“We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” ~Paul Mazer, Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s

It’s possible you’ve recently acquired a copy of “Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism” by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller.

Much has been made of the favor in which the doctrine of “Animal Spirits” is held by the current administration.

Michael Scherer recently wrote a piece on Obama and the Animal Spirits for TIME.

In that article he at one point gently chides the Administration for its faith in the Spirits. But Scherer ultimately concludes that these same Spirits are likely our only salvation.

William Safire provides a serviceable if somewhat truncated genealogy of the phrase in his recent “On Language” column.

If you’re not familiar with the term and haven’t the leisure time to dive into Akerlof and Shiller’s book, don’t despair – because Mr. Shiller offers some insight into his thinking in a column he recently penned for the Wall Street Journal. (More on that coming up)

But first, I’m going to shamelessly claim-jump Mr. Safire and reconstruct the fossilized underbelly of the “Animal Spirits” meme.

What I found should give at least momentary pause to those now enthusiastically touting the Animal Spirits as our path to redemption.

But only insofar as they’re able to recognize the source of their misplaced hope.

We’ll get to that source in a moment.

Right now, let’s go back to Mr. Safire’s dig site and examine what he’s unearthed…

As Safire notes, the term has a long history dating back to at least 16th century medical texts in which the “animal spirites” were employed to explain then-current notions of the elan vital, or vital animating force.

But it is in the term’s Economic usage, and particularly its deployment in Keynesian Economic theory, that Akerlof, Shiller – and the Obama brain trust – have resurrected their hope in the Animal Spirits.

Here are the relevant passages, quoted by Safire, from Keynes 1936 treatise, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.”

Most, probably… our decisions to do something positive . . . can only be taken as the result of animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

“In that passage,” writes Safire, Keynes “was warning about overconfidence; in another, he (Keynes) encouraged risk-taking: ‘If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.’”

“I like that one more,” Safire opines.

What’s interesting to note – at least in the columns mentioned – is the unconscious and reflexively deferential attitude Safire and Shiller (and by extension, Obama, Summers and Geithner) show toward the unexamined premises of Keynes’ argument.

And the reason of course is because they are the shared premises of what Dallas Willard describes as the “life-form called modernity.”

Or to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrasing, they are the premises of emotivism – the moral underpinning of Keynes’ economic theory.

On Keynes view, success at moral suasion rests not on the power of rational appeal, but with those who “speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction,” and can “best use the accents of infallibility.”

To the modern (by definition, emotivist) mind, what matters is not that our convictions have solid foundations.

In fact, there’s no need for our convictions to have any foundations, or even any need for us to have convictions at all.

All we need is the ability to speak in clear “accents of infallibility” with the “appearance of undoubting conviction” (emphasis added).

But in these uncertain times and while wholly in the grip of the life form called (post-)modernity, we can’t keep ourselves from asking our political, corporate and bureaucratic leaders if there isn’t at least a token gesture toward something of substance beneath their histrionics.

Even if just a knowing wink that they could produce it if we were to ask.

We instinctively know not to inquire too closely, “but still,” we think, “it would be nice to see a marker on the table indicating something real supports all those casino chips.”

“We want to trust you,” we tell our leaders.

But when trust is no longer confidence grounded in reality, but is simply a subjective psychological state allowing us to suspend disbelief, does it really matter if we can trust our leaders or not?

And if it’s no longer necessary to restore confidence based in reality – but simply to restore trust in Keynes’ “appearance of conviction” – then there’s not much need to inquire as to what the Emperor is wearing.

The only thing necessary is that he appear undoubtingly convinced his robes are as magnificent as he says they are…

It’s been said that in the last decade or so, we’ve lost our capacity for irony.

But given recent events, the quote at the beginning of this post from Paul Mazer – the now long-departed employee of the recently departed Lehman Brothers – ought to induce smiles from even terminal post-modern life forms such as we.

Because Mr. Mazer is correct – just not in the way he intended.

We indeed must be “trained to desire”.

And whether our training was haphazard, or left to currently fashionable management theories, or intentionally guided by the most profound grace, our desires must always overshadow our needs.

Given this state of affairs, the questions we must continually and humbly ask are, “Who or what am I allowing to train my desires?” And, “If what’s now training my desires leaves me a slave to my animal spirits, what can allow me to retrain them before they consume me?”

Substituting “animal spirits” for “flesh” in the ESV translation of Romans 8:13 we get:

For if you live according to the animal spirits, you will die, but if by the Holy Spirit you put to death the deeds of the animal spirits, you will live.

If a significant number of us begins to do that, perhaps we can once again demonstrate real trust in each other, instead of an impoverished
counterfeit of trust.

The alternative – as our intellectual, corporate and political leaders see it – is to concede that “managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government.”

Of course there is a huge bootstrapping problem here. Exactly who is it that’s managing the animal spirits of those who would manage us?

Because if MacIntyre is right when he says in After Virtue that “the barbarians are no longer waiting beyond the frontiers, but have already been governing us for some time” – then it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of prayerfully considering exactly who it is we can trust to train our desires.

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