sentimental value. Value actually requires a transaction in order to be realized, yet the perspective from which it is viewed remains relative—to feelings, perceptions, and historical context.

Something else important is happening within this transactional picture. The coat was hanging in a closet, out of circulation you could say, maybe even in cold storage or mothballs. Once given, it is now moving about in the world providing bodily warmth and helping someone focus on their life tasks instead of the condition of being cold. Most important, this picture presumes a kind of ideal world in which the human being is valued more highly than material goods.

Money, especially gift money, works in a similar way. Money, which has been heavily or continuously used either for purchase or investment, or held in “cold storage” such as land or real estate where its primary purpose is an increase in monetary value, needs to be recirculated into the economy through gifts to support research, education and other activities that foster human capacity for cultural renewal and envisioning the future. And, in its purest form, this renewal is done without any expectation of monetary return (though there may be a tax benefit). Where money makes possible the furtherance of human capacity, money is given, in a sense, a new life. Its value has increased for benefit of culture and humanity rather than for the benefit of its giver.

There is a secondary aspect of this gift transaction that is equally important. That is, how the gift is received. A gift usually comes with an intention. If the recipient acknowledges the intention, feels responsible to it, then they have in a sense met the giver on his or her destiny path. In this act, a spiritual link is created, almost like a bridge between the past and the future. The receiver is taking on work which the donor recognizes as important and has resources to support, but has chosen not to do. This link between donor and recipient is also a critical part of the increased value of the gift, a transformation from monetary or trade value to human value.

While philanthropy primarily is concerned with giving from accumulated or surplus capital or time, a gift economy focuses more broadly on the circulation gifts and assumes an ever-renewing human capacity for adding resources to that circulation—whether in material form such as goods, or spiritual form such as ideas. Philanthropy is a subset of the gift economy, but it is based upon the capitalist-based assumption that wealth or capital rightly accrues to the one or ones best able to organize human labor in economic activities. Thus philanthropy is made possible through an extractive and accumulative process. Historically it has been the role of philanthropy to return some portion of this surplus to the culture for public benefit, or to what English law called, in the 17th Century, the “community chest”. While it may not be treated as such in conventional economic thinking, philanthropy is an essential part of economic life when viewed through qualitative aspect of financial transactions.

However, we live in and by another economy which lies outside economic discipline, namely that of caring, thinking, relationships, among others, all of which we need in order to survive, but which also have no “economic” value. These human processes are the essence of a gift economy, through philanthropy is one element of it. While goods may be circulated as part of the gift economy, it is the recognition and celebration of human needs that serve as prime motivators—in other words we are moved by a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood rather than self-interest. That the value of a gift increases over time is a kind of modern mystery in that while a gifted object or money gets consumed, the values that pass through the transaction do not. Instead when one values someone their sense of value increases. In this view, the material and the spiritual aspects part ways to circulate in degenerative (material) and regenerative (spiritual) economic pathways. The reality is that we need both aspects, but we lack a science of regenerative economics to complement prevailing materialistic economic science.

John Bloom
©2008

Begging to Differ: Charity at the Threshold

2008-01-22T16:47:00.000-08:00

Begging to Differ: Charity at the Threshold

[Rembrandt—Beggars at the Door, 1648]

With all due ritual and circumstance, a friend recently game me a begging bowl as a token of appreciation. That bowl now contains an origami-folded snail made from a dollar bill (slow money) and one as a rabbit (fast money). However, the constant presence of the bowl got me thinking about the real practice of begging as a spiritual tradition and as I experience it presently on the streets of San Francisco.

As I walk or drive along many people have signs out asking for help and it invariably raises an unwelcome inner dilemma. Some of the signs seem tragic, some clever, most on found cardboard and the worse for wear. The people displaying those signs are sad exemplars of the human condition and their presences are compelling. My personal dilemma has many dimensions of elicited response—a kind of pity, anger and guilt at a system (of which I am a part) that makes for such a dehumanizing situation, and an uncomfortable reminder of my own privilege. I am enervated by my inability to reconcile seeing such impoverished conditions in a place where there is so much wealth.

Begging has a rich history, storied as social commentary through literature and art, and treated as emblematic and instructive of one’s responsibility to care for the other or less fortunate. The dynamic of cross class interaction and the assumptions both true and false that are played out in that dynamic are the stuff of drama. Begging and the charity it elicits, are part of a moral or religious cosmology of wholeness, and charitable acts have their own reward. One Renaissance painting, a seven-paneled altarpiece (1504) for St. Lawrence's church in Alkmaar, Netherlands, portrays the seven works of charity needed to secure a place in heaven. This Christian moral instruction identified the acts as: feeding the hungry (as shown in this detail), refreshing the thirsty, clothing the naked, burying the dead, receiving travelers, visiting the sick, and comforting prisoners. In this approach, the beggar serves the religious progress of the donor by providing an opportunity to exercise virtue. At the same time, the beggar’s condition is nothing more than a fact of life, an object of pity. The beggar’s condition did not symbolize injustice; the work of art did not serve as polemic call for systemic change. This would have been outside the bounds of the mores of the time.

Another thread in the history of begging comes through the Buddhist stream of renunciation of worldly goods. Buddhist monks carry their begging bowls as part of their initiation and work in helping to bring about new spiritual consciousness for the world. That tradition found expression in the Christian “west” as well. Based upon the Francis of Assisi’s personal epiphanic experience, his followers became mendicants as part of their evangelical work in the world. The Franciscans held community property rather than private ownership as essential to furthering their sacrifice of self for the good of God. This is a far cry from begging to meet one’s basic needs.

Such begging is one of the most unfortunate conditions to which a person may be reduced; yet, in a spiritual or religious context, such as Buddha with the begging bowl, it is practiced as a path to enlightenment. In the former, it does not seem a preferred choice; instead it is a social consequence. In the latter, the practice is taken as a totally conscious self-imposed choice. Regardless of whether imposed by external circumstances, or taken as a personal path, both require a committed trust in the world, and both are conditioned on vulnerability. Both extremes share a quality of threshold experience that places the beggar at the edge of existence and the gift as a virtuous or spiritual deed and bridge across that existential chasm.

In this line of thinking about begging, a dear friend told me about Cyberbeg.org and its kindred host of sites such as cyberbeggar.com, donate2me.com, and ePanhandle.com. Given all the emotions evoked by the interactions between beggar and donor, this new virtual process is intriguing in the anonymity and safety it makes possible for the beggar complemented by a capacity for reach that goes well beyond a stream of passersby. To set up a begging site, I imagine one first has to self-identify as a beggar, with all the stigma and cultural baggage to set aside at least for the time being. This seems to me to be a fundamental shift of consciousness made possible by the aforementioned safety of the virtual space. [I would like to disclose here my concern about how presumptive this assertion may be as I do not identify as a beggar.] I can certainly see the advantage to the beggar as a way to present his or her case without feeling judged by others, and without the physical strain of the act itself. The opportunity to tell one’s story to whoever might listen or read definitely has value.

But, as a possible donor why would I go out of my way to find such a site where I know I will find active “begging” when I would prefer to avoid such pleas in my daily travels? Wouldn't I expect to have my heartstrings pulled? Given my own take on this, I wonder what kind of person might seek or take pleasure in reading about others’ tragedies—unless the search actually started as a desire to be charitable. That such a site (or sites) exists is a sign of the times, both the shadows and the opportunities.

Here is how Cyberbeg introduces itself (from the “about us” page of the website):

Cyberbeg.com offers people hope. This site provides a way for financially unfortunate people to connect with those who may donate. Some may compare it to a lottery or the classifieds, but we like to think of it as a site dedicated to helping people. Before Cyberbeg.com, the financially unfortunate had no way of asking for help. Now, through Cyberbeg.com, requests are broadcasted for donators to view. The creators of Cyberbeg.com send the best of luck to all of those who need help and a sincere thanks to those who have donated to these worthy causes.

This represents a new kind of marketplace, competitive, comparative, based primarily upon access to the web and then the quality of written language. As I read the appeals I was inwardly replicating the same unwanted dilemma, the interest in along with the “wish-it-weren’t-so” but with a slight shift—the rising sense of being a voyeur. In an attempt to understand this new mechanism and venue in the gift economy, I had chosen to enter the domain not to beg or donate, the site’s primary reason for being, but rather to see what and how people would represent need. The stories are compelling and I am sure they are mostly real notwithstanding the necessary legal disclaimer, but in the end I felt more like a consumer than a donor, even though each of the entries has its own donate now button. I do not know whether this feeling is conditioned by how much internet information seeking and shopping I do, or because my intuitive donor process is not activated by the virtual nature of the venue. I do know that charity is literally and figuratively a gesture of the heart and of love. Despite all the begging in the world, stepping into that gesture is also a threshold experience of my own making and one that I take in a measured way. Given that I am writing this essay on Martin Luther King’s birthday, it seems entirely appropriate to close with his words:

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

It is possible to consider Cyberbeg as a new and virtual practice of the begging bowl. When one registers a need on the website, it is clearly out of an inner decision or commitment, sometimes desperate, to seek gifts by “wandering” through cyberspace. My only hope is that by donating online, the donor also has a meaningful and hopeful experience.

John Bloom
© 2008

The Transcendentalist and the Immigrant: Two Views of Money in America

2007-10-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Transcendentalist and the Immigrant: Two Views of Money in America

The desire for money as a tool of culture was implanted in the American consciousness early in its history when Alexander Hamilton held sway over Thomas Jefferson in setting economic direction for the future. Simply put, Jefferson argued for a land-based (or agriculture) economy. Hamilton was a monetarist. In Jefferson’s framework, the land and America’s abundant natural resources, if properly stewarded, would provide for a sustainable economy. But Jefferson, as a land and slave holder, was also an architect of private ownership, along with other framers of the constitution. In many ways these positions setup continual conflict between private ownership and the concept of the commons, which holds that natural resources are held by all with right of use as the economic element.

Hamilton held a vision of economic trade which required a monetary system as a tool of accounting to accommodate intra- and inter-national exchange of goods and currencies. His approach presumed that all things physical could be monetized—labor and natural resources as well as commodities. This monetarist approach explains the generation of great wealth (of the monetary sort) through the consumption of nature. Hamilton, along with international counterparts, set the groundwork for financial innovation which has transformed money from physical substance minted and held in treasuries (the gold standard and Fort Knox) to a nearly pure electronic record (most money these days is actually generated by the banks as debt).

Much more could be addressed concerning the economic dynamics broadly identified here; I mention them primarily as background for two other perspectives on money in America that speak more to the direct human experience of what has resulted from Hamilton’s policy. The words of Ralph Waldo Emerson (an American Transcendentalist who wrote in the nineteenth century) and Eva Hoffman (an immigrant who grew up in Poland, and before coming to America moved to Canada at age 13) offer exemplary insights into and voices for the culture of money that has evolved in America. Emerson wrote the essay “Wealth” in 1860. Hoffman’s book Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language written in 1989 is about her impressions of this new culture.

These two voices evoke a moral tone that sounds across time. Though each of the insights is inevitably seated in an historical moment, a deeper thematic tone re-emerges and resonates in new expressions. Though American culture looks very different now than in the nineteenth century, the quest for a moral understanding of money, its purposes and its effects on the human condition, remains. Consider the following passages by Emerson and Hoffman that address money and the American experience from a moral perspective in surprising ways, though they were written more than a century apart. Emerson forewarned us of the moral challenge of accumulating wealth. Hoffman, the modern and open-hearted immigrant, witnesses the force that money bears and sees only two paths of recourse to its pressures.

