Musical Banks

 I was reading Samuel Butler's Erewhon this week, and came to the section of the protagonist's travels in which his Erewhonian hosts conduct him to a mysterious building called the "Musical Bank." The building—an imposing and beautifully-wrought edifice, with stained-glass windows—is one for which all the inhabitants of Erewhon profess the highest esteem. They all become offended if anyone insults these institutions in their presence. They all claim to aspire to want to attend these buildings regularly. 

And yet, the narrator notices, they seldom actually deposit their money in these banks. The inhabitants of Erewhon, he observes, actually use a system of dual-currency. One currency—the hard one—is what they employ for their daily transactions. It is the only one in which they will accept real payment in ordinary economic life. The second currency—which the narrator describes as a kind of "toy money," is that which they deposit in the Musical Banks. It does not appear to be good for anything else. 

But does the "toy money" held in these banks at least bear a solid rate of interest? Hardly. Butler explains that most of the Erewhonians in practice hold most of their real savings—the ones they will actually need in retirement—in different, non-musical, much more ordinary sorts of banks. It is only a small portion of their wealth that they deposit in the Musical Banks. And this is because the latter only pay out their dividends once every thirty thousand years. Those alive to deposit today will not live to see the return. 

At a certain point, while he is touring the precincts of one of these Musical Banks, the protagonist observes that they are surprisingly empty. Despite the fact that everyone in Erewhon swears by these institutions—and they even compete to get their sons positions working for the banks, these being highly prestigious and sought-after jobs—no one actually seems to go to them. They are practically deserted. 

When he points this out to his hosts, they all make a great show of deploring the fact. "Mrs. Nosnibor said that it was indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious institutions," he reports. 

And I thought—goodness, that is what people used to say about churches, back when I was in divinity school!

Perhaps I am dense, but it took me until nearly the end of the chapter to realize that was exactly the joke Butler intended. 

Most of the institutions that Butler's protagonist visits in Erewhon, after all, have some real-world analogue. Most of them serve as a commentary upon the parallel institutions of Victorian England. By witnessing some eccentricities of Erewhonian institutions, and holding them up to our scorn, Butler's narrator thereby serves as an indirect commentator on English mores. "Isn't it ridiculous that they think this?" he asks—all while subtly showing how similar it is to ridiculous things we, the readers, believe. 

Yet I have to confess that the "Musical Banks" stumped me at first. I didn't get what Butler was trying to satirize until the last two paragraphs of the chapter, at which point I had to flip back and read it over. Calling them "banks" threw me off the scent. I thought that perhaps Butler was trying to mock some actual financial institution. But no—he had in mind the way in which Victorian Englishmen purported to lay up treasure in heaven (while conducting the real business of life all the while in hard currency). 

What really gave it away, as I say, was the dialogue with Mrs. Nosnibor. She deplores the fact that people are not more regular in attendance—just as everyone in divinity school always complained about the fact that people today did not seem to know what was good for them. They had stopped attending church, and thereby deprived themselves of weekly enforced contact with "community," "the source of ultimate concern," the "higher meaning and purpose," etc. In short, they were accused of being perverse. 

And yet—even back then, when I was an aspiring divine myself—the irreverent thought did occasionally occur to me: perhaps people were avoiding church—not because they didn't realize they needed all these things—but because they knew their own needs better than the ministers did. Perhaps they needed a free Sunday morning more than a twenty-minute sermon. Perhaps they needed solitude more than "community"—and found "higher meaning" in something other than the reverend's preaching. 

After all—even as I mouthed my own professional platitudes about the "value of religious community"—I notice that I seldom graced the seats of the pews on Sunday morning myself—even when I was studying for the ministry!

This is the same thought that occurs to Butler's protagonist: "I have ever been of opinion that the greater part of mankind do approximately know where they get that which does them good." So if church were doing them any good, they would in fact be coming back for more. But as it stands, all the churches are offering them is a kind of tin-foil coinage—Monopoly money, counting for nothing in the world of real experience. Eventually, people come to realize this subconsciously, and avoid these places by instinct. 

It would be a great misunderstanding, however, to read Butler as straightforwardly condemning this inconsistency on the part of the Erewhonians—who pay lip-service to the musical banks while depositing their real cash elsewhere. Butler was not writing a pamphlet of social reform or a scathing Arthur Hugh Clough–style denunciation of Victorian "hypocrisy." To the contrary, the whole message of Butler's career was to embrace the value of hypocrisy. 

There is no one Butler satirizes more—whether in Erewhon or in The Way of All Flesh—than the people who insist too strongly on consistency. Reason makes fools of us all, Butler insists, so long as it is "uncorrected by instinct." The person who proselytizes for logic-chopping atheism is just as "ungentlemanly," in his view, as the evangelical missionary. Instead, his ethical ideal is that of a "blessed inconsistency," as he puts it in Erewhon—or a "charitable inconsistency," as he writes in The Way of All Flesh. 

Butler satirizes the Erewhonians for worshipping the goddess Ydgrun—an anagram for Grundy, the allegorical embodiment of conventionality and philistine conformity. Yet, Butler also believes that it is better to worship Grundy than the creatures of our own imagination. In this, he is in the same tradition as Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, or Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm: No one is so ridiculous, these books agree, as the person haunted by their own self-created ideological hobbyhorses. 

Northrop Frye calls this tradition the "satire of the low norm" (indeed, he cites Erewhon as a prominent example of the genre). Butler recommends rather overtly the pursuit of a "low norm." Before we aspire to the empyrean—to ultimate reason and consistency—how about we first try to reach at least the level of common sense? After all, as his protagonist observes, "I generally found that those who complained most loudly that Ydgrun was not high enough for them had hardly as yet come up to the Ydgrun standard."

And so, while we might make ourselves ridiculous by pledging loyalty with words to an institution that we do not honor by actually placing our bodies in its seats—there may be things even more ridiculous. And, since everyone seems to agree that this sort of hypocrisy is the best approach to religion (honor it, but not in the observance) then perhaps—says Butler—there is some sort of instinctual wisdom behind it. Common sense and practical action are usually more right than logic, he declares—so what are they telling us here? 

Butler suggests they are telling us that there is indeed an "unseen world," and humankind really does have need of two currencies—one for the seen and one for the unseen realm. The only mistake that religion makes, says Butler, is that it purports to know anything more about this unseen world than the rest of us. It "pretends to know more about it than its bare existence," as he puts it. 

But in that case, my ministerial colleagues in divinity school were not actually on the wrong track. Perhaps they builded better than they knew, as Emerson put it. Their promises as to what church might deliver people were indeed vague. "Come here and you will find community, ultimate concern, higher meaning and purpose!" they cried. And, as advertising slogans went, this could hardly be convincing. They could not compete with the people hawking more practical wares. 

And yet, all these same nebulosities are indeed things of which people recognize, on some instinctual level, the "bare existence," even if we cannot define them more precisely. And that is why churches keep on existing and being funded—even if no one goes to them. That is why, more than a century and a half after Butler wrote his novel, the church buildings are still beautiful—if still empty. 

Day to day, we will always chase after harder currency. But on some level too, we recognize that there is another kind of currency in this world. There is a spiritual coinage, treasure in heaven. The mistake, as Butler notes, would be to assume that we are privileged to define it with any more precision than that.