by Lael Ewy
The history of civilization is also the history of mood enhancement. Mood enhancement is, arguably, an artifact of civilization and also a necessity of its perpetuation. Some primary cultures practice it, but that is often a reaction to long periods of forced inactivity (a rainy reason, for instance), or as a matter of sacrament (Native American peyote rituals).
Civilization and the specialization that it allows help those who have specific skills practice those skills full-time. Through continual practice, those skills can become incredibly refined. Thus civilizations create the grand achievements we associate with them: roads and aqueducts, cathedrals and coliseums. The downside to this is civilization turns one’s skills into salable commodities, not practices performed for the sake of the community or for the sake of the product itself. In response, the worker can conceptualize the activity and formulate it as an art or a craft. Or she can think of what she does in entirely economic terms—as fee for service, as “skilled labor.” Generally, she does something of both.
This process is a hedge against early-stage alienation, and it was the guilds’ stock-in-trade (all puns intended), and why Marx marked their passing with concern. In that, monetization is also a way to stay motivated to work and produce things that the worker will not, himself, enjoy. As soon as one’s skills or the product of those skills become merely monetary, one must temper one’s emotional investment in them. One must increase one’s motivation artificially, and monetization helps do this. Money makes the goods and services of others in the civilization accessible to the worker. It is a mood enhancer because it creates artificial value that substitutes for the practice of the skill. The payoff is a materialist way of life, materialization. As opposed to practicing a skill for the sake of the community or for its own sake, the skill is practiced for the sake of stuff and one’s access to it. Anyone who has ever shopped for pleasure understands how this enhances mood; it is a substitute for the power and competence one feels when one does useful and meaningful work.
Alienated from what one does, the worker begins to think entirely in terms of monetary value, and that value becomes what she works for. She wishes to amass enough monetary value to retire on someday.
But if a thing is worth doing, if it is the expression of one’s particular abilities and skills, why would one want to retire? Specialization and the monetization of skills lead to a lack of balance. The ancient Greek idea of being competent in many areas was an attempt to rediscover the generalist past that we evolved into and that was lost with civilization. Specialization takes normal differences in ability and blows them out of proportion—or rather into the proportions that the civilization demands. The Greeks were able to practice balance and civilization by having slaves do the menial work civilization requires.
Still, the technological enhancements of civilization have given us a remarkable standard of living, but it is clear we lack balance. Over 50% of us are overweight; this is the physical manifestation of our lack of balance. Our massive consumption of drugs shows our lack of emotional balance. The wealthy and middle classes have their mood enhancers prescribed (antidepressants, sleep aids, anti-anxiety medications, pain killers), but that does not stop them and much of the rest of the population from consuming beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tobacco, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, MDMA, and a host of other drugs in order to deal with the distance they have from what they do.
Indeed, opium production, the brewing of wine, beer, and hard liquor, and the cultivation of coffee and tea are all associated with civilization. They would not have been possible without the agriculture that fuels civilization, of course, but given its alienating properties, how possible would the continuation of civilization have been without them?. Added to this are entertainments and sports—leisure time itself—which have ballooned in order to distract us and make us forget about our lack of balance. We would not need a work/life balance if our work did not in some sense involve alienation.
I do not think many of us are ready to give up the blessings of civilization for the sake of restoring balance. But we can create ways of doing and ways of being that help restore it. We will not be able to reverse monetization, but we may be more open to barter. We will not be able to do away with large industries entirely, but we can respect communities more as we do business, helping the worker see the value of what she does. An unalienated worker is a conscientious one, one able to adapt to changing resources and environmental stresses. A conscientious worker is able to appreciate the local wine for the sake of the wine, not merely for the sake of forgetting.
Mediocrity inspires a certain exciting familiarity. We (who think ourselves humble) see it and in it recognize something of ourselves. Mistaking the thrill of recognition for brilliance, we glorify our own identities within the mundane. Thus the success of Avatar, American Idol, Sarah Palin, et al.
–Lael Ewy
The common wisdom, probably due to comments Ronald Reagan made in the 1980s about “welfare queens” (and incessantly repeated by Rush Limbaugh), is that the poor have a “sense of entitlement” to their welfare benefits and that the public dole has become a “lifestyle” for the poor. The theory goes further, stating that this results in a large number of people who have no incentive to work and have become lazy and complacent.
There may be an element of truth to this, but with 45 million Americans now qualifying for food assistance, it can’t be all true. This statistic is shored up by the fact that the fastest growing segment of the homeless and of food bank users is comprised of families in which at least one adult works—so clearly the problem isn’t that people receiving assistance don’t want to work.
