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The following article appears in the Spring 2009 issue of Inquiring Mind
THE MIDAS ECONOMY: BUDDHIST REFLECTIONS ON THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AN INTERVIEW WITH AND ESSAY BY DAVID LOY
David
Loy is Besl Professor of Ethics/Religion and Society at Xavier
University in Cincinnati. His work is primarily in comparative
philosophy and religion, particularly comparing Buddhist with modern
Western thought. His many books include The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, and Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution. A Zen practitioner for many years, he is qualified as a teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition of Japanese Buddhism.
David Loy: Is
the current financial and economic crisis a good thing? I wouldn’t want
to minimize the suffering it’s creating for many people, but the world
economy is an unjust system, and absolutely unsustainable. If we don’t
know how else to transform it, maybe it’s better that it collapse
sooner rather than later so as to lessen the long-range impact both on
people and on the biosphere. Our economic system is devastating the
Earth. The financial losses from this collapse may amount to several
trillions of dollars, but who can compute the value of the rain forests
we have been cutting down? What price do you put on species extinction
or global warming?
Inquiring Mind: What do you see as a Buddhist approach to this current situation?
DL: On
some level, the Buddhist solution is always the same—awaken yourself
and live in harmony with others. In our time, especially, that means
learning how to live in harmony with the biosphere. Our economic system
has to be ecologically sustainable, and it has to work to the mutual
benefit of everyone, rather than to just a small percentage of the
Earth’s population.
IM: The Buddha and his followers chose a form of communalism or socialism: the Sangha.
DL: That’s
true. The Buddhist scholar Trevor Ling believed that the Buddha wasn’t
just forming a small group of monastics to support their own
realization, but that he was modeling a broader, transformative vision
for how society should function. Did he perhaps see the Sangha as the
example or “vanguard’ for a more egalitarian social order? And more
recently, the great twentieth-century Thai reformer Buddhadasa proposed
what he called “dhammic socialism.”
But
what is most distinctive about the Buddha’s social analysis is that the
fundamental dichotomy is not between good and evil but between
delusion/ignorance on one side and wisdom/enlightenment on the other.
The challenge is to understand our economic system not primarily in
terms of some people selfishly exploiting others but instead as a
system of collective greed and delusion. Some suffer much more than
others, of course, but even those at the top are trapped by their own
ego-based cravings.
IM: So the current economic breakdown may be a “heavenly messenger”—a great
opportunity for collective insight—as people begin to see more clearly
into the fundamental flaws of the system. You say that you would like
to see Buddhists step forward more vigorously at this time to offer an
alternative perspective to the world.
DL: Yes. I’m encouraged by the “gross national happiness” movement inspired
by Bhutan, for example. And recently there have been several Buddhist
economics conferences, most notably in Thailand. Perhaps this is an
idea whose time has come. Unfortunately, the people in politics who are
closest to the Buddhist analysis—liberals, progressives and other
left-of-center groups—often dismiss the Buddhist approach as simply
“religious.” It’s Marxism’s old “opiate of the masses” critique. Maybe
now, in the middle of our discontent, they will be encouraged to take a
fresh look.
According to Legend, Midas was a Lydian king who was offered any reward he wanted for
helping the god Dionysus. Although already fabulously wealthy, he asked
that whatever he touched might turn to gold. Midas enjoyed his new
powers, transforming everything in sight—until it came to be
dinnertime. He took a bite—cha-ching! The food in his mouth turned to
gold. He took a sip of wine—cha-ching! It solidified into gold. He
hugged his daughter—cha-ching! She hardened into a golden statue. In
despair, Midas pleaded for Dionysus to deliver him from this hateful
power. Fortunately, the god obliged; Dionysus sent Midas to wash in the
river Pactolus, which cleansed him of what he now realized was a curse.
We
are all familiar with this story. Despite its simplicity it is one of
the most profound of all Greek myths. So why do I retell it now?
Because today it is more important than ever: it can help us understand
the financial and economic crisis that has just begun and that is about
to transform all of our lives.
