The Normalization of Non-Sharing
I am away from the Farm at a writing cabin and I’ve left the microphone with which I normally record the audio behind. So, please forgive the sound quality if you’re inclined to listen rather than read. I will upload a new file when I return home at the end of the week.
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
Growing up, my brother and I sat down to a home-cooked meal nearly every night. We mostly ate what our parents prepared without complaint. Once we were old enough, we were expected to help with the dishes. I wish I could tell you that kitchen cleanup was a complaint-free affair.
I am struck this morning by an image I’ve never quite caught sight of before. Picture a household in which one of more of the residents is regularly excluded from meals as a form of punishment. The cruelty of it turns the stomach. Around these parts, such exclusionary behavior is punishable by law, but only when it is enacted between family members.
The word economy only came into common usage in English within the last century. It is formed from the Greek words oikos for ‘house’ and nomia for ‘law’ or ‘management tool.’ We might translate ‘economy’ as ‘a set of shared agreements or understandings that keep a household in healthy working order.’
The fact that most English speakers got along just fine without the word ‘economy’ before the 1930’s suggests that ‘household management’ fell under the category of ‘doing what humans do to keep one another alive.’ Anthropologists often say that a culture remains invisible to its inhabitants, like water is to fish. We make something visible by creating some distance from it, by dis-embedding. What shall we call the human equivalent of a fish out of water?
In the place where I live, the late 1800’s saw a rapid loss of subsistence lifeways. In an economy of subsistence, the household of human life is the surrounding landscape. Its inhabitants are neighbors: human, animal, plant, soil, wind and water. Given the proximity, their health isn’t difficult to discern. It can be tasted in each bite of food, smelled with each breath of air.
As railroad lined linked countryside to city, a commercial agricultural economy grew rapidly. “Efficiency-obsessed agricultural reformers urged farmers to end ritual cooperative work like corn huskings…economic life was becoming less embedded in social interactions like visiting one’s neighbors and communal work parties.”1 Economic life was becoming more embedded in the practice of walking up to a counter and asking the store clerk or market vendor to share some of what they had with you. The answer: “Yes, so long as you have money.” The household of the burgeoning market economy increasingly encompassed the entire globe. The profound loss of intimacy began ushering in different maintenance responsibilities and very different moral guidelines.
For over a week I’ve been hunkered down in a cabin working on the book project, my stay here offered as a gift of encouragement toward that birthing process. As such, I have been deep into the distinction between the market economy and what I often call ‘an economy of home,’ more commonly known as a gift economy.
But a rare visit from out-of-town family drew me from the snowy woods into the city for a day and a half. I don’t do well in cities, and I had a hunch that the timing would only amplify those dynamics.
I haven’t been to a restaurant in years. But I decided to push myself this time, given the shortness of the visit and the family’s wishes. I wasn’t going to order food, but at least I could join in the conversation and try not to be too much of a grump for a couple of hours—two aims at which I didn’t succeed. But grumpy isn’t really an accurate word for the sorrow that washes over me when I try to find a comfortable seat at a table founded upon the polite normalization of non-sharing.
In order to build and maintain the specific form of household we call a market economy, all of its residents must internalize the notion that they are only worthy of eating and staying warm if they contribute to the household maintenance in one most fundamental way: making money. Failure to do that is a punishable offense.
Thus, on the cold, damp day that I decided to break my no-restaurant rule, all of the local people without money kindly kept up their end of the bargain and stayed away. Those with money looked at menus, used the toilet, washed their hands, and warmed themselves by the fireplace. In order to continue functioning, the market economy requires everyone to play their parts. A flood of snow-soaked street people would have made quite a stir in the polite atmosphere of the restaurant. Likely, the police would have eventually been called. In this household, overt or stubborn insistence upon neighborly sharing can become a punishable offense.
I’m not criticizing specific people here. We may be asked to play different roles at different points in single life. ‘Not having money’ might look as simple as leaving your wallet at home. Until you retrieve it, you will be asked to obey the laws of the house—literally the ‘oiko-nomia.’
In my early twenties, on a family vacation to Barcelona, my brother and I bought a round-trip bus ticket to the tiny country of Andorra where we planned to snowboard for a couple of days. Once there, however, our debit cards stopped working. This was before cell phones. We survived for three days on the handful of Euros we had in our pockets. At one point, a kind woman took pity on us and gave us the food she had on her: brie, baguette and apples. My brother and I still talk about how good that food tasted twenty years later.
As it turned out, the restaurant where I sat feeling sad last weekend was now owned by a couple of old friends of mine. I sold bread at the farmer’s market and local coop in that town for years, so I got to know quite a few people there. The wife remembered me and came out to say hello. She reminded me that she was pregnant with her first child when she and her husband started drinking milk and cream from the cows I milked back then. “You helped grow my son to full term. He is fifteen years old already.” She then asked what I’d been up to; last she knew I was farming and baking for business. Where to even begin? Here I am sitting at her restaurant under the influence of a quality of heartbreak bordering on the unbearable.
“I haven’t sold anything since the first day of the pandemic,” I began. I always try to read people’s faces for clues. About five sentences in, after I mentioned my longing to create meaningful cross-class relationships, she said, “Can we please keep talking about this? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the fact that we have no real communities any more. I am so glad we crossed paths again.” They needed her in the kitchen; we would have to part ways for today.
I’m back at the writing cabin now, where there is blessedly no phone reception. In order to check voicemails the other day I walked to the top of the town cemetery, where I found a single bar. As I paused to pay my spoken respects to the old ones buried there, I learned that the couple listed on the tallest stone met and married in Scotland, where they were born in the 1820’s. The husband died in 1901, the wife a few years later. I wonder what they would make of the story I’m trying to tell, a story of longing for home in a displaced time.
The public library, where I will sit outside on the chilly porch to send out this newsletter, carries the family name I read on that hilltop gravestone. It strikes me that libraries are one of the few remaining public places where people don’t have to make money in order to be welcome. This one is still open four days each week for at least a few hours. The other day I told the librarian that I’d forgotten the puppy’s leash back at the Farm. She offered to bring one for me from home, as her family dog had died the year prior.
Writing about the pain associated with the forced normalization of non-sharing places me downwind of a lot of strong emotions. It’s taken me years to realize that there is nothing I can do to keep people from feeling criticized by anything I write, if that’s what they need to do to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And yet, from what I’ve seen, the pain syndromes associated with the various roles within the ‘household of the market’ differ only in flavor and texture, not in magnitude. Unworthiness and un-belonging may have been the foundation for the house that my ancestors moved into generations ago, a house that had to keep growing to stay healthy and sound. The bargain was billed as a path to freedom but it often ends up feeling like a living death.
But we disobey the house rules all of the darn time. Aliveness has a wily way of slipping through the cracks. That’s what I’m trying to write a book about—a testament to the gaps in the story and the longing they can awaken, if we let them. If there wasn’t so much outrageous beauty trapped in the wreckage of modernity it wouldn’t be so exquisitely sad.
With love,
Adam
From my friend Sam Bliss’ dissertation at the University of Vermont, Non-Market Food Practices Do Things That Markets Cannot: Why Vermonters Produce and Distribute Food That Is Not For Sale.
Long may you continue dandelioning between the paving slabs, my friend.
The "seems grumpy but is really just deeply sorrowful" is my song, too. Big hug, Adam!