Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Three

Bob Fiske

Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Three

CLICK HERE to go to Part Two.

Engines of Reciprocity.  The value of reciprocity is deeply embedded in our culture and our thinking.  I think we are well aware how intrinsic the engines of marketing and the engines of advertising are to the methods of conducting business on a daily basis. 

The actors in these sectors are hard at work dreaming up new and better ways to promote the idea that your giving away something of value (your money, your credit) will result in an even better return to you.  We need look no further than the advertising in print media, broadcast media, billboards and the Internet to appreciate how omnipresent this “value of exchange” is, and how actively it is being promoted.

Apparently promoting reciprocity—the good deal—works because tons of people respond to Black Friday mania, convert cash to precious metals (or vice versa), own over-priced and over-designed technology, etc., etc, etc.

The Crack in the Fishbowl.  But let’s remember that reciprocity is so ever-present, so woven into our lives that it is like water to fish. We swim in it, just a bunch of fish in a fishbowl.  Strangely, more and more folks are starting to notice the crack in the fishbowl.  They are becoming aware of, and are questioning, reciprocity.

There isn’t so much to go around anymore, and the efforts of the big, the rich or the powerful to keep their tubs full is starting to draw attention—and stimulate outrage.  That is understandable.  The deep value of reciprocity pretty much mandates that we keep our senses tuned to the frequency of detecting “unfair exchanges”.  More and more fish in the school are starting click and clack in distress.

But that is not the end of the story, as I recently recognized.  The imbalances in our society may be a good thing, insofar as they lead us to notice, question, and replace the deep, unquestioned value of reciprocity.

Recapitulation.  We have all been conditioned, not just to strive for payoff, but to hold out for the good deal.  Here are some examples.

I’m going to drag myself out of bed the day after Thanksgiving, and IN RETURN you’re going to give me half-off on all the Christmas presents I need to buy.  Or, I’m going to give four years of my life to this university and accept a debt to lenders, and IN RETURN you’re going to set me up for life.  Or, I’m going to give you all the labor hours I can, and IN RETURN, you’re going to assure me and my family of a secure life.  Or, I’m going to shop at your supermarket, and IN RETURN you’re going to print a number on my receipt that shows me how much I’ve saved (to make me forget how much I spent).  Or, I’m going to give you my vote, and IN RETURN you’re going to give me some promises.

The Hidden Debt.  The good deal is hard to resist.  Even knowing what I do, I will still choose the gas station that has $3.57/gallon over the one that has $3.59/gallon, as if it really matters!

What we are not told (or choose to forget) is that nobody in the United States pays the true cost for anything.  We are taking from Third World labor, irresponsibly mined resources, and the health of the planet without giving back to repay the debt.  The costs have been mounting for two centuries, at least, and the debt that Western civilization has been accruing is knocking at the door.  Reciprocity is a lie because the true costs have been hidden.

This question of unacknowledged debt is key.  Which brings me to my second proposition.  If you take something from someone or somewhere and do not return a fair share, you are a criminal.

We are all criminals because for two centuries we have been taking from the earth (our ultimate bank) and have not replenished what she has given us.  So, before I sit in judgment of someone else, I best remind myself that we ALL share responsibility for creating and maintaining a broken system.

How the System Got Broken.  Long ago, when financial accounting methods and money were being invented, we all bought into the idea we could make everything balance.  What was taken would be matched by what was given, and both parties would be satisfied.

Over time various social experiments tinkered with this.  Different models of exchange were tested.  Along the way, the methods of reciprocity and fairness got refined.  An evolution was underway, and the most widely accepted system would be declared “the winner”.

The capitalist ideology has become dominant.  In this worldview it is presumed that fairness is preserved.  Now, of course, many of us know that fairness is not preserved, but what I’m doing is arguing from the point of view of proponents of capitalism (at least for the moment).

Summary of Part Three.  Marketing and advertising promote the idea of reciprocity every day, and help it become a deep value that is barely noticed.  The system of “fair exchanges” is more and more out of balance.  Some are reaping far more rewards than others.  The result of this is that significant segments of the world-society are recognizing that reciprocity does not necessarily lead to balance and fairness.  The good deal we have been conditioned to seek out may hide important costs.  The spirit of accounting, in which all benefits are matched by costs of equal value has been tinkered with.  Experiments in economic systems produced a dominant form—capitalism—that expertly hides so-called externalized costs.  These are debts we owe to the natural world and to exploited workers who remain beyond the view of our consuming society.

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Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Two

Bob Fiske

Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Two

CLICK HERE to go to Part One.

