Preparations

There's this thing I do every New Year's Eve, I don't really know why.  What I do is I pick a "resolution" spontaneously, and stick to it whether I like it or not.  It's an exercise in self-discipline, or something like that.  It doesn't really matter why, it's just this thing I do.  I don't do it every year, so I suppose it isn't really that disciplined.  Also I don't always stick to it (likewise).  Some resolutions are easier to keep to than others.  In 2002 for example, my resolution was to wear a suit every day.  I did fairly well here; I recall it was about September before I first neglected to wear a tie.  In 2003 my resolution was to eat a tuna sandwich (or baked potato) whenever I felt like it.  This was easier to stick to, and I was a success.  In 2004-5, I lost my mind, which may or may not be related.  I was a student.  Good times.

What heaven used to look like.

Anyway, three years ago my resolution was to go vegan for a month.  (Who said a new year's resolution has to last a year?  My game, my rules).  I thought that would be as long as I could stand it.  I really liked fish.  I really, really liked cheese.  Just thinking about pizza brought on a rush of adrenaline.  What would I eat?   Admittedly this wasn't an area entirely alien to me, having grown up in a (sort of) vegetarian family.  Steak and chips was not the issue, nor gammon and eggs.  Bacon wasn't even the issue.  (A full English was, occasionally I admit, the issue).  The issue was ignorance.  I'd absorbed the myth-conception that vegans were skinny, malnourished degenerates lacking the proteins and fats that make up a healthy human body.  I knew animal life mattered - mattered more than our moral conventions tend to allow for - but I knew that my life mattered too.  I "knew" in some abstract sense (a remnant of my philosophical education) that my life mattered more.  I'd started to dabble in transhumanism, and was already a few years on the other side of thirty.  I knew I was past my physical peak (my mental peak, too - remember how I said I lost my mind?  Well that wasn't all bad).  I've been moderately overweight, and asthmatic, most of my life, so I'd never been a perfect human specimen anyway.  My knees hurt more often, not for any particular reason, just from being knees.  I am aging.  My last remaining grandparent had died, and my parents were approaching retirement.  Mortality was coming to mind.

So perhaps I wasn't best placed to take the leap into a lifestyle that seemed radical, needlessly (joylessly?) aesthetic at that time.  I did it anyway.  A month, I thought.  I can do this.  It will be an interesting experiment.

Three years later, I'm still vegan.  I wouldn't have believed it, but it's one of the best decisions I ever made.  There are two things to say about it to anyone with similar inclinations:

1.  It's much, much easier than you think.  Veganism today is where vegetarianism was maybe 20 or 30 years ago: on the verge of going mainstream.  You'd be hard pressed today to find any respectable public eatery that doesn't have any vegetarian options (even MacDonald's has that, and they're the opposite of respectable).  The market has been saturated by meat substitutes for those who still crave the taste of bloody flesh.  To a very large degree, meat has been severed from the image of "manliness".  And most of all, there's just a much wider variety of food available now than there ever was.  (Yeah, we have global capitalism to thank for that, I know, but one step at a time).  You can walk into a supermarket and come out with a trolley full of meat-free, non-dairy goodies without even really trying.  I speculate that within a few decades in the West, "vegetarian" could be a redundant word.  "Vegan" may not be too far behind.  What?  We used to eat animal corpses?  Yeah.  We didn't know any better.  Like we didn't used to know micro-organisms spread disease, and not even that long ago.

2.  It's a moral imperative.  Sorry about that, but it's just the way it is.  There are simply no good arguments against veganism that don't come down to "meat tastes nice" or "my life matters more because of what species I belong to".  Everyone who can go vegan, should.  Veganism is the logical conclusion of the entire Enlightenment project.  If you want to fight me over this fact, bring it on.  Individual rights, social justice, political progress, human evolution itself means nothing without veganism.  I'd like to write a book to explain all of this, for those who haven't already worked it out (and I think a lot of people have, so maybe I won't need to).  For the planet, for your health, for the future of life on earth, just fucking do it.

