Academic Wank

Occams,

It is certainly academic work. Reading more into something than is there is, in some ways, a working definition of academic work (except any academic will tell you that it’s there, you just have to attend to it). Academicizing a problem is nothing that needs apologizing for. And there are academic “uses” that have nothing to do with everyday uses: thought experiments that remain just that, arguments that hone our analytic skills, looking into the history of a subject, examining the controversies surrounding the subject, &c. As Stanley Fish has noted, an academic inquiry does not ask, “What is the right thing to do?” but “Is this account of the matter attentive to the complexity of the issue?”

Politicians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, I leave it to them to ask the first question. I tried to make my analysis above answer the second question with regard to treating money as a symbol. I have actually thought a lot about how this is useful to my everyday life in a not strictly academic sense. For example, you say this is just the old saws of children, but then you go right back to money as merely a tool for trading. It may be a mere tool, but I contend the tool has symbolic power. I nowhere advocated for a world without money. That would make the wheels of life grind to a halt. I only ask here for a world that attends to the symbolic of money, to its power as a motive, and our impulse to seek money as an end.

I think you’re probably right that money is not the real problem, but I think that is what I was saying all along here. The symbol of money – the, to use your words, trading systems, avarice, and competition indicated and implied by money are the real source of our woes. ’Tis true. But perhaps by attending more to the symbolic power of money we might imagine different trading systems, or realize that so much of our present economy depends, in fact, on temperance – not avarice, cooperation – not competition.

See that pesky loop we’re in when we think symbolically. The money symbol divides as well as unites. All symbols, actually, do this. That lesson is an important one, both academically and for everyday.

DG