Here is Emerson:

Whilst it is each man’s interest, that, not only ease and convenience of living, but also wealth or surplus product should exist somewhere, it need not be in his hands. Often it is very undesirable to him. Goethe said well, “nobody should be rich but those who understand it.” Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character; they seem to steal their own dividends. They should own who can administer; not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor.

And, Hoffman:

The gospel of detachment is as well suited to a culture of excess as it is to a society of radical poverty. It thrives in circumstances in which one's wants are dangerous because they are surely going to be deprived—or because they are pulled in so many directions that they pose a threat to the integrity, the unity of one's self....Money, in America, is a force so extreme as to become a religious force, a confusing deity, which demands either idolatry or a spiritual education.

It is pretty clear that Emerson, a preacher and deep interpreter of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant American experience, was heralding the force of money at work in the culture of the early nineteenth century, and already experiencing the effects of it himself as a member of the contribution supported clergy. He could see that land holders, bankers and emerging industrialists were accumulating wealth through the right of ownership of land and capital. The first sentence of this passage establishes wealth or money as necessary to the well-being of humanity, but questions the right ownership of that wealth. He is in some senses positing wealth as part of the commons. His primary inquiry then was into who could be given the right of the use and distribution of that wealth.

Emerson was a student of human character—surveying its inner aspects through exploring the soul and linking that capacity to higher more transcendent forces of the spirit. He also understood that a person’s character, or essence, had a greater effect on behavior and on those around them than any measurable capacity of intellect. (See: Emerson’s lecture “The American Scholar” given to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University, 1837). But he takes character analysis another step by looking at whether wealth is owned selfishly or on behalf of others. He is pretty clearly in favor of an altruistic (on behalf of) rather than ego-centric practice. Dickens’s Scrooge could be considered an exemplar of both the inner and outer transformation from “stealing his own dividends” to “carving out work for more,” from greed and fear to generosity and compassion.

Emerson has taken the sense of land stewardship described by Jefferson and applied it to the monetarist model. In other words, he recognized that wealth or money had become the new “natural resource.” But he does not directly answer the question of how it would be determined who is a good administrator. He counts upon the individual’s highest moral integrity to self-determine if one can administer on his terms. This is truly the transcendentalist speaking—that a human being can rise above her or himself to a higher self in order to hear the reflective voice of truth as affirmation or condemnation of their practice of social responsibility. There is a kind of inspiring idealism in this imagination, and ample demonstration of good practice in the philanthropic sector. It is not an accident, but rather an integral part of its character that America, for all its flaws, far surpasses any other country in its charitable generosity. In some ways Emerson presaged the evolution of public charities in America (from their origins in the community chest in early 17th century England) as trustees and administrators of wealth for public benefit.

In his time he could not have known the extent of the wealth that would be generated by first the industrial, then the technological revolutions. He would not have guessed that wealth generation would have been separated from direct work, investment, or natural resources. But that has happened. Much wealth, though certainly not all, becomes self-generating via indirect investment through public stock trading, hedge funds, and other such well-orchestrated financial instruments. Financiers and wealth advisors have become the new priesthood, confessors, holders of family secrets, and cross-generational shepherds.

Such is the presence and power of money in the modern American economic landscape, that a young, impressionable person stepping into it brand new might realize the moral dilemma and choices it presents. Eva Hoffman writes from such a vantage point, but her gospel is not like Emerson’s. Hers is a depersonalized one in which the personal, one’s identity, is defined not by a sense of self as it was for Emerson, but rather imposed on the individual by the confluence of material and cultural circumstances. According to her narrative, the external pressures of the melting pot separated one’s self from one’s deeper authentic soul experience and the sense of community.

One can see this in the effect that contemporary media and marketing have on the identity formation of young people. Were I to succumb to this effect, I would think of myself as a brand rather than a self, an image rather than its source. This is the disconnection that Hoffman uses as her framework. In this light, one can hardly know the sources of desire or wants. Are they, for example, part of some image of myself created by someone else’s subtly commercial agenda to get me to buy a product that I may not really need? The passage brilliantly alludes to the connection between virtual or invented desires and the virtual wealth created by an overheated consumer and investment culture. They thrive on each other. Hoffman sees the causal relationship between the creation of wealth and the rise of poverty. Those in poverty will never have enough; those with wealth will face a multiplicity of choices and never-ending demands to spend.

She observed the power and attraction that a culture of everything-for-sale had on her attention. Purchase takes on the mantle of ritual. Desire is connected to the worldly and material, rather than the spiritual. Value resides in gratification not celebration. Money devolves into the icon of this experience. It comes and goes; its sheer impermanence, presence and absence, create fluctuations in one’s emotional life that are a far cry from the constancy of faith one might have in a higher being. The idolatry she speaks of is that of the biblical golden calf in which the thing itself, its material presence, is the locus of connection and belief. The antidote to such a materialist practice is a spiritual education which cultivates deeper human values and reverence for the mystery and generative principles of life—the spiritual that lies within or behind the material. She argues that this spiritual perspective and the practice of its values protect the self from the illusory power of money and all that it represents of a purely materialistic world view. Her ability to articulate this important distinction is based upon the strength of her soul-rich childhood experiences weighed against the pull of her new cultural experiences.

Both Emerson and Hoffman were aware of the dynamic duality of the spiritual and material. Emerson recognized it as an integral part of his philosophical framework. He came to understand and influence human experience through this wisdom that had its heritage in a cultural thread from Aristotle and Plato, through the science and spirit of Goethe whom he quotes. Hoffman came to her view from direct and personal experience, through the struggle to survive as a transplant in American soil. On the topic of money, Emerson’s Transcendentalism is matched by Hoffman’s intuitive intelligence, and her ability to engage us in her reflective process. Where Emerson instructs, Hoffman invites us into a modern dilemma, the capacity of money to dis-integrate inner and outer experience. She proposes two paths, two pathologies, but leaves us free to choose, maybe to bargain. Both authors were deeply engaged with the American experience and the American soul as witnesses and participants. Both ask us to explore our relationship with money as an instructive reflection of soul and possibly that of our broader economic life, as uncertain and highly abstract as it is. Both courageously call for a level of moral consideration of money that is often lacking or ignored in American discourse and culture.

John Bloom
©2007

Economics and the Presence of Philanthropy

2007-05-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

Economics and the Presence of Philanthropy

Imagine, if you would, what our world would be like without the presence of philanthropy. Certainly, we would continue to produce and consume. We would continue to save or invest any surplus generated out of basic economic activity. Likely, investments would continue to grow and be reinvested. The “economy” could continue to grow. At the same time, organizations that depend upon gift support and volunteer time would suffer unless they became somehow profitable. Any activity or service—such as education, research, and the arts—whose purpose or end is other than producing a profit would basically be headed for extinction. The conventional economist might acknowledge the social consequences of this, but register no economic ones. This is why it should come as no surprise that philanthropy, the art and science of giving, is not to be found in classic economics text books.

As one of the primary means of support for education or any field connected with renewing the human spirit, philanthropists know that philanthropically-funded activities actually have a very important place in the economic cycle, from a social as well as economic standpoint. Philanthropic gifts are generative in nature. That is, without charitable gifts there would be no economic activity at all. Proof: In the history of mankind, gifting processes notably preceded all other forms of economic trade transactions and monetary systems. Cultures have found ways to meet all the basic human needs without any monetary systems at all. In addition to physical needs such as food and shelter, these economies valued the non-commodity aspects that conventional economics cannot fathom, like caring and learning, imagining, inspiring. Yet these are the very things that really matter most to us day-to-day. Such intangibles fall outside the quantifiable world of modern social science. They are nice but not economic. Rather, it has been left to philanthropy, which is primarily motivated by these intangibles, to make whole the fragmented and generally inhuman picture of economics. Given this encompassing perspective, I would posit that gifting is the most important and productive component of the economic system.

In the world of risk and return, a gift is 100% risk while the returns on the gift are immeasurable, so rich are they in the experiential and qualitative aspects of life, so laden with potential for the future. The fascinating thing is that charitable activities are actually structured to consume, even burn up, excess capital. Through this transformative process, they produce new human capacity (education), new insights and breakthroughs (research), and cultural innovation (the arts), all of which often lead to economic renewal. It should come as no surprise that these three areas (and there are others of course) are primarily supported by gifts and taxation, a form of mandatory gifts.

Philanthropists know that accumulated capital is the most vital source of gifting. Money “ages,” becomes more disconnected from human initiative as it accumulates. As soon as that money is given away it leaves the sphere of investment and is given new economic life by being used for purchase to accomplish a charitable mission by the recipient. Thus the linkage is established between the generation of surplus capital and the renewal of that capital through philanthropy. The logic here is one of functional integration rather than cause and effect. Historically, philanthropy is something you are privileged to do because of your financial success. This may be considered something of the Nineteenth Century industrial model. But that too is shifting. More corporations and individuals are structuring their philanthropy as part of their present financial activity rather than putting it off pending the results of a career. For example, the dramatic increase in young people’s interest in philanthropic activity is a result of activism and engagement; they want to make a difference with their lives now rather than viewing the accumulation of resources as a measure of accomplishment. This sense of social responsibility and integration is but one reflection of a much larger, though just now barely visible, sea change in the emerging field of social finance.

Social finance holds that the purpose of money and finance is to support human initiative and to foster the evolution of new community. Social finance recognizes that in the context of a global economy, we are fully interdependent. It is no longer possible to stand outside this reality, regardless of political boundaries, accumulated wealth, or dire poverty. Social finance recognizes the human and environmental consequences of economic activities. In this paradigm, for example, socially responsible businesses are capable of bringing about needed changes in our culture through fair labor practices and the charitable distribution of a portion of profits. This is just one emergent approach in which gifting is integral to the whole economic cycle. It presents a picture of a healthier sustainable future—and one which leaves behind the industrialist model of philanthropy that lives so strongly in the mythology of American history.

John Bloom © 2007

Economic Chiaroscoro: Georges de La Tour's Payment of Dues

2007-05-09T05:01:00.000-07:00

[Georges de La Tour. The Payment of Dues (Taxes). c. 1624. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Lviv, Ukraine.]

Economic Chiaroscuro: Georges de La Tour’s Payment of Dues (Taxes)

George de La Tour was a master of painting scenes illuminated by candle. It was his chief compositional and organizing principle and became his signature approach throughout his life’s work. His portrayal and storytelling revolve around the single point light source of the candle flame with its warm glow and sharp shadows. However, though he used traditional perspective, the sense of a vanishing point is absent. There is no distant resting point for the eye. Rather the viewer is implicitly included in the radiant and taut space of the dramatic scene. This is visual theater; it is about directorial as well as painterly decisions.

The story portrayed in The Payment of Dues is about an older man who has opened his purse to pay his dues or, more likely, taxes to the collector. There is an official registry or book of accounts open on the table. The collector himself stares intently on the collection of coins on the table and at the same time, as if unconsciously, tightly clutches a money bag. The figure in the back center is leaning in toward the older man to hold the candle closer, presumably so the older man can see better—though of course then they can all see the coins better. Judging by the expression on the older man’s face, this is not a pleasant experience. His worried look is not only about digging deeply into his purse to pay what is due, but also about his consignment to the fate of never having quite enough. The luxuriantly clad figure whose face is turned away from the viewer is either from the military or other form of government. Given de La Tour’s interest in character and expression, the faceless of the representative of the state is fully intentional. He is part of the group on the left side of the table who stand on the side of power. They have been rendered less visible and within a deeper and encompassing shadow than the figural group on the right hand side where the light brings forth the individual’s humanity and elicits a note of sympathy from the viewer.

This particular painting marked the beginning of Georges de La Tour’s so called “night paintings.” Rather than night, I would frame an understanding of this painting (and his others in a similar mode) around the concept of interiority—the interior spaces which we inhabit both outwardly and physically as well as inwardly and psychologically. On one hand this seems somewhat obvious; on the other, this is not necessarily understood from the deeper perspective of how the interior and exterior are linked and integrated. Financial transactions, especially paying taxes, often highlight that lack of integration between inner and outer behavior.

