The first time I heard the idea of a “money story” was during AmeriCorps orientation. Sitting beside a couple hundred young twentysomethings preparing to spend a year on a limited budget and a commitment to intentional living, a dynamic young woman pastor told us her money story and urged us to think about our own.

Of course, most of us were coming from a money story that allowed us to spend a year living on a stipend. I can’t say how others thought about that, but I can say that while the language of a “money story” was new for me, the experience of living on a stipend was extremely clarifying — especially in contrast to the money experiences I’d had (not all of them easy) growing up in the suburbs or attending a famous college.

Some of the most clarifying parts of the experience were when my unconscious notions of scarcity and abundance were challenged. The more I looked around, the more I began to see that I’d had access to more money and opportunity in some ways than the people I was then living among, and yet I’d also had less freedom in other ways. Conversely, I found I could have more fun and meaningful time with people with very little money. I also saw grown-ups barter and trade with each other, which was almost totally foreign to my experience.

One of the funny things about being a volunteer in a small community is that people tend to give the volunteers things, and many of the most meaningful experiences I had that year were free to me thanks to the generosity of others (many of whom didn’t have very much by the standards of the Boston suburbs).

After several months of being showered with such generosity, I came to understand that I did not want to live that way forever: sooner or later, I was going to have to take responsibility for the opportunities I’d had in the first 22 years of my life. But I also understood that I’d never be able to repay the generosity I’d been shown, and so part of taking responsibility for my independence would have to do with creating opportunities for other people in the same spirit of generosity I’d been shown.

What that means changes from day to day and context to context. But I always try to have the conversation with myself about opportunities taken and opportunities created, and whether the money story I’m telling or living at any given time honors the generosity that shaped my life.

In order to do “economics as if people mattered” (E. F. Schumacher), we had better start at least one step upstream of people: with nature.

Whatever words you want to put around the processes — extraction, production, value-adding, etc. — the inescapable fact is that economics, especially in the sense of property or real goods, is about people taking what they find in creation and doing something with or to it that they consider valuable.

(This suggests another question further upstream, as to where creation comes from and what responsibilities might inhere in the giving and receiving, but that’s a topic for another day.)

For now, let’s focus on a few assertions about nature the way nature works that might help us think about how we work with nature:

• Nature is almost unimaginably varied, complex, and interconnected. The ancient metaphor of the web is a good one; from a spider’s-eye view, it’s impossible to see the results of our actions in one corner of the web in their full expression in other corners.
• Nature abhors a monoculture. Industry likes to scale sameness: the bigger and samer, the better. Nature never does that. Instead, it produces infinite imperfect copies, usually with great respect for the particularity of place. Nature doesn’t grow all apples exactly the same size and weight by choice; it’s only as a result of industrial culture that we might see that as “natural” at the grocery store.
• Nature is resilient — within very exacting tolerances. Sometimes limits can be transgressed: a drought hits the land, or a person lifts a car. But resiliency implies an allowance for recovery. If you lifted a car, you can bet you’d be pretty sore and tired after the adrenaline wore off.
• Just because we can’t precisely see, feel, or measure a limit does not mean that no limit exists. In fact, those might be the severest limits of all.

To take another classical idea, each science (or discipline, in the modern sense) was fitted to a proper sphere.

Ethics was the science of the sphere of habit (ethos), and specifically the habits that form our characters. Our word “economy,” in contrast, comes from the Greek oikonomia, or the governance (use) of the things of the household, or oikos, which could variously mean family, home, and property.

I’ve always found it helpful to think of economics in terms of how we manage families, homes, and property, rather than specifically how we manage (or make) money, goods, and services in “the economy” of the colloquial sense.

Beginning from families and households rather than abstractions like GDP or supply-and-demand graphs helps me keep the fundamentally human element of economics more firmly in mind. After all, other creatures don’t really have economies in the way people do — certainly not at the scale that could shape the destiny of the planet.

And so, as we proceed — here and in daily life — let’s try to begin from the idea of “economics as if people mattered,” in E. F. Schumacher’s words.

To begin a new month’s investigation of a new topic, it’s important to begin again from first principles.

Again, the thread of the first three months of this year is to interrogate the topics of ethics, economics, and politics — in that order.