Deep Values.  Let us propose that not all values are equal.  Some values may be woven so tightly and deeply into the fabric of a culture that they are held by virtually every person who has grown up in that culture.  Deep values of this type are so common that I compare them to the water in which fish swim.  Do fish notice that they are constantly surrounded by water?  Similarly, how often does a person in our society notice he or she is guided by a deep value?  Not only that, but the rare person who goes even farther and dares to question whether a certain deep value is good or necessary may be regarded as crazy or threatening.

Now, some fish may be in a position that allows them to become aware of the water.  (Think of flying fish or trout leaping at bugs buzzing over the pond.)  By the same token, some people may be in a position to recognize a deep value in their culture long before the majority of that culture’s inhabitants do.  Perhaps that person is forced by a quirk of history to inhabit a social niche in which that value is not such a certainty.

Or, recognition of the deep value might occur because it has negative consequences.  This can happen if “the system” is already in a grotesque state of imbalance.  An imbalanced system is in a state of stress, therefore, negative consequences can add to that stress.  If so, then it becomes harder and harder to ignore the damage that a deep value is doing.  (By way of analogy, imagine a cracked fishbowl in which fewer and fewer fish can rely on the presence of water.  In this stressed system, all the fish become aware of water.)

I now wish to discuss one of these deep values, reciprocity.  This value has been central to civilizations for thousands of years.  It must have occupied an important place in the social structure to have not been displaced.  Yet, modern society has pushed this value to such ridiculous extremes that terrible consequences are unfolding.  Later, I will discuss an alternative to reciprocity and why that alternative’s importance should be elevated.

What is Reciprocity?  Reciprocity is an important type of value, the type that we use to evaluate the worth of things and actions.  We also use it to regulate our use of another precious commodity: time.

Reciprocity—this sounds like I’m using a fifty dollar word where a fifty cent word would suffice.  Well, I’ve been known to do that…  Let’s see if some related phrases can clue us in to the idea: return on investment, payoff, fair trade, good deal, not ripped off, equitable business transaction.  Reciprocity has to do with fair exchanges, and that idea has been with us for millennia.

I believe that ever since people recognized opportunities to exchange things—call it what you will, barter, trade, exchange of goods and services—they were confronted by the issue of fairness.  Why even children show a propensity to think this way.  There is an underlying concern about being taken advantage of, or giving away more than you’re getting in exchange.  In fact, I find it plausible that the institution of monetary currencies owes its existence to this concern about fair exchanges.

And why does this concern exist?  Because it is natural and tempting for a person to want to maximize his or her resources, even if this means that a trading partner ends up with less than a fair share.  (By the way, there are interesting similarities in biology.  Nature learned to deal with these issues long before the thinking brain appeared on the scene.)

Think of the business person or the private investor.  It is “natural” to want to maximize your return on investment or to leverage your profit.  Why, it is simply a case of efficiency, of doing more with less, and who could question that?  When a deal profits us, do we question that?  Does it occur to us that our good fortune might be a distortion of true fairness, or reciprocity?

In an earlier age, the earth appeared to have plenty of everything humans needed (space, water, resources, labor).  Therefore it was easy to accept the efficiency of maximizing return without regard to what might be happening on the side that you weren’t inhabiting.  But as the human population approached and crossed the three-billion mark, the system began to display strain.  Hence the concern of a few individuals to come together in the Club of Rome.

I believe that right now it is much easier to question the value of maximizing “payoff”.  Why?  Because the earth is crowded with seven billion of us (and growing).  Every negative effect of a deep value is multiplied many billions of times.

Summary of Part One.  Some values are “deep values”.  They are woven tightly into the culture and are held by virtually every person.  But deep values are hard to recognize unless the system is in gross imbalance.  This essay focuses on the deep value known as reciprocity.  Although reciprocity suggests the idea of fair exchanges, it is usually modified by the natural human tendency to maximize payoff.  Some people justify this as efficiency, or doing more with less.  Our huge human population is causing this distortion of reciprocity to deliver more and more damage to the world system in which we live.

CLICK HERE to go to Part Three.

Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part One

Bob Fiske

Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part One

Prologue: Why Now.  These thoughts have been in my head for some time without achieving escape velocity.  Something had to goad me into action.  What lit the fuse?  It was the news that the Occupy group near me, Occupy Long Beach, would be discussing “What We Value”.  Suddenly, I knew I had to try to share this point of view.

