I completely agree with the anti-crypto reasoning and have the same thoughts on bitcoin (which is why I sold all of mine a number of years ago!).
One thing I think is overlooking key truths in your writing is the idea that money is necessarily an IOU.
I can accept the idea that the barter->money move is a historical fabrication, but I still think the underlying narrative is valid to an extent, that money is grounded in value before it becomes money (ontologically if not historically).
After all there’s cross-state, cross-cultural recognition of the desirability of gold or silver or copper, and when Nero diluted the coins, I’m sure the people were not naive, Greshem’s law always comes into play, and prices do rise too. So your paragraph about that seems incomplete. Trade between Rome and other nations did exist after all.
That said I acknowledge gold/silver weren’t valued by people for their use alone, and I can see that it is mixed in with fiat aspects too.
Even so the aspect I’d emphasize with gold and silver is that they are real. And not just in terms of physical weight but *symbolic* weight. They shine, they naturally emanate preciousness. I don’t think that it’s superficial or superstitious to think that. Ancient peoples did think gold and silver were valuable in and of themselves, for the most part. I’m sure it gets murky and this line is not definite, but I think there’s an important truth in here.
Perhaps to me it’s that gold and silver reflect an innocent world that is ruled by God, who created gold and silver, instead of a world that is ruled by the state, which created banking systems and structures. Or the anon postmodernist, who created bitcoin.
I’ll summarize my view this way: Gold and silver are a God-given trustlessness. Bitcoin is a godless trustlessness.
And yet, godly trustlessness itself is not for the purpose of abstracting us from communion - it’s a gift to facilitate it. It holds us to account to reality, to God. Accounting is good, of course. We must weigh things to act with wisdom. And God himself will hold us to account before we enter the new city of God, where perhaps the true new money is not an abstraction but a facilitator of communion! God only knows.
Good reflections. I did cut short the "history and nature of money" section just so I could get this article finished. This stuff is a major active research area for me and I know I'll do a big project on it in the medium term, sort of coming together as my next big thing after the basketball video. Anyway,
It is true that gold and silver are intrinsically valuable, and that this is from God. However I don't think that it follows that to use them as a commodity currency is from God. We know that God made gold and silver to be beautiful. You can make jewellery and sacred items out of them and even a big golden calf and these things are beautiful. Now to make gold into a commodity medium of exchange is to use it not for its beauty but for its abstract future use towards beauty. That is to say, we know that gold will always be desirable because it is beautiful and you can make beautiful things out of it — and thus we use it to represent desire itself. I don't say that this is wrong necessarily but I do not think it intuitively follows from the nature of the God-given beautiful thing, and thus I do not see it as God-given.
And certainly there would be no call for this in a human-scale tribal society, since on this scale IOUs are more efficient, and there are all kinds of ways we can owe each other. It does simply seem to be the case that commodity money follows from the agricultural state and its invention of currency. Now, you don't really challenge this point but you say that money must have some value that precedes it, "ontologically if not historically." Now I am curious about this statement. Personally I hold a historical ontology and I'm not sure that anything could be ontologically so and yet not historically so.
Certainly to develop my intuition that all money is somehow fiat would take a lot more evidence and argumentative work, which I have not done in this article. The section is very underdeveloped. I basically just make the assertion. The denarius example may demonstrate that there is a bit of a false dichotomy here. As the denarius was debased and it had less and less silver in it, it also coincided or correlated with the image on the denarius being a less trustworthy Emperor!
The state's claim is historical, which is necessarily mythic. If you are operating on the level of mythic speech, and if these coins that are being issued with the face of the king are a form of mytho-historical speech, then it is natural that you would want to make them shine. The same way that we use golden things in the liturgy. If there is something important, you want to give it the best presentation. You want to honour it. It would be inappropriate to make such a grand claim with anything less than the best material.
I think the fact that gold and silver are intrinsically valuable does not necessarily negate my intuition that fiat is primary. If you are making a promise of this scale, then you will naturally want to etch it in gold.
So in summary although gold and silver are from God, the commodity form is not necessarily from God because it does not follow from those things. And all of this stuff is connected to civilisation and literacy. I think that the commodity form, being abstract, is a very literate way of approaching something. I think a pre-literate person would have a lot more trouble and perhaps wouldn't think in these terms at all.
To look at a piece of gold that they have found and instead of saying, "Oh what beautiful gold. This is the best" saying "This is one instance of the pattern of gold; this belongs to the set of gold" You see that it's a Platonic way of thinking and as McLuhan teaches us it's no coincidence that we get Plato's philosophy right in the first few generations of Greek literacy.
So I would argue that the symbolic weight and the intrinsic value and beauty of gold and silver are scaffolding the mytho-historical promise made by the agricultural literate state when it issues fiat currency. If I'm right that that is the direction that it went in historically, I think it also goes in that direction ontologically. I would be curious for you to expand on your claim that something could be so ontologically and yet not historically.
