The Morphogenesis

of a Very Odd Name

PREFACE

I watched the debate last night. This morning is September 11, 2024, another anniversary. At my computer in my office downstairs. It’s quiet in the house -- the world headquarters of Westphalia Publishing. Tomorrow my weekly newspaper column hits the electronic newsstand. Jackson the Cat is perched on the window ledge in front of my desk. In our shared language, she says, “Well?” But I realize that I’m literally afraid to write what I’m thinking. Like my book about economics, it would have to be in code.

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Shortly after 9/11, the first thing I did after deciding to spend the rest of my life writing a book about economics was to come up with a name for it. It took a while, but I finally decided to call it Oikos Gnosis. Friends said nobody would read a book about economics called Oikos Gnosis. But I had my etymological reasons.

I started with the prefix. The prefix of the word “economics” -- eco -- comes from the Greek word “oikos.” When I saw that, I about fell out of the bunk in the cab of my truck, where I was living at the time as an over-the-road trucker.

I had first learned about oikos way back in 1979. At the time, I was an investigative reporter for a major Detroit metro.

When I wasn’t running around the city chasing stories, my favorite place to hang out and think was an older section of the downtown area known as “Greektown.” It’s where many Greek immigrants first went to get away from the 20^th century’s wars and revolutions in the old country, lured to Detroit where there was work in the factories.

The immigrants arrived, found work and lived in shacks on a mosquito infested mud flat. They had children who had children and by the time I arrived on the scene, it wasn’t the same place anymore.

Lots of Greeks still lived in the area, but what everybody called “Greektown” had become more… more like touristy. It had morphed into a few blocks of cobblestone streets blocked off to traffic and lined with sidewalk cafés serving truly authentic Greek food. It smelled like no place else in Detroit, like a Mediterranean bakery. The shoemaker’s shop added a pinch of leathery scents. There was a store where you could buy freshly prepared stuffed grape leaves.

On the weekends, the place was so crowded with young professionals from the suburbs seeking authenticity that it was hard to find a place to sit.

But on weekdays -- especially mid-morning before the sun got too hot -- it was pretty much just a few old Greek guys clustered around sidewalk tables, swapping stories and observations in a language that was pure Greek to me, playing board games, sipping ouzo.

I liked to sit close to them so I could listen in. They knew who I was and sometimes broke into English to let me know what they were talking about.

They knew I was a reporter for one of the big Detroit newspapers. I’d written a featured “human interest” story about the 90-year-old Miklas widow who still ran the bakery. It was on the front page of the newspaper. She cut the story out and had it framed and hung it in the front window of the bakery for everybody to see.

The old Greek guys knew the value of being on good terms with a newspaper reporter. Their immigrant parents and grandparents had settled into the tenements and row houses of the area when it was still swampy and full of bugs and rats and had made something of the place, creating neighborhoods. But new fast money seeking big profits were eyeing the area like a pack of wolves on a hunt, envisioning upscale apartment and office buildings, shopping malls… a five-star hotel. But first they had to get the residents out. They were offering property owners above-market-value money, enough to buy a house in the suburbs. But the older Greek families didn’t want to move, and they owned the choicest locations, right where the five-star hotel was planned. The investors offered them under-the-table bonuses, enough to go back to Greece and buy a nice house, maybe even on an Aegean island with the sounds of the sea washing up against the rocky shores of antiquity. But, nah, they liked it where they were. They could walk down the same streets where they’d played stickball as kids. They went through the Depression there and then the war. It’s where they watched their children grow and go off to college. Nah, they didn’t want the investor’s money. It was dirty money, anyway, offered under the table so others wouldn’t know how much they were willing to pay.

The Greeks knew they had the law on their side, but the developers were pulling strings behind the scenes at city hall. A front-page story in one of Detroit’s big newspapers about greedy developers screwing with the Greeks would be a good thing, in their eyes.

The day I learned about oikos was a perfect fall day in Detroit. Shadows cast by the city’s brick-on-steel skyline were fading. The sky was clear. The sun was a warm yellow. A soft breeze off the Detroit River smelled like living water. Then, one of the old Greek guys leaned back in his chair, spread his bare arms out wide as if to take in all the warmth of the morning sun and the smell of the air and everything going on around him including the universe, and he said, or, like, rather, intoned, looking up with his eyes closed: “Ahhh,” he said, “my Oikos!”

The other old guys around the table nodded and then sipped their ouzo like priests sipping consecrated wine from a golden chalice.

I leaned forward to ask the old timer: “Oikos? What’s that? What does it mean? Is it a real word?”

The old timer looked me in the eye, like he’d decided to tell me something important.

He looked like Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek.

“Look it up,” he said. “The dictionary will tell you that the Greek word ‘oikos’ means ‘home,’ or ‘household…’”

He paused for effect.

“But what is home?” he went on, gesturing with the finger of a weathered hand like stirring a pot. “What is home?” he repeated, and then answered his own question. “It’s where you feel comfortable, where you feel like you belong and can think straight… your oikos… it can be anywhere.”

The others looked at one another and nodded and smiled like at the end of an Orthodox service and then went back to their ouzo and their board games behind the walls of a different language.

I never forgot about oikos.

I taught it to my children when they were little. Getting tucked in at bedtime, they would spread their arms out wide and intone: “Ahh, our Oikos!”

Years later it dawned on me that our oikos, humanity's oikos, where we feel comfortable, like we belong and can think straight, is earth’s biosphere.

That settled that.

Next, I moved on to the suffix -- nomics -- from the ancient Greek word meaning “to manage.”

Economics meant management of the biosphere.

But then I thought some more. To manage something wisely you have to understand it, to know it, to know, from the Greek word “gnosis.”

Thus, a book called Oikos Gnosis.

Like the book, knowledge will never be completed, but can be deepened if we’re unafraid.