Passing Fair

What though the sea with waves continuall
Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all ;
Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought :
For whatsoever from one place doth fall
Is with the tyde unto another brought :
For there is nothing lost, that may be found if sought.

― Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Municipal bond market maven, government official, and longtime Twitter fixture Kristi Culpepper penned an interesting riposte yesterday to Leon Wieseltier’s recent jeremiad against the disruptive cultural effects of technology in The New York Times. Leon, you may recall, laid about rather vigorously with his rhetorical cudgel in defense of humanism against the allied evils he sees arrayed against it today, including technologism, scientism, data fetishism, and commerce. He declared—correctly if rather dramatically—that “A culture is an internecine contest between alternative conceptions of the human.” And he, if I may be so blunt, came down on the side of writing, art, and Western cultural patrimony and against the forces who wish to strip, devalue, and denature same in the name of technological progress and efficiency.

Now, being as I have consistently declared myself an amateur and aficionado of such arty, literary, cultural-y things, I am sympathetic to Mr. Wieseltier’s arguments, although I do think he lays it on a bit thick in the straw man department. I also have reservations that his full-throated defense of writers and thinkers against the commoditization, devaluation, and impoverishment of a certain sort of careful, deeply informed thinking and writing by the forces triumphant of digital and social media is a bit overblown. For one thing, I would observe Mr. Wieseltier himself seems to have had no problem securing a soapbox at the paper of record for the liberal intelligentsia to spout his opinions, mere weeks after the implosion of his prior perch at The New Republic due to the machinations of the sort of technologist philistines he decries. Second, I utterly fail to see a shortage of intelligent, hardworking writers pontificating on important matters and sundry throughout the English speaking opinionsphere. It seems that everybody and his brother and his brother’s three-legged cat are scribbling as journalists, bloggers, opinion editors, MFA students, novelists, and nonfiction writers nowadays. When I walk into the ground floor of my local 50,000 square foot Barnes & Noble bookstore, I am not struck by any dearth of written material for my perusal, and the ground floor of my store is not filled with the works of dead white men (those are in the basement). Speaking as an acolyte of microeconomics (and a minor unpaid contributor to the general oversupply of published dreck), it strikes me that writers face a supply problem in the market for their wares, not a lack of demand. Maybe if writing weren’t so popular as a lifestyle choice, rather than an actual calling for a dedicated few (as it has been for most of recorded time), fewer professional writers would be bemoaning the parlous state of their bank accounts.

Be that as it may, Ms Culpepper takes issue with our Cultural Cassandra from another direction:

First, innovation presents new opportunities to define oneself for those that are willing to invest the time and effort. The same is true for society as a whole. That Wieseltier doesn’t want the character of society to be determined by engineers overlooks history. Feats of engineering have been a conduit for conversations about the public good and the ambitions of civilization from ancient Rome to NASA. I don’t understand the temptation to hold art or poetry above these endeavors. I would trade all the Jeff Koons in the world for a better understanding of what lies outside our solar system.

(Personally, I would be content to pack all of Jeff Koons’ art and the artist himself on a spaceship launched into the Sun for no counterbalancing intellectual recompense whatsoever. I’d even be willing to erase some string theory and most of Jacques Lacan’s drivel from the cultural patrimony for the privilege. Mais à chacun son goût.)

Second, most criticisms of technology are highly selective. Why is it that garbage media is the first thing people think of when they lament the invention of the smartphone? This is the same device that allows a trauma surgeon to know a patient’s statistics as he sprints to the operating room. Where’s the angst in that?

This is an excellent point. Technology is by definition a tool. And while tools are by definition teleological in nature, they are usually far more value neutral than we reflexively consider. A hammer can be used to build a prison, a library, or a church; a hammer can be used to repair a child’s dollhouse or murder an enemy. The same thing is true of digital media. While Ms Culpepper is no fan of modern journalism, she draws attention to the fact that current technology has enabled an enormous explosion in democratic access to ideas and information, a point Mr. Wieseltier concedes himself. And yet the same tools which enable on-demand, real time access to almost all of humanity’s accumulated knowledge to anyone are the same tools that let almost anyone produce and contribute to them at will, regardless of quality or credentials.

The sword of innovation almost always has (at least) two edges. It is up to the user to use the tool properly and deliberately, and to minimize the harm of unintended effects or negative outcomes.

* * *

More broadly speaking, I get the sense Mr. Wieseltier is fighting a rearguard action against change itself. He does not like the current technology, science, and economic triumphalism sweeping through Western society because it does not value—and it may actively harm—those things he holds most dear, the things he has spent his life learning, loving, and fighting to preserve. This is understandable, if only as human psychology, but it is not an argument. Change is natural. Change is ineluctable. Life is change.

I am not afraid of change, even if not all of it is for the better. Frankly, there are very few human societies—ours included—that couldn’t benefit from a little disruption. The opposite of technological change and disruption is stagnation and the ossification of socioeconomic power structures. Human beings are lazy. (Or, if you prefer a less pejorative characterization: humans naturally and quite sensibly conserve their own energy.) If something does not force us to change, we will not do so. It is too… disruptive. Internally and externally imposed disruption is what forces us, both as individuals and societies, to adapt and change to new circumstances and environments. And let us not kid ourselves: not all change is good, and very little good change is unalloyed with bad. Change, even when positive overall, is painful and annoying, and it often destroys things we hold most dear.

We must strike a balance here. We must neither champion change mindlessly nor suppress it willfully. Neither extreme is healthy, for change will come whether we want it or no, and change is dangerous, for we cannot see all ends. I have cited the maxim of Chesterton’s Fence before, which encourages reformers to educate themselves about the history and intent of social institutions before they decide to destroy them, as a bar to change for change’s sake. But conservatively minded people should heed its message, too: if you discover the purposes for which an institution were created no longer apply, or its effect has evolved into a positive impediment or harm to current objectives, it is incumbent upon you to destroy it also. Chesterton’s Fence is no bar to change or reform. It is a warning to manage change mindfully.

* * *

So far we have talked about intentional change, at the level of culture and society. But we must not forget that our intentions are guided in part by our predictions of the effects our changes will have. And, in this respect, our track record as a species is abysmal. It is a truism by now—or should be—that forecasts of the future are reliable only as a guide to what is most certain not to happen. Railways to the Moon, flying cars, sentient artificial intelligence, post-apocalyptic dystopia: none of these predictions, serious or semi-serious, over the past 100 years has come remotely true. Part of this must be due to our intellectual energy-conserving tendency (q.v. supra) to extrapolate the future from the confines of our current environment. A railway to the Moon was obvious. Nobody predicted Facebook.

But another part is due to our ignorance and blindness. We are ignorant of how major changes are incorporated into, adapted to, and create second and third order feedback effects within something as complex and changeable as a culture or society. We underestimate our own social and cultural inertia. We cannot foresee how human actions will affect our physical and natural environment, or how extra-human feedback effects will dampen or amplify our behavior to our benefit or detriment. We see but little of this even now, and that through a glass darkly. Finally, we forget just how small and insignificant we are in the scheme of things. I love wilderness and Nature as much as anyone, but I can’t help but laugh when I hear activists freak out about preserving spotted owl habitat, when neither human beings nor spotted owls existed for 99.9% of this planet’s physical existence. As if it matters in the context of the Cambrian Explosion, or the Permian Extinction, or the inevitable future subduction of virtually all evidence of human habitation on this planet into the Earth’s mantle.

Yes, Children: flowers wilt. Beauty fades. Human beings are born, grow up, age, and die. Societies and cultures do too. The Earth keeps spinning in her orbit, and the icy vacuum of space marches inexorably on toward… something. Change is inevitable. Not all of it is pleasant, but it has its beauty, too. Change gives an edge of poignancy to the things and people we love, because we know, if we are honest with ourselves, that these too shall pass. We can try to hold onto them, cling to them tightly and never let them go, but go they do. It is up to us to enjoy them, love them, appreciate them while they and we are here.

