Enough is Best

Originally published in The Realities of Poverty in Delaware 2009 – 2010

Let there be small countries with few people.
Let the people have no use for complicated machinery.
Let them be mindful of death so that they don’t move too far from their birthplaces.
If there are boats and carriages, let there be nowhere to take them to.
If there are weapons, let there be no occasion to display them.
Let the people’s responsibilities be few enough that they may remember them by knotting a string.
Let them enjoy their food, be content with their clothes, be satisfied with their homes, and take pleasure in their customs.
Though the next country may be close enough to hear the barking of its dogs and the crowing of its rooster, let the people grow old and die without feeling compelled to visit it.
~ The Tao Te Ching, 80 ¹

The Spirit Level elaborates upon the symptoms of a social model in which income and status have eclipsed all other forms of representation of self‐worth. The great and most enduring value of The Spirit Level is the observation that personal, familial, and social ills correlate not simply to disparities in income between groups but, more complexly, to the relative strength of these disparities.

So, two persons of the same age, gender, and income can be more or less disposed to all the ills (lack of community life, aggression, murder, incarceration, obesity, drug use, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, high school dropouts) researched by Pickett and Wilkinson, dependent upon the relative strength of income inequality in their respective societies.

In fact, such is the power of inequality, according to the authors, that a person with less income in a more equal society may have better life expectancy, for example, than a comparable person of higher income who lives in a less equal society. Consequently, it is in everyone’s interest, from poor to well‐to‐do, to make society more equal. It is also the authors’ conclusion that affluence has diminishing social returns, as it does individually.

The Three Fires

Discussing the concept of “slow news” days, when “nothing happened,” the Australian journalist John Pilger, points out how “[w]hole societies were described and measured by their relationship with ‘us’, their usefulness to ‘our interests’ and their degree of compliance with (or hostility to) our authority. Above all, they were not ‘us’.”

“These colonial assumptions have not changed. To sustain them, millions of people remain invisible, and expendable. On September 11, 2001, while the world lamented the deaths of innocent people in the United States, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation reported that the daily mortality rate continued: 36,615 children had died from the effects of extreme poverty. This was normal in the age of ‘economic growth’.” ²

There is an ancient description of root human ills which classifies them in terms of three fires: desire (greed), aversion (hatred), and delusion (ignorance). In this context, economic growth represents a phenomenon which depends upon all three for its existence: the appeal to, and celebration of, desire (consumption, accumulation, greed) as a central economic virtue, the promotion of aversion (competition, aggression, envy) as the means to satisfaction, and the cultivation of the delusive view that we can grow our way out of the underlying problems.

The three fires reinforce one another. Remaining deluded, for example, can strengthen my belief that my unfulfilled desires must be met, as well as my aversion toward others whom I see as doing better (envy) or worse (fear) than myself. Though ancient, the three fires are, upon examination, very similar to the cycle of addiction: we do not admit the effects of craving (desire) upon us and live in denial (ignorance) of its effect. Believing that we can be happy through feeding our craving, we seek to overcome (aversion) all obstacles to our satisfaction.

Desire

The Thai social activist, Sulak Sivaraksa, refers to the current world economic system as “free‐market fundamentalism,” “a demonic religion” the institutions of which threaten all of us.

“One quarter of the world’s population lives in the industrial North and consumes over 60 percent of the world’s food, 85 percent of its wood, and 70 percent of its energy. More than a billion people in the agricultural South live in absolute poverty, without access to the essentials needed for survival. Disparities between classes and gender in the North and South are increasing. Women and children are disproportionately among the poorest everywhere in the world.

“Development is a modern form of colonialism. We accept words like underdeveloped, developing, and developed without realizing that they were imposed by former colonizers. The newer term, globalization, is even worse. …” ³

Growth as the ultimate solution to structural greed of the kind described here would only have a chance of working, if even then, were we to have several additional Mother Earth’s to pillage.

