OUT OF CONTROL

The first chapter was about technology and its secret powers. We cannot manipulate technology as if it were our own slave. Even if we would be able to own a private slave, we would not be able to impose our will entirely on that slave without becoming affected ourselves. In the best case, we would become friends and that would make nonsense out of the owner-slave relationship. In the worst case, the slave would die of misery, escape or challenge us so much that it would affect our daily joy of life and proper judgment. We cannot own, control and manipulate a slave without changing ourselves. That is even more true for technology of which we do not know its boundaries. Is it hardware, like pumps or engines? Is it software like our ability to plow with a tractor, or to influence wholesale prices for our products and services, or is it our ability to make a good family or to teach at school? We cannot be owners without becoming affected by what we own.

In the second chapter I explained that we can only participate in the course of creativity. Although we can own a piece of art, we can not buy the mind and the hands of the artist. Not everything is for sale!

This chapter is on "ownership" because its interpretation is so essential for development of AT.

POVERTY AND PARTICIPATION

Once I traveled through the southern United States, and in my effort to know "the other side" of society, I avoided interstates and did not eat in fast food or other chain restaurants. After a night in Meridian, Mississippi, I asked for the old road to Jackson and for a local breakfast. A young African-American woman insisted after my explanation, "There ain't no other road to Jackson than the interstate and there aren't other restaurants than ...." However, I found the other road to Jackson and a southern breakfast with grits and scrambled eggs, served by the owner of the restaurant himself. My point is that this young lady, though well- dressed and well-fed, did not show any understanding of her own environment and history. Does she know how her forefathers had to live and to work, and how that affects her present reality? How much does she own of her future? Her reality seems to be the high speed interstate with nationwide, chain restaurants. Though the chains provide local labor, the bulk of the pr ofits are accumulated elsewhere. She owns no apparent share in profit, decision or vision. Though unusual, it is not difficult to imagine us owning a part of our history, our present and future. We can call such an awareness "freedom to choose." It is less unusual to imagine ourselves as owners of a piece of land, eventually renting to those who do not own, but again it is unusual to think that with our land we own part of the future of our renters. A few examples may help to understand the overall importance of ownership:

• Nobody will invest labor and capital to do active soil conservation without legal or effective social guarantee that the landowner will allow for continued use of that land. Instead of that, often the rent will be raised next year "because the land is now worth more."

• Nobody will carefully maintain a rented house (or even invest in some needed improvement) if there is no effective legal or social guarantee that s/he will still have work next month in the same area!

POVERTY AS INJUSTICE

People have always experienced various kinds of poverty. There have always been poorly skilled people who didn't make it, or widows, orphans, and disabled people who fell to poverty. But in general, good neighbors could take care of that. Pests, floods, droughts and other natural disasters have caused poverty, but that was in general only short term and not very selectively by social status. If all people are creatures of God, would God then really have equipped the majority so poorly that they can't take care of themselves and have to live in such misery? Or are there other, more human causes at work? Before blaming God, I prefer to analyze human-made reality!

My definition of poverty includes physical, spiritual and community poverty. The three are as related as "sun, heat and light." Physical poverty is not only an individual problem--it is a problem (and a failure) of the spirit in which the community functions. Therefore I focus especially on "justice-related poverty," because that was what we worked with in Central America. Although we will probably never eradicate poverty, we don't want to support it, so that poverty of others becomes our sin.

It is not easy for us to discern justice-related poverty, because it keeps itself away from us. That is a diabolic truth and we have to know about its mechanism. I provide two examples:

• As an urbanization and sanitation consultant, I was assigned by UNICEF to work out proposals for development of urban slum areas in Guatemala City. Slowly I understood the reality of urban marginal misery; first, none of the main traffic veins through the city really gave access or exposure to the marginal areas. A wall, a row of trees, or upcoming new business can hide the misery right behind. Second, in the process of quantifying my work field I became aware that the city was almost completely surrounded by a belt of about 4 km (1 mile = 1.6 km) of slum. Although in cross section that 4 km made only 28 percent of the linear exposure, its actual mathematical area was as extended as the "middle class and well-to-do" center area of the city. But even worse, the people in the slums live at least four times as densely, so the actual rational proportion of urban misery is about 80 percent instead of the visual 28 percent.

