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The Guest Lecture
Riker, Martin

Epigraph
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There is no reason why we should not feel ourselves free to be bold, to be open, to experiment, to take action, to try the possibilities of things. And over against us, standing in the path, there is nothing but a few old gentlemen tightly buttoned-up in their frock coats, who only need to be treated with a little friendly disrespect and bowled over like ninepins. John Maynard Keynes, 1929
1
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I will keep my busy thoughts trapped in the dungeon of my overactive imagination, where no one else will be made to suffer them.
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this moment is volatile and exciting, a period of uncertainty that will involve growing pains but that will ultimately find us in a more mature stage of human existence.
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in a hundred years, your real problem will be that you’re bored. The permanent problem is not poverty or scarcity or robots. The permanent problem is life.
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The rich man of his day still saw money as an end, not a means, and found meaning in a constantly deferred future rather than the here and now. “For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day,” Keynes says, paraphrasing one of the queens in one of the Lewis Carroll books. Whereas we, his presumptive grandchildren, will find meaning in life itself. We will become better people and learn to help each other more.
2
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you were more interested in proposing a utopian space for thinking through how the world could be different than in fastidiously predicting what would actually come to pass. And if that’s my point, if what I’m arguing is your intent, then it would help if my audience had a sense of who you were. Because the person you were says a lot about how you saw the world, the ethics behind your economics, the importance you placed on public discourse, the importance you placed on all kinds of things.
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“I think, Abigail, as a general rule, in every instance and in all places, you should talk only an eighth as long as you feel like you want to. An eighth at the very most. No one will notice what you’ve left out, because it will never have been there in the first place, and your listeners will attend to your words better if the words themselves are fewer. You were born into an era of overload. Leaving things out is the great unmastered art form of your age.”
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The big difference, then, the saving difference, though it is not a very saving difference, it is more like a sad pathetic difference, but the defining difference between my shortcomings and Keynes’s is that mine have hardly ever imposed themselves on anyone. My ideas have not remade economic theory, or settled geopolitical disputes, or helped establish international cooperative monetary oversight institutions. My prejudices and presumptions have had pitifully little effect on anything at all. So I guess there’s that to feel good about.
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he had no way of knowing, for example, that TV would arrive, filling our days with its nonsense. Then the internet. How mass psychological manipulation by the advertising industry would amp up the consumerist side of our natures, causing us to care so much more and so vapidly about what other people have. The rampant increase in per capita consumption. The endless distractions of modern life. The rise of the military-industrial complex and how it would soak up our surpluses in the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction. Of weapons of any size of destruction. He did not foresee the “Great Acceleration,” which only really got going after he died. The explosive expansion not just of technology but of all kinds of Earth-altering activities, how capitalism would reshape the planet, the environmental and social and economic costs that climate catastrophe would impose unequally but without exception around the world. The down-the-road consequences of endless growth. How the income inequality caused by globalization would render traditional political structures increasingly susceptible to the very sort of authoritarian takeover bids that keep popping up these days.
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Who seem so much surer of themselves and their place in the world than you ever feel
3
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Now and then, one of them wheezes out some fusty rule or rotten intellection, poisoning the air with the rarified mouth-stench unique to this species, the smugly entrenched academic.
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I wanted to compare two Keyneses: the creative improvisational human he was in life and the institutional symbol of unchecked governmental expenditure that history has made of him. I wanted to talk about the problem of translation, how an idea clear in concept never remains so in practice, how social and economic forces remake ideas in their own image, how it’s not just capitalism that does this, it’s any system at all, and how Keynes and his ideas were a poignant example precisely because, even though he was in his own way radically optimistic, he wasn’t some dippy idealist. He was deeply pragmatic. He devoted the greatest part of his energy to solving actual problems in the world.
