The blasé attitude March 27, 2009
Posted by caesar in Economics, Georg Simmel, Philosophy.Tags: Philosophy, Simmel
add a comment
In Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, he describes several different negative effects the growth of the money economy can have upon the individual. The first few are really things which can be found in any sort of economy – no matter how primitive. These include greed and avarice (by avarice he means being miserly), which are caused by thinking of money as the final end; in greed, the individual simply wants more money, whereas in avarice, the individual is not willing to ever part with the money that has been accumulated. The next two effects are those of extravagance and ascetic poverty. Extravagance is easy enough to understand, but ascetic poverty, initially, seems misplaced when discussing negative effects of money. What indites this sort of poverty as a perversion of money is that it still makes money into an absolute importance. Simmel says: “The tremendous and wide-reaching power of the process by which money is elevated from its intermediary position to absolute importance is best illuminated by the fact that the negation off its meaning is elevated to the identical form.” Thus, by making the renunciation of money the highest good, money is still viewed as something more than a mere tool. The final 2 effects are also those which come only in a more fully developed money economy, according to Simmel. Those 2 are cynicism and the blasé attitude. He writes: “cynicism and a blasé attitude – both of which are the results of the reduction of the concrete values of life to the mediating value of money.” The cynic, Simmel writes “his awareness of life is adequately expressed only when he has theoretically and practically exemplified the baseness of the highest values and the illusion of any differences in values.” This only occurs in a well developed money economy because it is there that everything becomes reducible to money. Anything – and everything – is for sale, and as such can be given a “value” that is nothing more than an amount of money. For the cynic, this debases the object to nothing more than its monetary value.
This leaves the blasé attitude, which is what I wanted to talk about all along, but I had to set the stage. In the blasé attitude, the person “has completely lost the feeling for value differences. He experiences all things as being of an equally dull and grey hue, as not worth getting excited about.” This is the individual who has become indifferent towards just about everything. This is caused by the nature of money. Simmel writes, in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life:”
“For money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of ‘how much?’ Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money.”
Money then changes qualitative differences into quantitative ones, which leads to the emptying of everything. While the cynic responds to this by mocking it, the blasé individual responds by searching for some sort of stimuli that actually retains meaning. Again, Simmel writes: “out of this there emerges the craving today for excitement, for extreme impressions, for the greatest speed in its change.” This search for stimuli, however is ultimately worthless, and even exacerbates the problem. Simmel says:
“The search for mere stimuli in themselves is the consequence of the increasing blasé attitude through which natural excitement disappears. This search for stimuli originates in the money economy with the fading of all specific values into a mere mediating value. We have here one of those interesting cases in which the disease determines its own form of the cure. A money culture signifies such an enslavement of life in its means, that release from its weariness is also evidently sought in a mere means which conceals its final significance – in the fact of ’stimulation’ as such.”
What makes Simmel’s claims even more compelling is that he wrote in the early 1900’s. He saw in his time those currents which have become endemic in our time. It is hard, at least for me, to read his description of the blasé individual and not see myself in it, even if only to an extent. I find the last line of the last quote particularly true, and also increasingly disconcerting. The money culture enslaves to such a point that even those who recognize its negative effects can still only seek release from within it. In nearly every situation, it is impossible to truly escape from the money economy – and it is only becoming more difficult.
N.B. I wish to be careful to express that this is only one aspect of Simmel’s presentation. He is extremely balanced throughout the entire book, and this is merely one aspect of his argument that I have focused upon. In the book, he is constantly showing the positive and negative effects of the changes the money economy brings. So, please don’t read this as Simmel (or myself) condemning the money economy as evil or as something purely bad.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. Ed. Richard Sennett. Meredith Corporation; N.Y., N.Y. 1969: pgs 47-60.
Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. Routledge, NY. 1978
Simple Economics March 17, 2009
Posted by caesar in Economics.Tags: Economics, Simmel
add a comment
Before I begin, I have to tell you that I am by no means a professional economist. I have a basic grasp of some major economic ideas, but I am far from really understanding economics in any sort of overarching sense. That said, this really seems to me to consist in rather self-evident things, hence “simple economics.”
I was reading a book entitled Confidence Games by Mark Taylor, which I’m reading because it is heavily influenced by Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which I’m reading for class, and I came across this section.
“In addition to this, the policies of many lending institutions during boom times returned to haunt them when the economy slowed. With inflation and interest rates rising rapidly, banks encouraged many property owners – especially farmers – to borrow more money to cover operating expenses. The logic was a familiar as it was flawed: borrow now at lower interest rates, pay back later with cheaper money. The only way people could do this was to leverage their land. But as the economy fell into recession and interest rates did not adjust quickly enough, property owners could not meet their debt obligations and defaulted on their loans. At the same time, the vallue of their land was declining, thereby decreasing the value of their collateral. As matters worsened, debtors’ problems quickly became creditors’ problems.”
Now, as I said, I am not a professional economist, but when I was reading this passage I could not but help be struck by how familiar that passage sounded. I do not really understand the details of the current economic “crisis,” but I think that many of the issues in this passage are the same as the ones that caused the current state of events. Taylor, however, was writing about a collapse that occurred in 1981-2.
Whatever other similarities there may or may not be between 81/2 and now, I feel quite confident in saying that institutions encouraging people to borrow in an irresponsible manner happened in both situations. I mean, how could you miss it these past several years? Banks encouraging people to take second mortgages on their homes to do home improvement or buy a car, a big T.V., a race-horse (okay, probably not the horse). Even beyond the banks, the whole of culture was/is based around borrowing. (As an aside, I am far from claiming that people should never borrow money, as I borrowed money to go through undergraduate and at the beginning of my graduate work.) I have read about college students who graduate with massive debt, and not simply from paying for school, but several thousand dollars of credit card debt as well. Seemingly everyone engaged in buying things with their credit cards and paying the minimum due, or not much more than the minimum. This culture of debt was definetily a factor in this current “crisis,” and, according to Taylor, was a factor in 81/2.
Now, I realize this is easy to say after the case, but it seemed so to me even before the events of the last half-year or whatever it’s been. It seems inevitable that a culture built upon people spending money they don’t have will experience economic crisis. It doesn’t seem reasonable, to me at least, to believe that there will be no adverse consequences for irresponsible behavior. Now, it obviously can endure for a while, but it seems to carry within itself its own destruction. The problem, however, runs deeper than what I called above a “culture of debt,” because people are obviously not going into debt simply for the sake of being in debt. No, the reason they plunge headfirst into debt is for what I like to call (if you’ll permit me a bit of dramatization) the “tyranny of comfort.” What I mean by that seems relatively simple, but perhaps I’ll talk about it more sometime. Regardless of whether I am getting too carried away to refer to it so strongly, our culture has a definite obsession with stuff, and acquiring as much of it as possible, and it seems ridiculous to deny that this sort of mentality was not a factor in either of these economic crises.
