The Mother of the Economy is Always Pregnant

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly — what is essential is invisible to the eye
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Four Seemingly Unrelated Things

I try not to listen to too much news. Without putting my head in the sand, and while remaining tolerably informed about the events swirling around the world, I also know that there is precious little I can do. For every cheerful metaphor about returning starfish to the sea, the beach stretches on for miles.

Four things — well, not just four, but for the sake of brevity, four — have been prodding at my mind: The War in Iraq. The “Buy Canadian” movement; The Starfish Thrower; and a Danish conference on DEI. They seem unrelated, but they are absolutely born of the same mother.

The War

It really doesn’t matter which war. They are all, at their heart, the same. But in the current context, war’s presence in public conversation seems to centre almost entirely on the economy.

I am not, clearly, referring to those actually losing their lives, their possessions, their body parts. I am referring to those of us living in nations that wage wars elsewhere, or that support those who do. Among us, the loudest and most frequently cited objection is the cost of living. The price of gasoline. The rising price at the supermarket. “Kitchen Table Economics” is the cliché of choice.

No one, apparently, is expected to bemoan the deaths, the destruction, the razing of the land, the annihilation of the environment, the wounding of the people, the permanent psychological scarring of those who survive. One fusses about the price of gasoline. And this, according to every survey and every cable news pundit, is the top priority of the American People.

The economy as an article of Faith. As Dogma. Received Wisdom. It is the only filter allowed to decide right from wrong, policy from morality. If the money keeps flowing, nothing else matters. Some may grouse about inequities, but when all is said and done, the only thing that truly counts is what we can afford to buy — wants indistinguishable from needs, and the full cost invisible to those paying only the sticker price.

Buy Canadian

When the United States declared a trade war on Canada, the “Buy Canadian” movement arrived with considerable momentum and genuine fervour. Many Canadians became devoted to the cause. Others were uninterested. As such things go, the fervour subsided.

Initially, I was enthusiastic. The movement aligned with my own preference for small and local — though I am aware that this preference is itself a privilege, available to those of us whose electric bills are not at risk. But as the movement gathered steam, I began to look more carefully at what exactly it was supporting.

I watched people choose Amazon DOT CA over Amazon DOT COM, with the peculiar logic that a DOT CA address was somehow insulated from the American parent company. People continued buying American cars, regardless of which side of the border they were partially or wholly produced. In the grocery store, misleading (sometimes fraudulent) labels materialized with breathtaking speed. “Made in Canada” proliferated, accompanied by maple leaf stickers that are, it should be said, purely decorative.

The distinction between “Made in Canada” and “Product of Canada” is, however, meaningful. “Product of Canada” requires a 98% threshold of Canadian origin. “Made in Canada” requires only that a minimum of 51% of total production costs be incurred in Canada — a comfortably vague standard under which a product made entirely from Patagonian ingredients, expensively packaged in a Canadian facility, becomes a bona fide “Made in Canada” item.

So what to do? Direct one’s loyalties to Canadian Tire, Loblaws, Irving — massive corporations owned by investors and holding companies not necessarily Canadian in any meaningful sense? On what grounds would the ethics of these giants differ from those south of the border?

Which brings us, inevitably, to the starfish.

The Starfish Thrower: Psychology for Sale

I’ve written elsewhere about my years as a corporate trainer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the many stories I delivered — stories, mind you, comfortable little anecdotal tales that seemed to materialize in the corporate canon and persist there still — was usually called “The Starfish Thrower.”

A man walks along a beach after a storm and sees, in the distance, a child. The child walks, bends, picks up a stranded starfish baking in the sun, and tosses it gently back into the ocean. The man approaches and asks why he is bothering. He points out that the beach stretches for miles, littered with thousands of starfish. “You can’t possibly make a difference.”

The child listens. Bends down. Picks up another starfish, and throws it past the breaking waves. He looks up at the man and replies: “I made a difference to that one.”

A lovely little story, simple to tell, simple to absorb. Everyone can picture themselves in it; everyone can see how touching, how meaningful, how uncomplicated their actions can be and can provide life-changing outcomes.

It was, of course, extremely life-changing for Jack Canfield, who immortalized it in Chicken Soup for the Soul — a series of upbeat, easily digestible vignettes that spawned 275 distinct titles and sold north of 500 million copies, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that simple-minded solutions sell.

Some of the more fanciful titles included Chicken Soup for the Christian Teenage Soul, for the Dental Soul, for the Dieter’s Soul, Here Comes the Bride, for the Soul of Hawaii, for the Soul of the Latter Day Saints, for the Nascar Soul, for the Network Marketer’s Soul. I could go on, but I'm starting to feel queasy.

