Enough Is Enough

From Menletter June 2006

By Tim Baehr

In Daniel Quinn's The Story of B, most of society's ills are traced back 10,000 years to the development of a particular form of agriculture. Somewhere in the Middle East, a group of humans discovered that they could farm intensively enough to create huge surpluses. For the first time in hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, it seemed that hunger had been conquered and that our survival would be much easier.

Quinn calls this new farming method "totalitarian agriculture" because its vast surpluses needed to be managed. Cities and central governments evolved, and their power grew. There was an exponential population explosion, eventual food shortages and famine. Laws were written, and the concept of crime was established, along with a view of humans as essentially flawed. Perceived human frailty led to salvationist religions that tried to convert or impose their orthodoxies on others - by waging war if necessary. Intensive agriculture required land, and territorial wars became common (and continue today), often with the expanded goal of wiping out the culture of the vanquished peoples and replacing it with the culture of the victors.

Quinn claims that the smaller, more modest tribal societies that preceded the so-called agricultural revolution had evolved a sane, sustainable life in which humans were ecologically integrated into the rest of terrestrial life. Everything was local. Laws were not written down because everyone understood how to behave for the good of the community. Although some people might behave badly, they did not look on each other as good or evil. Wars between neighboring tribes were sporadic, small-scale skirmishes not intended to wipe out an enemy but to send a message: "We're here, we're strong, don't mess with us."

The cure for today's ills, according to Quinn, is not some new program or system but a gradual changing of people's hearts and minds. He advocates a kind of new tribalism but doesn't articulate in detail what it is or how to get there. Quinn's philosophy, couched in his story of a parish priest's personal journey and involvement in a murder mystery, is a good read; but it is not exactly a blueprint for social change.

Needs and Wants

Absent some external force, any life form will succeed and thrive if it manages to fulfill its needs. Although Quinn doesn't say so explicitly, I think his basic message can be characterized very simply: By figuring out how to create food surpluses, our ancestors stumbled upon a way to erase the distinction between needs and wants. For the first time in the history of the planet, one of its life forms no longer had to survive by fulfilling its needs.

Need fulfillment is self-limiting. When an organism has enough shelter, it stops looking for it. When an organism has enough to eat, it stops eating. Among humans, a hunter stops hunting, a gatherer stops gathering, a farmer harvests the crops and plans for the next planting. Enough is, literally, enough.

Want fulfillment has no limits. Once we figured out how to create and store surpluses, once we had more than we needed, we were free to discover and pursue our wants. What could we possibly want? Everything, and more of it. There is never enough.

Wanting stuff is not necessarily a bad thing. It's nice to have things that make us happy and more comfortable, things that are beautiful or give us pleasure. This may be what distinguishes humans from other life forms. The danger is in confusing our needs and our wants. If we cannot keep this distinction in mind, we risk isolating and alienating ourselves from the rest of the planet - perhaps from the rest of the universe.

The Alien Invasion

Philosophers and theologians have encouraged us humans to be either the conquerors or the stewards of the natural world. We are deemed unique, if not superior; and as either conquerors or stewards, we engage in a hubris that sets us apart from all other life forms. The subsequent damage to our planet - pollution, stripping of resources, killing off of whole species - is obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is our growing loneliness as we exile ourselves from an intertwined, interdependent web of life that, if we manage to kill ourselves off, will get along fine without us.

By alienating ourselves from the rest of our planet's life, we have become as much aliens as if we had invaded the planet from another galaxy. We have come to conquer and destroy (or conquer and then manage what we have acquired). We are an expeditionary force and not a group of immigrants hoping to fit into an adopted culture.

We can’t blame any person or group of people for what has happened over the past ten millennia. But one unintended consequence is the division of human society into haves and have-nots. The irony of our alien invasion, based as it is on a major breakthrough in food production, is that huge portions of our human population live in abject poverty at the edge, or beyond the edge, of starvation. Having figured out how to pursue our wants, the citizens of the First World have managed to deprive much of the Third World of its needs.

Awareness

I think Quinn is right when he says that no reform program will heal the rift between humans and the rest of the planet. Programs grow out of what is in people's hearts and minds. There was no rule book that we had to follow to fulfill the agricultural revolution - or the Industrial Revolution, for that matter. Conditions coalesced that fostered a mind change, and an increased awareness of the need for that kind of change may be what we have to look for to turn things around now.

