When I was in my final year of high school (back in the Pleistocene era, when Ontario still had “Grade 13”), I was fortunate to take two courses from the same teacher, a Mr. McCabe—fortunate in a number of ways, although I am only going deal with those relating to the subject matter that Mr. McCabe taught here. I had chosen to take Introductory Economics with him, and was also under obligation by the school, which was a Roman Catholic one, to take a course in Religious Education in each of the five years of high school, which in Grade 13 was actually, at least as Mr. McCabe taught it, more about what is called Social Justice than anything overtly doctrinal: it was, in effect, a course in contemporary human geography and social history viewed through the lens of the Church’s doctrine of there being a “preferential option for the poor”. So while in period one Economics class we learned about the supply and demand curve, about marginal propensities to produce and consume, etc., in period four Religion we learned about the plights of the poorest of the poor around the globe—about Haiti and Jamaica, about Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, about South Africa, just to name a few examples.

It was an eye-opening experience for me (and, I hope, for my equally-unworldly classmates), as, with all of the callow solipsism of a typical youth, I had never considered that morality might have a widely social dimension to it before; it was largely a matter, I had erroneously thought, of the individual and his or her conscience. After all hadn’t Margaret Thatcher just made it clear (well not to me, as I didn’t know of it until some years later) that there was no such thing as society, but only individuals and their families?

My own intellectual tendencies at that point were similar to those of many young males who are on track to a career in engineering: one studied the sciences because they were true and useful; they got you a job, produced goods that people both needed and valued, and were firmly rooted in reality, in the stubborn objectivity of nature, and in man’s need to master and tame nature in order to provide the aforementioned jobs and goods. The humanities were required by the education system, it seemed, either because they were stuck in the past, valuing some outmoded view of the world (values that could not be measured), or because they provided some subsidiary value to life, because one could not work all of the time: one had to pursue leisure activities, some of which should for the serious-minded engineer be of an intellectual nature, and the humanities instructed one as to how to go about doing so intelligently, at least (even if it “was all really just subjective BS, wasn’t it, in the end?”).

What united both the sciences and the humanities, though, was that they were “subjects”—units of study that seemed to have been not so much carved off from one another as to have been “born” naturally that way—discrete from each other, each with its own logic and method. Economics was surely a science, modelling the natural inclinations of human behaviour with formulas and charts, and if you mastered it, you would no doubt understand the way that markets naturally function, something which was important, I assumed, for those overseeing the running of the economy, who must be to it like doctors and dentists were to the human machine: highly skilled mechanics adept at keeping the gears of the economy turning over.

Except the evidence coming out of period four Religion seemed to put that assumption to a test, since we studied about the poorest of the poor and how their nations came to be that way, and what should and perhaps could be done about it.  The evidence was there, but I did not connect it to what was being taught in period one economics until several years later—these were different worlds, right?—worlds that had no real bearing upon one another. At best, I might have achieved a momentary insight along the lines of “yeah, well our prosperity here does seem to require their poverty over there” in period four Religion and then just go happily back to imagining, in period one Economics, that the laws of supply and demand were as unimpeachably laws of human nature for Homo Economicus as the laws of gravity were for Newton mechanics in period two Physics. Everything was in its place in this Best of All Possible (Adolescent) Worlds.

Several years after finishing university, however, after abandoning Engineering for Physics, then Physics for English and Philosophy, I had occasion to think about Mr. McCabe and his two courses again, after having encountered the character of Wemmick in…

Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations.

 Wemmick toils as clerk and bill collector for the successful and remorseless lawyer Jaggers.

At work, Wemmick is all business, and his enslavement to that cold, calculating, utilitarian, instrumental reason (that anything of any worth can be expressed in terms of what Yanis Varoufakis calls exchange value, in terms of what it can be bought and sold for), the ethos which rules over market society like a tyrant posing as God’s anointed proxy, is unavoidably reflected in Wemmick’s demeanor: at the office, Wemmick’s enforced inhumanity to his fellow man is portrayed by the mechanical “post office box” opening that is his mouth, a mouth completely colonized by his occupation. Nothing escapes that mouth which does not advance his employer Jaggers’ financial interests.

At home (which is an actual, miniature castle, complete with drawbridge-and-moat that effectively protect his private life from his diurnal existence), however, it is another story: here he is a jovial host to young Pip, and affectionate son to his father (“the aged P”)—a man, seemingly (if you forget the hours of the working day and the days of the working week), in full.