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for too long you’d held in your head many self-romanticizing notions about your position as an outsider, notions that allowed you to feel sure of yourself and important to yourself as long as you were never forced to share them—the notions—with anyone else? That as long as you didn’t share this side of yourself with anyone else, it was all unadulterated potential, never forced to perform, never exposed to judgment. That some glimmer of this ‘self’ had materialized long enough to write that article but this self was not really you, it didn’t sufficiently encompass what you care about or what you want to say. Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say. You know these things in your mind, or think you know them, and you are capable of saying these things or writing them, but the moment you do, you immediately doubt them. You are capable of being many selves but the moment you commit to one, it becomes an imposter, a dummy to dress up and roll out into the world in your place. And you hate the dummy, hate everything it says, even though it only says what you give it to say, and even though the words you give it to say are the best you can come up with. Which means, must mean, that the fault is not with the dummy but with you. That you are not as brilliant as you’ve always wanted to believe. As you’ve needed to believe. That it is easy to be impressed with yourself in private but another thing entirely to project a public self into the world—that this is a skill they don’t teach in school, yet so so so many people seem to have learned it. How did all these people, effortless at parties, easy on social media, how did they learn to be public? There must have been a moment, an afternoon in elementary school, when an imposing gray eminence showed up to class and passed out everyone’s public personas while you were in the bathroom. And here you are decades later still forced to pretend you’d been in class that day, that like everyone else you received your persona, that you’ve displayed it proudly on your wall ever since. Perhaps the real revelation today is not that these men seated before you wanted you to fail, even if that is obviously the case. Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention.
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No one in reality is blaming you for anything. Your family is not blaming you. I, who am dead, am certainly not blaming you. And disappointing as it may be, even your colleagues are no longer thinking about you at all. Only you are blaming you. Only you are questioning your legitimacy, placing yourself in this witness box ostensibly to tell your side of things, to grant yourself justice, if only in your mind. The trouble being that it’s here, in your imagination, the place where you ought to feel most safe and free, that you are in fact most weighed down by doubt and fear. Part of you clearly thinks they are right about you, even though they can’t be, they have to be wrong or else your life’s work is pointless, and that is a level of personal negation you cannot possibly survive. No, there’s no room for that, no good it would do.
5
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It was the birth of democracy that turned speech-making into a career, and the original careerists of democratic speech-making were called the Sophists, from which term we derive the word “sophistry,” which is even more universally maligned than “rhetoric.” It means, or has come to mean, manipulative, deceptive language. “Clever speeches.” It’s a slur built right into the English language,
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and latched on to whatever opportunities presented themselves. Looking back, it’s easy to pretend that I chose the path that led here, but I know it was more passive than that. I didn’t lack courage, but what I really had was a sort of faith in the future that resembled, more than anything, a total absence of strategy. I was ready to be steered. It wasn’t books or ideas that steered me, though. It wasn’t goals and plans. It wasn’t anything I discovered on my own that brought me here. It was people who I met at different times in different places. I won’t say at the right or wrong times, just times.
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It was that wandering Abby with her peculiar predilections occasionally stumbling upon someone who showed her what it was like to live with purpose. It was people with purpose, or with what looked to me like purpose, providing models of how to meaningfully exist in this world. I suppose that was the future I pictured for myself: meaningful presence. Somehow, someday, I would become myself for the world, and someday, somehow, that would matter.
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when charged with inconsistency, quipped, “When I get new evidence I change my mind. What do you do?”
6
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I am feeling existentially attuned, lying here in the dark, mulling it all over, and my natural inclination is to look back on things, the past. To trace a storyline through the past in order to explain to myself how I’ve ended up where I am.
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I was reading Feminist Economics, discovering that larger world, and feeling frankly pretty impressed with myself, even if part of me could never stop second-guessing, self-doubting, the perpetual wrench in my personal reinvention.
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as I was leaving, she handed me a copy of Keynes’s Essays in Persuasion from a pile on her desk. Keynes who I thought I already knew, but whose writing I’d never actually read, an embarrassingly superficial sort of knowledge, though if I’m being honest, that’s probably true even now about most of my so-called knowledge of writers I so-called know. “You’d like this,” she said, “and I have an extra.” Since I had no idea how important that book would become for me, I didn’t think much of it at the time. But if I’m counting up formative life moments, obviously that one counts.
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Maybe the value of memories, as with any other commodity, is a function of scarcity. When you first notice that you have some, you have relatively few, so they seem to matter more. You are fascinated with the fact that you have them at all. Self-awareness. Growing up. But as you begin to accumulate memories with the years, their relative utility diminishes. You grow into a more realistic appreciation of their worth, then eventually even that dwindles. Finally, there are so many memories, and you are so used to having them around, so accustomed to their plentitude, that your demand curve approaches zero, and your past, your entire personal history, seems hardly worth the effort of remembering at all. Did I just discover an economic explanation for why young people are self-absorbed? And why old people can’t be bothered?
7
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in this sleepless vigil that I rationally know is of no consequence but that feels like a final accounting, a cataloging of all things, as if I’ve arrived at some profound existential destination rather than just a particularly acute bout of hyperactivity for the busy brain trapped in this stationary body, the mommy-mummy, monster to most but unsung hero to her loved ones, a sweet husband-daughter duo who will never know the epic battles she fought, through the darkest hours, so that they could get some sleep.
