"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo. . . . "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds." -- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
I think what Goto Dengo says about gold could be said just as well about oil, or many another modern MacGuffin of imperial world domination. Corpses of value. Come treasure hunting with me, below the fold, and who knows? We may also find ourselves digging up a few more corpses.
Goto Dengo may not be the smartest character in Neal Stephenson's majestic novel Cryptonomicon--that would be Dr. Alan Turing or any of several fictional mathematicians who help break Enigma and other Axis codes--but he's probably the wisest. He's the "mere" engineer who faces every imaginable hell in the War in the South Pacific and survives it all, living long enough to reflect in old age on what it all means. Late in the book, he asks modern treasure hunters why they want to dig up a mind-boggling Imperial treasure buried in the Philippines at the end of the War, when, in his view, the transfer of all that gold from Japan to the Philippines has only enriched Japan and impoverished the Philippines? "Gold is the corpse of value," he says. What's in people's brains, he says, is the real wealth.
Goto-san's view is that the absence of the lost Imperial treasure from postwar Japan forced that nation to develop its real wealth of human ingenuity, to Japan's ultimate benefit. At the same time, the Philippines', or at least the Marcos regime's, interest in recovering all that buried booty impoverished the Philippines for decades.
What Goto-san knows is that gold, the evaluating medium, is what you have left--maybe--when everything of real value has died, or been slaughtered, or murdered, perhaps in the pursuit of gold itself. Because everything of real value in the world is a living thing in some sense, whether an animal or a vegetable or a human being, or some product of human brains and ingenuity and creativity, or the biomass itself, or the climate, or the fertile regions of the world, or the ocean. All living things, all mortal, all vulnerable. And if all of them die together, not all the gold in the world will bring them back.
Gold is the corpse of value. You might say the same thing about oil, another substance that, while having its uses as gold does, is certainly not worth the amounts of blood that are spilled for it. You might say the same thing about fantasies of Euro-American military domination of west and central Asia. This would benefit us how, exactly, apart from magically turning some trillions of dollars of U.S. and allied blood and treasure into a few billions in profits for oil companies and Halliburton? And yet our governments pursue these corpses--doomed fossil fuels, doomed imperial chimerae--while letting the real wealth of the world go to waste. Men and women can't get up out of bed and go to work where there is no work. People in the post-industrial United States can hardly find jobs, unless they're in the military, or the police, or the sprawling prison system--none of these an intensively wealth-creating industry. Schoolchildren are all but obstructed from learning their lessons and improving their minds. Public schools in the United States are allowed to go to hell, as if just to make sure that future generations of Americans won't be able to find jobs either. First-world corporations and third-world governments race each other to sell off the biosphere, foreclosing on the future--everybody's future--to make this quarter's bottom line look a little bit better. A small fraction of the trillions that will ultimately be spent on the Iraq occupation might have financed a Manhattan Project of energy independence, a harnessing of renewable energy sources that might have eliminated the need for adventurism in Asia or the ongoing destruction of the environment. And that might even have proven profitable for the energy companies. The world of the 21st century, especially (though not only) in its global-corporate aspects, is virtually a series of mechanisms for throwing away things of value in the pursuit of results that are likely to be of less value than the things being sacrificed.
As you can probably tell, I'm haunted by that phrase, the corpse of value. It suggests so many others: Oil is another corpse of value. Consumerism is the corpse of community. The gilt and glitter of Vegas is the corpse of creativity. The Bush regime is the corpse of American democracy. The United States' energy policy and Middle East policy are the corpses of intelligence and common sense. And the United States in 2007 is coming perilously close to being the corpse of a dream.
Thanks for reading. I don't know whether I've said anything useful, or valuable, or not, but I expect the peer reviewers will let me know!