 Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Jeffrey Spear, a retired professor of English at New York University, who has taught Victorian Studies art history, done some work on British India, and the focus today is his book Dreams of an English Eden. He comes from Minneapolis, so there's plenty to talk about in light of recent developments here on June 1st of 2020. And he's accompanied by his colleague and co-author, Lynn Paramore. Lynn, I am proud to say, works as a research analyst with the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She's one of the most gifted writers and translators, and she helps what we might call brilliant, abstract economists reach other people with great skill. She's a cultural historian and lives in that space between culture and economics. Together they wrote a very, very powerful article for our website recently called America's Chilling Experiment in Human Sacrifice. On May 14th of 2020, it was published. Thank you both for joining me. Thank you, Rob. Thanks for having us. So we're sitting atop a midst, not atop, amidst a pandemic, COVID-19 here at the beginning of June in 2020. And I'm curious how, whether in the world of events, institutions, or ideas, each of you is perceiving, seeing things, some of which you find, I'm sure, dreadful. Some of it, perhaps, there are some, how you say, silver linings to be pointed out. And always, I'm interested in your vision of how to move and evolve society to a better place than has been unmasked by this terrible episode. So either Lynn or Jeff, I'll let you choose, but I want to hear from each of you. How does this pandemic affect your view of the world we live in and the possible? I'll start out maybe and sort of tee things up for Jeff. I find the work of John Ruskin, whom we focused on in our recent article, a very interesting voice for this moment. He was a Victorian art and social critic as well as a political economist who had a moral vision for how the economy could operate and be structured. And that's one of the things that Jeff and I have talked about in our work. And he came out of a moment in English history, the 1840s, following the French Revolution, a time that really could have become an era of reform or an era of revolution. A lot of questions on the table, a lot of tensions as to whether we were going to have a violent transition or a more peaceful one into better lives for the English people. And I think that starting with that context and that milieu really helps us think about this moment that we're in right now. Yeah, okay. Ruskin was born in 1819, so he was a mid-Victorian. And his background had roots in Scotland. His mother was an extremely pious Evangelical Christian. And his father was a wine merchant and a kind of frustrated gentleman. He wanted Ruskin to grow up to be the kind of gentleman that he didn't, because of economic necessity, have a chance to be. So Ruskin's thinking is formed partly by his Evangelical heritage, even when he, as many Victorians did, lost his specific faith. That pattern of thinking, which is a strain of Evangelical Christianity that sees the world as the fallen garden of Eden, and there's mankind's responsibility to help restore that Eden. So did he spend a lot of time, what I'll call, almost like inductively observing the world and sharing his observations or his interpretations of those findings? Yeah, I mean, again, that began with his obsession with the work of the painter, Turner, who of course was a painter of natural landscape. And so he became an acute observer of the weather, as well as, and it's a kind of paradox because he chose his major first work, the Modern Painters, was a defensive Turner, not as a realist as we would understand it, but his late work, which is atmospheric. So he became a kind of, on the one hand, his idea then of nature was kind of like a dynamic interchange, not the static thing that he attributed, say, the Dutch painting where nature was represented conventionally. So there's a kind of phenomenological underpinning to the way he looked at things that again carried over to social commentary. Interesting. Interesting. I didn't know Turner had played such a role. That's, that's a fascinating bridge. Lynn, when you two sat down to create your article for INET, what was in your mind, but what, where did the inspiration come from? Yeah, I think the inspiration came from the fact that Ruskin as a very trenchant critic of capitalism of his day, had a very interesting definition of wealth that was different from economists of the time like John Stuart Mill and others. And he really defined wealth as anything that is availing to life, to the life of the people in the country. And as we were seeing, Jeff and I were seeing the pandemic evolve. It became clear that even though the United States was the wealthiest country on earth, it had become quite impoverished when it came to the life and the health of its citizens. And it was accumulating what Ruskin referred to as the opposite of wealth, which is what he called ill things that make society and its people ill. Anything from lack of access to healthcare to environmental pollution, et cetera. Ruskin early on in his writing career wrote a letter to the London Times, and he said that the first duty of a state is to see that every child born there and shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attain years of discretion. And that is something that the United