Read Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition Online
Authors: Charles Eisenstein
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (7 page)
The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film
Ancient Futures
sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: “She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone—all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we barely have time to talk.”
For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor.
If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. “Clocks,” writes John Zerzan, “make time scarce and life short.” Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. “Time is money,” the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor “I can’t afford the time.”
If the material world is fundamentally an abundant world, all the more abundant is the spiritual world: the creations of the
human mind—songs, stories, films, ideas, and everything else that goes by the name of intellectual property. Because in the digital age we can replicate and spread them at virtually no cost, artificial scarcity must be imposed upon them in order to keep them in the monetized realm. Industry and the government enforce scarcity through copyrights, patents, and encryption standards, allowing the holders of such property to profit from owning it.
Scarcity, then, is mostly an illusion, a cultural creation. But because we live, almost wholly, in a culturally constructed world, our experience of this scarcity is quite real—real enough that nearly a billion people today are malnourished, and some 5,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. So our responses to this scarcity—anxiety and greed—are perfectly understandable. When something is abundant, no one hesitates to share it. We live in an abundant world, made otherwise through our perceptions, our culture, and our deep invisible stories. Our perception of scarcity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money is central to the construction of the self-reifying illusion of scarcity.
Money, which has turned abundance into scarcity, engenders greed. But not money per se—only the kind of money we use today, money that embodies our cultural sense of self, our unconscious myths, and an adversarial relationship with nature thousands of years in the making. All of these things are changing today. Let us look, then, at how money came to so afflict our minds and ways, so that we might envision how the money system might change with them.
1.
Warner, “The Charitable-Giving Divide.”
2.
Piff et al., “Having Less, Giving More.”
3.
Buzby et al., “Supermarket Loss Estimates.”
4.
You can get some idea of the untapped potential of agriculture by reading F. H. King’s fascinating 1911 book,
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
, which explains how these regions sustained enormous populations for millennia on tiny amounts of land, without mechanization, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. Instead, they relied on sophisticated crop rotation, interplanting, and ecological relationships among farm plants, animals, and people. They wasted nothing, including human manure. Their farming was extremely labor-intensive, although, according to King, it was usually conducted at a leisurely pace. In 1907 Japan’s fifty million people were nearly self-sufficient in food; China’s land supported, in some regions, clans of forty or fifty people on a three-acre farm; in the year 1790 China’s population was about the same as that of the United States today!
5.
LaSalle et al.,
The Organic Green Revolution
, 4., citing numerous supporting studies. If you have the opposite impression, consider that many of the studies that show no benefit from organic agriculture are conducted by people with little experience with organic farming and on land that is impoverished from decades of chemical farming. Organic methods are not easily amenable to controlled studies because they properly involve a long-term relationship between farmer and land. It is only after years, decades, or even generations that the true benefits of organic agriculture become fully apparent.
6.
Unfortunately, many of us are so wounded that we prefer not to interact and share, but to retreat farther into the hell of separation and the illusion of independence until its fabric unravels. As various crises converge and this happens to more and more people, the urge to restore community will grow.
MONEY AND THE MIND
When all are isolated by egoism, there is nothing but dust, and at the advent of a storm, nothing but mire
.
—Benjamin Constant
The power to induce a collective hallucination of scarcity is only one of the ways money affects our perceptions. This chapter will explore some of the deep psychological and spiritual effects of money: on the way we see the world, on our religion, our philosophy, even our science. Money is woven into our minds, our perceptions, our identities. That is why, when a crisis of money strikes, it seems that the fabric of reality is unraveling, too—that the very world is falling apart. Yet this is also cause for great optimism, because money is a social construction that we have the power to change. What new kinds of perceptions, and what new kinds of collective actions, would accompany a new kind of money?
Here we are on Chapter 3, and I have not even defined “money” yet! Most economists define money by its functions, such as medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Accordingly, they put a very early date on the origin of money, perhaps five thousand years ago with the emergence of standard commodities such as grain, oil, cattle, or gold that served these functions. But when I speak of money, I am talking about something quite different, something that first appeared in Greece in the seventh century
BCE. That was arguably the first time that money transcended mere commodity to become a distinct category of being. Henceforward, we could speak not only of what money does, but also of what it
is
.
Economists’ folklore holds that coins were invented in order to provide a guarantee of weight and purity for the underlying commodity metal. Their value, this story goes, came entirely from the gold or silver from which they were made. In fact, like the barter origin of money, like the assumption of scarcity, this account of the origin of coinage is an economist’s fantasy. It is a fantasy with an illustrious lineage to be sure. Aristotle wrote,
For the various necessaries of life are not easily carried about, and hence men agreed to employ in their dealings with each other something which was intrinsically useful and easily applicable to the purposes of life, for example, iron, silver, and the like. Of this the value was at first measured simply by size and weight, but in process of time they put a stamp upon it, to save the trouble of weighing and to mark the value.
1
This account seems quite reasonable, but historical evidence seems to contradict it. The very first coins, minted in Lydia, were made of electrum (a silver-gold alloy) that varied widely in consistency.
