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Mammon’s Ecology: Metaphysic of the Empty Sign
Proverbs 22:22 enjoins the reader, "Don't take advantage of the poor just because you can." Mammon's Ecology is a systematic investigation into the mysterious nature of modern money, which confronts us with the perplexing fact that, in the global economy as it is, we take advantage of the poor whether we want to or not. We destroy natural systems whether we want to or not. Ched Myers describes Mammon's Ecology as a "workbook" about "the secret life of money." Where Prather and others have shown that money is one of the perverse Powers described in Ephesians 6, Mammon's Ecology details precisely how money exercises this peculiar power and outlines suggestions for Christians who feel trapped in this complicity--not just as individuals, but as church. Mammon's Ecology is not a book about economics (which the author calls "the world's best antidote to insomnia"), but rather a book about the "deep ecology" of (post)modern power and injustice. Read individually or as a group, Mammon's Ecology will leave you unable to think about money the same way again.
307 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 30, 2018
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August 25, 2022
Without general-purpose money, there wouldn’t be a climate crisis. This is the claim made by Stan Goff, and he devotes his book Mammon’s Ecology to arguing this position.
He does this in an interesting way by trying to help us understand both the nature of money as well as the hidden ecological consequences of money. He tries to teach us detective skills so that we can see the things typically not seen by our usage of money.
To start with Goff recognizes that energy is the basis for all development. This can easily be forgotten or neglected, but it is a necessary fact to consider. And if we are going to understand energy, we need to understand some basic physics and examine closely our energy usage.
When we take a closer look at energy and sustainability, it doesn’t look good for sustainability. Part of this is due to basic laws of physics. For example, when we cool things, through AC or refrigeration, we always warm more air than we cool. We simply exchange the hot air in one place with cool air, but to do this, we create even more hot air. This isn’t something that can be overcome through better design but is instead inevitable.
When considering replacing fossil fuels, Goff makes some sobering points. First is that we simply cannot replace oil. All our alternative energy sources simply aren’t fungible with regards to oil. For example, in transportation, we simply don’t have the ability to replace oil with batteries. We can replace some cars and trucks, but we can’t replace tractors or airplanes. There are physical limitations about battery energy storage which aren’t there for oil energy.
When we consider energy usage economically, we realize that electric vehicles aren’t the solution at all. As Goff points out “The average electric car ultimately uses as many or more calories of fossil energy than a gasoline-powered car.” This is due to the parts needed as well as the power needed to charge the battery. The electricity coming into a car doesn’t magically become fossil free. Instead, most of the energy we use to power our electric cars comes from the burning of fossil fuel.
These are some of the aspects of how we can follow the energy and see what is really going on. What does any of this have to do with money though? Money is a sign, and, now that there is no gold standard for US currency anymore, a sign without any final referent. This means money has nothing to point to except itself. Money is not embedded in anything. It has no location, no narrative, and ultimately, no referent apart from itself. Without a referent, we have nothing to stop at. Money is not a symbol. It stands for nothing.
Money is the ultimate abstraction. Everything can be reduced to one value $. GDP is in $. All the different variations, such as where it came from, the overall health of the land, people, or nation can be abstracted to one symbol $. Even computers, which use incredible abstraction, deal with two symbols, 1 and 0.
In order for the ecological crisis to happen, the complications of deforestation and other far distant effects had to be hidden from us. Money removes any important category differences. The abstract nature of money lets us exchange, without seeing the cost, a computer for the exploitation of nature. It also lets us say that clean water and coca-cola are of the same categories. The abstract nature of money uniquely lets us ignore distinctions in value.
For the ecological crisis to come about, we need a lot of unequal exchanges as dissipative structures (order comes in, but increasing entropy, or disorder, leaves), and this couldn’t happen without general-purpose money.
All of our goods are now produced to far away to be gotten without fossil fuels. We could only have gotten to this point because of money. Now we are too deeply enmeshed in this system to see a good way out. We do not possess money. We are possessed by money. This isn’t the same as being possessed by the need of money or its accumulation. Instead, we are “its structural captives, which at least means we can face our captivity without worshipping our captor provided we recognize money-idolatry for what it is.” Economics is the liturgy of money.
