Gift Economy
The unseen power of Compassion.
Goodness, Compassion and Beauty go together in a human power triage.
These three super powers applied with Love save many lives daily.
People applying their skills are quiet and hard working.
Sensible folks, like urban farmers, health care activists, school builders and volunteer counselors, and they’re not working to save the world,
but they are working hard to at least make it a better place.
Yet they are mostly unseen.
In the movies, action heroes tend to be young, fast and strong. They save the world in a madcap rush. But in real life, they are more often on the far side of 50, performing their exploits over decades. They display no particular physical powers as they move through meetings, public halls and airports, armed with cell phones, laptops and vast networks of contacts. At a time of endless, seemingly insurmountable crises, when bureaucracies don’t seem to work, when public disgust runs rampant, when dollars are scarce and sense even scarcer, due to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, these selfless humanitarians carry on their quiet quest to save the world, or at least make it better.
They are game-changers. They are changing our ideas about what is possible. They are taking on society’s biggest, most intractable problems and, against all odds, making a huge difference.
They become hugely visible whenever disaster strikes…. They learn from the best.
Nature teaches us this. Gift Economy is all there is in Nature.
Natural Ecosystems abide the Goldilocks planet in perfect harmony and balance that allows us to live here.
Compassion is the force represented here. And the Gift Economy it fosters here, as it does everywhere, matters greatly because it is a force that has become ever more visible to those who dedicate themselves to their ideals and act on their principles, in solidarity with the true Human Nature.
The Nature of Human Compassion as we really begin to understand the full scope of its power is immense and unending.
Old Adam Smith, honorary intellectual father of capitalism, understood this.
Because, even though he wrote about the “invisible hand” of the free market in the Wealth of Nations, a phrase which always brings to mind horror movies, Adams family cartoons, and Gothic novels in which detached and phantasmagorical hands go about their work crawling and clawing away, he also wrote about Compassion.
In 1759, Smith published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He continued making extensive revisions to the book, up until his death. And although The Wealth of Nations is widely regarded as Smith’s most influential work, it is believed that Smith himself considered The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be a superior work.
In the work, Smith critically examines the moral thinking of his time, and suggests that conscience arises from social relationships. His goal in writing the work was to explain the source of mankind’s ability to form moral judgements, in spite of man’s natural inclinations towards self-interest. Smith proposes a theory of sympathy, in which the act of observing others makes people aware of themselves and the morality of their own behavior. Sympathy is empathy mixed with compassion no less…
Still the idea that the economy would somehow self-regulate and so didn’t need to be interfered with further, or so goes the justification for capitalist excess, took hold in the intervening centuries. And even though it took an enormous armature of government interventions to create the current mix of wealth and poverty in our world, we forget the public good.
Remember that your tax dollars pay for wars that make the world safer for giant oil corporations, and those corporations hand over huge sums of money to their favorite politicians in order to regulate the political system to continue to protect, reward, and enrich themselves. But you know that story well, because they also make the world less safe for you and your children. Or at least they make it appear so…
As 2010 ends, what really shines isn’t the corrosion and failure of this system, but the way another system, another invisible hand, is always at work.
An invisible multitude of hands, in what you could think of as the great, ongoing, Manichean arm-wrestling match that keeps our planet spinning. The invisible claw of the market may fail to comprehend how powerful the other hand, the one that gives rather than takes is, but neither does that open hand know itself or its own power.
But we all should understand and feel the contribution we owe to this power of goodness and compassion. And the best way to feel this is to contribute and participate.
Because the needs are great and who wouldn’t agree that our capitalist society today, based on competition and selfishness leaves a lot to be desired ?
As it happens, however, huge areas of our lives are also based on gift economies, barter, mutual aid, and giving without hope of return; principles that have little or nothing to do with competition, selfishness, or scarcity economics. Think of the relations between friends, between family members, the activities of volunteers or those who have chosen their vocation on principle rather than for profit.
Think of the acts of those, like international aid volunteers, climate activists, Red Cross workers, Medecine sans Frontieres staff, Environmental Parliament volunteers, daycare worker to nursing home aides who do more, and do it more passionately, than paid workers do. Just think of the armies of the unpaid volunteers who are at “work” counterbalancing and cleaning up after the invisible hand of the market causes horrible imbalances and wars and famines. Think of those making every effort to loosen its grip on the children, the vulnerable, the weak or the poor and on our collective throat. Such acts represent the relations of the great majority of us some of the time and a minority of us all the time. They are, the nine-tenths of the human economy. They aren’t seen because like the economic iceberg, most of the wealth is what is below the waterline – vast, invisible & unseen yet a massive and stabilizing force majeur.
Capitalism is only kept going by this army of lesser capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp. How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don’t happen, the forests that aren’t leveled, the species that don’t go extinct, the nuclear bombs that aren’t dropped on people, the nuclear plants that aren’t build, the racism that isn’t allowed to raise it’s nasty head, the discriminations that don’t occur and all the more the good things that happen daily.