Receiving welfare is still a matter of deep shame in America, and its rolls are swelled by the economic downturn and the shrinking American wage, not by laziness or a sense among those getting it that welfare is anything other than a last resort that they would gladly give up if given a chance to earn a decent living.
The “sense of entitlement” language is, if anything, a classic case of Freudian projection by the rich onto the poor. For recent evidence of this look no further than Wall Street shaking down Uncle Sam for $700 billion simply because the big Wall Street banks gambled away all their money on risky financial instruments. This sense of entitlement that involves private jets and Fifth Avenue apartments, not a sackful of groceries for this kids and a housing voucher for a run-down Section 8 apartment.
More subtle examples can be drawn from the common practice of major corporations demanding tax breaks for locating in a particular area. In economic development terms this is known as being competitive on a global scale. In mafia terms, this is known as a protection racket. But it derives from a sense by the corporations and the rich people who run them of pure entitlement; they demand special treatment that other, smaller businesses can’t get, and they demand a special status that actual people—versus the corporate “people” a recent Supreme Court decision assured us exist—can never achieve. The promise, of course, is that by locating in a given area, the company will “create jobs” which will then lead to eons of wealth and contentment in that locale. Until, of course, the company finds a better deal elsewhere.
Wal-Mart is well known for these tactics, but its behavior is even worse. Once the titanic retailer does locate in an area, tax incentives assured, it proceeds to undercut local retailers and drive them out of business, monopolizing local retail. It also pays its employees so little that they qualify for government subsidized food and health care benefits. Thus it “double dips” once at the front end, with tax incentives, and once at the back end by sucking on the public teat to keep its employees healthy and alive. Clearly, it feels entitled to this treatment and to these benefits, as it actually coaches its employees about how to get public assistance.
All that is well known. But then there’s this item from the July 9, 2010 edition of Public Radio International’s Marketplace Morning Report. The piece, titled “Rich More Likely to Walk Away from Homes,” has Nancy Marshall Genzer summarizing a New York Times article that shows about one in seven mortgages worth more than a million dollars is in default, as opposed to one in 12 for those worth less than a million. And apparently it isn’t because the rich can no longer afford these homes. Here are Marshall Genzer’s words: “Well, the Times reports that these homeowners just say, look, their houses are not a good investment, and they decided to walk away.” In other words, they’re screwing the banks, and by default the rest of us who use those banks, by going delinquent on mortgages that they don’t like because they aren’t returning the kind of value they want, not because the mortgage holders are out of work or seriously financially strained. Marshall Genzer goes on to explain how they can get away with this: “[T]he Times also says that the wealthy are less susceptible to tactics used by the government and banks to shame them into paying their mortgage.” What she isn’t saying here, possibly in order not to upset the show’s corporate underwriters, is the next obvious thing: that the wealthy have no shame.
Obviously, that isn’t true of all rich people, just as certainly some poor people abuse their welfare benefits. But the actions of the rich here don’t pass ethical muster. If we apply a little Kant, we can see that if what Wall Street, Wal-Mart, and these rich homeowners do were to become universal law, the economy would not merely be damaged as it has been but utterly destroyed. The ever-weakening responsible middle is keeping the boat afloat by working hard amidships with a bucket. Meanwhile the water flows in from our captains continually running aground.
But these examples above require some type of deeper explanation. Why do those at the very top feel like they can bash the hull in and then retire to their deck chairs? We might be able to move in the direction of understanding this if we look again at Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment from the 1960s. In it, he got a majority of subjects to shock another person to the brink of death. He did this simply through the power of the authority of a man in a lab coat standing next to the subjects and giving them orders. No one really got shocked, of course—all but those giving the faux shocks were actors—but the experiment revealed how people can act in unethical and immoral ways if they feel confident in the authority that assures the course of action. The poor and middle class are less likely to walk away from our debts because we view banks and government agencies as authority figures. But also, perhaps, because we view these entities as somehow infused with the power of the public good. Even the much-despised banks, after all, keep money building interest for regular users and loans flowing to locals building homes and small businesses. Or at least they did before the financial meltdown, which was led by the rich and the Wall Street investment firms.
The rich find their authority figures in other rich people and the corporations they run, not in the public, the government, or some penny-ante bank. Evidence supports their view in a sort of feedback loop: they get the entitlements they want from the government; the government is therefore a sucker; the government therefore deserves no respect. This is reinforced by free-market dogma which shores up the authority effect through think-tanks, Ayn Rand novels, and the business departments of colleges and universities. A Marxist would recognize this as reification, but it happens not as a top-down form of control, but peer-to-peer, excusing bad behavior that keeps the rich rich despite the economic damage they create.
