In class last week, we were discussing the chapter on greed in bell hooks’ All About Love. Toward the end of class, I put forward a question posed earlier by one of the students – “How has our greedy society impacted you?” Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, or the discomfort of examining our own complicity in the culture of greed, or simply that greed has become so normalized that we don’t even recognize it, but the question was met with a stunning silence.
So, I offered some thoughts on ways in which greed impacts our lives, beginning with the cost of their education. Once nearly free, now, lacking public support, tuition at this state university costs thousands of dollars, sending generations into spiraling student debt. I went on to chronicle the increasingly unaffordable cost of housing, rent, health care — which in other countries is supported as a public good, and the ongoing racial injustices born of greed-driven genocide, land theft, and enslavement. And then there is climate change, fueled by our gluttonous consumption of coal, gas, oil. Even as we are reaching a tipping point, US oil and gas corporate executives and their allies in state and federal government continue to obstruct global efforts to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels, putting profit above the very life of the planet. And now, war is raging in Europe, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine an act of imperialism and greed impacting everyone in the world. In the US, much has been made of the resultant increased cost of gas, fueling soaring inflation, but we also ache for those directly in harm’s way suffering destruction, dislocation, and death. We mourn as well the wasted earth -- the destruction of precious resources, the needless burning of fossil fuels in jets and tanks and troop movements, the threat of nuclear irradiation. Perhaps the more appropriate question is, how has greed not impacted us?
Adam Smith, the 18th century Scottish philosopher considered to be “the father of economics,” believed greed to be a quality inherent in human nature which, despite its considered evils, ultimately can benefit the public good. He argued that people pursuing their own self-interest, in competition with each other, through the beneficent “invisible hand” of the free market would result in increased prosperity for all. I imagine he would be dismayed by the current stark division of wealth in this country and the world, with 1% of the world’s population holding half of the world’s wealth, and three people alone holding more wealth than the bottom half of the US population,[i] while millions die every year of hunger alone.
17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose thought still informs ours, based his justification of greed on two assumptions: 1) the scarcity assumption -- that there is not enough to go around, and 2) the insatiability assumption – that our appetites are unquenchable.[ii] Thus, it only makes sense that we acquire and hoard as much as we possibly can to garner some sense of material security, and even then, it will never be enough. Bred in the Hobbesian world of life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, 107), this fear-ridden paradigm continues to fuel the grab for power and goods in Western society. Strange, or perhaps not, that we call them “goods” – from the Old English “god.” Our worship of material possessions suggests they have indeed become our gods.
Mindless consumption has become our way of life, to which we seemingly feel entitled. In a recent interview with Krista Tippett, climate and racial justice activist Collette Pichon Battle commented, “We don’t even know what we’re doing. We’re so unconscious. We just do it unconsciously. We’re so wealthy — just go buy it. Just go take it. It’s yours to take.” She went on to say, “It takes a lot of courage to examine that, right, because we would have to examine our comfort.” Her words reminded me of something Sr. Joan Chittister said in a speech at the Conference on Ethics and Meaning in 1996. She recounted how US delegates to the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing -- in the company of thousands of women from nations without potable water supplies, electricity, sufficient food resources -- complained about the quality of the more-than-adequate accomodations provided by the conference. Chittister chided us all, “Americans are addicted to comfort!” As bell hooks wrote, “It did not take long for this generation [of 60s radicals] to find out that they loved material comfort more than justice” (All About Love, 121). As I sit here on my comfortable couch, in my comfortably heated home, with my (mostly) reliable internet and my cup of chai, it begs the question -- what comforts are we, am I, willing to go without in order to secure a more just and livable future?
Yet, this issue has deeper roots than our desire for creature comforts. In a speech to a local Pax Christi conference years ago, peace activist Liz McAllister noted that in our ravenous consumption we are trying to fill a void that can never be satisfied with material things, because the emptiness we are experiencing is spiritual. All the riches in the world cannot fill this deeper need for meaning and connection. Bell hooks as well wrote that “intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess” (All About Love, 105-106).
