The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: Everything eventually degenerates and decays...people, eras - and even empires. Bill Bonner wonders if it is worth fighting against the inevitable, or embrace it. Read on... NOBLE ROT
by Bill Bonner
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress
- W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” The altoplano of Northwest Argentina is dry. The air is thin. Even though it is not far from the equator, it is not very hot, even in the middle of summer. We were there in early autumn. Francisco’s grandfather had planted rows of alamo trees all around the house and far out into the open prairie. This time of year, the trees wear their dresses of bright red and gold. And then, when the wind blows, the leaves go dancing in the meadow. Staring out the window, we can’t remember seeing anything quite as beautiful...the rows of yellow trees, stone walls surrounding a large green pasture, and beyond the stone wall, a broad expanse of open range with rugged mountains in the distance, their summits sparkling with snow. “I don’t like it when you say things are always decaying and degenerating; it makes me depressed.” Elizabeth seemed weary as she spoke, like someone who had just been given five to 10 by a federal court, with nowhere else to appeal. “I just don’t like the idea that everything is always getting worse. Always degrading. Always degenerating. I don’t think it is true.” Elizabeth believes in the power of reason...of progress...of good intentions and hard work. She believes that time takes us forward, generally towards a better world. She imagines an upward slope to human affairs, always marching ahead into the brighter light of an improved day. Where she sees rot and corruption, she is annoyed and aims to treat it like mildew in a closet. We, on the other hand, give in to rot like a middle-aged man gives in to an affair with his secretary; it might lead to trouble, but he hopes it might be worth it. Out the bedroom window was evidence - the bright leaves. They were brought to us by corruption and death. Decay, degeneration, death - and then, renaissance. Unstoppable. Ineluctable. Irremediable. It seemed like progress to us...even if it weren’t always uphill. Elizabeth reads the papers and chaffs against it. Problems have solutions, she believes. Mistakes are made by humans; they can be corrected by humans. She sees the empire in decline and is tempted to do something about it. She is a better American than we are. Readers may wonder what any of this has to do with money. Of course, the answer is nothing at all - or everything. For the same laws that condemn the body and rule the soul also apply to all things human - including investment markets and the civilizations that produce them. It was human beings who created the American Republic, and human beings, too, who nursed it into a great empire with a reserve currency and a $50 trillion public debt. Now, the debt grows more every 18 months than in the first 204 years of the nation’s existence. Competitors in Asia take away its business; energy exporters take away its cash. All while the United States squanders its borrowed money on domestic bread and circuses that can do it no real good, and foreign wars against countries that can do it no real harm. The empire is surely on a downward slope now. But so what? Empires, like beautiful women, fine wines, or graceful buildings are never more alluring than when there is a hint of decay about them. Age gives them grace and mystery...before destroying them completely. And what man is any good until he has been tempered by age, and hammered at the forge of mortality? A young man walks upward. He climbs the mountain every day, but it is the downhill walk that puts him to the test. Like an army in retreat, he tries to hold himself together and meet his fate without making a fool of himself. Yet, we cannot argue with Elizabeth’s desire to make things better; in fact, we admire her for it. The process of corruption is no more natural or inevitable than her readiness to fight it. Besides, there is nothing more captivating than a lost cause, and no man so appealing as the one who fights for it, like Rhett Butler who went off to join the Confederate army after he knew the war was lost. We were put into this philosophical mood by pain. Riding along on horseback on our estate, we wrenched our back and spent nearly three days in bed. Accidents with horses seem to promote a certain kind of reflection. Indeed, the career of one of the greatest thinkers about the corruption of life began and ended with horses. In 1867, when Friedrich Nietzsche began military service, he attempted to leap-mount into the saddle of his horse, only to flounder with a chest wound. That sent him back to the University of Leipzig, where he wrote one of his great works, “Human, all too human.” Then, in 1889, in the piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, he saw a horseman lying on the whip and was moved to throw his arms around the horse’s neck. Legend has it that the sensation of pity drove him mad. More likely it was third stage syphilis, a disease of irreversible degeneration in those days. Either way, his career was over. Our injury on horseback gave us time to think, but nothing newsworthy to think about. We had no television, no radio, no newspapers, no books, no telephone, no Internet. All we could do was stare out the window. And from the position of our bed, all we could see was the bright autumn colors of the dancing leaves, and up the hill behind the house, a large, white cross. There’s nothing to be depressed about,” we told Elizabeth. “If it weren’t for the decay, we wouldn’t have this view.” We wouldn’t have the view, and the leaves would never turn colors, curl up, and die. No one would have gone to the trouble to put up a white cross at the top of a barren hill an hour’s drive from the nearest one-horse town. Without death, there would be no redemption, no hope of heaven, no fear of hell, and no chance of everlasting life. Without death, life everlasting would have no meaning; all movement would cease...because all the earth would be frozen into a meaningless past, and an equally meaningless future. “You know, the main difference between Indian culture and Western,” said Michel over lunch, “is the idea of time. In our culture, it is linear. We see it going forward...in a kind of eternal march of history. But in India it is circular. The Hindi word for tomorrow, kal, is the same as the word for yesterday, because yesterday is in the future, too. Kal (yesterday) - Aaj (today) - Kal (tomorrow). ” Yesterday, today, tomorrow, and yesterday, again. Eram. Sum. Ero. Eram. Ero. Civilizations rise, and then decline - and then rise again. Markets begin, rise, soar, then collapse, and begin rising again. History records the whole thing as a pack of lies and misunderstandings involving hairy people with tails, doing foolish things for absurd reasons. But, there are moments of glory, too, when men occasionally stand on two feet. Down in Cafayate, we visited the vineyards. There, too, the process of corruption brings the grapes to a majestic and honorable conclusion. As they mature, they store up sugar, an oenologist explained to us. They also collect what they call a “noble rot” - a type of decay that begins the process of fermentation and turns grape juice into fine wine. Noble rot is a specific fungus - Botrytis cinerea - found on certain grapes and famous at the Chateau Yquem, which produces some of the finest sauternes in the world. Botrytis cinerea is a grayish mold that looks like ash on the grapes. When the wine growers see the fungus forming, they carefully watch the grapes and pick them at just the moment when there is enough rot to produce a fine wine, but not enough to destroy it. The fungus is, of course, a parasite - like a leech on a dog or a lobbyist in Congress. But the rot it engenders does not make the grape go bad; instead, it concentrates the sweetness. The world and everything in it seems set up for disappointment. The green buds come out in spring, unaware that they are all doomed. But when the crisp weather comes, they do not simply droop and die. Instead, the stress of approaching death brings out the best in them. Like Sidney Carton, they seem to rise in grace and dignity as they mount the scaffold. They are at their moment of glory when the hangman slips the noose around their necks. And as the ship’s officer remarked when the Titanic took on water, the orchestra never sounded better. Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning Editor's Note: Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of The Wall Street Journal best seller Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century (John Wiley & Sons). In Bonner and Wiggin's follow-up book, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, they wield their sardonic brand of humor to expose the nation for what it really is - an empire built on delusions. Daily Reckoning readers can buy their copy of Empire of Debt at a discount - just click on the link below: "Now Perhaps Someone Will Listen!" --- Advertisement ---
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