An anthropologist would recognize this as a form of intensification, which is necessary for any culture (or in this case sub-culture) to maintain group cohesion. It is clear the rich are doing this better than the rest of us, and it is to the detriment of both the common culture and the common good.
–EW Wilder
Economic philosophers have a history of not being able to predict the future. Marx could never have known how much the New World would act as a safety valve to depressurize the boil of Europe’s working class. Adam Smith could never see how the steamship and the vast resources of the American West would threaten what he saw as England’s eternal agricultural hegemony. This is part of the problem with traditional economics: it is designed to explain a certain given way of being. Most economic theories are developed around the culture of the economist developing them. They are, therefore, offshoots of their cultures, while their creators pass them off as universal and empirical explanations of eternal truths.
An anthropological approach does not suffer as much from this problem. By this way of thinking, an economy is simply how a culture exploits its environment in order to survive. The means, resources, and resource allocations are all at the heart of how a culture creates an economy, and an understanding of a culture’s economic potential is a measure of these. So an economic model for an Inuit population living above the Arctic Circle would of necessity be different than that of the Germans or French. It would simply be silly to expect the same set of values to apply to the material lives of these disparate cultures.
Recent trends toward true-cost accounting have made steps in this direction, but they’re needlessly recidivist and reformational; they still begin with current economic theory as their basis. If we consider economics to be at its most basic level how a culture accesses and allocates resources, we can come at it from the correct orientation to begin with.
In this way, we no longer need to predict the future to determine the success of our economies, no longer need be hidebound by the present or recorded past. An anthropological approach is less likely to be shackled to ideology, or, as is just as common, by tradition and class warfare masquerading as ideology. Instead, we are forced to confront the world as it is and ask ourselves honestly “What is our environmental condition? What do we need from it to survive? When are we taking too much?”
This is a much more sensible approach from the get-go, and it has the simultaneous effect of making us more in control. Fealty to ideology forces us to ignore the facts when they fail to comport with our theories. Thus the oil and gas industries have spent millions of dollars trying to deny global warming. Thus Mao’s China adopted agricultural practices that killed millions of Chinese. Being beholden to ideology leads to corruption of the political system as well, as companies that cannot deal with reality go groveling to the government for handouts or gear the law in their favor. Thus the oil and gas industries get their war in Iraq and big business gets laws that help them break labor unions. In contrast, an anthropological approach can be much more practical, matching resources to supply, supply to need.
Free-market capitalists will argue that this is “anti-freedom” because it would necessarily restrict some parts of the market. But the market has demonstrated that its principles are at odds with one another. According to free-market theory, the market itself is supposed to self-regulate meager supply and disparities in need. Under the theory, as resources decline, the cost of them becomes prohibitive and those who exploit those resources move on to more promising ones, preserving the remainder. Instead, of course, the market destroys those resources, as those who profit from them allow themselves to see only the rise in price, not the future collapse. The gap between those who have and those who want widens and the very resources that culture needs to survive disappear, threatening the culture itself. This happens because at the core of the free market system there is a basic contradiction. It posits both that markets will regulate themselves and that individuals will control themselves, acting in their own “rational self-interest” and therefore not trading short term gains for long term suffering. But the theory also posits that people are essentially selfish and acquisitive. Selfish and acquisitive people do not act rationally in the long term: if you believe that others are also selfish and acquisitive, you cannot trust them not to take all of a resource, and so, in order to prevent them from taking it all, you must take as much of it as you can as quickly as possible. The immediate then always takes precedence over the long-term in a perfect free market system and resources are always squandered rather than conserved.
Anthropological economics has no problem with the free market as long as it works as advertised, but this contradiction forces some regulation of the market if a culture that uses it is to survive.
But the anthropological approach is also not beholden to communism as formulated by Marx. It is collectivized only in the sense that it considers the collective needs of individuals within the culture as matched with their environment. If incentives need to be in place in order to motivate people to do what needs to be done, so be it. Anthropological economics is a form of bricolage: work with what you have in order to do what needs to be done. There is no ideological weight given to complex civilizations versus bands of hunter-gatherers. Unlike other economic theories, the anthropological approach is open to future contingencies and methodologies as they are developed and found useful. It is essentially humanistic and ecological as it is born of the nexus of people and their environment, based on that relationship.
–Lael Ewy
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