Walter B + Future, Fundamental Uncertainty and the Animal Spirit
Essay reflecting on Walter Benjamins philosophy
Keyword: Future, Reality, Value, Utopia, Keynes, Fundamental Uncertainty, Animal Spirit, Damasio, Aura, Alpha-Male, Ethics, John Dewey, Ecology, Capitalism.
The past months I have been studying how to envision and create alternative futures and learning what kinds of tools can be used in creating societal changes on the level of systemic design of society.
Main issue I have come across while thinking about the future with my fellow researchers in utopias, is the question of what is Reality: Is reality really real, or just imaginary structures guided by our projections colored by fears or hopes. And that if there is something we can call a shared reality, like a society, then what is it made of? Seems, trying to grasp reality, we end up discussing Values and Truths and how they creat building blocks to create bases for a view of life as we know it and can share with others.
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When we envision Utopias, we inherently flex the muscles in how to imagine Change, for Utopias consist of seeing an alternative societal structures. First of all the question is how well we can imagine what that alternative could be and to state -clearly- a desirable condition we want. If we can vision that, then we can concentrate in finding ways to make them embodied, tangible realities we can live in. Every step on the way. The biggest task is to dive in with awareness and with nimble imagination, as this is an exercise in finding out where the borders lie: how willing are we in investigating, questioning existing paradigms and how able in inventing, implementing and negotiating alternative structures, habits and values. Therefore it is important to understand what we perceive as value and which authority decides which values are fundamental for our common concept of reality. This process of assessment is an inherent part of a societal evolution. This part is where choreography comes in to play -or redesign: in pinpointing and analyzing how we create change in an existing system.
Heading towards the future is like a stream. Awareness of the mechanism involved can enable us to choreograph both HOW. I'm sure we all have played with streams and stones as children, changing the flow by changing individual stones. So how the stream flows and how we can navigate IN it best -swimming, sailing, surfing or diving- are all to be re-tweaked. Though we cannot stop the stream from flowing, we can guide it and learn to surf it skilfully, which is different from blindly jumping in and just hoping good luck or God will keep us away from the treacherous Deep Seas of Change. We can also add things and occasionally try to weed out stuff which floats with us, even change the color of the water.
One way to do this could being to understand how value is created in our society and what are the facts we base our evaluation on i.e. what is valued, and how value is created, measured and evaluated? Are we open to perceive meadows and sunsets as values valid in the stock market, competing equally with the mineral and metals resources resting underground? What has value and what is a price worth considering? What is the price of – for example – extinction, war, peace, art, happiness, beauty or equal rights for all sentient beings on earth, if it interferes with our reality? Or what is a long time? If we want to, art can be currency, Tuna in the oceans investments we want to grow in stocks, more valuable for investors alive and accumulating than cut, killed and sold. Is world peace a desirable commodity? After all value is given and created by choice.
Nothing comes out of nothing. These structures of value we have created are structures we can redesign. What we design we can choreograph to enable systemic mobility, open up to movement in time and space, context and multiple “dancers” effecting the whole. Redesign is an aesthetic change which will change thinking - the other way is much more difficult if not impossible to achieve.
For the world is changing. Sometimes the changes involve more fear, resistance and polarized opinions. Sometimes we do not want to give up the values we feel are important. It is very humane to cling on to what we find valuable but somehow our fear of the other is used against us for controlling us and for profit, rather than to preserve tradition and wisdom.
Philosopher and economist John Maynard Keynes: the man behind the much-adoed Keynesian economic theory, was a contemporary of Walter Benjamin as well as John Dewey and Martin Heidegger. His magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was published in 1936. Some of the key concepts were Fundamental Uncertainty and the Animal Spirit.
Fundamental Uncertainty means in short: Shit happens which we cannot predicts. It is not based on a lack of human ability but rather on the fact that the basic nature of the world. We cannot predict the future; unexpected changes crawling slow or even ripping through our existence fast as a flash in forms of earthquakes or bad dreams, of an accident or an election other side of the world - or if we fall in love. Keynes wrote about Fundamental Uncertainty two years before WWII broke out, a war that changed world economy more profoundly any one expected,some claim with more impact than the invention of agriculture. It didn’t appear out of the blue but was still very unexpected in its impact, duration and extent. No one could have predicted the change on all levels – even economic- the Second Great War had. In the aftermath, international institutions were created such as WHO, EU and IMF, a wall was built in the heart of Europe, Japas was filled with American influences, a cold war lasted for decades... Only to mention a few major controllers of our current global political and monetary reality.
With Animal Spirit Keynes explained the basic human nature we all carry. Rather than rational beings, we tend to base our perception of reality on hunches; on deep feelings of trust or mistrust guiding our actions on a most fundamental and pre-relational level. It makes us do things which we mask as rational and can have great impact on our lives through decisions we make: the house we did not buy or whom we vote. It is based on the fundamental need to feel safe, even if we might seem to be making counterintuitive decisions. I have a feeling Keynes and neuroscientist-turned-philosopher Antonio Damasio are much on the same lines on this matter: mental processing effecting our emotional responses and conceptual thinking happens prior and well below the surface of conscious cognitive processing.
