Tea, Toast and Power

Accordingly, many of us believe that the restrictions on our rights, that our vaunted American freedoms, are being taken from us by others.  It’s the government’s fault, or that of big business.  But neither of these institutions sprang full blown like Athena from the head of Zeus.  They have, instead, grown and developed from the thoughts and concepts, the wants and needs, of the people they serve, and each of us bears some small responsibility for what they have become.  If government becomes cruel and repressive, if business becomes sly and underhanded, then perhaps they do this in response to the desires of the people and to give them what they want.

And what Americans want, generally speaking, is Power—power to control the natural world around them, to bend it to their will and to get what they want.  Many of them will deny this when baldly confronted with it, face-to-face, just as Peter three times denied Jesus.  But such denials do not and cannot alter the facts of the situation. 

Let’s take, for example, the simple matter of tea and toast.  Eating, after all, is one of our primary functions as humans, as animals, on this planet.  Before all else, we must stay alive, we must maintain our organic systems, our bodies, and to do that we must therefore eat.  We must consume other life forms, whether animal or vegetable.  We need hydrocarbons that have been sparked by plants with life energy from the sun.  And we also need water, that liquid combination of hydrogen and oxygen that constitutes so very much of our earthly bodies. 

At a very basic, simple, individual level, we could satisfy these needs by drinking from a stream and grazing upon some plant we found in a field.  But we humans have something that both delights and torments us, that both liberates and condemns us, often at the very same time—something that creates both heaven and hell for us.  We have language coursing through our minds, through our bodies and our souls.  We conceptualize.  And our concepts—that still small voice inside us—tell us that plain water and a simple plant is not enough.  We want more.  That voice tells us that we’re better than that.  As the Elephant Man famously declared in the 1980 film, “I am not an animalÖI am a human being!”  At the same time, because language gives us awareness and a sense not only of the future but also of our own impending death, that voice worries that we won’t find anything as good tomorrow, that we have to make plans and prepare for the future.  It yearns for a sense of security. 

Driven, then, by this combination of pride and fear, we begin to manipulate our surroundings and our reality to get those things that we want.  And as the years have passed, especially during the course of the Twentieth Century, those manipulations have become increasingly complicated and convoluted.  Certainly we can still attain some of what we want on our own.  But much more depends upon the smooth, constant, dependable cooperation and coordination of other people—hundreds, thousands, even millions of other people living hundreds, even thousands, of miles apart from each other. 

We need water.  We need food.  But we want more.  We want something better.  But how do we obtain it?  What steps must we take to obtain not just water and food but tea and toast?

Let’s start with the tea.  First, of course, we need water.  We have become acculturated in modern life not only to expecting water at the mere turn of the tap but also to paying very little money for it.  But where does that come from, and how does it get into your house?  What specific things have to happen, what steps must we take, to get the water out of the ground and into your house?  New York City, for example, gets it drinking water from upstate reservoirs.  My wife grew up in the Catskill Mountains right next to one of them.  The land for that reservoir was seized by the State using its power of eminent domain during the 1950s.  The people living there were forced to leave and their land was flooded.  The State no doubt also used eminent domain to lay the pipelines which carry this water south and east to the city. 

Where did the metal come from for those pipes?  How did that metal get to the pipe factories?  Who built and maintained the roads upon which the trucks that transported the metal and the pipes rode?  Who built the trucks?  Where did the gasoline for those trucks come from?  Where was it stored?  How do we know that storage was safe and secure, and that it won’t explode or leak and pollute? 

Once the reservoir is there (Who built it?  To what standards?  And who establishes and enforces the standards?) and the pipeline is laid (Who controls this?  Who maintains it?  Who pays them, and how?), the water must be pumped to the city.  That takes Power in the form of electricity.  And where does that come from?  Where is it generated, and how—from water, from gas, from coal?  If gas or coal, where do they come from?  How do they get there?  How much do they cost?  Who puts up the transmission lines that get the power to the pipeline?  Who maintains them? 

That’s just the water.  What about the tea kettle?  What about the stove?  How do we know the stove was hooked up right to the gas line and that it won’t explode?  How does the gas get here?  Through whose property do those lines run, and how did the gas company get permission to put them there?  How do we know those lines are safe and well constructed?  Inspections and regular maintenance cost money—what assurances do I have that a profit-driven company focused on the “bottom line” and concerned for its shareholders will spend that money?  Can we perhaps have competing gas companies and competing gas lines?  And if so, will the responsible one cost less and create more profit, at least in the short term, than the irresponsible one?