The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid the plenty of consumerism. An artificial scarcity keeps the wheels turning. Famines in Africa and Asia and South America while the North throws away more than 50% of it’s food…
Still the Gift Economy, this vast shadow system provides Food Aid, International Assistance, local soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.
The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention. In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.
Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit. Rather it’s done in a compassionate volunteer fashion at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible. Years ago, as a parent, I finally began to grasp just what kind of labour and selfless effort goes into sustaining one child from birth onwards…
If you do the math, with nearly seven billion of us on Earth right now, that means seven billion years of near-constant tending only to get children upright and walking, a labor of love that adds up to more than the age of this planet. That’s not a small force, even if it is only a force of maintenance. Still, the same fierce affection and determination pushes back everywhere at the forces of destruction.
For the American environment, this last year was, at best, a mixed one. The Gulf of Mexico was ravaged by the humongous oil spill but nonetheless, the Alaskan polar bears got some protection and the building of at least one nuclear power plant was prevented through the work of groups like the Sierra Club and the Environmental Parliament who continued to keep new coal-fired power plants at bay. And we were lifted by the Californians who came together and defeated an oil-company-sponsored initiative to stop their cap & trade, to name just a few of the more positive developments.
Don’t forget all the groups at work on the environment, hardly noticed by the rest of us, because without them it would have been a massacre out there…
We not only have a largely capitalist economy but a rigid ideological system that justifies this as seemingly inevitable. “There is no alternative,” was the favourite expression of Alzheimer ridden former PM Margaret Thatcher. Many with full faculties today still argue that this is simply the best human nature, nasty to the core, can possibly hope to manage.
Fortunately, it’s not true. Not only is there an alternative now, but it always has been one.
Another world is possible. That other world is not just possible, but it’s always been here.
We like simple easy change because we fear drastic change. We are afraid of revolutionary change big on ideals and long on policy delivery, because we tend to think revolution has to mean blood letting, a big fight in-the-streets, pain & loss of life, a winner-takes-all battle, a zero sum game that culminates with regime change.
But in reality it’s just far more subtle and painless. The kind of revolution we want is painless and rather pleasing too, and in the past half century it has far more often involved a trillion tiny acts of resistance that sometimes cumulatively change a society so much that the laws have no choice but to follow after the people’s choice. For example, American society has changed profoundly over the past half century for those among us who are not male, or straight, or white, or Christian, becoming far less discriminatory and exclusionary.
Radicals often speak as though we live in a bleak landscape in which the good has yet to be born, the revolution yet to begin. Yet this isn’t true. Because both of them are here, right now, and they always have been. They are represented in countless acts of solidarity and resistance, and sometimes they even triumph. When they don’t carry the day and don’t outright win, they still do a great deal to counterbalance the official organization of our economies and nations. That organization ensures oil spills, while the revolutionaries, if you want to call them that, head for the birds, the vulnerable people and the beaches, and maybe, while they’re at it, change the official order a little, too.
Of course, nothing’s quite as simple as that. After all, there are saints in government and monsters in the progressive movement. There’s oil in my gas tank, dirty coal electricity in my home and money in my name in the bank. To suggest that the world is so easily divided into one hand and the other, selfish and altruistic, is impossibly naive, but talking in binaries has an advantage. It allows you to communicate with the tech geeks and it also lets you focus on what is seldom acknowledged.
To say there is no alternative dismisses both the desire for and the possibility of alternative arrangements of power. For example, how do you square a Republican Party hell-bent on preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest 0.2% of Americans with a new poll by two university economists suggesting that nearly all of us want something quite different.
The economic pollsters showed a cross-section of Americans pie charts depicting three degrees of wealth distribution in three societies, and asked them what their ideal distribution of wealth might be. The unidentified charts ranged from our colossal disparity to absolute equality, with Swedish moderation in-between. Most chose Sweden as the closest to their ideal. According to the pollsters, the choice suggested that “Americans prefer some inequality to perfect equality, but not to the degree currently present in the United States.”
It might help to remember how close the US had come to Sweden by the late 1970s, when income disparity was at its low ebb and the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was yet to launch in the western world. Of course, these days in the US we aren’t offered Swedish wealth distribution, since the system set up to represent people actually spends much of its time representing complex fiscal interests, their own self-interest and moneyed interests instead. The Republicans are now being offered even larger bribes than the Democrats to vote in the interests of the ultra-affluent, whether corporate or individual. Both parties, however, helped produce the Supreme Court that, in January, gave corporations and the wealthy unprecedented power in our political system, power that it will take all our energy to counteract and maybe, someday, force into retreat.
Think of the effort put forth by a Russian woman scientist who says: “Almost every day I come home from work and spend several hours improving Wikipedia! Why would I donate so much of my free time? Because I believe that by giving my time and effort — along with thousands of other people of different nationalities, religion, ages — we will one day have shared and free knowledge for all the people.”
