How gift economies can help us come home again
Perhaps I was an anxious kid. I remember watching television shows and movies like Conan the Barbarian and The Princess Bride, set in a far-off time vaguely evocative of the Middle Ages, and worrying when the itinerant protagonists said they had no money. How would they eat? Where would they sleep? The characters trusted in the kindness of strangers and the fruits of the land, but I could not. I had learned you can’t survive without money, and I projected the felt precariousness of our time onto theirs.
The reality, I know now, is that our society is the outlier. Hospitality has an ancient pedigree all over the world. It’s a tenet of all the world’s major religions, still adhered to in many traditional cultures. The Yakut people, for example, when told by a Western visitor that people die of hunger in other parts of the world, refused to believe it, reasoning that one can always visit with a neighbor and share in a meal.1 Hospitality is part of the cultural inheritance of the United States too. But we’ve lost touch with those habits as more and more of what sustains us is obtained through buying and selling. As I explain in this post, these trends are part of a larger shift in our way of being, so fundamental that it usually escapes our notice.
I’ve already touched on the dramatic growth of the money realm, considering it as one important aspect of the self-interest-driven systems I called the mercenary world. I also introduced the idea of gift economies as an alternative to market exchange and issued an invitation to take a step into gift through the Hickory Rooted Project. Here I want to describe the priceless things we lose as markets expand, and consider the potential of gift economies to reconnect us to community.
This is all part of my effort to sketch the social counterpart to a rewilded Potomac River. As together we imagine a vibrant and healthy watershed, rich in diversity and suffused with innumerable relationships of mutuality, let us imagine the same for our human communities.
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A Subtle Poverty
The growth of the money realm leads, counter-intuitively, to a form of poverty. In the words of Charles Eisenstein, whose Sacred Economics contains the best treatment of these ideas I’ve encountered, we inhabitants of a highly monetized society suffer “a poverty of immeasurable things.”
As an illustration, imagine two diners in a restaurant. The first is recognized as they come in the door, welcomed, and shown to their favorite table. They chat with the waiter—How are the kids?—and share a laugh with another regular customer. The bartender knows their favorite drink, and insists this one’s on the house. Even though their favorite dish is no longer on the menu, for them the chef is happy to prepare it. Afterwards they linger a while, waiting for a rush to die down so they can catch up with the bartender and thank the chef in person. Feeling grateful, they leave a big tip.
Now imagine a second diner who has enrolled in the same restaurant’s “premium experience” program. For an annual fee, they get to skip the line and choose any open table. They’re guaranteed a complimentary drink, and a member profile informs the bartender what they like. They get access to a premium menu that showcases the chef’s talents. The wait staff know this diner is in the premium program, so they’re extra attentive and polite.
Even if both diners eat the same food, drink the same drinks, and hand over the same number of dollars, these two experiences feel very different. The first diner is nourished in ways the second is not. Perhaps we can describe the difference: The extra nourishment the first diner receives has to do with connection and belonging, ease and authenticity. But we cannot measure the difference, at least not with sufficient standardization and precision for science and the market. The special qualities that distinguish the first diner’s experience defy our attempts to quantify, predict, and control.
You’ve probably had experiences like the first diner’s in your own life, where you engaged in a market transaction that wasn’t only a market transaction. This kind of experience can provoke a range of emotions for those of us raised in a highly marketized society, accustomed to the anonymity and independence that characterize pure market transactions. But we also recognize a certain status in “knowing someone here” or “having a personal connection.” The status such relationships confer grows as connection and belonging become scarcer.
The restaurant example is just one instance of a dynamic that plays out continually in our lives. To the extent we meet our needs through pure market transactions, we may gain in efficiency and convenience, but we lose out on the connection and belonging that is reinforced each time we borrow a tool from a neighbor, share a potluck dinner, or help friends paint their house—each time we meet needs through community. When we meet needs through the market instead, even if we have all the goods and services we want, we don’t satisfy, in Wendell Berry’s words, the “need to need one another.”