Ecofeminist Susan Griffin locates the source of this emptiness in our disconnection from nature, the body and everything associated with it -- a disconnection deeply embedded in what she called our Western “habit of mind.” “[An] alienated approach to knowledge, the spoiling of nature, the building of empires, warfare . . . there is a thread that connects all these . . . There is a resemblance in the look and feel of a field that has been polluted with chemical waste, a neighborhood devastated by poverty and injustice, a battlefield. . . . The alienation of human society from nature has led to many different kinds of destruction“ (Eros, 6, 8).
Among these is the destruction of our humanity -- our inability to feel compassion for others and the earth. Griffin linked this in part to the shaping of the Western ideal of masculinity to fit the necessities of war.[iii] Designed to habituate soldiers to override their own bodies and emotions to enable them to kill and maim their fellow humans, this militarized psyche is not limited to soldiers, nor to those biologically or gendered male. Rather, she claims, it has infused our entire society. “The foreshortening of emotional response. . ., the aggression necessary to survive, these are all characteristics of civic masculinity, qualities required for business, politics, law, even medicine” (Eros, 121). The attendant “separation of all that is called feminine from meaning, creates in turn another kind of void and its own longings” (Eros, 122), leading to greed for power and conquest of nature. And so, we come full circle.
Similarly, Battle, in describing her work for climate justice bemoaned “the inability to value the feminine, and the power of it, and acknowledge that it is the other half of this circle.” Even among those seeking to blur this arbitrary gender divide I have witnessed a proclivity toward civic masculinity and a minimizing of the pre-patriarchal feminine. Battle continued, “If we do not respect it through women, through a care economy and through taking care of each other . . . , things that we have learned to devalue because we’ve put this masculine thing on high. . . .” She did not conclude the “if,” but I suspect she was seeing the end of life on earth as we know it.
“We’re all responsible,” she acknowledged. “If we’re maintaining this system, we are all responsible for the inequities, and therefore we are all responsible for solutions that are equitable. . . . We have enough resources to help everybody.” Scarcity, it turns out, is a false assumption. We have enough. What will now motivate and guide us to distribute the gifts of the earth equitably, and use them wisely?
Other models exist. A care economy. A reverence for the earth. Living simply. In her Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer imparted her indigenous wisdom of a way of life based in gratitude, reciprocity, and connection, and an ethic not of greed, but of “honorable harvest.” She warned that we can no longer live in the illusion that what we consume is not taken directly from the earth, asking, “How do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take?” (Braiding, 177). In response, she enumerated the rules of the honorable harvest: Be accountable. Ask permission before taking, and abide by the answer. Never take the first or the last or more than half. Leave some for others. Take only what you need, and what is given, and never waste. Use it respectfully. Share. Give thanks, and give a gift out of reciprocity. Sustain the ones who sustain you (Braiding, 183). And, we must always take care “that our purpose be worthy of the harvest” (Braiding, 187).
Gratitude fills us with a sense of abundance. Reciprocity acknowledges our connections with the earth, with the cosmos, with meaning, with the divine however we may experience that, with each other. Honoring these connections enables us to step outside the cycle of greed. So, in the words of Collette Battle, “Let’s take the time to connect through love,” and may our purpose be worthy of the harvest.
Notes
Colette Pichon Battle — “Placed Here, In This Calling” | The On Being Project
Griffin, Susan. The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Parts One and Two. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1958. Originally published in 1651.
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow & Co., 2000.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Originally published in 1776.
This Simple Chart Reveals the Distribution Of Global Wealth (visualcapitalist.com)
[i] Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos. The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country, Study Finds (forbes.com).
[ii] I am grateful to my college professor, Ken Hoover, for these insights.
[iii] Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, recounted a time when during one of her interactions with Putin, he brought his dog to a meeting with her and, knowing she was frightened by dogs, took it off the leash. She said, “I understand why he has to do this, to prove he’s a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness.” Vladimir Putin, Right-Wing American Masculinity and the Russian Attack on Ukraine - Ms. Magazine (msmagazine.com).