What then? Where do we go from here? Goff has some interesting ideas about how to move away from a monetary economy. For a book so wise and persistent in following things to their endpoints, I was a little surprised at his list of immediate suggested changes. Essentially, he wants immediate military withdrawal and financial support system for everyone from the government. It is difficult to believe that, even if this were more than a pipe dream, it wouldn’t cause a bunch of unintended side effects. It is way too many sudden changes happening at once. If President Biden pulling out of Afghanistan caused so many problems, then I dread to see what would happen if all of our military pulled out immediately.
His other proposed solutions, including his long-term solutions are much more thoughtful and reasonable. We need to fix the built world, including our soil health. And ultimately we need to transition to a de-financialized, de-growth economy.
There are of course problems with his proposed large-scale solutions. Namely that I have no real ability to bring about any of them. But Goff doesn’t leave the average person without hope or a calling. He draws on Ivan Illich’s moving and insightful interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan to provide a way out. What we all can do is to avoid the abstract and universal temptation of money, or even of solving the future. Instead, we can offer the gift of free and enfleshed friendship to those around us. As Goff concludes “In our witness, before, during, and after we live and know and act in that world to which we witness as resident aliens, we are united—if we can be faithful—in a conspiracy of friendship. We seek knowledge as best we can. We practice various renunciations to know our freedom as best we can. We seek after the resurrection of the commons and an economics of local conviviality. But our currency is friendship, because the Incarnation happened, the Incarnation was a surprise, the Incarnation was a gift, the Incarnation was revealed not discovered, and the Incarnation is expressed through love and knowledge.”
I went into this book with little understanding of what I was getting into, other than it was a book on money and ecology. I left pleasantly surprised. Goff does an excellent job at tracing the hidden effects of money and how without it the ecological crisis wouldn’t exist. This kind of sober, patient work is much needed.
I found quite a few genuine insights in this book. While I already knew that attempts to get rid of fossil fuel were often misleading, Goff showed this in a very clear way. He also tied the problem to general-purpose money, something I would not have connected on my own. This is an excellent book to gain understanding of the problem of money. After reading this, any Christian should be much better able to see why Jesus can make Mammon as the antithesis of God. Goff doesn’t dig deep into the theological roots of Mammon, but he shows how money affects us all.
I want to say, as a word of praise in conclusion of this review, that Goff’s work is insightful in the nature of money and in tracing the hidden flows and effects of capitalism. But I also appreciated how Goff wrote. He stuck to his thesis even when he had other things he clearly didn’t like. For example, he did criticize Donald Trump very harshly, but he was also critical of other presidents. He also is clearly not a fan of certain things such as the Patriarchy, but he didn’t let those other things dominate this book. You could disagree with Goff on the evils of Patriarchy or how bad Donald Trump is or the good of a Constantian strategy and still get a lot out of this book.
He does this in an interesting way by trying to help us understand both the nature of money as well as the hidden ecological consequences of money. He tries to teach us detective skills so that we can see the things typically not seen by our usage of money.
To start with Goff recognizes that energy is the basis for all development. This can easily be forgotten or neglected, but it is a necessary fact to consider. And if we are going to understand energy, we need to understand some basic physics and examine closely our energy usage.
When we take a closer look at energy and sustainability, it doesn’t look good for sustainability. Part of this is due to basic laws of physics. For example, when we cool things, through AC or refrigeration, we always warm more air than we cool. We simply exchange the hot air in one place with cool air, but to do this, we create even more hot air. This isn’t something that can be overcome through better design but is instead inevitable.
When considering replacing fossil fuels, Goff makes some sobering points. First is that we simply cannot replace oil. All our alternative energy sources simply aren’t fungible with regards to oil. For example, in transportation, we simply don’t have the ability to replace oil with batteries. We can replace some cars and trucks, but we can’t replace tractors or airplanes. There are physical limitations about battery energy storage which aren’t there for oil energy.
When we consider energy usage economically, we realize that electric vehicles aren’t the solution at all. As Goff points out “The average electric car ultimately uses as many or more calories of fossil energy than a gasoline-powered car.” This is due to the parts needed as well as the power needed to charge the battery. The electricity coming into a car doesn’t magically become fossil free. Instead, most of the energy we use to power our electric cars comes from the burning of fossil fuel.
These are some of the aspects of how we can follow the energy and see what is really going on. What does any of this have to do with money though? Money is a sign, and, now that there is no gold standard for US currency anymore, a sign without any final referent. This means money has nothing to point to except itself. Money is not embedded in anything. It has no location, no narrative, and ultimately, no referent apart from itself. Without a referent, we have nothing to stop at. Money is not a symbol. It stands for nothing.