The restaurant example also makes clear, I hope, that the connection and belonging that inheres uniquely in the first diner’s experience cannot be purchased. Indeed, as soon as we attempt to buy and sell this type of nourishment, we convert it into something different, counterfeit.
Community, by its nature, is priceless. And so is everything else that makes life worth living. Beauty. Family. Friendship. Wild nature. Joy. Play. Wisdom. Ease. Meaning. Love. All evade quantification. If we attempt to bring them within the market, we change them, shortchange them, or both. And the growth of the market realm has made them all scarce.
The empire of money
It may seem intuitive that the market and the priceless could co-exist, or even support one another. After all, advertising bathes us in the message that consumption of goods and services also makes us happy. Can’t we have more of both? Why should economic growth degrade our quality of life?
The answer is that market transactions invite us into a distinctive way of perceiving and relating. Sociologists have repeatedly observed that money and markets weaken community-oriented norms. In one study, a group of people paid a commission collected less money for charity than another group that received only a motivational speech. In another, introduction of a fine for late pickups at a day care increased the rate at which parents arrived late. In both these cases (and others), introducing money “crowd[ed] out moral and civic commitments,” according to the philosopher Michael Sandel.2
So how does this happen? One way of answering the question is to observe that markets atomize, separating us from one another. A market transaction leaves the participants “even.” No one is indebted to anyone else, so they have no enduring connection either. Not only that: a market transaction is one in which we look out for ourselves, one which invites us to view our interests as in competition with those of the person or entity with whom we transact. The (often implicit) negotiation is zero-sum: If I pay more, I lose and they win. And vice-versa.
The atomization and orientation to self-interest produced by the market lead in turn to the scarcity of priceless things. Because without cooperation and generosity—without mutuality—any social phenomenon that cannot be purchased (or compelled) withers.
While it is possible to engage in market transactions within a context of relationship, the transactions don’t contribute to the relationship. In this sense, as James Scott observes, markets are “parasitic” on social trust: They require it, but they draw us into ways of being that do not replenish it.3 This is in contrast with the dynamics of a gift economy, which I’ll say more about below. Money transactions may even weaken a relationship. Imagine charging your kids for their dinner, or paying rent to your spouse. Some families may do these things, but with time regular money transactions will make a family more like housemates than intimates. As Louis Hyde puts it, money transactions “will either be missing or frowned upon to the extent that the group thinks of itself as one body.”4
At a deeper level, market transactions are rooted in, and reinforce, a distinctive way of attending to the world. When we inhabit a market mindset, we draw upon the analytic, reductionist, and instrumentalist mind that Iain McGilchrist describes at length in The Master and His Emissary. We tend to see the elements of the world around us as objects, not subjects, and to evaluate them in terms of their utility to us. “Whatever lies in the realm of the implicit, or depends on flexibility, whatever can’t be brought into focus and fixed, ceases to exist . . . .”5 Under the sway of this way of thinking, we reduce priceless things to utility, or deny them entirely. And so we lose sight of what we have lost.
It would be one thing if markets and their associated attitudes could be kept in their place, employed where they are useful but prevented from expanding into other areas of life and society. Alas, the money economy is, in Michael Sandel’s words, an “imperial domain.”6 The realm of money must grow, converting more of what we formerly received from nature into goods, and more of what we received from community into services.7 And so the money realm colonizes more and more of the world—which, after all, is finite. Each of us has only so much time, attention, and need. And the Earth has only so much land, life, and wildness. The more we measure, quantify, buy, and sell, the less remains of the priceless.
The glimmer of mutuality
It sounds bleak I know. So much has been lost, and the money realm continues to expand. But other ways of being are available to us. By meeting our needs differently, we can attend to the world differently. What Ivan Illich calls “the glimmer of mutuality” is available through an alternative mode of economic organization that few recognize as the potent form of resistance it is: gift.