Wemmick’s solution to the alienation endemic to life under capitalism comes at a cost, indicative of one of the contradictions inherent to market societies: each of us can only be part-time human beings, as the market forces us to alienate ourselves from those more human values whenever they come into conflict with exchange value.

For example, love, friendship, walking in nature, singing a nursery rhyme to a child or taking care of an aging parent—these are all aspects of our lives that enrich them with meaning (and which Yanis Varoufakis calls “experiential values”, as they lack or cannot be translated into monetary or “exchange” value).

Wemmick’s solution makes sense to us even as it seems completely crazy: the only way to stay partly human is to give up being fully human, to compartmentalize our lives by erecting imaginary ramparts and digging imaginary moats around our “real” lives, so as to protect them from the harsh realities of the world “out there”, of life in the metaphorical market.

That literature can reveal to us in a such strikingly nuanced, ambiguous and yet palpable way might strike some readers as unusual, as we have been trained to think of literature and political economy as subjects as incommensurable as my period one Economics and period four Religion supposedly were: we almost instinctively view art which attempts to be politically or ethically engaged in social matters as being potentially propagandistic, tendentious, as being somehow lacking in the elusive artfulness of “proper” art, art that aims not at reductive answers to complex questions, but, on the contrary, further complicates them.  We expect art to offer us ambiguity, not certainty, about ethical and political matters, and political art is thus a contradiction in terms, we say.

But a closer look at Dickens’s deployment of metaphor in the case of Wemmick brings a certain kind ambiguous clarity, one that poses as many questions as it seems to answer. The metaphor of Wemmick’s split existence, reified (“thingified”) into his slit of a mouth, his homey castle of a home needing defences that a feudal lord might envy—this image opens up a way of thinking about aspects of our existence that might otherwise have gone unexamined. And far from reducing our range of thought, Dickens’s portrayal of his character expands it, makes further inquiry possible, but does not offer us propagandistic solutions to those contradictions and dilemmas. What if everyone lived like Wemmick did? What would become of ideas such as “community” and “social life”? What if Wemmick were forced to choose between these two worlds, work and home life, due to some unforeseen circumstance (such as the parent being taken ill, making Wemmick at least temporarily unable to meet his obligations to his employer)? Dickens does not presume to answer such questions. Instead, he depicts Wemmick as balanced precariously between these two worlds, successful (for the time being) at balancing the tensions between them, living with the contradiction that the “postal slit mouth” and the “castle” of a home metaphors reveal—reveal as if the novelist is a spelunker venturing into some previously  unexplored cave for the very first time, and his novel is a flashlight by which we, too, may see as we follow behind him.

And so a novelist of great skill can bridge the artificial divide between the various aspects of our existence (between, say, the worlds of economics and social justice, kept apart only by a set of assumptions shared by those who might develop a high school curriculum, but which are very present on the ground of lived human reality for those who have eyes to see.

Talking To My Daughter About The Economy

Thus does Yanis Varoufakis in his book Talking To My Daughter About The Economy wisely look to literature, myth and film to attempt to capture the very contradictions , those conflicted mysteries that compose our socio-political-economic hyphenated reality—the very environment in which we live and die and which is by no means a natural one. Varoufakis teaches us with many vivid examples from the dramatic and literary arts that economics possesses a deep, almost mythical but historically determined structure, one which deserves to be dragged into the light of day so that each of us (Wemmicks all) can see for ourselves what drives it so remorselessly on, lest we otherwise might leave it all to the so-called experts, to those who claim the subject of economics as their exclusive territory, a pseudo-science which is supposedly exclusive of all moral or political concerns.

In this book, Varoufakis not only shows us how the growth of human civilization  gave birth to the first systems of politically-legitimized inequality (and how ancient and feudal inequality, “societies with markets” gave way to a much different kind of world, “market society”, in which everyone is driven to, compelled to sell their labour, and in which the only real value is “exchange value”) he also takes us on a tour of several key moments that truly define the capitalist world as we now know it: the imposition of debt via the contract (with Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus); the expansion of capitalism via debt-financed industrialisation (with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein); the “black magic” of how private bankers create money out of nothing (with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath); the irrational mysteries of money and labour markets  (with ean-Jacques Rousseau’s fable of “The Stag and the Hares” and the myth of king Oedipus); and the triple threat of our current economy, automation, virtual currencies and environmental degradation (with Star Trek and The Matrix).

