Beautiful Disasters: Sex and Money Without Ends

10 minutes

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
-Invictus, Willam Ernest Henley

This rather simple epitaph
Can save your hide, your fallen mind:
Fate isn't what we're up against,
There's no design, no flaws to find.
-Young Pilgrims, The Shins

Common Sense Declined

In Aristotle, the West found a thinker willing to take the radical step of starting with what is most evident, and reasoning from there. The Pre-Socratics, not to mention many philosophers of the East, had approached the world through the lens of their own minds, seeing particulars through the filter of one great insight or another. The results were any number of fascinating reductionisms: everything is atoms; everything is change; change is an illusion, because everything is Being. In Descartes and the Enlightenment thinkers, Aristotle’s empire of common sense went into decline, and everything once again became something else — Atoms, or machines, or numbers, or survival, or sex. Nothing but the most facile reasons were ever offered for this modern reversion, but it did have one obvious consequence: the loss of objective purpose in Nature.

Of the Enlightenment’s many offspring, Liberalism is the most robust. It might be defined as the romantic idea that man, with his reason and his will, makes reality. Its three greatest expressions are popular government, free economy, and romance as an end in itself. In previous posts, we’ve explored parallels between political and economic liberalism, and we’ve suggested a common flaw: the absence of ends. In this post I want to look at how the same dynamic plays out in parallels between our notions of sex and of the free market.

Crusoe and Brangelina

If you’ve read any of the popular expositions of classical economics, then you’ve met our friend Robinson Crusoe. This gentleman was stranded on an island, but being a liberal hero, he was right at home. Forced into a real life life “state of nature,”  he does the sort of things that economic men do. Before him stands nature, raw and red in tooth and claw. Gratuitous. Indifferent to him, and yet ready to be shaped. He attends to his most urgent needs first, then gradually proceeds to construct a life worth living.

From the ordinal nature of his choices, and from his bottomless store of needs, proceed property, money, economy, and politics. His is certainly a world of purposes — order consciously imposed on chaos is its very drama — but it is not a world of purposiveness. God there may be — watching from his distant perch — but Nature is an unbroken horse, a thing full of danger, beauty, and unbridled potentiality, as likely to kick you to death as to befriend you. The liberal man is essentially a horse-breaker, a cowboy carving order from a desert landscape. And since he alone shapes it, he’s also its master (for good or for ill.) His glory is that he might make it an Eden. His tragedy. that despite his best efforts he might make it a living hell. Our recent ancestors believed with confidence in the former scenario. They called it Progress. In an age of atom bombs and AI, we now fear the latter. But man-as-heroic-shaper, man as bestower-of-purpose, is the central actor in both scenarios.

Something very like this dynamic plays out in modern notions of sex and romance. If the castaway or the cowboy is liberal economics, then liberal romance is some version of Romeo and Juliet just before the tragic end. Human romance is full of power and potentiality. Two people fall in love, and in that love they sense eternity. No one wants to fall in love for two months, or two years. And love must grow and thrive amid hostilities as real as Crusoe’s roving cannibals, or Wyatt Earp’s outlaws. Just so, modern romance is a nexus between love's own native mysticism and man’s gritty burden as shaper-of-reality. On the one hand, love is forever. On the other hand, nothing is forever. Even when love is the last great bit of common mysticism, you and I are still under the burden “making it work.”

Beautiful Disasters

It’s interesting to see this tension play out in popular music. I’m a sucker for love ballads, especially the grandiose ones from the 1980s. “The Glory of Love” by Peter Cetera is perhaps the most moving and resonant love song of all time. “I am a man who will fight for your honor...We’ll live forever, knowing together that we did it all for the glory of love...Like a knight in shining armor, from a long time ago. Just in time I will save the day, Take you to my castle far away.” But the same era gave us Roxette’s haunting, “It Must Have Been Love,” whose lyrics tell the other side of this capricious, Heraclitian reality: “It must have been love, but it’s over now. It must have been good,  but I lost it somehow. It must have been love, but it’s over now, From the moment we touched, till the time had run out...It’s where the water flows. It’s where the wind blows.”

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

“Dad,” asked my ten-year-old, after we switched to something more ‘upbeat’ (Ace of Base, “The Sign”,) “why are so many lady’s love songs about not caring anymore, and not needing the person you broke up with?” I think the answer is that love, as we moderns understand it, is too mystical to be human, and too human to be mystical. We self-making liberals still want love to be beyond us — so we can be swept away by it — and yet unbounded by any human conventions, so that we can make love ours. I’m painting in generalities, but the last sixty years of popular love has been a general passage from the stirringly romantic ideal of eternal romance, to a more tragic and unmanageable picture, and one that has finally given way to music about rutting animals. This is not really a contradiction. It’s the natural course of even the noblest human things when they remain merely human.

