A friend recently brought
to my attention on online article about the destruction of a pre-Inca pyramid
in Peru by land developers:
It’s a short article and I
haven’t been able to find anything else in the news about the incident, but
given that the recent Turkish protests started with another commercial
encroachment on public space, I think it’s worth considering what’s going on
here. Look around the world and you will see the pattern again and again in
the ongoing struggles of people in Alberta to stop tar sands development, and in
many other places including anti-fracking groups in New York and Pennsylvania.
Whether people are
concerned with protecting a forest, an ancient site, a public space, or their water
supply, this is a common theme: there absolutely must be places, things, and
values that money does not touch and cannot reach. This assertion directly
opposes the agenda of powerful economic interests seeking to bring everything
from DNA to public lands, waters, and airwaves under market control — hence the
battle.
I once looked up the etymology
of the word "profane." I found that the word is derived from the
Latin words for "before" (pro)
and "temple" (fanus). So,
that which is profane is that which is not allowed into the temple, is kept
outside of it, and is unworthy to enter.
And what exactly is it that
must be kept "before the temple?" What is it that must not be allowed
to enter it? What is profane?
Answer: The market.
In many traditional towns
and cities, this is literally true — the marketplace occupies a space in front
of the place of worship, often in the city square. Nobody would think of
hawking bananas or haggling over the price of a basket inside the local
Cathedral. But this principle also holds for anything of a higher-order value:
clear boundaries must be drawn that keep the profanity of the market from entering
and defiling things of higher-order value. There have to be places where
priceless things are protected from the instincts of market mentality to throw
a number at them and determine their relative value. Whenever the market does
this, higher-order values and the things they represent are in jeopardy, and
every protected place is threatened with defilement: our parks, our waters, our
ancient sites, our homes, our beds, our bodies, and our minds.
“Is nothing sacred?” goes
the old cliché. In the market, the answer is clear: No. Where numbers and money rule, all things of higher-order
value, from our children to our local rivers, are just so many things in the
marketplace.
From a metaphysical point
of view, I don’t see how such a system can endure. There have to be things of
absolute or at least higher-order value to bring the relative valuations of the
markets into right relationship with life as it is lived. But as we see, our
society is remarkably schizoid in the way the eroding bulwarks against market
hegemony are maintained. We hold as criminal those who exploit children in the
sex trade or the market for child pornography, but on the whole we seem
comfortable with and even willing to enable the wholesale commercial
exploitation of children through television advertising and pharmaceutical
drugs. Many people say a blessing over their meals, but much of the food
marketed today by industry should be reckoned as a slow poison, and it is
produced in ways that the writers of the ancient food preparation laws of great
religions could not envision and thus could not prohibit.
As I wrote in my previous
blog, http://greenhandinitiative.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-dissociative-states-of-america.html whenever money moves into a place of primary value in society,
values are inverted and bad things happen. Regulation, the demon of neoliberal
economic liturgy, amounts to the place where society erects a barrier between
things of primary or higher-order value on the one side and the profanity of the
marketplace on the other. This barrier is by necessity somewhat moveable in
places as a society negotiates the tradeoffs of resource allocation to find
balance. Nonetheless, our health, the safety and quality of our food, the
preservation of water, air and land for future generations, the care of our
children, and the ability of citizens to peacefully operate in an environment
without excessive threats — these are broadly embraced, higher-order values. Where
regulation is lax, tailored to industry, or badly enforced, then buildings fall
down, tainted food finds its way to family dinner tables, and lakes, rivers and
the air we breathe become dumping grounds.
Perhaps worst of all is
when commercial interests find their way into the honorable duty of national
defense. Next thing you know, people are fighting, killing and dying for no higher
cause than the profitability of a given war to defense contractors and other
interested businesses. While there is by necessity always a commercial element
to war, the degree to which warfare is a product of commercial interests is a
very good gauge of how far into our imagined “temple of higher-order values” the
marketplace has advanced. If we extend our original metaphor and identify one
of the “holy of holies” within this temple as being human life itself, the
taking of lives and the destruction of nations for monetary gain will
demonstrate how deeply into the temple that these profane market interests have
penetrated. Once again: when the relative valuations of the market take the
place of the higher-order values that guide our living, ultimately all values
are reduced to rubble.
Bill Clinton said something
during an interview with Jon Stewart on The
Daily Show last year http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-september-20-2012/exclusive---bill-clinton-extended-interview-pt--1
[9:20] that I thought was pretty remarkable, and which I paraphrase here: All
markets tend to self-destruct. If true, this begs the question: What does this
mean for a nation that has hitched its destiny to these markets?
Perhaps this sobering
thought will shed some light on why the ancient Hebrews set aside a day without
commercial activity or productive labor of any kind and called it “the Sabbath.”
Granted, we don’t see many people in contemporary society following the
guidelines set forth in the Bible, even though the text is rather specific. I’m
neither religious nor a scholar on things biblical, and I certainly don’t want
anybody telling me what day to work or rest. However, I think it’s worth
considering why a culture with such remarkable powers of endurance made it a
matter of fundamental law that one day each week the butcher should put down
the knife, the farmer hang the hoe in the barn, and the lender of money turn
away from business.
Part of the reason, I
suspect, may lie in the fact that the knife, the hoe, the stack of shekels and
the international corporation are, basically, tools. Human beings have a
peculiar relationship with the tools with which they shape the world. The
wielder of the knife, the hoer of the earth, and the corporate executive are in
turn themselves shaped by those tools, both in body and in mind. Consequently,
if we cannot let go of the tools that extend our range of influence, we in turn
become mere extensions of these tools, and less than fully human.
Viewed in this way, a day
without labor is a way to push back the pernicious and dehumanizing effects of
commercial activity and productive work, and with them the dangerous blowback they
generate if the energies of a society are entirely monopolized by economic
activity. The Sabbath presents a balancing counterpoint, a day when our hands
can unwrap themselves from their accustomed handles, so that we may find in
that release something of greater value that may guide us in our work when we pick
them up again.
Of course, I am not suggesting
that this is a desirable approach to the problems we now face; I’m pointing to
the larger pattern here, which is that there must be places in our lives, both
public and private, from which the market is excluded if we are to endure. Getting
money out of politics looks to me like a very good place to start, but wherever
it is, however it is, whenever it is, and whatever it looks like, we need to protect
our higher-order values and subordinate the market to those values rather than
the other way around, in both our private and public lives. Otherwise, there is
clearly a danger that, both as individuals and as a culture, we will become
lost without knowing it in the profanity of the market, and ultimately
destroyed by it.
