Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (22 page)

The second hallmark of the transition to adulthood is an ordeal. Ancient tribal cultures had various coming-of-age ceremonies and ordeals that purposely shattered the smaller identity through isolation, pain, fasting, psychedelic plants, or other means, and then rebuilt and reincorporated it into a larger, transpersonal identity. Though we intuitively seek them out in the form of drinking, drugs, fraternity and military hazing, and so on, modern men and women usually have only a partial experience of this process, leaving us in a kind of perpetual adolescence that ends only when fate intervenes to tear our world apart. Then we can enter a wider self, in which giving comes just as naturally as receiving. Having completed the passage to adulthood, a man or woman takes full possession of his or her gifts and seeks to contribute to the good of all as a full member of the tribe.

Humanity is undergoing an analogous ordeal today. The multiple crises converging upon us are an ordeal that challenges our
very identity, an ordeal that we have no assurance of even surviving. It calls forth unrealized capacities and compels us to relate to the world in a new way. The despair that sensitive people feel in the face of the crisis is part of the ordeal.
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Like a tribal initiate, when we as a species emerge from it, we too will join the community of all being as a full member of the “tribe” of life. Our unique capacities of technology and culture, we will turn to contribute to the good of all.

In humanity’s childhood, a money system that embodied and demanded growth, the taking of more and more from earth, was perhaps appropriate. It was an integral part of the story of Ascent. Today it is rapidly becoming obsolete. It is incompatible with adult love, with cocreative partnership, and with the graduation into the estate of a Giver that comes with adulthood. That is the deep reason why no financial or economic reform can possibly work that does not include a new kind of money. The new money must embody a new story, one that treats nature not only as a mother, but as a lover too. We will still have a need for money for a long time to come because we need magical symbols to reify our Story of the People, to apply it to the physical world as a creative template. The essential character of money will not change: it will consist of magical talismans, whether physical or electronic, through which we assign roles, focus intention, and coordinate human activity.

The next part of this book will discuss such a money system, as well as the economy and psychology that will accompany it. There is a personal—some might say spiritual—dimension to the metamorphosis
of stories that we are entering. Today’s usury-money is part of a story of separation, in which “more for me is less for you.” That is the essence of interest: I will only “share” money with you if I end up with even more of it in return. On the systemic level as well, interest on money creates competition, anxiety, and the polarization of wealth. Meanwhile, the phrase “more for me is less for you” is also the motto of the ego, and a truism given the discrete and separate self of modern economics, biology, and philosophy.

Only when our sense of self expands to include others, through love, is that truism replaced by its opposite: “More for you is also more for me.” This is the essential truth embodied in the world’s authentic spiritual teachings, from Jesus’s Golden Rule, which has been misconstrued and should read, “As you do unto others, so also you do unto yourself,” to the Buddhist doctrine of karma. However, to merely understand and agree with these teachings is not enough; many of us bear a divide between what we believe and what we live. An actual transformation in the way we experience
being
is necessary, and such a transformation usually comes about in much the same way as our collective transformation is happening now: through a collapse of the old Story of Self and Story of the World, and the birth of a new one. For the self, too, is ultimately a story, with a beginning and an end. Have you ever gone through an experience that leaves you, afterward, hardly knowing who you are?

The mature, connected self, the self of interbeingness, comes into a balance between giving and receiving. In that state, whether you are a person or an entire species, you give according to your abilities and, linked with others of like spirit, you receive according to your needs.

Not coincidentally, I have just paraphrased a fundamental tenet of socialism: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” This is a good description of any gift network, whether a human body, an ecosystem, or a tribal gift culture. As I will describe, it is also a good description of a sacred economy. Its currency contributes to a very different Story of the People, of the Self, and of the World than usury-money. It is cyclical rather than exponential, always returning to its source; it encourages the protection and enrichment of nature, not its depletion; it redefines wealth as a function of one’s generosity and not one’s accumulation; it is the manifestation of abundance, not scarcity. It has the potential to recreate the gift dynamics of primitive societies on a global scale, bringing forth human gifts and directing them toward planetary needs.

I remember as a teenager reading Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
, whose black-and-white characters, hyperrationality, and moral absolutism appealed strongly to my adolescent mind. The book is a manifesto of the discrete and separate self, the mercenary ego, and it appeals to adolescent minds to this day. The book devoted its most vitriolic ridicule to the phrase “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” painting a picture of people outdoing each other in their postures of neediness so as to be allotted a greater share of resources, while producers had no motivation to produce. This scenario, which was in certain respects played out in the Communist block, echoes a primal fear of the scarcity-conditioned modern self—what if I give and receive nothing in return? This desire of an assurance of return, a compensation for the risk of generosity, is the fundamental mind-set of interest, an adolescent mind-set to be superseded by a more expansive adult self that has matured into full membership in the
community of being. We are here to express our gifts; it is among our deepest desires, and we cannot be fully alive otherwise.