Are Values Central?  There are diverse ways that people use to explain human behavior.  Why should values stand in relief against the backdrop of the other qualities of experience, including thoughts, feelings, perceptions, points of view, beliefs and attitudes?  I believe that values have a primal distinction.  Values—those things that tell us who we are and what we want—sit at the well of being, situated so deeply that many people may have only dim awareness of their power.  From there, values motivate so many choices, and we scarcely appreciate that they are the primal reasons for much of what we do.  So I will propose that, if you change a person’s values, you will change his or her beliefs, actions and social affiliations.

The Politics of Values.  In the early 1970s an international group of businesspeople, academicians and politicians formed “The Club of Rome”.  They started with a realization that humanity’s progress was so rapid that none of us could lay claim to knowing—much less planning—our collective destiny.  Consequently, one of the Club’s first acts was to produce a white paper that attempted to define The Predicament of Mankind.  (See http://sunsite.utk.edu/FINS/loversofdemocracy/Predicament.PTI.pdf .)

A result of the early efforts of the Club of Rome was a project whose hub was MIT and which integrated the knowledge of experts from many countries.  This project was published in 1972 as a slim paperback entitled The Limits to Growth.  Using the method of system dynamics the MIT investigators built a “simple” computer model of the world and tested it to understand how the many components might affect human destiny.  The book sent shockwaves through the halls of policy-makers, for it suggested that, without careful management, human civilization could collapse fairly rapidly.

The phrase “without careful management” is hinted at in the book’s title, the limits to growth.  It is a statement of values: new choices would be necessary, a new definition of “what is the measure of a good life”.  Perhaps that explains what happened in the years after its publication.  In a show of massive denial, the governments, financial institutions and economists of developed nations (especially in the greatest consuming nation, the United States) belittled the Limits to Growth project to such an extent that nobody talked about it anymore.  “Progress” continued.

That demonstrates the powerful nature of values.  Many values that dictate human behavior are mutually dependent with a vast infrastructure of industry, financial systems and political institutions.  The response to the Limits to Growth project suggests that this infrastructure reacts somewhat like a living being.  If you attack the values at its foundation, it will move swiftly and forcefully to maintain its methods of operation and the values that motivate those methods.

To say this somewhat differently, the values underlying modern Western civilization (which, of course has spread to all parts of the globe) may allow certain modest changes.  Thus, we regulate auto emissions, and it is possible to buy recycled toilet paper, and some people are installing sustainable energy systems on their houses.

However, if you ask the system to examine and change out its core values, that is like trying to turn an oil tanker with the force of one finger.  (It can be done, true.  But, alas, humanity may not have that much time.)  Thus, we can understand the tremendous resistance to quitting fossil fuels, defunding weapons companies and ending cruel exploitation of cheap labor.

Summary of Part One.  If you change a person’s values, then you can expect a change of his or her beliefs, actions and social affiliations.  Many values connect with the larger, containing social infrastructures.  These include industrial, financial and political structures.  The social infrastructure reacts like a living being.  If you attack its values, it will forcefully maintain its values and its methods of operation.

CLICK HERE to go to Part Two.

One HAND

August 30, 2012

One HAND

At the neighborhood coffee house, W. and I were chatting over our cups of coffee.  About Eckhart Tolle, about seeing without thinking, about being a dot of paint that somehow managed to escape the canvas that all the other dots of paint take to be the whole world.

He looked at me quizzically.  "Have you ever heard the Zen koan, 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?'"

"What?"

"Do you know what a koan is?" he asked.  I shook my head, No.  "Koans are these riddles that they use in Zen Buddhism to challenge students.  They usually sound like nonsense.  But the nonsense somehow leads the student to a state of enlightenment.  Then, suddenly, the student understands the riddle."

"OK," I answered.  "So you have one that you're going to tell me?"

"Yeah.  It goes like this: 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?'"

"I give up.  What IS the sound of one hand clapping?" I said, waving my hand through the air.

"That's not bad," said W.  "It looks like you are clapping to an imaginary hand.  Not bad at all."  After a pause, in which he reflected on what he THOUGHT I was doing, he said, "OK. Here is how I think of it."

He reached out with his left hand and grabbed my right wrist.  "Can I borrow this?"

I allowed him to lift up my hand by the wrist.  He held it about twelve inches above the table.

"THIS is the sound of one hand clapping!"  With that, he slapped his right palm against my right palm.  It made a strong conventional clapping sound.

Next, he leaned toward me and caught my gaze in his.  He held the stare.  Lowering his voice he said, conspiratorially, "And you know what?"  I waited.  Softly, he said, "It's the SAME hand!"

He let go of my hand.  It remained in the same place above the table where he placed it for the clap.  He put his hand near mine and slowly looked back and forth from one to the other.