States has obviously been failing in. And so this impoverishment and a reorientation of how we view what makes country and its people wealthy, what makes them happy seem to be an important discussion to have right now. And I think it's even become more important since we wrote the article in the context of this terrible murder of George Floyd, which happened just last week in Minneapolis. And, you know, Jeff, you might want to say something about your experience in Minneapolis during the 60s. I think that's coming into a lot of people's minds right now. Yeah, I was a graduate student at Minnesota. And during the antiwar period. And when we were demonstrating, we tried to broaden the protest to make it not just about the war, but about local conditions as well. And one of the saddest things for me to see about this whole episode, apart from the immediate tragedy of that man's murder, is how little progress was made there, despite being one of the most liberal spots in the country. And if you look at who they like to office, it's like a roadmap for the future. And yet one of the things we were protesting was the fact that most of the police in Minnesota and police department didn't live in the city. Because of economic reasons, again, it was cheaper to live in the suburbs. So you have a police force in all of the city, but of course in the minority area as well. That doesn't live there. That's not part of the community. And after 50 years, that's still problem is still not been solved that you have a, and to some extent you might say an alien police force in those areas in that part of Minneapolis, which is not only home to the African American community, but to the Native American community, which hasn't gotten much mention here, though, their center was burned down in this protest. And a lot of the, since I left a lot of the South Asian Southeast Asian populations there too. So it's a mixed, a very mixed area. And that's one of the things that I found so really disappointing that if a place like Minneapolis can't deal with these issues with the kind of governance it has, it's, you know, does make you worry about places in which the problems are even more And the, this particular death itself as a, as an image, then also encapsulated like the image of somebody kneeling on a person's neck. In this insouciant casual manner with his hand in his pocket is so this wrong, I think to people I think it's one reason that this this unlike shootings which seem to show some space and, and sometimes it seemed to involve a narrative of chase and whatever. This is person to person. It's, you know, and I think there's something about that that just grabbed people, as well as the almost archetypal image of conquest which goes all the way back Lin knows about this all the way back say to ancient Egypt, of your foot on the neck of the people you've conquered. It's just terribly just really resonant. I think it's one reason that that image is just riveted people and brought them out in the middle of a pandemic. So you could say that these demonstrators the peaceful demonstrators are in a sense risking their own lives at this moment to make a statement. You know, stop there. Yeah. Yeah, that I think you're very sensitive and putting together the, which you might call the, the inescapable nature of this horrid thing that happened to Floyd. Yeah. And, and it portends, which you might call a longer and deeper oppression. I saw Kareem Abdul-Jabbar today, put a beautiful piece in the Los Angeles Times, about the nature of the despair that people are feeling. Yeah, I mean that African American community. The legal question about first degree murder. See, in a moral sense it's first degree murder in a technical legal sense it may not be. But to the way I see it what's pressing down through the agent of that one policeman is 400 years of intent of evil intent. And that takes place in the transaction just between that one man and another. But it's really the intent comes all the way back into the beginning of our, you know, as everybody says our original sin as a nation, which is slavery. I originally came from North Carolina, which is actually where I've been spending time during the pandemic. And one of the things that's always troubled me about America's attitude towards slavery is what seems to me a blind spot about our collective guilt. I lived most of my adult life in New York City. And you sometimes get the feeling that people think that slavery is something that happened in a particular region of the country. But actually, the second largest slave market next to Charleston was on Wall Street. And Wall Street has had a connection to racist economics unfortunately from the beginning. The slave trade could not have operated without the shipping industry, the insurance industry, the bankers, the financiers. The whole country was so deeply intertwined in this abhorrent economic system that the guilt is really collective. And it's not something that happened in one particular place. It's something that we all are collective guilt about. And I think that, you know, a question which is hanging in the air, a moral question about reparations comes up in the context of what happened to George Floyd. And I think as people are grasping for systemic solutions, that's something that we're going to have to perhaps visit and own this collective guilt and this collective stain on our history once and for all, all of us as