Awareness is growing. In the past decade or so, many people have become more aware of dangers to our continued existence on this planet. Pollution has increased. Wars have become more deadly, and more nations are seeking membership in the nuclear "club." Famines have not been eradicated, even as we find more efficient ways to produce food. The human population is still growing exponentially, along with an ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

The awareness of our plight has led to some new programs: the conservation movement; slightly more fuel-efficient cars; symposia, summits, and other institutionalized hand-wringing about global warming and Third-World economics; and so on. These are feeble attempts at best. It's frustrating to see our planet and its people in danger of annihilation and see how powerless we are to act effectively against the juggernaut.

Maybe the most we can hope for is that the awareness will lead to . . . awareness. I'm not trying to be cute here. If awareness becomes deeper and more widespread, there is a chance that people who have a choice between needs and wants will become more aware of their choices and the consequences of those choices.

Large changes cannot be legislated. No government is large or pure-hearted enough, and no police force is strong or brutal enough, to create a large, long-lasting change that is global in scope. But conditions may be right, or moving in the right direction, and coalescing into something that might change human society and its relationship with the planet.

Self-Interest

However much we may become aware of how bad things are becoming, I think it's foolish to hope that the bulk of our population will begin to make new choices based on some far-off long-term benefit to the planet. Humans may have some altruistic tendencies, but I doubt that altruism can become so widespread as to effect major change.

What will change our collective mind? What will appeal enough to our short-term self-interest that will lead us to behave more like members of our planet's life system and less like invading aliens?

Some ideas:

● We want to be happy, and we tend to do things that make us happy.

● Not fulfilling our needs can make us unhappy. We get cold and hungry. We feel unsafe.

● We have, for many millennia, confused our wants as needs. We have pursued our wants as if they were needs - as if the wants were crucial to our survival. And when our wants are unmet, we are as unhappy as if our needs are unmet.

● We are becoming more and more aware that fulfilling our wants has not made us happy anyway. There is always something more to want, and we are always unfulfilled.

● As we become increasingly unhappy with our lives, we may start making a clearer distinction between our wants and needs.

● If we can identify our wants and separate them from our needs, then we can be happy with what wants we can fulfill and not be devastated by what we don't get.

● By being happy with what we get, we may be able to decide that whatever wants we fulfill will be enough.

● Having broken the unhappy cycle of unfilled wants, we may want less, be happier, and live a more modest, planet-friendly life in the bargain. Because more resources will be generally available, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will become narrower.

● Over the next 10,000 years - maybe sooner - human existence will become more satisfying, more egalitarian, more simple. All without a massive program, government legislation and enforcement, and so on.

Practical Matters

How would all of this look in the short term - within our lifetimes?

We could make more conscious decisions about how we lead our lives. We could choose to acquire things beyond our needs with an eye to long-term satisfaction and not how we stack up against other people or how well we meet some advertisers' image of how life should be. We could see the virtues of modesty and ignore the blandishments of government-supported attempts to increase consumption and enrich large corporations under the fiction that we're improving the national economy.

For some of us with means, we (I'm using "we" very loosely here!) could still end up in a large house with a pool and a huge media room, a household staff, lots of fancy clothes, meals at four-star restaurants, and a couple of Hummers and Lincoln Navigators in the garage. At least the choices will be conscious. We'll look for usefulness. We'll look for value. We'll look for beauty. We'll try to make choices that lead to long-term satisfaction. And we might even stop acquiring new things long enough to enjoy what we have.

For most of us, our lives may involve a home just the right size with a nice stereo and TV, clothes that look really good on us, good food prepared at home or at neighborhood restaurants, and one or two good used cars. Our choices will be conscious. We'll look for usefulness. We'll look for value. We'll look for beauty. We'll try to make choices that lead to long-term satisfaction. We'll have time to enjoy what we have.

In any case, we will have discovered that enough is, indeed, enough. Whatever we have, we'll have time to enjoy it. We may even have enough resources left over to share with others less fortunate, who don't yet have the choice between needs and wants.

Wants will not be eliminated. Needs and wants will be in harmony. We'll be leading the good life.