Now all of this is just background information to what I actually sat down to write this post about.  In another few weeks it will be 2017, and time for me to make another resolution.  This year though I'm not going to be so spontaneous, since I'm already resolved.  The plan is to buy a year's supply of food and live primarily off that.  I'm still doing some calculations but on but I'm thinking 25kg of porridge oats, 25kg of rice, 25kg of lentils and some 5-10kg supplies of dried beans could be my staples (breakfast, lunch and dinner?) that I could then flesh out with fresh vegetables as I grow them.  That looks very austere written down, and I've not much interest in being ascetic just for the sake of it, but it's the start of an idea and I'll have to make it realistic if it's to work.  The main challenges are boredom, malnutrition, and how much fresh green food I'm actually going to be able to grow in my flat.  Obvious benefits include saving money.  Like so much that I've been doing and thinking this year though, it'll have to be an experiment.  Your comments on this subject would be much appreciated.

Related posts

Sausage Roll Politics
Grow Your Own Curtains
Imaginary Forest Library
Music for Gatwick Airport
****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Spring Onions: The gift that keeps on giving

I've had these spring onions for several months now.  They're a food you can regrow seemingly indefinitely from 'scraps'.  Just keep the stalks in water next to a window, and they'll regrow themselves to about half their original length every couple of weeks.  There's actually quite a few other edibles you can regrow - next experiment: broccoli - so far with no results perhaps because of the time of year, or maybe I'm just impatient - and it's a very satisfying thing to do.  A few tips I've learned from regrowing spring onions:

1.  Stalks should be about two inches long.  Occasionally you may need to peel off the outer layer.

2.  Refresh the water each time you cut the onions.

3.  Keep the water (and the roots) out of direct sunlight, in a cup rather a glass, as pictured.

It's interesting to speculate how it might be possible to live entirely off scraps of regrown food.  As with so many other things I've been learning about this year, I'm forced to ask myself: why aren't we all doing this?

Related posts

Spring Onion Afterlives
More Fun With Food in Jars
****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Vertical garden planning

Winter is a good time to make plans.  Today I started thinking properly about setting up an indoor garden in my new flat.  Two things occur to me: one, sunlight and two, space.  The flat has three large windows, all facing the same direction (due east, more or less).  I'm happy about this because it means a good supply of sunlight - even now, at the end of November, I'm getting some direct late afternoon sun in the kitchen.  This bodes well for spring and summer.  The windows in the kitchen and front room are pretty high (about 2 metres) which suggests the best option for indoor growing is vertical.

Over at shelvingsystem.co.uk you can buy made-to-measure "multipurpose" wooden shelves (aren't all shelves multipurpose?) to order.  So I've ordered a set 30cm wide by 178cm high by 40cm deep to fit into the left-hand side of my kitchen window, the sunniest spot in this room.  This is tall enough for five shelves of about 35cm in height each - space enough, methinks to grow some microgreens, herbs, perhaps peppers and tomatoes; a veritable, vertical kitchen garden.  So we'll see how that goes.  Shelves should arrive next Thursday.

Related posts

Shelf Life
Make Sofas Comfortable Again (By Stuffing Them With Ecobricks)

****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Not Buying It. Whatever It Is.

Today is Buy Nothing Day, a "global holiday from consumerism" that originates from the 'Adbusters' and 'culture-jamming' factions of the global justice movement (the people who brought you Occupy Wall Street) that rose to prominence in the late 1990s.  While the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation protests aren't quite as in vogue as they once were with the left, some of whom have fallen down the rabbit hole of social justice and so-called "politically correct" identity politics, Buy Nothing Day has remained a staple of general 'anti' sentiment for the past 20 years.  More recently, it's come to be associated explicitly with "Black Friday", the hyper-consumerist nightmare binge promoted (perversely as can be conceived) on the day after the American celebration of "Thanksgiving", and which has inevitably spread across the pond.

Search "Black Friday" on youtube for literally hundreds more such reports, clip compilations and even tips on how to navigate your revolting flesh bag through the megastore aisles and escape without getting horribly, horribly injured or perhaps even killed while clinging like a wretched maniac to a really big telly.  (Even, more horrifyingly still, what to wear while doing so).

As with working out how one might possibly react usefully to so many other things in the world today, there's a fine line between sincere incredulity that this is the sort of thing millions of human beings actually do (and not just in moments of psychotic greed but repeatedly, and voluntarily, year after year) and the smug self-satisfaction that comes from telling yourself that at least I'm not one of them.  That's mainly, I think, because you are one of them, or could be far more easily than you're willing to admit.  "In choosing for myself I choose for all mankind", as Sartre wrote, which means that for every well-meaning mother who just wants the best [new X-Box] for her kids and will literally trample over an old lady with a zimmerframe to get it, or misfit beta male who just wants a 43-inch UHD smart TV below which he might more efficiently masturbate to the niche porn of his choice, there but for the grace of Guy Debord, go you.