So with all due respect to Dylan Thomas and Leon Wieseltier, I would rather not rage, rage against the dying of the light. Instead, I’d like to sit down with a drink and a cigar and enjoy the sunset.

Related reading:
Kristi Culpepper, A Defense of Disruption as a Cultural Phenomenon: Responding to Leon Wieseltier (Medium, January 17, 2015)
Leon Wieseltier, Among the Disrupted (The New York Times, January 7, 2015)
Chesterton’s Fence (March 5, 2012)

© 2015 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

His Dark Materials

Joseph Wright, Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night, c. 1782

The best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t. … He’s not available because he’s not a being of a kind that would fit into our availability. … If God were knowable, why would we believe in him?

— Anne Carson

* * *
All religions [have] at least one common commandment: “Thou shalt not disfigure the soul.”

— Frank Herbert, Dune

* * *
Seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.

We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.

— Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials

Do not forget to build the Republic of Heaven where you are, my friends, starting with your family and friends this holiday season. Most of us have no more important work, and most of us will leave no more lasting legacy than this.

Happy Thanksgiving.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few

Auguste Rodin, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1893

Martin Blank: “I’m sorry if I fucked up your life.”
Debi Newberry: “It’s not over yet.”

— Grosse Pointe Blank

Why do we regret life choices? In retrospect, some are decisions with serious and long lasting consequences we make carelessly, hastily, or without due consideration to relevant factors clearly available to our decision making process at the time. They are important choices poorly made. These are good candidates for regret, because we think to ourselves, “If only I had thought more clearly, or taken more time, or investigated my options more carefully, I could have accomplished something important I would have wanted at the time and perhaps still do.” These are the kind where our overwhelming impulse is to kick ourselves for being so stupid, blind, or rash. And we are right to do so. If you are like me, Dear Readers, these are the decisions I cringe to remember, and for which my ears burn with embarrassment.

Others are choices we make deliberately, carefully, with all due attention to the facts as we know them, but that turn out to be wrong, or have unanticipated negative consequences which would have made us choose differently had we foreseen them. These regrets take the form, “If only I had known…” But these are properly weaker regrets, because they hinge on counterfactuals which we instinctively if not explicitly realize were not in our control: information which would have made us change our minds was hidden or unavailable to us, or—a special case of the foregoing—future conditions which we relied upon in making our decision changed after we decided, thereby undermining our intent. Human beings operate with bounded rationality, and even the best and most conscientious decision maker can be foiled by unknown (and perhaps unknowable) data and the vicissitudes of an uncertain future. The consequences may be just as bad, in retrospect, as those arising from a bad decision poorly made—or even worse—but it is pointless to beat yourself up too much for choices you made without considering information completely unavailable to you. Someone who gives more than a passing shrug of regret for the abandoned winning lottery ticket they failed to pick up off the street has their priorities and sense of the possible all messed up.

Still others are good decisions, carefully made, incorporating a complete set of relevant data and good anticipation of future developments, that we later come to regret because we discover we no longer want what we thought we did at the time. Perhaps these are just another subset of the second kind, where the unknown facts we did not incorporate into our decision process are future changes to our values or priorities. But these regrets are often the most troubling, because we are stuck with bad consequences we did not anticipate for which we can blame no-one but ourselves. Nobody hid any data from us, we weighed the pros and cons carefully, and the future played out just as we expected, but now the successful results of our decisions prevent us from realizing other desires or values that are just as or more important to us. This kind of regret often is a natural consequence of the normal process of aging, as young people make important and often irreversible life decisions they later come to regret as older individuals.

* * *And so we get examples like this, where a 46-year-old banker complains on Reddit that his choices as a young man—for security, wealth, and a successful career—have resulted in a broken marriage, estrangement from his son, and the abandonment of cherished dreams of writing, travel, and adventure he had when he was young. According to his story, he did not make choices rashly or irresponsibly; if anything, his complaint seems to be based in part on his opinion that he chose too cautiously. I will not judge this man’s life choices or his current situation, other than to observe that perhaps his real faults are blindness and inattention.

Why should anyone expect that decisions once made should never be revisited or reexamined in light of changing circumstances or changed desires? Even in our blessed state of deferred decision making in the developed world, many of us begin to pick mates, careers, and life paths while we are still in our twenties, when maturity-wise we are little more than children. Not only should we expect our values and priorities to change with age and circumstance, we should be alert to the fact that many of the decisions we make will be impossible or very difficult to undo. This is naturally hard for young people—I speak from experience, having been one—since the general existential assumption of youth is that time is unlimited and life is one endless series of sequential possibilities. The notion that, for example, having and raising children will impose dramatic limitations on one’s freedom and possibilities for personal fulfillment for decades in one’s young and middle adulthood doesn’t even occur to most twenty-somethings, except in some sort of intellectual sense, which is to say: not at all.

Of course this lesson—and many others which cranky oldsters like me try to impart on a regular basis to succeeding generations—is almost always only learned by personal experience. I remember having gauzy, exciting dreams of adventure and possibility as a twenty-something myself. Most of them, in retrospect, were pretty unrealistic, naive, or just silly. I don’t regret not trying to pursue them now because I realize they likely would have been a disappointing waste of time. In contrast, the adventure and excitement in my actual life have come from the commitments I have made, like marriage, children, and a career, because almost all of them required, in some form or another, a blind leap of faith into the unknown. Has it all been peaches and cream? Absolutely not, but it has been an adventure.

And, lest you sink into a youthful funk contemplating an endless vista of diaper changing, weekend soccer games, and college application trials as the entirety of your ineluctable fate, take heart. The good news about adulthood is that is doesn’t necessarily crush your dreams. It just gives you new ones. You just need to be alert to discovering them.

* * *

Of course, a looming sense of mortality can be salutary, too. There’s nothing like lagging energy, mysterious aches and pains, and strange growths discovered in the mirror to drum into your consciousness that your time here is limited and precious. Adventure and excitement can often be found right in your own backyard, if you know where to look:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

— John Lennon

Hey, I warned you it all isn’t peaches and cream.

Related reading:
Turn the Page (December 31, 2011)
Walking Song (December 18, 2011)
Can’t Buy Me Love (April 29, 2012)

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Sunday Reading from the Archives

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930

“Then I need say no more,” said Celeborn. “But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.”

— J.R.R. Tolkein, The Fellowship of the Ring

Periodically, O Dearly Beloved, I take a leisurely stroll through the carefully stacked and organized pixels of my back catalogue, clicking from link to link in a solipsistic journey of rediscovery. Occasionally such wanderings illuminate a consistent intellectual preoccupation of mine, which the bored and underemployed among you might find provocative or merely amusing to waste your time with on a leisurely Fall Sunday morning.

Today’s theme, I suppose, could be described as the necessity for us, as both individuals and as members of society, to accept our fate, to acknowledge the limits of our agency and the extent of our ignorance, and to accept our mutual entanglement with the fortunes of our fellow human beings. In other words, perhaps: Humility.

I like these pieces of mine, even though (or perhaps perversely because) they have not been among my most popular. I hope you find something to enjoy or even make you think. Cheers.

• All Together Now – Steve Randy Waldman has said opacity is integral to modern finance. I argue that opacity—and the information asymmetry which it reveals and which creates it—is an emergent feature of all sorts of social functions in complex societies, including finance. Information asymmetry and its associated rents are a convenience tax which members of a society implicitly accept when they agree to the division of labor necessary in complex social communities. Accordingly, I do not believe they can be made to disappear anytime soon.

• Punished by Fate – C.J.F. Dillow despairs of the common man’s understanding of chance, declaring it irrational. In contrast, I believe folk notions of justice and fairness incorporate a very sophisticated understanding of our exposure to fate—good, bad, and indifferent luck—and rest upon a communitarian ethics of sharing such undeserved gifts and punishments. Rather than being evidence of ignorance, irrationality, or undeserved entitlement, the average person’s sense of fairness is a very sensible collectivist approach to the problem of just deserts in an uncaring universe.

