Frank Fisher 1995: From Being Precious to Precious Being

FROM BEING PRECIOUS TO PRECIOUS BEING

First published in Cappuccino Papers #1, ITF, 1995, pp 61-65, based on a 1993 ecoversity presentation.

Reprinted in CSIRO Sustainability Network Update – No.32E, Oct. 2003

Recently Volvo presented its ‘Environmental Concept Car’ (VECC) to Melbournians. It is a four-seater ‘family’-sized vehicle that uses a gas turbine spinning at speeds close to 100,000 revs per minute to generate electricity, which drives electric motors connected to the front wheels and charges a bank of batteries, which are used when ‘zero emission’ motoring is required. It does indeed produce few toxic emissions from the 5 or so litres of diesel it uses per 100 kilometres. For all its technical wizardry, however, the new machine still weighs one and a half tons.

In the 1960s I used to drive a car that Citroen has now been building for 60 years. The four-seater Deux Chevaux had an engine that developed about one tenth the power of today’s averaged family car. It weighed about half as much as the VECC, could maintain 100km/hr (without a head wind) and consumed just 4 litres of petrol per 100km! The fact that it has survived for all those years is testament to its popularity, and to its safety.

This car was banned in Sweden because there was nowhere substantial to attach seat belts. Perhaps the authorities were also conditioned by Volvo/Saab interpretations of safety. The Swiss, on the other hand, graced the car with a comprehensive insurance category all of its own – cheaper than any other car. One reason was that the car was cheap to repair, but more importantly it just was not involved in many accidents. Inside such a vehicle one’s vulnerability is palpable, and this induces careful driving. Swedish armoured cars and four-wheel-drive wagons, by contrast, induce a sense of invulnerability that leads to the infamous driving behaviour we associate with them.

Meanwhile, in Wintersville, Ohio, Bulldog Security has designed a talking car alarm. It can be set to scream ‘Please help me!’ at jet-engine volume – 127 decibels. The body language of the expensive car normally yells ‘Desire but don’t touch’. Once it is touched, however the illusion shatters, and the car screams for help.

In the age of the mobile phone we are assailed by ads exhorting to buy one to ensure the security of our daughters and (in much smaller ads) our mothers.

At another level, we have the phenomenon of specialised insurance ‘products’, targeted at particular groups of people. Such specialisation gradually undermines the essence of insurance. Low-premium health insurance for fit youth, for example, removes them from the general pool of insurees, in turn necessitating an increase in the premiums paid by those who are not fit and youthful.

Then there is the food ‘waste’ grinder that disposes of valuable food scraps, called ‘putrescibles’ directly into the kitchen sink. And, while we’re on the subject of waste, consider why you would not pick up the rubbish in a railway carriage, even though it offends you …or what you think of NSW ex-Premier Fahey, who was stuck by a syringe while participating (without gloves) in Clean Up Australia Day 1995.

Finally, consider Australia’s anti-cancer directions: slip-slop-slap and the other more explicit material exhorting us to quit smoking, trim our diets and check ourselves regularly for symptoms. No campaign recognises that most cancers are lifestyle-induced, nor that these ways of living give others cancer.

While these examples can all be seen as new versions of the hunt for material security, they also reflect a particular version of what is important to us, what is precious. They say something about how we see ourselves, and about how we have become precious.

In one form or another, all these stories are concerned with security. Being precious, as I am using the term here, involves developing and maintaining special conditions that set one apart. There are two parts to this exercise. First, there is the creation of the desired personal access, to known rescuers in the case of the mobile phone. The other is the creation and maintenance of a social environment that condones these isolated, personalised services.

In the first three stories, people are materially protected from harm or loss through access to various devices. Specialised insurances appeal to groups whose ‘special needs’ are now recognised – at the expense of the amorphous mass. The cases of the food waste grinder and responsibility for rubbish in public places raise still further interpretations of preciousness. Ads for one brand of kitchen sink grinder remind us that removing food waste from the rubbish stream keeps potentially recyclable bottles and cans ‘clean’. So we do ourselves – and apparently the environment – ‘a favour’ by separating ourselves from our wastes. Waste on trains revolts us, but we do nothing about it because we are not our brothers’ keepers (and don’t want to get ourselves dirty in the process). Finally, the cancer ads are seen to have succeeded when we recognize that we personally are threatened and remove ourselves from its agents.

The culture we live in rests on a general way of looking at the world that may be characterised as social Darwinist. ‘Dog-eat-dog’ competition is thought to ‘bring out the best in us’. There is little understanding that virtually all human and natural interactions are based on a co-operation so all-enveloping that it cannot be mapped. Even in a football match, the fun derived from competition is actually the tip of the tip of a huge iceberg of co-operative interactions. Most of these physical and intellectual co-ordinations between us, let alone between us and nature, are quite invisible.

In a social environment like this, when we seek to maintain the integrity of people and things close to us, we build on what we know we can control ourselves. When we are constrained to rely for our sustenance on an economy that formally distrusts its players, it is not surprising that people resort to preciousness as a means of maintaining their integrity.

