Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (13 page)

When I ask people what is missing most from their lives, the most common answer is “community.” But how can we build community when its building blocks—the things we do for each other—have all been converted into money? Community is woven from gifts. Unlike money or barter transactions, in which there are no obligations remaining after the transaction, gifts always imply future gifts. When we receive, we owe; gratitude is the knowledge of having received and the desire to give in turn. But what is there now to give? Not the necessities of life, not food, shelter, or clothing, not entertainment, not stories, not health care: everyone buys these. Hence the urge to get away from it all, to return to a more self-sufficient life where we
build our own houses and grow our own food and make our own clothes, in community. Yet while there is value in this movement, I doubt that many people will start doing things the hard way again just in order to have community. There is another solution besides reversing the specialization of labor and the machine-based efficiency of the modern age, and it springs from the fact that money does not meet many of our needs at all. Very important needs go unmet today, and money, because of its impersonal nature, is incapable of meeting them. The community of the future will arise from the needs that money inherently cannot meet.

You can see now why I call money “the corpse of the commons.” The conversion of natural, cultural, social, and spiritual capital into money is the fulfillment of its power, described by Richard Seaford, to homogenize all that it touches. “In reducing individuality to homogeneous impersonality,” he writes, “the power of money resembles the power of death.”
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Indeed, when every forest has been converted into board feet, when every ecosystem has been paved over, when every human relationship has been replaced by a service, the very processes of planetary and social life will cease. All that will be left is cold, dead money, as forewarned by the myth of King Midas so many centuries ago. We will be dead—but very, very rich.

Economists would say that such things as phonographs and bulldozers and the rest of technology have enriched us, creating new goods and services that did not exist before. On a deep level,
though, the human needs these things meet are nothing new. They just meet them in a different way—a way that we must now pay for.

Consider telecommunications. Human beings do not have an abstract need for long-distance communication. We have a need to stay in contact with people with whom we share emotional and economic ties. In past times, these people were usually close by. A hunter-gatherer or fourteenth-century Russian peasant would have had little use for a telephone. Telephones began to meet a need only when other developments in technology and culture spread human beings farther apart and splintered extended families and local communities. So the basic need they meet is not something new under the sun.

Consider another technological offering, one to which my children, to my great consternation, seem irresistibly attracted: massively multiplayer online fantasy role-playing games. The need these meet is not anything new either. Preteens and teenagers have a strong need to go exploring, to have adventures, and to establish an identity via interactions with peers that reference this exploration and adventure. In past times, this happened in the actual outdoors. When I was a child we had nothing like the freedom of generations before us, as you might read about in
Tom Sawyer
, yet still my friends and I would sometimes wander for miles, to a creek or an unused quarry pit, an undeveloped hilltop, the train tracks. Today, one rarely finds groups of kids roaming around, when every bit of land is fenced and marked with no-trespassing signs, when society is obsessed with safety, and when children are overscheduled and driven to perform. Technology and culture have robbed children of something they deeply need—and then, in the form of video games, sold it back to them.

I remember the day I realized what was happening. I happened
to watch an episode of the Pokémon television show, which is basically about three kids roaming around having magical adventures. These on-screen, fictitious, trademarked characters were having the magical adventures that real children once had but now must pay (via advertising) for the privilege of watching. As a result, GDP has grown. New “goods and services” (by definition, things that are part of the money economy) have been created, replacing functions that were once fulfilled for free.

A little reflection reveals that nearly every good and service available today meets needs that were once met for free. What about medical technology? Compare our own poor health with the marvelous health enjoyed by hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists, and it is clear that we are purchasing, at great expense, our ability to physically function. Child care? Food processing? Transportation? The textile industry? Space does not permit me to analyze each of these for what necessities have been stolen and sold back to us. I will offer one more piece of evidence for my view: if the growth of money really were driving the technological and cultural meeting of new needs, then wouldn’t we be more fulfilled than any humans before us?

Are people happier now, more fulfilled, for having films rather than tribal storytellers, MP3 players rather than gatherings around the piano? Are we happier eating mass-produced food rather than that from a neighbor’s field or our own garden? Are people happier living in prefab units or McMansions than they were in old New England stone farmhouses or wigwams? Are we happier? Has any new need been met?

Even if it has not, I won’t discard the entire corpus of technology, despite all the ruin it has wrought upon nature and humanity. In fact, the achievements of science and technology do meet
important needs, needs that are key drivers of sacred economics. They include the need to explore, to play, to know, and to create what we in the New Economy movement call “really cool stuff.” In a sacred economy, science, technology, and the specialization of labor that goes along with them will continue to be among the agents for the meeting of these needs. We can see this higher purpose of science and technology already, like a recessive gene that crops up irrepressibly in spite of its endless commercialization. It is in the heart of every true scientist and inventor: the spirit of wonder, excitement, and the thrill of novelty. Every institution of the old world has a counterpart in the new, the same note at another octave. We are not calling for a revolution that will eradicate the old and create the new from scratch. That kind of revolution has been tried before, with the same results each time, because that mentality is itself part of the old world. Sacred economics is part of a different kind of revolution entirely, a transformation and not a purge. In this revolution, the losers won’t even realize they have lost.