It won’t surprise me if my invocation of gift leaves you cold. For much of my life, I viewed gift giving as an idiosyncratic, even frivolous custom. I was deeply skeptical of the suggestion that it could be an important organizing principle for our collective lives. Now I think it can be just that. And I view my skepticism of gift (which on some level I still carry) more as a reminder of how far we’ve strayed from gift culture.
It’s worth clarifying that when I say gift, I don’t mean barter. As David Graeber tragi-comically explains in Debt: The First 5000 Years, the “myth of barter” runs deep, especially among economists. According to that ahistorical view, barter was the predominant form of economic organization before money. In other words, humans have always met their needs through arms-length market transactions, and money just made those transactions a lot more convenient. Except, as Graeber documents, it didn’t happen that way. In actual fact, before money, economies were predominantly organized around relationship, reciprocity, and gift.
It’s no surprise that modern economists, steeped in market logic, anachronistically project barter backwards onto traditional cultures. Because barter is just a market transaction without money. In barter, the price I charge for corn may be expressed in fish or blankets, but I still demand payment in exchange. A gift, by contrast, is not conditioned on receiving in return. In Louis Hyde’s memorable phrase, we give gifts “around the corner.”
Functional gift economies and vibrant gift cultures require more than just the giving of gifts, however. They also require that others be open to receiving, unafraid of the indebtedness that inheres in receiving a gift. Only when we fully acknowledge receipt of a gift, “only so long as the debt is felt,”8 do we feel gratitude and the corresponding desire to give in return.
As I mentioned above, I now think my experiences with gift giving are a sign of how far we’ve moved away from gift culture. I find the gift-giving traditions I was raised in, like at birthdays and at Christmas, somewhat stressful. I often fail in those situations to tap into a genuine desire to give, and I end up giving out of a sense of obligation instead. I think this tendency is related to the difficulty of appreciating gift’s deeper logic, because that logic conflicts with the primary messages we receive from society—that we succeed or fail as individuals, and ultimately need to look out for ourselves.
Another reason gift giving can be challenging is that it’s hard to consummate the desire to give well and generously in a highly marketized society. Part of that desire, when I feel it, is wanting to put something of myself into the gift. But how do I do that when I know people could simply buy what I’m giving? Likewise, to give well and generously means meeting a need. Yet giving in our culture often means buying more consumer goods for people who have a lot already. There is unmet need all around us, but our gifts largely fail to meet it. Until we reconnect gifts with needs, gift giving will feel blind to context, even frivolous.
My experiences of not giving tell me something about our culture too. I’ve lived a lot of my life in cities, and I’ve had countless experiences of encountering panhandlers on the street . . . and continuing on past. Those situations always made me feel vaguely guilty, but also fearful and hopeless in the face of what seemed like bottomless need. My despair in those situations is a product of the intuitions of our highly marketized society, born of systems that both assume scarcity and enact it, and that invite us to see ourselves as separate from those around us, our interests in conflict with others’ wellbeing.
Gifts resonate with a different set of intuitions. That there is enough for all. Gifts naturally move toward the empty place and enable the meeting of needs without the necessity of taking from anyone. That my wellbeing is inseparable from yours. Gifts not only invite us to give attention to the needs of others, they connect us with others until the distinction between others’ needs and our own softens. That the gift is to the giver. Gifts attune us to the satisfaction and fulfillment born of giving to good purpose. That life is a gift. Gifts teach us that we do not engineer our wellbeing; we receive it. We are not “even” with the world that sustains us; we are in its debt. And by that realization we access gratitude. That the world is a community of subjects. By orienting us to the needs of others, and disabusing us of the notion that we can or must engineer our individual wellbeing, gifts help us treat others as ends in themselves.
Stepping into gift
In Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein distills all of this into a simple prescription: Grow the community, not the economy. Because meeting needs through gift offers a path to both material abundance and more of the priceless things that make life worth living, including a thriving Potomac River.
That’s the inspiration for the Hickory Rooted Project, our experiment in building a gift economy that roots us in land and community. But Hickory Rooted is just one of countless ways to step into gift. All it takes is giving attention to what you receive. And noticing when you want to give.
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