Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (8 page)

In the introduction I mentioned the idea that we have created a god in the image of our money: an unseen force that moves all things, that animates the world, an “invisible hand” that orders human activity, nonmaterial yet ubiquitous. Many of these attributes of God or spirit go back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers who developed their ideas at precisely the time that money took over their society. According to Seaford, they were the first to even distinguish between essence and appearance, between the concrete and the abstract—a distinction completely absent (even implicitly) from Homer. From Anaximander’s
apeiron
to Heraclitus’s
logos
to the Pythagorean doctrine “All is number,” the early Greeks emphasized the primacy of the abstract: an unseen principle that orders the world. This ideology has infiltrated the DNA of our civilization to the point where the size of the financial sector dwarfs
the real economy; where the total value of financial derivatives is ten times the world’s gross domestic product; where the greatest rewards of our society go to the Wall Street wizards who do nothing but manipulate symbols. For the trader at his computer, it is indeed as Pythagoras said: “All is number.”

One manifestation of this spirit-matter split that gives primacy to the former is the idea, “Sure, economic reform is a worthy cause, but what is much more important is a transformation of human consciousness.” I think this view is mistaken, for it is based on a false dichotomy of consciousness and action, and ultimately of spirit and matter. On a deep level, money and consciousness are intertwined. Each is bound up in the other.

The development of monetary abstraction fits into a vast meta-historical context. Money could not have developed without a foundation of abstraction in the form of words and numbers. Already, number and label distance us from the real world and prime our minds to think abstractly. To use a noun already implies an identity among the many things so named; to say there are five of a thing makes each a
unit
. We begin to think of objects as representatives of a category, and not unique beings in themselves. So, while standard, generic categories didn’t begin with money, money vastly accelerated their conceptual dominance. Moreover, the homogeneity of money accompanied the rapid development of standardized commodity goods for trade. Such standardization was crude in preindustrial times, but today manufactured objects are so nearly identical as to make the lie of money into the truth.

As we consider the form of the money of the future, let us keep in mind money’s power to homogenize all that it touches. Perhaps money should
only
be used for that which is or should be standard, quantifiable, or generic; perhaps a different kind of money, or no
money at all, should be involved in the circulation of those things that are personal and unique. We can only compare prices based on standard quantities; thus, when we receive more than that, something immeasurable, we have received a bonus, something we didn’t pay for. In other words, we have received a gift. To be sure, we can buy art, but we sense that if it is mere commodity, we pay too much; and if it is true art, we pay infinitely too little. Similarly, we can buy sex but not love; we can buy calories but not real nourishment. Today we suffer a poverty of immeasurable things, priceless things; a poverty of the things that money cannot buy and a surfeit of the things it can (though this surfeit is so unequally distributed that many suffer a poverty of those things, too).
⁸

Just as money homogenizes the things it touches, so also does it homogenize and depersonalize its users: “It facilitates the kind of commercial exchange that is disembedded from all other relations.”
⁹
In other words, people become mere parties to a transaction. In contrast to the diverse motivations that characterize the giving and receiving of gifts, in a pure financial transaction we are all identical: we all want to get the best deal. This homogeneity among human beings that is an effect of money is assumed by economics to be a cause. The whole story of money’s evolution from barter assumes that it is fundamental human nature to want to maximize self-interest. In this, human beings are assumed to be identical. When there is no standard of value, different humans want different things. When money is exchangeable for any thing, then all people want the same thing: money.

Seaford writes, “Stripped of all personal association, money is promiscuous, capable of being exchanged with anybody for anything, indifferent to all nonmonetary interpersonal relationships.”
¹⁰
Unlike other objects, money retains no trace of its origins and no trace of those through whom it has passed. Whereas a gift seems to partake of its giver, everyone’s money is the same. If I have $2,000 in the bank, half from my friend and half from my enemy, I cannot choose to spend my enemy’s $1,000 first and save my friend’s. Each dollar is identical.

Wisely, perhaps, many people refuse on principle to mix business with friendship, wary of the essential conflict between money and personal relationship. Money depersonalizes a relationship, turning two people into mere “parties to an exchange” driven by the universal goal of maximizing self-interest. If I seek to maximize self-interest, perhaps at your expense, how can we be friends? And when in our highly monetized society we meet nearly all our needs with money, what personal gifts remain from which to build friendship?

That the profit motive is antithetical to any benignant personal motive is nearly axiomatic—hence the phrase, “Don’t take it personally; it’s just business.” Today, an ethical business movement and ethical investment movement seek to heal the opposition between love and profit, but however sincere the motives, such efforts often mutate into public relations, “green-washing,” or self-righteousness. This is no accident. In later chapters I will describe a fatal contradiction in the attempt to invest ethically, but for now just note your natural suspicion of it, and in general of any claim to “do well by doing good.”

Any time we come across a seemingly altruistic enterprise, we
tend to think, “What’s the catch?” How are they secretly making money from this? When are they going to ask me for money? The suspicion, “He’s actually doing it for the money” is nearly universal. We are quick to descry financial motives in everything people do, and we are deeply moved when someone does something so magnanimous or so naively generous that such motive is obviously absent. It seems irrational, even miraculous, that someone would actually give without contrivance of return. As Lewis Hyde puts it, “In the empires of usury the sentimentality of the man with the soft heart calls to us because it speaks of what has been lost.”
¹¹