Money is the ultimate abstraction. Everything can be reduced to one value $. GDP is in $. All the different variations, such as where it came from, the overall health of the land, people, or nation can be abstracted to one symbol $. Even computers, which use incredible abstraction, deal with two symbols, 1 and 0.
In order for the ecological crisis to happen, the complications of deforestation and other far distant effects had to be hidden from us. Money removes any important category differences. The abstract nature of money lets us exchange, without seeing the cost, a computer for the exploitation of nature. It also lets us say that clean water and coca-cola are of the same categories. The abstract nature of money uniquely lets us ignore distinctions in value.
For the ecological crisis to come about, we need a lot of unequal exchanges as dissipative structures (order comes in, but increasing entropy, or disorder, leaves), and this couldn’t happen without general-purpose money.
All of our goods are now produced to far away to be gotten without fossil fuels. We could only have gotten to this point because of money. Now we are too deeply enmeshed in this system to see a good way out. We do not possess money. We are possessed by money. This isn’t the same as being possessed by the need of money or its accumulation. Instead, we are “its structural captives, which at least means we can face our captivity without worshipping our captor provided we recognize money-idolatry for what it is.” Economics is the liturgy of money.
What then? Where do we go from here? Goff has some interesting ideas about how to move away from a monetary economy. For a book so wise and persistent in following things to their endpoints, I was a little surprised at his list of immediate suggested changes. Essentially, he wants immediate military withdrawal and financial support system for everyone from the government. It is difficult to believe that, even if this were more than a pipe dream, it wouldn’t cause a bunch of unintended side effects. It is way too many sudden changes happening at once. If President Biden pulling out of Afghanistan caused so many problems, then I dread to see what would happen if all of our military pulled out immediately.
His other proposed solutions, including his long-term solutions are much more thoughtful and reasonable. We need to fix the built world, including our soil health. And ultimately we need to transition to a de-financialized, de-growth economy.
There are of course problems with his proposed large-scale solutions. Namely that I have no real ability to bring about any of them. But Goff doesn’t leave the average person without hope or a calling. He draws on Ivan Illich’s moving and insightful interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan to provide a way out. What we all can do is to avoid the abstract and universal temptation of money, or even of solving the future. Instead, we can offer the gift of free and enfleshed friendship to those around us. As Goff concludes “In our witness, before, during, and after we live and know and act in that world to which we witness as resident aliens, we are united—if we can be faithful—in a conspiracy of friendship. We seek knowledge as best we can. We practice various renunciations to know our freedom as best we can. We seek after the resurrection of the commons and an economics of local conviviality. But our currency is friendship, because the Incarnation happened, the Incarnation was a surprise, the Incarnation was a gift, the Incarnation was revealed not discovered, and the Incarnation is expressed through love and knowledge.”
I went into this book with little understanding of what I was getting into, other than it was a book on money and ecology. I left pleasantly surprised. Goff does an excellent job at tracing the hidden effects of money and how without it the ecological crisis wouldn’t exist. This kind of sober, patient work is much needed.
I found quite a few genuine insights in this book. While I already knew that attempts to get rid of fossil fuel were often misleading, Goff showed this in a very clear way. He also tied the problem to general-purpose money, something I would not have connected on my own. This is an excellent book to gain understanding of the problem of money. After reading this, any Christian should be much better able to see why Jesus can make Mammon as the antithesis of God. Goff doesn’t dig deep into the theological roots of Mammon, but he shows how money affects us all.
I want to say, as a word of praise in conclusion of this review, that Goff’s work is insightful in the nature of money and in tracing the hidden flows and effects of capitalism. But I also appreciated how Goff wrote. He stuck to his thesis even when he had other things he clearly didn’t like. For example, he did criticize Donald Trump very harshly, but he was also critical of other presidents. He also is clearly not a fan of certain things such as the Patriarchy, but he didn’t let those other things dominate this book. You could disagree with Goff on the evils of Patriarchy or how bad Donald Trump is or the good of a Constantian strategy and still get a lot out of this book.
April 20, 2023
It's like if Edward Snowden wrote The Lorax and put Bible verses at the beginning of the chapters. 10/10.
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