Related posts

Taking the Zero Waste Plunge
Failure, hope and potatoes
The Paradox of Minimalism


****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Failure, hope and potatoes

The indoor potato harvest was disappointing.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, two other things happened that were also...disappointing. Leonard Cohen died, and Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States.  On my Facebook page, I remarked that Leonard Cohen had died because his presence in the world was simply incompatible with Donald Trump's ascension to its most powerful political office.  Leonard Cohen has ascended.  Those of us left behind continue to fall.  Facetious - perhaps; pretentious - of course; but tenuous?  No, I don't think so.

It's difficult not to indulge the overarching sense of dread that descends in the aftermath of such events.  Not everyone who voted for Trump was a misogynist, or a bigot, or a "privileged" white (supremacist) male, but the election result was close enough that it seems likely that the support of such people was enough for him to snatch victory from the jaws of Hilary Clinton, herself a deeply suspect character, profoundly unpopular as presidential candidates go, and transparently not the best opponent the Democrats could have nominated to defeat Trump.  And once again, just as the support of evangelical Christians kept Bush in the White House for eight years, so too has their support for Trump raised him the position of most powerful man on the planet.  This is a man who seems to delight in displaying the kind of character diametrically opposed to the teachings of the New Testament: obscene wealth, arrogance, divisiveness, fear, ignorance, sociopathy, male dominance and greed.  By way of comparison, consider St Paul's "fruits of the Spirit" in his letter to the Galatians - love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Try to find any indication at all to suggest Trump even knows what those words mean.

But then, the moral character of the individual in the office should not matter.  It certainly shouldn't (and apparently doesn't) decide the results of elections, which are not about one person, however charismatic, but what that person represents.  America is a liberal democracy, which exists only because of the success of liberal, secular values in the 18th century.  President John F Kennedy, an icon of American liberalism, was hardly an example of Christian moral integrity.  Neither was Bill Clinton (who was impeached while in office for the kind of indiscretions Donald Trump has already admitted to before even setting foot in the White House).  The hope remains that the American political infrastructure is strong enough to resist the kind of excesses Trump has threatened to unleash on its citizens and the world.  For my money, I see Trump more as an opportunist than a outright fascist: a man willing to say literally anything to get into power: his inconsistencies in so far as policy and political philosophy goes are well documented.  On the other hand, a few days after his victory, he has apparently no interest whatsoever in taming the monsters his politically incorrect iconoclasm has awoken.  As divisions continue to widen between left and right, between liberal and conservative, between progressives and reactionaries, Trump has yet to say anything substantial that would suggest he meant a word of his superficially magnanimous victory speech.  Thus far, the only thing I think that can be said about the man with any degree of certainty is that he simply does not care: he does not care who he offends, who he violates, who he victimises.  He does not care about any other human being even a fraction as much as he cares about himself.  It is doubtful he even has the capacity for such things.  He has been called a narcissist, a psychopath, a demagogue.  I suspect (in a certain sense, I hope) he's more just simply an idiot.  Then again, a powerful idiot is a very dangerous thing.  Time will tell.  What people say, in the long run, doesn't really matter.  The only thing that matters is what they do.

The Christian writer C S Lewis said that good philosophy must exist, even if for no other reason than because bad philosophy must be answered.  The world needs good people for the same reason.  Most of us are neither really good nor bad, but inconsistent, complicated, hypocritical, well-intentioned - um, yes, idiots, and this is why it is worth mourning the death of a man like Leonard Cohen in the same breath as articulating our fear over the election of Donald Trump.

Leonard Cohen lived the life of the artist and the philosopher; the poet and the ascetic.  His words and music are nuanced, articulate, beautiful, gentle, hilarious, sad, erotic, silly and profound.  His work embodies the combination of depth with surface into something more transcendent and intangible than is rarely achieved in any medium.  It is human.  It captures the strangest and most beautiful complexities of our sad, silly little species.  It never belittles or simplifies anything or anyone.  Refresh your memory with St Paul's list of virtues, and then listen to 'Bird on a Wire' or 'There is a War' or 'Hallelujah', or this:

Imagine Donald Trump listening to Leonard Cohen one cold evening in the Oval Office alone.  Just imagine that.  Remember that Donald Trump and Leonard Cohen both occupied the planet at approximately the same time.  Now try to make any sense of human beings.  Try to find a single thing you can say about human beings in general that is indisputably, unambiguously true.

