I was riding in the weathered naugahyde wonderment that is the front seat of a 1973 Chrysler Imperial Lebaron earlier this evening, my friend and my son’s namesake in the driver’s seat, looking like he had been born to drive such a monstrously beautiful automobile. It was a perfect Maine summer day – a little humid but not too hot, humid enough that the clouds were puffy and the air still, making it essential to drive with the windows down on back roads to get some air movement, to feel a breeze, between stops for lobster rolls and fried scallops and Diet Coke. My friend pointed out that fried seafood – and, for that matter, shellfish in mayonnaise on a hot dog bun – is quintessentially downscale summer seaside fare, but it’s not cheap. The lobster roll was sixteen dollars, the fried scallops twenty-two, each beyond the reach of a family trying to stretch a vacation budget who would thus maybe, maybe get a box of clams for eighteen dollars and three hot dogs and fries to round things out.
What they wouldn’t do – no matter how down on their luck – is worry fundamentally about starving. Don’t get me wrong, malnourishment and actual hunger is a problem in the US, particularly for lower income families, but actual starvation – famine, dying of hunger – is not on the radar screen for anyone except those with some kind of mental affliction which prevents them from being in the light of other human beings. This, we forget, is something rather new in the history of mankind. Up until the mid 19th century in the west, and sometime in the last fifty or seventy years for the rest of the world, people of almost any age would have had personal exposure to a famine, where thousands of their local friends and neighbors would, in fact, have lost their lives, or come close to it, due to a fundamental inability to find enough to eat for an extended period of time. When that happens locally now – in third world areas for a variety of reasons, or in more advanced areas which have transport problems due, say, to earthquakes or flooding or the like – local government or the UN or various non-governmental organizations fire up a fleet of aircraft or littoral landing ships and import massive amounts of food to relieve conditions on the ground. In most cases, the transport cost far outweighs the actual cost of the food. In many instances, because it’s easier and cheaper to piggy back transport costs, they will also bring temporary shelters, stacks of clothing in various sizes, potable water, latrines, and pretty much all that’s necessary to survive. Not thrive, perhaps, but definitely survive – and that, again, is a completely new phenomenon on earth.
We forget that routinely. First, that it’s new – postmodern humanity is burdened with a terrible memory and an incomprehension of the scale of time, enhanced by our recently invented ability to fob off memory onto digitized storage banks and to the utter breakdown of our sense of duration due to the almost instantaneous delivery of change which now occurs in our lives. The end of regularly occurring death on a massive scale due to famine is a very new phenomenon, but we don’t consciously recognize that. We also, however, forget – or maybe simply don’t consider – that this is totally, completely new in the history of the planet. At all times past, pre-sentient and even sentient creatures have had to accept that their lives exist, on some level, solely at the whim of the availability of nutrients and shelter, and that availability is roughly consistent but not totally so, and sometimes vanishes altogether. But as long as we don’t lose the manuals that we’ve written describing how to engage in mass scale agriculture, and to build and maintain the machines that allow it and also allow for delivery of the harvest across vast distance and to store it over time just in case something happens, we’re going to be well-fed forever. We are the first species to do this. It’s actually more novel than language – we can see signs of abstract communication ability in dogs, chimpanzees, and even crows – and certainly more novel than tool building. Admittedly, it’s a product of all the nifty cool intellectual and physical and inventive toys we have as sentient human beings, but that product makes us totally, completely different as a biological system than anything that’s ever grown up on our planet.
There’s something notable about totally new things, however, especially totally new biological realities. Mostly it’s that if something is completely new, then the lessons or systems or learning frameworks which have come before it are now, if not no longer valid, likely not going to work the same way as they did before. Literally every part of a living organism – every species that has been successful to date – has evolved in a condition of potential and often actual scarcity of the items which are required to survive and reproduce. Human beings no longer are subject to that condition (again, assuming the vanishingly small number of us who do, in fact, know how to farm and build the machines which farm, convert produce to food, store food, and create fabrics and shelter items continue to do their jobs reasonably well, which I think can be taken as a given right now given how few people actually do this and how little investment is required relative to the overall human project to do so). So we’re no longer subject to the one condition which has been a constant since life started to evolve. Give that, I think it’s almost a given that we’re going to require some period of experimentation to get used to our new-found, utterly unheard of in the history of time gift of abundance.
Taking a step further, though, one could imagine that for a sentient, self-reflective species, which has already had hundreds of generations of reflection and thinking about how to thrive (giving rise to its own science of thriving, economics), and how to be happy (philosophy and religion and their various more or less ridiculous cousins), we’d face a further quandry of this novelty. Scarcity – or the likelihood of scarcity, to the point of the almost-predictable assumption that mass death and destruction will occur, if not regularly in time then certainly regular in existential reality – is a sometimes spoken assumption of our thinking (in the case of economics, for example) and is an often unspoken assumption as well (say, in morality – “property is theft” really only works when property is scarce; if it’s not, then there really can’t be “theft” of an overabundant, valueless commons good, or if there is, it’s because a system has artificially walled off access to something which has no real scarcity value in the first place). Our entire facade of thinking about how society should be ordered, how a good life should be lived, is based (at least in part, and admittedly to a greater extent in some contexts and a vanishingly small part in others, which I’ll get to in a moment) on at least a leg of assumptions that are now utterly, completely wrong.