There is apparently no definitive historical or literary interpretation of this painting.[1] De La Tour sometimes rendered biblical stories in, for his time, modern characters and staging, but there are not enough referents included in this one to assign that kind of meaning. Instead, I would say that it is a direct social commentary on the flow of money and economic life as experienced in de La Tour’s day. Issues of class and power are woven into the story told. The people of the Touraine region, particularly the craftsmen and laborers, were heavily taxed to support endless military efforts. The military and clergy (those with the power in those days) were exempt from those taxes so the burden always fell to those who were the principle servants to the economy. So the older man in the painting is the middle-class everyman whose plight is exacerbated by the futility of taxing the poor and the self-serving protection of wealth and power by those with the “right” to tax.

Georges de La Tour was a circumspect dramatist. The message is clear but not strident. He understood the underlying human conditions created by the economic and political environment. His painting is not a judgment as much as a witnessing. He has portrayed the predicament of the craftsman as one in which this worker is stuck in the middle—almost as if in an eternal moment. There are no doors in the painting, no escape except through the eyes of the viewer. I can certainly empathize with the predicament, the tension, with the presence of power and the sense of doubt or worry all of which are also part of the field created by the light. The message of the painting is also a kind of instruction to the viewer.

Each us likely has all of the characters in the painting within ourselves. We can play many roles in relation to money depending on the circumstances—the taxpayer, the collector, the authority with power, and the cast of supporting characters as well. I am perfectly capable of shining that same pinpoint light on my own interiority, only I also have to be willing to accept the shadows as part of the whole. In painting, in chiaroscuro, as in life, both the light and shadow are sides of the same coin and share a common, and in this case pointed, source.

John Bloom
© 2007

[1] In Georges de La Tour and His World, Philip Conisbee (Ed.), presents the various ways to interpret this painting in a historical context.

Real Virtuality: QQ Coins and the Quandary of Complementary Mercantilism

2007-05-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

Real Virtuality: QQ Coins and the Quandary of Complementary Mercantilism

Coincidental emergence occurs when a new system or structure surfaces along side its originating system. Often this emergent world coexists as a complement to the original—much as an afterimage arises from a color—rather than as a replacement for it. The conventional approach to explaining this phenomenon, that I see green as an afterimage of red, is to rationalize the secondary system by cause and effect. However, once this emergent world is understood to have its own reality, its own rules, and its own function, the causal relationship is no longer relevant. The postmodern world is filled with such emergent virtual worlds: image is mistaken for the thing itself; simulacra abound; we think we are communicating through the internet when in fact we are messaging; we transact business through credit cards and ATMs and call it money. Names for things are designed to create the illusion of the familiar and known, when the facts contradict the implied connection. A complementary color is only an opposite in a world defined by polarities. The virtue of reality is that the world doesn’t really operate that way. It is multivalent, both-and, complex, and in constant movement through time.

Cause and effect are loosely linked through the non-rational as well as rational dimensions. If one follows the color experience, the afterimage itself has an afterimage, which in turn has an afterimage—each image a transformation of its predecessor. The color of origin becomes a distant memory, but the experience of each emergent image is just as valid as the original sensory one. By exploring coincidental emergences and by understanding their “unconventional” logics, the apparent rational and “conventional” world can become clearer.

It is in this frame of mind that I was fascinated to read a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (March 30, 2007) entitled “QQ: China’s New Coin of the Realm?” written by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Juying Qin with contributions by Lina Yoon. The story, as they reported it, is that QQ coins are an online virtual currency originally issued by the Chinese company Tencent Holdings Ltd. [an intentionally ironic name?] for users of its instant messaging system ICQ to “purchase” virtual flowers and other such niceties to send to correspondents. As with other virtual currencies used in video games, the virtual coinage serves as an incentive and has value so long as it stays within the boundaries of its own system. Any accumulated earnings can only be used up within the system. For me, the simplest example of this is something like “winning” an extra ball or new game playing a pinball machine.

The crux of the WSJ story goes like this: “Then last year something happened that Tencent hadn’t originally planned. Online game sites beyond Tencent started accepting QQ coins as payment.” In other words, the rules of one “virtuality” were co-opted by another “virtuality.” The QQ coins crossed the boundary of one system into another with a different though somewhat parallel set of rules. The authors cite the convenience of managing and accounting for petty transactions online as one of the primary motivations for the shift. Interestingly enough, the other online game companies recognized the essential value of the virtual QQ coins. Like real money they represent nothing more than an accounting system for which Tencent already had a structure that could be leveraged for the sake of efficiency. This is free market mercantilism at its best.

But the QQ situation quickly became more complicated. The subheader for the WSJ article reads, “Officials Try to Crack Down As Fake Online Currency Is Traded for Real Money.” The article spends much of its focus on the quandary the Chinese Government is currently facing. One result of free market mercantilism is that it can quickly generate a surplus. The article goes on to state: “At informal online currency marketplaces, thousands of users helped turn the QQ coins back into cash by selling them at a discount…Traders began jumping into the QQ coin market as an opportunity to make a quick yuan off of currency speculation.” Yet the authors never question how “real” the real currency is. Of course, once the QQ coins were pegged to conventional currency value, they could be used as a parallel system for real commodity purchases beyond the reach of government control and the tax system. And, with the advent of secondary exchange markets, transactions related to QQ coins can occur both within and between the virtual and real money worlds. The Virtual Economy Research Network [virtual-economy.org] calls these transactions of conventional currency for virtual property RMT’s or Real Money Trade.

Back to the pinball machine model. Provided the pinball game is online, there is now a mechanism to sell that extra game to someone else for an agreed upon price. That person can then use that game either to play online, or to sell for cash to someone else who wants to use it, or thinks they can sell it for more. One can see very quickly how many schemes could unfold. The WSJ article mentions a few such as “intimate private chats online,” and online gambling. For a government used to tight regulation, the open market and economically democratic invention of the online virtual world is a challenge.

One notable difference between conventional currency (yuan) issued by the government and the QQ coins issued by Tencent Holdings is their physical versus virtual realities. They are both monetary systems that stand in for an accounting of value, at least until they are sold as commodities. The government sets the value of the yuan, and, since the government stands in for the people, it represents, for better or worse, an agreement by which the citizens abide. What supports the value of the virtual currency is not just the supply and demand, as the authors of the article state, but also the quality of perception and what the currency makes possible. The QQ coins came into existence in order to enhance online communication, to add emotional value to an instant message. As superficial as that may appear, it is the motivating human emotion that makes the virtuality of the coins real. For a user to be able to operate in an “economic” life free of government control is itself a coincidental emergence.

Many virtual currencies are part of or attached to online games. And there is an aftermarket in RMT to purchase some of the virtual equipment used to play those games. One need only explore eBay to find them. This kind of trade is driven by the desire to profit from a willing market. It is based on the flawed assumption that what is virtual is real, like mistaking the image for the thing itself. The fictional Wizard of Oz was, of course, one of the modern masters of this kind illusion. His power lasted until the curtain was pulled back by Toto and he was revealed to be manipulating the machinery of deception, and all too human in his humiliation. But Oz was a dream from which Dorothy could awaken.

Virtual coins and virtual realities are not dreams, they are complementary systems that first emerged as a mechanical reflection of human consciousness. As a result, they exist as a kind afterimage alternating between the light and shadow of that consciousness. The Chinese Government has every right to concern itself with the QQ coins and their potential for creating economic chaos. Their goal would be to return QQ coins to their own self-contained system and thus sever any linkage with the conventional system. The real interest is in controlling the value of the “coin of the realm” by also controlling the perception that that value is controlled. What the QQ coins point out is that value is a spontaneous occurrence, and is drawn into currency by perceived need, convenience, and reduction of hindrances to the flow of human activity.

Tencent Holdings probably never imagined that QQ coins would flow over their intended boundaries. But neither does the company have an interest in stemming the flow. Tencent gains visibility and publicity as it demonstrates that a currency is only as vital as its social and economic efficacy. There are thousands of complementary currencies at work in the world solving important social problems that governments may not recognize as having economic interest or have the resources to meet. Where currencies arise out of a community’s interest, they tend not to compete with, but rather augment or fill the void of conventional currency. Where currencies are issued by for-profits to leverage their businesses, they will inevitably compete with governmental currency when those currencies become commodities. Open market or exchange currencies, as Tencent’s QQ coins are designed not only for competition, but also to capitalize on market-based efficiencies which leverage existing resources such as the yuan. What threatens any government is losing the authority or control over the emergent self-governing power of this profitable currency. But then the legal issues governing virtual online activities are yet another dilemma—whether the current body of national and international laws apply to a virtual world. The complement or afterimage of law would be chaos, because an absence of law would be socially inconceivable. In the case of QQ coins, chaos, at least, has real virtuality.

John Bloom
© 2007

[Note: I am appreciative of my colleague Gary Schick, COO of RSF Social Finance, for passing along this WSJ article. The image of the QQ Coins with Tencent Holdings logo penguin came from the The Virtual Economy Research Network website.]

Just Money and Social Finance

2007-04-12T16:44:00.000-07:00

Just Money and Social Finance

[Written as the introduction to “There Is No Wealth But Life,” a special issue on money for Resurgence magazine, Issue 240, January-February 2007]

Money is a source of great pleasure and pain. How it is used heals and harms both individuals and societies. But, money is not a thing. It is symbolic. It serves a broader and deeper economic system embedded with rights, values, and intentions. On a simple level, money was invented to account for value in the production and exchange of goods and services. Such an accounting system inevitably reflects the values, priorities and flows of human activities. Dig a little into the system, whether your checkbook or a national budget, and you will find a mirror of your economic self, or the character of a national economy. Through financial transactions, expenditures and revenues, you will see what you, or a country, really care about. Dig deeper again and you may awaken an awareness of what was created and sacrificed of human and natural resources in order to make those transactions possible. Step back far enough, and you will see a hyperkinetic field of money, currencies and material that transcends political boundaries. In our current global economy, the circulation in this field is permeated with greed and “never-enoughness,” and generates enough friction to overheat our societies and environment.

This brilliant accounting system we call money has been corrupted and exchanged for a profit-driven endgame of control over natural resources and human manufacture. At the center of this exchange are the functions of debt and interest. Debt, of course, makes it possible to start enterprises and own homes. The lender’s and borrower’s mutual interest in each other’s success is a central tenet of social finance, an approach to finance that places primacy on social benefit in financial affairs. Lending and borrowing have gone on for millennia imbued with culture-specific values and mores. But interest charged for the debt is another matter all together. What first served as a system of compensation for “giving up the money” for a time, became a system of compensation for an absence of trust or “risk mitigation.” While both of these approaches to interest continue to be at play, the demand for immediate financial return on money and the rapid increase in predatory lending practices on a local and global scale have turned financing and debt creation into an extractive industry—extracting wealth out of the seemingly limitless supply of debt. Debt and interest have become the tools for creating wealth while increasing poverty—though many who control the wealth would not frame it that way.

Only a small and privileged percentage of the world’s population can define their economic lives in terms such as investing, saving, or consumer choice. Those who control wealth have arrogated the right of ownership over the right of use through raw financial power or the ability to control policy and law. Water is a glaring example of this as a basic necessity. It has existential but not economic value until it is transformed through production into a commodity. By this logic there can be no private right of ownership of water, only a right to use it granted by those who own it in common. Claimed “economic rights” are imposed primarily for the purpose of the control of production and creation of wealth, not for stewardship and sustainability. This example of natural resource appropriation is symptomatic of having lost sight of the original and higher purpose of economic life—making sure that each human being’s physical needs are sufficiently met in order for her or him to be a contributing member of society. This is the economic base of a free society. But, economic life is simply not simple.

