Field Notes, vol. 2

Überbros, usury laws, and Jane Austen

Welcome to another edition of Field Notes, a peek inside the chaos that is my brain. Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to make sense out of a crucial chapter in my risk book, writing two essays on the Broligarchs, and watching Jane Austen’s Persuasion with my girls. Naturally I have lots of thoughts about each of these. Let’s dive in, shall we?

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Have you ever found yourself down a rabbit hole that just kept going? Where every time you thought you had glimpsed—if not actually mapped—the bottom, new tunnels came into view, each sprouting their own network of arteries? My friends, I have been swimming in the waters of the Canon law and in particular, the Catholic Church’s prohibitions against usury — aka the interest-based lending that makes the modern economy go round.

Photo by Waranya Mooldee on Unsplash

Why precisely? The very short answer is that risk played a key conceptual role in legitimizing interest-based lending. One way to narrate the history of late medieval/early-modern finance is to track how jurists began to invoke ‘risk’ to justify commercial practices that would have struck earlier eras as usurious. Risk did not always play this role. The Scholastics explicitly rejected the notion that the existence of risk entitled creditors to compensation. I’m interested in how risk was put to work in this way, and in turn, fueled a new sort of market economy that was simultaneously ‘fair’ and deeply unjust.

The historian Lorraine Daston has argued that early-modern legal texts deeply influenced the pioneers of mathematical probability, who devoted much attention to questions of fairness and the equality of conditions between players of various games of chance. In my work I’m focusing on something else: how invocations of risk gave rise to a new basis of inequality. Under the new rules of the game, vast disparities of wealth and privilege could be defended not on the basis of inherited status or tradition, but on that of individual risk profiles. Certain types of people were (to anticipate the language of insurers) bad risks and should be treated accordingly.

There were fascinating voices of dissent, even if they proved no match for the tidal wave of capital. One of the most powerful rebukes came from the Italian theologian Pietro Ballerini (1698-1769), who published several works with his brother, Girolamo. Ballerini appealed to traditional arguments to renounce liberal theologians (chiefly Jesuits) who tried to justify usury, but he also forwarded one based on social utility. “If risk demands pecuniary compensation, the most interest should be taken from the poor, so that great oppression of the neediest will be justified in the name of risk.”¹ Given that payday lenders charge an annual average interest rate of almost 400 percent based on the risk profile of borrowers, I think we can say that Ballerini’s fears have been fully realized.

The Introduction to “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” If this is not a religious document I don’t know what is.

Next up, I’ve been reading Marc Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (which I discuss in Part II of the risk book). For the uninitiated, Andreessen is former software engineer turned entrepreneur and conservative mega-donor whose past ventures include Mosaic and Netscape. In 2009 he co-founded (along with Ben Horowitz) a venture capital fund that invests in both tech startups and established companies. Like other members of the broligarchy who fancy themselves intellectuals but seem to have never taken a single class in history, philosophy, anthropology, politics, or literature, he is fond of sharing ‘insights’ that would have never survived a freshman seminar.

For example: “We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology,” or, “We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet” - paging

Samantha Rose Hill

and her work on how the loneliness epidemic has run parallel to the growth of digital media!

Andreessen espouses a view of economic history that is so naïve and self-serving it might even make Milton Friedman blush. Take the assertion, “Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.” There is little empirical, as opposed to theoretical, evidence to support this claim. The joint-stock companies that created the modern global market were monopolies created by royal charter. Capitalism would not exist without them. And as the contemporary case of Google and Amazon attests, market dynamics also facilitate monopolies unless acted upon by an outside force – in our case, the Federal Trade Commission.

I also enjoyed this bit of self-justificatory nonsense for the notable lack of charitable giving among the tech set:

The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2% of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98% flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus. Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio.

Please please stop lauding these people as special unicorns who can fix our world with their magic coding wands. They may very well possess technical genius, but so do many mechanics. Just because you’re good at engineering problems does not mean you deserve the keys to our democracy.

My real interest in Andreessen though is as a champion of Great Man theory centered around the risk-taking tech entrepreneur who moves fast and breaks things: the Überbro. There is an awful lot of Nietzsche floating around this world, with the regulatory state cast as the purveyor of a new “slave morality” that the tech elite must overcome. The Überbro does not desire comfort and safety (for you at least) but adventure and greatness, and he (it’s always he) knows that genius cannot exist without chaos (he means the suffering and preventable deaths of millions of people who are, again, not him). As Andreessen writes, quoting Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man:

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself…

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest…

One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome…

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse…

Our enemy is… that.

We aspire to be… not that.

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

I’m planning to write much more about Silicon Valley’s dangerous fixation with Nietzsche soon. For now maybe just remember the last group of powerful people whose lazy readings of the philosopher wreaked havoc on humanity.

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Finally, I’ve been watching the 2022 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, starring a fourth-wall destroying Dakota Johnson. Some of you may know that Austen has been one of my favourite writers since high school, when she helped me pass many a boring day (there were no balls and few intrigues in rural South Dakota). Little did I know at the time that Edward Said,² whose work would leave an indelible imprint upon my own, was himself an Austen fan. More on that in a moment.

Illustration from an early edition of Persuasion (1898)

Persuasion centers on Anne Elliot, the daughter of a wealthy but indebted gentleman who had previously been engaged to a young naval officer named Frederick Wentworth. Seven years has passed since she broke off the engagement—her family and friends had objected that he was too poor and undistinguished—when suddenly he reappears on the scene, a bit weathered but still handsome and now rich.

I won’t try to offer a fulsome summary here, as my talents in this regard are wholly inadequate. What the film dramatizes so effectively is how colonial conquest abroad greases the wheels of domestic felicity at home. Set against the backdrop of Anne’s vain family members and the petty concerns of those who need not work to survive, the empire represents novelty, adventure, freedom from social constraints, and above all wealth.

In his chapter about Austen in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said shows us a new way of reading “contrapuntally,” a method that attends to the silences and ellipses, the action we are meant to infer happening just outside the narrative frame. As he writes, one could “look for something like an imperial map in the world of English literature,” the empire existing as “something taken for granted, but—more interestingly—threaded through, forming a vital part of the texture of linguistic and cultural practice.”

By resisting the isolating tendencies of New Criticism, and instead regarding the English novel as a literary artifact that opens out onto imperial geographies, Said envisions a series of “intertwined and overlapping histories” that could be read contrapuntally. As he writes in describing his method, “I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility. A more interesting type of secular interpretation can emerge, altogether more rewarding than the denunciations of the past, the expression of regret for its having ended, or—even more wasteful because violent and far too easy and attractive—the hostility between Western and non-Western cultures that leads to crisis.³

As the canon wars of the 1980s and 90s evolved into the culture wars of today (often led by the same people), it’s worth revisiting Said’s attempt to find a path through the malaise.

1. As cited in John Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury. 290-291.

2. People always seem to forget that Said was first and foremost a scholar of the English novel, and that far from denigrating the Western canon on account of its “problematic” contents, he prescribed a sort of critical engagement grounded in both the appreciation of beauty and the recognition of barbarism present within many of our cultural objects.

3. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. 18-19.