I did, however, permit myself a quiet smile for the parody: Chicken Poop for the Soul: Stories to Harden the Heart and Dampen the Spirit.

Anyway, the original story is more telling — and considerably darker.

It is a chapter called “The Star Thrower,” part of a 1969 book by Loren Eiseley entitled The Unexpected Universe¹. The original essay is a deeply philosophical inquiry into morality and evolution, and its tone bears little resemblance to the cheery parable about optimism that circulates in training rooms.

In the corporate version, the setting is a bright, sunny beach with a cherubic child. In Eiseley’s original, the setting is a bleak, gloomy coast in Baja California. The beach is populated not by a cheerful child but by shell collectors and professional scientists, ruthlessly boiling sea life for specimens or to sell as souvenirs to tourists. The central characters in the corporate myth are an optimistic child and a somewhat grumpy older man. In the original, the observer is a disillusioned scientist who has developed a conscience; the star-thrower is a mysterious, unknown old man.

The corporate version ends with the child instantly enlightening the older man. Eiseley’s ends with the man returning home, spending a dreadful night of tossing and turning, and arriving, through a deep existential crisis, at the slow and hard-won conviction that compassion is worth something, and that he, too, will become a star-thrower.

Difficult to pack into a fifteen-minute training segment. And awkward to apply to developing market share.

The Danish Conference

I recently attended an online conference summarizing the findings of a Danish university assessment of the Human Library.

For context: the Human Library Organization was founded in Denmark some twenty-five years ago and now operates in 85 countries. Its tagline is “unjudge someone.” The primary focus is to give people an opportunity to learn, in a safe and structured environment, about the life experiences of someone they might not otherwise encounter. The “books” cover unusual occupations, immigration, marginalization, adoption, 2SLGBTQ+ experience, transgender identity, war, refugees, non-mainstream religious practice, disability, and abuse, among others. Some books — including mine, as I have been a Human Book on several occasions — represent journeys that many of us either take ourselves or travel alongside others.

The assessment was ostensibly designed to measure how effective the experience is for readers.

And I want to be clear: I believe in the vision and the aim of the Human Library.

What I found disappointing — perplexing, rather than shocking, since it is perhaps too familiar to shock — was the headline finding, offered right at the outset: that promoting DEI through methods such as those of the Human Library increases workplace productivity.

I am not naïve. I understand that an organization like the Human Library requires serious funding, and that serious funding is most reliably found in the corporate world. One might, at best, call it enlightened self-interest.

And yet, Mother Economy is still held aloft as the primary motivator, the parental authority — productivity, profit, and economics remain, apparently, the only palatable filter for moral decisions.

─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ───

War is wrong primarily because it raises the price of gasoline. Buy Canadian presumably will repair our economic woes, and we need not look too closely at what exactly we are choosing to support. One happy little starfish story is sufficient to bright-side² any darker or more profound implication. And even DEI is only worthwhile when the bottom line improves.

I am about to break one of George Orwell’s cardinal rules for effective writing by reaching for a Latin phrase: Cui bono?⁴

And while we are quoting philosophers of Orwellian stature, we can pivot to that grandly acknowledged prophet of profit — almost — Peter Drucker, who consistently argued that profit is not a purpose but a result. This rather underlines my own counter-position: that measuring the depth of our morals should not be performed with the poor yardstick of profit.

Our pregnant mother now becomes Old Mother Hubbard, who went to her moral cupboard and found it bare.⁴

Notes

¹ Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe (1969). “The Star Thrower” is the opening chapter, running to some 24 pages — a very different creature from the two or three paragraph parable that circulates in corporate training materials.

² Barbara Ehrenreich coined and popularized bright-siding in her 2009 book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, a critique of the American cult of forced optimism. Well worth reading.

³ A small but interesting aside (also because I am by nature somewhat iconoclastic) on the subject of war and George Orwell, occurred during the height of World War I, when he (a youth of conscription age) was spotted walking about Southwold in civilian attire. When asked why he was not in the military, his reply was purportedly "because I am the civilization others are dying for." Clearly he had not yet developed some of his later beliefs enshrined in his essays.

⁴ “Old Mother Hubbard / Went to the Cupboard, / To give the poor Dog a bone; / When she came there, / The Cupboard was bare, / And so the poor Dog had none.” The rhyme first appeared in Sarah Catherine Martin’s The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog (1805).

Another apt nursery rhyme is “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. / She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. / She gave them some broth without any bread; / Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.” First recorded in Gammer Gurton’s Garland (1784), though the rhyme is believed to be considerably older.