There is increasing awareness of the injustice and corruption of our current global money system, and increasing attention being paid to innovative economic systems that respect human dignity and the social value of local economies and currencies. But changing the destructive patterns of over-consumption, over-production, and degradation of community and environment will require concerted and sustained action including transforming how we work with money in purchasing, investments, and philanthropy.

Throughout history, the darkest of times have spawned enlightened innovation. The same power of consciousness that gave rise to money and money systems is fully capable of new thinking when it recognizes that the present-future is grim without radical change. As we become more conscious economic citizens and realize how deeply interdependent we are, the social reality of finance will become not only more palpable but also more desirable. The principle of altruism—working to meet the needs of others in trust that others are working to meet mine—will replace the current drive of self-interest and accumulation.

The successful emergence of fair trade practices and certification is one outward manifestation of redirecting economic systems to more just and associative ones. Such practices include the voices and needs of all parties to the economic process from farmer to consumer. International fair trade has taken over an increasing share of the coffee market and is expanding to other foods as well. Consumers are willing to pay more for the product because they understand the value and values in the transactions. On a more localized level, the rapid growth of the community supported agriculture around the world indicates that consumers want to participate in the economic life of the land, farmer, and food. In this model, shareholders divide the total annual cost of the farm with the result that the farmer will be supported regardless of the amount of food grown. “Community supported” also means a community of shared risk. Though this is a purchase model, it has a parallel in the field of micro-loans pioneered by Grameen Bank. This approach allows small loans to enterprising individuals who are part of a guarantee community. This group of peer-guarantors assumes responsibility for the success of their colleagues such that the others will guarantee them when they have a need for such an investment. This simple powerful form fosters individual initiative, economic collaboration, and community building.

Conventional currencies are issued by centralized authorities such as a government bank. As soon as this money is issued someone or an institution owes interest on it to pay for its use. This triggers the inhuman debt-interest cycle. However, in recent years, complementary currencies and other leveraged currencies have been developed and implemented as a way to engage and enliven local economies, and to demonstrate that a community can create its own agreements around its value and use. The basic concept of a complementary currency is to facilitate a link between unused resources with unmet needs. These currencies circulate as a true accounting system as people meet each others’ needs within the system’s jurisdiction. Such a concept could include critical aspects of life, such as companionship or managing a home, which are not normally considered to have economic value. In some ways complementary currencies are harbingers of a true gift economy. What is awakened through them is an awareness of others’ needs and a capacity to meet those needs outside the conventional money system. Imagine a whole economy operating and no “money”! There are many complementary currencies active around the world, and they are increasing rapidly as local solutions to the global monetary crisis. Time Banks and BerkShares are but two examples in the United States and much more can be found internationally. Along with the growth of complementary currencies has come the concept of leveraged currencies such as Interra which allows members to collectively allocate profits from transactions across the economic community of producers, suppliers, and consumers, toward charitable programs and community projects.

In a single magazine issue focused on money, it is impossible to cover all the innovations and new thinking about money and financial systems. Rather, we invited a few practitioners to articulate their views and approaches as a selection from a much broader emerging field of social finance. In her article, “How Money Creates Poverty,” Vandana Shiva articulates the powerful and painful pressures of debt on developing economies, communities, and individuals created by some of the major global industries and financial institutions. She addresses the societal consequences of the abuse of natural resources, particularly in the realm of agriculture, and the relationship between what she terms nature’s economy, people’s sustenance economy, and the market economy. James Vacarro writes from the perspective of banking and investment. He argues for the value of investing in a way that has direct social benefit. Depositors can know that their money is being used in alignment with their personal values and is helping to accomplish things they themselves would like to see happen. He moves beyond “ethical” investing to “holiscient” investing which includes not only the reality of the financial return, but also the qualities of intentions and consciousness on the part of the investor and the borrowing projects. Woody Tasch has looked at the consequences that stockholders have had on the economy by demanding high and immediate returns on their investments. He is wisely recommending “Slow Money” that would allow businesses to make decisions with a long-term perspective and investors to appreciate value by participating in sustainable social transformation. He lays out the investment landscape of venture capital, patient capital, and slow money. Finally Jacob Needleman takes us on a philosophical and personal journey through the inner dimensions of money. He argues that because we no longer experience the inner world as strongly as we do the outer, the two worlds tend to become disintegrated. Thus, we are ruled more by our desires than by our higher ethical selves. He recommends work on one’s relationship with money as a gateway to integrating more fully with outer experience.

We trust that you will find much in these articles to stimulate you to rethink your relationship to money and how you use it. At its heart, money and its many forms are tools to empower each of us to improve the quality of local and global economic life. Without recognizing our inextricable connection to the whole world through our economic lives, to our dependence on others’ capacities whether growing food, making clothes, or educating children, we miss an important and daily opportunity to connect more deeply with ourselves and to work in whatever way possible to practice social finance toward a more just economy.

John Bloom © 2007

An Inventory of Polarities: Quentin Metsys's The Money Lender and His Wife

2007-02-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

An Inventory of Polarities: Quentin Metsys’s The Money Lender and His Wife

[Quentin Metsys (1466–1530), worked primarily in Antwerp. The Money Lender and his Wife, 1514]

There is much that can be said about this detail-rich painting once owned by the famous painter Peter Paul Rubens, and now owned by the Louvre Museum. It lends itself easily to formal, semiotic, and historiographic analysis. Its composition is structured with a classical symmetry. It was very much of its time for its demonstrated interest in aspects of daily life. It is full of moral messages and symbolic references—particularly of a Christian sort. Metsys painted in such painstaking detail and with such precision that it serves as a visual inventory or an accounting of the scene. However, because of its extreme order and precision the painting takes on a veneer of surrealism—in this case fact-is-stranger-than-fiction, as the saying goes. Spend enough time with the image and what emerges is a complex of polarities, evident and implied.

One simple example of this complexity is found in the curved surface of the oval mirror at the bottom of the painting. On one hand, there is a perfectly rational explanation for the reflection of the window that serves as the source of the painting’s illumination. (This device also allows the conceit of the artist getting himself in the picture.) On the other hand, the window frame itself is a reference to the crucifix.

The positive-negative (the “both and”) of this small element of the painting surfaces on a grander scale and is of more crucial significance in the powerful dynamic playing out between the sacred and profane, between the religious text and objects of material desire, a complementarity reinforced by the color schema. While the woman casually leafs through the illuminated manuscript open to a portrayal of the Madonna and Child, her attention is clearly drawn in the direction of the object the man is holding. This is the essential historical moment and message. To the knowledgeable person located in Antwerp at the time, then a major center of mercantilism, every coin or other acceptable means of exchange had a story to tell about its issuer, provenance, and value system. For the money lender, equivalency and value were a matter of judgment and negotiation. His living depended on these capacities. Devotion, on the other hand, was guided solely by the authority and dominion of the church. It is no small irony that in our current times, this situation has completely reversed. There are many, many religions and sects embracing a diversity of values and practices, but currencies are issued and governed by central authorities. (No wonder that investment bankers are sometimes referred to as the new high priesthood, the bearers of mystical wisdom!)

Clearly this money lender did very well, well enough to have a portrait painted and to have bought the hand-illuminated religious book his wife is perusing. While Gutenberg had developed moveable type sixty three years before this painting was made, it was not yet possible to replicate color images on the order seen in this painting. So, why is it that she holds the precious religious artifact, while he holds the precious metals and gems? Is there a gender polarity here as well? The answer is—of course. It is the same gender story line that has led to modern banks as the central issuing authorities for money, the agreements about its use, and the right to set lending rates to control the markets. And the same story line that in Western cultures withheld credit and financial standing to women until very recent times. Though that shift has changed the economic landscape including the players and how decisions are made, the rules still have not really changed.

So, did Quentin Metsys paint the woman drawn away from the devotional to admiring the coins as a paean to the man, his profession, and his adoring wife, or was the artist a harbinger of a new impulse in the modern world first emerging in the Renaissance? Namely, the notion that desire for wealth and the material world was overshadowing the desire for devotion and the holy. Metsys probably meant the painting as a cautionary tale, a moral teaching to warn of the dangers of such material distractions. The bible says that it is easier for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven, after all. That was then.

Perhaps the most curious detail in the painting is the scene painted behind the couple, apparently out the open door of the residence. Where the mirror in the forefront reflected the space in front of the plane of the painting, the scene out the door takes us into what art historians call deep space. What we see is an interchange between a youth and an older man. While the portrayed are enclosed in their interior space, one of tight definition and order, we see that in the exterior world wisdom and acculturation is continuing to cross generations through the convention of speech and the traditions of social interaction. Metsys has set up yet another polarity, and one quite relevant, for example, to my own practices and integrity around the values that I tell myself I hold, and the way that I navigate the world. An internal dialogue between my spirit-self and money-self is ongoing, as in the interior space of the painting. Further, I strive to bring the intelligence gained there into integrity with my behavior in transacting with the world—which I find generally operating with diverse values and messages. This is no easy work, especially when I look at it on the level of meticulous and excruciating detail that Quentin Metsys shows me. A work of art such as this is an invitation to reflection. What was real to the artist at the time has also tapped into something of an archetypal story—the polarity of spirit and matter—that transcends time.

John Bloom
© 2007

The Other Invisible Hand

2006-12-15T10:31:00.000-08:00

The Other Invisible Hand: Money and its Subtle Influence on Social Life

I recently came across an intriguing article by Benedict Carey, “Just Thinking About Money Can Turn the Mind Stingy,” in the New York Times.[1] The author was trying to place the seemingly surprising findings from a recent research report in some historical human behavioral context. This NYT article was based upon a research report published in Science entitled “The Psychological Consequences of Money.”[2] The researchers found that their test subjects acted in either a more or less community-minded manner depending on whether they had been exposed to neutral or money-based background content in the task materials they were given. Further, these behavior patterns were evident regardless of race, class, gender, age, or any other group. It is a fascinating study, one which confirms what I [and probably many others] have experienced over many years of working with issues of money in organizations. That is: When money or financial issues are at play in the context of decision making, even the most socially conscious, warm-hearted people tend to act in an anti-social manner.

The following is the abstract for the research published in the Science article:

Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to non-money reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

In short, when money is introduced into the mix, the default reaction is to withdraw into a self-centered or egocentric posture and away from a more altruistic view that includes concern for others and recognition of our real dependence upon one another. Neither the NYT nor the Science articles addressed whether this is bred in the bone or learned behavior. This is a challenging question because money and the financial systems of which it is a part are relatively late entries into the evolutionary stream of human consciousness. And, it is a likely bet that money first emerged as a technology of transactional agreement in service of furthering the human economy. Only more recently has the acquisition of it become an end unto itself and a legitimate measure of worth. Though I could not make a direct correlation between this latter shift and the behavior demonstrated by the experiment, my sense is that money is now so deeply connected to our sense of identity or being, and our sense of safety, that any inflection upon those senses will instantaneously and unconsciously adversely affect our social or relational capacities. It is a challenging place to be so bound to something we can neither really own (we only have a right of use) nor control the value of.

The authors of the research study have tapped into one of the great mysteries and, probably, ironies of our time. Namely: Self-reliance is an important spiritual ideal from the point of view of individual freedom, but a misleading illusion from point of view of interdependence in our economic life. What they found, I think, is that with the background money mind-set, the subjects no longer operated as socially normal as defined by the neutral mind-set group. The money-minded separated themselves either out of fearfulness and protection or because they felt that they did not need the others. In either case, by placing themselves apart they were denying consciously or unconsciously the social significance of, and their real dependence on, an economic system that somehow punishes or benefits them. The outcome of the research points to a level of disintegration between inner and outer life that has had increasingly powerful social implications for everyone, and is probably one (of many) of the driving forces of the wealth gap that has expanded so drastically in recent years. The more one “separates” oneself from the social body, the more one has to accumulate resources to meet one’s own needs. And accumulation is the name of the game; a mistaken substitution of net worth for self worth.