And there is a parallel between our “free love” and our “free markets.” The advocates of both must eventually see a kind of beautiful tragedy in creative destruction. It’s a little disturbing that we can find enough beauty in heartbreak to first celebrate it, then normalize it, and finally discard any illusions about love’s initial promise of happiness and freedom. The late eighties and early nineties gave us grunge, the beautiful celebration of popular despair. It was in this prosperous period that America began to lose its conviction that unbridled personal freedom would lead to unbridled happiness. That it is was the end of rock and roll, and the rise of music only good for fighting or….eh...quick flings…is not a coincidence. 

A Beautiful Nightmare

I once had a prophetic dream. I was in a house in Hollywood packed to the brim with actors, musicians, and the Who’s Who of the last one hundred years. It started out wonderfully. We were all looking for something. There was just so much promise… The woman holding the party was very mysterious. Her eyes and hair were dark. She was not, to my eyes, beautiful — think Elizabeth Taylor from Doctor Faustus; only shorter, and more plump — but she was mesmerizing. Powerful. She sang a song — a beautiful, and terribly sad song — so melodic that when I awoke, I thanked God that I couldn’t read or write music. Then I would have wanted to record it. Her song was poison, you see. And that is because she was the Devil himself. Her song, I came to understand, was the beauty of creation sans final ends. It was so arresting that we all wished to be held captive to it, even as we sensed the house becoming darker. Even as it began to drag us toward Hell. Many of my famous contemporaries, there in the house on Mulholland Drive, would have willingly followed that music into the abyss. Luckily I woke up. The essence of her song was this very creative destruction, this attractive despair, that so characterizes the modern romantic. It still haunts me now, though I can recall only its echo.

As with “liberated” love, so with liberal markets. Any natural human activity that does not work in view of its ultimate purpose must first shine brightly, and then flare up into a destructive fire. Though, in the popular mind, the pragmatism of money seems far removed from the mysticism of sex and love, they have certain crucial similarities. Both sex and money have built-in dynamism that points at their proper ends without automatically leading to those ends. Let me explain:

End-less Money; End-less Love

The liberal economist can tell us how Crusoe, starting with his ordinal value scales and limited resources, attends first to his basic survival, and then to the more complex activities necessary for his physical and psychic thriving. Since goods are scarce, and often unusable in their natural state, they must first be taken into possession, then worked and made useful. When Crusoe has more sharpened sticks than he needs, and not enough salted fish, he can trade the former for the latter. Given enough time and enough people, direct trade (barter) becomes impractical, since it’s tough to find a double-coincidence of wants that can be cashed out in such particular products. Enter money, one of man’s most wonderful inventions. If Crusoe and Friday both need salt — and since salt is divisible and has a high value-to-weight ratio— they can solve their problems by indirect trade in this common commodity. Given enough time and enough people, salt becomes copper, then bronze, then silver, then gold. And where there was only natural man hacking it out in a hostile world of scarce goods, now there is civilization. All of it happens spontaneously, “emergently,” without the need for an outside authority to initiate or to authorize. 

In a similar way, man falls in love without needing (or wanting) external authorities to arrange the matter. A man and woman — we’ll call them Brad and Angelina — find themselves captive to forces attracting them together. This pleasant captivity consists in euphoric desire for the other, a power that takes them out of themselves, and which sets them on a path a union that feels like it must be eternal. Not coincidentally, it compels them to join their bodies together, so that their physical circumstances might reflect their feelings. Those same feelings compel them to (eventually, one hopes) formalize this union in a ceremony that marks its permanence. Not coincidentally, the act which joins their bodies together in euphoria that begs for permanence also produces new lives. These lives, by some wonderful magic, just happen to thrive only within an enduring framework of parental love. Romance leads to marriage, and to sex. Sex and marriage lead to children. Children need this permanent union. The family, like the market, emerges naturally from the bottom up.

But let’s dig a little deeper, for this is not the whole story. Just how can Crusoe work, and build, and buy, and sell, without greater structures of legal and cultural stability? How could such a widespread social project as a market ever get off the ground without a scaffolding and assurance of law? And how could law exist without lawmakers, and the notion of law as sacred, not merely the product of momentary whims, or of personal convenience? And how can law be sacred if it does not refer to the meaning and purpose of human life? It turns out that our account of the free emergence of a market has left out some rather critical things: the actual psychology of the human race, and the fact that freedom to work and own and build and trade is all contingent upon the “slavery” of law.