• Occupy Galt’s Gulch – Continuing with the theme of communitarian ethics, Jim Manzi points out that “winners [in society] require shared resources produced by the losers.” I explore some of the implications of this notion in the context of just deserts for self-styled übermenschen who rely on the resources of society, the labors of their fellow citizens, and the uncontrollable vicissitudes of chance to create the conditions for their success, as filtered through the particular lens of American culture and society.

• To Whom It May Concern – Drilling deeper into the notion of individual success, I explain the exposure an aspirant in my industry has to luck, both good and bad, and some of the ways of coping with it. I suppose one could call this approach fatalism.

• It’s All How You Look at It – Wisdom is good, but it is no comfort. And there is no shortcut to it; no box of Wisdom waiting for you at the local WalMart. You must earn it yourself, with no guarantees that it will make any difference. Sorry.

• Prolegomena to Any Future Life – So what are you waiting for? Why are you reading this? You must change your life. Get to it.

Happy Sunday.


© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Oop. Time, She’s Up

“I am old, Gandalf. I don’t look it, but I am beginning to feel it in my heart of hearts. Well-preserved indeed! Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can’t be right. I need a change, or something.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

When I launched this blog seven and three-quarters years ago, O Dearly Beloved, my first post incorporated the following mission statement:

I have started this blog to comment on what I consider to be a fascinating part of the global economy: the global market for M&A and its various inhabitants, participants, and miscreants. Hopefully I will be able to relate some interesting anecdotes, a few enlightening opinions, and a couple of amusing stories that will shed a little more light (or a little more laughter) on what remains for many a murky area best left to investment bankers, corporate lawyers, and other such terrifying bogeymen.

Five hundred and sixty-six published posts later, more or less, plus a lumber room of unpublished fragments, ruminations, and provocations, I think I am ready to declare victory and move on. This is not necessarily because even I believe that I have achieved victory, mind you. That is for you Lovely People and the sub-sub-librarians of internet history to judge. But one of the advantages of running a blogsite of which you are the sole, unimpeachable authority, author, and editor rolled into one is the ability to make such unilateral declarations without fear of pesky contradiction from the peanut gallery. (I have not made it a policy here to prevent comments for nothing, children. If you object I can direct you to a convenient pile of nearby sand which needs pounding.)

Of course those of you who have made an intermittent study, intentional or not, of my ramblings on this site will be aware that my output has both exceeded and failed to satisfy my stated mission of explaining the market for corporate mergers & acquisitions. The lion’s share of this mission creep (or evasion, if you will), I must put down to my lack of discipline: I have used this platform to hold forth on all sorts of topics and sundry, many of which fall far afield from the cloistered halls of buying, selling, and financing companies, which is my primary trade. I have addressed mildly cognate fields like private equity, Corporate America, and the history, structure, and pay of the investment banking industry; more tenuously related areas including hedge funds, capital markets, and financial regulation; and wildly off-topic digressions such as higher education, philosophy, and identity in the age of Facebook and the NSA. I have indulged my fancy for humor without regard for its funniness to anyone else, and I have waded into culture and art criticism without shame or regard for my lack of training or expertise therein. I have posted pictures and poems that appealed to me, for no other reason than I could.

In other words, I have written about what interests me, in addition to that much narrower and shallower range of topics to which I legitimately claim any expertise. The curated list of my more prominent posts runs to many pixels and reveals the breadth of my work. I remain unapologetic about this. This site is a personal blog, not a public service. Those of you who disagree with my choices are welcome to join the protestors from the first paragraph at the nearby mound of silica, etc., etc.

* * *

I was lucky to start blogging when I did. Financial markets had reached a peak of silliness which offered rich fodder to a financially literate cynic such as myself. Soon, the global financial crisis elbowed aside these more pedestrian concerns to offer a rich and exciting topic for me to both demonstrate my naturally firmer grasp on markets and the financial industry than the legions of panicky and underinformed journalists and pundits who were scrambling to understand and report it and also learn more about the crisis’s players, issues, and concerns than I had theretofore known myself. While I claim no particular merit for having done so, I take pride in contributing some measure of rational, grounded knowledge and facts to a society-wide conversation about the Panic which was badly in need of them. I even tried to contribute more serious thinking to the reform of financial regulation in this context, but sadly that seed fell on stony ground.

Subsequently, I think I have contributed some things of use to the broader understanding of investment banking and financial markets, including reality-based commentary on initial public offerings, illumination of the ways and byways of careers in my industry, and a little insight into the plight and prospect of women in high powered careers like mine. Hopefully these small contributions have added something of value to the public understanding and hence social weal. If so, I am glad. If not, well, you all got what you paid for.

But now I have reached a pass where I find it increasingly difficult to maintain any sort of regular posting on these pages. Most of what I have to say about things I know I have already said, often more than once. I have come to realize I will never convince those who believe in their bones that investment banking and financial markets are useless, evil, or a social liability rather than a boon. People who use the word “bankster” unreflectively and unironically are not now and never will be interested in what I have to say. People who have a more nuanced understanding, or who continue to form their opinions on the matter, have many more sources today than they used to to call upon, and a much broader and deeper understanding of these issues in the press. I hope I have contributed in some small way to this education. Unless Blogger.com sinks beneath the waves, people should always be able to find my blatherings on these topics gathering dust at this location for handy reference anyway.

I expect I will continue to maintain this site in some small way, perhaps adding a post here and there to the topic listing at the Table of Contents and maybe even doing a final and/or comprehensive post of Greatest Hits. But I do not anticipate blogging here regularly any more. I have reached the end of the interests and expanded mission which drove me to launch myself into cyberspace in the first place. Now I am most interested in topics where I am a student and a learner, not a master, and I want to spend the not inconsiderable time I have devoted in the past to explaining financial arcana and beating back the ignorance of the unfair and unjust here to reading and thinking about others’ expertise and ideas instead.

* * *

If I find I have something interesting to say, never fear, O Faithful and Long-Disappointed Readers, I will probably say it here. Those of you who know me via this opinion emporium probably have little doubt of that. I am the sort of person in fact whom it is almost impossible to shut up. It just is unlikely to be a regular affair, and this site is likely to sink into desuetude and decay as the years lengthen. Whether I decide to pop up in some other form, at some other place, I have yet to decide.

If I do, I’ll be sure to drop you a postcard. Cheerio.

Related reading:
Fragments (February 26, 2010)
Table of Contents (February 16, 2013 and passim)

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Some Work of Noble Note May Yet Be Done

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

Ever since the release of Dr. No in 1962, the James Bond 007 films have acted as a touchstone and running commentary on popular culture and society. For over half a century, a parade of different Bonds, Bond Girls, and increasingly over the top villains have offered escapist fantasies of varying implausibility and ridiculousness which have served, inter alia, as travel brochures, fashion statements, and advertisements for the benefits, drawbacks, and terrors of technological progress. They have done this, for the most part, not because it was their makers’ purpose (or even within their power) to critique society, but rather because they were intended to be hip, with it, and relevant, even at the inevitable expense of any seriousness or credibility. (Roger Moore, anyone?) With various degrees of success, these pop confections have held a mirror up to society. It is no wonder not everybody likes what they see.

These thoughts were inspired by film critic A.O. Scott’s interesting essay on the death of adulthood in American culture, which seems to be making the rounds of the culturesphere. He says many things, but his major point seems to be that popular culture, moviemaking preeminent within it, has elevated a strain of anti-adulthood and fixation on youth long dominant in American culture to the forefront of everything we see. I am not qualified to judge the correctness of his claim, but it certainly does seem to me the flight from responsibility and adulthood and the joys and tribulations of perpetual adolescence have become a leading subtext or topic for a very large number of popular entertainments nowadays. In particular, this cultural conversation seems to be focused on men and boys and their refusal to grow up.