In his research for the NYT article, Carey interviewed George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Loewenstein responded to the findings of the research: “We know there is a civilizing side to money, that people acting in a self-interested fashion depend on fellow human beings in a community and tend to treat them fairly….But this study shows its pernicious side, how the pursuit of money can be isolating.” This response identifies even more layers of complexity. It is fair to point to the civilizing side of money since it does make transacting in our economic life pretty efficient since each transaction is also an embedded agreement about value exchange or cost and use of funds. It is also fair to point to our dependence upon our fellow human beings as a reason to treat them fairly—a version of the golden rule. But what the study shows is that in our current culture, money and self-interest are so inextricable that fairness has become a matter of priority rather than a bedrock value—especially if you are on the wealth side of the gap.

As individuals, each of us will have a response to the implications of this important research and the ensuing dialogue, if we care to. On a personal level, I look at my work as serving or meeting the needs of others. And I appreciate that others have made the clothes and grown the food that I and my family consume. To me this is the oversimplified essence of economics; it is a picture of interdependence. From a certain perspective, one could remove all the money and financial transactions and still have a functioning economy. By this I mean we could still work to find the resources (food, shelter, clothing) to meet our and each other’s needs with human resources, motivated by a sense of responsibility and community. But money is ever-present and powerful, and we need to realize on the personal, community, and policy levels the injustice that has emerged from an economy that is essentially ego-centric. That we can barely do anything without having money these days indicates that money is almost always coloring our social and economic experience. Thus, the researchers’ findings about its subtle influence on behavior have significant implications for cultural, political and economic life in general. The findings indicate the inner and personal work we have to do in order to effect social transformation—if that is our wish.

When Adam Smith named the invisible hand in The Wealth of Nations, he was making an oblique religious reference to a higher being at work in the economy. What this new research identifies through scientific methodology is the other invisible hand, our unconscious self at work in our economic behavior. The transformative work, then, is to become conscious of the unconscious influence money has on each of us—to bring it out of the shadows—and then to align and integrate our financial practices with our deepest values.

John Bloom ©2006

[1] New York Times: Science Times Section, November 21, 2006.
[2] Science: “The Psychological Consequences of Money”; Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode; Nov. 17, 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5802, pp. 1154–1156.

Judas's Dilemma, Giotto's Rendition

2006-11-16T20:36:00.000-08:00

[Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337), Scenes from the Life of Christ: Judas’s Betrayal, 1304–06, Fresco]

Judas’s Dilemma, Giotto’s Rendition

In a small fresco panel at the end of the Scrovegni Chapel in Podova, Italy, Giotto painted an important turning point in the life of Christ. Judas, one of the twelve disciples, has made a promise to betray his master in exchange for 30 silver coins. In a sequential episode, Judas indicates Jesus by the kiss he gives him. Jesus is then arrested and crucified according to Roman custom. Seeing the arrest, Judas is besot with guilt, tries to return the coins to priests who refuse them. He then discards them on the floor of the temple, but they are recognized as “blood money,” collected and buried in the sinners’ graveyard. Judas hangs himself. As Giotto portrays this scene of betrayal, he has the character of Satan standing behind and guiding Judas. One might say that Judas is serving as agent for this shadow character who is visible to the painter but not to anyone of the figures within the painting itself. Thus, we witness Giotto’s telling of the story, a perspective that indicates that there are forces at work in the transaction which are in some ways beyond immediate human perception. Yet, they are all too human.

The shadow is Judas’s shadow. It is clearly attached solely to him. Though the rendering depicts a physical character, Judas is the true actor having internalized the shadow role he was to play. Logically, one would expect the satanic character to be present at the fulfillment of its wish. However, it is nowhere evident in the scene in which Judas kisses Jesus. It was not needed because that force was already foreshadowed in and contained within Judas’s promise made for compensation received. According to the Bible, we know that Satan was an adversary to the Christ, but was unwilling to attack directly. Satan (or Ahriman, or other names for the same archetype) instead operated as much as possible through the agency of others and in the shadows so to speak. Within this framework we are witness to a double transaction, the work of Satan through Judas, and the exchange of money for commitment or promise to the priests to act at a later date. An act of destiny was set in motion that would change the history of Western consciousness through the process of the crucifixion. A second associative pattern, connected to and reflected in this moment, is buried within a Christian ethic—that money and activities surrounding it are bad, or worse, evil and likely to corrupt faith and the spirit. The phrase “filthy lucre” has its origins in this ethic.

Giotto is famous for his having brought the art of representational rendering to a new level early in the Renaissance. His figures are not only columnar and dimensional, but also display their emotions and humanity. The Scrovegni Chapel is a very special venue for Giotto’s frescos because he was responsible for designing and painting the entire chapel—a rare moment in an artist’s life and an even rarer glimpse into an artist’s genius. What emerges is an extraordinary capacity for story telling and in that storytelling, a revelation of insight. In this one small fresco, Giotto has portrayed one of the mysteries of money—he has demonstrated how intention is transmitted through a financial transaction. In accepting the money, Judas was morally bound to the intentions of the priests who in themselves could or would not directly identify Jesus, probably for political reasons. Satan also had an intention aligned with the officials, but also could not act directly. The money itself was buried in the earth to eventually return to base mineral; it had served its purpose as medium and transmitter of intention. Judas, in taking his own life, was relieved of physical body in time and space, and returned to the spirit having served for better or worse. While this very Christian story casts aspersion on the financial transaction, it is also true that positive intentions are conveyed through the same mechanisms for the benefit of all parties involved. In its rightful place money is a servant, not a tyrant. And, every transaction is part of an unfolding story.

John Bloom © 2006

Trumped Money: Value and the Eye of the Beholder

2006-11-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

[Victor Debreuil, Money to Burn, 1893]

Trumped Money: Value and the Eye of the Beholder

Given the precision with which Victor Debreuil selected his subject matter and applied his trompe l’oeil technique to this still life, one can only assume a certain degree of social commentary. The title of the work itself is a double entendre: Is this money really ready to be turned to ash, or is this someone’s surplus ready to be expended at a whim? Some historical context is important in order to understand that there is validity to both implications. The 1890s was the age of the “robber barons”; the accumulation of wealth by the few had an impoverishing consequence for the rest of the US population. From the populist standpoint, there was great mistrust of the reigning powers, bankers and government. There was good reason. Those in charge of monetary policy were wrestling with the gold-backed currency while at the same time re-issuing “greenbacks” that were in fact pure fiat money—that is to say money issued on faith with no real or agreed upon objective valuation basis. Greenbacks were first issued to help pay for Civil War expenses and were blessed as legal tender. As with our current money, it was a completely self-referential currency in that you could go to the Federal Reserve or the issuer and you were assured only one thing, you would receive another bill of the same denomination or an equivalent total of one you were exchanging. Of course, fiat money can be issued without limits because it is not pegged to any other measure. In other words, one could have barrels of it, though its actual purchase value would depend upon who actually trusted that it had any value in the first place. Given his capacity for visual replication, I imagine Debreuil enjoyed the trope of counterfeit as a commentary on what was real in the first place.

The issuance and supply of currency have always been suspended between the poles of quantity and quality. Consumers tend to desire quantity since its gives them more purchase power, at least until it devaluates, while producers always prefer the qualitative because its supports rising value until it brings about a cost of production and prices too high to afford. And of course the debate between gold-backed currency and fiat currency is something of a reflection of this polarity, but in a complicated context of politics, power, and class consciousness. Our present day financial system meets the consumer’s wish for quantity not so much through the issuance of fiat currency as much as by deregulating a banking system that provides unrestrained credit or indebtedness (mostly at predatory rates, unfortunately).

Debreuil’s choice to portray the money in barrels is a populist reference. They were common storage for everything from wine to hardware. But to find them in an isolated space whose only identifier is a stone floor constructed of triangular sections (a reference to the three branches of government or other institution) is a deliberate contrast—another visual joke one might assume. And, of course, he plays with the size and scale of the bills in relation to the barrels, an accepted standard of measure. Is his representational style, Debreuil has much to say about money and our assumptions about it. His work is something of a morality play stage set that teases us into accepting the factotum simply through its means of representation—that is until the credibility comes in to question under analysis. I wonder how Debeuil would feel were he to know that one of the first works of art collected by the Federal Reserve Bank was a single barrel of money painting by him from the same series and time period. While Money to Burn is full of wit and irony, the irony is doubled with one of his painting’s residing in the vault-like confines of the US government’s central bank.

John Bloom ©2006

Free Market Money in a Pop Iconomy

2006-10-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

[Roy Lichtenstein, Ten Dollar Bill, Lithograph, 1956]

Free Market Money in a Pop Iconomy

When Roy Lichtenstein first created his lithograph of the ten dollar bill, he was building a bridge between the highly idiosyncratic artistic vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s and the emergent interest in an art of the mundane things of mass production and sensibility such as money and comic books in the 1960s. Another way of looking at it is this: The Pop Artists reversed the modernist tenet of making the invisible visible (Paul Klee)—which assumed the primacy of the inner experience. Instead they attached a certain aesthetic aura to common commercial and public imagery. In the optimism of the post-World War II US economy, nothing was more prevalent in everyone's daily experience than the dollar bills that circulated each with its cachet of consumer potential. When an artist focuses his attention on and uses as subject matter such a common and desirable object, it takes on a new meaning simply by asking viewers to take pause at our own experience of physical money. This subtle inflection-reflection in daily experience helps us to see it with new eyes, and to value its aesthetic as well as its purchasing power. No one would accuse Roy Lichtenstein of counterfeiting money. That was certainly not the point. Instead what we experience is his raising of the mundane to the status of icon.

Probably the best known and most controversial (though not the earliest) example of this "iconizing" was Andy Warhol's "Brillo Boxes" (1964) in which he replicated the existing commercial packaging and displayed his work along side standard manufactured Brillo cartons. On one level the two were indistinguishable. This was to a degree the demonstration of a philosophical proposition: What is the significance of the exercise of identifying the original from the replication when in fact they are both replications in the first place? The authority and presence of the artist's hand in the work, an association that goes all the way back to the early Renaissance, has been displaced by the presence of concept. It is no longer the making of the work or object of art that is important. For Warhol it was a mechanical process. What became important was how the "work of art" was situated within the culture of common experience.

Warhol adopted the commercial photo-silkscreen process in 1962 which enabled him to generate and replicate images with great rapidity. Virtually anything could be photographed and reproduced including existing images.

[Andy Warhol, Dollar Bills, Screen print painting, 1962]

Among his works of 1962 are several that use the dollar bill as source image. It may be an ironic twist of history that Andy Warhol's paintings and drawings of dollar bills were created the same year that Milton Friedman first published Capitalism and Freedom, the seminal book that framed the rationale for our current free market economy. In essence, Freidman's theory was that an economy operating free of governmental control would of itself raise everyone's standard of living. The conflation of freedom in the democratic sense with economic forces set up the culture for unfettered profiteering—what I would call the shadow rather than supply side of capitalism. One unfortunate consequence of this economic philosophy is that the world of business and commerce has managed to control not only the market place, but also the rules and regulations governing those activities such that the concept of a "level playing field" for economic opportunity is nothing more than a myth. Once upon a time, money was created as a system of values for accounting of transactions; it was a means toward an end of continuous circulation of money in order for everyone's needs to be met. However in our free market economy, the endgame is money and accumulated wealth, a systematic reward for competitive behavior. The rights that are at the heart of political freedom, that protect equal economic opportunity and our common natural resources have simply become more commodities available to the free market.

