So, I just finished reading Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner, by Swedish writer Katrine Marcal. It is a very funny feminist critique not of economic policies, but of the most basic assumptions that underlie economic thought.
Some of the critiques are familiar. It obviously is not true that humans can be reduced to nothing more than purely rational actors devoted solely to their own material self-interest, competing endlessly against and trying to dominate everybody else (characteristics that Marcal asserts are considered “masculine” in Western societies). And it is revealing that traditional so-called “women’s work” like raising children, doing laundry, cooking meals, and tending house is all work that most economic measures simply ignore – despite the fact that this “non-economic work” is what allows the measurable, “economic” activity of a society to flourish in the first place. (This, by the way, is where Marcal’s title originates: Adam Smith’s mother cooked his meals, thereby allowing him to develop a basic economic theory that took no notice whatsoever of how his dinner actually ended up on his table.)
But I don’t think I really tumbled onto what Marcal is trying to express until I got to Chapter Thirteen, which begins with a discussion of photographer Lennart Nilsson’s iconic 1965 photographs of fetuses. From her description, I recognized the photos immediately, as I am sure most everyone reading this will too:
Crouched, with a large head and fin-like arms, the foetus floats freely inside a balloon of water. This is how we’ve become accustomed to picturing the beginning of our own existences. The baby floats, an independent astronaut, with only an umbilical cord connecting it to the world around. The mother doesn’t exist. She already has become a void – the already autonomous tiny space hero flies forth. The womb is just a room.
(emphasis added).
Marcal argues that this is, in fact, how we like to imagine ourselves: full-sprung, out on our own, totally independent of the world into which we are about to be born. And she points out that this is, in fact, an old story, dating back at least to the idea of the Social Contract: the idea that the lives of primitive humans were “nasty, brutish, and short,” a war of all against all until we rationally decided to form a civilized society, to respect the rule of law, and that we each would agree not to murder any others in exchange for all those others agreeing not to murder us.
And that idea, once actually considered, is patently ridiculous. It – like Nilsson’s photos – only makes sense if we actively write out of our histories how we all actually come into the world: helpless, naked, terrified, and utterly, utterly dependent on our mother and all the other people around us. And this, Marcal suggests, is precisely why we choose to create such absurd myths – because they allow us to ignore how deeply vulnerable we all really are. We create ludicrous mindscape models of utter rationality and independence because those models let us pretend that our wellbeing is not always entirely dependent upon the good wishes and fellow feeling of all the other people around us. We want to believe in these myths we make up because those myths make us feel strong and protected.
For a while now, I’ve been working as a CNA at our local hospital. Some years back I wrote about how I like to think of myself as an “aspiring Buddhist,” and how I was taking this job specifically because I thought it might serve as a working meditation. I suspected that – at least for the term of each shift – I would be forced to practice at being compassionate, at being patient. After four years, the experience has very much confirmed those suspicions.
Our hospital is a poor one, serving a lot of poor people in a mostly poor community. This means some of the obvious things. The staff is overworked, and nearly every night we have to waste time scouring other floors looking for basic supplies, because that night’s needs have outstripped the inadequate inventories our own department has. But it also means that our patients are nothing like the patients you might expect if television shows inform your ideas of what hospital work is like.
More than anything, I have learned that there is a seriously, seriously high number of people in my community with varying degrees of emotional and mental illnesses. And there is a seriously, seriously high number of people in my community who are just crushingly, unbearably lonely.
And there is an enormous overlap between these two populations.
If there is one overarching lesson I have imbibed over the past four years, it is the universalism of what is sometimes called “the human condition.” The number of people one meets, night after night, week after week, without end, whom one realizes (and I can recognize these people now within moments) are not physically sick so much as they just need someone to see them and listen to them and pay attention to them . . . the number of people who just need someone, in their hour of need, to hold their hand . . . it is staggering. And heartbreaking.
Because there is nothing material that can be done to solve their problem. There are no drugs that can be prescribed to cure it, there are no surgeries that can excise it. These are people who are suffering because – for whatever reasons – they feel alone and cut off from others. These are people who need human contact, and nearly every night our hospital is too understaffed to really provide that.
(Ugly truth about me: part of my “patience” work is trying not to get angry at these people, who will do anything to keep me in their room talking to them. I know what they are doing, and I know what they need, but every night I have twelve other patients whom I need to see and these people are keeping me from tending to all those others.)
Each of the people I’ve met who suffer in this way suffer for precisely the same reason: like all of us, they need to feel connected to others, to be part of a family and a community, and they are now alone. Each of these people can be seen as a cautionary tale about how vulnerable our need for each other makes us, and how disastrous it can be for anyone when that need goes unmet.
* * *
My schedule last week allowed me to watch the last two nights of the Republican National Convention. My schedule this week allows me to watch every night of the Democratic National Convention except Tuesday’s. In fact, I’ve been watching it on C-Span whilst writing this; it is the differences between the two conventions that got me thinking about this stuff. I think that those differences spring out of two very common, very human, but polar opposite reactions to the same thing: the inherent vulnerability that comes with being human.
The hatred and divisiveness that was on display during the RNC is, in this way, understandable. If you feel vulnerable, one way to hide that is by lashing out and attacking others. Tearing others down can make you feel strong; pointing out someone else’s flaws helps you ignore your own. Having an outside enemy, pointing out divisions, attacking and insulting and debasing gives the illusion of invulnerability: Hey! If you’re attacking then you’re not defending, and if you’re not defending then maybe – just maybe – you’re not really vulnerable.
(And, if – finally - you can get rid of all those other people, then there’ll be nobody around for you to actually need, right?)
That’s surely one way to go. But . . . oh, man, this Democratic National Convention? What a more beautiful way.
Tonight I’ve watched people of all colors, all genders and sexualities, all backgrounds, DREAMERS, Karla Ortiz and her mother, and Anastasia Somoza join together under the single rubric of Americans. And this, ultimately, is the promise and the pride of our country: that you don’t have to be alone. We can be together, we can be with each other. Maybe we don’t often think about it this way, but an implicit promise that the very idea of our country makes is that when you need it – and you will need it at some point – then in your hour of need the rest of us will be there to see you, to listen to you, to be with you, and to hold your hand.
I think Katrine Marcal would tell you that the nearly complete internalization of the concept of “the economic man” – the person who exists only to compete with everyone else – is the only thing that can explain the absolute division that the GOP explicitly has promised to inflict upon this nation. After all, if everything is a competition, if the only way to relate to each other is through dominance and submission, then every gain made by “the other” is necessarily a loss for “the us.”
But we’re Americans, dammit, and we don’t have to think that way. A little while ago, Cory Booker spoke of our “interdependence.” Al Franken was on stage earlier, and he quoted the late Paul Wellstone: “We all do better when we all do better.” Right now, Bernie Sanders is giving his speech, and he is telling his supporters and the rest of America our one overarching truth: we are stronger together.
Donald Drumpf’s GOP wants to cut our country in half, and is betting that they’ll end up with the bigger half.
Based on tonight’s speakers, the Democratic National Convention is going to be a repudiation not only of that bet, but of its very premise: we are not going to allow our country to be cut in half by ugliness. We are going to wind up winning its all, because — in the end — the all of the country is still just us.
And come November, we’re going to bury the ugliness on display last week under a landslide.
Hell, yes!