Moral Economics and WEATHER
This week: a conversation with Zachary Carter about John Maynard Keynes. Hear it at 2 pm today, or anytime at our site.
What’s to be done, on a grand scale? What’s worked or failed in the past (on the grandest possible scale)? On this week’s show, we’re thinking about a socially conscious, morally concerned economist who saw in his field a way to produce changes that address widespread catastrophes.
That economist is John Maynard Keynes, and on this show we hear from from Zachary Carter, the author of the new Keynes biography now getting rave reviews; Carter tells the story of a once-in-a-century kind of thinker, a philosopher who was close friends with Virginia Woolf and who saw economics as a discipline that could serve moral, social, and aesthetic good. On our show, Carter says:
Keynes is a very unusual economist, perhaps unique among economists, in that he did not look at the economic world really mathematically (the way that we’ve come to understand economics over the past century or so). His chief concerns were not things like economic growth or GDP or even the unemployment rate. He was concerned with social stability and social harmony and also international stability, international harmony, the ability for peoples to hang together and not fight with one another.
And I think if he were looking at the world today, even before the pandemic, there were a lot of alarm bells that I think would be going off for him, far beyond deficit spending or unemployment benefits or specific policies that would be used to address a lot of the problems that we’ve seen arising since since the pandemic. He’d be worried about things like climate change. He’d be worried about inequality. He’d be worried, be very worried, about the scope of U.S. military action.
Watch: Whose Streets?
Since the killing of George Floyd, we’ve all seen a mass movement to reject police violence and racist inequality, and it’s a movement that expands upon so many earlier instances of protests and rebellions. To reflect on the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, from several years ago, watch the film Whose Streets?, directed by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe wrote, ““Whose Streets?” gives us more than enough stories from people not often enough heard, and their refusal to remain silent is invigorating.”
Read the Guardian’s interview with the directors, Folayan and Davis:
Coming to St Louis and seeing how blatant and unapologetic this discrimination was, it really kind of peeled back whatever filter that I had left as far as being optimistic about why these things are happening,” Folayan said. “[It made me feel] there is nowhere that I can be completely safe and there’s no one who I can really rely on to protect me in the event that I would need some kind of protection. There’s no number that I can call and truly believe that I’ll be safe when they come.
Read: About the Dust Bowl
Looking at a bleak future, we wonder what others have done when facing natural and social calamity. The Great Depression had its own bio-disaster, not coronavirus but something also extremely deadly: the Dust Bowl, the period of dust storms and drought through the American Plains, which both worsened and was worsened by the Depression. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck describes the Joad family’s flight from the Dust Bowl to California. In Steinbeck’s novel, we read about a place where
[h]ouses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes.
The Dust Bowl reality was often closer to a horror movie than a John Ford movie, though (but the John Ford Grapes of Wrath still must be seen). In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan describes the Dust Bowl as an almost apocalyptic scene.
Cattle went blind and suffocated. When farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand. Horses ran madly against the storms. Children coughed and gagged, dying of something the doctors called “dust pneumonia.” In desperation, some families gave away their children. The instinctive act of hugging a loved one or shaking someone’s hand could knock two people down, for the static electricity from the dusters was so strong.
Support us on Patreon and Hear Jenny Offill
A celebrated new novel about all kinds of widespread breakdown is Jenny Offill’s Weather. And over at patreon.com/radioopensource, Adam Colman interviews Offill about how fiction responds to that kind of breakdown. It’s this week’s installment of our Patreon miniseries, Close Reading at a Social Distance.
Weather includes rumination on philosophers who had their own ideas about dust, or about particles, or, more specifically about atoms; the form of the novel is itself atomized, fragmented. And for philosophers like Democritus and Lucretius, things breaking down into fragments and atoms was just an intriguing fact of our reality, in which forms exist as merely evanescent instances in a continual process of things always turning into new conglomerates of atoms.
The idea is sort of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and with perhaps the reassurance (or radically negative opposite-of-reassurance) that, as King Lear says in a Lucretian moment, “Nothing will come of nothing.”
Go to patreon.org/radioopensource, sign up to become a patron of Open Source, and hear the conversation with Jenny Offill and more!
This week’s ephemeral library
Thomas Pynchon on the Watts Rebellion. Philip V. McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris on de-funding police and funding “emergency response programs that don’t kill black people.” James Baldwin on racism and ignorance. The rapper Killer Mike urges calm in Atlanta. Cornel West with Anderson Cooper: America is a Failed Experiment.