What about the tea?  Where does that come from?  Who picked it?  Who processed it?  Were the workers fairly paid—or does that matter less than the price you paid for it at the supermarket, which you probably reached in your automobile using gas and oil and roads (How much gas and oil did it take to grow the tea and then to transport it to the factory, the wholesaler’s, the supermarket?)?  Do the workers at the supermarket have the right to unionize or strike, or can they simply be terminated at will?  Do they have benefits?  Unemployment? 

Think about the toast.  That, of course, requires bread, and bread requires flour, which requires grain.  Who grew that grain?  How much petrochemical fertilizer did it take?  Who processed it?  Who baked it into bread?  When?  How?  What’s in it?  How do we know there’s nothing in that bread that might hurt us? 

Two simple things: tea and toast.  But, as  you can see, the questions surrounding their provenance are legion—and we’ve only scratched the surface.  Even tea and toast require huge numbers of people.  They require equipment and machinery and technology and Power.  In the end, whether we like it or not—whether we admit it or not—they require the State.  Jacques Ellul wrote in The Technological Society that:

“The whole edifice was constructed little by little, and all its individual techniques were improved by mutual interaction.  Before long, however, the need for still another instrument appeared.  Who was to co-ordinate this multiplicity of techniques?  Who was to build the mechanism necessary to the new economic technique?  Who was to make the decisions necessary to service the machines?  The individual is not by himself rational enough to accept what is necessary to the machines.  He rebels too easily.  He requires an agency to constrain him, and the state had to play this role—but the state now could not be the incoherent, powerless, and arbitrary state of tradition.  It had to be an effective state, equal to the functioning of the economic regime and in control of everything, to the end that machines which had developed at random should become ‘coherent.’  To this end, the state itself must be coherent.  Thus, the techniques of the state—military, police, administrative, and political—made their appearance.  Without them, all the rest would have been no more than faint hopes unable to attain maximum development.  They intermingled, necessitating one another, and all of them necessitated by the economy” (p. 115).

Lewis Mumford, who spent a lifetime studying the effects of technology on society, agrees: “To the extent that men have escaped the control of nature,” he wrote in Technics and Civilization, “they must submit to the control of societyÖto abandon the social collectivism imposed by modern technics means to return to nature and be at the mercy of natural forces” (p. 280-1).

Now, I don’t want to believe that any more than you probably do.  But the facts leave me no choice.  Certainly I’m aware of the libertarian idea that the free market will solve all these problems, that it would work more cheaply and more efficiently than the State.  Perhaps that’s true.  But it has costs—serious costs we must consider.  The reason the State has consistently intervened in the marketplace over the last hundred years is because the marketplace, in its infinite immoral greed, lies and cheats and takes advantage of people’s wants, both rational and irrational, to make as much money as possible.  Upton Sinclair’s famous and influential book The Jungle describes just one of numerous examples of how the market took advantage of people a hundred years ago in their unprincipled, selfish and single-minded quest for maximum profit.  Last week I read in the Washington Post that American automakers, after having consistently lied for years that the highly profitable SUV was no more dangerous than regular passenger cars, have “voluntarily agreed to redesign its vehicles by model year 2010 to reduce the risk of injuries from collisions between sport-utility vehicles and smaller cars.”  Why did this happen?  What caused this change in attitude?  Pressure from consumers?  From businesses?  From free-marketers?  From the companies themselves?  No.  According to the article, “The industry’s quick action was driven in large part by pressure from the government.”  And last Sunday’s New York Times published three interesting reports on the workings of the modern market: podiatrists who deform feet for profit (one says she is “simply fulfilling a need, a need to wear stylish shoes”—at $2500 per toe); keeping the price of the Etch a Sketch below $10 by hiring Chinese workers who put in seven 12-hours days a week at 24 cents an hour; and the miracle of Wal-Mart, which according to one economist “is the greatest thing that ever happened to low-income Americans.  They can stretch their dollars and afford things they otherwise couldn’t”—whether they need them of course, of not.  After all, nothing is more important to America and to Americans than their sacred right to buy what they want.    

Epictetus wrote almost two thousand years ago that “freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling that desire.”  The Tibetan saint Milarepa warned us almost one thousand years ago that “desires achieved increase thirst like salt water.”  And Thoreau told us about 150 years ago that to be free we must do three things: “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”  We can either hearken to these voices, or we can continue on our merry mindless way, craving more and more Power, enjoying our tea and toast while complaining about Homeland Security and never seeing any connection between the two.  Just keep in mind, though, what the great German poet Goethe said: “We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.”