Defending Our Common Wealth
Community or Commodities: Which Makes Us Happier?
by Scott Russell Sanders
A recent two-page ad in The New York Times, under a slogan of “Get More,” listed two dozen benefits you would get more of by subscribing to a cell phone service, including more laughs, more party invites, and more second glances; with this phone you’d also become more friendly, available, motivated, and involved; you’d get more time with your kids, more of what you want, “more and more and more.”
Those claims are almost entirely false, of course, and we could laugh them off if they weren’t beamed at us on behalf of one product or another, through every channel of communication, 24 hours a day. “Get More” might serve as the motto for our entire commercial culture, which tells us that the good life is to be found through piling up money and buying things.
Our political culture delivers pretty much the same message—which isn’t surprising, since the corporations that pummel us with ads also fund political campaigns. After the September 11th attacks, when Americans longed to know how we could help heal our country, politicians told us to go shopping. When Americans wondered how we could reduce our dependence on oil, and thus our entanglement with despotic regimes in the Middle East, our leaders told us to drive and fly. As we look around at this richest of nations and see the national debt piling up, hospitals closing, schools failing, prison populations swelling, forests dying, glaciers melting, farmland disappearing, children going without medical care, and countless people sleeping on the streets, our leaders offer us tax cuts. And 40 percent of those cuts will go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, who already have more money than they know what to do with.
For the past quarter century, U.S. politics has been dominated by efforts to ransack the commons, increasing the wealth of a few at the expense of the many. This plundering takes many forms: below-cost timber sales in national forests, over-grazing of public lands by privately-owned livestock, drilling in wildlife refuges, subsidies for the nuclear industry and agribusiness, pork barrel highway projects, sweetheart deals for military contractors, off-shore tax havens for corporations, industrial pollution of air and water and soil, on and on. The looting of the commons has been carried out through the privatization of prisons, the transfer of tax dollars to religious schools, the commercial rip-off of the airwaves and internet, the scouring of the oceans by factory ships, the draining of aquifers for development, the opening of parks to snowmobiles, the patenting of organisms, and the elimination of the estate tax. The net result of all this plundering is to diminish the wealth we hold in common.
Our politicians and merchants seem not to notice that we hold any wealth in common. The story they tell is almost entirely about private wealth and private solutions. If the streets are unsafe, instead of reducing the poverty that causes crime, buy an alarm system, move into a gated community, pack a gun. If the public schools are failing, instead of fixing them, put your kids in private schools. If the water is tainted, don’t work to clean it up; buy your own supply in bottles. If the roads are clogged, don’t push for public transportation; buy a bigger car. If cancer is epidemic, instead of addressing the causes, try the latest therapies. If Social Security looks insecure, instead of overhauling the system to safeguard everyone, funnel the dollars into private accounts, so those who guess right on the market will win and those who guess wrong will lose.
Telling a New Story
The political assault on the commons and the commercial appeal to “consumers” go hand-in-hand. Both urge us to grab whatever we can, to indulge our appetites without regard for the needs of community, without gratitude to the countless people whose labor supports us, without concern for future generations, without acknowledging that we live on a planet alongside millions of other species, and that we draw every drop of our sustenance from nature. While the world decays around us, we are urged to buy our way to security, as if we could withdraw inside a cocoon of money. This story, the dominant one in America today, is a self-centered fantasy that leads to loneliness for the individual and disaster for the world.
We need an alternative story, one that appeals to our generosity and compassion rather than our selfishness. We need a story that measures wealth not by the amount of property or money in private hands but by the condition of the commons. We need a story that links the health of individuals to the health of communities, a story that reminds us we belong not merely to a city but to a watershed, a bioregion, and ultimately to the earth. Rather than defining us as consumers, this new story would define us as conservers; rather than exhorting us to chase after fashions, it would invite us to find joy in everyday gifts—in the voice of a child or a bird, in music and books, in gardening and strolling, in sharing food and talk. To live by such a story, we need not be sages or saints; we need simply be awake to the real sources of the good life.
