Pound Foolish
I’ve got a friend named Pete. He’s one of the most intelligent people I
know. He’s an independent animation film producer with a lot of credits to his
name, a lecturer in film studies, owns a home on a London canal, and does—as
they say—all right. But, like many of us, he has a few odd traits.
Pete will get up at 6.30 on a Sunday morning and take two buses to the
street market at Brick Lane, rain or shine. He does that because he can’t resist
a bargain. He will turn up, proudly clutching a packet of 144 Jaffa cakes and tell
you that he got them for half price. Once, he bought a huge carton of 1000 tea
bags for a penny each. Here’s the thing: I don’t think Pete even likes Jaffa
cakes, but, if you’re his friend, you’ll eat your share to please him, because a
bargain’s a bargain.
It’s not because he’s a miser. He’s not; he’s a regular guy who never fails
to buy his round in a pub. It’s something else. Once, I was doing a little gentle
teasing about this fixation of his, and he told me that I didn’t understand
economics. What he went on to say was a version of that old saw that I have
heard all my life and hated it every time I did: “Take care of the pennies and
the pounds will look after themselves.”
Humbug! I would snort. It’s just the reverse: focus on the pounds and
you can afford to ignore the pennies. But then I began to look at that saying as
a metaphor and it started to make a different kind of sense. Here’s what I
mean.
There’s a temptation in many, if not all, of us to always have an eye on
the big picture. Big trends, polls, political ideas. In economics, the macro
picture is foremost. An incident of casual racism leads us on to speculations
about structural racism, as in certain police forces. Unemployment, instead of
being a multiplicity of personal tragedies, is expressed as a percentage. Poverty
in the so-called Third World is seen as having to do with unjust systems, not
local problems. And in this way of thinking, we are not incorrect, just short-
sighted.
The problem comes when, eyes on the forest, we cannot see individual
trees. Focussing on systems, thinking big, can lead us away from what is in fact
a much simpler view of humanity’s difficulties. I’ve begun to think that maybe
it’s time I thought more about the pennies, and less about the pounds.
One of my heroes, during the years I worked with and for Quakers, was a
historical figure called John Woolman. Woolman was a devout Quaker who
lived in Ohio during the 1700s- then the western fringe of the new world. He
was a merchant and itinerant preacher in the wild new settlements of white
Europeans in a Native American continent.
In one settlement, a problem had arisen as a result of an unscrupulous
merchant selling guns and alcohol to local Native American tribes. These
people had no prior experience of intoxicating liquor and so lost control of
themselves when drunk. I’m told it takes a culture of drinking to make good
drinkers, if such a thing exists. Things were even worse because these drinkers
had firearms, and fear and occasional fatalities had shocked the white settlers.
This was a time of little or no law, so there was no chance of passing legislation
to prevent the sales and no means of enforcement.
Woolman decided to act. He rode to the home of the outlaw merchant,
determined to reason with him. His fellow Quakers advised him against it for
fear that he might be killed. But Woolman knocked on the man’s door anyway.
As the door opened, Woolman was suddenly afflicted with a sense of shame.
When the merchant appeared, Woolman burst into tears. Instead of his
prepared speech berating the man for his recklessness, he found himself
begging the man’s pardon for having the arrogance to think that he was in the
right. Sobbing, he was led inside and comforted by the gun dealer, who was
astonished at the effect he had had on Woolman.
Quaker legend has it that, not only did the gun and booze dealer change
his ways, he became a good member of the Society of Friends as well.
Whether he was aware of it or not, Woolman was laying down a
blueprint for a kind of social action that doesn’t rely on systems. Instead of
electing a gun-toting sheriff, passing laws and relying on court judgments, a
problem was addressed directly. It was a transaction of—you might
say—pennies, not pounds.
In my younger days I was involved in quite a few “save the world”
activities, including being moderately active in civil rights and anti-war
movements. I was interested in the Big Picture, in dismantling old systems and
installing new ones. I was motivated by theories of change and political action
whose focus was on the large, the structural. Even when I went to work in
three different poor countries, where the local realities can confound the most
cleverly constructed theory, I was thinking of the general, not the specific; of
pounds, not pennies.
