“The philosopher's job is to be an interface between things that would not normally communicate with each other. We think about policies, strategies, business models, priorities: they are all open problems, where the philosopher has his perfect place.” Oxford University professor Luciano Floridi considers himself a digital philosopher.
Digital communication has become a much greater part of our lives. And some of the best strategists I've worked with did use philosophy as a lens to make sense of things. His statement also bears with my own experience. For example, when I taught advanced digital marketing and communications to master students at the Bologna Business School, I spoke about identity as a way to understand the web.
Philosophy can help you see the tension in choices. Margaret Wheatley pointed out:
“The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines.
These days, a different ideal for organizations is surfacing. We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent – attributes found only in living systems.”
Being able to draw from past wisdom is invaluable. Whether digital or through other media, communication opens the door to other intellectual challenges on ethics, aesthetics, and the theory of knowledge. They're all topics I've been exploring in the last several years.
The ethical dimension impacts the current objectives on sustainability, equality and governance in business and organizations. When it comes to ethics, money is usually part of the conversation. The answers I've been getting as I ask people about their feelings on money are fascinating.
Some people think of money as an instrument of desire, others as an instrument of the mind. By and large, the great majority sees money as an expression of emotion. The stories go way back into the past: how nobody was allowed to ask for or talk about money during the war, why it's embarrassing to bring up money in certain social settings, and how money distracts from the actual goal.
I worked in financial services for fifteen years. But it occurred to me that though I gained a deeper appreciation of the nature of risk vs. uncertainty, I never looked into the history of money beyond the elementary. It's never too late to learn. Since books are the most complete form of reference, that's where I turned.
Four books on money for a conscious life
Here are four books that will tell you nothing about gaming the market, and everything about the history of money, and the human narratives associated with it. They're written by an anthropologist and activist, a professor of philosophy, a writer and poet, and a sociologist.
1
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years took me almost as long to get through.
The premise is quite simple: before there was money, there was debt. Debt and debt forgiveness have been central to political debates all over the world for a long time. We can trace the centrality of debt to society down the language we use. Words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption” had their origin in ancient debates about debt.
To give you a sense of the importance of Graeber's contribution:
The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.
The corollary of this thought: when you reframe relations in the language of debt, you get away with violence couched in moral terms. See the ethical angle here? Suddenly, the victim of debt becomes the guilty party. It also turns out that we don't have to pay our debts, only some.
Equity and equality share a root. Graeber sheds a light on what happened and asks questions important to the future:
Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?
Consider how the value of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the signal of trust in another human being.
2.
Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth tackles the same subject from a different perspective.
Along with how financial and social debt has appeared in literature, Atwood looks at the history and meaning of debt. She starts with the concept of balance, not just in the accounting books, but in our fundamental belief in fairness, and the evidence that this belief is hard-wired in humans.
Her sense of humor doesn't pull any punches. For example, on the debt we owe the environment in taking and taking and not giving back. The debt owed to Mother Earth and the hilarious Cockroach Future Trader Ghost is brilliant.Balance, fairness, and payback are much more than money. They are:
“moral debts, or debts having to do with imbalances in the right order of things. … The concept of balance is pivotal: debtor and creditor are two sides of a single entity … and exchanges between them - in a healthy economy or society or eco-system – tend towards equilibrium.” <
We're all in debt with someone at any one time. Some examples of debt in literature - financial (Ebenezer Scrooge's miserliness), spiritual (Dr. Faustus and others who sell their soul to the devil), and soaked in blood (the Merchant of Venice's pound of flesh, Hamlet's obligation of vengeance.)
By making amends then, Scrooge is paying a moral debt. To whom does he owe this debt, and why? In Dicken's view, he owes it to his fellow man: he's been on the take from other people all his life-that's where his fortune has come from-but he's never given anything back. By being a creditor of such magnitude in the financial sense, he himself has become a debtor in the moral sense, and it's this realization that's at the core of his transformation. Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have value: good turns and gifts must also flow and circle-just as they do among chimpanzees-for any social system to remain in balance.
