Gresham’s (or was it Aristophanes’) Law

This city, it often seems to me,	That’s how we treat our finest citizens,
treats our best and worthiest citizens	the nobly born, our righteous men,
the way it does our old silver coins,	our best and brightest, the ones well trained
our new gold ones, as well. This money	in music and the dance at the palaestra.
was never counterfeit—no, these coins	Instead we use foreign bronze for everything—
appeared to be the finest coins of all,	useless men from useless fathers, red heads,
the only ones which bore the proper stamp.	men who’ve come here very recently—
Everywhere among barbarians and Greeks	the sort the city at its most negligent
they stood the test. But these we do not use.	would never use in earlier days,
Instead we have our debased coins of bronze,	not even as a scapegoat.
poorly struck some days ago or yesterday.	Aristophanes, The Frogs

Gresham’s law, attributed to the British financier Thomas Gresham (1519-1579), is complicated to explain in an age when we use paper money we can’t exchange for gold. So is the history of this law. But the concept first. To sum it up, if two currencies are present, the “bad” money will drive the “good” money out of circulation. So what is bad money? It’s money artificially overvalued, thus valued by government fiat. Supposing the currency is gold but the government introduces silver to increase the money supply and sets the value of the new coinage in such a manner that the silver coins required to obtain one gold coin aren’t actually worth what gold coin would fetch as gold. We’ve come a long ways since. In this day and age debasing the currency is handled in a much more sophisticated way. The money supply is increased simply by printing more money—the effect of which is to reduce the purchasing power of bills in circulation or held in virtual form in banks. The result is essentially the same.

The history is also interesting. According to a modern-day scholar, George Selgin, Gresham never framed such a law. It was done by the economist Henry Dunning McLeod (1821-1902). But long before McLeod “borrowed” a famous name, the same concept had been articulated by no less a figure than Copernicus (1473-1543), before him by philosopher Nicole Oresme (1320-1382) and a Muslim contemporary of his, Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), who wrote about the Mamluk dynasty—which inflated its economy by stamping out huge quantities of copper coinage.

And, as my quote shows, Aristophanes (446 BC-386 BC) came in even earlier. It delighted me, therefore, to discover that the first framer approached the subject as I did this morning in looking up this law. Aristophanes enlarged the concept, in framing it, to the wider view of human affairs, commenting, as it were, on politics and on pop culture. What goes around, comes around—but what comes around may not have the same value as what had gone around.

Our Games Teach Us Pop Culture

We were playing Bananagrams again. I was finished with a perfectly square 10 x 10 structure requiring only the placement of a Z. After long staring I finally put it in. The partial image here shows where I put it. The top horizontal is PROKARYOTS, the left vertical is POTENTIALS, the middle word is TACHOMETER. The CHE is, of course, the first name of someone called Guevara.

I showed the puzzle to Brigitte, who is a quick study, mind, and instantly she said “RZA? What is that? OZ I recognize as the Wizard, but RZA?” — “That’s RCA as they might write it in Russia,” I said, both laughing and blushing a little.

It’s just a game…

But then, later, I went down to see if there is an abbreviation like that, something that isn’t all that obscure. Googled RZA. Well! You learn something every day. The very first item Google presented was a Wikipedia article (here) on Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, described as “an American Grammy-winning music producer, author, rapper, and occasional actor, director, and screenwriter.” It turns out that RZA is his stage name. Our Bananagrams rules are that the word must be in the dictionary or be notable in the culture so that one can readily write a clue for it, as in a crossword puzzle. The clue for RZA is therefore “Stage name of Rapper Robert Diggs.”

It’s just a deadly serious and tense game around here, each of us peering over ramparts of dictionaries…

Transformational Dynamics

In the 1930s, 40s, when I stepped or, rather, crawled onto the scene in Europe (but it was then the same pretty much everywhere) appropriate behavior had to be learned and learned the hard way. Code words are upbringing, manners, etiquette. Kinderstube in German, which simply means “children’s room” signaled where it all began. It was already there at the dinner table where rules guided the use of cutlery and “children are seen, not heard.” We had to learn the habits of society; it didn’t take place spontaneously. But these were habits. The applicable code words here are customs, traditions. Worth noting is that habits can be formed without much inward understanding of the whys and wherefores that lie behind them. My mother, fortunately, made sure that we understood more than simply behavior; she dug up the roots of it; we knew why it mattered. She knew full well that using one hand for the fork, another for the knife, was arbitrary—and that manners at table had a transcending meaning of which these arbitrary signs were simply symbolic tokens. We knew that, even growing up. This somewhat subtle distinction has strong bearing on what follows.