Using gold and silver for their beauty, appreciating their beauty, is innocent, but using gold and silver as an abstract representation of value itself is certainly not innocent. It is very shrewd, and somewhat - although not completely - arbitrary. There is surely something of the Fall in it.
Certainly I do not lack a sensitivity to the primacy of gold. Hence why I made that idyllic painting of gold panning the cover photo of the article. There is an innocence to it, although the gold prospectors came for greed, not beauty, but there is an innocence to greed, too.
I will make one side comment I thought of in relation to your point of platonic thought
It always annoys me when people say “essentially” to limit things. It is the logic of system thinking, which conforms ineffable things into patterns.
But there is a correct form of this, I think most notably described by St. Maximus, when referring to the logoi of things.
This way when you speak of the pattern of things, you speak on the order of God’s systems, which are rightly ordered technical articulations.
As opposed to our technical articulations - the way we name the animals after the Fall - which always limit and bound that which is to that which is convenient for us.
Nonetheless in this fallen world we must do this thing, to survive, and if we do it with purity, then God shall establish our efforts, and our meaningless labour in this meaningless world is redeemed
Yea but there’s a difference from doing historical archeology work to dig up an underlying ontology and receiving that ontology through participation in a living tradition. Even our tradition or understanding of history is only done in the present through what we’ve received, and so we should look at historical record through the reception of history in the present, which implies a participative epistemology before a historical one, which is the spirit behind my notion there
Yeah I like that, but I think the participative epistemology is also historical: the forms we participate in are given by our ancestors, we participate, and in doing so we change them, and then pass them on to our heirs. This is pure Rosenstock-Huessy stuff. So it's subtly the wrong idea to say our understanding of history is "only" through what we've received in the present: our life in the present is absolutely historically mediated on every level: we are always actively participating in past and future
In this particular case, since we live under an agricultural literate state, we can understand the nature of such a thing inchoately before we "dig up" any sumerian tablets. Because we are in history and it is in us...any form that we participate in precedes us, and we are changed by our partaking in these forms.
I completely agree with the anti-crypto reasoning and have the same thoughts on bitcoin (which is why I sold all of mine a number of years ago!).
One thing I think is overlooking key truths in your writing is the idea that money is necessarily an IOU.
I can accept the idea that the barter->money move is a historical fabrication, but I still think the underlying narrative is valid to an extent, that money is grounded in value before it becomes money (ontologically if not historically).
After all there’s cross-state, cross-cultural recognition of the desirability of gold or silver or copper, and when Nero diluted the coins, I’m sure the people were not naive, Greshem’s law always comes into play, and prices do rise too. So your paragraph about that seems incomplete. Trade between Rome and other nations did exist after all.
That said I acknowledge gold/silver weren’t valued by people for their use alone, and I can see that it is mixed in with fiat aspects too.
Even so the aspect I’d emphasize with gold and silver is that they are real. And not just in terms of physical weight but *symbolic* weight. They shine, they naturally emanate preciousness. I don’t think that it’s superficial or superstitious to think that. Ancient peoples did think gold and silver were valuable in and of themselves, for the most part. I’m sure it gets murky and this line is not definite, but I think there’s an important truth in here.
Perhaps to me it’s that gold and silver reflect an innocent world that is ruled by God, who created gold and silver, instead of a world that is ruled by the state, which created banking systems and structures. Or the anon postmodernist, who created bitcoin.
I’ll summarize my view this way: Gold and silver are a God-given trustlessness. Bitcoin is a godless trustlessness.
And yet, godly trustlessness itself is not for the purpose of abstracting us from communion - it’s a gift to facilitate it. It holds us to account to reality, to God. Accounting is good, of course. We must weigh things to act with wisdom. And God himself will hold us to account before we enter the new city of God, where perhaps the true new money is not an abstraction but a facilitator of communion! God only knows.
Good reflections. I did cut short the "history and nature of money" section just so I could get this article finished. This stuff is a major active research area for me and I know I'll do a big project on it in the medium term, sort of coming together as my next big thing after the basketball video. Anyway,
It is true that gold and silver are intrinsically valuable, and that this is from God. However I don't think that it follows that to use them as a commodity currency is from God. We know that God made gold and silver to be beautiful. You can make jewellery and sacred items out of them and even a big golden calf and these things are beautiful. Now to make gold into a commodity medium of exchange is to use it not for its beauty but for its abstract future use towards beauty. That is to say, we know that gold will always be desirable because it is beautiful and you can make beautiful things out of it — and thus we use it to represent desire itself. I don't say that this is wrong necessarily but I do not think it intuitively follows from the nature of the God-given beautiful thing, and thus I do not see it as God-given.
