Sam Osborne – MATC 1

Modern Branches, Ancient Roots:

Conflict, Culture, Economies and the Environment

If you woke up this morning and didn't turn on the television, didn't turn on your car, didn't

have a cup of coffee, didn't even flush the toilet, we'd still have to talk about your sheets – and if you

made them yourself, we'd be talking about the the fabric, or the thread, or the cotton or the sheep. If

you've taken a course in economics you know: there is no such thing as a free lunch. So, today I'd like

to talk about some of the things we don't discuss often enough. How ideas we often overlook (like our

own culture), when paired with ideas we use to measure ourselves (like economics) have started,

shaped and furthered the way we interact with each other, and the world at large.

In the course of this discussion, I will be taking the following as given and true: that we as

humans have needs – including, but not limited to breathing, eating, defecating, sleeping, reproducing

and otherwise occupying ourselves with the time we spend on this earth. Some would add religion to

this mix, but until the advent of agriculture, there may not have been much time for well defined

hierarchies or beliefs though there were some forms of ritualized worship amongst our earliest human

ancestors. The cultural lines that divide us fall in many areas and for many reasons. Family and tribal

structures and needs, language and geographical differences, our individual wants and desires have all

played their roles as we interact within and between our cultural groups, sometimes amicably and at

times violently.

In many ways, we are no different today than we have ever been, though I am arguing that

today's stakes are much higher. We are better at violence than ever. Although we've managed to avoid

the scenarios where our weapons wipe the planet clean, and our mostly global community interacts

primarily in terms of words and economics, we are far from achieving world peace. I hope to explain

not only how we are utilizing ancient methods of interaction, but also that the systems we use to relate
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to each other, which are rooted in these ancient methods, are outmoded and obsolete. We are

stratifying ourselves with aging economic systems and along blurring ethnocentric lines while dividing

ourselves with an imagined geography and ignoring our connection to the land itself; these are not

reflections of the highlights of our histories. We need to learn even from the mistakes of our collective

past if we are to make a better future.

Conflict, culture, economies and the environment; of these only the environment is universal to

the human experience, though it is certainly as varied an experience as the other three. Regardless of

the weather, whether we live near oceans, in deserts, in the city or the country, in the back woods, the

great plains, the rolling meadows, foothills, valleys or mountain tops; we're sharing the same space

whether or not we like to admit it.

Today in the United States, the environment lies couched in the vocabulary of economics. It is

not about making sense, but about dollars and cents. I believe that before we can answer questions

about climate change, or world hunger we have to first discuss economics. Without a discussion of

economics we're just dreaming.

There is a lot to be said about the spread of globalization, some good and plenty of bad. We

could spend the day debating whether or not it is the result of imperialistic policies and European

colonialism, but for now let's just focus some simple economics, the history of money. In his book,

“The End of Money and the Future of Civilization,” Thomas Greco Jr. traces the course of money

through four phases: barter, commodity, symbolic and credit money. He defines the primary purpose of

money to be facilitating the exchange of goods and services. Money changes hands through three

major formats, gifts, involuntary transfers and reciprocal exchanges.

The idea of gifts requires little explanation, regardless of money's form, a gift can be given.

However, as money has evolved from barter to credit, opportunities for involuntary transfers have
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decreased and reciprocal exchanges have become increasingly simple, in part due to the changes in

money and the systems we utilize to exchange commodities for money.

Just as gifts require little explanation, the idea of bartering is the core of trade. If I have

something you want, and you have something I want, we can establish how much of each can be

beneficial to both of us, and exchange. The trouble arises when more people get involved, when a

commodity is generally in demand, or when there are too many hands and not enough to go around.

The evolutionary answer is the idea of commodity money – if everyone wants something, why not use

that something as money? In many times and places, it has, and that is where commodity money

comes in.

Commodity money quickly gives way to symbolic money. As it is unwieldy to carry a

wheelbarrow of wheat, gold, or any other fairly universal commodity money, to the market. The

commodities quickly become notes. What starts simply as paying the merchants by requesting them to

come and acquire your “money” with an IOU, rapidly becomes a revolution that gives birth to banking.