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that other cool people I’ve known have liked me, has been my only reliable evidence, through the years, that I must be an interesting person. When my feelings about myself take a bad turn, this is the one proof that even my deepest insecurities can’t controvert. Cool people aren’t idiots, after all. You can’t fool them into liking you. If they like you, then something about you must be at least a little bit likable.
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Improvisation is a form of thought, a process of inventive reasoning, reasoning that plays outside the lines of Reason, but spontaneity is more like faith. Improvisation is a way of exploring the emotional and intellectual possibilities in a set of ideas and forms, but spontaneity rejects form and fetishizes risk.
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It’s easy to be skeptical of the thoughts you’ve had while tripping, to write them off as mere mushroom talk, but your mushroom mind isn’t always wrong. Your mushroom mind sees some things more clearly than your sober mind ever will. Sees things as they are, and welcomes them. Your insomnia mind is more like your mushroom mind, in that respect. But your mushroom mind is mostly benevolent, while your insomnia mind is out to destroy you. It’s your job to tell it, No. Not tonight.
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Events that happened years ago, that are utterly lost to the past and have no consequences for the present, should not hit you in the middle of the night with an onrush of shame and self-loathing. Mistakes made when you were young that barely even mattered at the time should not revisit you years later and make your whole body cringe. There needs to be a statute of limitations.
9
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The death of a very gifted person is strange for their friends, even if they haven’t seen each other for a while. Trying to balance, emotionally, the cost to the world and the cost to yourself. The feeling that you lost something all your own, alongside the feeling that the culture, which is also yours, lost something as well. Two losses that overlap but are fundamentally different. That in some ways might even contend with one another, yet you have to make sense of them together.
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the real value of any utopia—is that it doesn’t exist. It’s not a model of how everything should be; it’s an alternative to whatever reality you currently inhabit. The purpose of a utopia is to open your eyes to possibility, to allow yourself to see more clearly, by way of contrast, the society in which you live, the customs you’ve grown so accustomed to that they’ve come to seem inevitable. It’s not a proposition, even less a plan, but a viable reminder that everything you take to be “the world” could be, if we wanted it to be, very different.
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Ideology is a big bubble that surrounds you. It’s all the assumptions you make about how to live, and you live so deeply inside these assumptions that it’s very difficult, on a day-to-day basis, to remember which parts of your reality are natural and inevitable, versus which parts are things people just made up. History is made out of realities but comes to us through stories, all the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are and what we care about, all the narratives people have told themselves, about themselves, for centuries—these are ideology, the plots we live inside of. Ideology isn’t a bad thing—we have to live inside something—but failure to recognize ideology for what it is, to bear in mind that society and culture are things we made up and can remake and improve, keeps us from changing those aspects of our lives that could be better.
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we can better understand the constructed nature of our own stories, and decide for ourselves whether we are telling them as well as we could be. Like the story of how a nation is an actual thing, rather than an idea people collectively agree to—are we telling that one as well as we could? Or the story that money is valuable, when really it’s the story of money that we place value in. All the stories about how you’re supposed to act, what men are supposed to be like, or women are supposed to be like, what people in general are supposed to be like. These examples are already getting vague. The stories you accept, the ones you question, the ones you don’t believe but still need in order to get through the day. Like the story that we’re all going to get our acts together on climate change before it’s too late. That is one I personally need in order to get through the day. The story that guns make us safer. That is one I don’t believe at all but am forced to hope I am wrong about. The story that—what? These should be rolling off my tongue. That actors’ lives are interesting. That scientists are handling it. That education improves our personalities. Now we’re getting somewhere. The story that success only counts if it’s measurable. That the more papers you publish, the smarter you must be. That if the economy is growing, everyone benefits. The story that giving poor people a guaranteed income will make them lazy. That rich people earned what they have. The story that. The story.
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The lure of the abstruse.
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The first time you hear a name, it means nothing. Names only fill with meaning after you develop your own sense of the person behind them, unless the name itself is memorable, like, I don’t know, Buckminster Fuller?
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He likes to work, but he doesn’t give himself goals. He likes work for work’s sake. He is basically allergic to ambition, which is admirable. A certain kind of admirable. On the far side of aggressive, passive, and ambitious lies a certain kind of admirable.
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“Agenbite of inwit,” said the professor. Did I hear that right? “The Agenbite of inwit,” he said, “from the Middle English. The again-bite of inner wit, or more simply, the remorse of consciousness.” Or, more simply still, if I understood correctly, a fancy term for the human conscience.