Interestingly, upon reading Scott’s essay, my thoughts turned immediately to the most recent film in the Bond series, Skyfall. It occurred to me this movie can be read as providing a very interesting commentary on the issues of growing up, responsibility, and adulthood for a man nowadays, even if—or perhaps because—it is wrapped up in a popular escapist spy thriller. I claim no special cultural profundity for the film, nor no searing insight for the filmmakers or screenwriters, but I think the mirror which this particular thriller holds up to our current zeitgeist is pretty revealing. Even if the cultural critique I read within it was unconscious, or only semi-intentional, that does not vitiate its insight or force. Perhaps it enhances it. You Delightful Readers can judge for yourselves. If Stanley Cavell can find deep commentary on Hamlet embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, I can certainly tease a bildungsroman out of a Bond film. It’s my blog, anyway.

* * *

I will not tax your patience by relating the plot or other details of the film which you can discover yourself if you like. Nor will I spare you any spoilers. If you have not seen it already, there is no plot element I can reveal that will diminish your appreciation of the movie as cultural critique. In my experience, anyway, it is a measure of the quality of a story that you are willing to reread or rewatch it even when you know how it turns out. Skyfall is that good a movie.

The key plot points I would draw your attention to are as follows:

• At the beginning of the film, Bond is accidentally shot by his competent, no-nonsense assistant while attempting to recover a stolen data file from the top of a train barreling toward a tunnel of no return (cue Alfred Hitchcock and Sigmund Freud). Bond’s assistant, who happens to be black and female, shoots him on the explicit orders of their boss at British intelligence, “M,” who, while white and old, also happens to be female (Judi Dench). Bond, by the way, is an orphan who has a simultaneously fraught and close relationship with M which a casual observer could mistake for a mother–son dynamic.
• After plunging to his apparent death in deep water (cue Carl Jung, opening credits, and Adele’s theme song), we later discover Bond is alive after all, although he appears to be hiding from M and MI-6 in an exotic backwater and spending his time in self-destructive drinking, meaningless sex, and taunting dangerous arachnids for thrills and money.
• Bond comes back home to mother M when he hears she and MI-6 are under attack by a mysterious hacker who can penetrate British intelligence’s defenses at will. M displays no regret, casually informs Bond she has sold his home and all his belongings, and puts him into a crash course to get fit for active duty again, at which he struggles painfully. Nice homecoming.
• Bond tracks the mysterious hacker through various exotic locales and the beds of one or two expendable women to an abandoned island off the China coast, where he discovers a platinum blond Javier Bardem who minces and lisps and puts the moves on our trussed up spy. Bardem, it seems, is Bond’s evil twin, who is pissed at M for betraying him to the Chinese. He has channeled his anger into a worldwide empire of computer intelligence and manipulation, which he sells to the highest bidder. Strangely, though, this evil computer genius uses data screens that look like video games.
• After more plot machinations and an unsuccessful attempt on M’s life by Bardem (for an evil computer genius, he’s pretty lame with a gun), Bond flees with M to his ancient family home in Scotland, Skyfall, where he acquired what an MI-6 psychologist called his “pathological rejection of authority due to unresolved childhood trauma.” Bond himself tells M they’re going “into the past.” For transportation, they use Sean Connery–Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 from 1964’s Goldfinger. Into the past, indeed.
• An epic battle ensues at Skyfall, in which Bond, M, and Bond’s old gamekeeper and surrogate father battle Bardem and his small army, resulting in the destruction of Skyfall (which Bond hates), the Aston Martin DB5 (which only seems to mildly irritate Bond), and Bardem’s army. Bardem tracks a wounded M to a chapel where, while trying to persuade her to shoot both herself and him in the head to end their misery, Bond literally stabs Bardem in the back with a large hunting knife. So much for homosexual tension with your evil twin.
• Finally, after blessing Bond with her approval, M dies.

* * *

Now of course everyone who watches Skyfall knows all about James Bond. (All Bond movies assume it.) He is a charming, ruthless killer, a master manipulator with no empathy who treats friendly and hostile women alike like Kleenex and enemies like target practice. He is unmarried and childless, a man with no duties or responsibilities other than his job, which he often does grudgingly and against orders. Come what may, he always wins, usually punctuating his triumph with a cynical joke. As a cultural symbol of the last half century, James Bond is Peter Pan with a gun. For a British character he is as American as they come.

And yet in Skyfall he is betrayed and (symbolically) killed by women (including his mother), he falls into adolescent irresponsibility and self destruction, he is blocked and belittled by the genius avatars of today’s high technology (one of whom is gay or bisexual and the other is so young he still has spots), and he struggles not very successfully against physical and intellectual decrepitude. What more comprehensive list of challenges facing modern American man can one compile? What greater list of fears and blocks to maturity torture the brains of today’s man: emasculation, obsolescence, irrelevance, sexual confusion, self-indulgence, failure, age?

But Skyfall’s James Bond does not remain on the beach in India to sulk, boozing for breakfast and daring scorpions to sting him. He does not smoke pot and play Parcheesi with his stoner 30-something friends while the world burns or skip dates with beautiful women far out of his class to rearrange his vintage comic book collection. He is no Marvel superhero or genetically enhanced super soldier who can pretend to be invincible. This James Bond is the most vincible hero we have seen. And yet he picks himself up painfully, dusts himself off, and throws himself back into a game he is not sure—we are not sure—he can win, because it is his duty.¹ This is the opposite of the flight from adulthood. This is its embrace: the embrace of duty and responsibility. If there is a bubblegum escapist fantasy thriller which offers a better critique of the flight from adulthood—yet does not shy away from depicting how difficult and costly adulthood is—than this, I do not know what it is.

* * *

At one point, as Bardem’s villain bears down on M’s public hearing to kill her and Bond sprints through the streets of Whitehall to stop him, Judi Dench–M recites the conclusion from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” at the top of this post. The effect is inspirational, as we fully understand by now the effort and will it requires for Bond to push his aged, broken-down body through the streets to rescue both the head of his service and the only woman he has considered his mother for his entire adult life.

And yet Bond is not Tennyson’s Ulysses, a selfish, vain old man who wants to abandon his aged wife—who waited patiently for him for twenty years of wandering—his dutiful son, and his own people, to fling himself onto the wine dark sea once more in search of glory and adventure. No, Bond is a soldier, a dutiful son who dons his buckler and sword to wade again and again into the blood and mud of the battlefield, risking life and limb for the country which is his only family and his only allegiance. At the end of the movie, Mallory–M welcomes him into his new office—the original Bernard Lee–M’s office, down to the paneling, soundproofed door, and paintings on the wall; a fine, full circle the filmmakers have crafted for us²—and tells him as he tosses a new mission brief onto the desk, “So, 007, lots to be done. Are you ready to get back to work?”

Bond replies with a smile, “With pleasure, M. With pleasure.”

That is adulthood, children. That is what it means to be a man.

Related reading:
A.O. Scott, The Death of Adulthood in American Culture (The New York Times, September 11, 2014)

¹ I am not overlooking the element of revenge in Bond’s motivation; it is undoubtedly there. But this is just to say that Bond’s character’s motivations are multifarious and complex, as they are in real life. This makes Skyfall a better film, if a more complicated and ambiguous one in many respects.
² Note how, having reset the location of M’s office back to its setting from the very first film of the series, the filmmakers have also given enough backstory and proof of Mallory’s personal courage and toughness to justify his position in M’s chair. No longer just a fat, slightly ridiculous old man behind a desk, M’s role as leader and father to James Bond has been justified to us and to Bond. This little bit of the patriarchy, at least, makes sense again.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Labor Day

Diego Rivera, Melancholy Promenade, 1904

Thomasina: “Oh, Septimus! — can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Aristotle’s own library! … How can we sleep for grief?”
Septimus: “By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Do you take stock, regularly, of what you are carrying in your arms, Gentle Reader? Do you take care to pick up and discard the right things, things which make you happy and proud to carry? Do you seek out and cultivate those things you will be pleased to press into the arms of companions who go on without you? Things they will be eager to carry themselves? Love, knowledge, kindness, and wisdom are big things, things which fill up your arms and your soul, but paradoxically weigh next to nothing: they are easy to carry. They make excellent gifts to bequeath at the end of your long journey.