That scaffolding comes from the classical Greek tradition, in which thinkers like Aristotle determined that human nature was to live together, and that living together in society required that people learn to “rule” (or govern) first themselves, then their households, then their polity.

That sequence makes intuitive sense. If we truly are social by nature, then our fates are somehow bound together. And if our fates are bound together, then our adequacy to the progressively greater tasks of governing ourselves, our homes (and resources), and our communities will have progressively greater effects on the fate of society.

For if we cannot govern ourselves, we might harm another in word or deed. But if we cannot govern our money or politics — or if people who cannot govern themselves nonetheless control great wealth and power — the effects quickly and clearly scale to the level of the polis and perhaps beyond.

And so, let’s begin.

For this last post of a month focused on ethics, it feels appropriate to conclude with an assertion that how we confront our history — as individuals, and as inheritors and influencers of culture — is a profoundly important ethical question.

Though there are surely longer and more complex academic treatments of the ethics of history, today I simply want to juxtapose Gary Clark Jr’s recent single, “This Land,” with a few lines from Wendell Berry’s essay “Still Standing” (1999).

Evaluating the merits of the introduction to 1930’s I’ll Take My Stand — of whose 12 authors many were sometime racists and one remained unreformed until his last breath — “Are we going to disown our forebears entirely because partly they were sinners? (Are we willing to stand judgment before our own descendants on the same terms?)”

Ethics are complex because people, history, and ideas are complex. Seeing the value in a committed racist’s idea about something other than race should give us pause.

But reappropriation is part of the game, and that’s where Gary Clark Jr’s visceral music video shows what art can do to weave the sins of the past and the situation of the present into a single complicated garment.

Like “Let America be America Again,” it’s a brave statement about our common, complex inheritance of a land, a culture, and a dream. Thank goodness that artists, philosophers, and poets still raise their voices from time to time to insist that all of that belongs to all of us.

We are none of us innocent of the past, nor will any of us be held blameless by the future. If we live such that the citizens of the future might say we knew our past and learned from it, that might be enough.

***

H/t to Texas Monthly for highlighting and praising Clark’s work.

At an event a couple of nights ago, I heard a handful of smart people make a bunch of none-too-sophisticated arguments about the state of society and democracy.

“It’s 1930s Germany!” said one.

“It’s industrial-age Britain,” countered another.

“Change is happening faster and faster,” offered the third.

“It’s not so bad — data and markets will win out,” concluded the fourth. (Over both idiocy and democracy, if I understood the argument correctly … an outcome that might be worse than the other two by quite a ways.)

I’d been looking forward to the event and left frustrated. We all know better, and we ought to act better, too.

Everyone argues in metaphors and comparisons, and that’s not about to stop. (I don’t wish that, either — if I couldn’t use metaphor, I couldn’t write!) But we can be responsible speakers and listeners by simply demanding not better facts but better comparisons.

In honor of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, who developed this framework in Thinking in Time, let me urge that we don’t offer or accept a comparison that doesn’t come with a clear statement of the specific likenesses and differences intended in the comparison.

Better yet, we could also demand to know what’s known, unknown, and presumed in the data from which the argument is constructed.

If we can’t ask — or an author or speaker can’t answer — these deceptively simple questions, treat the argument as an emotional opinion rather than a solid, fact-based comparison.

Deliberate misinformation is indeed a problem. But 90 minutes of shoddy comparisons made and (apparently) accepted by people who think they’re smarter than that isn’t much of a step on the road to truth.

Who’s responsible for making better choices?

Institutions — companies, governments, organizations, even the culture — have enormous power to shape the context in which everyone else operates. That’s why it’s important that founders, managers, and doers at that scale have their ethics as squared away as possible before they take on their big role.

And, since we can’t always trust that that’s going to be true (you never know when a social network for spotting hot girls on campus will suddenly scale to a few billion members), it’s also worth creating a sensible, pro-social regulatory regime to ensure that creative genius (which is necessarily unpredictable) is channeled in directions that don’t harm society.

But none of this is to let any of us completely off the hook, either. We might wish there were better social networks on offer, but we have quite a bit of choice about how and how much we choose to engage with those we’ve got.

Of course some will object that companies ought to be better, or that consumer education is an oxymoron. Maybe so. But we have the corporations our culture has incentivized, permitted, or at least tolerated. And they’re undeniably powerful: economically, politically, socially, and psychologically.

