God and Mammon

Chronicles of American Money

By: Lance Morrow

Narrated by: Tom Parks

This book is about the partnership of God and Mammon in the New World - about how Americans have made money and lost money, and about how they have thought about that obsessive and peculiarly American subject. Money is the basic American thing, the life's blood of the country. God and Mammon shows how the dynamics of money in its many dimensions (material, spiritual, cultural, psychological) worked to make America what it is. It traces the grand American binaries of success and failure to their theological origins in Calvinism's anxieties about salvation and damnation.

©2020 Lance Morrow (P)2020 Tantor

Young person, this will open new vistas

In a few words, this is an eloquent, gifted writer rooted in the mid-20th-century USA, looking back (across great pools of wisdom, practical and intellectual, but here plucked up and tossed into vibrant life), and looking at mid-2020. This book zooms us in on some amazing people and scenes we would not find in popular culture today: what was the supreme balance of practical smartness of very business-minded Quakers long ago? I swear here I can see through their eyes. And he does it all so dexterously and intimately. So it is the voice of a USA writer at a cultural height of the "American Century" (Luce, coiner of that phrase, figures in this story), coming from deep education in the humanities (as I was steeped,if more shallowly, in the 1970s at university) speaking to right now. These brilliant voices are served up lest their shine be shoved off, effaced and buried under mountains of TikTok and facebook and video wargames and Vegas and schlock "music" and every other overstimulated and garish thing corporate hegemony has baited the hook with as "hot" or whatever. (This author never shows my sort of petulance and resentment. His is a more compassionate voice.) This is the opposite of the current flood of "make a zillion this very afternoon by day trading, all in five seconds and for $3!!!" titles. It is very nonlinear, very much the series of personal essays, wanderings, occasionally self-indulgent, but I say: hang in there, the rewards are many and vast. This is a walk through literature, and personalities. It makes one more literate. Bits of it might seem musty and dusty; stretch your mind! See what more is to be seen here! That click of things connecting or finding a new description or angle from old things is nearly constant. I won't call this author a genius, though he often shows glimmers and touches of that. (I've read other things by him, he's quite good, reaching the grand and the tiny-but-telling within a single sentence all the time.) His work for me, does point to genius; it does support the thinker in moving to the verge of great, novel thoughts. So to use various now-moldy characterizations he is a sort of John the Baptist, a Weylund the Smith, maybe a Nietzsche who realizes he isn't the Superman of now, but forges the powerful sentences to loft you up toward the heights. It is liberating, for those with the ears, as maybe he first aha! understanding of Emancipation was (and maybe the heights were beyond reach, but the invitation is there). The voice that did this for me in 1975, as I recovered from a broken arm skateboarding, vaulting me mentally to a whole new level, was Sir Kenneth Clark in Civilisation (yes spell checker-robot, that is a correct British spelling). (The spell checker here has freaked at most every unusual word I use, showing that tagging the name "smart" on anything now often means the opposite.) This book is a popularization, like Civilsation was, for those who hadn't the time or patience to read all the classics (as the humanites grew out of the old classical education), but still like a super well-spoken tour guide. There are flat moments here, but there is SO much well-crafted and nourishing food for the brain!