By G.D. Maxwell
For what it’s worth, greed is one of the seven deadly sins. And depending on how you define covetousness, it falls under the Commandment warning us about drooling over all those cool things our neighbours have.
Despite being one of the on-ramps to Hell, that didn’t stop the One True Religion from building gilded monuments and surrounding its henchmen with silk and gold... to the greater glory of God, of course. Tithing peasants never bought that whopper but what did they matter?
The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas – founder of all those Aquinas Centres – said of greed: "...it is a sin directly against one's neighbor, since one man cannot over-abound in external riches, without another man lacking them...." Several centuries later, scientists have refined that thought, corrected its zero-sum premise, and helped to explain why people make the choices they do. I’ll explain later.
But for now, let’s follow a tangent back to 18 th century France. Denis Diderot was a philosopher, which is to say he wasn’t a painter, didn’t know how to make wine and wasn’t likely to inherit anything of real value. One of his friends, noting Monsieur Diderot’s tatty old bathrobe, gave him a gift of a luxurious, scarlet dressing gown – a misnomer if ever there was one since anyone lolling about in a ‘dressing gown’ never seems to actually get dressed.
Well, Denis was pretty stoked. He wore his new robe all the time. But then a funny thing happened. He began to notice how shabby the rest of his life was. Truth be told, Denis lived like a pig. His furniture was busted and uncomfortable, his rugs were almost see-through, his study looked more like a prison cell than a place a philosopher might sit around and be philosophical.
"This won’t do," he said, but in French. Since he’d already taken his old robe to the Re-use-It Centre, the only thing left to do was replace his familiar, comfy furnishings with new ones. So he did. And in the end, Denis found himself philosophizing in much grander, but less comfortable, surroundings. He also grew to really, really hate that scarlet dressing gown, being as it was the thin edge of the wedge.
In her book The Overspent American , Harvard economist Juliet Schor calls this the Diderot Effect. Get it? Anyway, Ms. Schor says it explains why, for example, people feel an overwhelming compulsion to buy new furniture when they move into a new house, new ties to go with new suits, and so on.
Of course, it doesn’t explain why aging boomers with tiny ponytails and big cigars listen to ‘golden oldies’ in their new Lexus but it certainly explains the greatest scourge currently threatening North America: HGTV. HGTV is all about being constantly dissatisfied with your surroundings and renovating. Renovation – not knowing when to leave well enough alone – most often starts with being dissatisfied with your kitchen wallpaper and ends up with hopelessly underqualified people gutting their homes, hating each other and running off to divorce courts. Understandable, given its roots. Renovate: vt. from the Latin reno , stupid idea; and vate , sucker. But I digress.
So right about now you’re probably asking yourself what a Harvard economist and a UCLA neuroscientist have to do with adolescent boys sneaking peeks at each other’s dicks in the shower after gym class. Aren’t you? I am.
You would if you knew the UCLA neuroscientist was Michael McGuire and that he’s spent an amazing amount of time studying the effects of serotonin on the behaviour of vervet monkeys. "Oh yeah," I can hear you say, "that neuroscientist."
To make an incomprehensible scientific thing merely hard to understand, let’s just say Mike and his buddies found the dominant minkey had 50 per cent more serotonin than the others. Serotonin, as you remember from high school biochemistry, is a neurotransmitter that regulates mood and behaviour. Got a lot of it and you have an overall warm, fuzzy sense of well-being. Not enough, and you feel, well, like you feel most of the time – like a dissatisfied cog in a big machine.
Anyway, they took the top minkey out of his group and put him all by himself for three days. His serotonin levels dropped since he didn’t have anyone to dominate. The serotonin levels of the new leader of the pack shot up like crazy. When the former Numero Uno was put back in the pack, all the minkey’s serotonin returned to normal. Cool, eh?
"What’s that got to do with...."
I’m getting to that. So the gist of Mike’s research is that being number one feels good. In other words, as much as we might not like to admit it, there is a deep-seated, biochemical basis for adolescent boys checking out each other’s dicks in the shower. It helps them know their relative position in the group. And relative position is, like it or not, extremely important to all of us.
So getting something new makes everything else seem old and we’re locked into a constant evaluation of our relative position in our little corner of society. So what?
Well, it helps explain how we’ve gotten to – and how disastrous it just might be – a point in our social and economic evolution where it makes perfect sense that CEOs make 600 times more than shopfloor workers. Where the size of the average home has more than doubled in the last 25 years. Where gas-guzzling SUVs outsell everything on the market. Why Whistler’s landfill is choked with perfectly good appliances that were tossed out so nice, new stainless steel ones could be installed. Why, in some corners of North America, conservation is a dirty word.
And it drives home just how important the next phase of Whistler’s ‘sustainability’ plan, about to get under way, really is. Many, most notably me, would say sustainability and Whistler belong in the same sentence about as much as benevolent and dictator do. Whatever. Overcome your cynicism and I’ll work on mine.
If you think sustainability in Whistler is about sustaining growth, sustaining opulence, sustaining monster homes, sustaining sky-high prices, sustaining low wages and bad working conditions, sustaining the outflow of workerbees to satellite communities, sustaining overly-expensive public works and sustaining a model of greedy conspicuous consumption, do nothing.
If, on the other hand, you believe sustainability is about improving the quality of life for all of us – without sacrificing the quality of life for every other inhabitant of this planet – if you think sustainability has something to do with human rights, culture, community, livelihood, freedom from corporate rule and living within our systemic means as opposed to our individual economic means, get off yer butt and start screaming and shouting because you, my friend, are about to become extinct.
Or at least be moved the hell out of Whistler.