a people. You know, and I don't let myself off the hook because my people came to this country in the 20th century. When you're interpolated into the culture, you acquire it, the good and the bad. And there's no, there's no easy out for it. I've reminded one of my earliest guests on the podcast was the African American scholar Gerald Horn from University of Houston. And he wrote a very, very powerful book. He and I talked about his book Jazz and Justice, but he has another book called the counter revolution of 1776 slave resistance in the origins of the United States of America, which how would I say so shows how deeply embedded even at the time of our, which you might call inspiring documents. This practice had, had, had become. Yeah, I mean, I want to go back to the founders then just before we move on to Ruskin. And when Jefferson changed the standard formulation of life, liberty and property, which he inherited, of course, in British tradition to life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness. He made a tremendously important ideological switch that of course he could not live up to in his own life. So the paradox, you know, the paradox is right there at the beginning. Life, liberty and and property. That formula seems to have had a still in operation right. The pursuit of happiness and is for everybody. The article I recall you that you co authored for a unit. I recall you focused on the world happiness report and Columbia University studies in relation to that and it is I recall and I remembered reading this. On the same day I read a piece by David Brooks in the New York Times about the Nordic experience. Yeah, but where, where has, where has happiness been most achieved. And what type of social organizations has have these studies found to. Well, I'm probably an expert on that kind of thing, but one of the things that's quite clear is that in the in the literal sense of the word social security has been the thing that has marked the success of the Scandinavian That and then you look at the things that have been undercut since the time of Ronald Reagan. Pensions. I was astonished to find that a company of course could reorganize and get rid of all of its pension obligations. They extend, you know, they want to privatize that health care. All of the things as unemployment a guarantee that that you won't be thrown out in the street if you become unemployed. So it's basically I can say it kind of the broadest sense of the word social security, which actually ironically encourages entrepreneurship, because if you have an idea and you want to pursue it and create a business or something in Sweden. Say, you don't have to worry that if your idea fails, you'll be on welfare in our sense. So it's not well, I guess, terribly well known fact, but there's more entrepreneurship per capita in some of these countries than we have, even though we like to say that this is the great home of entrepreneurship and invention. And so that's where Ruskin comes in. Oh, I was just going to say, I think that the what we have learned about George Floyd really underscores this point. He, for example, had hypertension. This is a condition that is overrepresented in the black male population in the United States. And it's certainly connected to economic inequality and the 400 years of oppression and walking outside your door and being afraid of a potentially fatal confrontation with the police. All of these things, racism, xenophobia, all of all of these things we know from social science are exacerbated by economic inequality and those countries that have less inequality tend to have less social unrest of this kind and fewer deaths, what some call deaths of despair, deaths from diseases that are caused by living in poverty and living in circumstances. Yeah, as we all know, it's very expensive to be poor. Very expensive. In many respects, the, I remember, I often recall a meeting I had with some Swedish economists at the Consulate in New York at the behest of the Pogrodsky, who is an old friend of mine, and was the attache in the United States in New York. An economist came in and they said to me, Mr Johnson, the old growth model was the American model supply side flexibility and Europe was considered to be sclerotic and bogged down because there were too many tragedies and social protections. But with the advent of globalization and automation and profound transformation. I was excited to me this was in, let's see, I guess it's been early 2019 that the kind of presidency that Donald Trump represented was a symptom of a despair that they thought was overwhelming America, and that we were not going to be able to adopt technology, because our politics would become dysfunctional and violent. And their, their punchline was, we in Scandinavia love the robots. We don't protect jobs we protect people. They're taking their health care their pensions their children's education, and their ability to be retrained, so that in a dynamic sense they could be radiant and taking advantage of all these opportunities with all of the humans being confident that they would continue to benefit. And that America had lost any credibility in that regard. And in fact, I think it's important to say that this doesn't mean that there's no disharmony or no racial prejudice or anything like that in Scandinavia. And sometimes it said that they're like that they are more uniform populations, and that we couldn't do that here