I’m guessing that everyone reading these lines has entertained such a vision. You’ve dreamed of living in a household and a neighborhood suffused with love and respect. You’ve dreamed of living in a community that is just, beautiful, harmonious, and durable, a community that values all its citizens, makes room for other species, draws energy from wind and sun, meets many of its needs from local sources, nourishes learning and the arts, and protects these blessings for future generations. You’ve dreamed of belonging to a nation of such communities, and to a world of such nations.
The work of creating wise and loving communities begins with cherishing our common wealth. I speak of it as “common” because it’s ordinary and because it’s shared. By “wealth” I don’t mean money, but the actual sources of well-being. I mean the soils, waters, and atmosphere; the oceans and prairies and forests; the human gene pool and the plenitude of species. I mean language in all its forms, including mathematics and music; every kind of knowledge, from folklore to physics; and all manner of artifacts, from satellites to shoes. I mean practical arts such as cooking, building, herding, and farming; the art of medicine; the traditions of civil liberty and democratic government. I mean wildlife refuges, national parks, and wilderness areas, as well as schools, museums, libraries, and other public spaces.
You won’t see these treasures for sale in the mall. You won’t see them advertised on TV. You won’t discover them in corporate balance sheets or the Gross National Product. You’ll rarely hear them spoken of with pride by politicians, who seem hell-bent on auctioning off everything that might have the word “public” attached to it.
Where you’re likely to hear people talking about our common wealth is at a block party, a union meeting, a street festival, or a concert in the park. You’re likely to hear such talk among people cleaning up a river, planting trees on a ravaged hillside, reclaiming an abandoned rail yard for a playground, or turning a trash-filled lot into a community garden. In short, you’ll hear testimony to our shared wealth wherever people come together to preserve, restore, or create something for the good of the community, and not merely for their own private advantage.
Creating a New Vision
What’s being sold to us every day as the “American way of life” is mostly a cheat and a lie. It’s an infantile dream of endless consumption, endless novelty, and endless play. It’s a pacifier for the ego to suck on. It’s bad for us and bad for the earth.
We need a new vision of the good life. We need a dream worthy of grown-ups, one that values simplicity over novelty, conservation over consumption, harmony over competition, community over ego.
Fortunately, many people sense this need. Across our country and around the world, people are shaping a new story about the sources of peace and plenty. You can see the story come alive in farmers’ markets, Habitat for Humanity building sites, food coops, town theaters, land trusts. You can witness the story unfolding in citizen forums and simple living collectives, in hospices, in shelters for abused women and children, in efforts to restore eagles or wolves. Those who embrace this new story are recovering wisdom known to our ancestors but largely forgotten in our narcissistic age.
Love of our common wealth is the root impulse behind countless acts of gratitude and kindness that ordinary people perform every day. We all feel it, but we don’t always know how to speak of it, or we speak of it so quietly that our story is drowned out by the blare of consumerism.
We need to speak up, to say boldly why we fight for good schools, why we build houses for the homeless, why we protect open space, why we look after the ailing and the elderly, why we pay taxes without grumbling, why we honor government as a force for public good. In a society obsessed with competition, we need to say why we practice cooperation. In a culture addicted to instant gratification, we need to champion long-term healing and the welfare of coming generations.
In spite of what the media tell us, we know that the good life is not for sale. We understand that the good life is something we make together, in partnership with other people and in harmony with nature. Because we realize that happiness, health, security, and meaning come to us largely as gifts, we feel called to preserve those gifts, enhance them if we can, and pass them on.
The glorification of private wealth will go on around the clock, in every medium, without any help from us. We need to counter that chorus by lifting our voices in praise of the wealth we share, recalling how our lives depend on one another, on generations past and future, on the bountiful earth and all its creatures, on the spirit that lifts us into being and sustains us through every moment and reclaims us in the end.
Scott Russell Sanders is the author of more than 20 books, including novels, collections of short stories, and personal nonfiction. His latest book, published this spring, is A Private History of Awe, which is a coming-of-age memoir, love story, and spiritual testament. His writing has won the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. Since 1971 he has taught at Indiana University, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English. This piece was excerpted from a longer work printed in Tikkun magazine.