From Meltdown to Miracle

This year we had a particularly good apple crop, more than we could eat in any form, so when we found ourselves between crops for our staples (kale and chard), we took a bushel or two of granny smiths and winesaps down to the nearby community-supported farm, and traded. The aroma of fresh wine saps is subtly intoxicating, which added to the stark contrast: while something called the economy was going through its vertiginous descent – trillions of dollars disappearing overnight – there we stood, chatting with our neighbors as we exchanged real apples for real greens. Our produce was as solid and as local as the strange events of Wall Street were remote and abstract.

The meltdown, who or whatever caused it, is of course a disaster; but some disasters are opportunities. Shortly before the devastating events of 9/11, someone on the President’s team famously complained that it would take “a new Pearl Harbor” to galvanize the country into accepting their agenda of militarism and domestic authoritarian control. They got their disaster, and made thorough use of it. And maybe now we have ours. The economic meltdown should be telling progressive-minded people that the time has come, not to shore up the old, top-heavy system that turned the wealth of the country into a vast gambling operation and exploited people and planet alike, but to create an economy that endures. Though we do not object to some stopgap measures to save innocent people from the worst of the damage, more importantly we call for shift to an economy of scale in which, as E.F. Schumacher said long ago, “people matter.” The words of Martin Luther King, Jr. are ringing in my ears: “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”

Every component of such an economy is already there: the community supported farm up the road, local currencies, ‘natural capitalism,’ sustainable farming practices, ‘closed-loop’ manufacturing — all the way out to ‘capitalism with a human face’ in the Mondragon cooperatives of Northern Spain — or even the ‘gift economies‘ that render money itself once again irrelevant. They have been there all along, but the general public never hears about them or is made to understand that they are the economies of the future, as well as the past.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel: we only need to reassemble it.

The core principle of these economies I’m tempted to call real is, they are economies of needs, not of wants. They supply and exchange things that real people really need – like kale and apples – rather than dangle in front of them things that make them have wants – like the latest iPod.

The idea behind that principle is, as Gandhi understood and many studies now are documenting, that once certain basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter are met (and the bloated economy we have now does not meet them for all of us, by the way), human happiness is not served by more stuff.
In the mysterious metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly, scientists say that there is a stage when the contents of the cocoon is completely liquid – it could become anything. Let us sieze the ‘liquidity’ of this moment to strike out on a new course.

The ‘economic miracles’ of Japan and Germany after the devastation of those countries in WWII were due in part to the fact that with the infrastructure of their manufacturing systems virtually demolished they had the chance to rebuild something much more modern and appropriate. We now have a ‘software’ version of the same opportunity – for the whole concept of our consumerist economy is now in question.

We have not asked for this shocking event but, as a famous American patriot of old said, “let us make the best of it.” And that means calling up the stable, simple economy based on local networks — and designed to fulfill human needs — rather than depending on artificially inflated wants. Let’s adopt a saner economy that is already there and that can give us a security of basic needs so that we can get on with the human experiment, which is not about who can acquire more but how we can all develop our highest potential.
Michael N. Nagler