Keep your eyes on the road before you. Stay alert for good things to add to your burden. Those are the legacy you will contribute to the march. That is how we will remember you.

It’s time to go back to work.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

In Memoriam: June 6, 1944

Claude Monet, Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise, 1865

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

— Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”

Related reading:
Ernie Pyle, “A Pure Miracle” (June 12, 1944)
Ernie Pyle, “The Horrible Waste of War” (June 16, 1944)
Ernie Pyle, “A Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish” (June 17, 1944)

Note:
Poet and Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, exactly one week before the signing of the Armistice which ended World War I. He had returned to the front from England in July 1918, where he had been treated for shell shock, even though he might have stayed on home duty for the duration of the war.

War correspondent and civilian Ernie Pyle was killed by machine gun fire on April 18, 1945 on Ie Shima, northwest of Okinawa. The monument American soldiers erected to him on site was one of three monuments the Japanese allowed to remain when the island was returned to their control after the war.


© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Short Cuts

The narrative arc of the universe is long, and it bends toward expropriation.

— Yours Truly

I.Scene: Two weeks ago, Your Faithful Bloggist took exception to two paragraphs buried deep within a review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century by prolific economist Tyler Cowen. Said economist objected to my exception, dismissing it, in large part, as indicative of faulty framing of the underlying issue. Said YFB replied shortly thereafter, dismissing Cowen’s dismissal in turn as a bull-headed, tone deaf, and lazily written mischaracterization of my remarks. To date, Herr Doktor Cowen has declined to respond.

Conclusion: It seems whatever small brick Tyler Cowen thought my essay contributed to the structure of his meta-narrative of sociocultural reaction to Thomas Piketty’s work was ultimately unimportant enough to him that it does not bother him I have taken it back. Given that he willfully misinterpreted or mischaracterized it as a brick in the first place, I cannot say I am displeased.

Corollary: The practice of verbal judo—in which one attempts to redirect the force and power of one’s opponent’s words against him—requires dexterity with words, and such skill is not necessarily related to the intellectual prowess or force of ideas behind them.
Also: Don’t mess with a messer.
Also also: If Martin Wolf can’t intimidate me, there’s no way in hell Tyler Cowen can.


II.Scene: This past week, the incestuous echo chamber that is journalism was roiled by the unexpected firing of Jill Abramson, the Executive Editor of The New York Times. Imagine rolling a flash bang grenade into a warehouse full of 100,000 mockingbirds and your mind’s ear just might hear a pale imitation of the uproar, cacophony, and panic this has caused among the professional scrivening class. Of course, a hundred thousand theories and stories are blooming around this event, approximately 100,000 of which take the form of “What the Firing of Jill Abramson Really Means.” This, for instance, is a timely example.

Conclusion: Notwithstanding the force of any or all of these narratives—entrenched sexism, the personal and managerial flaws of Ms Abramson herself, or the vicious effects of third generation nepotism on the executive suite of the newspaper of record, all of which are plausible as contributing factors—getting somewhat lost in the kerfuffle seems to be the ineluctable fact that success or failure in the executive ranks of large corporate organizations is driven in large measure by politics. And politics, as we all know, is a simmering melange of personality, prejudice, path dependency, and conflicting issues of greater or lesser substance which intersect and interact in highly specific and often unexpected ways depending on the circumstances at hand. Very rarely can they be interpreted correctly by outsiders and, if truth be told, as often as not they remain opaque to insiders too. Therefore, the hubris of outside pundits opining on the real (primary) reason anything happens at the top of any large organization is laughable. Having been party to such organizations over the course of my own career, I can testify that power moves usually happen in response to a combination of multiple such factors, and it is the height of folly, even in retrospect, to assign superior weight to any one of them.

Corollary: Sorry to puncture your balloons, Single Issue Commentators, but when it comes to organizational dynamics you’re mostly full of shit.
Also: Oversimplifying complex phenomena to promote your hobby horse doesn’t fool anybody who matters, and it sure doesn’t help your agenda.


III.Scene: Also this past week, a widely followed and respected pseudonymous commentator on issues of municipal finance, financial markets, and other things on Twitter outed herself. She did this, in her words, because reporters from fixed income finance rag The Bond Buyer had apparently pieced together her real identity from various sources and were calling widely across the close knit municipal finance community trying to confirm it. This of course led to many of these people—many of whom knew her by her nom de plume Bond Girl (or @munilass) on Twitter but did not know her in real life—flooding her office with phone calls and emails warning her of The Bond Buyer’s actions. In order to keep control of her own narrative as much as she could, she announced her own identity on Twitter and began deleting her old tweets. Five minutes later, by her account, reporters from Bloomberg called to interview her for an article which ignored her authority and stature in the market in favor of gossip and personal innuendo. This episode has apparently created widespread disgust within the muni and markets communities against both Bond Buyer and Bloomberg, and has led several market participants to swear off acting as sources for either publication in the future. It did not help that Bloomberg subsequently attempted to smooth things over by publishing a humorous take on their reveal which turned Bond Girl into a sex object. More than a few people wondered openly whether Bloomberg would have “apologized” to a man in such a fashion.

Conclusion: I mean really, people, I admit I have a dog in this fight,^1,2 but what the fuck? What newspaper worth its pretensions to being a source of industry news, knowledge, and analysis undermines a known industry expert and potentially puts her career at risk in order to titillate readers with trivia they will forget in 48 hours? What public benefit did this serve? Bond Girl was highly respected (if not always agreed with) for her insightful, informed, forceful opinions and analysis which she published on Twitter (and, for a long time, on a blog also) as well as a fun and interesting personality. In addition, she spent countless hours helping reporters from Bond Buyer, Bloomberg, and elsewhere by acting as an unpaid and uncredited source of information and analysis in the muni finance market. Call me crazy, but this seems like a very expensive bridge to burn for a very small bonfire.

Corollary: Burning sources for no good reason strikes me as a very stupid way to run a newsroom. I thought that’s why editors make the big bucks: for editorial judgment.
Also: Don’t shit where you eat.


IV.Epilogue: We all have our bullshit stories to tell. Most of the time, the primary and only audience we have for them is ourselves. Sometimes, however, somebody or other will try to expropriate your story and replace it or recast it as their bullshit story, for reasons of their own. While this may not strictly be the narrative fallacy as commonly understood, it certainly is fallacious.

It’s your story. Don’t let the bastards take it from you.


¹ I have explained my own rationale for maintaing a pseudonymous profile online and why—contra many non-pseudonymous bloviators—I believe pseudonymous commenters can add real value to public discourse elsewhere at length. However, I am under no illusion that I am safe from being outed at any time in the future. I have left enough clues, intentional and unintentional, over the course of my seven plus years online that someone in possession of one or two key facts about me in real life should be able to triangulate me to this identity. I am sure it will happen at some point down the line, if it has not already. I can only hope, however, that when it does the person in question will realize the trivial fact of my real identity will add virtually nothing good, bad, or even interesting to people’s understanding of me and will keep it secret to themselves. If they do not, well, then I will have to rely on discovering their home address and my knowledge of ancient ninja assassination techniques to extract suitable revenge.
² The fact that I consider Bond Girl to be a friend is, of course, irrelevant to my argument. It is, however, highly relevant to me.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Assume a Can Opener

Once upon a time, O Dearly Beloved, a cruise ship carrying a convention of scientists and social scientists collided somewhere in the South Pacific with a floating shipping container full of remaindered Greg Mankiw textbooks. The textbooks had been bound for the newly founded Jack Welch School of Neverending Business in Shenzhou before the container fell off a freighter during a storm. Sadly, the cruise ship foundered and sank to the bottom with almost all hands and passengers on board, with the exception of one physicist, one chemist, and four economists.