There is a documented transition in ancient Egypt where wheat transitions from commodity money to

symbolic money. Today, we would say that wheat was nationalized, but you brought your wheat to a

facility (like a nationally sanctioned bank) and they gave you symbolic wheat money. The merchants

you paid with your symbolic wheat money could then come and claim as much wheat as they had notes

for. Exchange is facilitated, but is limited to the amount of wheat in the system.

In Europe, as well as many other parts of the world, gold was the commodity symbolized into

money. Even in the United States we've worked with a gold standard for the majority of our years.

There was a time when you could take your dollar and get a dollars worth of gold, or silver (as in the

case of the silver certificate), but credit puts an end to this. Just as the previous evolutions from barter

to commodities, and from commodities to symbols, the new makes the old obsolete. However, credit

was a much sneakier advance.

Sam Osborne – MATC 4

During the late middle ages, the cusp of the European renaissance, banking becomes a system

unto itself, and credit money comes into existence. Individuals and groups who held amounts of gold

or symbolic money, as well as the records of such transactions, found themselves in a position where

they would have both gold, and the money that gold represented. Having control over both the symbol

and the symbolized, money become not only symbolic of the gold held in vault, but also of the debt's

being loaned out. The symbol, the money, remained the same but there was more money than there

was gold. It's important to note that this is not a matter of nationalized, or even standardized currency,

these are bank notes, redeemable at a given bank, traded at face value. The only trouble is that if

everyone brought their bank notes and demanded their gold, there wouldn't be enough to go around.

The scenario portrayed in the climactic scene of “It's a Wonderful Life,” is an advanced

example of what the confusion between symbolic and credit money can lead to. The money has shifted

from gold, to investment, or conceptually we've moved from a something to the absence of it. The

words of George Bailey are all too true, “The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house...” Credit

money solves the common problem of it's predecessors, there are no limits to the amount of money in

the system. However, it brings a two pronged trouble. First, it makes symbolic money obsolete – no

longer can you redeem your dollar for it's worth in gold, and second, the value of the money itself is

tied to the a system of debt. Though not necessarily necessary to the system of credit money the way it

works in our world today, there is more debt than there is money to pay it, because banking is a

business – a proven and profitable one at that.

Which brings us to the matter of what happens when credit money meets standardized national

currency. From elitists to populists, from Hamilton to Jefferson, to Jackson, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy,

in the two hundred years and change within which the United States has been born and risen to it's

place in the world, we have not been able to agree about who should control our money. Though we

haven't been able to find a permanent solution to the question of who is responsible for issuing our
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national currency, we have been able to agree that it will be taken at face value. We went so far as to

print, “this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private” directly on our paper bills.

Today, we have the Federal Reserve Bank and all its systems. The bottom line of which is that

the Federal Reserve Bank is responsible for managing our United States Dollar. The money issued by

the Fed isn't worth any more than the dollars we spend and save with thrift and frivolity, but this money

is lent to directly to private banks, who in turn loan out many times the amount (in some situations to

other banks, where the process then repeats). Because there are no goods or services being exchanged

with this money, the money supply is inflated, hence the term inflation. Inflation is by definition, the

improper issuance of money into the economy. As the currency multiplies, so does the debt.

If money is merely a placeholder to facilitate the exchange of goods, money must be tied to

goods in some way. By combining the idea of symbolic money with the reality of credit based money

under the same currency with no distinction, we have exchanged a system of exchange for a system of

debt from which there is no easy escape. The idea of economy dominates our daily lives – we take

loans to go to school, we work to pay the bills, we save to get ahead of our expenses, we spend for our

wants and necessities. This engine of consumption is how we live. We excel, meet expectations and

fail in an economic system where even if the individual is debt free, the money he has is as grounded in

debt as the company he works for, or the banks that hold their money. There is an ever present push for

increasing profits, to even out the ever increasing debt. This is the root of the desire for geometric

economic growth. These in turn, promote the exploitation of both man and our shared planet and fuels

an unsustainable future.

Though we may see the world through economic glasses, our cultural membership supplies tint

to the lenses. Our ties to a given region, a group of people, an ideology or a religion are the framework

through which we learn and interact with the world around us. Repetition, reinforcement, praise,
Sam Osborne – MATC 6

correction, pride and shame all connected to our actions and perceptions. Our cultures are as varied as

we are as individuals, and each interaction presents its own set of obstacles. Our similarities and

differences in skin-tone, language, location and culture have all played a part in our interactions of

peace and conflict.