In the conservative lexicon (thinking of Burke now), tradition is understood as the slowly formed deposit of a collective value. At the broad social level, thus at the level of habit and behavior, customs and morals are the same—as the etymology of the word (mores, customs) indicates. The fact that traditions preserve bad habits as well as good is the source of the tension between traditions and the urge to break them. I view the subordination of women as one of these bad habits.

Long ago and far away it genuinely pleased me to encounter the word enantiodromia, a coinage by Carl Jung, derived from Heraclitus, meaning “counter-running” and used by Jung to indicate the tendency in nature, certainly in society, of things to morph into their opposites: growth becomes decline, decline eventually transforms into growth. Why is it that foreign words derived from people long, long dead have a curious authority? Why doesn’t opposite-tending have the same clout as enantiodromia? Is it a deeply rooted respect for…tradition? Probably. But the key to the Greek as well as the mundane English version of it is that this tendency is natural, thus that it belongs to a certain level of reality, the habitual, the behavioristic. It does not pertain to the higher level that my Mother never tired of linking to its mundane expression.

Easing the strictures of social behavior has been a powerful tendency throughout the years of my life—and always framed in positive ways, formally as “Question authority” and in thousands of informal ways relating to dress, language, the content of books and dramas, sexual norms, etc. Just how far this opposite-tending force has pushed its way to the front of the line—since my childhood—came unpleasantly to view last night. I was upstairs reading, late, when Brigitte called me. Quickly. You’ve got to see this. And we watched the last ten minutes of a reality show called Jersey Shore. Stuck in the past as we are, very abstemious re popular culture, neither of us had seen or heard of this phenomenon until last night. Enough said. We’ve come a long ways, baby…

But enantiodromia is natural, not human, as it were. Persistent and genuine pursuit of excellence and virtue does not naturally lead to moral collapse. Nor does persistent and genuine practice of vice naturally lead to virtue. Hence mindless liberation leads to license, license to decadence, and decadence, ultimately, to disorder—and disorder, as history shows, can last and last and last for many, many centuries. The turn-around actually requires a ray of transcendental light to fall upon the stricken population from on high. It isn’t natural or automatic. It is, as the philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev used to say, a kind of vertical descent of grace transecting the horizontal dimension of nature.

What We Don't See

Somewhere in his astute discussions of the “stream of consciousness,” a phrase of his own invention, I think, William James notes the almost sovereign role of attention which, at will, picks some element of this stream on which to bestow its focus. James is often read as if he equated the “stream” with consciousness itself, but he really describes two distinct phenomena at work. I am at times reminded of the power of attention to draw near, and also to shut out, when I encounter certain puzzles or problems. The other day I saw a quiz on another site (Rebecca Writes) that I occasionally visit. It tests your knowledge of the borders of States of the Union. The quiz is here. I only scored five out of ten: obviously I’m not smart geographically despite thinking otherwise. But every time the subject arises, I flunk again. The other day, reading an old history book, I couldn’t for the life of me locate Sidon and Tyre. I should have known: Carthage was settled from there, and the settlers were Phoenicians, hence they came from Lebanon. Another great geography test is here, hat tip to Monique for that one.

The passing of Michael Jackson powerfully reminded me that, despite my arrival in the United States in 1951, I’ve managed to miss the whole flamboyant flowering of psychedelic pop culture in my own times—except to the extent that I couldn’t avoid it—including phenomena like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and many other greats. Out of that ocean the only figures I’m able to focus are Bruce Springsteen on the male and Enya, Joan Baez, and Judy Collins on the female side. I recognize the faces of perhaps a hundred or more actors and actresses—and have definite ideas whether or not I like them—but I can only name one: Meryl Streep.

Sports is a desert. I only know a little about baseball, but that amounts to a small cluster of atoms—this despite The Dickson Baseball Dictionary within reach of where I sit. My knowledge of flowers and trees is even more abysmal—but I do regularly visit Jim’s Hostas, aka the hosta library, just to get lost in gardening reveries.

Yes. We see those things we choose to see. Lord! The world is limitless. And you do have to make choices. But we also actively construct our ignorance.