Being practical, quick-acting folk, the physicist and chemist salvaged a shrink wrapped pallet full of Principles of Economics (4th ed.) from the open container to float upon in the open sea, where they were shortly joined by one of the economists. The other three economists swam to another pallet floating nearby, which happened to contain Denver Broncos Super Bowl XLVIII Champion t-shirts, and were able to climb onto that. Eventually, the drifting current separated our two little bands of survivors, and a few days later they each washed up on small, isolated atolls about five miles apart.

Upon their atoll, as luck would have it, the three economists found a large cache of perfectly preserved canned food, left no doubt by local fishermen for just such an eventuality. Unfortunately, however, the fishermen had forgotten to provide can openers or indeed tools of any kind to open the food, and of course the survivors had carried nothing off the ship with them but their clothes. After considering the situation, the three economists agreed to separate and come up with solutions to their predicament which they could discuss and agree upon. The economists spent some time wandering the beach in thought. Then they reconvened to discuss their ideas.

The first economist stated that, based on his calculations, the joint probability of the three of them surviving the shipwreck, landing on a habitable atoll in the middle of thousands of square miles of empty ocean, and finding a cache of edible foodstuffs was so infinitesimal they might as well curl up and starve to death, content in the knowledge they had beaten the odds spectacularly so far. The second economist countered that, based on his proprietary DSGE model, the normalized incidence of unopened canned foodstuffs in an economy in equilibrium should comprise no more than 17.2% of all available consumables. He therefore proposed a thorough exploration of the 500 square meter atoll to find the remaining edibles—theoretically consisting of canned goods already opened and uncanned foods edible without the aid of openers—which his model predicted were just waiting to be discovered. The third economist demurred, contending that, even if they were able to find some means of opening and cooking the canned food, eventually the stores would run out and they would starve to death. He argued that expending tremendous amounts of effort trying to extend their lives in the face of certain death was foolish. Instead, he proposed the three spend their remaining days in relative ease and comfort, arguing about Paul Krugman’s latest op ed in The New York Times.

Naturally, being economists, the three could not agree on which solution to follow, so they parted company and went their separate ways. The first economist, true to his word, curled up under a palm tree and waited to die, taking comfort in his distress from the even more unlikely fact he could shelter under a blanket made of Denver Broncos Super Bowl shirts. The second economist set off on an expedition around the atoll to look for the missing food his model predicted. Within minutes, he stumbled into a sinkhole and broke his neck. The third decided that, since he was now alone, going for a pleasant swim would be easier than attempting to discuss a Krugman piece with himself, so he waded into the ocean and was promptly eaten by a large shark.

* * *

Meanwhile, five miles away, the physicist and the chemist killed the fourth economist with a rock, roasted and ate his body over a bonfire of economics textbooks, and waited for a ship to respond to their smoke beacon. After they were rescued, they got married, got tenure, and lived happily ever after.

So who said economists are useless?¹

Related reading:
Bryan Caplan, Try Harder or Do Something Easier? (EconLog, April 16, 2014)


¹ As someone who has made giving advice his living, this kind of nonsense irritates me no end. Advising people to take or forgo risks based on averages isn’t good advice. It’s lazy advice. Good advice includes a clear discussion of the odds of success—or what you think might be the odds (which are normally not quite so clear cut in most instances)—but it doesn’t stop there. You discuss the risks, the odds, and the special talents and resources your advisee intends to bring to the situation to come to a specific, tailored recommendation. “Don’t start a restaurant, because 60% of them fail” is lousy advice. “You realize on average 60% of new restaurants fail, right? What makes you think you can succeed?” is a better start to advice that might actually do the advisee some good. Notwithstanding many economists’ predilection to think in aggregates and averages, virtually nobody lives an average life. And a hell of a lot of outliers contribute to socioeconomic averages.

Consider the quincunx.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The School of Hard Knocks

Power Figure, Kongo Peoples, 19th C.

I am no student (We’re going down to meet
Feel those vibrations) Of ancient culture
(I know a neat excavation)
Before I talk
I should read a book
But there’s one thing
That I do know:
There’s a lot of ruin
In Mesopotamia

— The B-52s, “Mesopotamia”

Megan McArdle penned an impassioned plea last week for the (presumably elite, corporate, Bloomberg-View-reading)¹ employers of America to consider hiring more ex-slackers. Notwithstanding her acknowledged bias as a self-described ex-slacker herself, Ms McArdle argued this made sense for two reasons: first, young slackers do not necessarily stay slackers as they age, and second, hiring the alternative—highly professionalized, directed, ambitious careerists—tends to result in fragile corporate monocultures which are subject to their own risks and flaws, including social and intellectual conformity and groupthink.

I am less persuaded by Ms McArdle’s first rationale. In my experience there are all kinds of slackers, including potentially promising ones who dicked around in their youth because they were restless and bored by the cookie cutter path of adolescence and completely irredeemable ones who dicked around because they were lazy bastards who preferred (and will always prefer) to get high on tasty weed rather than do their homework or take out the garbage. I guess the operative screen is ex-slacker, since someone who actually gets her shit together and tries to make something of herself does deserve a real opportunity. Like Ms McArdle, though, ambitious ex-slackers have a lot of proving to do.

Her second rationale resonates strongly with me, however. Over the course of my more than two-decade long career in investment banking, I have read the job applications and interviewed hundreds of young candidates for entry level Financial Analyst and Associate positions at a number of firms of different size, prestige, and culture. Over that same period, I have seen an increasing convergence in the kinds and qualifications of these candidates: predictably good or stellar grades in unobjectionable mainstream majors like finance, business, or economics, predictably hyperactive extracurricular activities centered around “leadership” building opportunities, and predictably careerist charitable and community service activities which only Scrooge could object to. My typical reaction to such candidates is ably captured by David Brooks:

When you read these résumés, you have two thoughts. First, this applicant is awesome. Second, there’s something completely flavorless here. This person has followed the cookie-cutter formula for what it means to be successful and you actually have no clue what the person is really like except for a high talent for social conformity. Either they have no desire to chart out an original life course or lack the courage to do so.

Now normally this is not these children’s fault. It is what they have been told to desire and groomed to accomplish their entire lives. But, with all due respect to Megan McArdle’s Harvard friends with 4.0 GPAs, my God these people are boring.

Most of them, if they ever had a personality or original thought in their head in the first place, have hammered it down so deep into their subconscious they couldn’t summon it on pain of death. Their résumés, their bearing, and their polished interview patter render them about as distinguishable and interesting to talk to as Brooks Brothers mannequins. Nothing in their conversation or revealed background indicates any appetite for adventure, risk, or enlightenment. Nothing they can relate indicates they have tried something they didn’t know they could succeed at, risked failure for a good reason (or any reason at all), or simply gave themselves up to powers greater than themselves—love, fate, chance—just because. They haven’t lived at all. They’ve followed a career path.

I call them carbon sinks.²

* * *

Now the more charitable among you (as well as the helicopter parents who spawned these pathetic simulacra of humanity) will object I am being too harsh on these special snowflakes. You will remind me they are young, and hence pathetically stupid and naïve about the world and their true opportunities in it. Give them time and space, you plead, and these button-downed zombies will blossom into fulfilled and meaningful personalities. You will scold me for dismissing naturally interesting and unusual individuals because they are too wise (or afraid) to run up their freak flags in an interview with a curmudgeonly old white man at a potential future employer. You will complain that I only seek for such adventurers and renegades because I miss my own long-lost adventuring, and I want to relive my halcyon youth in these eager tyros’ stories for the space of a half an hour.

And you would be right. A tiny, tiny bit. But not much. Because I am experienced and clever enough to know how to winkle most such secrets out of the prepackaged dross of most college and business school graduates, if they exist. But they usually don’t. The polished husk you see is usually all there is. And my youthful gallivanting is not something I need or want to recapture in the glazed eyes of some nervous, dissembling twenty-two year old.

