Zeitgeist: reading the spirit of an age
The previous three posts were about money: What money is, How banks create money and The world monetary order, from gold to the dollar. Money is never only technical. Each monetary order reflects what its age believed about trust, the state and the future. This post steps back to that larger idea: the spirit of an age.
. * . . * . *
* . _______________________ .
. . / \ * .
* / Z E I T G E I S T \ .
. . /___________________________\ *
* | | | | | | | | | | .
. * | the air everyone | | *
. | breathes and no | | .
* . | one can see | | .
___|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|___
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The word
Zeitgeist is German: Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit, mind). The idea is usually traced to Johann Gottfried Herder in the late 18th century, who argued that each people and each era has its own way of feeling and thinking, and should be judged by its own standards, not by ours.
G. W. F. Hegel gave the idea its weight. For Hegel, history is the story of Geist, of mind slowly coming to understand itself and its freedom. Every age expresses one stage of that process in its law, art, religion and philosophy. Two of his lines are often quoted in paraphrase:
- Philosophy is its own time grasped in thought. No thinker can leap over their era any more than a person can jump over their own shadow.
- The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk: we understand an age properly only when it is ending.
an age is lived ---------------------------> and then understood
[ dawn ] ........ [ noon ] ........ [ dusk ]
,___,
(O,O) <- Minerva's owl
/) ) sets out only now
--"-"--That second line is a warning for anyone, me included, who tries to name our spirit while still inside it.
Is there really one spirit?
Critics have pushed back hard on the idea.
- Karl Marx turned Hegel upside down: ideas don't drive history, material life does. The "spirit of an age" mostly reflects how it produces things and who owns what.
- Karl Popper distrusted any theory that claims to know where history must go. He thought such theories feed authoritarian politics.
- Historians point out that every age is plural. Peasants and courtiers, women and men, colonisers and colonised did not share one spirit.
A careful use of the word keeps all three objections in mind. A Zeitgeist is a pattern of shared assumptions: what an era takes for granted, finds obvious, or cannot imagine. It is not a ghost directing events.
About the 2007 film
Many people meet the word through Zeitgeist, an online film from 2007 and its sequels. Since this series is about money, it is worth being direct about it. The film's central claims are:
- the US Federal Reserve is a private plot to enslave the public through debt;
- the 9/11 attacks were an inside job;
- Christianity was copied wholesale from ancient sun myths.
All three are rejected by the historians, economists and investigators who have examined them. The film does touch real questions, such as how banks create money and who benefits from monetary policy. But it answers them with conspiracy rather than evidence. How banks create money covers the actual mechanics, which are both less sinister and more interesting. The later films moved toward a technocratic utopia (the "resource-based economy" of the Venus Project), which is a separate and openly debated set of ideas.
Ages in one picture
Simplifying a lot, here is how the spirit of a few eras is often summarised, set beside its money:
| Era | What it took for granted | Its money |
|---|---|---|
| 19th-c. liberal age | progress, empire, the gold-backed promise | gold standard, sterling |
| 1914-1945 | crisis of liberalism, mass politics, total war | broken gold, controls |
| 1945-1971 | planning, welfare states, reconstruction | Bretton Woods |
| 1980-2008 | markets, globalisation, "end of history" | floating rates, dollar system |
| after 2008 | crises, networks, distrust of institutions | QE, crypto, sanctions |
Trying to read our own age
With the owl's warning in mind, here are some descriptions that serious thinkers have offered of the present. Each catches something, and each is disputed.
+------------------+
| NETWORKED SELF | feeds, profiles, metrics
+---------+--------+
|
+---------------+ +--------v--------+ +-------------------+
| ACCELERATION |---->| O U R A G E |<----| DISTRUST OF THE |
| more, faster | | (?) | | INSTITUTIONS |
+---------------+ +--------+--------+ +-------------------+
|
+---------v--------+
| POLYCRISIS | climate, war, money, health
+------------------+- Acceleration. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that modern life is defined by speeding up: of technology, of social change, of the pace of living. We gain options but lose a stable connection to the world. He calls that missing connection resonance.
- The attention economy. When information is abundant, attention becomes scarce. Platforms compete for it, and what spreads is what provokes. Critics link this to polarisation. Others note that moral panics followed the novel, the radio and television too.
- Distrust. Trust in governments, media and experts has fallen in many countries. One reading: elites failed (2008, wars, inequality) and people noticed. Another: networks make every failure visible and every rumour viral, so trust erodes even when performance doesn't.
- Polycrisis. The historian Adam Tooze popularised this word for the feeling that crises in climate, energy, money, health and geopolitics now feed each other, so no single one can be solved alone.
- The optimists' reply. Writers like Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling point to long-run data: extreme poverty, child mortality and illiteracy have fallen dramatically. On this view our age is a period of real progress, experienced through a news cycle that only reports bad things.
Notice that each description also implies a politics. That is the risk with the word. Whoever names the spirit of the age is often trying to recruit it.
A practical exercise
You can't see the air you breathe, but you can test for it. Three questions help:
- What do people around me find obvious that past generations would find strange? (Carrying a networked computer at all times; money as numbers on a screen.)
- What would people in fifty years find strange about us?
- Who benefits from things staying obvious?
assumption ----> test it ----> still holds? --yes--> keep it, for now
|
no
v
you just saw a piece of the ZeitgeistNext and last in this series: Philosophy for people who read machine code, about old questions that look surprisingly fresh to anyone who spends their days in a disassembler.