Grace and Disgrace

A while back I wrote a post that mentioned an island where everything is shared. I couldn't remember the name, but yesterday I caught the programme where I first heard about it: the first episode of the BBC series 'South Pacific'. The name of the Island is Anuta. If you want to view this lovely programme (it has the most perfect, lyrical surfing shots you'll ever see), and you live in the UK, it's on BBC iPlayer for the next six days. The bit about Anuta starts at about minute 38. The entire programme is worth watching, but the segment about this island is unique.

By contrast to Easter Island where the populace competed in the building of giant stone sculptures and in the process destroyed the paradise which their ancestors had originally encountered, the people of Anuta have lived on their island in harmony with its ecosystems for 400 years. This island is tiny: one sixth of a square mile in the middle of nowhere. For most of its history, the island has been too far from other inhabited islands to trade. Everything is shared. The population density is equal to Bangladesh. There are still people who live their entire lives on this island. They live in harmony with their environment, never taking too much, either from the land or the sea. Their outriggers look as though they are made of driftwood, and they are careful of the few trees the islands support.

It is possible to live like this: granted, the people of Anuta appear to have an idyllic place, but they also face hardship: nine major typhoons a year churn across the Pacific. They have had to learn to put enough food aside in storage underground in case a typhoon devastates their crops of taro and breadfruit.

To illustrate, here is another quotation from Lewis Hyde's The Gift, p. 38-9:

"One man's gift [in a gift society] must not be another man's capital...the increase that comes of a gift exchange must remain a gift and not be kept as if it were the return on private capital...Capitalism is the ideology that asks that we remove surplus wealth from circulation and lay it aside to produce more wealth. To move away from capitalism is not to change the form of ownership from the few to the many, but to cease turning so much surplus into capital, that is to treat most increase as a gift. It is quite possible to have the state own everything and still convert all gifts to capital, as Stalin demonstrated...the locus of ownership having nothing to do with it.

"...To speak of the increase of gifts is to speak of something simultaneously material, social, and spiritual. Material wealth may be produced in the course of a commerce of gifts (in the cases at hand, for example, food is gathered and preserved for the winter, canoes are constructed, lodges are built, blankets are woven, banquets prepared, and so forth and so on). And yet no material good becomes an item of commerce without simultaneously nourishing the spirit (of the salmon [in Northwest Coast and circumpolar societies, the bones of fish are returned to the sea so that the inua may make more fish], of the tribe, of the race. To reverse the vector of the increase may not destroy its material portion (it may even augment it) but the social and spiritual portions drop away....To say, then, that the increase of a gift must itself be a gift is to ask that we not abandon the increase-of-the-whole in favor of a more individual and more plainly material growth.

"To restate this choice in slightly different terms, a circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, the group, the race, or the gods. Furthermore,  although these wider spirits are a part of us, they are not 'ours'; they are endowments bestowed upon us. To feed them by giving away the increase they have brought us is to accept that our participation in them bring with it an obligation to preserve their vitality. When, on the other hand, we reverse the direction of the increase—when we profit on exchange or convert 'one man's gift to another man's capital'—we nourish that part of our being (or our group) which is distinct and separate from others. Negative reciprocity strengthens the spirits—constructive or destructive—of individualism and clannishness."

As I type these words, the government of the United States is going through the shut-down process, thanks to a small group of extremists who believe that the destruction of the group by the dominance of the few is the only way forward.

To say that this attitude and this situation are a disgrace, and that America is shamed, is a gross understatement.

[Hyde, p. 46]: "...the parking lots and aisles of discount stores may be where the restless dead of a commodity civilization will tread out their numberless days."

[Hyde, p.48]: "p. 48 ...Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. ...[It] is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms..."