Aversion

As noted, the three fires are mutually reinforcing. This is true on the institutional level as much as on the personal. Discussing the “slow news” phenomenon, Pilger reminds us of “the atrocious misadventure known as the ‘Iran‐Contra affair’

“…which was represented in Washington as a domestic embarrassment for the Reagan administration rather than a conspiracy to bleed to death the Nicaraguan government, whose only threat was that of a good example. That countless innocent people were killed or denied the opportunity to free themselves from poverty, disease and illiteracy was never an ‘issue’. A subsequent ruling by the International Court of Justice distinguished the Reagan administration as the only government the court has ever condemned for ‘terrorism’, calling on it to pay the Nicaraguan government $17 billion in reparations. This was ignored and the matter long forgotten, for it was the slowest news.

“…When Ronald Reagan died, he was lauded as a ‘great communicator’, a leader of magnetic personal charm. His terrorism and lawlessness were unmentionable.” ⁴

Elsewhere in his book, Pilger quotes the Czech writer, Milan Kundera, “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Our vast, institutionalized network of greed, calls for an abuse of power, and a maintenance of inequality and disadvantage, so massive, that denial on both the personal and societal levels becomes critical to holding the system together.

Delusion

On both levels, delusion (denial) can take the form of deeply rooted belief in our uniqueness. On the social level, it can be a conviction of the rightness and goodness of ‘our’ way (regardless of the evidence). Personally, it can manifest as arrogant, and undisciplined individualism. Discussing “the freedom that doesn’t bite,” freedom grounded in responsibility and recognition of our mutuality, the American teacher and social critic, Santikaro Bhikkhu describes how our wealth and power increase our capacity for self‐delusion.

“Living as a superpower, pampered with affluence, doting on technology, it’s easy for us to ignore how life requires limits and boundaries. Overlooking the big sticks we still carry and believing we are the good guys, we throw our weight around in the world as if nobody should mind. Such arrogance trickles down into us all, no matter how liberal. As we shop around the world, fill the skies with airline exhaust, and refuse to live within the constraints of our ecosystems, we in effect throw out vinaya (discipline), renounce renunciation and rationalize away basic precepts. Lost in our delusions of autonomy, we deny the natural realities, family dynamics and social responsibilities that require boundaries and compromise. The freedom that doesn’t bite requires seeing that our own humanity is a shared inheritance and a socially supported dependent co‐arising.” ⁵

Nature and Growth

The ecological economist, Herman Daly, argues that we must make a transition from “more is better” to “enough is best.” His “impossibility theorem” states that an American style economy of high consumption and growth is unattainable as a goal for the entire world.

“Although many question whether further population growth is desirable, very few people question the desirability or possibility of further economic growth. Indeed, economic growth is the most universally accepted goal in the world. … The appeals of growth are that it is the basis for national power and that it is an alternative to sharing as a means of combating poverty. It offers the prospect of more for all with sacrifice by none – a prospect that is in conflict with the ‘impossibility theorem’…” ⁶

Daly, and many others, emphasize that nature cannot be relegated to the role of raw material for economic processes. The consequence of doing so is the erosion of the capacity of our common life‐support system to sustain us. Vandana Shiva, the Indian activist and ecological thinker, echoes Sivaraksa’s condemnation of market based “development.”

“The organizing principles of development based on economic growth render valueless all resources and resource processes that are not priced in the market and are not inputs to commodity production. This premise very often generates economic development programs that divert or destroy the resource base for survival. While the diversion of resources – such as the diversion of land from multipurpose community forests to monoculture plantations of industrial tree species, or the diversion of water from staple food crop production and drinking water needs to cash crop production – are frequently proposed as programs for economic development in the context of the market economy, they create economic underdevelopment in the economies of nature and sustenance. Earth Democracy movements are aimed at opposing these threats to survival from market‐based economic development. In the Third World, ecology movements are not a luxury of the rich; they are a survival imperative for the majority of people whose life is put at risk by the market economy and threatened by its expansion.” ⁷

Sivaraksa, Shiva, and others come at the problems of growth and sustainability from the perspective of indigenous cultures, as does President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who, Maude Barlow reports, “brought the climate justice movement together in Cochabamba last April and is leading the campaign at the UN to promote the Rights of Mother Earth.”