And certainly there would be no call for this in a human-scale tribal society, since on this scale IOUs are more efficient, and there are all kinds of ways we can owe each other. It does simply seem to be the case that commodity money follows from the agricultural state and its invention of currency. Now, you don't really challenge this point but you say that money must have some value that precedes it, "ontologically if not historically." Now I am curious about this statement. Personally I hold a historical ontology and I'm not sure that anything could be ontologically so and yet not historically so.
Certainly to develop my intuition that all money is somehow fiat would take a lot more evidence and argumentative work, which I have not done in this article. The section is very underdeveloped. I basically just make the assertion. The denarius example may demonstrate that there is a bit of a false dichotomy here. As the denarius was debased and it had less and less silver in it, it also coincided or correlated with the image on the denarius being a less trustworthy Emperor!
The state's claim is historical, which is necessarily mythic. If you are operating on the level of mythic speech, and if these coins that are being issued with the face of the king are a form of mytho-historical speech, then it is natural that you would want to make them shine. The same way that we use golden things in the liturgy. If there is something important, you want to give it the best presentation. You want to honour it. It would be inappropriate to make such a grand claim with anything less than the best material.
I think the fact that gold and silver are intrinsically valuable does not necessarily negate my intuition that fiat is primary. If you are making a promise of this scale, then you will naturally want to etch it in gold.
So in summary although gold and silver are from God, the commodity form is not necessarily from God because it does not follow from those things. And all of this stuff is connected to civilisation and literacy. I think that the commodity form, being abstract, is a very literate way of approaching something. I think a pre-literate person would have a lot more trouble and perhaps wouldn't think in these terms at all.
To look at a piece of gold that they have found and instead of saying, "Oh what beautiful gold. This is the best" saying "This is one instance of the pattern of gold; this belongs to the set of gold" You see that it's a Platonic way of thinking and as McLuhan teaches us it's no coincidence that we get Plato's philosophy right in the first few generations of Greek literacy.
So I would argue that the symbolic weight and the intrinsic value and beauty of gold and silver are scaffolding the mytho-historical promise made by the agricultural literate state when it issues fiat currency. If I'm right that that is the direction that it went in historically, I think it also goes in that direction ontologically. I would be curious for you to expand on your claim that something could be so ontologically and yet not historically.
Using gold and silver for their beauty, appreciating their beauty, is innocent, but using gold and silver as an abstract representation of value itself is certainly not innocent. It is very shrewd, and somewhat - although not completely - arbitrary. There is surely something of the Fall in it.
Certainly I do not lack a sensitivity to the primacy of gold. Hence why I made that idyllic painting of gold panning the cover photo of the article. There is an innocence to it, although the gold prospectors came for greed, not beauty, but there is an innocence to greed, too.
Historical happenings don’t dictate ontology to me, although they can be informative, just as you can learn about God through creation.
If history preceded ontology, then it’d be very difficult to understand anything, since we live in the history of the Fall.
That’s why we can base our epistemology on Scripture and the reception of wisdom from God passed down through Christian tradition
I will make one side comment I thought of in relation to your point of platonic thought
It always annoys me when people say “essentially” to limit things. It is the logic of system thinking, which conforms ineffable things into patterns.
But there is a correct form of this, I think most notably described by St. Maximus, when referring to the logoi of things.
This way when you speak of the pattern of things, you speak on the order of God’s systems, which are rightly ordered technical articulations.
As opposed to our technical articulations - the way we name the animals after the Fall - which always limit and bound that which is to that which is convenient for us.
Nonetheless in this fallen world we must do this thing, to survive, and if we do it with purity, then God shall establish our efforts, and our meaningless labour in this meaningless world is redeemed
Oops I hit send by mistake. Anyway you make good points, I will come back to this because I’m realizing I need a short power nap rn :-)
The Incarnation and the tradition of the Church are both historical: in fact, they are history itself!
Yea but there’s a difference from doing historical archeology work to dig up an underlying ontology and receiving that ontology through participation in a living tradition. Even our tradition or understanding of history is only done in the present through what we’ve received, and so we should look at historical record through the reception of history in the present, which implies a participative epistemology before a historical one, which is the spirit behind my notion there
Yeah I like that, but I think the participative epistemology is also historical: the forms we participate in are given by our ancestors, we participate, and in doing so we change them, and then pass them on to our heirs. This is pure Rosenstock-Huessy stuff. So it's subtly the wrong idea to say our understanding of history is "only" through what we've received in the present: our life in the present is absolutely historically mediated on every level: we are always actively participating in past and future
In this particular case, since we live under an agricultural literate state, we can understand the nature of such a thing inchoately before we "dig up" any sumerian tablets. Because we are in history and it is in us...any form that we participate in precedes us, and we are changed by our partaking in these forms.