2
Coinage quickly spread to Greece, where, even though coins were fairly consistent in weight and purity, they often had a value greater than the commodity value of the silver from which they were minted.
3
Indeed, some city-states (including Sparta) minted
coins from base metals like iron, bronze, lead, or tin: such coins had negligible intrinsic value but still functioned as money.
4
In either case, stamped coins had a value (which, following historian Richard Seaford, we shall call the “fiduciary value”) greater than an identical but unstamped disk of metal. Why? What was this mysterious power that inhered in a mere sign? It was not a guarantee of weight and purity, nor was it an extension of the personal power of a ruler or religious authority. Seaford observes, “Whereas seal-marks seem to embody the power of the owner of the seal, coin-marks create no imagined attachment between the coins and their source.”
5
Rather, coin-marks
authenticate the metal as possessing a certain value. And they do so not by transmitting power (magical or otherwise) to the piece of metal, but by imposing on it a form that recognizably assigns it to a distinct category of things, the category of authentic coins.… The coin-mark … operates in effect as a mere sign.
6
Signs have no intrinsic power, but derive it from human interpretation. To the extent a society holds such interpretations in common, signs or symbols bear social power. The new kind of money that emerged in ancient Greece derived its value from a social agreement, of which the marks on coins were tokens.
7
This agreement
is the essence of money. This should be obvious today, when most money is electronic and the rest has the approximate intrinsic value of a sheet of toilet paper, but money has been an agreement ever since the days of the ancient Greeks. Those reformers who advocate gold coinage as a way to return to the good old days of “real money” are trying to return to something that never existed, except perhaps for brief historical moments almost as an ideal. I believe that the next step in the evolution of human money will be not a return to an earlier form of currency, but its transformation from an unconscious to an intentional embodiment of our agreements.
Over 5,000 years, money has evolved from pure commodity, to a symbol riding upon a material, to pure symbol today.
Sacred Economics
seeks not to undo this evolution, but to fulfill it. The agreement that is money does not stand in isolation from the other systems of signs and symbols by which our civilization operates. We can embody in our money new agreements about the planet, the species, and what we hold sacred. For a long time we held “progress” sacred, the advancement of science and technology, the conquest of the natural realm. Our money system supported those goals. Our goals are changing now, and with them the great meta-stories of which the agreement called money is a part: the Story of Self, the Story of the People, and the Story of the World.
The purpose of this book is to tell a new story of money; to illuminate what new agreements we might embody within these fiduciary talismans, so that money is the ally, and not the enemy, of the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible.
It is no accident that ancient Greece, the place where symbolic money originated, also gave birth to the modern conception of the individual, to the notions of logic and reason, and to the philosophical underpinnings of the modern mind. In his scholarly
masterpiece
Money and the Ancient Greek Mind
, classics professor Richard Seaford explores the impact of money on Greek society and thought, illuminating the characteristics that make money unique. Among them are that it is both concrete and abstract, that it is homogeneous, impersonal, a universal aim, and a universal means, and that it is unlimited. The entrance of this new, unique power into the world had profound consequences, many of which are now so deeply woven into our beliefs and culture, psyche and society, that we can barely perceive them, let alone question them.
Money is homogeneous in that regardless of any physical differences among coins, coins qua money are identical (if they are of the same denomination). New or old, worn or smooth, all one-drachma coins are equal. This was something new in the sixth century BCE. Whereas in archaic times, Seaford observes, power was conferred by unique talismanic objects (e.g., a scepter said to be handed down from Zeus), money is the opposite: its power is conferred by a standard sign that wipes out variations in purity and weight. Quality is not important, only quantity. Because money is convertible into all other things, it infects them with the same feature, turning them into commodities—objects that, as long as they meet certain criteria, are seen as identical. All that matters is how many or how much. Money, says Seaford, “promotes a sense of homogeneity among things in general.” All things are equal, because they can be sold for money, which can in turn be used to buy any other thing.
In the commodity world, things are equal to the money that can replace them. Their primary attribute is their “value”—an abstraction. I feel a distancing, a letdown, in the phrase, “You can always buy another one.” Can you see how this promotes an antimaterialism, a detachment from the physical world in which each person, place, and thing is special, unique? No wonder Greek philosophers
of this era began elevating the abstract over the real, culminating in Plato’s invention of a world of perfect forms more real than the world of the senses. No wonder to this day we treat the physical world so cavalierly. No wonder, after two thousand years’ immersion in the mentality of money, we have become so used to the replaceability of all things that we behave as if we could, if we wrecked the planet, simply buy a new one.
I named this chapter “Money and the Mind.” Very much like the fiduciary value of money, mind is an abstraction riding a physical vehicle. Like monetary fiduciarity, the idea of mind as a separate, nonmaterial essence of being developed over thousands of years, leading to the modern concept of an immaterial consciousness, a disembodied spirit. Tellingly, in both secular and religious thought, this abstraction has become more important than the physical vehicle, just as the “value” of a thing is more important than its physical attributes.