Up until today, very few of the products of our economy and technology have served the aforementioned needs. Not only are our needs for play, exploration, and wonder underfulfilled, but great anxiety and struggle accompany even the meeting of our physical needs. This contradicts economists’ assertion that even if no new needs have been met, technology and the division of labor allow us to meet existing needs more efficiently. A machine, it is said, can do the work of a thousand men; a computer can coordinate the work of a thousand machines. Accordingly, futurists since the eighteenth century have predicted an imminent age of leisure. That age has never arrived, and indeed has seemed in the last thirty-five years to recede even farther into the distance. Something obviously is not working.

One of the two primary assumptions of economics is that human beings normally act in their rational self-interest and that this self-interest corresponds to money. Two people will only make an exchange (e.g., buying something for money) if it benefits both to do so. The more exchanges that are happening, then, the more benefits are being had. Economists therefore associate money with Benthamite “utility”—that is, the good. That is one reason why economic growth is the unquestioned holy grail of economic policy—when the economy grows, the world’s supposed goodness level rises. What politician wouldn’t want to take credit for economic growth?

Economic logic says that when a new good or service comes into being, the fact that someone is willing to pay for it means that it must be to someone’s benefit. In a certain narrow sense, this is true. If I steal your car keys, it may be to your benefit to buy them back from me. If I steal your land, it may be to your benefit to rent it back so you can survive. But to say that money transactions are evidence of an overall rise in utility is absurd; or rather, it assumes that the needs they meet were originally unmet. If we are merely paying for something once provided through self-sufficiency or the gift economy, then the logic of economic growth is faulty. Herein lies a hidden ideological motivation for the assumption that primitive life was, in Hobbes’s words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Such a past would justify the present, which actually bears all of Hobbes’s qualities in various ways. What is life in the Great Indoors of suburbia, if not solitary? What is life in equatorial Africa, if not short?
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And has any age rivaled the last century
in its nastiness and brutality? Perhaps the Hobbesian view that the past was a harsh survival struggle is an ideological projection of our own condition.

For the economy to grow, the realm of money-denominated goods and services must grow too. Money must meet more and more of our needs. Gross domestic product, after all, is defined as the sum total of the goods and services a nation produces. Only those exchanged for money count.

If I babysit your children for free, economists don’t count it as a service or add it to GDP. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt; nor can I go to the supermarket and say, “I watched my neighbors’ kids this morning, so please give me food.” But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a “service.” GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier. I have grown the economy and raised the world’s level of goodness. “Goods” are those things you pay money for. Money = Good. That has been the equation of our time.

The same is true if I cut down a forest and sell the timber. While it is still standing and inaccessible, it is not a good. It only becomes “good” when I build a logging road, hire labor, cut it down, and transport it to a buyer. I convert a forest to timber, a commodity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I create a new song and share it for free, GDP does not go up and society is not considered wealthier, but if I copyright it and sell it, it becomes a good. Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine that they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, and clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation—and I have made the world richer. I have brought
various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money.

Any time someone pays for anything she once received as a gift or did herself, the world’s “goodness” level rises. Each tree cut down and made into paper, each idea captured and made into intellectual property, each child who uses video games instead of creating worlds of the imagination, each human relationship turned into a paid service, depletes a bit of the natural, cultural, spiritual, and social commons and converts it into money.

It is true that it is more efficient (in terms of labor-hours) for day care professionals to care for three dozen kids than for a bunch of stay-at-home parents to do it themselves. It is also more efficient to farm thousand-acre fields with megatractors and chemicals than it is to raise the same amount of food on a hundred small holdings using hand tools. But all this efficiency has neither given us more leisure nor met any fundamentally new need. The efficiency ends up meeting the old needs in endless, obscene elaboration, eventually reaching the extreme of closets full of clothes and shoes that are barely worn before entering the landfill.

The limited character of human needs presented problems from the very beginning of the industrial era, appearing first in the textile industry. After all, how many garments does one person really need? The solution to the looming crisis of overproduction was to manipulate people into overfulfilling their need for clothes. Enter the fashion industry, which, in a surprisingly conscious and cynical way, encouraged would-be dandies to stay up with the fashions. Part of the reason that people embraced this is because clothing occupies a special place in all cultures, fulfilling various sacred, joyful, somber, and playful needs and contributing greatly to the deeper need for social identity. It is as natural to adorn our bodies
as it is to spice our food. The point is that no new need was being fulfilled. More and more production is devoted toward meeting the same need, endlessly elaborated.

Moreover, the same industrialization that brought the mass production of textiles also caused the social disintegration that shattered traditional communities and made people susceptible to the fashion industry. I described this in a somewhat broader context in
The Ascent of Humanity:

The crisis of overproduction that occurs when one need has been generally fulfilled is resolved by exporting it onto some other need. An equivalent way of looking at it is that one type after another of natural, social, cultural, and spiritual commonwealth is converted into property and money. When the social capital of clothes-making (i.e., the skills and traditions and the means for their transmission) is turned into a commodity, and no one is making clothes outside the money economy any more, then it is time to sell even more clothes by destroying other identity-sustaining social structures.
Identity becomes a commodity, and clothes and other consumer items its proxy.