rudolf steiner library newsletter: reviews
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition By Charles Eisenstein; Evolver Editions, Berkeley, CA, 2011, 496 pgs. Review by Christopher Schaefer, PhD This is a profound and moving book, full of insight and living examples. It is a book about money and our relationship to it, and how we can restore a sacred dimension to the world and to each other. As the author notes in his introduction, the book works at four levels: it shows what has gone wrong in our economic system; “it describes a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy”; it moves to those collective actions and social changes required to shift our world from that of exploitation to sustainability and mutual service; and it ends with the individual changes of attitude and behavior that will contribute to a better world. The argument is both simple and complex. Simple in the sense that Eisenstein, like Rudolf Steiner and Silvio Gesell, sees private land ownership and the interest-bearing nature of money as responsible for the gradual erosion of our shared heritage of the commons: of land, water, air, and natural abundance, and of a natural gift-economy that most ancient cultures experienced in word and deed. Complex because money and economic processes are so embedded in our everyday consciousness and so full of taken-for-granted assumptions that even to think differently about money today requires great effort. It seems as if our present economic and money system is surrounded by a magic spell that makes it difficult to even imagine alternatives to the exploitative nature of today’s market-driven global economy. The great virtue of this book is that it deals with the fundamentals, as did Steiner in his World Economy. It goes deeper than, say, David Korten’s When 12 •
being human
Corporations Rule the World or Agenda for a New Economy; or the work of Gar Alperowitz; or even that of William Greider’s The Soul of Capitalism.1 By this I mean that each of these other studies accepts traditional notions of private land ownership rather than engaging concepts like leasing land and owning buildings and equipment. They don’t question the present approach to currency creation through central banks charging interest for the money created and pumped into the economy. Instead, they tend to argue about the balance between the private economy and government or public institutions, and the role of the latter two in taming or modifying the excesses of today’s market-economy. The three central chapters of Eisenstein’s analysis of present issues are called “The Trouble with Property,” “The Corpse of the Commons,” and “The Economics of Usury.” Each is compelling in its own right, and often poetic in imagery and tone. In the chapter on property Eisenstein states, “The urge to own grows as a natural response to an alienating ideology that severs felt connections and leaves us alone in the universe. When we exclude world from self, the tiny, lonely identity that remains has a voracious need to claim as much as possible of that lost beingness for its own sake. If all the world, all of life and earth is no longer me, I can at least compensate by making it mine. Other separate selves do the same, so we live in a world of competition and omnipresent anxiety.”2 In “The Corpse of the Commons” Eisenstein describes how we have commodified and privatized the four forms of capital that were at the heart of the “commons” we once shared as human beings: natural capital (the land and nature); social capital (community); cultural capital( books, songs, language, poetry); and spiritual capital (our consciousness and ability to create new realities). Each is now bought and sold so that the relentless logic of growth, of increasing wealth and GNP can be met.3 In the chapter on the economics of usury the author gets to the heart of his case: “the problem starts 1 David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 1995, & Agenda for a New Economy, 2009, both Berrett Koehler, San Francisco; Gar Alperowitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 2005; William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, Simon and Schuster, NY, 2003 2 Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, 50. 3 Ibid., 69–90.