A similar weight falls on Brad and Angelina. True, their love alone is sufficient to create the initial circumstances for marriage, and children, and the resultant household. But the promise of love is permanence. The glory of love, as Peter Cetera said, is inseparable from “foreverness.” But what if what guarantees this permanence is not simply identical to the human forces that bring love and family into being? Survey history prior to the liberal age, and you will find that all cultures have nested love within a framework of law and taboo. Why, if love is a kind of freedom? The answer is that freedom requires discipline, and end-directedness. The gymnast or the parkour artist who wows us with his incredible freedom of movement should also teach us something about the true nature of freedom. For the gymnast to be free, he must direct himself, body, soul, and spirit, toward clear and definable outcomes. His natural interest and athleticism are not sufficient to guarantee acrobatic excellence. Yet even this analogy is incomplete.

Gods and Losers

For marriage and markets are not rarified, highly specialized realities, like athletic excellence. They are common conditions of the human race. Barring strange circumstance, such as a massive shortage of goods — which is certainly not our case — everyone who is willing to work hard and practice normal frugality ought be able to thrive. Everyone who is willing to be faithful and honest ought to be able to make a marriage “work.” Yet in liberal society, “making it,” either in love or in work, is regarded as a kind of trophy. On the one hand, we can celebrate the love or entrepreneurial courage of those who attempt to reach “success.” On the other hand, we cannot expect widespread success. If many workers live on dollars a day, and if many marriages are broken, this is unfortunate, but it is only the expected outcome of regarding marriage and markets as human inventions, with no teleological referent aside from those we make ourselves. God created us, then left us free to do what we want, provided it’s voluntary. There is, therefore, no overarching Purpose to life; only the purposes of the many. These are sacred — even if they lead to widespread individual unhappiness — because they are ours. 

What I find fascinating about both market activity and human sexuality is that both provide a fair amount of “order for free,” but not so much as to be stable or sustainable by themselves. Left to itself, human choice will indeed produce trade, prices, money, and the other natal elements of the market, but it will not provide the external ground rules that “incentivize” anything beyond subsistence living or brigandry. So we should hardly be surprised when an end-less market, or a market in which only the minimal legal framework exists for enforcing contracts and property rights, tends to produce legal brigands, and exaggerated inequity. Such a market might be very successful when considered in terms of its gross product while still failing to make work livable and dignified for the masses (who cannot all 'win the trophy.’)

Left to themselves, romance and sexuality tend to produce a desire for sustained unity, as well as children — who need that love to be permanent. But such a “double-coincidence” of individual wants will not provide the sacred rules that sustain anything beyond coupling, (so long as it is mutually desirable.) The institution of marriage exists because sexuality, left to its own devices and divorced from its ultimate human purpose, leads to human misery. Laws, morals, and taboos that corral market and sexual actors, forcing them to act in accordance with ends, exist because neither activity spontaneously reaches its own fulfillment.

But we know all of this. At this point, we cannot not know. A market without ends, means a market where the richest are those with the “freedom” to engage in destructive speculation, to warp national trade policy to their own ends, to control acceptable public conversation, and to shape the political order to reflect their preferences. The consistent classical liberal may rage all he wants about government bailouts, tech censorship, and barriers to entry; it is precisely the libertarian notion of a market with no ends but those of its players that leads to just these outcomes. In romance, it leads to, “Sorry, I know we have several children, but I’m just not in love with you anymore.” In our music, it leads to, “Don’t turn around, cause you’re gonna see my heart breaking...I wish I could scream out loud, that I love you. I wish I could say to you don’t go!” It leads to, “There’s a hole, in my soul, that’s been killing me forever, It’s a place where the garden never grows.” It leads to, “All the love gone bad, turned my world to black, Tattooed all I see, all that I am, all I’ll be…”

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

This is the glory of pure individualism, of freedom unhinged from purpose, of an impoverished notion of the self that fails to see that the individual man or woman is a person. It is as beautiful, if one might say so, as a Son of the Morning just before his terrible crash into a red and thirsty hell of his own making. “My reflection, dirty mirror,” sings Billy Corgan. “There's no connection to myself…Intoxicated with the madness. I’m in love with my sadness.”

Nemesis from a Poisoned Spring

I leave you with a quote from Pope Pius XI’s encyclical QUADRAGESIMO ANNO. Read it carefully, for here the pope describes not only the destructiveness of this unbridled liberal freedom, but also how it, like a poisoned spring, gives birth to the very economic dictatorships that liberals seek to oppose:

Attention must be given also to another matter that is closely connected with the foregoing. Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. Destroying through forgetfulness or ignorance the social and moral character of economic life, it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect. But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life - a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. This function is one that the economic dictatorship which has recently displaced free competition can still less perform, since it is a headstrong power and a violent energy that, to benefit people, needs to be strongly curbed and wisely ruled. But it cannot curb and rule itself. (88)

I daresay what is true of free markets, and of their strange, dictatorial offspring, will come true — and is coming true — for love, marriage, and family. Unless we keep our eyes on eternity, we cannot keep hold even of the temporal. Nor can we say, with Peter Cetera, “I will always love you. I could never leave you alone.”

© 2021 Joseph Breslin All Rights Reserved