All of this is far away.  You will probably never meet Donald Trump in person.  You will now certainly never meet Leonard Cohen.  So what does all this mean to you?  News travels as fast as light.  Our own technology continues to accelerate towards the singularity that we may or may not survive.  A small rectangular supercomputer in your pocket can teach you more than you could ever possibly understand.  You are connected, but you are also totally alone.  Nobody really knows you.  There is an urge to distinguish yourself - somehow, anyhow - but you are one of billions.  Your desires can never be satisfied.  Whatever you have, you will always want more.  Should you retreat into your bubble?  Should you grow your own potatoes?  I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.  I'd recommend learning.  I'd recommend understanding, loving, laughing.  I'd recommend breathing deeply, and thinking deeply, too.  There's more than one way you might go about that, by the way.

                     

Related posts

Sausage Roll Politics
Vegan Christmas Dinner


****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Thoughts from an empty room.

To be is to occupy space. Walls divide space from space. Walls take space and turn it into place. Place is humanised space.

A place is somewhere to put things. A space is a place with things in it. "Wherever I hang my hat, that's my home". Things are not human. Things are other. What I do to the world, I do by means of things.

Today I move out of one place and into another. I collect the keys, sign my name on various documents I say that I've read, and I arrive. My place. 

Your place or mine?

The place is empty. Some bare necessities have been provided: an oven, electricity, running water. There are no curtains in the windows. The walls are almost white. Accumulated post for the previous occupant, no longer at this address, please return to sender. They have gone to a better place. Round at their place. 

Furniture begins to arrive. It is as though I am already losing something. Space becomes place. 

An unbearable stillness. A king of infinite space. Life is here, I think, somewhere. 

Related posts


Thoughts from a non-empty room
Is minimalism boring?

****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

The Cost of Living: August 2016

August 2016 is the end of 'stage one'.  This month I move from a flat costing me £650-675 a month in rent to one costing £350 a month. Since rent has been my biggest expense up until now, and will probably continue to be for some time, I'm very pleased about this.  It's also satisfying that I'm moving only about 10 miles from where I am now, into a one-bedroom flat that's about the same size as the one I'm in at the moment.  Manchester city centre has become prohibitively expensive for anyone you might once reasonably have described as "normal".  Perhaps it always was: I don't know, or really care.  Normal is relative of course, but you know what I mean.  Just don't live in a city centre, OK?  Trust me on this one.  I am not a normal person.  That's all I have to say about that.

A normal person.

This month's numbers are actually rather pleasing, all things considered.

OUTGOINGS
Food: £168.59
Postage/ebay costs: £89.20
Prescription: £25.20
Rent: £675
Mobile/internet: £87.19
Council Tax: £84.00
Alcohol: £25.14
Deposit and 'admin fee' for new flat: £680.00
Other: £123.64
Total outgoings: £1957.96

INCOME
Income from work: £958.20
amazon/ebay selling: £221.88
Other: £3.30 (refund)
Total income:  £1183.38

BALANCE:  -£774.58

When you take account of the £680 for the deposit and admin fee I had to pay for the new flat (and what is an 'admin fee', really?  Nobody knows) this is an acceptable result.  All being well I have a £750 deposit to be returned to me when I move out of where I am now, which brings me to more or less even for this month.  What that means is that with my rent about to drop by £325, I can live as I have been doing, sustainably, while working much less than I used to.  Goal achieved.  What's next?  Some more number-crunching, for a start...

Related posts

The Cost of Living: July 2016

****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Two Weeks Remain

This week I began to feel for the first time as if I'm really making progress.  It's now 13 days until I move out of this flat and into the next one - a step sideways it may seem, but it's really a step down, by which I mean a step up.  It won't be as "nice" as where I live now, but it will cost less.  And less cost = more time, which is the whole point.  That's what I'm telling myself; I may be wrong of course.  It feels at least like I'm beginning to gain some

Packing does this to you.  I started packing seven months ago when I gave up my full time job and started selling things off to pay my way.  It felt good at first, there was even a tinge of actual joy, but became a chore sooner than I'd hoped.  Those trips to the post office, contacting those ebay buyers, hauling bags of clothes and knick-knacks over to Oxfam - it all becomes very tiresome - and time consuming.  It's a sacrifice worth making though.  As you cut through the clutter, you start to see the space around you for what it is.  It's just walls and windows, ceilings and floors.  However ornate a barrier you put between yourselves and the elements - however you decorate it, adorn it, clean and tidy it, it's not where you're supposed to be.  You're not supposed to be anywhere.  You're supposed to moving, living.  Somehow.