because we're so disparate that that seems to be like a terrible cop out. In other words, this this economic idea of putting people first works, even despite the fact that there is in fact racial tension in these countries that have taken in immigrants since, you know, the last 50 years. So it's, you know, it's not, it's not paradise on earth, but it is a better system. And it goes to this definition that that that john rest forward of wealth that they're an understanding that the wealth of the country again lies in the phrase the radiant lives of its citizens. And also, you know, I think another Raskinian perspective that's useful for us now is not only it is. Is it the life of individual citizens, it is their social life, their life together, recognition and economics that the human being is social is the member of a mutually responsible community and not. We're not just atomistic units, separate economic units. And this, this really goes into something that Jeff and I have talked about the importance of narrative and storytelling economics mainstream economics neoclassical economics has told a story about human beings. That is fiction, that we are these separate units working in our economics, self driven by our economic self interest. That is actually not how human beings live it is a fiction, but it is a fiction that Donald Trump has picked up on very successfully, for example, and, and some on the conservative side. That the story of the salvation of our country I mean I think everyone can agree right now that something is wrong whether you're on the right or the left or whoever you may be all over the globe there's a feeling of anxiety that something is wrong we all agree on that. But the salvation and where it's going to come from Donald Trump would put it forward that it comes with individual empowerment. Someone like Ruskin would have said no it is our collective empowerment it is our collective salvation. He was a storyteller who was interested in the plot structure known as romance, where you have a hero fighting against, fighting against a dragon good versus evil, but the hero doesn't have to be an individual hero. It can be a collective hero, for example the essential workers during the pandemic, the people who are producing the materials that can help help us combat this, this virus foe. It is a way of thinking about our interaction and mutual dependency that I think is so important at this moment. And it's a difficult narrative to achieve I think the individual empowerment narrative is hard to argue against because for example in Ruskin's time, you had a very clear idea of Christian social values that you could pit against capitalist practices. But we don't have that now we don't have an agreed upon set of practices. Later in Ruskin's career he might have even said that exploiting your fellow human or exploiting nature was a violation of natural laws. We don't really talk that way either. And Jeff and I were discussing so what is it what is it we can pose in opposition. What what what does it violate when we exploit nature and we exploit our fellow human and we and we agreed. It's a violation of what a thinker like Ruskin would imagine as whole systems and some thinkers that Rob know you found the podcast such as Jeremy lent I think could relate to this idea that it's whole systems we live within that become when we damage and when they when they become segmented. And that's that was the argument of people like Barry commoner and the original ecology movement that much of the prosperity and capitalism has been produced by creating a debt to nature that if you have a factory that pollutes the water. That pollutes the air. And so on that. You can produce a much cheaper product that this going back to 19th century kinds of examples then place that pays a decent wage and is careful to clean up after itself. So where does the debt go. It's very often assumed by the people who have to clean their water where they wouldn't have had to filter their air. And very often that's put on to the state. But so the the the the actual you might say real profit in Ruskin's terms of the firm is much smaller than its capital return, because they've taken much of the cost and dumped it on other folks. And so, so looking at things as a whole system that's why he said even if you hold private by the way this is one reason he supported a graduated income tax and tax on property. It's very popular in his time. You, you have a responsibility because you, you don't own the land in an absolute sense you're a custodian of it. Yeah. And, and it's interesting now. To me the the awareness of climate is. Yeah, it's not even one person or a group. It's how different countries can affect the whole world. Yeah, I've talked to many guests on this podcast about tension now between the development of India. And this is a country that has limited resources for an investment in the transformation of an energy structure. That will help the rest of the world a great deal. And yet we don't seem to be able to marshal our resources among the advanced countries to help them help us. And I just since there are failings in every respect I'm always very attracted to the notion that Naomi Klein brought out in her book this changes everything. Meaning the change in response to the challenge of climate change. Eliminates the fantasy that an unfettered market can take care of human needs. And it sets a precedent for a