No, I look for evidence of intellectual independence, untrammeled curiosity, and adventuresomeness because these are really, really valuable traits in a professional investment banker. A young person who has deviated from the beaten path, who has taken risks, who has ventured to explore something unknown is far more likely to develop the mental flexibility, toughness, and adaptability that will make him or her a valuable counselor and advisor to his or her clients. Sure, these traits are largely useless in the beginning of any investment banker’s career, when they are and must be suppressed in order to satisfy the pressing demands of intellectual drudgery and unimaginative detail work that investment banks expect of their indentured chattel. But they re-emerge later on, as a young banker increasingly grows into the role of a pure salesman who must earn the respect and trust of his or her clients, colleagues, and peers.

And when you do this, a youth spent stretching the envelope and taking risks comes back to pay dividends all out of proportion to its actual extent. For one thing, you have a lumber room of stories which you can share with your clients and colleagues over dinner and drinks that will make them laugh and look at you admiringly. You will not be boring. For another, you are likely to genuinely appreciate these very clients’ and colleagues’ own youthful peccadilloes, which will only endear you to them as a non-judgmental, non-asshole, which is a sadly rare commodity in my business. Most importantly, taking risks and exploring the unknown—whatever form that may take—will likely increase your store of that deeply unfashionable and socially awkward characteristic: wisdom. As Ms McArdle herself avers,

When the prodigal sons return to the fold, they often bring with them valuable information about the outside world.

Wisdom is nothing to sneer at in a professional advisor, much less in a normal human being.

* * *

So what does this mean for the average ambitious youngster reading these words? Well, it means I heartily recommend taking a flyer or two, mixing it up, and actually trying to explore who you are and what you want out of life other than a prestigious, well-paying job at Stereotype Brothers, LLC. For one thing, you may find out to your chagrin after 22 years of prepping for Goldman Sachs that you really want to be a professional chef. Or a skydiver. Or a paleobotanist. Your whole life is ahead of you. I’ve asked this before: why should you put all your youthful energy, curiosity, and enthusiasm into a basket you’re not sure you want to carry?

Plenty of college students nowadays—perhaps too many, in this old man’s opinion—spend all their time and energy in college acquiring what they believe to be marketable skills, without considering for a minute whether the employment to which they aspire is right for them, will exist in a meaningful form in the future, or even will hold their interest for more than a few years.

But don’t get me wrong, either. Taking risks, avoiding the beaten path, and cultivating adventure is not an easy road. It’s certainly no guarantee of success.³ But is conventional success all you want out of life? Please say no.

It is the brave ones who are not afraid to expose themselves to risk, earn scars, and take hard knocks who make the most interesting humans. And even if you stick to the halls of commerce, I bet you’ll find a lot more risk takers and nonconformists among the ranks of the truly successful than Harvard 4.0s.

Guess who they’d rather talk to over a beer at 3:00 am.

Related reading:
The Standard Model (February 18, 2012)
No Country for Young Children (October 21, 2012)
Curriculum Vitae (March 10, 2013)


¹ As opposed, say, to the vast unwashed non-elite, non-Bloomberg-View-reading firms who have to compete for their employees in less exalted realms.
² As in somewhere a carbon atom goes to wait for 30 to 60 years before it can do something interesting, like get sucked into a supernova. Or become a charcoal briquet.
³ For one thing, if you do decide you want to get into investment banking, you’re going to have to run a gauntlet of dozens of junior bankers who are just as blinkered and one-dimensional as the straw men I have been eviscerating in this post. And very few of them, by definition, will be able to appreciate your non-conformity to the career model and professional values they have staked their entire young lives upon. I can’t tell you how many polite arguments I’ve had in group recruiting meetings with tyros who only want to hire (really smart, really accomplished) cardboard cutouts like themselves. And I don’t always win. Caveat interviewee.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Venn Diagram

Anselm Kiefer, Sulamith, 1983

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity’s displayed:
I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I’d have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.

— William Butler Yeats, “Before the World Was Made”

De gustibus non est disputandum.

— Latin maxim

Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty—he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world—alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Many, many circuits of this small blue planet around its dim yellow star ago, O Dearly Beloved, I remember helping my college rowing teammates put away the boats and oars one evening after practice. As we bent over exhausted to collect and carry our equipment, a few of us were suddenly struck by the beauty of a lovely sunset, which spread rosy fingers of gorgeous color across the sky and water around the dock and boathouse. Some mischievous wag, no doubt with an eye to provoking exactly what followed, starting proclaiming loudly “Art! Art!” while pointing to the scene, and several of us joined in in boisterous agreement. One upper-class oarsman of distinctly aesthetic and artistic persuasion (who was clearly the wag’s intended target) objected loudly, however, exclaiming that a natural phenomenon such as a sunset could never be art. This, of course, only spurred us jokesters to redouble our banter and offer all sorts of spurious rationales for our baseless badinage. The put upon aesthete was satisfyingly frustrated by our feigned obtuseness, and the rest of us enjoyed a temporary respite from the long, thankless business of training aching bodies for distant races far in the future. In other words, a pleasant time was had by all.

What recalls this memory to mind is a recent peroration by Antipodean philosopher and author John Armstrong, who penned a piece which claims that beauty, or at least the contemplation of beauty, can and should spur humans to become better people. He takes his guidance in this regard from German Romantic philosopher and aesthetician Friedrich Schiller, who Professor Armstrong claims attributed beauty’s appeal and importance to us to its capacity to unite two conflicting psychological drives we all possess—the “sense” drive which “lives in the moment and seeks immediate gratification,” and the “form” drive which seeks order and coherence in the world—into a harmonious whole. Dr. Armstrong does not specify where we should seek this therapeutic, personality shaping beauty, but one may sensibly assume from the examples he uses and the title of a book he has co-authored, Art as Therapy, that he looks primarily for such models and guides to harmony in the realm of art.

Now, while Your Humble Bloggist is an admitted devotee of beauty of all sorts, and an enthusiastic champion of the power and value of Art—which characterizations anyone who has followed my writings here should have no trouble admitting—I simply cannot agree with our earnest Professor that beauty is capable of creating better people, no matter what psychological, emotional, or intellectual mechanisms he might propose. For my reasons, I would point you to the following diagram, which I have constructed out of the goodness of my heart to illustrate the logical conundrums Dr. Armstrong’s assertions entail.

A Comprehensive Theory of Art, Beauty, and Morality in One Microsoft Word Diagram

A quick perusal of same will acquaint you with my own views, which boil down to the hopefully uncontroversial contention that the spheres of Art, Beauty, and Morality in human experience, while they do indeed overlap, are neither coterminous nor coextensive; that is, there is more to each than either or both of the others can comprehend. To defend this argument, I would simply point you to easily identifiable counterexamples to the opposing view: beauty, empty of morality, which is not art (like my oarsman's sunset years ago); art, empty of beauty and morality, which one might find in abundance at any Biennale; and morality, devoid of beauty or aesthetic construction, which one can enjoy in unlimited quantities in the arguments of our politicians and the jeremiads of our paid and unpaid commentariat. That there can be beautiful art, empty of all but the most tenuous and vague moral sentiments, I would point you to a great deal of the Western World’s artistic canon (including, for example, almost the entire oeuvre of Henri Matisse) and most classical music. That there can be unhandsome art of deeply moral intent and impact, which can inspire harrowing, uplifting, and life altering thoughts in a sensitive soul I can illustrate with the paintings of Anselm Kiefer (q.v. above) and numberless examples from world literature. And that there can be moral beauty without aesthetic selection or artifice I would demonstrate by the exercise of courage under great threat, as perhaps we are currently seeing among the citizenry of Kiev and Venezuela.

The happy confluence of all three spheres, Art, Beauty, and Morality in one whole, as designated by the comely asterisk in the diagram above, I contend is only a small portion of the map of human experience. As well as, more importantly, a relatively rare occurrence in most of our lives. And this is not even to address the complications and confusions introduced to a morally therapeutic program of appreciation of art and beauty by the undeniable fact that each, and perhaps most especially the latter, are indeed seen in the eye of the beholder. Which means they are culturally determined, cognitively limited, and far too idiosyncratic to hang a plan of human betterment upon. Frankly, it makes me wonder what sort of wooly headed nonsense Professor Armstrong is blathering on about. There is far too much amoral art and amoral beauty floating around out there to think their contemplation is a reliable source of moral improvement for anyone.

