Wealth Inequality and Sentimental Credit
By Noni Mausa
Wealth Inequality and Sentimental Credit
I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread. But I haven’t actually harvested a loaf of bread (unless I am a shoplifter.) I have, instead, used a tiny scrap of credit to mobilize a farmer, a baker, a truck driver, and probably a score of others to exert their skill and energy to have a loaf of bread there when I arrive.
Though my credit is sliced very thin and passed around to these dozens of people, and though it travels backwards in time, so to speak, to reward them, it is merely a placeholder for an exchange of human effort.
My “credit” is not necessarily cash or even money. It is simply whatever leverage I can wield to direct human effort to my benefit. Sometimes, of course, it takes the form of cash, but just as often it can manifest as pity, fear, misdirection, beauty, hope, hatred, fun, or family feeling.
One way to increase one’s own power is to increase your ability to work one or another of these levers. Currently, people focus on only one of these – the possession of money, in the forms of cash, investments, steady incomes, etc.
When the possession or control of cash increases in a small group, we call this wealth inequality. But another way to increase inequality lies in reducing people’s access to non-cash credit, what you might call sentimental credit.
Sentimental credit is the credit the poor depend on when all else is stripped from them. This is the reason why people in the poorest countries are often described as generous, welcoming, lovely, cheerful, honourable, charitable, and keenly alive to community and family connections. It’s why these people create intricate art and music and wonderful food out of the unlikeliest poor materials, and tell long and fascinating stories. It’s why their land, however poor, is seen as their home, with loyalty, respect and family-feeling.
In deeply poor communities, sentimental credit circulate available resources, earns respect and trust, cultivates family feeling, builds pride, and basically keeps things together. People in these societies who aren’t generous, who are miserable to be around, who take but never give, who take no pride in skills, who know no stories, and yet are not actually crippled and thus deserving of assistance — these people don’t have anything to trade. They have little or no sentimental credit. Such people can get along fine if they have a good supply of cash and can live in a relatively anonymous society. Otherwise, they are, ahem, evolutionally impaired.
How does this apply to the descent of America into an unequal society?
I have wondered for several years at a growing pattern of fragmentation in America. In all ways this pattern has moved opposite to the fibres that strengthen sentimental credit. In culture, vulgarity. In communities, intolerance. When encountering the poor and needy, contempt. In the legal system, tolerance of fraud and injustice. In families, shrapnel-dispersion of children and families which makes mutual support or even communication difficult, and weakens their attachment to the land they stand on. In skills and knowledge, disrespect of excellence, or institutional barriers to acquiring or using it.
Sentimental credit, I believe, reaches a kind of steady state in an “oh-aren’t-they-lovely-and-generous”culture after a few generations of steep poverty. And indeed it exists, must exist, in all stable cultures. But its elements may also be used to push back against or circumvent pressures of inequality.
Were the props of sentimental credit in the United States targeted and willfully kicked away (or co-opted) from 1975 onwards, as conventional, anonymous credit was consolidated in fewer and fewer hands?
Which was cause? Which was effect?
And how can they be rebuilt?
Noni,
Interesting post. Here’s a guess. Say out of every group of 100, there are some number of loafers, malcontents, criminals and otherwise bad characters. Let’s assume that number is in the single digits. Now, in a small village, everyone knows who they are, and those people are avoided. The sentimental credit circulates primarily among everyone else.
The criminal gets no benefit of the doubt except from his immediate family, and perhaps not from them. The guy whose wife shows up at church with a black eye on a regular basis only gets sentimental credit on behalf of his wife and kids, who nobody wants to see go hungry. They suffer enough at his hands anyway. And so on.
Frankly, being a bad actor doesn’t pay very well in small town America.
But in a city, things are different. There are fresh marks every day. Nobody in the big city knows if the guy across the street beats his wife or molests his kids. Or if the only reason the woman two houses down can’t keep a job because she hasn’t been sober for more than three hours at a time since 2004. So people fall for scams, and for the BS. And then they feel like idiots. So to avoid becoming the victim of a scam, they become desensitized. If they can’t tell who is a criminal, it becomes safer to assume everyone they don’t know is a criminal.
There are very few solutions to this and those that are don’t seem all that palatable. One is punish severely anyone who violates the local mores. I imagine that is the Singaporean solution. Another is to allow people to self-segregate, which would run afoul of many of the anti-discrimination laws we have today. (I note that this wouldn’t necessarily end up happening by race or ethnicity, but would in a fair number of cases generate outcomes that are similar to those that would be arrived at by discriminating by race or ethnicity.) Massive amounts of surveillance is a third one. There may be other ways.
I am not optimistic.
I am somewhat more optimistic, and think the recognition of sentimental credit as a resource to cultivate, coupled with at-present undeveloped digital resources, could abruptly make SC much more useful and accessible. I will try to explore that further tomorrow morning. Too sleepy at present.
Under industrial capitalism maximizing one’s self interest is not only a virtue but to the Randite/Friedmanite camp the highest virtue. Indeed the very basis of individual freedom.
Under almost every other culture through world history such a figure is called the “Miser” (as in misery and miserable) and in life and literature is considered a figure to be equally pitied and scorned.
Note that this doesn’t apply to the “Rich Man” as such. Becoming rich is often a righteous goal in those same literature, the difference being what you do with those riches. Good Kings share the wealth, indirectly in the form of public display and directly in the form of generosity.
Neither Midas or Scrooge was a hero, until the later started sharing. And to show this isn’t a matter of wealth as such, the folklore Miser was often a fellow peasant.
with the near total victory of mechanized society you don’t see it or hear about it much anymore, but it used to be said, by some who claimed to know, that people in poor countries…absent real famine… were happier than people in rich countries.
i think this happiness may actually generate the ethic of sharing. i am sorry that kimel thinks pro-social behavior needs to be forced on people by sanctions.
put it another way… maybe selfish, self-serving, or anti social behavior is generated by a society that does not allow people to express their natural sharing because they… the people… are being at the same time treated badly by those who control the resources.
kind of reminds me of some liberal i knew who wanted the police to do something to force an eighty year old neighbor to cut her lawn. never occurred to him, it seems, to go over and over to do it for her himself.
i was the beneficiary of maybe the last gasp of this kind of neighborliness when i moved into a small town and rented a house.
i was a city boy and not used to the idea of cutting lawns., (but i was young and strong, not like the eighty year old woman). one morning the mailman came over and mowed my grass. never said a word. i am sure he considered me a lazy lout and probably a druggie. but he acted according to the ethics of his small town. i got the message but not without a lengthy rearrangement of my assumptions.
note
by “mechanized society” i am not talking about the use of machines to make our work easier. i am talking about society itself, and people, being turned into something like machines.