different consciousness in a different organization of society. And I think, I think you're working as you mentioned Barry commoner. I think these, how I say these different visions are beckoning us now. Yeah, well, as he Ruskin saw this clearly in a way that we can't quite now, in that he was present when the industry was coal fired. So he literally saw a pristine environment in the countryside turned black from coal. So there was and there was no question about who caused it. I mean, the steam engines were putting out that smoke. And so the area around northern England around the Wolverhampton became known as the black country around Wolverhampton. There was so much pollution. It's a little less clear, or we certainly made the narrative a lot fuzzier about the causes of our present climate and there's the ozone layer and things like this are very abstract to most people. And so you don't see day to day as vividly say as Ruskin did the damage until we start noticing weird things like a few years back I noticed I took a car trip and came home and realized there were only like two or three bugs splattered on my windshield. And remembering when I was young, if you went out for a drive in the summer. You know, you had, you had to, they were all kinds of things you would have run into that what happened to the bugs. You know, we don't have those bugs, some of them, we're not here. Well, I think that's where you get into the whole systems idea again and this idea of connectivity. And you know, Jeff and I with our background in literature talk a lot about language and the very language that we use to talk about nature is something I think Ruskin would find problematic. We refer to it as the environment. It sounds something that is wholly external to ourselves something that is out there, rather than nature, which is, which is a word I think is much more honest. It is something that is within and without and there is no real meaningful separation between the two. And the virus reminds us because it is entirely a biological phenomenon. And we are, we are mammals. And we're subject to little bits of RNA that want to replicate themselves. And we're part of it. Yeah. So Lynn, what is the story that you want to write that the pandemic, the COVID-19 virus has awakened so that people will be able to comprehend the lesson of your vision. It is a story. And I think it has been never been told as succinctly as Mohammed Ali told it in a poem that he wrote that I know you're very fond of Rob. And that poem is those like this me, we. To me that really says it all that is the transition that we have to make at this moment that that is the key to all of it. The key to new economic thinking, the key to social reform, the key to reforming our prison systems is to understand fundamentally that we are connected and that we have a mutual responsibility and to not be afraid of putting our story in a moral context and using value laden words to talk about what we what we need and demand and deserve as a people. That is the plot that I want to see unfolding and I would like to, you know, talk and think more about not just leadership in a general sense, but narrative leadership. One of the things that's become clear in this pandemic, we have these images in and particularly in the George Floyd murder, we have these images flashing constantly on our television screens, but it's stories that put the images together in a way that we understand and comprehend and move us forward as a society and the Internet for all its wonder and the media that we have now sometimes we are just lost in a chaos of images that aren't woven together into a coherent story and I think people who want to challenge the narrative of neoclassical economics or the narrative of politicians like Donald Trump we have to we have to really think hard about regaining our plot and make it clear that our plot is one of a collective salvation and not just an individual one. Yeah, and it's a necessary I mean, again, since Americans as a whole have so little interest in history. It's worthwhile remembering that the nation state that we're one of the oldest nation states and the nation state has not been the natural form of human organization forever and ever. Historically speaking they come and go so the idea that the United States is some kind of exceptional place that's going to go on forever while the rest fade away. We're in a very, very troubling moment and I at times it reminds me of what it was like in the 1930s, which I don't remember and only know historically. But people should remember that Hitler took over, not when he was winning elections but when his party had peaked and was declining. And so this whole it can't happen here narrative is is we're in a very, very perilous time. You know, in terms of what our political future and because each of these images and so forth. To make up a story about it that story is going to be determined by ideology, and we have a very divided ideologically divided and by ideology I don't mean a conscious held viewpoint but more like the philosopher. And so we have to put it that it's the, it's our way of making contradictory things cohere, and it's not a conscious process and that's one reason it's so hard to bend these things around. Because one image and image does not tell its own story. Who's doing the storytelling is really an important issue. I'd like to go back if we could just to say that there's an