In the end, this is a highly entertaining and informative little book, for the neophyte and initiate alike. I wish my own father had given something like this to me when I was a teen. Varoufakis ends with a juxtaposition of two ancient Greek concepts the idiotis  vs Eudaimonia: idiots are those who place themselves outside of civilization by refusing to think of the common good: an idiot is literally a privateer, someone who minds only his own business, and ignores that of others. True happiness comes from understanding our true, interconnected nature, and involves an environment and an economy in which each of us can literally “flourish”, grow from tiny acorns into mighty the oak trees of our fullest potential. Varoufakis challenges his daughter to see past the conventional wisdom of those idiots whose technocratic mumbo-jumbo would prevent us from reaching toward a more democratic world, one in which eudaimonia is a possibility for everyone. I have a hunch which side his daughter Xenia (whose name’s “etymology comes from the Greek word xenos , meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner’ and translates as ‘kindness to strangers’” (146) will pick. He seems like a pretty good dad.

Note: If you are interested in learning more about this book before (hopefully) purchasing it, I have provided a “digested read” or Midrash of the book over on my Longreads site.

This brings me to the 2020s and

Varoufakis’s Another Now.

TLDR: I’m of three minds:
(1) The lit bro didn’t want to be seen having read it in public
(2) The Yanis-fanboi wanted more economic debate, less fictional scaffolding
(3) The eternal 12 year-old was absolutely thrilled
In other words, Two (of Five) stars, maybe, if you are a yarn-dyed high-brow lit-type, with a number of non-negotiables when it comes to what you expect from a novel (or a “novel”).

But this is a five full star-read for the 12-year-old in your life—or, perhaps, if you’re at all like me, the 12-year-old in you, too, cos this book, though it is laughably short on plot, and not at all “convincing” in terms of how it portrays the causality, at least, of how the “another now” (a multiverse story, which universes branching at key points in history, perhaps even all the time, with this one focused on a particular world that took decisions remarkably different from the ones taken by ourselves—or by our politicians, rather, acting on behalf of their true constituency, the 1% of the 1% of the 1%***) came about during the financial cataclysm that was 2008 (I mean, imagine Blackstone giving up its power, wealth and privilege, or Blackwater laying down its petrochemically-purchased mercenarial arms, or Murdochs of the world shutting the hell up in the papers they own, or…)…

But if I had had this book thrust into my hands by the librarian at 12 (rather than, as was actually the case, Anthem, by Ayn Rand—>negative 5 stars!¹), I might have turned out a better human being, or at least a more questioning one (or, most likely, one who pesters his parents alone with such pesky questions as are raised in this book, while behaving remarkably pliant as regards all other authority figures in my life, from teachers to coaches to the local newspaper delivery manager, to the Burger King manager who hired me underage).

In any case, it was that 12 year old who read this book in 2023, and loved it, not so much as a novel, but as a kind of turbo-charged Socratic dialogue, of the kind that no less than what another Murdoch (Iris, not Rupert) has written, with her superb faux-Plato plays Acastos and Above the Gods (in Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues²). For, like that Murdoch and not the other, Yanis Varoufakis is remarkably adept at playing several devil’s advocates at once, as his trio of main characters debate the (de)merits of our own world and those of the parallel democratic socialist/market socialist one, from the point of view of 2025, but narrated from 2035 (via a rather underdeveloped frame narrative).

But for you non-12-year-olds out there, what this book most resembles (and where it might rank) in your other readings depends upon your tolerance for the class utopian/dysopian tradition, arguably beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia (or Plato’s Republic, etc.) and reaching its zenith with, say, Ursula K Leguin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. From top to bottom, one stab at fixing them upon a pin of aesthetic hierarchy (ranking them as aesthetic objects as well for their ability to stimulate debate) might look something like this:

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Leguin
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Player Piano (etc.), Kurt Vonnegut
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Another Now, YV
Utopia, Thomas More
News From Nowhere, William Morris
The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon
Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy (etc., etc.)