Then one can trot out all the horrible examples of cultured monsters who have perpetrated horrific acts upon their fellow humans throughout the ages notwithstanding and often at the same time as they enjoyed the fruits of artists’ labors and the pleasures of natural and manmade beauty. All one need do is read Paul Celan’s Todesfuge or contemplate the orchestrated theft of fine art from around Europe by Hermann Göring to realize the ability and desire to appreciate art and beauty can in fact be completely divorced from any impulse toward moral betterment or even basic humanity. And I would not be the first to point out that some of the most egregious of such atrocities were committed by denizens of the same nation which produced and idealized such figures as Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, and, if we are being complete, Friedrich Schiller. Not a good scorecard in support of Dr. Armstrong’s hypothesis.

* * *If pressed, I would propose a different formulation. What I believe is that a sensitive, open soul in the presence of art, morality, or beauty may be able, if she concentrates, to extract meaning and value from the experience. But this meaning and value will not necessarily convey simple, uplifting lessons or moral improvement. Rather, these lessons may be something different entirely: in the case of Art, ambiguity, complexity, and obscurity may illuminate certain open-ended pathways of thought; in the case of Beauty, awe, desire, and uncanniness may give rise to fear, frustration, and a feeling of loss. Surely there are certain lessons to be learned, and moral growth to be had, in the contemplation of beauty and art. But I would contend these lessons may not be comforting ones to learn, and in the case of Great Art and Great Beauty, they are almost certain to be neither simple nor clear.

Perhaps that is the biggest moral lesson to learn, after all: the world, and our experience of it, is too big to be shoehorned neatly into any coherent system of belief. That the world, in many respects, is completely indifferent to our own personal lives and fates, and there are meaningful, awe-inspiring, and wonderful things out there which have nothing at all to do with our petty concerns. Perhaps that is the real power of Beauty and Art and Morality: writ large, they are a reminder of our own insignificance, and a spur to the sort of radical doubt that encourages us to seek harder for the meaning and value—the sources and guides to morality—in our own circumscribed lives.

That is a good lesson, but I’m not sure how you’re going to print it in a textbook.

“I see no justice in that plan.”

“Who said,” lashed out Isaac Penn, “that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand—until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.”

— Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Gedankenexperiment

Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.

— Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain, from “Songs of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan

— Frank Herbert, Dune

I learned a very interesting fact today, O Dearly Beloved. Apparently, if you select a random entry from the online encyclopedia of human knowledge known as Wikipedia and click on the first linked term in the top entry and each linked entry thereafter (aside from italicized preambles and parenthesized definitions), there is a very strong likelihood that within a finite number of links you will arrive at the Wikipedia entry on “Philosophy.” Some intrepid soul has actually scrubbed the Wikipedia data and determined that this interesting phenomenon obtains almost 95% of the time. By comparison, the next highest source link incidence (at less than 2%) is what is known as a “red link,” or a link which leads exactly nowhere within the Wikipedia database.

This is a strongly suggestive result, and in my opinion it carries interesting implications for those public intellectuals who would like to assert that philosophy is dead, or at least meaningless, in comparison, say, to the ineluctable juggernaut which is Science. This, attentive members of my audience will recall, is a topic of some little interest to me.

Therefore, as a public service to you, My Loyal and Esteemed Readership, I decided to perform my very own small experiment in this regard to check this provocative hypothesis against the facts of the matter. In order to summarize my results, I have defined a specific terminology and notation to represent the structural remove of any Wikipedia entry from philosophy. This concept I hereby label the Wikipedia Degree of Remove from Philosophy, and I designate it with the notation P_wⁿ, where n is the degree, or number of clicks on first entry links it takes to get from the Wikipedia entry in question to the one on the Philosophy.

First, as a sort of control, I investigated the primary Wikipedia link tree of Professor Stephen Hawking, that indisputably accomplished physicist and cosmologist who has asserted more than once that philosophy is dead or worse, irrelevant. My working hypothesis was that Herr Doktor Hawking would have a very high degree of remove number, given his brilliance and success in the realm of science. The empirical link tree results were as follows:

• Stephen Hawking —> theoretical physics —> physics —> natural science —> science —> knowledge —> fact —> proof (truth) —> necessity and sufficiency —> logic —> reason —> consciousness —> quality (philosophy) —> property (philosophy) —> modern philosophy —> philosophy

which gives our esteemed subject a WDRP of fifteen, or P_w¹⁵. Of course, this gives our intrepid philosophy denier quite the benefit of the doubt, for if we stopped our degree of remove calculation at the first instance of a specifically philosophical entry—viz., “quality (philosophy)”—Dr. Hawking’s figure would rather be P_w¹². But who are we to split hairs in such an investigation? For all we seek, Dear Readers, is the undeniable empirical truth.

Then I attempted to calculate similar WDRPs for a not-quite random selection of other Wikipedia entries, just for comparison. My results were as follows:

• Banana — P_w¹⁹
• Kiwifruit — P_w²⁰
• Sam Harris (author) — P_w¹³
• Romantic love — P_w²⁰
• Glenn Beck — P_w²⁴
• Eggplant — P_w¹⁵

which is sort of odd, when you think about it. For it means that the crowdsourced experts of Wikipedia classify one of the most renowned theoretical scientists of our age at the same remove from the general topic of philosophy as an eggplant, and closer to same than a banana, romantic love, or kiwifruit. The only random entity in our limited sample set closer to philosophy in Wikipedia’s taxonomy is author, New Atheist, and neuroscientist Sam Harris, which is also intriguing given his rejection of great swathes of the discipline in favor of a concentrated scientific reductionism. (I presume none of us will be confused by the result that Glenn Beck is several orders further removed from philosophy than a banana or kiwifruit.)

Now, I admit these are highly selective and tendentious data points, and I am sure our committed devotees of scientism and reductionism will reject them out of hand as not dispositive. However, I would note such skeptics might find their naive and touching faith somewhat shaken were they to replicate the research above themselves, for they would then find every single one of those entries leading inexorably, through no matter how many Glenn-Beckian twists and turns, straight to the core Wikipedia entries on “Knowledge” or “Natural science.” From which it is but a hop, skip, and a short jump to the realm of philosophy.

But anyone not blinkered by their expertise should not be surprised at this result. The Wikipedia entry on Philosophy lays it out as clearly as can be:

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument.

Philosophy is a foundational discipline, which underlies and transcends all forms of human knowledge, including that practiced by petty intellectual tyrants swanning about in lab coats. To claim that science does not depend upon philosophy, in at least an epistemological sense, is to claim that science stands outside the realm of human knowledge and thought itself. That it cannot be judged, analyzed, criticized, or challenged except on its own terms and with its own tools.

Which strikes me, at least, as a remarkably stupid and unempirical thing to say.¹

Related reading:
A Foolish Consistency (February 5, 2014)
Our Glassy Essence (October 17, 2013)


¹ The cleverer among you might object to this semi-serious diatribe with two points. First, the nature of Wikipedia begs the question, since its own editing conventions encourage article authors to set the stage for each entry with foundational definitions; that is, defining entities and concepts in the most general terms and context. In other words, the structure of Wikipedia itself is foundational and hence, in a very deep sense, philosophical. Therefore, linking down through foundational statements should naturally lead to the core concept of philosophy. Wikipedia itself is a form of philosophy. To which I answer: Correct. You have confirmed my concluding remarks. Second, you might say Messrs. Hawking and Harris’s structural Wikipedian proximity to philosophy shows that in fact they are offering their own form of philosophy. To which I again answer: Correct. That they are, but they themselves deny it. Who’s a blinkered idiot now?

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.