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As there are no real means to predict the future, because we can neither rely on our own ability to see into the future nor predict what could happen or act without our animal spirit, we create social habits, etiquettes and traditions supported by social conventions, institutions and even laws to give us the illusion of control. We are convinced we can base decisions on facts and in our ability to read tendencies to predict our futures. Yet the deciding factor affecting the general trust -or mistrust- is based on our Gut feeling leading into action. If we feel confident and trust the future, we spend money and empathy more freely and make more easily large, even risky investments. If not, we cut spending, close up and prefer to liquidise assets rather than invest long term. And we either lean more or cut down on epathy, depending on how we feel more safe. According to Keynes, mistrust leads in worse cases to recession. All caused by human animal spirit sensing and reacting instinctively to insecure a future. Unlike the neo-classical economist - or as we call them Neo-Liberalists- who seem to run the show in today’s European economics and euro. Unlike Heyek father of the current monetary mainstream Keynes did not believe in a rational human and claimed basing large economic structures on such an illusion to be a colossal mistake. I kind of have to agree with him. The markets need regulation not to eat us all up. Though far from a socialist, Keynes nevertheless gave institutions and governments governing the markets a key role in regulating Economic Trust by creating supporting structures the markets to over come periods of diminished trust. This way recessions could be avoided or mended quickly. Means to assist the markets would be based on increased lending. I might add for clarity, that Keynes and Post Keynesian economics are the arch nemesis to the neo liberal and neo classical economics, austerity politics. Today some core agreements between euro-countries block any possibilties to implement Keynesian methods on our current recession and monetary crisis. Its hard to truly understand why, beyond the fact it is a belief system, not a rational fact based science of economy.
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Facts of today’s reality of the rational human in the 21st century can only be based capital. A hard fact is that money and profit have ultimate value, overwriting any other value, quality or quantity - even life it self. After so many generations living with mass production of the mechanical age, we seem suffer to from a form of dyslexia of Aura. We cannot recognize it even if we came across it. We cannot read value if not in a price tag. Yet the inner yearn for substance – for Aura – pushes us to consumerism and to chase for experiences. Yes, very Frankfurt school but also so much more. What else can I write when kids in pre-school learn to become the executive directors of their our lives, pitching their dreams and Slushing our sunsets. Time for taking time is a waste of time. Complexity and pluralism – to think for our selves- are oddities in monoculture, where the Alfa-male is the prototype of any successful human.
As a system the current Western market economy, that is to say Neoliberal Capitalism, is very intelligent, resilient and ruthless. It is ready to kill anything and everything in order to survive. It facilitates our needs, our inner hungers and our inner fears, boiling us slowly like frogs: It is not going to give up its current position of power without a fight. Would you?
What is baffling is our willingness to buy into this in an era in Human History when we are better well off than ever. We -the peak of evolution enjoying safer, freer, more educated and internationally connected than ever before - abide to bad quality and deep inequality, stress and unhappiness to support our addiction in shop-a-holism. We accept to enslave ourselves and deplete our planet for kitchen magnets.
Despite all our claimed rationality, we humans struggle to perceive the world as en ever evolving system able to change fast and radically.
Homo Sapience seems to inherently think the future will remain very similarly to our present. Even if the evidence of history proofs every time this to be a wrong assumption. It is as if we are hardwired to perceive the future like Benjamin’s Angler of History: fixed view on the rear window while driving forwards. The Death of Aura and Ethics seem to be advancing hand in hand with Austerity.
Perhaps the Angle of History is trying to slow us down, to remind us to remember past mistakes, to take a moment to see carefully where we are and where we are heading. We cannot just chew up this planet, ourselves together with all of it elements, and spit it out. We need to live and be lived to respect our selves and to respect life. We have no Plan B. Migrating to Mars reboot our system. I’d claim that as a fact as Mars has no oxygen, too little gravity and does not support human culture.
I would also claim that we need Art to feed our souls and for Aura to emerge, for truth to shine though the cracks of our conceptions of reality. Even cavemen respected art and life. They could recognize Aura. But cavemen were not divided head-humans, lobotomized from their embodied experience of the world as we do. Living in a crueller and harsher reality. Still they respected life and created art. They cared tenderly for the humanity and each other in a much more wholesome realities than we live in.
The globe is changing; evolution is happening as we speak. We need open skins and minds too keep up with it. We need to give credit to the embodied, sensing human being we are, not just to invest in stocks or to pump oil in the Arctic.
The Alpha male has to give up being our only perfect human, the norm and the goal, if we are to have a tomorrow. We need both technical advances as well as Poetry to expand our minds and to feed our souls. We need empathy to guide our ethics. We need to live happily without having to lobotomise reality. We need have space and time to live through processes to allow maturation, transform and evolution.
Utopia? Perhaps but who could have predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall or believed smoking could become such an extinct habit? Not to mention a Finland where Nazi slogans are ok for the governmental establishment? Changes happen as we speak whether we like it or not.
Unwillingness to negotiate these values on a larger scale cuts out elements in our society that need to have a voice. AS Martin Luther King once said: Riots are the voices unheard. Hindering them cuts out vital sources for possible solutions to our urgent crisis of Humanity. It might make our lives more complex: even in Keynesian economics, the Military Keynesianism is much more simple and effective way to make money than non-military Keynesian economics. Fascism is faster, less complicated and far more effective than Democracy. It is also a world I’d prefer not to live in.
John Dewey wrote art is an Experience. I’d like to claim that statement from a consumerist commodity framework to life itself. Life is an experience when lived and Art has an impeccable ability to mess up our neatly organized plans, pulling our fabulous imaginary structures apart and back to the reality of body, mind and the heart. If monetary investments are an invented concept, then we can also re-invent the parameters for value, new ways for measuring worth, which support a flourishing Planet Earth rather than depleting it. What are our limits in this reinvention? Finding agreement, implementing strategies or just our ability to dream wildly enough? Probably all of these and much more. Let’s face it people like Donald Trump do not think alternative futures with alternative values are a desirable development. Then again he’s a narcissist psychopath. Sounds reasonable not to go with his preferences in the first place, but still, we do.