Imperfect as it may be, ad-free, nonprofit Wikipedia’s sheer scope with 3.5 million entries in English alone, to say nothing of smaller Norwegian, Vietnamese, Persian, and Waray-Waray versions with more than 100,000 articles each, is an astonishing testimony to a human urge to work without recompense when the cause matters.
Russian Vladimir Nabokov once asked someone coming down a trail in the American Rockies whether he’d seen any butterflies. The man said that there were no butterflies. Nabokov, of course, went up that same trail and found plenty of butterflies. Proof enough that You see what you’re looking for.
Most of us are constantly urged to see the world as, at best, a competitive place and, at worst, a constant war of each against each, and you can see just that without even bothering to look too hard. But that’s not all you can see. From news coverage to Hollywood movies, the media suggest that, in these moments of turbulence when institutions often cease to function, we revert to our original nature in a Hobbesian wilderness where people fend for themselves. But in truth we fend in communities. We fend for each other…
The surprise though is that in such situations, most of us fend for each other most of the time at that. Perhaps this, community like care, rather than the so called short-term, self-interested human nature, red in tooth and claw, is our original nature. At least, the evidence is clear that people not only behave well, but take deep pleasure in doing so, a pleasure so intense it suggests that an unspoken, unmet appetite for meaningful work and vibrant community and human solidarity, lives powerfully within us.
Those healthy and compassionate appetites can be found reflected almost nowhere in the mainstream media, and still we are normally told that the world in which such appetites might be satisfied is “utopian.” Impossible to reach because of our savage competitiveness, and so should be left to the most hopeless of dreamers…
Even reports meant to be sympathetic to the possibility that another better world could exist in us right now, accept our Social-Darwinian essence as a given. Consider a November New York Times piece on empathy and bullying in which they wrote, “We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion. Brain scans reveal that when we contemplate violence done to others we activate the same regions in our brains that fire up when mothers gaze at their children, suggesting that caring for strangers may be instinctual. When we help others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure also light up. Research indicates that toddlers as young as 18 months behave in an altruistic way.”
Are we really hardwired to be aggressive and selfish, at the outset? Are you?
No evidence for such a statement need be given, even in an essay that provides plenty of evidence to the contrary, as it’s supposed to be a fact universally acknowledged, rather than an opinion.
Compassion now becomes truer for all.
I’d say that compassion and altruism are hot. It might, however, be more useful to say that the question of the nature of human nature is being reconsidered at the moment by scientists, economists, and social theorists in all sorts of curious combinations and coalitions. Take, for example, the University of California’s Greater Good Science Center, which describes itself as studying “the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.” “Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest” the Director says.
A few dozen miles away is Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, which likewise draws on researchers in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to Buddhist ethics. Another organization, Roots of Empathy in Toronto, that reduces violence and increases empathy among children. Experiments, programs, and activities like this proliferate.
Independent scholars and writers are looking at the same underlying question, and stories in the news this year, such as those on school bullying, address questions of how our society gets organized, and for whose benefit. The suicides of several queer young people generated a groundswell of anti-bullying organizing and soul-searching, notably the largely online “It Gets Better” attempt to reach out to queer youth.
In a very different arena, neoliberalism, the economic system that lets the invisible hand of the markets throttle what it might find convenient, has finally come into question in the mainstream.
Mainly because it throttled the people it supposed to serve, now we are all free to criticize it and hamstring it.
Whereas if you questioned it in 1999, you were a Luddite, a troglodyte and a flat-Earth type or worse. Hillary Clinton lied her way through the 2008 primary elections for President of the US, claiming she never supported NAFTA, and still her husband, who brought it on and forced it to the poorer countries of America, publicly apologized for the way those policies eliminated Haiti’s rice crops by removing local tarrifs protective of native food staple production. “It was a mistake,” Bill Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10th 2010. “I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.”
Think of those people doing the research on altruism and compassion as a radical scholarly movement, one that could undermine the philosophical and political assumptions behind our current economic system, which is also our political system.
These individuals and organizations that are putting together the proof that not only is another world possible, but it’s been here all along, as visible, should we care to look, as Nabokov’s butterflies.
No matter how engaged these community folks might be, though their community of interest is likely to be small. Yet the aggregate of their work is vast and overwhelming throughout the world.
Do not underestimate the power of this force.
The world could be much better if more of us were more active on behalf of what we believe in and love.
And it would be a much worse world if the myriads of countless activists weren’t already hard at work from Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma and the climate activists in Tuvalu to the homeless activists around the corner.
When we study disasters past, what is amazing is not just that people behaved so beautifully, but that, in doing so, they found such joy.
It seems that something in their natures, starved in ordinary times, was fed by the opportunity, under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected; and when this appetite was fulfilled, the joy shone out, even amid the ruins.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
Happy New Year with plenty of Compassion.
It just might be the spice of Life.