Solutions to problems experienced by the very poor were hatched in
Reading, Hampshire, and Berkeley, California, and then exported to places the
hatchers had never even visited. Methods for conserving firewood to slow
down deforestation, ways to collect clean water from roofs, clever types of
cultivation that doubled vegetable yields—these were carried into the field by
people like me, where they ran head on into reality… and failed. It wasn’t that
the techniques didn’t work in test plots in Britain, it was that the reality of life
in an impoverished culture could not be translated into plans and formulas.
You might have a master plan for combatting infant mortality with a safe water
supply, but—if you were human—you wound up buying antibiotics for Paco,
the neighbour’s son, and eyeglasses for Amina in the hut down the creek. You
moved from the general theory to the particular case, from pounds to pennies.
Sometimes I get the feeling that someone, somewhere has opened a
plug hole and all the goodness is being drained from the world. People say and
do things to each other that they didn’t used to do—or so it seems. I suppose
things were worse during the time of, say, Genghis Khan, or Hitler, so maybe
what I’m experiencing is actually part of a pattern, a cycle of history. But it
seems to me that within my own lifetime, things that people just didn’t DO
have become the norm.
No, I’m not talking about relaxed sexual mores or gender fluidity—I
count those things as blessings. I’m talking about something much more subtle
about the way people treat each other. There was a time when the word
“ambitious” was a negative. If you don’t believe me, then consult Act 3, Scene
2 of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. If someone—even a salesman—was
“aggressive”, that was a bad thing. Being competitive had to do with sporting
events, not eulogised national goals. And people bought homes, not put a foot
on some ugly-sounding thing called “the housing ladder”. When I hear that, I
always want to ask where the hell the ladder leads to if you climb it.
Now, if you’re a big company, you can buy the rights to sell water to
everyone in a medium-sized town in Bolivia and charge people even to collect
rainwater from the roof. You can buy the rights to a vital medication and raise
the price 500 times, making its purchase almost impossible for those who need
it. Maybe all these things can be treated by a new act of Congress or
something. But they indicate that beneath the normal-seeming surface, a new
and chaotic set of rules for human behaviour is emerging.
Go ahead—you can name your own examples. And yes, the grist mill of
government does sometimes address the issues of unfairness—not all that
often, but sometimes. And am I saying don’t vote wisely and support causes of
restoring fairness? You probably know me better than that by now. No–I’m
asking a deeper question: if there was once a sense of good will that restrained
the worst excesses of selfishness, what has happened to it? And—to
paraphrase the young rabbi Jesus—wherewith shall it be replaced?
I’ve come to think that laws can seldom fix things. Programmes and
committees can’t fix things. Treaties and international courts can’t fix things,
either. If there is a way to get the lion to lie down with the lamb, it’s got to
come from somewhere else. The route is in the pennies, not in the pounds.
That same young Rabbi used to go on about it. When he said things like
“Turn the other cheek” and “If a man asks for your coat, give him your shirt
also,” was he just offering a way to earn brownie points with God? A crown in
some distant, bye-and-bye heaven? I don’t think so. I think he was outlining
some good, practical advice—even for those who, like me, don’t buy into the
whole Christian story. Was Buddha’s stress on compassion just a meditation
technique that would offer a ticket out of life’s hardship? Not likely, either.
Those two, and a whole slew of other sages throughout history were offering a
practical solution– a methodology you might say– to treat the misery we
wreak on each other through our much-camouflaged selfishness.
I’m coming back now to my rather overworked metaphor: the answer
lies in the pennies, not the pounds. Those spiritual geniuses were not saying,
“Go thou and start a movement for un-revenged victims of cheek-slappers” or
“legislate to make cheek-slapping punishable by fine or imprisonment”. They
were handing the problem right back to where it belongs—with us. They were,
in effect, telling us to– yes—sweat the small stuff.
If goodness is being drained from the world, there is only one way to put
it back. Yes, it’s us. Chipping in our pennies of fairness, of respect, of love,
without worrying about the pounds of large events.
It seems I have never learned about the relationship of the small to the
large, about the micro to the macro, the pennies to the pounds. Pete was
right. So I’m on a crash course. You might say I’m going to my own sort of
moral Brick Lane market.
You see, I don’t doubt that if you can express good will in pretty much all
your dealings with people, that the good will will get passed on. Maybe it will
incubate in other people, as their good will incubates in us. Maybe it’s the only
sensible thing to do in a selfish and apparently uncaring world.
Now maybe we think we already do that. That we’re already little
beacons of light, doing our share to brighten the darkness, pockets full of
pennies.
But…are you sure? Have you counted your change lately?
AMEN