The near-universality of the suspicion of an ulterior profit motive reflects money as a universal aim. Imagine yourself back in school, speaking to the career counselor, discussing what your gifts are and how you might use them to make a living (i.e., to convert them into money). This habit of thought runs deep: when my teenage son Jimi shows me the computer games he makes, I sometimes find myself thinking about how he might commercialize them and about which programming skills he could develop next to be more marketable. Almost any time someone gets an exciting creative idea, the thought, “How can we make money from this?” follows close behind. But when profit becomes the aim, and not a mere side effect, of artistic creation, the creation ceases to be art, and we become sellouts. Expanding this principle to life in general, Robert Graves warns, “You choose your jobs to provide you with a steady income and leisure to render the Goddess whom you adore valuable part-time service. Who am I, you will ask, to warn you that she demands either whole-time service or none at all?”
¹²

Money as a universal aim is embedded in our language. We speak of “capitalizing” on our ideas and use “gratuitous,” which literally means received with thanks (and not payment), as a synonym for unnecessary. It is embedded in economics to be sure, in the assumption that human beings seek to maximize a self-interest that is equivalent to money. It is even embedded in science, where it is a cipher for reproductive self-interest. Here, too, the notion of a universal aim has taken hold.

That there is even such a thing as a universal aim to life (be it money or something else) is not at all obvious. This idea apparently arose at about the same time money did; perhaps it was money that suggested it to philosophers. Socrates used a money metaphor explicitly in proposing intelligence as universal aim: “There is only one right currency for which we ought to exchange all these other things [pleasures and pains]—intelligence.”
¹³
In religion this corresponds to the pursuit of an ultimate aim, such as salvation or enlightenment, from which all other good things flow. How like the unlimited aim of money! I wonder what the effect would be on our spirituality if we gave up on the pursuit of a unitary, abstract goal that we believe to be the key to everything else. How would it feel to release the endless campaign to improve ourselves, to make progress toward a goal? What would it be like just to play instead, just to be? Like wealth, enlightenment is a goal that knows no limit, and in both cases the pursuit of it can enslave. In both cases, I think that the object of the pursuit is a spurious substitute for a diversity of things that people really want.
¹⁴

In a fully monetized society, in which nearly everything is a good or a service, money converts the multiplicity of the world into a unity, a “single thing that is the measure of, and exchangeable with, almost anything else.”
¹⁵
The
apeiron
, the
logos
, and similar conceptions were all versions of an underlying unity that gives birth to all things. It is that from which all things arise and to which all things return. As such it is nearly identical with the ancient Chinese conception of the Tao, which gives birth to yin and yang, and then to the ten thousand things. Interestingly, the semilegendary preceptor of Taoism, Lao Tzu, lived at approximately the same time as the pre-Socratic philosophers—which is also more or less the time of the first Chinese coinage. In any event, today it is still money that gives birth to the ten thousand things. Whatever you want to build in this world, you start with an investment, with money. And then, when you have finished your project, it is time to sell it. All things come from money; all things return to money.

Money is therefore not only a universal aim; it is a universal means as well, and indeed it is largely because it is a universal means that it is also a universal end, of which one can never have too much. Or at least, that is how we perceive it. Many times I’ve been witness to discussions about creating an intentional community or launching some other project, only for it to end with a disheartening admission that it will never happen because, “Where are we going to get the money?” Money is quite understandably seen as the crucial factor in determining what we can create: after all, it can buy virtually any good, can induce people to perform virtually any service. “Everything has its price.” Money can even, it seems, purchase intangibles such as social status, political power,
and divine goodwill (or if not that, at least the favor of religious authorities, which is the next best thing). We are quite accustomed to seeing money as the key to the fulfillment of all our desires. How many dreams do you have that you assume you could fulfill if only (and only if) you had the money? Thus we mortgage our dreams to money, turning it from means to end.

I will not advocate the abolition of money. Money has exceeded its proper bounds, become the means to attain things that should never be infected by its homogeneity and depersonalization; meanwhile, as we have universalized it as means, those things that money truly cannot buy have become unattainable, and no matter how much money we have, we can obtain only their semblance. The solution is to restore money to its proper role. For indeed there are things that human beings can create only with money, or with some equivalent means of coordinating human activity on a mass scale. In its sacred form, money is the implement of a story, an embodied agreement that assigns roles and focuses intention. I will return to this theme later as I describe what money might look like in a sacred economy.

Because there is no apparent limit to what money can buy, our desire for money tends to be unlimited as well. The limitless desire for money was abundantly apparent to the ancient Greeks. At the very beginning of the money era, the great poet and reformer Solon observed, “Of wealth, there is no limit that appears to man, for those of us who have the most wealth are eager to double it.” Aristophanes wrote that money is unique because in all other things (such as bread, sex, etc.) there is satiety, but not of money.

“How much is enough?” a friend once asked of a billionaire he knew. The billionaire was stumped. The reason that no amount of money can ever be enough is that we use it to fulfill needs that money cannot actually fulfill. As such it is like any other addictive
substance, temporarily dulling the pain of an unmet need while leaving the need unmet. Increasing doses are required to dull the pain, but no amount can ever be enough. Today people use money as a substitute for connection, for excitement, for self-respect, for freedom, and for much else. “If only I had a million dollars, then I’d be free!” How many talented people sacrifice their youth hoping for an early retirement to a life of freedom, only to find themselves, at midlife, enslaved to their money?

When the primary function of money is as a medium of exchange, it is subject to the same limits as the goods for which it is exchanged, and our desire for it is limited by our satiety. It is when money takes on the additional function of store-of-value that our desire for it becomes unlimited. One idea I will therefore explore is the decoupling of money as medium-of-exchange from money as store-of-value. This idea has ancient roots going back to Aristotle, who distinguished between two kinds of wealth-getting: for the sake of accumulation, and for the sake of meeting other needs.
¹⁶
The former kind of wealth-getting, he says, is “unnatural” and, moreover, bears no limit.