Mammon

What's money good for?

This is almost a fairy tale: once upon a time, the richest man in the world, which is to say the richest man there has ever been in history, was flying in a plane he owns, communicating with a satellite, one of 700 which he also owns, and – with all the world’s wealth spread out, his to command, sat down to play a video game. For although it might seem that he had everything anyone could possibly want, he burned for something that he could not have – the status that would be his if only he were any good at video games. But he is not. He’d hired men in far away Cathay to play the games for him and build up simulacra whose skills he could command as if he’d earned them. But the skills of these avatars far exceed his own, and every time he took command of them he died.

The other players, knowing who he was, sent mocking messages, which the richest man in the world did not know how to turn off. “You will die alone” was among the least offensive. His face (which the mockers could see) retained a look of constipated concentration while the messages rolled across the screen. And so he occupied himself for 45 minutes.

I imagine that hell will be very much like that experience, prolonged forever, always dying, always mocked, and never getting out of tutorial mode.

Spenser is very clear that the love of money is a force of evil. In Canto 8, Book 2, of the Fairy Queen¹, Guyon, the knight of Temperance, is tempted by Mammon, the demon of wealth.

“An uncouth, savage and uncivil wight
Of grisly hue, and foul ill-favoured sight;
His face with smoke was tanned and eyes were bleared,
His head and beard with soot were ill bedight,
His coal-black hands did seem to have been seared 
In smith's fire-spitting forge, and nails like claws appeared.
...
God of the world, and worldlings I me call,
Great Mammon, greatest god below the sky ...
Riches, renown, and principality,
Honour, estate and all of this worlds good
For which men swink and sweat incessantly 
From me do flow into an ample flood

Serve me, says Mammon, and anything you want can be yours.

Guyon replies that these temptations bewitch weaker men, but he wants none. “Fair shields, proud horses and bright arms” are his delight, and fighting for crowns and kingdoms are “the riches fit for an adventurous knight”.

But all these thing are mine to give, says Mammon:

“... Money can thy wants at will supply:
Shields, steeds and armed and all things for thee meet
It can purvey in twinkling of an eye:
And crowns and kingdoms to thee multiply.
Do I not kings create, throw the crown
Sometimes to him that low in dust doth lie?
And him that reigned, into his rowme thrust down,
And whom I list do heap with glory and renown

So much for dreams of chivalry: armies and glory all can be bought. This is a rare irruption of historical truth into the epic. Guyon will have none of it. A noble heart despises riches, he says.

First got with guile, and then preserv’d with dread, 
And after spent with pride and lavishness, 
Leaving behind them grief and heaviness: 
Infinite mischiefs of them do arise, 
Strife and debate, bloodshed and bitterness, 
Outrageous wrong, and hellish covetize, 
That noble heart as great dishonour doth despise.

---

Central to Guyon’s argument is the claim that it is morally better to hold what was long ago seized by force than anything that’s been bought for money. That was always the creed of the landed gentry — cf the sneering at Heseltine because he bought his own furniture. It was, historically, a serious dispute between the conservative and the liberal. Mammon, it’s true, can arrange for crowns to be won, and kingdoms to change hands. But when that happens it’s the result of treachery. Money can only be “got with guile” and never fairly earned in the way that you earn things by defeating their possessor in a fair fight.

One of the strangest things about this view is that in a later canto Spenser rehearses Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fantastical history of Britain from its founding by Brutus, the supposed father of Aeneas. This is a grisly catalogue² of usurpations, civil wars, and feuding siblings (King “Leyr” is in there, too) in which money plays no part but neither does fairness or justice.