In such a setting, we should not be surprised that the old organizing mechanisms – indeed, even the old discursive mechanisms which allowed us to analyse and critique the organizing mechanisms – seem broken and unworkable. And it shouldn’t surprise us that the responses in the public sphere take on two, traditionally Kantian, end points of thesis-antithesis. On the one hand, there is a community of those who deny that there is, in fact, an abundance: this would be the right wing of today’s world, demanding that walls be built and resources withheld from those who haven’t “earned” them when, in fact, there isn’t anything to earn any more except social prestige: how can you “earn” access to food which is able to produced in quantities which is tens of times more than what humanity can safely consume? On the left, the response is to create artificial supply constraints – “we can’t use energy or land anymore because the world will boil up due to human climate change” – when those constraints simply don’t exist. It’s not that human climate change isn’t real; it is, and plenty of cities will be submerged, and plenty of historically constructed mechanisms for how humans live will be uprooted. But our ability to produce and move a surplus of the stuff we need to live and thrive really isn’t impacted by such change; it’s a red herring. We’ll be hotter and want to live in northern Manitoba in a way which no one, ever, in history, has ever wanted to live in northern Manitoba (if there were other options on hand; admittedly, plenty of Cree people wanted to live in northern Manitoba when offered the chance to move to Nunavit), but we’ll be fine.
In fact the emergence of that dichotomy gives me reason to believe that I’m on to something here, that this totally new phenomenon of abundance does represent a real, new thing that humanity is failing to grasp. I see few, if any, people talking about “well, we screwed up the climate, and sea levels are going to rise and the world will be hotter and deserts will grow, but I guess that means we should be planting more wheat crops in Siberia.” I mean, some Canadians are thinking about how land prices should rise around Hudson’s Bay, but that’s about it. (Canadians, by the way, are going to make out like bandits in the future. Literally, Canada couldn’t have been designed to better exploit a warming Earth. Maybe Toronto housing prices are for real.) In general, though, people are either denying that change has and is happening, or they are saying that the “change” will lead to apocolypse, despite no evidence whatsoever to imagine that a technologically armed earth and human species can’t solve pretty much any problem thrown at it, at an increasingly rapid pace. The emergence of a failure to understand a condition is actually a fine marker that the condition itself is real, given that human beings are a slow, plodding, and generally stupid race.
I have no idea what will emerge; driving around in a pre-oil-crisis Chrysler, which was dumping aerosoled gasoline into the air a pint at a time everytime we pulled away from a stop sign, isn’t an ideal environment in which to come up with original thought. Although it is a rather pleasant one, I must admit. My unoriginal concept at the time was to guess that humanity will make survival goods essentially free, or at least, subject to trivial barter economies in which the basic desire for human services – a haircut, a massage, life coaching, maid services, decorating, creating small objects of beauty – will allow most of us to not be bored and in return, we’ll get food, shelter, comfortable clothing, and basic health and mental care. Meanwhile, those goods which remain “scarce” – remarkable items of human or natural origin, like artworks and diamonds and real estate – will continue to exist in a parallel but increasingly abstracted “market” which has less and less to due with day to day survival, and access to such network will be subject to as-yet-unknowable “criteria” of admission on which we will base our social and hierarchical battles of the future. Literally battles, I think: we will end up fighting and creating new immoralities so as to be able to be a part of that market, even though it will be increasingly self-referential and thus absurd. That is, “real” goods and services will exit the market, while Geffen goods – goods of sheer privilege, whose possession is not actually important except to express the possessor’s ability to possess – and what I call control goods – rights to social control or direction of others – will exist in a market with a denominator which is increasingly irrelevant to day-to-day life. And over time, there will be fewer of us – because who wants to raise new children in a world irrelevant to striving? – and our ingenuity will absorb more and more goods and services into the unpriced, free world, and the Geffen and control goods will become increasingly irrelevant, but never entirely.
It will take millenia – if ever – before the Geffen and control goods lose their meaning because those are the hangovers of our past existence, a period so far as we can tell of over three billion years, of scarcity. As sentient, self-referential beings, who have also been clever enough (and have the opposable thumbs to enable it, sorry dolphins) to create the technology required to eliminate scarcity for survival goods, we’ve actually been building for a few millenia the artificial notions of scarcity which will allow us to continue to “want” to strive in the future. We don’t “need” to strive – now that we have Deere GPS-navigated tractors which can till soil, sow seeds, weed, harvest, and re-till at the rate of an acre every five minutes, with no human engagement whatsoever – to survive. But we do need to strive, to feel like we have a point for doing anything, because that’s how we got past the billions of years of scarcity. Scarcity made us strive; we re-invented scarcity, albeit of a derivative and purely social kind, to keep us striving. Thus until we actually do get past the idea of survival scarcity completely, we’ll just create new trophies to strive for because we have to.
I really can’t imagine a world past scarcity in an absolute sense because of that genetic defect. I have to hope that there will be a mutation in the future of the genome that will drop the notion of scarcity entirely. That being said, I think it exists: I think that’s actually the basis of what love is, as I know it. Love exists without limit, and is given without need of return. It’s the perfect example of a non-scarce good, a limitless good that actually gets even more abundant as it is “used” or “consumed” or, really, shared. But the last few years of my life have made me realize how much we are too terrified of love to make it our own. Most people think “love” is just another Geffen good, another thing to strive for. Even when you try to escape that, our coded expectation of scarcity usually overwhelms and, in this new world of being human, distorts and corrupts.
But then again, abundance is new. Maybe love is just a step ahead of its time. Hopefully, anyway.