The Ecologist
For Richer Read Poorer
It’s not wealth that makes people happy, says Jeremy Seabrook, but sufficiency. Yet a system based on constant growth always relys on us wanting more. We are perpetually dissatisfied with plenty. Where does gobalisation go now?
Wealth means abundance. We recognise this in our daily lives when we acknowledge ‘a wealth of detail’ in a temple carving, ‘the wealth of experience’ of a wise person, the ‘wealth of life forms’ in the forest. Wealth means plenty – not only the fruits of the earth, but also human resourcefulness, creative ability, the vast storehouse of imagination and inventiveness that has fed the richness and diversity of civilisations. But in economics this comprehensive understanding of wealth is suspended as we enter not a neutral accounting-system but the twilight zone of ideology.
Poverty, however, is not the opposite of wealth but of sufficiency. The poor want, above all, enough for their sustenance. They long to be relieved from an insecurity that threatens them with perpetual eviction – from forest, village, subsistence farm or city slum. They want, above all, a time of peace and stability in which to bring up their children and live out their lives not in indolence or dependency but in a self-reliance that will permit them to answer the few and easily met needs of humanity.
But they can’t have it. It is not permitted. If human beings were to declare themselves satisfied with what they have, what would become of a system that depends upon constant growth and expansion? How would the bottomless neediness of humanity be perpetuated by an infinite market if contentment were established? This is why even the rich are always talking about all the things they can’t afford and how much better off everyone else is. This is how the unavowed relationship between rich and poor is cemented even more deeply: they are united by the universal desire for more wealth.
The most serious criticism of monetary measurements of poverty (and wealth) is that they define everyone who lives on less than a dollar a day as poor. Yet millions of people who do so are virtually self-reliant, and self-reliance is the opposite of poverty. The global system is busy demolishing such aberrations, however, so that the whole world may be brought within the familiar and measureable indices of poverty. In other words, all humanity must learn how to be poor.
This is the poisonous ‘gift’ of globalisation to the people of the world. Globalisation is a system from which security, subsistence and sufficiency have been banished. All societies, all faiths that have taught restraint, all economic systems that have taught frugality and thrift (including our own), all philosophies that have counselled a joyful simplicity must be junked in order to accommodate the specific discovery of industrial society that enough can never suffice and that there are no limits to desire.
In order that there should be no mistaking this uplifting message, all societies based on other values have been brought to ruin. Those people who sacralised the source of their survival – the austere majesty and insentient beauty of nature – have found their respect for forests, lakes, rivers, soil and pastures mocked by the superior force that has turned all these things into the most raw of materials.
The crusade against poverty is no such thing.
It is, in fact, a crash course in instruction in how to be poor: lessons long assimilated by the well-off who have learned how to feel perpetual dissatisfaction with plenty, the rich who know the constant inadequacy even of excess, the wealthy who know best all the torments of their human indigence in the presence of the spectacle of industrial superfluity.
The poverty with which all international powers and institutions are now concerned is an overwrought artefact carefully crafted out of abundance. Only when the whole world has been totally immersed in the re-birth that is the global market, baptised in the waters of forgetfulness so that even the memory of self-reliance is erased, can these noble agencies devote themselves to the relief of a poverty that has no remedy since it depends on a wealth that has no end.
-- "To change the outside world, we must first change ourselves."
"To change our outer lives, we must first change our inner world."