Thus the "almighty dollar" has taken on an iconic quality in which the representation and the ownership of it has overshadowed the underlying structure and value of what is represented by that dollar--and of course its real value is subject to change at a moment's notice. In order to feed free market activity, the government reserves the right to order the issuance of more money as it controls the supply and the interest cost of using it.

Both Lichtenstein and Warhol already recognized the luster of power that was attached to money in the early196os. That is why representing money could stand beside the representation of other commercial imagery and of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell soup cans. By coopting these popular images, both artists along with a host of others in the Pop Art movement were paralleling the emergent free market economy with a free market of images. In the 1960s, I would say that that power attached to money was optimistic, possibly exuberant. It was idolized. Warhol chose a medium of easy replication to generate his money paintings. Repetition of an image tends to attach a certain importance or meaning to it, even though replication ought to dilute value as the supply increases. He was deeply interested in the means of production; and, the fact that he was reproducing the image of money as a private citizen was also a challenge to the meaning of the government's sole right to do the same.

Though one cannot spend Warhol's dollars, they provide a reflection on the nature of cultural and expressional freedom in a way that practitioners of free markets could not understand because of their desire to control the rules. The curious timing of such seminal works in 1962, both artistic and economic, is nothing more a sign of an emerging consciousness at work resulting in conflicting or complementary expressions. Would that the art had the same power as Friedman's economic theory.

Money and the Modern Mind

2006-09-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

Money and the Modern Mind

What an invention money is—one of the evolving mysteries and wonders of the modern world. Among all the factors of everyday life, money and its attendant issues consume more of our conscious time than most of us would likely wish. It gathers about itself mythology, shadows, and power; fear and greed seem to be ascendant driving forces everywhere. At least that is what the cultural media reflects, and perhaps fosters. Those who hold to generosity and compassion as principles are not often visible, and generally there is little reward for taking such a position. Yet, there is a growing cultural shift in this positive direction.

That money seems so invested with power and control arises partially as a consequence of the fact that it is minted and issued by one central authority and secondly, from the shadows cast over it by our culture and its history. The effects of this shadow are further amplified by unexamined archetypal forces, both good and bad, that remain in the subterranean constructs of the psyche. Indications of this unconscious reality tend to surface in unpredictable and often unexplainable ways. One need only to reflect on working with money in a relationship or other social or organizational context.

Though it is desperately needed, there is not yet an easily accessible lexicon or other constructive expressive form free of cultural baggage to help bridge experience and communication around money. When one takes the time to look a little deeper into a conflict over finances, to explore the values and intentions, the personal situation or group dynamic can be dissipated or resolved. But this takes training and commitment—and time, rarely afforded in the hustle of everyday life. After all, these days most of our financial transactions are instantaneous and many are not even conducted with another human being.

Where are the opportunities to explore these deeply significant issues of money and the modern mind? Why does our culture hold such a long-standing taboo against talking about money? Where are the new lexicon and practices for disenfranchising this cultural taboo and healing our relationship to money? Who or what has withheld the permission for these conversations? And, why? Where is the resistance? What will create the leverage for long-term transformation for individuals and for culture?

Take the case of J.S.G. Boggs, a contemporary artist.[1] Out of simple necessity and artistic mischievousness, Boggs began his money journey in a restaurant by drawing a $20 bill on a napkin—since he did not have money to pay for his food. Mind you, he is an accomplished draftsman and the results of is work bear a remarkable resemblance to the real thing. His proposition goes as follows. When the waiter brought the bill for the meal, Boggs offered him his drawing of money as payment. Of course, that automatically put the waiter in a personal, philosophical, and financial quandary.

The condition that Boggs sets is that if the restaurant accepts his drawing as payment for the bill, they have to give him his change in dollars along with the receipt. He also requests the name and address of either the waiter or the manager, which he then writes on the receipt. Several things have been accomplished at this moment. Boggs has had his meal, and he has generated all of the documents that will become the final work of art that surfaces in his gallery. The work of art as it is presented in its exhibition format consists of: the receipt from the restaurant which documents the time, place, participants and the cost of the transaction; the physical monetary change itself; and, Boggs’s original drawing, which either the gallery or a collector has taken the time to purchase from the individual who accepted it as payment in the first place.

Boggs has traveled to many places and has learned to survive quite well on his own “currency.” He has used it not only for food but also for rent and clothing. In each case the negotiation, process, and documentation conform to the conceptual framework he has practiced since the first restaurant experiment. The works all surface in his exhibitions and can be viewed over the web. To indicate how close to the legal edge of the acceptable his art and life take him, he became somewhat of a celebrity in England where he was tried and acquitted for counterfeiting British pound notes.

He has also managed in his own tongue-in-cheek way to point out how we create value in our transactions, and just how attached we are to a monetary system which surrounds us everywhere, remains opaque, and over which we have little to no control. Boggs’s actions penetrate to the deeper concept of value, and further evidence just how functional, fictitious, and perception-based our normal unexamined monetary value system is. There is something uplifting about knowing that someone has found a way to directly link their own creativity and authority through a social form that is parallel and complementary to the existing system. Mind you he asked for change in normal currency as a kind of proof and standard of value. It is also interesting to note that the “money” and other documents that are part of the transactions increased in equivalent value through the process—a remarkable reflection of the merits of a complementary or gift currency.

There is a modern fairy tale quality to Boggs’s story in which he plays a trickster. However, venerable fairy tales such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm also offer insights into archetypal pictures associated with money. There are numerous stories from Grimm that speak to the topic, stories such as “Star Money” and “Stolen Farthings,” but none address the full constellation of archetypes as well as an obscure story called “The Grave-Mound.”[2] While this article does not allow space for the full story and the cadence of the language through which it is told, the characters themselves are instructive.

First and foremost is the wealthy farmer. While surveying his riches his eyes fall on the iron money chest in his sitting-room. Just at that moment there was a loud knock close by him. “The knock was not at the door of his room, but at the door of his heart.” The door opened and a voice inquired about what good he had done with his money, what choices had he made between greed and generosity, for example. The heart was not slow in answering with the painful truth about his selfishness and hoarding.

Then there was a knock on the door to his room. It was a neighboring peasant whose children were starving. The peasant goes through all the fears and doubts about asking for a gift. The rich farmer intuitively recognizes the importance of the opportunity to begin his own rescue. He “looked at him [the peasant] long, and then the first sunbeam of mercy began to melt away a drop of the ice of greediness.” The rich man gave the peasant more corn than he asked for with a condition that he watch over his grave for three nights when he dies. The peasant agrees, and, of course, the farmer dies shortly thereafter.

In fulfilling his obligation, the peasant meets two characters on the third night. First he notices a stranger in the churchyard. “He was no longer young, had scars on his face, and his eyes looked sharply and eagerly around. He was entirely covered with an old cloak, and nothing was visible but his great riding-boots.” In a state of anxiety, the peasant asks him who he is. “I am looking for nothing, and I am afraid of nothing!...I am nothing but a paid off soldier.” The peasant recognizing the value of his company invites him to keep watch with him. “To keep watch is a soldier’s business. Whatever we fall in with here, whether it be good or bad, we will share it between us.” The peasant agrees to this.

At midnight the “Devil” appears to claim the rich farmer’s soul. He tries to scare off the peasant and the soldier to no avail. So the Devil changes strategies and “thought to himself: Money is the best means with which to lay hold of these two vagabonds.” The soldier considers and accepts offer with the condition that the Devil fill up one of his boots. The Devil goes off to get the gold. The soldier cuts the sole off his boot and places it over a hole in the ground close by the grave. Three times the Devil has to go in search of ever increasing amounts of gold. Each time he pours it in, the boot remains unfilled. At some point the Devil realizes he has been had, but also has to keep to his agreement. After the last weighty sack has been poured in and the boot remains empty, the Devil becomes furious and is about to rip the boot from the earth. The whole process took so long that at “that moment the first ray of the rising sun broke forth.” Unable to bear the sun, the Devil was forced to leave and the farmer’s soul was saved.

The conclusion of the story goes as follows: “The peasant wished to divide the gold, but the soldier said: ‘Give what falls to my lot to the poor, I will come with you to your cottage, and together we will live in rest and peace on what remains.’”

Each of these characters represents an archetype with a very particular relationship to money, the need for it, and its uses. While each of us may identify with a different character—who would willingly identify with the Devil?—we are home to all of them, for better or worse. Different ones come to the fore depending on circumstances. What do we do with the wealth of our gifts, whether money or talents? Can we see the transformative and healing opportunities that recognizing and reconciling our own money shadows offer us? Are we open to listening to our hearts? Do we know how to ask for help without pre-judging those who we are asking? Can we be completely free and without fears and still be committed to service? Have we not used money to try to get our way? Can we honor our agreements even if it takes us into the unknown and puts us at risk?

Just as Boggs has found a way to externalize his inner values through the modern money system, and to point to a truth about money by inverting the system on itself, the archetypal pictures in the fairy tales offer an engaging tool, even a language, for exploring our own inner money landscapes, testing our assumptions, and understanding what is at play in the psyche. It is amazing and possibly unnerving to think of how the modern mind and spirit could come to know itself through bringing consciousness to bear on money—and that might begin to change the way the world works with money.

John Bloom ©2006

[1] For the full story and detailed analysis see Lawrence Weschler, Boggs: A Comedy of Values. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1999. The book also has an excellent bibliography on the cultural aspects of money.
[2] These stories can be found in The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Pantheon Books: New York, 1944.

[This article first appeared in the RSF Quarterly, December, 2003]

Money and the Dance of Death

2006-09-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

[Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), The Rich Man, a woodcut from the Collection of the British Museum, c. 1526]

Money and the Dance of Death

Totentanz or the Dance of Death was one of the great artistic and literary leitmotifs of 15th and 16th Century Germany. The presence of death was visible everywhere in the culture because of the frequent occurrence of plague and other deadly diseases. One's longevity was uncertain. There was a sense that one could be visited by death at any moment. Holbein's series of 4o-plus illustrative woodcuts shows Death coming to people from all walks of life from beggars to priests, to knights and craftsmen. An artist always has choices in how he or she conveys a theme, the moment in time, the circumstances of death's appearance, and the setting. The woodcut process demands precision and predetermination in its crafting, and thus every detail is significant and telling.

Holbein chooses to personify Death as a character who has just enough flesh and bones to animate its presence. No black cloak, no scythe. This Death has body language (lending graphically to the quality of the dance). In this case, in gathering up the "Rych man's" money, Death is mirroring back to him the act and quality of greed that led to such accumulation. It is a kind of truth-telling and mockery, a demonstration of the man's own shadow. There are strong boxes, money bags, and coins everywhere they might rest in the room. The room is cell-like, probably meant to be a protective vault; but now, it looks more like a prison of the rich man's own making. Death has breached the thick-walled iron-grated chamber, the rich man's inner sanctum. The man protests of course; he is inseparable from his money. It is his life, his identity. Having put his stock in the security of money, Holbein makes it clear that the rich man's stock is now his vulnerability. In the realm of death and the spirit, money and life have no security value. It is no small linguistic turn that misery is the external expression of the inner condition of the miser. It is the rich man's connection to the money, his relationship to it, the shadows he carries around it, the "immaterial" aspects that find expression in Death's appearance and the death process. This is the story Holbein tells. The candle on the table is burned down. The hour glass has run out. Death collects the money, not because it has a use for it, but because it has a lesson to teach. The moment of destiny is non-negotiable. The consequence of greed and unabated accumulation of wealth is a legacy of false security.

