Coins as Tangible History
Normally, the way I experience history is behind some kind of barrier: either text or or the glass of a museum’s display case. But there’s one tiny slice of history that you can experience right up close: over the weekend a friend invited me to the New York International Numismatic Convention, and I learned something crazy when I got there: you can actually touch the coins.
“Who’s on that coin?”
“Julius Caesar. It was coined in February.”
“February? As in the month before he was assassinated?”
“Yes.”
I was holding a two thousand year old accidental suicide note.
At one level, nothing special; a numismatic convention is a chance to sell coins, and it’s perfectly normal for merchants to let prospective customers inspect the wares. At another level, it’s an incredibly intimate experience of history, and not just any history but the multi-millennia-long march of the middle class.
“Horseshoe theory” isn’t perfectly predictive, and often convinces people to say smart-sounding dumb things. But one case where it works is that the further left or further right you go, the more contempt you see for the middle class. On the far left, the bourgeoisie are natural exploiters, who hoard surplus value; unlike people who are born rich and powerful they consciously…