Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole…We shall run the world’s business, whether the world likes it or not.
—Joseph Conrad
In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen.
—Hannah Arendt
Time itself didn’t have long to wait for the ascendance of American commercial empire. Conrad in his 1904 novel, Nostromo, assigns the voice of economic dominance to the San Francisco banker Holroyd, “his massive profile” that “of a Caesar’s head on an old Roman coin,” buying control of an imaginatively constituted South American republic. Fifteen years later the voice is President Woodrow Wilson’s, in Paris at the end of World War I giving the word for everything (free trade, national self-determination, peace without victory) to the bankrupted thrones and dominions of bourgeois Europe.
Fare forward another thirty years to the end of World War II, and it is the voice of the American diplomat George Kennan, circulating in 1948 as a State Department memorandum phrased in the language of the successful businessman: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming,” disregard “unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.”
The American word for everything held its value for nearly the whole of the twentieth century, but time is no more inclined to stay than wait. The first 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs, voice of America’s material interests and moneyed elites, asks on its cover, who will run the world? and follows up the question with a collection of articles and essays—“How a World Order Ends,” “The Eroding Balance of Terror,” “The Age of Uneasy Peace,” “The Free-Trade Paradox,” “America’s Long Goodbye”—explaining why America is no longer up to the task.
Not, God forbid, through any fault of America’s own. But because globalization is dehumanization, and the rule of money is the rule of nobody. The great, good, and glorious machine that generates the world’s wealth and directs the world’s trade (aka “creatively destructive capitalism,” “the unfettered free market”) doesn’t come equipped with the freedoms of human thought, conscience, or speech. Admittedly, a design flaw, but not one that troubles the upper servants of American oligarchy. They enjoy first-class accommodations on the bridge deck of Leviathan and make no complaint of its brutality—name of the game, nature of the beast. What disturbs them is the insult to their vanity. The bewildered policy-speak in the winter issue of Foreign Affairs is the voice of merchants who would be kings reduced in function to engine-room sweat labor heaving steel mills and shopping malls, movie studios and migrants, into a remorseless furnace.
. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Janice H. Levin, 1991.
The dehumanization of the world’s trade is a refinement relatively new under the sun, and the reader curious to know how things worked before the nineteenth-century coming of the steam engine can find
Joseph Addison in 1711 on the floor of the Royal Exchange in the midst of “a prosperous and happy multitude” of Danes, Russians, Frenchmen, Swedes, Persians, Englishmen, and Egyptians “thriving in their own private fortunes and at the same time promoting the public stock…bringing into their country whatever is wanting and carrying out of it whatever is superfluous.” Addison is an early prototype of the tabloid gossip columnist trafficking in the lives of the rich and famous, and his heart “naturally overflows with pleasure” at the silk-smooth sight and sound of the most “useful members in a commonwealth,” who “knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of nature, find work for the poor, and wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great.”
Addison exaggerates the benevolence of merchants and overlooks mankind’s long history of economic warfare (cf. Paul Strohm’s essay “Maken Engelond Gret Ayeyn”), but in 1711 he can still see a global economy run by and for human beings. Moneymaking is not yet the primary objective of the journeys to the East and the sailings to the West. The worth of a thing still matters as much or more as the price of a thing. The traders on the eighteenth-century floor of the Change accepted the truth told by....MUCH MORE
Aristotle around 330 bc: that of everything we possess there is a primary and secondary use, the one “needed for the satisfaction of men’s natural wants,” the other for something intrinsically useful (“iron, silver, and the like”) to serve as surrogate for “the necessaries of life” (grain, cattle, wine) “not easily carried about,” i.e., a form of barter “not part of the moneymaking art” and therefore not contrary to nature. What is contrary to nature is the assigning to money a value it doesn’t possess, the conceiving of wealth solely and stupidly as “a quantity of coin.” Aristotle reduces the notion to absurdity:
But how can that be wealth of which a man may have a great abundance and yet perish with hunger, like Midas in the fable, whose insatiable prayer turned everything that was set before him into gold?The Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith poses the same question in 1776, attributing The Wealth of Nations not to the power of money but to “the propensity in human nature…to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” In civilized society men at all times need the cooperation and assistance of their fellow men. Money doesn’t go it alone. The trucking disposition (“Give me that which I want, and ye shall have this which you want”) gives occasion to the division of labor, which in turn encourages every man to “bring to perfection whatever talent or genius he may possess for that particular species of business” and thus provide surplus products of his own labor (goods over and above his own consumption) to exchange for surplus goods produced by other men. Like Addison and Aristotle, Smith thought the trucking disposition “common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals…Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.”....