You'll probably never read Jane Austen and George Eliot the same way. Also, without story there is no debt:
Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt. A story is a string of actions occurring over time-one damn thing after another, as we glibly say in creative writing classes-and debt happens as a result of actions occurring over time. Therefore, any debt involves a plot line: how you got into debt, what you did, said, and thought while you were in there, and then-depending on whether the ending is to be happy or sad-how you got out of debt, or else who you got further and further into it until you became overwhelmed by it, and sank from view.
Atwood mentions a widespread saying in Canada. Whenever there's good weather, people say “we'll pay for it later.” Everyday expressions in language are my portal to cultural differences. But then she adds that the expression is Presbyterian, not Canadian.
3.
Jacob Needleman's Money and the Meaning of Life is also in the form of a lecture. To explain the central concept of the way in life, the professor combines myth with psychology.
I skipped some of the initial set up and went right to the stories. Myth is essential to feel things, rather than intellectualizing them. Money has to do with emotion for so many people, and we tend to be alone with thoughts about it. Yet mutual relationships and group communication are the real art of our time.
History is full of such things: ideas which are an awakening force in their complete form and in the proper context, becoming a soporific, or even a destructive influence when only a piece of them is used or understood.
The ego is the vanity that one can be completely self-sufficient. If you pick up this book, don't let the higher and lower life duality get to you. Because it's simple and doesn't detract from the philosophical exploration of the concept of money.
At the core of all religious teachings, man is two-natured. Human life has meaning only insofar as we consciously and intentionally occupy two worlds at the same time. One force alone can never bring meaning into human life. Meaning appears only in the place between the worlds, in the relationship of two worlds, two levels, two fundamental qualities of power and energy.
Money is now, at this period of civilization, the chief representative of one of these fundamental worlds. That is its extraordinary, immense significance. We must understand it and respect it for that. This 'lower' world of money is not evil. for us, as beings build to live consciously in two worlds, real evil consists solely of those factors in ourselves that prevent conscious awareness of both the inner and the other world. It is not money itself which obstructs this awareness
There are kernels of wisdom throughout. For example, his definition of neurosis as “failure of the capacity to attend to the truth about oneself, with an awareness free of emotionalism” couching it in terms of capacity is useful. Feeling is thus not bad, just misplaced when not integrated with knowing. Because feeling leads to awareness.
Also the idea that money can buy almost anything we want, but we tend to want only things that money can buy is a profound thought on human condition. There's a spiritual dimension to the book: in the sense of enhancement of consciousness and search to serve the dignity of mankind.
You can a popular book, and you can have a book that shift the way you think and act. Needleman's book is the second. It will change your attitude toward money.
4.
Georg Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists. The Philosophy of Money is divided into two parts: an analytical and a synthetic half. He pulls apart of the idea of money, then he puts it back together again.
This is a book that merits more than one reading. Simmel presents the human condition as a movement from desire to will to purposive action to attainment and then ultimately to dissatisfaction. Keep in mind that this work is from 1900.
The idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy.
In Chapter 1, Simmel explores the theory of value, using the classical political economy and the Marxian theory of value. Value and money delves into reality and value as mutually independent categories through which our conceptions become images of the world.
Chapter 2 is about the value of money as a substance: The intrinsic value of money and the measurement of value. While Chapter 3 is an analysis of money as a sequence of purposes: Action towards an end as the conscious interaction between subject and object.
The synthetic part the opens with a chapter on individual freedom, which exists in conjunction with duties, and explores the money equivalent of personal values (dowry, prostitution, bribery etc.) as well as the style of life. We fail to address correctly the means-ends aspect of money's relationship to commodities. Hence the alienating attitudes of extravagance, greed, avarice, cynicism and indifference.