alternative possible way using Adam Smith and our own history of how economics developed that we that there's a there's two routes that might have come out of Adam Smith, who was after all a moral philosopher. What he's going to do is the story of the Division of Labor. One man draws out the wire and other straightens it a third cuts it a fourth points it a fifth grinds it the top receiving the head the head makes two to three distinct operations, and so on. That's the story that's generally told. But in the second volume of the work, one of the later volumes he says something else about the consequences of the Division of Labor. The workman having no occasion to exert his understanding or exercise his invention and finding out expedience for removing difficulties which never occur. In other words, he doesn't have to invent anything. He naturally loses therefore the habit of such exertion and generally becomes a stupid and ignorant as possible for a human creature to become his dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual social and martial virtues. In a very improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is the great body of people must necessarily fall and who would have thought Adam Smith would have said this, unless the government takes some pains to prevent it. If that were our Adam Smith. Maybe we would have a different basis for the way we think about our economic. And if we also thought about the state as that which enriches sustain provides the conditions for the radiant life of its citizens. I mean, I think that's other great insight. And it would help if we use a Raskinian framework to think about our response to the pandemic, for example, it would become very clear what kinds of choices we need to make about people to work with or without protective equipment. We would know the answer to that question. It would be a very easy judgment to make and we would know that it's the state's responsibility to make that judgment. Let's put it this way. If, if there's a moral hazard to people getting more money on unemployment, then they would get if they went back to their job as the Lindsey Graham's of the world seems to think. Does that say something about the people's motivations or does it say something about the miserable wages that they Yeah, I think the, it's, I, Lynn, you said it very well earlier on in this conversation, it's about the nature of the narratives that people have come to how you say emotionally be attracted to and how it influences what you might call the resistance to caring. And to go back to Muhammad Ali, the me and we. I think what you're suggesting Lynn is that me is better off when I work in the we system. Yes, it's dependent on the well being of we. Yes, it's not one or the other in the short sidedness or the vacuity of awareness as to what really matters is what you and Ruskin are exploring. Yes, I mean, I think it comes really clear in situations like discussion of a vaccine for COVID-19. Is it really going to be effective if we look at it as a we solution. If you look at it individually some people might prefer for various reasons not to have their children vaccinated, but unfortunately, we're all connected in this is if we do it as a we are individual choices are intimately and our individual lives are intimately connected to how we operate as a whole as a whole. Yeah, I mean our country took a strange turn when I guess Reagan was the great proponent of it. I thought it was more important that everybody get a dollar back that there was errors than that everybody put in a dollar for some general good. I mean, we've lost our, we promote the abstraction of liberty and democracy and all of these things until the words themselves are emptied of their content. Our sense of collective identity is right now I think deeply fractured. I think that's true Jeff and I think that's one of the reasons that George Floyd's dying words I can't breathe. I've been such an important message in the protest because I can't breathe has become a collective cry during the protest. It seems to lend itself not only to the moment of reckoning with police brutality, but as you said, an oppressive system that has its boot on the neck of the people of an environment that is so polluted that people can't breathe in it. It's a cry that is both an individual cry and a collective cry that goes to the very essence of what Ruskin talked about the the right to lead a life. Yeah, and breath breath is the essence of life and it also is metaphoric. You know, the beginning of the creation of the world and the God God breeds upon the waters right. So, you know, breath is in like even in yoga breathing and breath is our is our our life. The system of panic, when you're in a panic, you tighten up and you can't breathe. So that very I think that those words of his have this really powerful resonance like you're saying when not about the just about his own individual life and he can't breathe. But in a certain pretty literal sense, we're all being suffocated. And that's if there's to be a crusade of some time, then then saving the planet is also saving ourselves. I mean, everybody can sense that we're off course, profoundly off course. This is not the world we want to hand to our children. And but where I'm where I struggle and I'm asking you both to explore this is that is it the institutions that need to be repaired. Or is the real disease, the ideas, the ideology and the