Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (12 page)

Despite land’s obvious independence of human effort for its existence, land is not so different from any other kind of property. Let us first consider material property—anything made of metal, wood, plastic, plants or animals, minerals, and so on. Are these anything other than pieces of the earth, altered through the application of human effort? The distinction between land and improvements thereupon—the distinction between that which already exists and that which human effort creates—is no more or less valid for land than for any other material good. All that we use and all that we
own consists of modified bits of earth. Together they are “natural capital”—the wealth and goodness that nature has bequeathed upon us. Originally none of it was property; it came into that realm as technology lengthened our grasp and the mentality of separation intensified our will to own. Today, forms of natural capital that we barely knew existed have become property: the electromagnetic spectrum, sequences of DNA, and, indirectly, ecological diversity and the earth’s capacity to absorb industrial waste.
¹

Whether it has been made into a direct subject of property, as in land, oil, and trees, or whether it is still a commons that we draw on to create other property, such as the open sea, the original Great Commons has been sold off: converted first into property and then into money. It is this final step that confirms that something has indeed completed its metamorphosis into property. To be able to freely buy and sell something means that it has been dissociated from its original matrix of relationships; in other words, that it has become “alienable.” That is why money has become a proxy for land and all other property, and why charging rental (interest) for its use bears the same effects and partakes of the same ancient injustice as does charging rent on land.

Natural capital is one of four broad categories of the commonwealth that also comprises social, cultural, and spiritual capital.
Each consists of things that were once free, part of self-sufficiency or the gift economy, that we now pay for. The robbery then is not from mother earth, but from mother culture.

The most familiar of these other forms of capital in the economic discourse is cultural capital, which goes by the term
intellectual property
. In former times, the vast fund of stories, ideas, songs, artistic motifs, images, and technical inventions formed a commons that everyone could draw upon for pleasure and productivity, or incorporate into yet other innovations. In the Middle Ages, minstrels would listen to each other’s songs and borrow new tunes that they liked, modify them, and circulate them back into the commons of music. Today artists and their corporate sponsors scramble to copyright and protect each new creation, and vigorously prosecute anyone who tries to incorporate those songs into their own. The same happens in every creative sphere.
²

The moral justification for intellectual property is, again, “If I am my own, and my labor power belongs to me, then what I make is mine.” But even granting the premise that “I am my own,” the implicit assumption that artistic and intellectual creations arise
ex nihilo
from the mind of the creator, independent of cultural context, is absurd. Any intellectual creation (including this book) draws on bits and pieces of the sea of culture around us, and from the fund of images, melodies, and ideas that are deeply imprinted upon the human psyche, or perhaps even innate to it. As Lewis Mumford
puts it, “A patent is a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.”
³
The same is true of songs, stories, and all other cultural innovations. By making them private property, we are walling off something that is not ours. We are stealing from the cultural commons. And because, like land, pieces of the cultural commons are themselves productive of continued wealth, this theft is an ongoing crime that contributes to the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the owners and the renters, the creditors and the debtors. The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin made this general point eloquently:

Such considerations inform my desire to make my books freely available online and to forgo some of the normal copyrights. I could not have written this book outside a vast organic matrix of ideas, a commonwealth of cultural capital that I cannot rightfully enclose.
⁵

Spiritual capital is more subtle. It refers to our mental and sensuous capacities, for example, the ability to concentrate, to create worlds of the imagination, and to derive pleasure from experiencing life. When I was young, in the very last days before television and video games came to dominate American childhood, we created our own worlds with intricate story lines, practicing the psychic technologies that adults can use to fashion their lives and their collective reality: forming a vision, telling a story around that vision that assigns meanings and roles, playing out those roles, and so on. Today, those worlds of the imagination come prefabricated from TV studios and software companies, and children wander through cheap, gaudy, often violent worlds created by distant strangers. These come with prefabricated images as well, and the ability to form their own images (we call this ability
imagination
) atrophies. Unable to envision a new world, the child
grows up accustomed to accepting whatever reality is handed her.
⁶
Could this, perhaps, be contributing to the political passivity of the American public?

Another depletion of spiritual capital comes via the intense sensory stimulation of electronic media. Modern action films, for instance, are so fast-paced, so loud, so grossly stimulating, that older movies seem boring in comparison, not to mention books or the world of nature. Despite my best efforts to limit their exposure to modern excesses, my children can barely stand to watch any film made before 1975. Once habituated to intense stimulation, in its absence we get the withdrawal symptom we call boredom. We become dependent, and therefore must pay to acquire something that was once available simply by virtue of being alive. A baby or a hunter-gatherer will be fascinated by the slow processes of nature: a twig floating on the water, a bee visiting a flower, and other things that are beyond the anemic attentiveness of modern adults. Just as the Roman
coloni
had to pay to use the land they needed to survive, so also must most people today pay the owners of the processes, media, and capital necessary to create the extreme sensory stimulation that they need to feel alive.

