Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (9 page)

Unlike physical goods, the abstraction of money allows us, in principle, to possess unlimited quantities of it. Thus it is easy for economists to believe in the possibility of endless exponential growth, where a mere number represents the size of the economy. The sum total of all goods and services is a number, and what limit is there on the growth of a number? Lost in abstraction, we ignore the limits of nature and culture to accommodate our growth. Following Plato, we make the abstraction more real than the reality, fixing Wall Street while the real economy languishes. The monetary
essence of things is called “value,” which, as an abstracted, uniform essence, reduces the plurality of the world. All things are reduced to what they are worth. This gives the illusion that the world is as limitless as numbers are. For a price, you can buy anything, even the pelt of an endangered species.
¹⁷

Implicit in the unlimit of money is another kind of limitlessness: that of the human domain, the part of the world that belongs to human beings. What kind of things, after all, do we buy and sell for money? We buy and sell property, things that we own, things that we perceive as belonging to us. Technology has constantly widened that domain, making things available for ownership that were never attainable or even conceivable before: minerals deep within the earth, bandwidth on the electromagnetic spectrum, sequences of genes. Contemporaneous with technological extension of our reach was the progression of the mentality of property, as things like land, water rights, music, and stories entered the realm of the owned. The unlimit of money implies that the realm of the owned can grow indefinitely, and therefore that the destiny of mankind is to conquer the universe, to bring everything into the human domain, to make the whole world ours. This destiny is part of what I have described as the myth of Ascent, part of our defining Story of the People. Today, that story is rapidly becoming obsolete, and we need to invent a money system aligned with the new story that will replace it.
¹⁸

The features of money that I’ve discussed are not necessarily
bad
. By helping to homogenize or standardize all it touches, by serving as a universal means, money has enabled human beings to accomplish wonders. Money has played a key role in the rise of technological civilization, but perhaps, as with technology, we have barely begun to learn to use this potent creative instrument for its true purpose. Money has fostered the development of standardized things like machine components and microchips—but do we want our food to be homogeneous as well? Money’s impersonality fosters cooperation over vast social distances, helping coordinate the labor of millions of people who are mostly strangers to each other—but do we want our relationships with the people in our own neighborhoods to be impersonal too? Money as universal means enables us to do nearly anything, but do we want it to be an exclusive means too, so that without it we can do nearly nothing? The time has come to master this tool, as humanity steps into an intentional, conscious new role on the earth.

We have lived in an Age of Separation. One by one, our bonds to community, nature, and place have dissolved, marooning us in an alien world. The loss of these bonds is more than a reduction of our wealth, it is a reduction of our very being. The impoverishment we feel, cut off from community and cut off from nature, is an impoverishment of our souls. That is because, contrary to the assumptions of economics, biology, political philosophy, psychology, and institutional religion, we are not in essence separate beings having relationships. We
are
relationship.

I once heard Martín Prechtel, speaking of his village in Guatemala, explain, “In my village, if you went to the medicine man with a sick child, you would never say, ‘I am healthy, but my child is sick.’ You would say, ‘My family is sick.’ Or if it were a neighbor, you might say, ‘My village is sick.’ ” No doubt, in such a society, it would be equally inconceivable to say, “I am healthy, but the forest is sick.” To think anyone could be healthy when her family, her village, or indeed the land, the water, or the planet were not, would be as absurd as saying, “I’ve got a fatal liver disease, but that’s just my liver—I am healthy!” Just as my sense of self includes my liver, so theirs included their social and natural community.

The modern self, in contrast, is a discrete and separate subject in a universe that is Other. This self is the Economic Man of Adam Smith; it is the embodied soul of religion; it is the selfish gene of biology. It underlies the converging crises of our time, which are all variations on the theme of separation—separation from nature, from community, from lost parts of ourselves. It underlies all the usual culprits blamed for the ongoing destruction of ecology and polity, such as human greed or capitalism. Our sense of self entails, “More for me is less for you”; hence we have an interest-based money system embodying precisely that principle. In older, gift-based societies, the opposite was true.

The urge to own grows as a natural response to an alienating ideology that severs felt connections and leaves us alone in the universe. When we exclude world from self, the tiny, lonely identity that remains has a voracious need to claim as much as possible of that lost beingness for its own. If all the world, all of life and earth, is no longer me, I can at least compensate by making it mine. Other separate selves do the same, so we live in a world of competition and omnipresent anxiety. It is built into our
self-definition. This is the deficit of being, the deficit of soul, into which we are born.