narratives that are pointing us in the wrong directions. And that those institutions are a reflection of that misguided vision. I'm very attracted to the writings of an old man who studied a lot about Eastern Eastern philosophy. His name was RC Zainer. He was at Oxford University in the 50s and early 60s. He has a quote that's an epigraph of a music book that I own, where he says, loss of faith in a given religion does not by any means apply the eradication of the religious instinct. It merely means that instinct temporarily repressed will seek an object elsewhere. I want to I want to bring this to you, particularly Jeff, because you spoke about the wealth of nations. And my, my understanding of history was at the time of the Industrial Revolution and the onset of the wealth of nations. Much of the church and moral and ethical language had been the discourse of governance. It lost its credibility because the church was seen to be siding with the landed aristocracy, the oligarchy of the time and contributing and legitimating oppression. And after the Industrial Revolution, governance, for reasons that I think cohere, moved to this antiseptic, scientific, quote, value free technocracy. But that in itself is a false consciousness because there were values embedded in every action. But I can understand why a practitioner, say in a finance ministry or a central bank or the tax office or an agricultural office would not want to speak in moral and ethical language for fear of being suspected of being part of that old rancid power structure where the church had misused its power over ideas and committed to contributed to oppression. So we're at a place now where what you might call the dry technocratic value free notion exhibited some failures in the era of Stalin and Mao and other places. And it seemed like the void was filled by this deity called the free market and capitalism. Zaners seeking an object elsewhere for the religious instinct seemed to take on a secular form. And this my intuition is that this is breaking down. So this is a long winded way of framing a question. Can we just go to institutional reform or do we have to go to ideological re examination upheaval and get back to defining what it is that matters and create institutions that are a means to that end, despite the concentrated wealth and opposition that will always be present. I think it's the latter. Do you want to talk to him. Go ahead. Okay, so say I think it's the latter but of course in these institutions and structures. You brought up this the, the, they can be transformed, you know, in a sense, spiritually, the, as you pointed out the presence of the citizens united decision, for instance, changed the nature of politics, because both parties in our country had to go to the same people for support. It seemed now the the through the internet this development of grassroots financing is one of the things that's led to the the candidacies that are not so dependent on the big money. But that's, but spiritually speaking, this is one of Ruskin's main points is that the development of this free market ideology, somehow gave the market a moral free pass. But that that was his main objection to the idea that you could develop a science of economics. And then when you decide to apply it to actual situations, bring in things like human affections emotions and so forth. And what he was pointing out is that basically, you're, you're, you're, you're actually dividing human beings apart at that point, because they do have this instinct for reverence and religion, which will find its place. So why should the mark, why should your behavior as a merchant, or a person in the marketplace, not be subject to the values of your professed religion, which is supposed to govern all your behavior. One of the things that has struck me again about politics on the left is this kind of moral unilateral disarmament. You don't have to be a believing Christian to say that Jesus would not have some pretty bad things to say about some pretty what we consider the fundamentalism market capitalism right. So that to leaving that religious rhetoric to the right wing has been I think a terrible mistake that there is a there is a moral component that could be appealed to. And but it requires something other than the kind of cliche language that we get we are so used to these parades of abstractions that that Trump almost makes into a caricature where we act as though these abstract words like democracy and freedom and all of these things somehow do work for us. You know, and they don't. They serve their camouflage right. So, one thing I would love to see and we're not going to get it I'm afraid from Joe Biden would have been a really a moral and values based candidacy in this moment that could employ the religion language of all faiths and indeed moral philosophy. And so I think about in looking at these things that that there are issues of right and wrong here, not just issues of productivity. You know, and externalities and you know, capital return and so on. Anyway, so I think that that's what that's the best I can do at the moment. But I think that your question about you know whether we go to institutions before we go to perhaps more fundamental I think you know the observation has been made that the world arises out of language. You know, it arises out of culture, and the metaphors use shape our values in our culture and those in turn shape our