Another Minor but Nevertheless Happily Acknowledged Reason to Enjoy Faulkner

Reading Faulkner:

"- his conscience and the land, the country which had created his conscience and then offered the opportunity to have made all that money to the conscience which it had created, which could do nothing but decline; hated the country so much that he was even glad when he saw it drifting closer and closer to a doomed and fatal war... and so he would not be present on that day when the South would realize that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage."

Faulkner doesn't really describe the financial transaction that is at the nub of this crisis of conscience. Apparently it is something to do with credit and "one of those things that when they work you were smart and when they don't you change your name and move to Texas." Let's just assume that it is genuinely fraudulent, since Faulkner's choice between "stern morality" and "sands of opportunism" only reminds me of how difficult it is to quantify acceptable financial risk in terms of righteousness. The deadly sin of usury anyone?

But leaving that aside, there is genuine pleasure in watching Faulkner combine the puritan and profligate critiques of America: the tender conscience on the one hand, the promiscuously abundant opportunity for money on the other. It is not simply an act of "moral brigandage" that offends Faulkner's merchant, although Faulkner himself calls it out, but rather that the country should have offered him (the merchant) the opportunity for such a thing at all. And that conscience, that could revolt at the lush seedbed of possibility that is the plain reality of the nation, is named as explicitly American made. What a conundrum between the puritanism of our consciences and the profligacy of our opportunities. And how topical, even without throwing in the specter of economic impotency in the face of a "doomed and fatal war." Economic edifices with sham foundations! Judgment on departure from "stern morality!" As I mentioned above I am a little skeptical of making too much of the morality point, failure to appropriately evaluate risk being not quite the same as an evil cabal. Still it is interesting how our current discussions fit so easily into old critiques, summed up beautifully here by Faulkner. It points to something touchingly constant in the national character.