Trapped in the logic of me and mine, we seek to recover some tiny fraction of our lost wealth by expanding and protecting the separate self and its extension: money and property. Those who lack the economic means to inflate the self often inflate the physical self instead, which is one reason why obesity disproportionately afflicts the poor. Addictions to shopping, to money, and to acquisition arise from the same basic source as do addictions to food: both come from loneliness, from the pain of merely existing cut off from most of what we are.

Looking out upon the strip mines and the clear-cuts and the dead zones and the genocides and the debased consumer culture, we ask, What is the origin of this monstrous machine that chews up beauty and spits out money? The discrete and separate self, surveying a universe that is fundamentally Other, naturally treats the natural and human world as a pile of instrumental, accidental
stuff
. The rest of the world is fundamentally not-self.
¹
Why should we care about it, beyond our own foreseeable utility? So it was that Descartes, a pioneering articulator of the modern sense of self, articulated as well the ambition to become the “lords and possessors” of nature. As the latter word implies, the idea of property occurs quite naturally to the separate self.

Our rigid, narrow, self/other distinction is coming to an end, victim of its own premises. As the mystics have taught, the separate self
can be maintained only temporarily, and at great cost. And we have maintained it a long time, and built a civilization upon it that seeks the conquest of nature and human nature. The present convergence of crises has laid bare the futility of that goal. It portends the end of civilization as we know it, and the instauration of a new state of human beingness defined by a more fluid, more inclusive sense of self.

One theory of the origin of property associates it with the notion of autonomy, or self-sovereignty, that emerged slowly out of our communal tribal past. Charles Avila describes the logic this way: “If I am my own, and my labor power belongs to me, then what I make is mine.”
²
Here then is an ideological prerequisite for any concept of property, that “I am my own,” which is by no means a universal precept in human societies. In other societies, the clan, the tribe, the village, or even the community of all life may have taken priority over the individual conception of the self, in which case your labor power does not belong to you, but to something greater.
³
The institution of property, therefore, is not the root of our present malady, but a symptom of our disconnection and isolation. This book, therefore, does not seek to abolish property (for to do so would address the symptom rather than the cause) but to transform it as part of a larger transformation of human beingness.

Other thinkers, notably Wilhelm Reich and Genevieve Vaughan, link the origin of property to the emergence of male dominance
and patriarchal society.
⁴
While I believe these arguments have merit, I have chosen not to explore herein the sexual dimensions of money and property, a subject deserving of its own treatise. Each institution of our Age of Separation is tied to all the others; alienation from nature, the body, and the sacred feminine echoes the alienation from the world that property implies when it makes things detachable objects of commerce.

The urge to own diminishes as our sense of connectedness and gratitude grows, and we realize that our labor power is not our own, and what I make is not properly mine. Is not my ability to labor, and my life itself, a gift too? In that realization, we desire to give our creations to all that have contributed to our being and granted us the gift of life.

Certain socialist philosophers have turned this desire, motivated by gratitude, into an obligation instead, and into a justification for state expropriation of individual labor. We owe a “debt to society,” and the state becomes the debt collector. In less extreme form, it justifies the income tax—also an expropriation of individual labor. In both cases, we are compelled through force to give. Can we instead create an economic system that liberates, celebrates, and rewards the innate urge to give? That is what this book describes: a system that rewards flow and not accumulation, creating and not owning, giving and not having.

The sovereignty of the individual was but a first step toward the modern concept of property, for most things on this earth do not
exist through anyone’s labor. By the logic of “what I make is mine,” anything that existed independent of human effort could belong to no one. To claim ownership of such a thing—the land, the rivers, the animals, the trees—would be tantamount to theft, just as I am a thief if I seize ownership of something you make.

A distinguished line of economic thought has arisen from this realization, whose most notable exponents were P. D. Proudhon, Karl Marx, Henry George, and Silvio Gesell. “Property is robbery,” proclaimed Proudhon: tracing back the origin of any piece of property through a succession of “legitimate” transfers, we eventually get to the first owner—the one who simply took it, the one who separated it off from the realm of “ours” or “God’s” into the realm of “mine.” Usually this happened by force, as in the seizure of the vast lands of all North America in the last three centuries. This story has played itself out in various forms for millennia all over the world. After all, before Roman times there was no such thing as a deed. Land was like the air and water; it could not be owned. The first owners therefore could not have acquired it legitimately. They must have taken it.