Nearer to the bottom than the top qua aesthetic object, perhaps…

(which I would take a stab at defining, by beginning with:
—worth at least a re-read for the beguiling quiddity of its prose
—the subtlety and nuance and robustness its structure/architectonics
—ambiguities which linger long after its pages are left behind
—and which can proceed, seemingly organically, from its characters
—the uniqueness and cohesion of narrative “voice”
—and/or some undefinable quintessence, some nearly inarticulate “content” inseparable from “form” (if those words themselves so much as bear the weight of their utterance).
—its wholeness, harmony, and radiance, in other words (and to borrow a phrase from Aquinas).

…due to its habit of retreating into either didactic debate, or straightforward exposition, all beloved by the 12-year-old, of course, but they do distract from the actually interesting characters the author has invented, and (again, though the almost-teen was entranced) slow any forward motion to near-Tristram Shandy levels—albeit without that book’s sense of humour and, of course, metafictional hijinks…

All that said, alleged-adult me actually did find his characters compelling, and the book itself capable of real wisdom, deploying irony to swiftly undercut even the most obvious of its programmatic/didactic/tendentious conclusions, and always seeking to probe the foundations of its own foundational axioms (axia?). One example of this is how sensitive Varoufakis is to his own choice of examples, or his own deployment of revealing figures of speech. When one character tries to convince another, younger character of the superiority of collective action versus the power one man, Jeff Bezos, has arrogated to himself via his increasingly unassailable empire, the older character attempts to argue by analogy:

Thomas had been listening intently. Costa inferred from his silence that he didn’t quite know whether to be impressed or dismissive. Sensing his vacillation, Costa chose a different approach.

‘Forget the politics and look at it aesthetically,’ he suggested. ‘The force assembled by Akwesi is more beautiful than the blunt and boring power of an ultra-rich man and his sycophantic henchmen. If you were to put the two forces to music, Bezos’s would sound like Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, [the Another Now’s]like Beethoven’s Ninth.’

As Thomas and Costa continued their discussion, Eva reflected on her son’s character and the relationship that was taking shape before her. Costa’s musical references had been lost on the young man, and he had been forced to attempt a different analogy. But had Thomas been familiar with the two musical works, Eva was sure he would have chosen the Valkyries every time. Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ required an optimism of the spirit that her son lacked. She felt keenly that it was the absence of a father figure in his life that made him susceptible to absolutist patriarchal power. A Jeff Bezos, a Rupert Murdoch, a Darth Vader, especially a Mephistopheles, would find it easy to enlist Thomas in their enterprise, their boisterous validation of male power promising him what he had lacked all his life in a way that democratic power, however intellectually intriguing and aesthetically pleasing, could not.

The 12 year old me would have registered unconsciously, if not quite thought about, how none of our own leaders think of society as an intentionally produced aesthetic object, much less which classic works it would be most analogous to. Plato sure did, as did Leguin, and Vonnegut, etc. But most politicians, like most of us, take what’s “given” as given (as the famous DFW speech “This Is Water” begins, There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”). And time and again, Varoufakis’s book asks us to ask what the hell our water really is—if it provides the ideal conditions for our flourishing, in other words (or in YV’s, as with Plato our eudaimonia)

YV even undercuts the very underpinnings of his own book, or of all such books, to effect real change, when he has his characters look at the psychological tropes through which we view history (this book being one instance of those topes “writ large” much as Plato states that the state or polis is the soul writ large):

Thirteen years after chance had brought them together, Iris and Eva were sounding alike for the first time. Impressed, Thomas asked them if encountering the Other Now together had been ‘their moment of truth’, opening the way to a rapprochement.

‘Moments of truth are a fiction,’ Iris said, adding, ‘Truth grows organically, Thomas. There was never a particular moment or event that pushed my thinking and your mother’s closer together. Epiphanies are an illusion that our minds conjure up to explain our failure to realize the obvious earlier.’

A similar fate awaits the hoary “forks in the road” of history metaphor:

‘Our moment of truth came in 2008,’ he said. ‘Once we dropped the ball back then, by 2020 it was too late.’

Yet again, though, Iris had to have the last word before also retiring for the night.

‘Like epiphanies, the fork-in-the-road theory of history is a convenient lie,’ she said. ‘Yes, Costa, 2008 was a crisis whose wasting paved the way for the bigots and the financiers to prevail after 2020. But the truth is we face a fork in the road every day of our lives. Every single day we fail to take advantage of opportunities to change the course of history. And do you know how we console ourselves? We look into the past, pick out one “pivotal” moment and try to lessen our guilt by saying that was the moment we missed. No, mate. We miss pivotal moments every day, every hour, every freaking instant.’

