Creation Time and Capital Time

Professor Michael NorthcottSchool of Divinity, University of Edinburgh

IPCC 5ARb (2014) finds Mediterranean hardest hit by climate change in Europe with frequent forest fires, heatwaves, and failing harvests but increased heat in N Europe = less energy useIn the Americas Brazil and Mexico will be hardest hit with heatwaves, low crop productivity, forest and grassland die off

Asia faces threats in mid-term from glacial melt and ongoing ocean level rise requiring large-scale resettlement particularly in the Indian delta. Long term (2050+) food supplies in Asia are threatened by declining availability of Himalayan meltwater.

Russia faces long term food scarcity from heat

Africa faces desertification, drought, soil erosion, food shortages

UNFCCC designed to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system’ to allow ‘ecosystems to adapt

naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed

in a sustainable manner’

UNFCCC would mediate between capital time and earth time but its only economic reality is carbon emissions trading

The methods and interests of this world capitalism suspend the very spatial borders and distinctions that give concepts and images of interference and non-interference any intelligible content.The transformation of a spatially conceived principle of non-interference into a spatially undifferentiated general system of interference was made possible by the fact that Woodrow Wilson substituted for the original and true Monroe principle (non-interference in the Americas) the ideological idea of liberal democracy and its associated images, especially those of ‘free’ world trade and (a) ‘free world market.Carl Schmitt, ‘Grossraum versus universalism’, 1939.

(T)oday nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber predicted: a huge industrial plant. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

The acute question to pose is upon whom will fall the frightening power implied in a world-embracing economic and technical organization. This question can by no means be dismissed in the belief that everything would function automatically, that things would administer themselves, and that a government by people over people would be superfluous because human beings would then be absolutely free. For what would they be free? This can be answered by optimistic or pessimistic conjectures, all of which finally lead to an anthropological confession of faith.Schmitt, Political Theology

Economic End Times Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.Frederic Jameson, Future City

Capitalism as an imaginary seems more durable than a stable climate or the North Pole

It takes the form of a global electronic skein of communication and information systems that encompass the earth from satellites to trading screens

This skein creates global simultaneity - synchronous time - which is more ‘real’ than geographical distance or ancestral time

Through the time of money each surveilled site on earth must accrue or lose $£E

Interest accrual on balance sheets drives a process of ‘liquefaction’ so capital time depreciates ‘natural capital’

Hence ‘social cost’ of Syrian drought and civil war is not on capital balance sheets

Carbon emissions trading - atmospheric derivatives - is the only ‘reality’ economists can give to the ‘externality’ of climate change

The logic - time is money - creates fatalism

Hence ‘one of the affects of capitalism, that is, of thinking in terms of capitalism, is to generate for most people who do not benefit from its wealth a feeling of helplessness’ (B Latour, Affects of Capitalism)

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In Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari said that the prevalence of psychotropic drugs in societies dominated by contract and money time is the social cost of capitalism

Breaking Bad is a deeper metaphorWalter White the chemistry teacher as the drug baron is known as Heisenberg

He represents Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ - but he has to kill his business partners one after another

Nineteenth century economists modelled their ‘laws’ - such as their sealed model of supply and demand in a perfect market - on the laws of physics In Breaking Bad the sealed model of supply and demand keeps breaking bad - each attempt to seal off the drug production and supply chain turns eventually into the need to kill again

So interest accrual, discounting the future, is a ‘law of nature’ but it is breaking bad into the laws of atmospheric physics

But when Lord Stern said that the future effects of climate change required a lower discount rate to bring them onto contemporary balance sheets economists said he was wrong - capital time is more real than climate temporality

Christians from the first century until the sixteenth refused to lend money at interest

This refusal originates in the biblical connection between debt and slavery

In Israel debts were to be redeemed every fifty years through the return of the principal - land title - to the heirs of the debtor

This fifty year monetary cycle prevented speculation and inflation from becoming more real than human slavery or trafficking

Time in Christian culture before modernity was governed by the cycling of Ordinary Time and Sacred Time

Ordinary time - days in the year when the crops are either in the ground awaiting harvesting, or the soil lies fallow awaiting the rising of the sun

Sacred Time - Christmas, Lent, Easter, Rogation, Harvest, Advent

In Christianity agricultural/economic production is mediated by myth and ritual of liturgical time

