Because I play guitar and often - or at least, too often for my wife - buy guitar-related things, I get several catalogs from music retailers. Basically, you buy one thing from these companies and you’re on their mailing list forever, as they hope you buy some more.
Generally I do, but I run up against a problem. My capacity as a guitar player is limited, to say the least. I’m really not a good enough player to justify that $1,500 12-string Rickenbacker I’d love love love to have. One of these days I’m going to buy a decent tube amp, but not until the kids are older and I can turn things up in the basement once again; the amp I have now is fine for the occasional gigs I play with my band, and includes the feature I need most in an amp: I can spill beer on it and it still works.
And I’ve got all the pedals and microphones and everything else I need to do whatever it is I do. So the catalogs are really superfluous - they sit in our bathrooms and I’ll always leaf through them, looking with gear lust upon this guitar or that set of drums. But really - and this is a strange conclusion to come to after years of buying this and that - I don’t need any of these things. I have enough.
“Enough” is a difficult concept to grasp. Both personally and culturally. Personally, the acquisition of stuff remains the major pasttime for most of us. Which leads to its cultural significance; our economy has become so dependent upon retail sales that you’ll remember, in the aftermath of September 11, the Leader implored us to go shopping. And we did, mostly; and our expenditures creates these profits and those wages and we rolled on; the concept of “enough” was anathema. There was only the philosophy of more. More is growth, more is prosperity.
But can there always be more? And should there always be?
Bill McKibben had a lengthy but fascinating piece in Mother Jones a few months back, based on his book Deep Economy, in which he argues that the concept or the value of more undoubtedly had immesurable benefits for humanity and this country specifically over the course of the past two centuries, but - as I find myself so often saying on this site - what once made us strong now makes us weak.
Because more obviously carries with it a price tag; not just a personal price tag, in terms of maxed-out credit cards or adjustable-rate mortgages that become unmanageable once the terms are, er, adjusted. Rather, writes McKibben, there are environmental costs, both in terms of global warming and peak oil. Consider the implications not just of our own prosperity but that of the countries that seek to emulate us - like China:
Given current rates of growth in the Chinese economy, the 1.3 billion residents of that nation alone will, by 2031, be about as rich as we are. If they then eat meat, milk, and eggs at the rate that we do, calculates ecostatistician Lester Brown, they will consume 1,352 million tons of grain each year—equal to two-thirds of the world’s entire 2004 grain harvest. They will use 99 million barrels of oil a day, 15 million more than the entire world consumes at present. They will use more steel than all the West combined, double the world’s production of paper, and drive 1.1 billion cars—1.5 times as many as the current world total. And that’s just China; by then, India will have a bigger population, and its economy is growing almost as fast. And then there’s the rest of the world.
And the concept of more, of ever-expanding growth also extracts social costs, suggests McKibben. Affluence, or maybe this false idea that things create happiness, once you get past a certain point where it indeed can make lives richer, begins instead to make them poorer. Affluence, McKibben argues, has led to our current state of social isolation; where model new homes can forego family rooms but feature “closed-door” Internet cubicles for family members, where affluence permits individuals to sever the ties to community that once were necessary for survival, but no longer are because we’ve got the money to supplement the people.
It’s a compelling argument and one that runs parallel to something Kunstler says on a regular basis, which is that all of this, all this more, is unsustainable and may very shortly prove itself to be unsustainable; and what then? A downsizing, both agree; the era of industrialized agriculture, for example, may need to give way to decentralization, out of one farm the many. Which perhaps is an argument for farm preservation, a program which I’m not too big a fan of; but if there were to come a time when the average citizen, out of necessity, becomes more dependent upon local agriculture, we may all be glad to live in Lancaster County, if there are any farms left.
This sort of downsizing may require an attendant downsizing in our national ambitions, as well. Not just in terms of you living in a 4,000 square foot house now and wanting to live in a 5,000 square foot house; but rather our nation’s ambitions on the global stage; when wars in Iran and Iraq become unsustainable for us - perhaps for anyone. A downsizing of our sense of global manifest destiny. I don’t know if the American psyche can handle that.
I don’t know if the American psyche can ever reject the notion of “more.” I suspect that’s one reason for our current “Great Awakening,” in that faith may challenge the notion that more automatically equals better, at least in this society. But in that our economy is entirely predicated on the concept of more, were Americans on the whole to reject the notion it could hasten whatever downfall is to come anyway. And thus policy, rather than being used to buttress the idea of more, would be better used butressing the idea of sustainability; the idea of enough.
As I said, I don’t know that Americans would buy into this. It’s too easily demagogued; think, again, Jimmy Carter in the sweater. Long-term sustainability - having enough, rather than the ceaseless more - will indeed require sacrifice, though McKibbin, Kunstler, John K. Galbraith and others suggest that the sacrifice is going to be necessary anyway, and we’re better off meeting it on our, rather than its, terms.