• Our Guatemalan village was 12 miles away from the city limits. During our seven years the number of billboards increased to almost 300, or 25 every mile. Scarcely one percent of these were noncommercial, political or invitations of church congregations. The others promoted the image of the strong, impressive, young man smoking cigarettes, the attractive young woman buying U.S. imported bras, agriculture as possible only by spraying and fertilizing with agro-chemicals and the pharmacy as the only means against physical and mental disease.

• Some billboards are so big that people steal them, bend them over, and live under them with their entire household.

EARNING A LIVING

When talking about justice-related poverty, we can not avoid looking into the consequences of extreme capitalism. This may be an even more sensitive issue than the theological one, which I avoided earlier, and I pray that my comments will contribute to positive discussion.

Before engaging in such an analysis, I quote Thomas Jefferson as he visited France. He walked (like many MCC workers) with a poor woman, heard her lament and analysis and learned that the abundant land belonged to the rich who used it for hunting and pleasure, leaving the poor peasant without any basic provision: "The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment is provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as possible nobody shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state." (Ref 1)

Karl Marx suggests that poverty can get so bad that the poor have nothing to lose except their chains. He sees it as a necessary process; I see justice related poverty as a sin of society, and the poor as "sinned against," deserving extra attention! Actually we speak incorrectly about "preferential option for the poor." It would be better to recognize that accumulation of wealth leads to accumulation of power and to preferential treatment for the affluent. One way to give attention to the poor is to feed them and to dress them. The more difficult part is to walk with them and to understand their cause, just like Jefferson did. Besides sharing our material resources, we have to give time to learn our own history and reality, and take steps to participate in change! Indeed many honest and humble people defend capitalism without ever having been exposed to its shortcomings. They have not consciously chosen the capitalistic option, but are born into it, and are trained to believe that communism is the onl y other system. That is not true; in fact numerous (even much older) economic systems exist in today's world, and compete vigorously with western capitalism (Ref 2). Markets and profits have always existed and are not unique features of capitalism alone. It is with hesitancy that I list here some negative extremes of capitalism. The following examples illustrate factors that negatively interfered with our work in AT in Guatemala. (Recently I'm discovering similar patterns in the Western world as well.)

• Natural resources (also human labor) are often given a value derived from their present market value instead of their potential for future years and generations. This is based on an assumption that resources are infinite.

• Success is not evaluated by "enough" but by "somewhere else even more can be earned." This can be illustrated, by the local decisions of multinational corporations, which pull out if they do not make the overall profit goal, whereas a locally owned company would stay. Corporate business leadership can even be sued legally if it does not pursue maximum profit.

• Profit is considered more important than human value: "If the marginal urgency of goods is low," says Professor Galbraith in The Affluent Society," then so is the urgency of employing the last man or the last million men in the labor force. If ... we can afford some unemployment in the interest of stability ... we can afford to give those who are unemployed the goods that enable them to sustain their accustomed standard of living." (Ref 3)

• Schumacher criticizes: "From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity." (Ref 4)

• Resources are used for obtaining and protecting unreasonable commercial privileges; as I mentioned privileging the wealthy instead of "opting preferential" for the poor. "One example is Pocahontas Development Corporation ..., which owns more than 81,300 acres of mineral rights in Kentucky. In 1985 Pocahontas paid $74 in property taxes on this vast reserve of coal, worth millions of dollars."

• "A state circuit judge ruled in July 1985 that Kentucky's property tax rate on unmined coal--one-tenth of a cent per $100 valuation--was so low that it amounts to an unconstitutional exemption from taxation.... If the ruling stands, the statewide tax rate of 22 cents will apply. However, a 1978 law exempting coal from local taxation means local school districts, county governments, libraries and health departments still will not be able to tax coal property as they do all other property." (Ref 5)

• Machetes, airplanes and computers are considered an asset but human resources a liability. We see people slowly being replaced by machines.

