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Essay by Corey Anton |
LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE COMPLAINING about the soaring price of gasoline. And not just that. Prices of things like alcohol, tobacco, and coffee are up, and people are paying more for their eggs, their flour, and their milk too. As many people gripe and bitch over the state of affairs, few are taking the time to reflect upon what it will mean for U.S. culture, and how, in many respects, some of these adjustments are long overdue. Sorry to say it, and please don’t be angry at the messenger, but the truth be told, we as a culture seem a little out of touch with the conditions of living found throughout the bulk of the world.
Let me give you just one example: A friend of mine, someone who is both a great lover of coffee and an owner of a coffee shop in Canada, went to Costa Rica to learn about the particular coffee beans that he loves so much. At the coffee bean plantation he was given the opportunity to pick his coffee beans from the plants, and the experience was quite an eye- opener to say the least.
He discovered that it takes around three thousand hand picks—somewhere between two and three hours depending on how fast he could pick the beans—to produce one pound of coffee. Picking a couple of pounds of coffee was backbreaking labor, and after only a couple of hours he was exhausted. “I had no idea how much effort and time was behind just one pound,” was his first thought, followed quickly with, “and that was just the picking, not the roasting and packaging and delivering.” As he was telling me the story, we both just sat back and sighed. What a depressing state of affairs. “How to make amends for all of this?” was the thought that plagued us both.
We in the U.S. have had it way too good for way too long. In many respects we’ve lost the perspective of the bulk of the rest of the world. Whereas starvation, privation, and want prevail in many places, modern U.S. problems are mainly due to excess: countless health problems associated with over-indulgence, wide spread obesity, mounds of high-tech trash, and growing numbers of narcissistic and self-image disorders. And, despite all of this, so many people still seem not to understand how much goes into the foods and products they love. Admittedly, the oil companies suck and they’re ripping people off, but we, you and me, are sadly enough the exploiters on other fronts.
Migrant workers and people employed in third-world countries are exploited and ripped off by rich countries and this means us. In many places of the world, people work long hours in brutal conditions and have no health insurance or medical benefits. If people in the U.S. could learn to be more aware of how much exploitation is involved in the items they regularly enjoy, they might be willing to pay more for them, and maybe, just maybe, people could learn to waste a little less. Maybe people could act more locally when they think globally and think more globally when they act locally. They might actually try to ask themselves, who, actually, are their neighbors?
We are not, even as individuals, simply in the world; we are of it: we all are indigenous inhabitants. Communication scholar Amardo Rodriguez writes that communication is a kind of love, for it refers to the habits and practices by which we become vulnerable to the humanity of others. To overcome a discrete sense of self, to learn how to open to others and to the world more generally, we need these more than ever in today’s global economy.
One of the more relevant and insightful books on this issue is The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common by Alphonso Lingis. He argues that people too often attempt to define themselves or each other by using categories, the problem being that an excluded group inevitably emerges. Any collective based in race or nationality or religion or political party or even belief is a collective that excludes in order to include. In contrast to such symbolic identifications and disidentifications, Lingis argues that there is but one community, the true community, a community sharing in their very nonbeing. That’s right. Nothing is what everyone in this group has in common. To be alive is always to be among the community of the dying, and this community excludes no one. What more do you need to share?
We perhaps could learn much from Epictetus, one of the great teachers of Stoicism and arguably the person who issued the Western world’s first cosmopolitanism. Once asked where he was from, he gave a reply that all of us might just as well say: “I am a citizen of the world.”