It may not be readily apparent that spiritual capital constitutes a commons. What has really been appropriated here is a locus of attention. The capabilities of the human mind that I call spiritual capital do not exist in isolation; it is our upbringing, our nurture, our cultural surroundings that foster and direct them. Our ability to imagine and to obtain sensory fulfillment is to a great degree a collective ability, one today that we can no longer exercise from
the freely available sources of mind and nature, but must purchase from their new owners.

The collective attention of the human race is a commons like the land or the air. Like them, it is a raw material of human creativity. To make a tool, to do any work, to do anything at all requires that one place attention on that task rather than on some other. The ubiquity of advertising and media in our society is a co-optation of the collective human attention, and a depletion of our divine bequest. On the road, everywhere my eyes turn, there is a billboard. On the subway, on the internet, on the street, commercial messages reach out to “capture” our attention. They infiltrate our very thoughts, our narratives, our inner dialog, and via these, our emotions, desires, and beliefs, turning all toward the making of product and profit. Our attention is hardly our own anymore, so easily do the powers of politics and commerce manipulate it.

After it has been so long manipulated, chopped up, habituated to intense stimuli, and jerked around from one lurid but empty object to another, our attention is so fragmented we cannot sustain it long enough to create anything independent of the programs that surround us. We lose our capacity to sustain thought, understand nuance, and put ourselves in another person’s shoes. Susceptible to any simplistic narrative with immediate emotional appeal, we are easy targets not just for advertising, but for propaganda, demagoguery, and fascism. In various ways, all of these serve the money power.

The most important type of capital for purposes of this discussion is social capital. Social capital refers primarily to relationships and
skills, the “services” that people once provided for themselves and each other in a gift economy, such as cooking, child care, health care, hospitality, entertainment, advice, and the growing of food, making of clothes, and building of houses. As recently as one or two generations ago, many of these functions were far less commoditized than they are today. When I was a child, most people I knew seldom ate at restaurants, and neighbors took care of each other’s children after school. Technology has been instrumental in bringing human relationships into the realm of “services,” just as it has brought deeper and more obscure pieces of the earth into the realm of goods. For example, the technology of the phonograph and radio helped turn music from something people made for themselves into something they paid for. Storage and transportation technologies have done the same for food processing. In general, the fine division of labor that accompanies technology has made us dependent on strangers for most of the things we use, and makes it unlikely that our neighbors depend on us for anything we produce. Economic ties thus become divorced from social ties, leaving us with little to offer our neighbors and little occasion to know them.

The monetization of social capital is the strip-mining of community. It should not be surprising that money is deeply implicated in the disintegration of community, because money is the epitome of the impersonal. Convert two distinct forests into money, and they become the same. Applied to cultures, the same principle is fast creating a global monoculture where every service is a paid service. When money mediates all our relationships, we too lose our uniqueness to become a standard consumer of standard goods and services, and a standard functionary performing other services. No personal economic relationships are important because we can always “pay someone else to do it.” No wonder, strive as
we might, we find it so hard to create community. No wonder we feel so insecure, so replaceable. It is all because of the conversion, driven, as we shall see, by interest, of the unique and sacred into the monetized and generic. In
The Ascent of Humanity
I wrote,

The commoditization of social relationships leaves us with nothing to do together but to consume. Joint consumption does nothing to build community because it requires no gifts. I think the oft-lamented vacuity of most social gatherings arises from the inchoate knowledge, “I don’t need you.” I don’t need you to help me consume food, drink, drugs, or entertainment. Consumption calls upon no one’s gifts, calls forth none of anyone’s true being. Community and intimacy cannot come from joint consumption, but only from giving and cocreativity.

When libertarians invoke the sanctity of private property, they unintentionally create a need for the very Big Government they so despise. For in the absence of community bonds, the atomized individuals that remain depend on remote authority—a legally constituted state—for many of the social functions that community structures once fulfilled: security, dispute resolution, and the allocation of collective social capital. The propertization and privatization of the economic realm leaves us, to coin a phrase, helplessly independent—independent of anyone we know, and dependent on impersonal, coercive institutions that govern from afar.