It occurred to me it might be therapeutic to start putting things in boxes, days before they're due.  It's comforting to see your stuff contained like that, to see it all in one place, almost as if out of harm's way.  This afternoon I started to sort a 90-litre plastic box that I've been using as an indoor compost heap, into easier to carry containers.  (90 litres of compost weighs a hell of a lot).  Along with the residue of unsuccessful plants and vegetable-growing attempts (more on my potatoes shortly) I've been making a point of throwing my cooking scraps in there, to decompose at their leisure.  I noted with some pleasure as I was digging this all out how everything I've thrown in there the past couple of years, with the help of a worm or two, has returned entirely dirt.

Portable plastic boxes of dirt, stacked up next to the washing machine, in my home, three storeys off the ground.  A visual metaphor, no doubt, but I'm not sure what for.

Related posts

Thoughts from an empty room
Thoughts from a non empty room
****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Out of the Heartlands and Into the Spleen

In two weeks I move out of Manchester city centre and into Bury, a distance of less than 10 miles but that crosses a couple of constituency lines, taking me out of out of Labour territory and into Toryland.  Middle England, perhaps. If ever an understatement was to be made, it's this: this is disappointing.   A cursory glance through the charmingly useful theyworkforyou.com reveals my soon-to-be local MP to be a Mr David Nuttall, whose astonishing voting record reads like a list of all the top things a person would have to say if they wanted an absolutely guaranteed way to piss me off.

It starts badly, and only gets worse. "David Nuttall is a Conservative MP, and on the vast majority of issues votes the same way as other Conservative MPs."  Oh dear.  Let's look a little closer.  Here are some of the things David Nuttall has voted against in his parliamentary career: equal rights for gay people (including the right to marry), greater European integration, increasing welfare benefits to at least keep them in line with inflation, new high speed rail infrastructure and slowing the rise in rail fares, against allowing terminally ill people to be given assistance to end their life, a wholly elected House of Lords and a proportional voting system for MPs, measures to prevent climate change and - this one's my favourite - he has voted against the Human Rights Act.  That's right, in 2012, David Nuttall voted in favour of repealing the 1998 Human Rights Act, a act that requires UK law to be consistent with the European Convention on Human Rights.  In this instance, fortunately, Mr Nuttall was in the minority, and the Human Rights Act was not repealed.  How irritating that must have been for an elected representative of a constituency of human beings.

So, OK, David Nuttall is against legally protecting human rights, against co-operating more with our neighbours, against developing transport infrastructure, against allowing people to alleviate the suffering of their loved ones, against introducing more democracy into our bizarre and dysfunctional political system, and against taking action to deal with the climate change that has already begun to make parts of our planet uninhabitable.  So far, so Tory.  But really.  What's going on?  Is he just against human life?  Who elects these people in the first place?  I've visited Bury many times, and human beings most assuredly do live there.  18,970 of them voted for David Nuttall in 2015.  I wonder it what it was they thought they were voting for, exactly.

Let's have a look at some of the things David Nuttall votes in favour of in his capacity as a public servant.  They include: the use of military forces in combat operations overseas (including, of course, against ISIL/S, perhaps ignorant of the fact that this serves their insane apocalyptic ends very nicely indeed), replacing Trident with a new nuclear weapons system, more restrictive regulation of trade union activity, raising university tuition fees, mass surveillance, selling state-owned forests, killing badgers, the privatisation of the Royal Mail and restricting the scope of legal aid.  I'm not joking about killing badgers, by the way: Mr Nuttall has had four opportunities to vote for killing badgers, and has done so twice.  He was absent for the other two votes, which leaves open the possibility that, at best, Mr Nuttall takes a neutral position overall on the issue of badger killing.  So the evidence suggests that Mr Nuttall is against not only human life, but badger life as well.  For those of us left alive, he supports the privatization not only of public services, but of forests (so, basically, of the very stuff of life itself).