Most needs have been monetized, while the amount of labor needed to meet those monetized needs is falling. Therefore, in order for human gifts to receive their full expression, all this excess human creativity must therefore turn elsewhere, toward needs or purposes that are inimical to the money of Separation. For without a doubt the regime of money has destroyed, and continues to destroy, much that is beautiful—indeed, every public good that cannot be made private. Here are a few examples: a starry night sky free of light pollution; a countryside free of road noise; a vibrant multicultural local urban economy; unpolluted lakes, rivers, and seas; the ecological basis of human civilization. Many of us have gifts that would contribute to all of these things, yet no one will pay us to give them. That’s because money as we know it ultimately rests on converting the public into the private. The new money will encourage the opposite, and the conflict between our ideals and practical financial reality will end.

Usury-money is the money of growth, and it was perfect for humanity’s growth stage on earth and for the story of Ascent, of dominance and mastery. The next stage is one of cocreative partnership with earth. The Story of the People for this new stage is coming together right now. Its weavers are the visionaries of fields like permaculture, holistic medicine, renewable energy, mycoremediation, local currencies, restorative justice, attachment parenting, and a million more. To undo the damage that the Age of Usury has wrought on nature, culture, health, and spirit will require all the gifts that make us human, and indeed is so impossibly demanding that it will take those gifts to a new level of development.

This might seem hopelessly naive, vague, and idealistic. I have
drawn out some of the logic in
The Ascent of Humanity
and will flesh it out in greater detail in the second half of this book. For now, weigh the competing voices of your idealism and your cynicism, and ask yourself, “Can I bear to settle for anything less?” Can you bear to accept a world of great and growing ugliness? Can you stand to believe that it is inevitable? You cannot. Such a belief will slowly but surely kill your soul. The mind likes cynicism, its comfort and safety, and hesitates to believe anything extraordinary, but the heart urges otherwise; it urges us to beauty, and only by heeding its call can we dare create a new Story of the People.

We are here to create something beautiful; I call it “the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible.” As the truth of that sinks in, deeper and deeper, and as the convergence of crises pushes us out of the old world, inevitably more and more people will live from that truth: the truth that more for you is not less for me; the truth that what I do unto you, so I do unto myself; the truth of living to give what you can and take what you need. We can start doing it right now. We are afraid, but when we do it for real, the world meets our needs and more. We then find that the story of Separation, embodied in the money we have known, is not true and never was. Yet the last ten millennia were not in vain. Sometimes it is necessary to live a lie to its fullest before we are ready to take the next step into the truth. The lie of separation in the age of usury is now complete. We have explored its fullness, its farthest extremes, and seen all it has wrought, the deserts and the prisons, the concentration camps and the wars, the wastage of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Now, the capacities we have developed through this long journey of ascent will serve us well in the imminent Age of Reunion.

As our sojourn of separation comes to an end and we reunite with nature, our attitude of human exceptionalism from the laws of nature is ending as well. For decades, the environmental movement has been telling us, “We are not exempt from nature’s laws.” Increasingly, painfully, we are experiencing the truth of that. A child takes from his mother, blissfully heedless of her sacrifices and her pain; and so we have taken from earth during the long infancy of the human species. Our money system, our economic ideology, has for better or worse been an agent of that taking. Now, as our relationship to earth shifts toward that of a lover, we become acutely aware of the harm we are doing. In a romantic partnership, what you do to your partner bounces back to you; her pain is your pain.

And so, as humanity faces the coming-of-age ordeal of the present crises and transitions into adulthood, a new economic system is emerging that embodies the new human identity of the connected self living in cocreative partnership with Earth. Our economic system and money system will no longer be agents of taking, of exploitation, of the aggrandizement of the separate self. They will instead be agents of giving, of creation, of service, and of
abundance. The following chapters describe the elements of this sacred economy. All of them are apparent already, latent within the old institutions, and even being born from them. For this is not a revolution in the classic sense, a purge, a sweeping away of the old; it is rather a metamorphosis. The Age of Reunion has long gestated within the institutions of Separation. Today, it is beginning to come forth.

Money is inextricably woven into our civilization’s defining stories: of self, and of humanity collectively. It is part and parcel of the ideology and mechanics of growth, the “ascent of humanity” to overlordship of the planet; it has also played a central role in the dissolution of our bonds to nature and community. As these stories crumble, and as their monetary dimension crumbles apace, we have the chance to consciously imbue money with the attributes of the new stories that will replace them: the connected self, living in cocreative partnership with Earth. But how to imbue money with a story?

In its several-thousand-year history, money has gone through an ever-accelerating evolution in its form. The first stage was commodity money—grain, oil, cattle, metal, and many other things—that functioned as media of exchange without possessing any fiduciary value. This stage lasted several millennia. The next step was coinage, which added fiduciarity to the intrinsic metallic value of silver and gold. Money consisted then of two components: a material and a symbolic.