Within our groups, we have stratified ourselves based on many of these same differences, or

simply due of the family we were born into; hereditary leadership, caste systems and slavery are prime

examples. Today, in the free world we use a system of economic stratification. The system of

economic stratification is a theoretically open system and crosses many cultural boundaries, both of

which are appealing qualities. Any person can, in theory, find economic success and therefore acquire

a certain amount of status for themselves, and create a legacy for their offspring to inherit. This

process seldom involves wanton consumption, and typically involves an incredible amount of work and

financial intelligence.

In addition to economics, we have used many methods for managing our human interactions,

and have believed in many reasons for the sound and fury of natural phenomena, and the bounty of the

earth, to many boons and to many ills. But, the one thing we have today that we have never had before

is contact with each other. Desired or not, we humans are almost completely in contact with each other.

We can know what is happening on the other side of the world within seconds of its happening, and we

can travel there in hours if so desired. Yet we are still divided along lines of culture and cultural bias,

each filling the field of interaction with our ethnocentric contributions and requests.

These contributions and requests have been historical sparks to conflict. European colonialism

and imperialism, the western expansion of the United States into Native American territory and

Mexico, the empire building of various Islamic Kaliphs, Rome, Macedonia, Persia, and ancient Sumer

under the leadership of Hamurabbi – just to name a few. These are all groups that brought their culture

to a new group of people, annexing the land and the people by coercion and force. Bringing forced
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violent assimilation at worst and peaceful pluralistic coexistence at best. Our contact with each other

gives us the opportunity to understand each other by interacting with each other openly and evenly.

Regardless of our differences, we are all people and we all live on the earth, where we share the

planet's resources and space. It's a good home, and for the time being, it's the only one we've got.

Over the course of the last 500 years, the world around us has gone from being our sacred

provider to being the planet on which we live, a wealth of resources for the taking. The separation of

science from the pursuits of spiritual experience has led to a material world ripe for understanding. The

side effect of this highly productive shift has been the loss of sacredness in our overall understanding of

nature. It's not that we didn't understand that trees grow from seeds 500 years ago, we've known that

for some time. The problem is that we don't seem to be thankful for it the way we were. We don't

have to be now, we just understand it as a given. It's nothing special. What was once a gift of the gods

or the God, or perhaps a matter of treasuring the natural systems and cycles, is now understood as a

specific set of circumstances which yield the same results time after time.

During the same 500 years that have removed the sacredness (and by implication, our respect)

from nature, our concept of its scope and size has grown to near infinite proportions. Even while

operating from the standpoint of biblical or divine sanction over the whole of nature, European

Christianity found itself opposed by groups of people who held more pantheistic, animistic and nature

based beliefs. Nature was a battleground and the domain of heathens, far from something to be

treasured. It was a sinful, fallen and broken world into which man was forced after his fall from grace

and subsequent expulsion from eden.

Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, Native American and all animistic and

nature based religions attribute some sacred aspect to nature; even Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The

European Christian view of mankind's utter dominance over nature is unique amongst religions.
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Though many individual christians may have a great reverence and love of nature, the overarching

themes and tenets of the faith have had little to do with the natural world. This is the setting that gave

birth to the split between rational empiricism and religion that led to our modern, western, scientific

world-view. It's not only that experimental science is not concerned with the sacred, but additionally,

neither was the christianity it rebelled against. The outcry for the sacred nature of nature was absent.

The pressure cooker of consumption really compounds these issues of culture and the

environment. With no inherent sacred qualities, there are few surface reasons to avoid exploitation of

the land. Within the context of ethnocentricity, there are few reasons to avoid the exploitation of

people outside a given ethnicity. In economic terms, what can be exploited (cheated of its full value)

costs less than what cannot, and decreasing the bottom line increases the profit margins. Economics

presents its own morality: frugality; one where success is measured in profitability and rewarded

accordingly. The economic stratification system is an open system, anyone can succeed, but at what

cost?

This is not as simple as returning to a gold standard, or a socialist revolution, or declaring an

eco-friendly theocracy – there's too much we can't agree about – but it's hard to deny that what we have

isn't very beneficial to the numerical majority, and we're doing an amount of harm to the planet itself in

the process which may severely damage our place on its surface.

