The Blue Disc

by William B. Waits

  Although they don’t pile up individual possessions or show them off, their community facilities and grounds are abundant and carefully maintained: the pathways and grounds, flower beds, recreational and cultural facilities, and the dining hall. All excellent. John called it social wealth. Maybe that’s the key. It’s time to have that discussion with him.

  Fortunately, no blue disc was displayed at John’s shelter. After Rick knocked, John came to the door carrying a book with his finger stuck in the pages to mark his place.

  “Hi, Rick. Nice to see you. What’s on your mind?” he asked cordially.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you told me, John, about Euromamo attitudes toward stuff. As I walk through the village, I’ve noticed that villagers aren’t much concerned with accumulating personal possessions, certainly not as much people in the United States, yet the people here live well. The facilities are excellent and there’s no concern about getting enough food, having ample entertainments, or enjoying recreation.”

  “That’s because of our social wealth. It’s the main reason for our prosperity.”

  “Doesn’t the accumulation of social wealth have the same problems that the accumulation of individual wealth has?”

  “Not nearly as many problems as individual wealth does. I think we’re about to have that discussion of social wealth I’ve been promising you.”

  “Great. That’s what I wanted to talk about. To start, could you refresh my memory about what’s included in social wealth?”

  “Generally, it’s our public facilities like the entertainment center, medical facility, library, and the transportation system to La Puerta. Even the paint-dart battlefields are social wealth. It also includes the recreational fields, the communal kitchen and dining room, the storehouses of preserved food, the pathways through the rain forest, the flower gardens in the village center, the bath houses, and the water-power system. There are countless other examples.”

  “Since I first saw them, I’ve admired how fine and well-maintained they are.,” said Rick. “They required a lot of effort to build, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. A lot of people worked to build them and it requires continuing effort to maintain and expand them.”

  “The effort is worth it?”

  “Yes. It’s the most efficient way our labor can benefit our society. Our storehouses of food are an essential buffer against hard times. The medical facilities provide us healthcare. The books we’ve brought back from La Puerta over the years have sharpened our thinking, as have the plays and lectures that are presented in the entertainment center. We’ve built a wealthy society directly, that is, through building social wealth, rather than, as Adam Smith would have us do, build a wealthy society through the accumulation of scato by individuals.”

  “Social wealth is still hoarding, isn’t it, just done by the society?”

  “Social wealth is different. Its benefits are available to all equally so individuals can’t hoard it. The more we add to it, the wealthier all our people become. In addition, social wealth enriches subsequent generations more than individual wealth.”

  “Your social wealth lasts over generations?” asked Rick.

  “Most of it does but not all, for example, the food served in our communal kitchen. We generally share all types of food, and with some types, sharing is imperative. For example, if you kill a peccary, you have a large amount of food, enough for fifteen or twenty meals. But what happens if you hoard it?” he continued, not waiting for an answer. “It would spoil in short order in our hot climate, therefore, killed game and other perishable foodstuffs that are too much for a family become part of our social wealth.”

  “How does that work?”

  “They’re taken to the communal kitchen to feed others in the village. Nothing else makes sense. The successful hunter, in the case of a peccary, for example, usually takes a portion of the animal for himself and his family and then gives the vast majority of it to the communal kitchen to feed others.”

  “Does the hunter get anything in return for his gift?” remarked Rick.

  “You almost always get something in return when you give, and gifts of food are no exception. After the hunter turns over his peccary to the kitchen, he gets to eat someone else’s kill at the communal kitchen when his hunting is unsuccessful. It works out for everyone—except for the peccary, of course,” he said with a smile.

  “I can see that it makes sense to share the peccary and other perishable food, and to regard them as social wealth, but most of the other types of social wealth are made to last generations, aren’t they?” asked said Rick.

  “You still want to leave a legacy to subsequent generations, don’t you?” commented John.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  “We expect our social wealth facilities to function for generations, but not forever. As we say, ‘You don’t get forever’. Look at how some important examples of social wealth have fared over time, even ones made from the most durable materials. The Sphinx had its face shot by artillery. The Parthenon got blown up by the gunpowder stored there. Some of the metal from the Pantheon was removed to make the altar in St. Peter’s, and the Coliseum had stones pilfered to make other buildings in Rome. Art hasn’t fared better. Poor Venus of Samothrace lost her arms. More recently, Mary in Michelangelo’s Pieta got hammered on the face and arm. Florence has moved Michelangelo’s David inside to protect it from further weathering. A few like Hagia Sophia have fared fairly well but that does not change the general rule. Even large structures and objects made out of stone, one of our most durable materials, deteriorate over time. If no earthquakes, accidents, or violence damages them, they’re still subject to weathering. The record for less durable materials, such as wood and paper, is hardly worth talking about.”

  “I see that, but what if you build a social legacy of ideas?” asked Rick. “The books may be physical, but the ideas in them are not. They don’t deteriorate over time and they will continue to benefit society, at least the good ideas will.”

  “You are right to distinguish the ideas themselves from the books that house them. The ideas of some profound thinkers such as Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus have survived many years. Generally, however, when the physical books go, the ideas inside them go as well, for example, we only have seven plays by Sophocles out of the more than one hundred that he wrote. One event, like the burning of the library in Alexandria, can destroy many precious thoughts,” he said, pursing his lips and shaking his head slightly. “It’s not only the loss of the ideas of the very top thinkers that concerns me,” he continued. “A huge percentage of worthy ideas by insightful thinkers, only slightly less distinguished than the very best, has been lost over the years.”

  “Surely,” Rick remarked, “the chances of survival are greater in the modern world, where there are many large libraries and electronic databases to store information. One could engage in scholarly labor today and leave a legacy of ideas by the conclusion of one’s life.”

  “You make a good point that the chances of survival of written works have increased, but there is still no guarantee. For example, works tend to fall out of favor quickly. Consider, for a moment, academic books, widely regarded as among the most serious thought that humans produce. The Euromamo respect them and, as you saw in our library, we brought many such books here from the coast. While recognizing their value, our students who have studied at colleges in the outside world tell us that the works of even the best academic authors are assigned for only a generation of students at the most, and then are no longer assigned and are soon forgotten, having little further impact. Viewed against the long sweep of history, they are read only for a flickering moment.”

  “Don’t some intellectual monuments last a long time, though?” asked Rick.

  “Only the very, very finest have any chance…the music of Beethoven, for example, and that only by moving from perishable media to perishable media, like a frog hopping on lily pads. Beethoven’s
music has moved from paper music sheets to wax cylinders, to vinyl, to audio tape, and likely in the future to the new compact discs. None of these media are nearly as durable as the stones of the Parthenon, but his music, as an idea, has survived and is played and is listened to. Sad it would be if all of Beethoven’s music missed the lily pads.”

  “Everything is ultimately perishable,” Rick mumbled to himself.

  “Yes, and perishable sooner than you might think,” answered John glumly.

  “If all things are perishable, then why is social wealth so important?”

  “The size of social wealth is much larger than the piles of scato that individuals accumulate. It dwarfs them, in fact. In outside society, airports, highways, bridges, rail lines, water and sewer systems, telephone and electrical systems, dams and ports represent great social wealth. Like our social wealth, it’s been accumulated by outside society over generations, mainly through collective effort, and easily dwarfs the scato, or dollars, piled up by individuals.”

  “But if social wealth eventually deteriorates or perishes, how’s it preferable to individual wealth as a legacy to subsequent generations?” asked Rick.

  “We know that subsequent generations are going to need and use the things built as social wealth. For example, we can be confident that they will need a sewer system like the Cloacae Maximus in Rome, for example, than that they will need a particular style of dishes and flatware left by a parent. Generally, it’s more likely that social wealth will be enjoyed into the future. Even Hagia Sophia, the largest church in Christendom for a millennium, was simply repurposed as a mosque by the Muslims who conquered Constantinople and is now a public museum.”

  “But some significant examples of social wealth can become outdated, can’t they?” asked Rick. “For example, the canals built in nineteenth century America?”

  “The American canal boom and collapse is a good example to make your point. Sometimes the useful life of social wealth is short. Subsequent generations will surely face different infrastructure needs than we have but generally they use the social wealth of the infrastructure that they were born into to build the new systems that future generations will need. To use your example, the canals carried coal that was used to smelt the rails for the railroads.”

  “I think it would help me to know how your thinking about wealth has changed over time. How did you arrive at your emphasis on social wealth?”

  “It took us many years. When we entered this valley, we thought like good Englishmen. It seemed obvious to us that individuals accumulated their wealth through their own efforts. Some worked harder, produced more, and reaped the benefits. The books we read seemed to support this. For example, shortly after we started making trips to La Puerta in 1825, we purchased Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which had been published fifty years earlier. As you doubtless know, it extolled the benefits of individuals pursuing wealth for themselves. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we started to see problems with this viewpoint as we were absorbing Darwinism. As soon as they were published, we purchased Origin of Species and later The Descent of Man in La Puerta and brought them back here for our library. They got heavy use in those early years and we soon purchased additional copies.”

  “That was a part of your ongoing interest in biology, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. We needed his books to help us understand our environment. We wrestled with his findings as did many other people during those years. Before long though, we were persuaded by his arguments regarding the animal world, including his argument that humans were the product of natural selection. However, it was not the biological aspects of Darwinism that challenged our minds the most.”

  “What was the challenge? Darwin’s implications for religion?”

  “No. Although that required some adjustment in our thinking, we managed it over time.”

  “Then, what was the challenge?”

  “The Social Darwinists—Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner—were a problem for us. Generally, we were unpersuaded by the way they applied Darwin’s concepts to humans.”

  “How so?”

  “They said that the humans on top in the current environment—the wealthiest individuals in any society and the wealthiest nations in the world, were the fittest biologically and that those on the bottom were the least fit.”

  “Aren’t humans subject to natural selection like all other animals?”

  “While natural selection explains the appearance of homo sapiens as a species, it’s not the predominant factor in the present, contrary to the Social Darwinists.”

  “How are humans different?”

  “The short answer is that humans have culture, but let me give you an example. If there are a group of caimans in the river, it makes sense that the ones with genes that fit the river environment best, that is, the caimans that are the biggest, fastest, and strongest, would survive in greater percentages and pass along their genes to their offspring, thereby making the species more like themselves over time. However, the situation is different when it comes to humans. Those who are big, fast, and strong not only pass along their biological genes to their offspring but also their cultural goods, for example, their scato. The offspring get the cultural goods no matter how inadequate or ineffectual they are. As a result, those offspring have an advantage, having nothing to do their biological inheritance, over their peers, including peers who are bigger, faster, and stronger.”

  “I see.”

  “Inheritance of cultural goods is not the only problem with using Darwinism as a model for economic distribution among humans. As we were establishing ourselves in the rain forest, our forebears needed good strong fighters but most of all, they needed women who would bear children. Their circumstances seemed to fit Darwin’s struggle for survival. However, as their society developed, there was a significant shift in the skills that they needed for survival. Those who could understand technology became more important to them, for example, the engineers who built their water wheel power system and who built the transportation system to La Puerta. They needed health experts for the medical facility and business experts when they started selling their plant-based remedies. Over two hundred thirty years, we have gone from valuing child-bearing and sword fighting to valuing intellectual adeptness. That’s a mere blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, given that our genetics have barely changed at all during that time. The conclusion we drew from this was that our culture changed more rapidly than our genes. Given that, how could we predict which genes would be the most valuable to our culture going forward? Maybe the most valuable gene will provide resistance to some rare micro-organism that we have not yet encountered, or will be a gene that enables manual dexterity at some high-tech keyboard? These obviously have little to do with the earlier skills of sword fighting and bearing children.

  “Because the cultural changes occur much faster than our genetic changes, they’re the significant influences on our lives and they are outside of Darwin’s gene-based, biological theory. Caimans are still subject to biological Darwinism, but humans much less so. In short, we can transcend our biology more than other animals. Therefore, it’s important that we cultivate a wide range of skills and educate ourselves broadly so that we can adapt to cultural changes as they present themselves.”

  “This is important for inheritance and wealth distribution?”

  “Yes. Those who are doing well in our society today—those who are on top—may not have the skills to do well in a future environment. We’ve seen that in our history and in the history of other societies. Therefore, we don’t attribute the current prominence of our elite to biological superiority that will endure over time. It follows that we can’t justify their children’s inheritance of wealth in Darwinian terms.”

  “But some people in your society have more wealth than others, right?”

  “Yes. It was clear to us that some people worked harder than others and, as a result, had accumulated more. We didn’t want to thw
art anyone’s work ethic because it was accompanied by some individual accumulation. We wanted people to work. Therefore, we accorded energetic individuals significant latitude in enjoying the scato they had accumulated.”

  “But your society has become wealthier over the years, right?”

  “Yes, it has.”

  “That’s the result of accumulating wealth, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it’s more a result of building social wealth than it is individuals building their own wealth.”

  “How much does this social wealth amount to?” asked Rick.

  “We did some calculations that produced remarkable results. We discovered that each person’s share of social wealth was significantly greater than the amount of wealth the person could generate individually, even if they worked diligently. Stated another way, the substantial social wealth that the Euromamo have built collectively over the years made individuals wealthier than did the effort of those individuals to increase their personal wealth. As we say, ‘Social wealth is greater than individual wealth’. As a result of these calculations, we saw the scato that some individuals had accumulated during our time in the rain forest in a different light. What would happen if they continued accumulating scato? Would that produce the highest standard of living for the society? Did wealthy individuals make a wealthy society as Adam Smith argued? Or was the quicker, surer path to a wealthy society through building social wealth directly? As we thought about it, the answer became obvious.”

  “I see.”

  “Each individual can only produce so much in a lifetime, whether they labor to build their individual wealth or to build social wealth. It’s finite. However, because social wealth produces benefits that may be enjoyed by everyone in the group, it has a greater wealth effect than does individual wealth. That’s the fundamental reason why our emphasis on building social wealth works.”