institutions. And I think we're in the midst of a transition, which, which will be reflected in language one way or another, it's a process that sometimes in history can happen in a generation or two we may we may be in a moment of this kind of shift. But I think you know the nature of the shift is a movement from a self focus to a whole focus and we were talking about whole systems later, Muhammad, me, we framework think that's a way of thinking that certainly has existed in the West, you know, ever since here, but it hasn't necessarily been the dominant kind of narrative trope at least in the last couple hundred years so I again I'm sort of looking for language revolution and narrative revolution, as much as anything right now. I find it. How would I say, I find it like, I'm an explorer and I'm trying to understand the resistance to change when change is so clearly profoundly necessary. And I think that the pandemic, the environmental crisis, all of these things are very very big, what I'll call more than nudges, they're throttling our consciousness so that clinging. And here, the philosopher steven steven toolman wrote a book, essentially about from the 30 years war to the end of Ronald Reagan called cosmopolous. One of his key findings was the notion that the, how would you say this, at the time, when you are unsettled, and you become afraid, the tendency is to look back to the familiar, rather than forward to what is necessary. And, but, but I must say, I think the this episode is so extreme. We can't go back. I think that may be the silver lining. Yeah, of how ordered this is. I think you're right, Rob. And I think that, you know, one of the hopeful things neuroscientists have been showing us recently that our brains are flexible, we can rewire that we can learn new ways of thinking and doing things you know there's an example of when someone has a stroke. Sometimes certain activities are impossible, but the brain, it's possible to rewire it and train it and, and learn again. And we have a cognitive flexibility, we also have a cultural flexibility, you know, like I was saying, sometimes we have, we have pretty amazing shifts that happen just in a generation or two. We look at the environmental movement that took off in the 1960s with Rachel Carlson, Silent Spring. We have had these moments of transition and they unfortunately do often come out of very chaotic and bloody circumstances, such as the one that we have now but we don't have to be stuck. We are flexible. That's one of the things that makes us human and transformation is never out of our reach. One of the most impressive things and hopeful things that's come out of this has been the many actions of ordinary people in the absence of proper leadership. How people have stepped up, you know, and help their neighbor and look at the private mask making industry that came up out of nowhere. We certainly have the potential. If that could be, you know, put into some kind of, if it doesn't just go away and everybody go back to their own house after the crisis is over, there is a potential movement here, it seems like. And as we've been talking about, that's democratic in the real sense. And there's really no normal to go back to right now. That's both a very painful thing. That's right. But it's also a thing that makes transition possible. The pandemic is going to be with us and it's a feedback loop and a spiral that can be very destructive for a while. People who are protesting may get the virus. That's going to impact communities of color more than others. But it is also going to force us to remain in this moment of tension and struggle until we have figured something out. It's almost like the boot of history is on our necks right now. And it's not going to let up until we come up with a new framework, a new path forward. There is no normal. Yeah, people, you know, it's hard to, I mean, I keep thinking again of the 30s and my own, as of course I can say I'm old guy and all that, but my own relative passivity in seeing what's happening out there. And wondering again, you know, that did I not take action? I don't know what's going to happen next, but if the worst comes, you know, where was I when it was one thing to see all these things and pontificate about them, but where am I? Yes. I think that's a good, that's almost a good title for this session. Where am I? Where are we? Where is me? But I, I guess, you know, I, I love how much the two of you are exploring. Again, for our listeners today, America's chilling experiment in human sacrifice on the Inet website by Lynn Paramore and Jeffery L Spear is a tremendous article. And I, as I read it the other day, I heard a song from the rock band you two. And in the last verse, the lyrics go, one love, one blood, one life, you've got to do what you should, one life with each other, sisters and my brothers, one life, but we're not the same. But we get to carry each other, carry each other. I want to thank you both. And thank you each for bringing your vision and this challenge to this podcast. And I hope that we can convene again, and you keep writing, and I can keep illuminating your insights in the weeks and months ahead. For right now, I just want to thank you both for a beautiful exploration. And I look forward to our next one. Thank you very much, Rob. Thank you, Rob. I really appreciate it. Pleasures of mine. Thank you. Bye bye. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org.