The reality is that we, the United States of America, have a globally utilized, standardized

currency; a global economy based in credit and debt; plenty of ethnocentricity; we measure success by

the money that's made; and billions of people are involved in the game. Change isn't going to come

naturally to a widely participated in, self perpetuating system.

In “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization,” Thomas Greco Jr. proposes a fresh take
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on money and presents a possible solution to the problems of credit-based money. He proposes that the

control of the money itself lies with the producers of products and the system of for-profit banking is

replaced by a process of credit clearing (which is oddly similar to the way banks clear their finances

with each other). He sees alternative currencies as a step in the right direction and also as a move to

hamstring corporate interests by lessening their influence on the government. He has been involved

with alternative currency movements and points to the convenience and perceived necessity of national

currency to be the major reasons why alternative currencies fail. In situations where it is easier to

adopt an alternative, these currencies have thrived.

But, this doesn't solve the immediate problems of conscience, of doing the right things today. If

we are aware that the system we participate in has a tendency to harm as either a method or an

externality, we can avoid these aspects of the system. Much like the organic food movement moves

away from factory-style industrial food operations, we can move away from the exploitation of workers

and land with our wallets and our choices. Being a conscientious consumer is becoming increasingly

easy, a simple query in an internet search engine or an email can provide nearly instant, pertinent

answers to ethical dilemmas.

We can talk to our banks, familiarize ourselves with their investments, creditors and debtors –

and we can in turn avoid banking with those who support war, weapons of war, exploitation and

discrimination, either directly or indirectly. We can admonish for faults and plead for change from

providers of services and supplies we need or enjoy. With our power to communicate with each other

globally, we can share our experiences – both positive and negative – and learn about the how and why

we live the ways that we do. Most importantly we can look beyond the material in our quest for

personal satisfaction. We the individual can return nature to a sacred place, and regardless of our

individual views and beliefs, we can see the same sacred nature in each other. One doesn't have to

believe in God to treasure something.

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Victor LeBow believed in 1955 that the consumption based economy was capable of providing

a religious experience to the participants – at the very least it has required from us a religious

dedication in the observation of its rituals. The following quote is from an article by LeBow titled,

“Price Competition in 1955,” it was written for the Spring 1955 Journal of Retailing: “Our enormously

productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying

and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in

consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our

consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive

terms.”

If this is the underlying design to our economic system, then both religious and areligious alike

can find themselves participating. Whether you believe in heaven and hell, karma, the golden rule or

simple secular humanism, blindly participating in this religion of consumption isn't scoring you many

positive points: the system itself goes against many of our common values. Historically, the religions

of the world have bent their codes of conduct to the bequests of the rich and the powerful, yet the

religion of consumption doesn't need to be subverted – it is by design a religion that directly benefits

the rich and powerful. If we think of consumption as a religion with codes of conduct defined by

economics then participation in the cycle of work and spend comprises much of its ritual. In recent

history, participation is more or less mandatory – this is as much Marx's opiate of the masses as any

other religion. It's something to get lost in, not where happiness is found. Whereas historically

religions have attempted to ameliorate human suffering through codes of conduct and, or, promises of

paradise or nirvana, the religion of consumption deals only with the individual's material happiness.

Which begs the question, how much is enough?

We're going to run out of oil. Without serious changes in the way we grow and eat our food,
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we're going to run out of food. Fresh water is an incredibly limited resource, as populations increase so

rises the demand for fresh water – we're going to need smarter, more efficient ways of purifying,

storing, and transporting drinkable water, and sooner rather than later, we're going to need more of it.

There is no such thing as a free lunch – we're going to run out of the raw materials we need to fuel our

religious dedication to consumption.

It is time we set aside our differences and start dealing with our common, human problems. It is

time we recognize and discuss the problems inherent in our systems, and begin reconciling the past

with a better future. If we don't find a reason to respect nature, we're going to leave our children

nothing but debt and desolation. It is not too late, we still have some options left. We can find a

balance of enoughness if we can balance our present material needs with a dedication to forging a

better future – through conscientious, informed spending, reduced consumption and the realization that

life needs more definition than that which is acquired solely through material goods. What good is a

benefit that comes at the cost of the world or the future? Our material pursuits are grounded in ancient

principles of survival, however the world we live in today is not the same, and neither are the ways

with which we interact or how we share our environment. With all we know now, isn't it about time to

update the operating system?