I do not imagine, incidentally, that many people will aspire to the idea of living with nothing a thief could sell. Even less likely are we to aspire to a community in which we all alter our aspirations to allow for an even distribution of wealth, for this would mean a dramatic reduction in material throughput, not to mention in its primary driver (aspirations for goods and services). We simply cannot yet imagine a way of organising ourselves that would provide the same level of stimulation, challenge and satisfaction as our present society does, without the special privileging or preciousness.

These concerns are real enough. Even if we would like such a society, we are all aware that getting there implies profound changes. The hopeless air that seemed to pervade the March 1995 Copenhagen poverty conference is typical of our despair. We must find new sources of wealth, ways of decoupling employment from sustenance and even social status, new definitions of personal integrity, ways of enabling people to move from one social situation to another without being demeaned, and so on. Yet, while these issues are daunting, we can begin by preparing the ground.

What we are looking for is empowerment of a particularly deep kind: the enablement of being – or, even better, of becoming. For we humans are nothing if not human becomings, always in the process of change.

Being precious is a necessary consequence of seeing ourselves as separate from nature and requiring protection from it. If we do not subscribe to separation from nature, even the things we have grown most frightened of, death and suffering, no longer carry such fearful implications.

It is a long road to such understandings, and a road that carries with it the profound skepticism of conventional society. Nevertheless the contradictions in present society necessitate that those of us already blessed with the wherewithal to question should continue to do so.

Transition or Letting Go – a personal story
The first decade of my working life ended with the sack. Over the previous twenty years I had built up a stamp collection, which grew to have an appreciable monetary value. To me, however, it was a thing of beauty; besides, I thought that, if I ever had kids, I would like to give it to them and share their interest in it. Suddenly I was unemployed, and did not have the resources to insure and maintain the collection. Though I did not need the money it was worth, I sold it, and as I watched it being auctioned away I gradually became aware of the evaporation of an attachment and of a bind. Some time later it occurred to me that I could have simply stopped maintaining it and discontinued the insurance. I would then have had that thing of beauty to enjoy and perhaps resume collecting later. But at the time its material value shone too brightly.

Later still I discovered that my children weren’t interested in stamps and wouldn’t have appreciated the collection if I had given it to them. This is eminently reasonable, for part of the value of any collection lies in the collecting.

Not long after my attachment to that stamp collection vanished, so did the attachments to the remaining clutter I called mine. The savings from not having to insure this clutter would now enable me to easily replace the lot if I had to. One important bunch of possessions, however, was still precious to me: my books. They had become the bane of my life, for when I lent them to students they often failed to return, and I did not like following them up.

I realised that the literature I was buying to support my teaching was tax deductible, which in turn meant that the public owned about a third of each book and journal. So OK, my books were being loaned, but what about the journals? After eight attempts, I found a remarkable feminist philanthropic trust, the Lance Reichstein Foundation, which provided the assistance to establish the Periodicals Access Network Directory, a directory of academics and non-government organisations not connected to the main library networks and willing to make their (unusual) journal holdings available to the public. With this went the last vestiges of concern for my wall decorations. Now, I am angry with those who don’t return ‘my’ stuff, but only because it can’t be loaned again.

Transition or Letting Go – a social story
My own transition was related to involvement in the being of others. Society’s transition is similar, if much more complex. I shall illustrate by contrasting two community organisations: Neighbourhood Watch and the Safety House scheme.

In Neighbourhood Watch, neighbours observe street behaviours that may threaten others’ property, and their observations are linked with police surveillance and protection. The scheme shores up a neighbourhood’s defences against those who might threaten its values.

The Safety House scheme involves people opening their homes to people, especially children, in need. Anyone who feels threatened can simply dash into a house marked by a small yellow triangle, and there find succour.

Neighbourhood Watch cannot recognise that the values it is built to defend actually create the threat in the first place. A thief may have precisely the same values as the threatened community, but be unable to satisfy those values without using criminal means. In this way, the thief is an indicator that all is not well with our combinations of values and means to satisfy them. The Safety House scheme, on the other hand, does not judge the need of those seeking its benefits. It accepts the failings of society, and generously shares the security its homemakers offer.

Transition or Letting Go – getting there
In common with many naïve greenies, I did not want to bring children into the world: ‘with a future like that, who’d want to?’. Fortunately my partner had other views, and so, at quite a late age to still be naïve – well after the stamp collection episode – the first of our two sons was born. One of the two little people who had chosen to come and stay had arrived, or so it seemed to me. The idea that these two little people were ‘mine’, by law and by custom, has always troubled me. Equally, the idea that my partner and I were responsible for them was one that I objected to. I loved them; I didn’t need to be responsible for them.

This is by way of introducing two friends who had far more insight than I. They understood what living with children meant, but could not ‘have their own’ and did not want to use the Monash IVF program. What they did instead reflected a profound understanding of where children fit in society.