The book tentatively offers two particular “solutions” that aren’t really solutions at all, but survival strategies that are also modes of truly living on this lonely, one-way flight through time. One of these is friendship, or the elective family. Another is a life-in-art. Making art keeps that essential loneliness at bay, but also probes its contours and limits. Consuming well-made art also helps us see those contours and limits as not only socially constructed (more often than not Man-made) as well as self-imposed or at least -maintained. The book’s engineer character, Costa, has built a turbocharged virtual reality device named HALPEVAM (”Heuristic ALgorithmic Pleasure and Experiential VAlue Maximizer,” which—somehow!—also ultimately gives him access to the really real Other Now of the multiverse), but what really sustained him, in this world, has been art:

During the years he had spent designing and building HALPEVAM in his self-made technological prison, to avert losing his mind he would spend four weeks every summer floating off the southern coast of Crete on a small wooden boat, offline, reading nothing but poetry.

‘Why poetry?’ asked Thomas.

‘Because it’s all we have to prevent our dreams turning into nightmares,’ Costa replied.
A futurist since he had read Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto at a tender age, Costa’s faith in the future started receding in 1976 – the year he heard his beloved Sex Pistols singing ‘there’s no future’. Since then he had walked a hopeful tightrope over an abyss filled with dreams of emancipation shattered by the alienating power of his technologies. HALPEVAM was to be his redemption, his special gift to humanity.

In the words of another character, the left-visionary and revolutionary, Iris,

a good life requires that we find, like Odysseus, a strong mast to which to tie ourselves when it matters, lest we remain slaves to our every whim. This mast must be good and it must be self-chosen, but crucially it cannot simply be another, higher or more powerful desire. It must be something separate from and independent of our self. Lashing ourselves to it is the only way of ensuring the true freedom and autonomy that we crave.’

Costa suddenly understood what Iris was up to. This was her roundabout way of breaking to her friends the news that she was not planning to join them in the Other Now. And what better way to do this than via a rendition of her favourite theme: the sovereignty of good – her conviction that great art cannot be willed into existence by the calculus of an artist’s desires; that, similarly, exquisite music and brilliant mathematical proofs emerge for their own sake, not because of a musician’s or a mathematician’s self-interested scheming.

When we submit ourselves to that sovereign good (whether we find it in our families, elective and otherwise, in the art we create and/or consume, or in simply trying to be as good neighbours and citizens as we can), when we lash ourselves to that mast of self-forgetting, which sustains us even as our senses, desires, and attention are being summoned thither and yon, then we keep that frail hope that another world is possible…alive. And we survive to wrestle with it (or perhaps wrestle free of our mast, alas) all over again, another day–to write, perhaps even be, our poems†.

— — —

†[November approaches, one the year’s toughest months for me. A couple of Novembers ago, lashed long enough to my own mast I came up with this poem-thing (taken from a larger whole which can be found elsewhere on this blog)…

…my answer, perhaps, or one of them.

What’s yours?

1. Ok-OK, that wasn’t 12-year-old me saying that…actually, that WWII and Tolkien-reading 12-year-old was mildly intrigued by the slim-jim Anthem, and attempted to read both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead thereafter, to no avail. Even that lad found those two books ‘wicked boring’ (in the parlance of the day), in spite of their relative popularity with a small subset of the grade 8 male class… ↩︎
2. Is the Good good because the gods approve of it, or do they approve of it because it is good? (In effect, is the Good, is morality, somehow “above” the gods?) Or is morality just attributing high falutin’ notions to one’s own emotional preferences and prejudices, “dressing feelings up with flowers”?
   
   There are a few (really good) reasons to read Iris Murdoch’s Acastos:
   (1) you have just finished reading Plato’s Dialogues and desire a light, humorous palate cleanser.
   (2) you have read some of Iris Murdoch’s fiction and wonder about her 20C apparent obsession with that hoary classical notion of The Good, and want to see that spelled out a little.
   (3) You are a teacher of philosophy and are looking for a tightly-written, brief overview of various possible moral attitudes, as well as something to enliven the class after wrestling with something difficult.
   
   Short and sweet, and even better on a second reading, as Murdoch raises questions that she refuses to answer, but these stay with you and tease you into thought and hopefully out of confidence in your own moral and aesthetic assumptions. ↩︎