Interestingly, the value of art is that it transcends time, that it rises into and falls out of relevance in some rhythm sympathetic with the need to experience a truth that returns balance to the human sense of well-being. What was designed by Hans Holbein the Younger and printed to educate an audience in the 16th Century seems relevant still, though we seem to have less of a taste for moralizing. Imagine this woodcut as propaganda for the so called "death tax!"

John Bloom ©2006

Mercy in Mercantile Times

2006-08-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

[Gabriel Metsu, Userer with Tearful Woman, 1654, Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]

Mercy in Mercantile Times

Seventeenth Century Dutch painters were devoted to painting scenes from everyday life, with all its drama, humor, and social dynamics. These genre paintings served as social commentary and in some cases were meant to deliver moral lessons. This certainly seems to be the case with this painting by Gabriel Metsu (1629-1627). He has staged a scene that shows us a forlorn woman in tears (kerchief appropriately upstage) standing before a money lender or "userer." In her foreground lower hand she hold the remnants of a document--probably a promissory note or other legal docuemt. She has clearly come to plead her case. Looking at the money lender's face, the indication is one of scorn or judgment. One can easily surmise that there is a debt owed and not enough money to pay it. It is doubtful that it is her debt given the monetary practices of the times. Gender equity in the financial sphere is still an evolving ideal. Perhaps a husband gone off to sea and not returned. While it is difficult to be that precise with this painting, it was the birth of mercantilism and international trade that also provided the primary cause for the growth of lending and borrowing, the amassing of wealth and broken lives.

In keeping with the prevaling view of the time, usury was looked at as a necessary evil (in the truest sense of the idiom). Metsu doesn't really look favorably on either side of the transaction--the coldness of the money lender who can barely be bothered to look up at his client, the helplessness and vulnerability of the woman who really has few options. The userer wears his cloak almost as a protection from her. But the painter's real point is made through subtleties and painterly devices. In the left background behind the money lender's head is a folded sheet of paper or canvas. On that surface, there is a portion of a face looking at the scene with both interest and some judgment. Whose face is that? It seems religious, possibly Jesus or John. While there is a near subliminal moral overtone set by this aspect in the painting, there is an overt indication of the artist's perspective in his use of light and shadow on the woman's purse. At first glance it looks as if cloth or the liner has been pulled out of the bag. But it is no accident that the light catches it in such a way as to look like a hand reaching into the bag. This can be nothing other than the artist's projection of his view of how the money lender operates.

It is interesting to me that the real attitudes and feelings about money and the relational transactions were relegated to subsidiary details. To address them directly was taboo then as it is now. Of course, the history of and attitudes about lending and borrowing have evolved since the 17th Century. But given the degree of consumer debt and the precarious state of the economy, I could imagine this scene playing out many times over in modern dress and on the telephone. One hopes the quality of mercy prevails.

John Bloom © 2006

Coining a Myth: Titian's Danae and the Shower of Gold

2006-07-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

Coining a Myth: Titian's Danae and the Shower of Gold (1554)

Myths are meant to be told and retold. The archetypes they contain, the deeper human patterns of character, action, and circumstance, maintain their essences despite manifold variations. Both the literal and figurative coexist with great comfort. Both have meanings that transcend time and are simultaneously embedded in a particular time and place. The language, the images, and the choices in any teller's presentation are conditioned by prevailing cultural norms along with her or his personal history. With each retelling a myth is given new birth.

The artists of the Italian Renaissance had the joy of rediscovering the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Much of it had been physically buried. Its excavation sparked a merging of a scientific and anthropocentric view of the world, as epitomized in the development of perspectival systems of rendering, with a fascination with the deep and fluid harmony of forms and proportions typified by classic Greek sculptures. In some senses, the duality of spirit and matter became a central question.

In choosing to paint the mythological story of Danae, Titian (c. 1485-1576), Venetian master of the High Renaissance, addressed this duality in a very direct way. The Greek myth goes like this in short. Acrisius, king of Argos, having received a prophecy that his grandson would take over all his power and kingdom, has his daughter and her servant imprisoned in a cave or dungeon. Angered by this, the god Zeus sent down a shower of gold from the heavens from which the virgin Danae conceived her son Perseus. The scene which Titian depicts shows the shower of gold as coins dropping in two directions, one following the path of light in which Danae is bathed, the other falling into the apron held up by the servant. The shower of gold is a metaphysical or alchemical concept in itself. So representing a quality of light that could carry the otherworldly power of procreation and yet have some recognizable (material form) was quite a dilemma. Titian solved this dilemma by setting up a contrast between his approach to rendering the coins and between the tonal and energetic qualities of the two figures. The coins falling toward Danae have a lightness to them; they fall more like feathers. Danae lies bathed in light, vulnerable, unprotected. The coins directed toward the servant's apron move more like projectiles of consistent size traveling with force and focus. The servant figure moves aggressively to gather the coins with the gesture of greed. These coins emerge from the dark clouds as they cast their shadow across the servant and the right portion of the painting.

The purpose of my close analysis is to highlight that fact that Titian could still see and render golden "coins" as linked to the ancient and archetypal past of spiritual power--here the coins are a formal expression of that power. He equates light, gold, and creative consciousness on the one hand, while on the other acknowledges a more adumbrated modern reality of wealth, gold, and greed.

Imprisoned together in the cave, the two characters react as polar opposites to the sudden abundance. It is easy to fall into judgment about the two. But, they are both archetypal characters and as such a reflection of both reside in all of us. For example, in the face of abundance I know I have that selfless part of me that wants to transform it for the good. I also know that part of me that wants to gather it up, hold on to it because there is never enough. Thus is the power of art to tell a mythological story in grand scale that also has all the feeling of being the important news of the day.

John Bloom © 2006

Consuming Identity

2006-06-25T23:12:00.000-07:00

Consuming Identity

I engage daily in purchase transactions. These range from food, to gasoline, clothes, airline tickets. For each transaction I have numerous choices to make, one of the advantages and challenges of living in a resource-rich market-based economy. None of this is news. Each time I make a purchase, exercise my choice, I am acting out of my personal and social values. This transaction sends a message into the economic and production systems that encourages them to produce another item just like the one have purchased. By being ever more conscious in my buying, by becoming increasingly discriminating in the sources of the materials or the fairness of the labor practices involved, for instance, and being willing to pay for those qualities and practices, I am bringing my values to bear on the economic system. At the same time I constantly remind myself that such a frame of reference is extremely privileged, and available to a limited set of the world’s population. The element of change I can bring about through the transaction is nanometric, but valuable nonetheless. This is the story I tell myself.

This story, however, has had others help write it. Cultural conditioning, class bias, inherited and unexamined values, media exposure, and my own instinctive desires all play a part in its crafting. This part I can own. This is who I am as a consumer, an evolving aspect of my identity. However, there are others who make it their business to usurp that authorship while overwriting or overriding that identity. The intention through advertising and other forms of commercial-based media messaging is to relocate my awareness from my ever-emergent who to what I am as a consumer. That is: To objectify myself, to condition what I see as I reflect upon myself, as if the image in the mirror is the end of the reflective process. After all an image is a thing and we are very image-conscious.

Consider the following from the Art Directors Club Annual No. 34 of 1955: “It is now the business of advertising to manufacture customers in the comfort of their own homes.” “To manufacture customers”—what a dehumanizing and impossible imperative. What a misapplication of the industrial mind-set. And yet it was the overarching and brilliant strategy to control and commodify self-perception. In some ways, the very notion of personal spiritual or cultural freedom, that part of myself that I consider most sacred and inviolable, is put at risk here by an intention to redefine it as solely economic and dependent. According to this advertising imperative, I am only me in relation to the material world and what I buy or own, and more insidiously, to some fabricated projection of how I ought to be.

1955 was a watershed year for the commercial world which emerged post World War II. That year televisions numbered 30.7 million and were possessed by 50% of the population. Three short years later, there were more TVs than people, homes, or cars. For quick context: 1955 was the year that MacDonald’s and Disneyland opened in a hail of optimism about the future; “Queen for a Day,” an early form of what we now call reality or tabloid television, began broadcasting; the first atomic reactor began generating power in Schenectady, NY; the first bus boycotts began in Montgomery, Alabama; “Rock Around the Clock” (a telling title for our time) was one of the most popular songs. This is just to mention a few cultural signposts.

While 1955 was certainly not the beginning of the advertising industry, the new media opened up vastly increased opportunities for persuasion. The industry has become what I consider a place of genius (if understood for what it is) for concatenating a sophisticated understanding of the human psyche, pathways for influencing it, and the use of communication tools to effect that influence. Its precedent lies in propaganda; its deepest shadow was already known as “brainwashing.” It is an industry of people highly sensitive to cultural currents who recognize no limits for inventively co-opting what is deeply human in me and in my relationship to others and the world as a tool for further objectifying my “self” as an image—all the while maintaining the illusion of real experience. I would suggest this is true for each of us depending on how we relate to cultural identity or the degree to which we share in a collective unconscious filled with archetypes having different names but common characteristics.

There is nothing simpler, more direct and engaging for people than story telling. It is an ancient art, a living art of communing with our fellow humans. Storytelling is an efficient means for experiencing authentic voice. I intuitively experience someone’s truth (or untruth) as they tell me their story whether biography, recollection, or fiction. I also experience my own truth or untruth as I tell my story; story telling has powerful reflective capacities. Interestingly, story telling is having a significant come back in Western culture as a way of reclaiming that voice so polluted by cultural messaging systems. I imagine that you can probably guess the most recent trend in the advertising industry—the use of story telling because of its assumed authenticity, its ability to convince or engage.

An historical precedent for this twisting of veracity was the innovative use of photographs in print ads in the 1920s. The photographs replaced illustrations because the new medium told the truth (“camera don’t lie” was the theory) while illustrations were no longer convincing. We have come to understand that cameras do “lie” and that photographs are alterable representations, so much so that they are no longer accepted as evidence in court. Ethical practice aside, this is the way the advertising industry goes.

As a consumer, I live in the rift between who I am based on self-knowledge, and what the world of commerce is trying to make of me based on self-image. While a purchase transaction is nothing more than an exchange of value, there are other layers of meaning that play out through it. The story that compels me to the purchase, including a dose of self-interest, whether driven by legitimate or imagined need, interfaces with the product’s or service’s story, including what and how I was made aware of it and what it is trying to say about me. Sometimes the stories mesh nicely, other times not. I experience a degree of dissonance and integration emerging within almost every transaction I make. Being awake to those feelings, which constitute the soul of the transaction, is a step beyond conscious choice in consumerism, and toward returning “who I am” as I author my story and “what I am” according to others, to their appropriate domains. This is, of course, a powerful and sacred exercise in individual freedom and a central challenge for our time.

John Bloom © 2006

Culture: for the Price of Admission

2006-05-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what exactly you are buying when you purchase a ticket to the symphony (or any other cultural event)? What appears as a very simple transaction is complicated by exploring what you get for that “purchase.” When you buy a car, there is a clear exchange of value—money for goods; for the lawyer, the exchange is for a service. This holds true for the symphony as well. It is a service. But, the motivation, the real value is in the ephemeral experience, transcendent or otherwise.

When you buy the ticket, you are purchasing the right to be in a particular seat on a particular day to hear a published program. That same ticket provides no other rights, unless, for example, there is a rain rescheduling. The ticket does not provide a right to expect or hear a brilliant performance, only the right to be present for it.

From an economic standpoint, the cost of the ticket is your share of the financial support needed to allow the philharmonic service to continue to be provided to the wider community. After all, the conductor and musicians need to be paid in order to be able to bring their considerable gifts to rehearsals and performances. The hall needs to be built and maintained. Your ticket purchase provides for the physical (earthly) needs of the orchestra as your need to attend for aesthetic pleasure is being met.