• Mass consumption is encouraged by giving lower rates for higher consumption. Though this practice might in part be justified by more efficient delivery, it blatantly favors "the haves" over "the have nots," and it encourages accumulation more than caring conservation.

• Efficiency is measured more in "money value" than in any other value (like energy consumption, human satisfaction, art of labor, sustainability, etc.).

• Of course we can do things more efficiently, but do not carefully discern the effects and the actual purpose. A Dutch scientist said about travelling: People through the ages have spent the same amount of time for travelling. With technology we can go faster and we go farther. But why? What is actually gained?

• Ivan Illich says it this way: "The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The average American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles per year: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 2 8 percent." (Ref 6)

• Gross National Product (GNP) has been over emphasized as a measure of national well-being.

• "In some respects, ... GNP is too big because it includes certain things that either add nothing to our standard of living, or actually detract from it. However, GNP does not include certain things that should be counted.

• Some of the "economic bads" are congestion, pollution, and littering. These unfortunate by-products of our industrial society should be subtracted from our GNP ... because they detract from our standard of living. ... A lot of what we produce ... goes toward dealing with bad things like pollution. Think of how much we need to spend not only on cleaning up our rivers and streams, but on air pollution control devices, garbage disposal, as well as time lost and aggravation due to congestion. ... (Tobin and Nordhaus) also subtract the "regrettable necessities" of defense spending, police protection, and private security measures. ... (in the United States) more than two million people work in private security--private detectives, store detectives, hotel detectives, security guards, ... night watchmen, and private housing police.

• But we have to add to GNP all the goods and services it should have counted and didn't. We have to add household production as well as the production of illegal goods and services, not to mention unreported production. Sometimes illegal production and unreported (but otherwise legal) production are lumped together as the "underground economy.

• To put this all together, the Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW) is:

• - The economic bads

• - The regrettable necessities

• + Household ... production (and neighborly aid and voluntary community service)

• + Unreported and illegal production." (Ref 7)

DISTRIBUTION

Economic growth benefits the poor only to a certain extent.

First, as long as economic growth requires ongoing exploitation of earthly resources, the poor are first to suffer the effects of environmental degradation. Moreover, when a mine is depleted, the company can move, the miners cannot.

Second, distribution is often more urgent than growth. "Nowhere in the developing world are the contrasts between poverty and national wealth more striking than in Latin America and the Caribbean. Despite average per capita incomes that are five to six times those in South Asia and Sub-Sahara Africa, nearly one-fifth of the population still lives in poverty. This is because of the region's exceptionally high degree of income inequality. Raising all the poor in the continent to just above the poverty line would cost only 0.7 percent of regional GDP--the approximate equivalent of a 2 percent income tax on the wealthiest fifth of the population." (Ref 8)

Third, while the poor may eventually slowly work their way out of poverty, the rich also go ahead in developing their model of society, thus again increasing the stress for those who are working their way up. In reality the gap grows and does not decrease. (Ref 9)

OWNERSHIP AND CARE

Even now, many of the world's traditional cultures do not share the modern Western concept of ownership. They have, for example, no private land titles. They share and care for the land together, just like we do not "own" children or spouses but we "care" for our family. Nobody owns mother earth; we all have to care for her. Nobody owns the future, though some are closer to the powers that shape the future in their interest. Even legal systems can become subject to private ownership. Then, if law is a measure for the well-being of society, we can safely conclude that our common health is partly subject to private ownership and control.

In summary I stress by repetition that, just like technology and creation, ownership is not to be called "neutral" but it can take on a life of its own and destroy the health of body, soul and community. It will continue doing so unless we realize that we will not be judged only by what we owned, but also how we cared. For many people who pursue accumulation of wealth, these words sound like a call for repentance. They hear well!