“It was this small, poor, largely indigenous landlocked country, and its former coca‐farmer president, that introduced a resolution to recognize the human right to water and sanitation this past June to the UN General Assembly, taking the whole UN community by surprise. The Bolivian UN Ambassador, Pablo Solon, decided he was fed up with the commissions” and “further studies” and “expert consultations” that have managed to put off the question of the right to water for at least a decade at the UN and that it was time to put an “up or down” question to every country: do you or do you not support the human right to drinking water and sanitation?

“A mad scramble ensued as a group of Anglo‐Western countries, all promoting to some extent the notion of water as a private commodity, tried to derail the process and put off the vote. The U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand even cooked up a “consensus” resolution that was so bland everyone would likely have handily voted for it at an earlier date. But sitting beside the real thing, it looked like what it was – an attempt, yet again, to put off any meaningful commitment at the UN to the billions suffering from lack of clean water. When that didn’t work, they toiled behind the scenes to weaken the wording of the Bolivian resolution but to no avail. On July 28, 2010, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to adopt a resolution recognizing the human right to water and sanitation. One hundred and twenty two countries voted for the resolution; 41 abstained; not one had the courage to vote against.” ⁸

Society and Growth

What indigenous societies “lack,” unlike almost all of us in the industrial North, is a presupposition, coming out of lived experience, that a market‐driven society is the best and (somewhat contradictorily, the only conceivable) one. This “lack” would never allow them to understand, much less accept, that private corporations have the status of “persons” in law or that “money is a form of speech.”

In books like, The Great Transformation, the economic historian, Karl Polanyi traced the revolutionary development whereby the economy became so “disembedded” from the society, that society became “an accessory of the economic system,” ⁹ something of which traditional societies had no experience and which they have resisted at a great cost to themselves. Indigenous peoples have held out the possibility of a different “globalization.”

One of the points which Polanyi makes is that the freeing of the economy from the society at some point makes that very society impossible to maintain. In much the same way that the economy overtaxes the carrying capacity of the earth, it also destroys the ability of human beings to trust and depend upon one another. Society becomes increasingly anti‐social.

An unbridled market puts a price on everything, yet values nothing. Polanyi’s argument is that an economy is always a “political economy,” to use the phrase of Smith, Ricardo, and others. It is always a system which presupposes, is grounded in, and depends upon, a sound set of social institutions, which must not become a mere market accessory. At its limit, the market creates instability, and imbues a society with harshness and insecurity. It preys on society to such an extent that primary social bonds are weakened and broken.

What Pickett and Wilkinson have done in The Spirit Level is to remind us of some of the costs which growth has exacted. Others are warning us that it threatens to exact the ultimate cost.

Let us tend these fires no more. As we hope to be saved, we must learn from, and join with, all who have not forgotten a better, more modest, way. ≈

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Footnotes

1
The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, Brian Browne Walker, translator, (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
2
John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (NY: Nation Books, 2007) p 1.
3
Sulak Sivaraksa, The Wisdom of Sustainability, Buddhist Economics for the 21st Century (Kihei, HI: Koa Books, 2009, p 10.
4
John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (NY: Nation Books, 2007), p 2.
5
Santikaro Bhikkhu, “Freedom in the U.S.A.: Unrealistic, Distracting, and Delusory Notions,” in Inquiring Mind, A Semiannual Journal of the Vipassana Community, v 23, #1, Fall 2006, pp 6‐7.
6
Herman E. Daly, Steady‐State Economics (D.C.: Island Press, 1991), p 8.
7
Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005), p 49.
8
Maude Barlow, “We Are Facing the Greatest Threat to Humanity: Only Fundamental Change Can Save Us,” On the Commons, posted on October 15, 2010, printed on October 16, 2010, http://www.alternet.org/story/148519/
9
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p 79.

Footnotes

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