rain and parades

it was destined to be so, and so it now is. the latest fascination of investigative journalists is the mind of the financier. david passed a piece to me in what i want to say was new york magazine--i'm sure he can provide the link, since i no longer have it--which was another of these sorts of analyses of the typical wall street psyche. it wasn't a particularly good piece of writing. if its aim was to paint vividly the outrageous narcissism of your average trader, it really succeeded, instead, in putting a sickeningly rational spin on the whole nasty business.

(David: Here it is. It's very much worth reading)

too many of the articles dealing with our very own class of robber barons have, in fact, erred in exactly the same direction: what starts off as an attempt to humanize what everyone assumes are downtown demons, most writers seem to end up painting their inarguably excessive expectations as the product of well-reasoned and, therefore, airtight calculations. to take just one example, it's often brought up, by those who are both interviewing and interviewed, that your average trader didn't get to where he (almost never she) was for free. landing his office above the battery was costly: he paid through the nose to go to business school. having spent, say, $160,000 to get through university--a necessary expense, if one is to run with the right crews--his starting salary of 120 or 140 grand is really a drop in the bucket. think of the loans that need paying back! the trader sees himself as an object deserving of sympathy. yes, he's paid x amount of dollars more than you or your doctor or even some CEOs, but one must factor in all of the work that went into making all of that bank; days stretch into nights, one lives under the constant watchfulness of one's blackberry and the whims of clients. all in all, it's really a miserable time. how can you begrudge the poor fools their pennies from heaven, then?

something along these lines has appeared in every psychological expose i've thusfar encountered. part of that is, naturally, the shallowness of many journalists, for whom boat-rocking seems like career suicide. part of it, however, is a painful lesson about us, and about the values at which we've ultimately arrived. i get a sinking feeling in my stomach every time i start into a piece like that in new york magazine, or the several i've read in the times. these writers are rationalizing the actions of the traders because, i suspect, it appears rational not just to them, but to their audience. there is a hidden message there, and i'm not so sure it isn't going to be the tagline for the chapter in future social studies books that deals with us.

the public, and the elected representatives who feed off its moods, claims to be outraged at the astounding degree of unrepentance displayed by people who are very clearly guilty parties. how can they dare to look us in the eye and tell us they deserved all of this? people ask. to the trader, the equation is simple: i worked hard, and therefore i deserve what i worked for. put in those terms--put, in other words, in the terms used by the journalists who've written about financiers--i don't know if many people would disagree. americans do not believe in limits, not, at least, until the common social space is so disastrously violated that we have no choice but to put a fence around it and start shoveling debris. personal freedom is sacred; i'd use another word, but i can't think of anything that would be remotely strong enough. we are somehow zealously convinced that individual liberty, which we've already assigned ultimate importance to, is only understood in its negative, i.e. unrestrictive, sense. if you start with that as a first principle, you can't help but end up in the shoes of the AIG trader who very eagerly took his seven-figure bonus. what right does anyone have to deny him it?

now, i know that this type of thinking is absurd, and i'm sure that the two people who constitute my readership here will agree with me. how much, though, will that be true more generally? the lack of repentance on the part of wall street is really just a lack of repentance in the behavior of americans. it's a cultural characteristic, and it comes through time and time again, no matter what the arena. what is more frustrating about the behavior of, say, reagan- through bush-era republicans, than their utter refusal, in the face of damn near treasonous conduct, to admit any wrongdoing? when a west virginian mining company strip mines an area into oblivion and then flies the coup for fresh pastures in montana, leaving behind crumbling company towns and the poisoned earth, what is this but the selfsame unrepentance? the flaw that will end america is that we don't say sorry, not when we really need to. and, as in the case of the republican party, as our crimes individually continue to mount, it becomes harder and harder for us to apologize, and therefore almost impossible to fix anything we've done.

you can debate the merits of fiscal stimulus versus market self-correction all you like--and indeed, people much prefer that sort of discussion to anything moral--but in the end, nothing will improve for the better until, culturally, we learn to have a sense of personal responsibility. without it, we can't expect progress anywhere, whether academically, politically or economically. it's long been vogue that nations, though social aggregates, do not display agglomerations of individual characteristics. how do you sum the moral compasses of millions of individual people? i'm afraid, however, that nothing is really more important, that no theory, no mathematical model, and no piece of public policy, however well designed, will fill the gap that was once occupied by robust morality. it's especially easy, in these times, to forget that morality ever was robust. i don't mean to flag the old nostalgic's line, that once we were good, that men were men, women, women, etc. it is demonstrable, however, that before modernity, social institutions, if entirely imperfect, still existed to compel individuals to admit to their crimes, and to accept a distinct set of limitations. what was a church (and i'm thinking of the catholic and old orthodox rite of confession) if not a place to repent? of course, religion mixed with politics, and individuals became, to our tastes, too heavily circumscribed. it would behoove us, now that we've come to the logical conclusion of our blind run from repentance, to take a few steps back. i can think of more than one broker who wouldn't be badly served by a priest and a few hail mary's.