Sustainability

The Pilgrims, before leaving Plymouth England, signed a seven-year contract on July 1, 1620,  stipulating that the Pilgrims were to pool, for common benefit, “all profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means of any person or persons…” It further noted “that at the end of the seven years, the capital and profits, viz. the houses, lands, goods and chattels, be equally divided betwixt the Adventurers and Planters…” During this time the colonists were to “have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock and goods of the said colony.” To each according to his need. It sounds like a prescription written from a Pharaoh's dream, and it was. Lean years ensued. They did not make it to the lean seven. In the first two years the result was shortages and starvation. About half the colonists died. The group's Governor, William Bradford, wrote of the scarcity of food “no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any.” (from his book, Plymouth Plantation)

The socialist experiment Bradford added, “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to the benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense….” In did more than make strong men lazy. In another book written by the same author, History of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford spoke of another problem because of the government created famine—thievery. Even in this Christian community, “much was stolen both by night and day….”
And, as they say, the rest is history.

So, at the very founding of the nation and 200 years before the bloody-minded Marx, a remarkable social-economic experiment was founded, nurtured and discarded. Yet is seems we are fated to redo these experiments until we can make the experimenters happy. These demands, usually from tenured and barely working abstractionists, demand we relive these awful periods as if every society were subject to a constant Meckel-Serres social-economic   recapitulation. In the NYT this week is an editorial actually calling for a dismissal of Capitalism--as if it were a creed and not the consequence of one--and the substitution of "Sustainability."

This sounds like, and is, global warming in drag but it has an oblique thrust as well. Sustainability as a concept is not new and is championed by some good and admirable thinkers--Abbey and Wendell Berry come to mind--but there is a subtle mental shortcut necessary: Surplus must be curbed. Sustainability's enemy is excess, as in "wretched." But sustainability also is close to subsistence; it is production without wealth. Or trade. Nothing is less like us. I know this brings up the dreaded "naturalistic fallacy" objection--why do we have to be limited by how we have behaved before--but there are some realities here. The question is always what is basic and what is culturally layered on and slough-able. But I think growth, expansion, improvement and the participation in the interactive social structure is as much of what we are as is altruism.

And so we again try to teach the wolf to knit.