But there’s always a choice. The networks’ power is largely dependent on the permission we give them by opting into the deal they’re offering: membership only costs privacy, attention, and trust.

You might “have” to sign up, for whatever reason. But you never have to spend hours a day on there.

As long as we keep paying attention, why should we expect them to change?

***

Time capsule: This is the 100th post I’ve made on Noticings. Except for several days’ break around Thanksgiving, I’ve kept my promise to myself that I’d publish every day.

A few things I think I’ve learned:

• Three months can make a pretty strong habit.
• If you want to start a new habit, it’s worth thinking through what it’s for and how best to design for that. For example, I called this site Noticings since I wanted to start paying closer attention to my daily life, and I thought that looking for the spark of a blog post in each day might help with that. It has.
• It’s changed how I think about “good enough.” My first several blogs were very occasional and invariably waaaay too long. That’s what happens when you try to do three months’ worth of noticing in one giant post. In 100 daily posts, I’ve found the discipline of everyday practice, the subtler satisfaction of covering all I want to cover by treating just one item each day, and the freedom to accept when enough is enough for one day.
• This habit has helped create other good habits, such as much more consistent (and also much shorter) daily journaling and a (deeply imperfect) mindfulness practice.
• Even though I’m admittedly still mostly in the cat blog stage (i.e. blog-as-diary), clicking the “publish” button every day is really different from journaling for myself. And I’m OK with investing several months in playing with the form, topics, and voice before trying to reach more people.

By now, the story of Enron’s corporate ethic is well known: the company chiseled its values into the stone walls of its lobby, and employees walked past those words morning and night until the day the company failed.

That’s why we begin with ethics: until you’re clear on them, you can’t proceed to economics, politics, or beyond — and being clear on your ethics is never as simple as choosing the words (even if you carve them in stone).

Aristotle taught this way. The Buddha taught this way. Most of our great teachers, ancient and modern, teach this way: before fixing your neighbor — or your bank account, or your representatives — ensure you have removed the log from your own eye.

Ethics themselves are actions more than words, and (as Aristotle well knew) habits even more than actions.

What principles have you (or should you) write down?

Which ones might you be walking past every day?

Nature abhors a monoculture.

Planting and harvesting the same crop, year after year, exhausts the soil. Yet the industrialists keep doing it — first because they can (with the help of chemicals and money to suspend the laws of nature for a little while), and second because it’s what they know how to do.

They themselves have become a monoculture: when industrial farming is made to be the only economically viable option, everyone eats Monsanto.

Mass culture is the same way. Whether you’re buying the same ironically “alternative” fast fashion as everyone else or pinning all your hopes on the next presidential election, you’re looking for nourishment from “Food”®, not real food.

Presidents don’t fill potholes. They don’t take out the trash. And they don’t know (or care) all that much about the specifics of you and your place.

They can’t — and that’s not really what they’re for, anyway. Leaders can set the tone, choose the issues, and frame the debate, and all of that matters immensely.

But think very, very carefully before trying to scale what’s unique and cool about your neck of the woods to become everyone’s monoculture.

When you deplore them and they abhor you, nobody wins.

This past week, news came out that a student posted a picture of herself doing something extremely insensitive on a social network.

The president’s office shared the news with a university-wide email condemning the behavior and promising a thorough investigation and appropriate discipline for any and all violations of policy.

Personally, I can’t think of a good excuse for what the student was doing, and I certainly can’t think of a good reason to post a picture of oneself demonstrating such poor and offensive judgement.

But I also can’t help thinking, Where are her parents? I don’t know anything about the student or her family, and I’m not asking. What I am asking is why such bad behavior should be seen and punished as a violation of university policy.

Specifically, what chain of events or ideas led to this behavior, who was harmed, and how likely is it that university discipline will re-establish right relationship between the student and herself, her peers, or society?

I can’t help wondering why we expect universities to act en loco parentis (or police?) in this way, and whether that’s really serving anybody other than the PR people.

Of course it’s wrong and embarrassing. Of course it’s bad press.

Investigations and discipline might get us through this unpleasant moment in the spotlight, but I wonder if they’ll really help us make the most of an especially painful — and hence valuable — teachable moment.