Aldous Huxley’s last book, Island, was a Utopia – a very different story to that in Brave New World, the dystopia that made him famous. It was based in part on his experience of the place children had in Melanesian societies, where children simply belong to the community as a whole. This means that all are responsible for them – or, more accurately, the community shares its love with or for all its children.

Such an anarchistic arrangement, where responsibility/love is an environment rather than a directed commodity, is hard to imagine in the vast conurbations in which most people live today. Nevertheless, such care is possible even in our large communities, and there are many organisations in our own society that are based on the same concepts. Aside from all the major religions and their action organisations, there are secular organisations such as the Safety Houses and, in my friends’ case, Share Care. Share Care facilitates continuity of care for children whose parents have difficulty in caring for them on a continuous basis.

And then of course there are the kindnesses that are occasionally reported in the press as if they were unusual, but which actually occur very frequently, if usually in a very mundane sense. People stop and assist when they perceive that another is in trouble; they give money quite readily, and there are many similar examples of such generalised or socialised generosity.

Finally, let us return to the seven examples I began with and see what lessons we can draw from them.

The first three cases are cases of my property and myself as property. Can we use these concerns to generate conditions of material and personal security? Take the car first. We can define efficiency as the ratio of the energy theoretically required to do something compared to the energy actually used. By this measure, the car has an overall efficiency of only a few per cent. The most potent way of improving its efficiency is to increase the numbers of passengers it carries and the time it is on the road rather than sitting in a garage. But in order to transform the preciousness associated with the car (‘jump in and go, preciously, any time’) we must attempt to understand the social constructs underlying it.

Currently we need to own things in order to have them at our disposal. But there are other ways to achieve the same immediacy of transport. If we paid for our public transport entirely by an equitably devised annual levy on all people living in metropolitan areas, the way we perceive public transport would change. Public transport would also not need to be fenced off from those without tickets, so we could open up railway stations to commercial and community development. Further possibilities would arise if we then decided that we did not want our ‘own’ cars. At a minimum, car-pooling and hiring would become much easier with greater demand, but we might also have communally owned or leased vehicles. We would then treat our cars with care but not with preciousness. They would not be nearly as easy to steal, because we would all ‘own’ them and more importantly we would understand that we owned them.

In relation to the mobile phones, consider how the public transport levy outlined above would affect personal security. The levy would increase life around stations as well as on the vehicles themselves. Such changes imply caring security, as opposed to precious security, and the new form actually encourage us to generate it.

With regard to the specialised insurances mentioned above, how might we transform insurance into a social process in which the ‘shareholders’ regain the involvement that the old ‘friendly societies’ offered their members? How can we retain the specialised product, but also involve the insurees in producing the security they seek?

Currently a bland system allocates risk via actuarial charts. Without any major threat to the societies, it is quite conceivable that insurees could be involved in reduction of their risks. The insurance societies could empower insurees by providing education and other assistance. The premiums and actuarial charts would then be based on indications of participation in risk reduction rather than on the current impersonal and disconnected criteria. Needless to say there would have to be an insuree-based committee to oversee just how criteria were formulated and participation in risk reduction assessed.

To reconnect people with their waste, we can:

• Retain the word compostibles instead of putrescibles for food waste
• Restructure household rates to recognise households that minimises its wastes
• Make the installation of food-waste grinders subject to a licence, as they put an added load on the sewerage system.

On waste in trains, my own unit at Monash University (the Centre for Innovation in Waste Management) has just received a grant to pilot a scheme to do exactly what we are talking about here. By the end of 1995 I will be able to report on how we attempted this task and how we fared. The general direction will be to provide structures that encourage travellers to own their behaviours. For example, we may suggest that the Met only permit the sale of foodstuffs on its premises (e.g. via vending machines) where the containers are recyclable and carry a deposit refundable at selected stations.

Finally, the anti-cancer campaign. Self-interest is the best of all motivators; the challenge is defining it. Most people are capable of responsible behaviour given half a chance. The ‘half a chance’ involves work, of course. The cancer hospitals and the Anti-Cancer Council could adopt a deeper definition of public education. This could involve people in a variety of ways, not least through small ‘focus groups’ that developed their understanding of the context of their actions and lifestyle, for instance that their lifestyles can cause cancers in others as well as in themselves. We attempt to do this with our new students in the Graduate School of Environmental Science every year. It involves urging people to observe their everyday realities – washing clothes, getting to work, making beds, even watching neighbourhoods – in new contexts.

The search for social responsibility is here, and it isn’t precious.

Frank Fisher teaches in the Graduate School of Environmental Science at Monash University, Melbourne, and is the founder/director of the Centre for Innovation in Waste Management. His life’s work involves facilitating the following view: ‘if humanistic science may be said to have any goals beyond sheer fascination with the human mystery and enjoyment of it, these would be to release the person from external controls and to make her/him less predictable to the observer…’ (Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966). Frank has written some 100 articles and edited books around this theme.

Article posted online 6 July 2005 with permission from the author.
Copyright Frank Fisher 1995.