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Part of a vast web of reference I’d been caught in without knowing it.
Part III
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In fact, it’s all coming back to me now. The flood gates have opened, and the memories are rolling through. The original formative episode. The one I’m calling original. Calling formative. It’s forming right here before me. Like something long buried in a hidden chamber, unearthed for the first time in millennia. A memory so old and dusty, so distant and thin that to even start remembering it I have to regress to the mind of a younger self. To the feeling of being however old that was, before responsibility, or worry, or crippling self-doubt. A child who lived inside her experiences.
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I will treat myself better, and by extension will treat others better. I will have a brave mind. Keynes was never a parent. He looked for courage in other places, found generosity in thinking. It’s what he came to thinking for. To solve problems but also to live in the generosity of the mind and the imagination. That is not economics or scholarship, that is just being a thinking person in the world.
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It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit, said Obama, quoting Truman, I think.
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I’ve set up the utopic side of Keynes’s rhetoric but haven’t done a great job describing his pragmatism—the thing to understand is that Keynes knew better than anyone what kinds of obstacles good ideas are up against, the difficulty not only of getting those ideas adopted and acted upon by people in power, but of keeping them from being twisted into something useless, or worse, harmful, by people in power.
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at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, when Woodrow Wilson was promoting his Fourteen Points and his League of Nations and Keynes was pushing European debt forgiveness and lightening the massive reparations all the Allies wanted to pile onto Germany. Keynes came up with a weird but workable plan, his “Grand Scheme,” which proposed that Germany would issue bonds to cover the cost of the reparations, but the bonds would be backed by the League of Nations, since nobody with any sense would buy bonds backed by dead-broke Germany. In other words, the bonds would be backed by the very people the reparations were being paid to, a sort of shell game by which everybody got paid, and a way of achieving the diplomatic peace Wilson had come to Paris promoting. But Wilson’s people in Paris were all bankers, not economists but bankers, and the bankers couldn’t stomach letting go of debts. Nor could they help noticing that the only member of the League of Nations with any money at the time was the U.S., which meant saying the League would back the bonds was really just saying the U.S. would pay for it. Nor were they eager to give up their newfound power over the global economy, even if it was to the League of Nations, which was Wilson’s idea in the first place. So Keynes’s Grand Scheme flopped, Germany got snowed under with impossible debt, fascism took hold, and we ended up in World War II. This being only one example of Keynes recognizing the massive scope of a problem and finding a wacky but workable solution, then watching it get squashed by more powerful people with vested interests who could never see past what they knew. Who failed to imagine possibilities beyond the meager few they’d been trained into. Like tenured professors.
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In one sense, a life ends with death, but in another sense, it ends with forgetting. Ideas don’t die, so mostly they end with forgetting. They’re forgotten because they fail or because they succeed and become part of what we know. The new normal. To disappear into history or to disappear into normalcy—those are the options for ideas.
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Keynesian becomes a term without a person, with a life of its own, not the specific and complex ideas of John Maynard Keynes but a vague site of ideological contention, a way of staking turf, of turning systematic inequality into heroic-sounding fiscal policy.
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Only a pessimist would choose failure in the first place, only someone afraid of life, afraid of change, whereas a pragmatic optimist knows that no idea, no matter how good, is ever meant to last forever in all situations anyway. A pragmatic optimist is an improviser. Comes prepared, then wings it. Understands that the world shifts, and when it shifts, we switch tactics. Understands that what the world needs is not a set of perfect ideas, of flawless stable structures, but a healthy diverse population of good ethical intelligent ambitious unpresumptuous individuals ready to take on anything.
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even though Keynes would probably be disappointed by what’s happened to his ideas since he died, how people in power have used his ideas to mean whatever they needed them to, to justify whatever schemes served their own ends, still I doubt he would be surprised.
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History is full of amazing people who did important things and had revolutionary ideas, and each amazing person also had their own attitude toward ideas, which was not necessarily written or spoken but still perceptible in the things they did and said. It’s like what John Stuart Mill says about Plato, that a true Platonist isn’t someone who agrees with Plato’s opinions, it’s someone who interrogates life the way Plato did. Or it’s like what I tell my students about politicians, that there’s only one thing you can truly know about them, regardless of what they do and say. You can’t know who they really are, or what they really think, or what they will do in the future, the only thing you can know is how they speak to you, what sorts of words they chose, what vernacular, what school-grade level of vocabulary. From this you can tell not who they are, but who they think you are.