Obviously,
the Midas story is about greed, the first of the “three poisons,” or
three unwholesome roots, according to the Buddha (the others being ill
will and delusion). But the moral of this tale is about much more than
greed. Midas valued gold more than anything else, so the great irony is
his realization that a golden touch makes everything else worthless. He
couldn’t eat or drink gold, and he certainly couldn’t love it the way
that he loved his daughter.
By
no coincidence, the same is true of our own currency: even a $100 bill
has no value in itself. It’s just a piece of paper—in effect, nothing.
We can’t eat it, drink it, live in it, ride on it, etc. When we treat
money as the most valuable thing in the world, that’s simply because we
have collectively agreed to make it so. We forget that money is a
social construct—a kind of group fantasy. The anthropologist Weston
LaBarre called it a psychosis that has become normal, “an
institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once.” As long as we
keep dreaming together, it continues to work as the socially
agreed-upon means that enables us to convert something (a day’s work,
for example) into something else (bags of groceries, perhaps).
Yet
as Midas reminds us, money can also become a curse. In more
psychological terms, the danger is that means and ends become reversed,
so that the means of life becomes the goal itself. As Arthur
Schopenhauer put it, money is abstract happiness, so someone who is no
longer capable of concrete happiness can set his heart on money. Money
becomes “frozen desire”—not desire for anything in particular but a
symbol for the satisfaction of desire in general. But what does the
Buddha say about desire? Frozen or not, it remains the root cause of
suffering.
The news
media have also been telling us that the financial crisis is due to
desire—or, as they put it, the excessive greed of Wall Street
speculators and the unbridled spending of Main Street borrowers. But
the problem goes much deeper, and our predicament is much worse. Our
financial and economic system has institutionalized the Midas touch. To
use another metaphor, the “Midas problem” is not like a virus that has
infected the economic hard drive; rather, it has become the software
that runs our economy.
The
Buddha’s first noble truth identifies dukkha (“suffering,
dissatisfaction”) as inherent to the human condition: it is the nature
of an unawakened mind to be bothered by a feeling of lack. Our society
conditions us to understand this sense of lack as lack of enough money,
so that we always want more, like Midas. Our economic system
institutionalizes this lack into a collective craving that can never be
satisfied. Consumers never consume enough, corporations are never
profitable enough, the GDP can never be big enough, etc. The goal of
the system is to end up with more money than we started with, to turn
whatever we touch to gold. Those who think like Midas rise to the top.
Investors seek increasing returns in the form of dividends and higher
share prices. This generalized expectation translates into an
impersonal but constant demand for ever more profit and growth, a
desire that can never be fully satisfied.
But
who is responsible for this unrelenting emphasis on profitability and
growth? That’s the point: we all participate—as workers, employers,
consumers, investors and pensioners. The ultimate irony—or rather,
tragedy—of this process is that everything that gives life value is
devalued into a means for maximizing something that has no value
whatsoever in itself. Everything becomes a means to making more money.
“Everything” in this case includes the biosphere (resources), human
life (labor), and society itself (we must continually adapt to the
changing requirements of the economy).
It
is becoming increasingly obvious that this system is unsustainable
because it involves a growth obsession that, left to itself, will not
cease until the whole of the biosphere has been converted into profit.
Capitalism made more sense a couple centuries ago when the Earth seemed
infinite and capital (money for investment) was relatively scarce.
Today the obvious metaphor is cancer on a planetary scale. Cells become
cancerous when they mutate into uncontrolled growth and spread
throughout the body to disrupt its healthy functioning. That is not a
bad description of what might be called Midas globalization.
Midas
could ask Dionysus to remove his self-imposed curse, but we cannot
appeal to a god to remove ours. Individually, meditation practice
reduces personal dukkha by reducing desire, but how are we to address
the collective dukkha generated by institutionalized desire? Ultimately
we must choose between this economic/financial system and the survival
of the biosphere. Yet there really is no choice. Our current system is
doomed no matter what in the same way that a cancer always ends up
destroying its host. From that perspective, the financial meltdown is
actually a wonderful opportunity to address a much deeper problem. Such
a crisis would be a terrible thing to waste.
© 2009 Inquiring Mind
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