I was momentarily stunned.  Did I clap my hand against his?  Or did HE clap my hand against his.  For an instant, I couldn't be sure whether that hand--under his control--was his hand or my hand.  I, too, looked from one hand to the other, and nodded.  At a certain level of understanding, these were not two hands.  They were both manifestations of a single HAND.

I reached over with my left hand and grabbed his right wrist as he had done with mine.  Then I slapped my right palm against his right palm, making the clapping noise.

"That is the sound of one hand clapping," I agreed.  "It's the 'God-HAND' reaching out into two separate manifestations and clapping itself."

In a moment of contentment, W. laughed softly.  I laughed softly, too.  W. and I laughed softly.  We laughed softly.  I and we laughed softly.  I/we laughed softly.

Finally, one of us--and it doesn't really matter who that was--said:

"Every single one of us is a God-HAND clapping other God-HANDS."

‘Tainment

A

Koloa stepped out from the trees.  The plaza before her was lighted by dozens of flickering torches.  Several small groups of people stood engaged in conversation in the late summer air, while a few individuals and couples ambled leisurely away towards darkened streets beyond.  She walked briskly across the plaza and headed for the wide stairs to her left.  Torchlight glistened off her long, dark pony tail, and several people glanced casually as she passed them.  At the base of the stairs she paused and stared for a moment at the facing wall of the fortress.  Torchlight created a flickering effect on the wall’s surface.  She blinked, and, in her mind’s eye saw a mound of broken rubble.  One day, she mused, these walls will be no more.

B

Nisha reached down and lifted the steak from where it had landed in the dirt, ignoring Paul’s apology.  He whacked it a couple of times against the side of his pants, and brought it to his mouth.  Keeping his eyes on Paul, Nisha pulled off a mouthful of the meat, chewed it noisily, and swallowed.

“That’s the problem with your kind,” he said in an even voice before pulling off his next bite.  He chewed, swallowed again.  “You base your lives on fear.  You think that protection from germs is going to make you live longer.  You take only the safe risks.”

He brought his gaze to the fire, and continued to chew the meat from the bone.

Paul, too, continued to eat.  He had a camping plate, fork and knife, and he cut the steak into bite-size pieces.  Flustered, he couldn’t decide what to say in response to Nisha’s criticism. 

Nisha finished off his steak first, pulling the last bits of meat from the bone with his teeth.  Then he threw his bone into the fire.

Nisha wiped his hands on his pants legs.  Then he stood, keeping his gaze fixed on the fire, where the bone crackled and smoked.

“Know this, Paul.  All risks are the same.  All lives are the same.”

He turned away from the campfire and climbed into his tent, leaving Paul to finish his meal alone.

C

When Andy got home he kicked off his shoes and padded into the kitchen.  He knew the cupboards were bare, so he opened the door to the broom closet.  Aside from two brooms, a sponge mop and a dustpan, the floor of the closet was cluttered with an array of cleansers in various bottles and jars.  It was dark in there.

Andy got down on one knee and reached inside with his right hand.  It should still be there.  Finally, his fingers made contact with the old jar in the back right corner.  He jiggled it.  It was filled with money.

D

Romina announced to the assembled crowd, “Next in our Open Mic, Tom will speak to us.”

Tom looked out at the faces.  “We often forget that we share—”

“—MIC CHECK!” somebody called out.  Tom took a breath.  He would have to raise his voice over the din of the traffic driving past the park.  He started over with greater vigor.

“We often forget that we share this world with a zillion other species. It's not just about the welfare of humans. We're on our way to 9 billion individuals, and it's the well-being of the biosphere that is at stake.”

He stopped and swept his arm about him, indicating the trees in the park.

“Nature speaks, but not in a human voice. We must learn nature's language and speak for nature. This goes far beyond appreciating nature's beauty. It's science and ecology, folks. It's limits to growth. It's computer models to anticipate the future effects of what we've been doing for the last 100 years.

“Ultimately, it's knowing ourselves, not just as ‘cultured humans’, but as a pieces of a complex, coexisting wholeness.”

Concluding, he shook his head sadly, then remembered to raise his volume.  “People aren't dumb. They just don't know. Learn now, or learn later.”

E

Floyd’s power pack was half-full of charge.  Using a thought-command he diverted all of the power to the toroidal energy lifters and leaned forward slightly.  Immediately he felt the familiar rush of air against his face as he skimmed along at 30 meters per second, half a meter off the ground.  He breathed a sigh of relief.  He would be back in the city in less than a quarter of an hour.