This mediation mapped the sacrifice of time in planting and harvesting and tending the soil onto the movements of the sun, moon and stars

Liturgical time mapped agricultural production onto the quantity of sunlight emitted onto the earth’s surface

Time in Christian theology is given timeThe Creator gives time to Adam to tend the creatures - and also gives rest

The balance between ordinary and sacred time made 100+ ‘holy’ days in pre-Reformation Europe in addition to Sunday

But usury destroys time as gift and hence in capital time ‘time is money’, so Keynes wrong when he said rising GDP over generations results in more leisure

GDP has to rise indefinitely in usury/debt based money systems because without limits on debt creation GDP is required continually to rise to meet rising interest payments

Hence future climate costs must be discounted to zero > 50yrs

Modern economic production is mediated by the instantaneous rituals of consumption which ‘take the waiting out of wanting’

So climate scientists’ accounts of a temporal lag between cause and effect lacks cultural purchase

Monetised compression of space/time produces a new consciousness of instantaneity - delayed gratification also disappears from national and corporate accounts

Adam Smith first imagined Homo economicus as acting towards a providential alignment between small business makers

But this new providence involved monetising space and time and dissolved the old forms of their cultural mediation such as guilds, liturgical time, virtue

Marx understood the monetisation of space as rent and time as wage as an ethico-political and not only an economic project

Taylorisation of factory/wage time - time and motion - is the logic of time already contained in Smith’s account of pin makingSo time is commoditised - mathematised - in ways that deny its reception from ancestors, gods or the heavensNow the signs from the heavens reveal that mathematical time - atomic time - is a social construct that is unsituated in astronomical time and cannot resolve climate temporalities

To get climate temporalities into modern forms of representation economists invent a ‘carbon emissions market’ of financial derivatives in which atmospheric change - the laws of physics - are represented in the post-political abstract market mechanism

But derivatives are subject to expert manipulation - e.g. High Frequency Trading which relies on time stamp technologies that give the trading advantage to the highest precision time stamping machine

Carbon emissions derivatives represent a new market in the toxic waste of the fossil fuel industry in the atmosphere

Underlying assumption of R Coase’s ‘Social cost’ paper that ‘social cost’ only ‘valuable’ as marketable property

Alternative approach advocated in UK by Dieter Helm who chairs the UK’s natural capital committee is to monetise environmental costs and benefits as ecosystem services

Soil erosion in accounts becomes capital depreciation set against accrual of valued added by corn production

Materialising ecological values as mathematical numbers merely promotes the climate poison - the postnatural physics of monetised mathematisation - as the cure for the disease of a fossil fuel destabilised climateWhat moral philosophers call intrinsic value - of persons, of the ‘gift of good land’ - is not promoted by materialismPsychologists find that appeals to monetary values to ‘save’ nature promote continuing nature-destructive behavioursMorality - to ‘value’ others intrinsically not only for their instrumental ‘use’ - involves mediating communities, myths, rituals in which persons learn to respond empathically to the needs of persons and species

Therefore, since all things are beautiful and in some way delightful, and since beauty and delight do not exist without proportion, and since proportion exists primarily in numbers, all things are subject to number. Hence number is the principal exemplar in the mind of the Creator, and in things, the principal vestige leading to Wisdom. And since number is most evident to all and very close to God, it leads us, by its sevenfold distinction, very close to Him; it makes him known in all bodily and visible things when we apprehend numerical things, when we delight in numerical proportions, and when we judge irrefutably by the laws of numerical proportions.St Bonaventure, Itinerarium, 2. 10, 59 - 61.

Another Franciscan, Luca Pacioli, writing a Summa Arithmetica around Pythagorean mathematical cosmology, and in the same work of cosmological speculation elaborated the method of double-entry book keeping in which the modern capitalist calculation of profit in business enterprise finds its origin.

For Weber calculation of profit through book-keeping - and not money itself which goes back at least to the ancient near east - is the essential characteristic which sets modern economic institutions and practices against those of the pre-capitalist era. A rational capitalistic establishment is one with capital accounting, that is, an establishment which determines its income yielding power by calculation according to the methods of modern bookkeeping and the striking of a balance. Max Weber, General Economic History

Christian metaphysics (unlike Greek or economistic) is personal metaphysics Hence Christ’s saying ‘inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these you did it unto me’It therefore contrasts with the impersonal accounting machine that ‘balances’ fossil fuel pollution as ‘carbon price’