It is fair to assume that expectations come with the purchase, especially if the orchestra has a great reputation. Given the right to be there for the performance, given that the musicians are there to perform, it is a sure bet that you will have an experience. The ticket purchase cannot guaranty the quality of the experience. Instead, the terms, value, and meaning are determined solely by you. How you absorb the music and carry it in memory into the future is particular to your biography. The quality of the experience, that which happens performa, is in the nature of a gift. It is certainly not a thing; it is the result of a transpersonal (performers-audience) event. It defies any conventional economic measurement since the performance is simultaneous and nearly congruent in space for the whole audience, yet its effects operate outside of time and space for each individual present.

The price of admission to a cultural event is complex since the end of the transaction is not really economic, but rather experiential or spiritual if you will. One test of this is to observe how much gift money has to be raised to meet the true cost of operating the symphony orchestra. If the true cost were reflected in the price of admission, very few people would be able to afford to attend, and thus, lame the broader cultural value of the performance and the mission of the music. However much one winces at the cost of attending a performance, the ticket at least guarantees you the right to attend, provides for both your and the orchestra’s economic needs, and is to be celebrated not as a charge against your income but rather as a gift in support of music and culture.

John Bloom © 2006

Exploring Money and Spirit: Excerpts from an Interview with Jacob Needleman

2006-05-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from Exploring Money and Spirit
An Interview with Jacob Needleman

By John Bloom

John Bloom: What is America’s particular mission in relation to money and economics?

Jacob Needleman: America’s mission in relation to business goes back to the Enlightenment era, to the idea—which, in the light of modern history, may seem mere fantasy—that the money motive could be a force that could blunt some of the really violent and destructive passions of mankind. Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith and others made a distinction between what could generally be termed the passions and the interests. The passions were those violent egoistic impulses that tended to result in physical and social destruction. The interests were often selfish certainly, but they had to do with stability, property, possessions, and bourgeois values. To put it simply: war and killing were very bad for business! Although Enlightenment thinkers were certainly realistic about the flaws of human nature, they posited a theory that the money impulse, as reflected in the emerging system of capitalism, could become a moderating force in human life. Money-making was sometimes spoken of as a “calm passion.” That was an idealistic view of money, which formed part of the economic background in the founding and early development of capitalism in the United States.

Another comparable, but historically more efficacious idea, has to do with the play of forces affecting a culture (much in the way that forces operate in the Newtonian universe). This is our principle of the separation of powers in the United States government. You have a benign mutual interference of opposing forces that blunts any particular wolf-like aggrandizement or attack from one part of society on another part of society. Having three powers, the legislative, executive, and judicial, was a brilliant conceptual framework. It is the opposite of having a monarch, a single force that can do things very efficiently, including killing everybody.

Another idea was property. Jefferson and other people of that time wanted property to be the fundamental element in the country, rather than money. It was Alexander Hamilton who really monetized America, who felt that the power of money as an instrument was the more important part.

Property is a very interesting and sophisticated concept. The interaction of mind and nature creates property. You have a mind that makes something happen—you do something, and then there is property. This view of individual ownership, of property, had to do with the support of individual development and well-being. Ownership of property could provide a base of material security necessary for the pursuit of more spiritual goals. And, of course, property ownership was understood to be an effective counterforce to the tendency of the state to assume too much authority and political control. These ideas are among the most important elements constituting America’s mission and challenge around money.

Consider now the negative aspect of this mission, which has perhaps resulted in the power of money crowding out essential human values. Once the spiritual goal, or the moral or aesthetic element of life is diminished, then everything gets seen in terms of money. The means become the ends and money becomes equated with wealth. But money is not wealth; money is a means for wealth in the human sense of the term.

Money is a means, a necessary means, and a useful means. Money is a really brilliant piece of social technology. It enables people to share and exchange even in a very large community, and to recognize the reality of interdependence. So it is, and is meant to be, an instrument of community. Our aim should be to restore it to that noble function.

So, if it’s not wealth, what does money represent?

What is money? It’s nothing and it's everything at the same time. It’s a social promise, a representation of work. It represents the desire part of human nature which is so strong. In one sense, money is nothing, and in another sense it’s the bottom line. Money makes things real in human life. One has to acknowledge that money has this power. People tend not to want to see it that way, or else they give it too much power.

Is that because they haven’t worked on their own inner relationship to it?

It’s very hard for most of us. I don’t know anybody who is normal about money. I don’t even know what it would mean to be normal about money. You would not know how a person is about money until you’re dealing with him or her. You and I are both filled with contradictions about money. I know I am. In this sense, money in our society is a golden key to self-knowledge. If you want to become aware of your contradictions, study how you think, feel and behave in relation to money.

[For the full text see http://www.rsfsocialfinance.org/pdf/quarterly/June_2004.pdf]
© 2006

Emerson on The Weight of Money

2006-05-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on "Wealth" wrote:

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner. The coin is a delicate meter of civil, social, and moral changes. The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the day’s work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents;—how much rain, frost, and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen, or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked at as light. I wish the farmer held it dearer, and would spend it only for real bread; force for force.

The farmer’s dollar is heavy, and the clerk’s is light and nimble; leaps out of his pocket; jumps on to cards and farotables; but still more curious is its susceptibility to metaphysical changes. It is the finest barometer of social storms, and announces revolutions.

What an extraordinary concept Emerson was articulating. Money has relative weight depending on what it is measuring. Clearly the dollar the farmer earns and spends is the same dollar with which that city clerk is gambling. So, on what basis would Emerson make his claim? First I must state the assumption that Emerson was imagining what we call purchase money (rather than loan or gift). The money is nothing more than a physical expression of value, but value does not really exist except at the moment of a transaction. What we normally call value is determined as a result of the pattern of multiple transactions in circulation or currency--a virtual mean created of fluctuating values. Real value is establish by the parties to the purchase transaction based upon a constellation of personal feelings, perceived needs or desires, and the environmental context of the transaction. Consciousness brought to this aspect of the transaction, the sympathy of one party to the transaction to the condition of the other, is what I believe Emerson was referencing in his estimate of the relative weight of the farmer's money. The point is that if we enter into a purchase transaction from a position of empathy (we are engaged in meeting each other's needs) rather than antipathy (I am meeting my needs) that other metaphysical world to which Emerson refers will be more present, as will real value. Emerson was a visionary in many realms. In his view of wealth, he was arguing for an altruistic rather than egoistic economy.

John Bloom © 2006

Thinking about Giving

2006-04-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

Thinking About Giving

What actually lives in the gesture of a gift?

The most outstanding characteristic of a gift is that it increases in value when it is given. Value is, of course, a complicated subject, but it can also be simple and personal. Suppose it is winter, and you have an infrequently-worn warm coat in your closet. If you were to give that coat to someone who has none, then the value of that coat has increased drastically because of its increased usefulness, regardless of its original cost or sentimental value. Value depends upon the perspective from which it is viewed and is definitely relative—to our feelings, perceptions, and historical context.

Something else important is happening within this picture. The coat was hanging in a closet, out of circulation you could say, maybe even in cold storage or mothballs. Once given, it is now moving about in the world providing bodily warmth and helping someone focus on their life tasks instead of the condition of being cold. This picture presumes a kind of ideal world in which the human being is valued more highly than material goods.

Money, especially gift money, works in a similar way. Money, which has been heavily or continuously used either for purchase or investment, or held in “cold storage” such as land or real estate where its primary purpose is an increase in monetary value, needs to be renewed by enabling human capacity for envisioning or forming the future. And, this enabling must be done without any expectation of monetary return. Where money makes possible the furtherance of human capacity, money is given, in a sense, a new life. Its value has increased for benefit of culture and humanity rather than for the benefit of its giver.

There is a secondary aspect of this gift transaction that is equally important. That is, how is the gift received? A gift usually comes with an intention. If the recipient acknowledges the intention, feels responsible to it, then they have in a sense met the giver half way. In this act, a spiritual link, almost like a handshake, between the past and the future is created. This link is also a critical part of the increased value of the gift, a transformation from monetary or trade value to human value.

John Bloom © 2006

Money and Human Behavior

2006-04-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

Money and Human Behavior

There was a very revealing article in the NYT, Friday, April 7, 2006, p. A22, titled "Study Links Punishment To An Ability to Profit." The full study appeared the same day in Science. To quote the essence of the article: "Given a choice, most people playing an investment game created by the researchers initially decided to join a group that did not penalize its members. But almost all of them quickly switched to a punitive community when they saw that the change could profit them personally."

This raises all sorts of questions about how and why we are driven by self-interest when money is involved. It also speaks to the benefit to all when governance is clear and consequential. To tie the outcomes to a monetary incentive magnifies the power of the concept. Economics, the field that focuses on how we meet each others physical needs, thrives when the awareness of interdependence is at the fore. In this context, one works to meet others' needs as others are working to meet yours. This can be scaled to both local and global levels. As the NYT article makes abundantly clear, this is not how we are wired to think as economic citizens. Still, a system in which the rules are fair and equally applied, and each person is given the tools to enforce those rights, is better than the world of disenfranchisement and wealth disparity in which those with the wealth also create and manage the rules. While the laboratory was a simple investment game, it points to the need for a real balance between self-interest and community interest.

John Bloom © 2006

The Qualities of Money and Transactions

2006-04-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

The Qualities of Money and Transactions

Not all money is the same. Much depends on how you use it, the intentions you have for it, and the agreement that you have with the recipient. The money we use for purchases moves very quickly and is simply an exchange of money for goods or services of equal value as we assess it as a consumer. A purchase always happens in the present and certainly does not necessitate having a relationship with the person or store selling the goods, though it certainly adds to the quality of the process. The inner barometer of this equal exchange is the question that we seem programmed to ask ourselves: Am I getting my money's worth? This is, of course, a loaded question.

Money that we loan to someone has a different quality altogether. When you make a loan you are automatically in a mutual relationship with that person. You will find yourself interested in what they do with the money and how you will be paid back. You would likely want to help the person succeed because you are dependng on their success. The mutuality is not instantaneous as in a purchase, but rather slower as determined by the agreement which could be an hour or thirty years. The loan and its repayment is related to a financial event that happened in the past.

The third primary kind of money and transaction is one of gifts. When you make a gift you are giving up control of the money to someone else, so there is not a necesary financial relationship with the recipient. The clue to understanding probably lies in exploring what motivated the gift, and what the giver recognizes in the recipient as a capacity. Because the giver releases control of the gift it operates outside of any predictable time frame and is also subject to 100% risk. Thus gifts are related to the future; they are given to create new activity, new insights, research, artistic exploration and the like.

The qualities of money--purchase, loan and gift have direct correlation to time in the present, past and future. This is one of the small mysteries of money and its qualities as practiced in our transactions.

© 2006

Changing your relationship to money

2006-04-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

Changing Your Relationship to Money

If you are interested in changing your relationship to money try the following exercise:

Sit quietly and imagine yourself at a moment of the day in which you are transacting a purchase. As you work with the imagination make sure to widen your awareness to the full context, the place, the people, the sounds, etc. Then try to imagine the money out of the situation. Send it away from you. Then broaden the inner request to begin to imagine your life with no money at all in any context. What remains? What feelings come up? How do you inwardly begin to cope with the circumstances?

Try this a few times. It is not easy. After you are really able to rid your imagined world of money and what remains is really visible to you, try describing it and how it might work. How would you survive?

When you have created the money-free environment and have some comfort in it, begin to invite money back into your life--slowly at first so that you can observe the process, your feeelings, your preferences and predilections, etc. Be gentle with yourself.

© 2006