F

Butterfly fluttered among the garden plants.  Her antennae sought a particular chemical marker, and presently the signal was detected.  Since she had two antennae, she could locate the source by angling her body back and forth and tracing out a complicated three-dimensional path through the air.  Her muscles responded automatically to the different strengths of the chemical signal reported by each antenna.  Now she was headed straight toward it.  Only by landing would she know for sure.

She braked with her wings, and the stickers at the ends of her six legs wrapped around the twig-like branch.  She unfurled her proboscis and whipped it through the leafy tendrils.  Now she was sure.  Milkweed.

Her body sagged with exhaustion.  Her abdomen was full with semen.  Very soon she would begin to deposit her eggs.  Then would come her final sleep…

Nature’s Brains, Part 6

July 8, 2012

Bob Fiske

Nature’s Brains, Part 6

(Note: I invite you to read Part 5 before you dive into this part.)

It’s time to wrap this up.  Have I convinced you that brains are obsolete?  Probably not.  That’s OK, because I am not perfectly convinced, either.  However, I do suspect that they may be.

Let’s reexamine the idea of species survival.  Many people—including some biologists—equate survival with competition.  In layperson’s lingo survival amounts to “survival of the fittest”.  Even those trained in genetics might say that a unique gene (or complex of genes) confers a “survival advantage”, meaning that individuals endowed with this advantage will be more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation than individuals lacking the genetic trait(s).

What this amounts to is that more competitive individuals or species, because of “superior adaptability” will out-reproduce other individuals/species in the race to acquire resources, meet physical needs and produce offspring that also produce offspring.  Understood this way, human beings would be judged as the most competitive species, and largely due to the human brain.

If I stopped there, then you would miss the other crucial half of the picture.  The “competitive half-picture” conveys the image of nature as a producer of Olympic gold medalists that can beat out other contenders.  However, that is a simple human notion.  Nature has been in this business too long to aim so low.

The truth is, I believe, that nature’s brilliance can be summed up in a simple word: harmony.

While it is true that the natural world does create species rivalries, it is of much greater significance that species coexist.  It’s not hard to see.  Walking in the neighborhood in the summer I notice that every bush is laced with spider webs.  The plants don’t simply tolerate these invaders, they make them a comfortable home.

Go into any forest.  You are standing within a well-balanced system in which plants, animals, insects, worms and fungi each contribute in species-unique ways to the overall health of the biome.  By the way, one reference uses another interesting word: communities.  Biomes are notable as communities hosting a diversity of species.

Even in extremes of inter-species competition, nature manages to maintain harmony.  For example, swarms of locusts (immense concentrations of juvenile grasshoppers) can consume plant life rapidly in areas of thousands of square kilometers.  In their wake locust swarms leave no living thing.  This appears to be extreme competition, but it is more than that.  Grasshopper populations die off, and plant communities grow anew.  Nature restores balance by means of a time-based cycle.

The human brain appears to play by its own rules.  As a competitor it is unsurpassed.  The problem is that, in achieving its competitive advantage, the human brain has brushed aside nature’s tendencies to create coexistence.  Competition may be hard, and Homo sapiens may be the winner.  But one thing is certain: winning is easy when measured against nature’s ability to weave communities that maintain harmony among species.

Some people do understand this.  Farmers specializing in permaculture strive to create interactive plant, animal and insect communities that produce food, retain water, create shade and sun, grow flowers and constrain pests.  Their goal is to grow food in the manner that nature grows forests, with multiple species coexisting.  The knowledge of how to emulate nature exists.  It is not mainstream knowledge, but it exists.

That knowledge is not enough.  The human brain has painted itself into a corner because we are well on our way to nine billion individuals.  Most species have constraints that keep their populations in check.  Prey have predators, and predators have a limited supply of prey.  They are subject to limitations in territory or key resources.  The human brain, though, has invented methods to defeat every limitation that governs unbridled growth in other species.  Our population goes in one direction only: up.

In the end, I suspect that nature’s way will ultimately triumph.  The human brain is on course to exhaust every last resource it can.  In doing so, it will end the supremacy of the human species.  It will also take down many, many species by disrupting the finely tuned harmony that nature has woven.  Because of the human brain’s competitive and simplistic behavior, the world will undergo yet another massive extinction event.

Like the crops that were devastated by locusts, nature will re-emerge.  It will continue its process of creating species that both compete and coexist in balanced communities.  And it will never again produce a species with an over-competitive, non-harmonizing brain like the one encased in the skulls of Homo sapiens.

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