It boggles my mind that such people can win elections and exercise power over a country of civilized human beings.  I hasten to add I wish to make no personally disparaging remarks against David Nuttall or any other human being.  In all sincerity, I find it hard to doubt that even someone with such a patently inhumane voting record is still at his core a soulful human being with basically good intentions; but as the saying goes, by their fruits you shall know them.  It is the ideology that motivates people that I despise, not the people themselves.  I'll just take some comfort in the fact that Mr Nuttall won his seat in Parliament with a majority of only 378 votes in 2015.  That's about to be cut by at least one.

Related posts

Baby's First Constituency Labour Party Meeting
Plastic Free Market Forces
The Animal Abuse Industry Is Shitting Its Pants

****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.

Sacred Economics

This week I’ve occasionally been prying my eyes away from the pages of Charles Eisentein’s 2011 book, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Societyin the Age of Transition.  There are so many well-articulated thoughts in the book that I’ll need some time to absorb them, so this post will consist mostly of quotes lifted straight from the text.  I’ve nothing else to add but the “of course!” sensation that lights my mind on almost every page, that feeling you get when a book falls off the shelf and into your hands at exactly the right time, one of life’s strangest little pleasures.

The first section of the book concerns the “gift economy”, a provocatively (oxymoronic?) phrase I’ve always liked the sound of but never properly explored.  According to Eisenstein, we can only begin to construct a solution to our current crisis once we accept the that the “axioms of rational self-interest” on which modern economics is based were never really axiomatic at all.  This might seem obvious to anyone with a healthy, lefty scepticism of capitalism as an ideology: we should, by now, have moved well beyond the notion of “homo economicus” – the fully independent Cartestian self, acting only in his rational self-interest in a world of “resources” separated from us, a world of other essentially identical (and interchangeable) individuals.  But have we?  To what extent have we ever adequately challenged this economic ontology?  For Eisenstein, we need to look way back before the Enlightenment and into our hunter-gatherer past, out of which “the first money appeared in the first agricultural civilizations that developed beyond the Neolithic village”.  For all its remarkable achievements, money is in fact the cause of as many problems as it solves.  Primarily, it is the instrument of our separation: from nature, from ourselves, from the land beneath us.  Money did not replace the barter system, as generally supposed, but a system of mutual co-operation based on the cyclical nature of the gift.  We give to one another because we have received: not merely out of an expectation of gaining something for ourselves, but out of gratitude for what is already held in common.  Unfortunately:

“Primal though it is, gratitude and the generosity flowing from it coexist with other, less savory , aspects of human nature.  While I believe in the fundamental divinity of human beings, I also recognise that we have embarked on a long sojourn of separation from that divinity, and created a world in which ruthless sociopaths rise to wealth and power.  This book doesn’t pretend such people don’t exist, nor that such tendencies don’t exist in everyone.  Rather, it seeks to awake the spirit of the gift that is latent within us, and to construct institutions that embody and encourage that spirit.  Today’s economic system rewards selfishness and greed.  What would an economic system look like that, like some ancient cultures, rewarded generosity instead?”

“Our culture’s notion of spirit is that of something separate and nonworldly, that yet can miraculously intervene in material affairs, and that even animates and directs them in some mysterious way.  It is hugely ironic and hugely significant that the one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money.  It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an “invisible hand” that, it is said, makes the world go ‘round.  Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper but usually mere bits in a computer.  It exists in a realm far removed from materiality”.

The gift, on the other hand, is essential material.  As such, it could be the basis of economics in ancient societies, small and intimate enough for the giver and the receiver to exist not merely as individuals but as persons for each other, related through community ties in every instance.  It is to this understanding of economics that we need to return, says Eisenstien, and I could not agree more.

“The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature.  It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasise cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear.  Money may not disappear anytime soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as it takes on more of the properties of the gift.  The economy will shrink, and our lives will grow”.

Later chapters explore this insight and its implications for various, apparently sacrosanct notions – most of all, perhaps more familiar to traditional leftists, but no less uncomfortable to question – private property.  I’m still working my way through these chapters, and on into the more technical aspects of economics I used to run screaming from but can’t – ahem – afford to any more.  For now, let’s just consider this, from page ninety-four:

“Nearly every good and service available today meets needs that were once met for free”. 

Related posts

Good Things are H|appening
On staring out the window
"I have everything I need"

****** Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.