Still, the vision persists of an arcadian world where all social relations are personal and what counts is your store of honour, not of gold. As Brian Aldiss pointed out, it’s essential to fantasy literature. Perhaps this is one of the things that divides fantasy from science fiction, which can be very realistic about money and resources. It’s quite explicit in the defence of serfdom in The Sword In The Stone:

Everybody was happy. The villeins were slaves if you chose to look at it in one way, but, if you chose to look at it in another, they were just the same farm labourers as starve on thirty shillings a week today. Only neither the villein nor the farm labourer did starve. It has never been an economic proposition for an owner of cattle to starve his cows, so why should an owner of slaves starve them? The truth is that nowadays the farm labourer is ready to accept so little money because he does not have to throw his soul in with the bargain, as he would have to do in a town, and just the same freedom of spirit has obtained in the country since Sir Ector. The villeins were labourers; they lived in the same one-roomed hut with their families, few chickens, litter of pigs, or cow possibly called Crumbocke: most dreadful and insanitary! But they liked it. They were healthy, quite free of an air with no factory smoke in it, and, which was most of all, their heart’s interest was bound up with their skill in labour. They knew that Sir Ector loved and was proud of them. They were more valuable to him than even his cattle, and, as he valued his cattle more than anything else except his children, this was saying a good deal.

It’s one of the smaller things wrong with this passage that White, of course, could not foresee the horrors of modern factory farming. Spenser plays much the same tune³.

through foul intemperance,
Frail men are oft captured by covetise
But would they think, with how small allowance 
Untroubled nature doth her self suffice
Such superfluities they would despise,

To which Mammon replies that this might be all very well for the Golden Age, but we live now, and have to deal with gold.

Mammon has the better of this argument: it’s very hard to find a peasant society in which people did not prefer a money income when the choice was offered them. What else is the great migration to the cities of South East Asia about? My favourite example is the sturdy frontiersmen of the Swedish Arctic, who were not peasants but hunters and trappers as much as they were farmers, and who handled money only twice a year, when they traded furs for supplies at the fairs in towns like Jokkmokk. These were people who had slowly worked the frontier of settlement northwards for 150 years, but when the great rivers were damned for hydroelectricity in the middle of the last century, the young men went off for six months a year to earn hard cash and the way of life just shrivelled.

The only societies I know of which have resisted incorporation into the money economy are hunter-gatherers who have not been driven out of the territories where they can flourish: the Paraha with whom Daniel Everitt lived, and perhaps the Sami.

Sir Guyon, the Knight of Temperance refuses Mammon’s offers, since he is the a pattern of virtue. How can I know, he asks, what crimes may not lie behind these fortunes — again, the assumption that money is acquired by vice, but defeating your enemies in battle is the result of virtue.

So Mammon takes him down to hell to see where all the gold is stored. The way is guarded by Pain, Strife, Revenge, “rancorous Despite”, Treason, and “heart-burning Hate”. Only Jealousy and Sorrow hid from them in the shadows, while Fear itself fluttered about their heads.

This has a certain hard-won realism. All of these spirits attended Elon Musk as he played games on his aeroplane and presumably haunt his ever waking moment and his dreams. Beyond a certain point, riches can only breed the desire for more, which never can be wholly satisfied.

But where do we mark that point? I don’t think that “enough” can ever be a static measure. There was a nice example of this in a study my wife found that claimed dog ownership brought happiness equivalent to an extra £70,000 a year in income. The obvious strategy, if someone offers you a choice between a dog and £70k is to take the money and use a small part of it to buy two dogs; then you trade one of the new dogs for another £70k and so on.

But even if we’re not being ludicrous it’s very easy to see that the value of any sum of money depends entirely on the circumstances of the receiver. The point where enough becomes too much is when spending it becomes a problem because you can’t think what you want. This is a version of Guyon’s point even if he assumes like the heroes of contemporary fantasy that you can have enough without any money at all. The great evil of advertising — at least the unhappiness it inflicts on its victims — is that it gives people who have enough, or, worse, not enough, the worry of choices they don’t need to make at all and very likely can’t afford either.

1. I’ve modernised the spelling for this one. Sue me.

2. that feels endless as you read

3. For some reason the following quote just will not format properly