Immoral power versus powerless morality

Imagine a world where the base currency, the coin of the realm, is imagination itself. Give your imagination a little room, for this is really all that money is.

What else could explain the 600-year-old “Rai stones” of Yap, essentially slabs of immobile limestone (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones) still used as the basic currency of the tiny Pacific island? The Yapese certainly have imagination. But is the American greenback, intrinsically just green paper, anything more than a work of collective imagination either? Or consider the Euro, the world’s only currency for a sovereign that doesn’t exist. Now that takes imagination.

This was not the kind of economic thinking present a few days ago in Istanbul when the great figures of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank gathered for their annual conclave. Not that anything was missed there in the week of coverage prepared by Taylan Bilgiç, Emre Deliveli, Evrim Sel, Reeta Paakkinen Hatice Utkan, Öznur Tuna and others at the Daily News. “We kicked ass,” is how Emre, our economics black belt, described our coverage. They surely did. They also let me skip town in favor of another weeklong gathering of economists (plus me and a few other stragglers), this one here in Big Sur.

My meeting was at Esalen, the think tank on the California coast unfortunately best known for nude bathing and expensive massage (www.esalen.org). Esalen is less known for its many policy initiatives, including the U.S.-Soviet program in 1989 that brought a little-known Russian named Boris Yeltsin on his first visit to the United States. You know the rest of that story.

This third meeting of Esalen’s Global Potentials Program was convened by professor-turned-consultant-turned-professor James Ogilvy, now dean of San Francisco’s Presidio School of Management (www.presidioedu.org). Our little assembly, modestly entitled “Writing the Next Page in the History of Capitalism,” was hosted by writer Michael Murphy, who co-founded Esalen back in 1962.

As there were only about 17 of us in attendance, there was plenty of time to watch Hunter Lovins, one of the co-authors of Natural Capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org), pound her fists and rail over late-night bourbon about her recent two months in Afghanistan. Her idea of parachute-ready, containerized mini-telecommunications centers, with satellite links and Internet access, designed to become the cornerstone of post offices, medical centers and schools in every village in the country, is meeting tough opposition, though the University of Colorado is ready to find funding.

Why is it stuck? Because the local powers-that-be are wary of the national distribution of such a powerful tool without vetting warlords and imams and would-be teachers. Since this is impossible, Lovins’ idea remains on the shelf. NATO should consider itself duly forewarned: This Colorado cowgirl with a Ph.D. and an attitude is NOT happy.

Just as sobering was the explanation by pedigreed lawyer, Wharton Business School economist and Ashoka Fellow (www.ashoka.org), Bruce Cahan about how the vast majority of America’s trillion-dollar bank bailout has gone straight to pay executive bonuses. But the massive project in which he is now involved, an effort to create a “high transparency” bank, is reassurance that all is not yet lost. You can read more about Bruce’s work “to reconnect money and meaning” at www.goodbank.info.

Lest you get the idea that this was just a gathering of old lefties, I should mention that Sam Yao, the chairman of Esalen and himself a graduate of the famous University of Chicago, was there to remind us of the essential philosophy of Adam Smith, capitalism’s patron saint. Smith, with his “Invisible Hand,” was seeking a system that delivered prosperity as well as trust, responsibility and honesty. Few at the University of Chicago have actually read Smith, Yao said. Too bad.

Sure, there were a few snickers over book-title suggestions about the collapse of the world financial system being the “Invisible Hand Job.” But we were brought back to respect the promise of a real capitalist order by John Katovich, a top executive at a famous name-brand exchange. Katovich not only imagines a world of hundreds or even thousands of strictly local exchanges enabling small businesses, he is actually nearing the launch of this initiative. Little will be the same in finance when he’s through.

And then there was Kristin Cobble, who is involved in a project at www.nextagenda.org to create a mass-appeal reality game show where the prize is not the slut or the stud but the accolades earned for success in solving a major social issue. Or something like that. Her book-in-progress, “Enoughonomics,” is derived from Bruce’s “Theory of Enoughory.”

I for one was ready to drink hemlock after listening to Laura K. Landy, the president and CEO of the Fannie E. Ripple Foundation, which is front and center in the tribal warfare of health-care reform. Her description of the state of the American health-care system, in the most heavily lobbied fight in the world, will depress you, too. But I didn’t drink the hemlock after all. I think it was former Senator (and 2000 Democratic presidential candidate) Bill Bradley who drew our focus to the conceptual difference between “surviveability” and “survivalism,” an important distinction in these times and a source of optimism.

I got the journalism counseling of my career from Austin’s Emeritus Professor of English Betty Sue Flowers, until recently director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum: “If you want to understand the media, don’t focus on the stories the reporters are working on. Focus on the stories they are working from.” Wish I’d learned that 30 years ago.

I also appreciated the advice on a matter of family ethics from Alyce Faye Eichelberger-Cleese, a London pediatric psychoanalyst who is teaching this term at the Harvard School of Public Health. This advice involved my brothers Charlie and Herb. You see, Herb lives in Morro Bay, about 100 kilometers south of Esalen, while Charlie lives in Sebastopol, some 200 kilometers north. I had planned visits on either side of the conference, and first up was Herb. California was colder than I had expected and I asked if I could borrow a coat. Herb had a cool yachtsman’s jacket that I had my eye on. Only this would do. I promised him I would leave it with Charlie before departing. Should I keep the jacket without Herb’s express permission? Of course, Alyce Faye told me: “He’s your brother. And I guarantee you he doesn’t give a damn about the jacket.”

Our Aristotelian Bram Briggance assured us that if we can imagine a better future for capitalism than that of the model we currently drive, creating it is indeed possible. “It’s kind of like Saint Thomas Aquinas on God,” he offered later, over a bottle of wine. “And don’t forget, it’s just us monkeys.”

Dulcee Murphy, who heads Esalen’s Russia program (yes, the same one that convinced Yeltsin that democracy and markets have a virtue or two), closed a loop for me. It seems Vladimir Posner is one of the few independent journalists left standing in Moscow. I also learned from Dulcee that Posner’s parents and mine belonged to the same… well… club, back in the 1930s. Small world.

I could say so much more. About W. Brian Arthur (www.santafe.edu/arthur), holder of the Schumpeter Prize in Economics, and his take on “gaming the system.” About what markets CAN do for a green economy if we let them, as ecological economist Maggie Winslow explained. About international lawyer Lizbeth Hasse’s take on the mess that mediation has become in America’s legal system.

But Esalen director Mary Ellen Klee kept us focused on the most practical steps we can take. “Like chickens,” she said. And that we all got to Esalen at all was a miracle performed by miracle worker Frank Poletti.

A conference like this, unlike many, did not seek broad conclusions. We reshuffled no quotas, established no targets. We did not debate adequacy ratios. So why were we here? The best summary I can leave you with is the advice of Adam Kahane, a Canadian writer and mediator living in South Africa whose book “Power and Love” is about to hit the shelves (www.reospartners.com/team-view/63). He suggested the counsel of Martin Luther King:

“What (we need to realize is) that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic…” King wrote. “It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

I have a great deal to imagine as I return to Istanbul. You can imagine how sorry I am that I missed the annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank.