Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  Satire so often touches the raw nerve of reality. It seems we’ve all but forgotten that as citizens, we each carry a piece of the truth; that in effect each of us has been granted responsibility for the well being of all the others. Like many other civilizations that precede us, we Americans too often assume that “someone else” is responsible for maintaining the values we hold in common, such as taking care of the environment, providing the general conditions for health, and ensuring equal opportunity for everyone. Historian Edward Gibbons offers an instructive, distant mirror to view another culture that took democracy for granted: “In the end, more than the Athenians wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be.” While it’s difficult to imagine American culture ceasing to be, it’s not hard to imagine a country in which wealth and power are concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, armed by an unchallenged assumption of continuous growth. The only medicines strong enough to counter this epidemic of concentrated wealth and carelessness are democracy and community—the distributed power of the people.

  Democracy is an incredibly rich asset that needs to be maintained and pampered, like a racehorse. In the book The Healing of America, Marianne Williamson speaks eloquently of the incredible value of the Constitution, with its all-inclusive invitation to take part in decision-making. She imagines the way it must have felt in the room where the Declaration of Independence was being signed: “The air must have crackled. Their hearts must have known …” Yet she questions whether, only seven or eight generations later, we’ve trivialized the intensity and intention of their passion: “The founding fathers were talking about the liberation of the individual soul, not just the right to be rich,” she writes. “The statement that our “Creator … created all men equal and endowed them with ‘certain inalienable rights,’ is not just an early American public relations slogan. It is a bright light shot like a laser through thousands of years of history. It is a principle for which millions of people have fought and died. These words are a radical, revolutionary force.”2

  Wrote Thomas Paine in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine’s powerful pamphlet Common Sense was read by at least one in every five colonists, inspiring them to rip off the yoke of the Crown, and by extension, discard a whole way of life—authoritarian feudalism itself. An individual should not be subservient to any other human or human system, Paine and his compatriots believed, though they did defer to the will and omniscience of God. One of them, Virginia politician and revolutionary Patrick Henry, passionately told the Virginia House of Burgesses in March 1775: “There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free, then we must fight … ! Give me liberty, or give me death!”

  Another very influential event happened in 1776: the publication of Scottish economist Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, in which he proposed an economy based on the concept of a free market and a bright new doctrine called capitalism. The whole package seemed to fit together; the newly liberated individual was given something very compelling to do with his freedom: accumulate as much material wealth as possible. It must have seemed like a perfect marriage when divinely endowed Freedom and potentially limitless Fortune were wed. But there were skeletons in the closet, and it’s high time to reveal them. Adam Smith, by most accounts a decent enough fellow, may as well have written, “Hey, I’ve got an idea—humans are weak and greedy, and nature is an infinite storehouse of resources, so let’s harness our new technologies and have at it.” Smith’s proposal—that humans could make rational decisions resulting in collective prosperity—is not a bad idea, but in our time, the assumptions it was based on have become obsolete. Here are the most obvious perceptual blunders of a doctrine that currently rules our world:

  1. Humans aren’t just greedy, rational, and competitive (though there is some of that); we’re also altruistic, empathetic, and cooperative.

  2. Nature isn’t just a storehouse of resources to make into plastic grocery bags and cell phones, it’s a fragile, interdependent web of life that provides air, water, food, and shelter for us and for all the world’s species. But as long as nature is perceived as a mechanical, infinite vending machine, the market doesn’t perceive a need to maintain or preserve it.

  3. Just because a technology is possible does not mean it is desirable. Technology can be either useful or destructive, depending on its scale and purpose. The logic of the market doesn’t make qualitative evaluations very well so, empowered by democratic principles, citizens must help choose whether a given technology is socially and environmentally acceptable.

  Adam Smith’s free-market theories hitched a ride on the rationalist theories of scientists like Isaac Newton and René Descartes, who perceived the natural world as a mechanism, like a clock, an engine, or a waterwheel. In the Age of Enlightenment (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), Western civilization was emerging from superstition and a fear of the dark forest. The shadows of natural catastrophes like the plague still hung over the world. Newton, Descartes, and other “enlightened” scientists proposed that humans could rise above nature. Only humans have souls, feelings, or self-awareness, they believed, setting a course for disaster. Adam Smith’s capitalism was an adjunct to the new science, since a vigorous economy fueled by self-interest and technology would not only tame the dark forces of nature but also transform them into glittering assets in accountants’ ledgers.

  It’s critical to understand and acknowledge this arranged marriage of personal freedom and capitalism because this will help us stop the spread of affluenza. Although the original goal of personal liberty was to create a “New Order of the Ages,” nothing less, that motto ended up on the back of the dollar bill—novus ordo seclorum. Is it freedom or money we revere?

  In Descartes’s time, private property was just being “invented.” Individual rights and privileges were being seen in a radically new light. For example, until about the time Columbus sailed to America, the Western culture didn’t include individual chairs. Although royalty perched on plush, upholstered thrones, the common folk sat on wooden benches or stools, or squatted together on cushions on the floor. It was unusual to see a person walking outside city walls or on a country lane by himself, according to historian Georges Duby. “In the medieval era, solitary wandering was a symptom of insanity.”3

  In those days, most people ate from a common bowl and shared a tablecloth to wipe grease and gravy off hands and mouths. But by the 1700s, individual bowls were in wide use; along with the recently invented forks that separated humans from the “beasts” they were eating. Private rooms began to appear and manners were developed, to further distinguish “man” from beast. The pronoun “I” began to be seen more frequently in popular literature. Self-portraits became popular in art, and both personal and wall mirrors became common, literally reflecting a new interest in the self. René Descartes led the charge, proclaiming, “I think, therefore I am.” (The critical question is, What was he thinking?)

  I’m not suggesting that we should ever again share the tablecloth as a common napkin—certainly not with that sniffling, drooling bloke sitting between us! My point is that a new way of looking at the world emerged from a period that was far less comfortable, far less civilized, than our current era. Individual freedoms regarding consumption and possessions were seen as human rights issues. Life began to be more about “me” and what I own, and less about “we,” and what we share. In a grand reordering of political and economic reality, the free market became an organizing principle of social change. Freed from the chains of feudalism, the crudeness of communal living and the cruelties of nature, the capitalist was encouraged—soon, all but required—to wage battle in the market. In our day, the individual still aspires and expects to be king of his own world. He’s individually wired for direct audio, visual, and text messaging with the world. His customized car license plate reads “mybaby,” and his golf clubs are monogrammed, just like Tiger’s.
<
br />   Feudalism and Communism bit the dust; is Capitalism next? Many of the ideas that shaped our economy were products of a vastly different era. Credit: Susan Benton

  The point is, Adam Smith and his cohorts erroneously wrote greed and personal grandeur into the rules we still live by. Smith’s assertion that “moral sentiments” would counter-balance a free market powered by self-interest was a product of different times. Back then, most people lived in close-knit towns and ran village-scale enterprises. People knew each other by name, and there was accountability and conscience-by-community. If the butcher sold spoiled meat, he would not only get a bad reputation in the town but townspeople wouldn’t let their son marry his daughter. With constraints like these securely in place, competition was encoded as a primary motivator for creating wealth. Humans, like the rest of nature, were assumed to be naturally competitive—“red in tooth and claw,” as the poet Tennyson later phrased it. But nature is not as competitive as Enlightenment scientists imagined. The overriding theme of nature is really more about mutual benefit and survival of those that fit. The world’s species cooperate, barter, and negotiate to achieve ecological balance in tangible ways, such as building fertile soil for all life forms, stabilizing climate, purifying water, and operating with a zero-waste strategy.

  Since the science of ecology (the patterns and relationships among living things) hadn’t matured in Smith’s time, the idea that species share a water hole by visiting it at different, mutually agreeable hours may not have occurred to Enlightenment scientists. The fact that chimpanzees, pelicans, coyotes, and many other species hunt cooperatively didn’t impress them, either. And cooperation among humans at harvest time, in times of scarcity, in extended families, in social movements, and in noncompetitive forms of recreation was apparently not sufficient evidence to override philosophers’ certainty that competition was the undisputed way of the world. They had their theory and they made the economic world fit it.

  Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris argues that when taken to an extreme, competition starves the loser, which eventually also starves the winner. “Global economics is a hierarchical system where one level survives at the expense of another level,” she says. “But this top-down approach is never seen in healthy biological systems. What species is in charge of a rainforest? What part is in charge of your body? Imagine the brain deciding not to allocate resources to certain organs, but keeping them to itself. You can’t have some organs exploiting the others. You would die.”4

  “Burn Baby, Burn”

  Wouldn’t it be interesting to watch Adam Smith’s reaction to the obsessively competitive, immoral behavior of a modern company like Enron? In 2000-2001, Enron employees stretched the free market far beyond its intended limits, intentionally creating a phony energy crisis in California. Some utility customers died because of their behavior. In the documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room, we hear the actual taped voices of Enron employees requesting that plant managers “get a little creative” in shutting down plants for “repairs.” At one point, the company had made arrangements to flip the switch on three-fourths of California’s power supply, while the price of electricity soared 900 percent. In another tape leaked to the media, an Enron energy trader hears news that a forest fire has shut down a major transmission line into California. “Burn, baby, burn,” he sings.

  Sociologist Alfie Kohn gives the example of a sudden fire in an auditorium that creates mass panic. By acting competitively, panicked audiences have often smothered each other in a mad rush for the exit; but by acting cooperatively and forming fast-moving lines, everyone gets out alive. In Kohn’s view, competition is both fueled by, and creates, anxiety and a sense of inadequacy. Since we’re compelled to prove ourselves by beating others, we’ll inevitably feel humiliated when they beat us.5 How can we wish each other well when the rules of the game are “Show no mercy”?

  Contemporary science is proving that cooperation, compassion and trust are hardwired into our genes and psyche, and we can successfully wire them into our economy as well. Scientists have mapped the biochemistry of trust (which makes cooperation possible), observing that the chemical compound oxytocin is produced naturally in the brain by such stimuli as breastfeeding, sex, and various other forms of social bonding.6 Using MRI technology, scientists also observe that when participants in an experiment cooperate, the circuitry that feeds the brain’s “pleasure centers” becomes highly active. The same sections of the brain that rejoice over chocolate, pictures of pretty faces, and windfalls of money also get very excited about cooperation. We cooperate because it feels good, and it feels good because it provides a better shot at mutual survival—whether or not there are record profits.7

  What would Smith, David Ricardo, and their colleagues have said about the findings of an MIT-conducted computer analysis sponsored by the prestigious Club of Rome, an international group of business people, governmental leaders, and scientists? In the 1970s, the research team used a computer model (World3) to ask, “What will happen if population and economic growth continue at current rates? What can be done to ensure a human economy that fits within the physical limits of the Earth?” Their report, updated in 2004, included warning signs for any civilization living beyond its means, and alarmingly, ours shows evidence of all of them:

  • Resource stocks fall, and wastes and pollution accumulate.

  • Capital, resources, and labor are diverted to activities compensating for the loss of services formerly provided without cost by nature (e.g., water purification, flood control, pest control, and pollination).

  • Scarcer, more distant, deeper, or more dilute resources are exploited.

  • There is growing chaos in natural systems, with “natural” disasters more frequent and more severe because of less resilience in the environmental system.

  • Growing demands for capital, resources, and labor are used by the military or industry to gain access to and defend resources that are increasingly concentrated in fewer, more remote, or increasingly hostile regions.

  • Investment in human resources (education, health care, shelter) is postponed to meet immediate consumption, investment, or security needs, or to pay debts.

  • There is declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base. Adapted from Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (176–77).

  And what would these pioneers of capitalism say about the fact that all major natural systems (such as fisheries, grasslands, forests, and farmland) are in decline, all over the planet; about species that are disappearing at the fastest rate since the demise of the dinosaur, sixty-seven million years ago? Would they insist that the free market is running as smoothly as an expensive gold watch, or would they finally admit that we are running out of time? I think they might say, “Well, we have another idea—one that’s more moderate, easier on the environment, and more inherently democratic.” They were smart people; they’d recognize that times have radically changed. In the clear words of Marianne Williamson, “The chaos of our times is a reflection of a profound reorientation of the human mind. This explosion is coming from the deepest levels of the psyche: it is not orderly, and no amount of tight, repressive force can contain it. We can no more stop its energy than a parent can stop the explosion of hormones in an adolescent child.”8

  Nor would we want to obstruct the momentous, positive aspects of this planetary shift, as visionary Paul Hawken reminds us: “A shared understanding is arising spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions and cohorts. And it is growing and spreading throughout this country and worldwide. No one started this worldview, no one is in charge of it; no orthodoxy can restrain it. It is the fastest growing and most powerful movement in the world today, unrecognizable to the American media because it is not centralized, based on power, or led by charismatic white male vertebrates. Its strength is increasing in direct proportion to the breakdown of environmental, s
ocial, and political systems.”9

  Steady-State Capitalism: Something for Everyone

  Based on the shaky foundations of insecurity and greed, America’s current version of capitalism was flawed right from the start. But we don’t have to throw capitalism out the window of history; it just needs to be adapted so it maximizes more than a single variable. We need a bigger mission than money; a wider purpose than material wealth. For example, former New York attorney Robert Hinkley has drafted twenty-eight words—a “do-no-harm” clause—that he believes could and should be inserted into all corporate charters. This clause would take away CEOs’ chronic excuse for antisocial, antienvironment behavior: that they are just “serving their shareholders.” Corporations could continue to make healthy profits, “but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public health or safety, the communities in which the corporation operates, or the dignity of its employees.” What a great idea—that we tune up an existing institution so it serves everyone better!10

  Similar adaptations can be made throughout the dusty hallways of capitalism, as envisioned by people like Paul Hawken, Herman Daly, and David Korten—contemporary counterparts of Thomas Paine and Adam Smith. With greater public awareness and participation, the free market can be more responsive to the needs of both humans and environment and still provide sufficient jobs and returns-on-investment. Far from being a dream, this resurgence in democracy is happening right in front of the eyes of the world’s billionaires. In fact, one of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffet, recently pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune, stating, “Society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.” As author Jonathan Rowe observes, “What would oil be worth without highways on which to burn it? What would an expensive mansion be worth in a city on any continent with no police protection, sewer service or zoning laws?” This acknowledgment of public values is indicative of the nonpartisan transition capitalism is undergoing.11