The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [43]
Because of the bonding power of gifts and the detached nature of commodity exchange, gifts have become associated with community and with being obliged to others, while commodities are associated with alienation and freedom. The bonds established by a gift can maintain old identity and limit our freedom of motion. To take a simple example, as soon as an adolescent truly wants to leave his parents, he does well to stop accepting their gifts, for they only maintain the parent-child bond. If you want out, you pay your own way. I had a friend in college who once decided to stop participating in the family celebration of Christmas. He explained himself in several ways—the great distance to travel, the waste of money, the commercialization of the holiday—but whatever the reason, his absence removed him from a gift ceremony that would have reaffirmed his connection to family at exactly the time when he wanted to leave it. (The same friend rejoined the family Christmas in later years, the group spirit of a gift holiday being less threatening once he had established his own identity.)
It seems no misnomer that we have called those nations known for their commodities “the free world.” The phrase doesn’t seem to refer to political freedoms; it indicates that the dominant form of exchange in these lands does not bind the individual in any way—to his family, to his community, or to the state. And though the modern state is too large a group to take its structure from bonds of affection, still, the ideology of the socialist nations begins with the call for community. “Labor should not be sold like merchandise but offered as a gift to the community,” Che Guevara used to say. The young writers in Cuba refuse royalties for their books. “In a socialist society literary property cannot be private,” they say. The revolution belongs to everyone and everyone belongs to the revolution, they say.
In states that profess to be such a “big family” we can well expect an equivalent to my friend’s refusal to participate in Christmas. The jails in the free world are full of people who have committed “crimes against property,” but in the East, it seems, they lock men up for crimes “in favor of property.” There will always be times when we want to act upon our disconnection from the group. Herein must lie the fascination of Communist youth for Western commodities. Teenagers in Prague will risk their futures to acquire a pair of genuine Levi’s. In Russia there are secret societies of owners of Beatles records. A young man approaches a Western newsman in Peking to ask if he will buy him a Sony tape deck next time he’s in Hong Kong. He knows all the model numbers.
The excitement of commodities is the excitement of possibility, of floating away from the particular to taste the range of available life. There are times when we want to be aliens and strangers, to feel how the shape of our lives is not the only shape, to drift before a catalog of possible lives, staring at the glass arcades of shoes that are sensible and shoes for taking a chance, buses leaving town and the gray steam railway depot where men and women hurry by with their bags.
It is not simply luxury the teenagers of Peking and Prague want. All youth wants, once, to be alienated from the bonds that nurture, to be the prodigal son. Sometimes we go to the market to taste estrangement, if only to fantasize what our next attachment might be. This experience is so available in the West, of course, that we are well aware of its shortcomings. The freedom of the free world tends toward the perfect freedom of strangers. When Vietnamese refugees settled in Southern California they found its culture