Weight Counterweight

I like to think that I am a balanced person. My body is symmetrical. My eyes, ears, hands, and feet work in partnership. Beyond my own body, the natural world provides me other things--the climate of the atmosphere, oxygen as a complement to the carbon dioxide I exhale, and gravity that accepts the force of my weight. Natural scientific realities such as these from the time I was born initiated me into the world as a physical creature so that I would learn to use by body, the physical, even as I think. Sometimes, when I'm deep in thought, I will assist my process by doing something with my hands. I love early morning walks. They usually produce a small essay. I love this advice from author Raymond Inmon: "If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man [or woman!] when he [or she] goes for a walk."

However, it seems that in the western part of the world we haven't really begun to acknowledge the role of the body in thinking and in creating. Some would even say that we are strangers to our physical selves. We create and recreate what we think of as culture from a predominance of mental activity alienated often from the physical. "I think therefore I am," according to philosopher Descartes.

If this is true, then one could find I think in studying different aspects of western cultures, this same alienation that I speak of. This week, for instance, my students read "The Gold Standard" by Thomas Frank (Harper's, July 2011). The essay basically is a cynical response to the current interest by some in investing in gold as a safety measure against an anticipated eventual collapse in the value of the dollar. The larger concern of such persons is not merely a belief that the American economy is in decline but that when America abandoned under President Franklin Roosevelt the gold standard that once served as a reference point for the dollar the nation moved toward a wholly different kind of economy, one which some believe is doomed for failure much greater than what we have seen so far.

I am no economist, but as a worker and taxpayer I certainly do participate in the economy. One of my earliest clues that the nation's economy was headed for short-term disaster was when developers first started in the early '90s tearing down small forests and plowing up fields that had just been harvested months earlier to build the three and four thousand square-foot homes that some refer to as McMansions. This obvious aspersion on the realization of many Americans' dream in truth contains an underlying criticism of an economy growing too quickly or of what has been called "an Avatar economy." In other words, from the beginning of the housing boom, people, myself included, were suspicious of whether there was really any reference, any substance beyond even the bricks and mortar of the very large houses, to substantiate or justify the growth of the real estate market. Were Americans, in the last twenty years, really doing so well that the middle class was holding steady and their standard of living was appropriately increasing?

As with most questions, I began to answer this one from my own personal experience and observations. Most people I knew were during the boom years relying heavily on credit including popular home equity loans that helped put their homes under water even before the bubble burst. Americans are still of course using and abusing credit, and so it seems that a second point of our modern economy is plastic, working in concert with fiat money, i.e. money without a material check (as in check and balance), and American consumers who place great faith in the idea that this system works constitute the third point. If the critics of the late twentieth century real estate game aptly refer to Wall Street bankers as high stakes gamblers--they gambled on tens of thousands of realistically worthless mortgages--the metaphor might be applied to us commoners as well. Investments that we made were in relative terms just as high and, in the end, just as costly.

The question now is have we come to our senses. And, for me, this question doesn't merely ask if we understand that some things the market puts before our faces are not affordable, and, if a critical mass of Americans decide not to consume, then an economy that has come to rely on spending really will be in trouble. No, a deeper question for me is if the American middle class is ready to think not just with its minds but with its bodies as well. Doing so not only might help us to avoid a whole bunch of troubles that the mind gets itself into but remembering the physical might also impact so many other aspects of our culture--for example, education.