Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [6]
And here’s where the problem arises. It is not the institutions of the market or private property. The problem is converting these handy tools into fixed laws. What happens then? Human responsibility for consequences goes out the window.
If, for example, an inflating market pushes the price of housing out of reach of families on low incomes, leaving them on the street, hey, that’s not the community’s fault. That’s the market at work! We’re not responsible for that!
Or take income distribution itself. If it is the result of millions of individual free choices in the market, then as a society we’re not responsible for the outcome, no matter how wide the resulting chasm between rich and poor. Never mind that during the 1980s perhaps the greatest transfer of wealth occurred in our nation’s history—in this case from the nonrich to the rich—largely as a result of deliberate government and corporate policies. But we’re absolved of responsibility, as long as we cling to the myth that individual choices in the market “automatically” determine outcomes.5
As the market defines more and more of our lives, even the most sacred of human experiences is up for sale: I was saddened but not surprised that the Reagan era brought “surrogate motherhood.” In the 1988 debate over Baby “M,” parties wrangled over a contract. Few asked what the renting of a woman’s womb portended—a world in which any value could be reduced to a market value.
What if, I asked myself, instead of our masters, the market and private productive property could become mere devices in the service of our values, in the service of community-defined ends? The catch-22 is, of course, that those community ends can only be defined through deliberation—public talk—about our values and common needs—a process precluded by the very assumptions of social “atomism” with its self-seeking limits which we’ve come unquestionably to accept.
In Search of a New Myth of Being
If social atomism and the universe as machine became the dominant “myths” of the modern era, is there an alternative? What might replace these ubiquitous claims on our collective imaginations?
To suggest an answer, let me return to my life-long focus on food. When I began this quest, I was often dumbfounded when people asked me why I chose food. What a funny question, I thought. Everyone knows that all living creatures must eat. If they’re not eating, what else matters?
Yet in the 1960s, I only barely understood the implications of my choice to focus on our most direct link to the nurturing earth. Yes, I was aware of being influenced by the birth of environmentalism. In the late 1960s, I attended standing-room lectures on ecology at the “free university” at Berkeley. Most of us were just learning the word for the first time. Something was in the air.
I certainly didn’t understand until much later, however, that ecology offered us a new way of thinking about what it means to be a human being.
It’s difficult to perceive this possibility in part because the message we hear from environmentalists is too often a scold. “Okay,” the environmental preachers tell us, “the party’s over. You have all overdone it. Your indulgence must stop! Accept the grim fact that on our little planet we live on limited means, on a fixed income.”
Feeling guilty as accused, it’s hard to see that while these reprimands may well be deserved there is also a richly positive message for us human beings in the discovery of “nature.” Let our guilty feelings not block our capacity to listen. For there is a beautiful irony to appreciate. While the environmental catastrophe sounds the alarm, nature also offers us insights that are essential to addressing not only the environmental crisis but other aspects of social decline as well.
As we begin to see the world through the lens of ecology, subtly, we also begin to reshape our view of ourselves.
To explain, let me again pick up my personal journey.
In 1983, when I began research for what became Rediscovering America’s Values, I was reacting to the 1980s celebration of