Human Meme

Here is the idea at the center of it. Money has come in two families for about as long as we have had money. There is value that travels by possession: the coin, the note, the bill in your pocket that asks nothing of anyone. And there is value that travels by permission: the tally, the ledger, the account entry that moves only when a chain of institutions agrees to move it. Neither family is wicked. A healthy monetary world has always kept both, because each covers the other's failures. The story of our moment is that the first family is being retired, and the second family is being wired to a switch.

There is a coin in your pocket right now, and there is an identical coin in someone else's pocket across town, and those two coins are worth different amounts. Same metal, same stamp, same date. The difference between them comes from how each coin arrived. One of them was spent early, while prices still belonged to yesterday. The other arrived late, after the prices had already risen to swallow it. That gap, between the coin in the nearest hand and the coin in the other pocket, is the subject of the book I am holding today.

In the winter of 1393, the King of France gave his court an order that no one knew how to obey. He asked them not to touch him: not to brush against him in a corridor, not to take his arm on the stairs, not to embrace him on his name day. Charles the Sixth had become certain that his body was made of glass, and that one clumsy hand or one careless shoulder would shatter him on the floor of his own palace. He had the front of his clothing reinforced with rods, so that if he fell, the pieces of him might hold together long enough to be gathered up. He was a king at the center of a crowded court, and he spent his days in terror that the people closest to him would break him by accident. It is tempting to file that away as a medieval oddity, a story about one sick man six hundred years gone.

In 1868 the office of the Surgeon General put out an order asking Army doctors to gather Native skulls so the size of them could be studied. A grief that any family on earth would know on sight was treated, on the other side of the counter, as a research opportunity. The dead became holdings. An ancestor became an object that a stranger could keep, study, and decline to return. I anchor the book in the Pawnee because their story shows you the whole machine in one place. These were a people who read their own lives in the stars. The Skidi band, the Wolf people, built their earth lodges as small models of the heavens, with four posts for the four stars that hold up the corners of the sky, and they watched the Pleiades come through the smoke hole to know when to plant.

The subject is recantation: the coerced word, the public taking back of a belief by a person who has been given no real choice. We use the word recant without hearing what is buried inside it. It comes from the Latin for singing again. To recant is to sing your own song over, backward, in front of the people who marched you to the microphone. A confession of error that someone else wrote. An apology the speaker does not mean, in a room where everyone knows he does not mean it. The act has a sound, and the sound is a voice saying the opposite of what its owner believes, out loud, so the saying can be witnessed. Once you start listening for that sound, you hear it everywhere.