24A047 The Great Culture Collision by Jim Davies, 12/3/2024 

In the 1600s there occurred the most momentous reunion in human history: migrants from Europe came West and met up with migrants from Siberia whose ancestors had crossed into America Eastwards over the Bering land bridge, some 20,000 and 11,000 years earlier. The separation of these two nomadic streams of humanity had taken place 30- or 40,000 years ago.

As we were reminded last Thursday the reunion began well enough, but ended very badly. In my extreme youth we played Cowboys and Indians, and the latter (though in no respect Indian) were always the bad guys. The converse was closer to the truth.

The two streams had, over the millennia of separation, pursued the same enquiries about life and existence as all humans do, to one degree of intensity or another, but had reached quite different views of which way is up. The Europeans brought a tradition of rigorous intellectual enquiry, eventually evolving into the "scientific method", while the then-indigenous Americans, being still largely nomadic, had developed a deep appreciation of the animals and plants on which they depended; they related to them as fellow members of the universe and attributed to each a kind of personality. I'll buy that for dogs, but not for flowers; Benjy, see portrait, understood most of what I told him and always replied - in body language, if not in English. Not a single plant ever did that.

This deep, rather spiritual sense about living things has strongly influenced the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is herself Native American, and recently my attention was drawn to her article The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance. It has some very pleasing, attractive perspectives - but also an undertone of sheer, mythical nonsense. Let's try to separate the two.

Ms Kimmerer does have a very pleasant set of values - notably gratitude, for what she calls the abundance of nature in providing us (who are part of nature) with ample good things to eat. She is right - gratitude is a highly positive part of life. She also commends "reciprocity" or giving back, as if to create a cycle or "gift economy." Not a bad idea; a high point of her paper relates how a Brazilian hunter killed one day far more than he could eat, so gathered the other villagers and portioned out the meat. Asked why he didn't smoke or dry the surplus for future use, he replied "Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother." In turn, the goodwill which that created brought him other gifts later, and probably without a strict accounting.

That's a kind of "barter economy", and I can see it working in small groups. The free-market capitalist alternative is that the hunter's surplus could have been stored and sold, butchered into portions and offered to an equally wide set of buyers for each to eat on his or her own schedule, instead of on a single day. Each participant in that supply chain would make a profit, part of which would incent him to do more of the same; hence, a wide range of people would eat well. The hunter's "brothers" are many more than those he can see every day.

Benevolence is a delightful part of life, and the more each society member owns, the more he can give away - and in so doing he generates gain or pleasure not just for the recipient but for himself. "It's happier to give than to receive" did not originate in the Bible; humans discovered it long before that was written. So in this critique, I don't say Ms Kimmerer is completely kooky.

However, she admits to not being an economist, yet firmly states that all economists are wrong, for that subject starts from the premise that things are naturally scarce, which she denies. At one point she asks "Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance?" Answer: Madam, your assumption is inverted. Scarcity is a fundamental fact of life; and the capitalist economic system, which you despise, far from creating scarcity has blunted most of it.

In particular, on the single occasion when capitalist enterprise was freed from most of government control (the 19th Century, in the UK and US) the rise in prosperity for the whole population was jaw-dropping and unprecedented. In the US, per-capita income quadrupled in those 100 years, while population grew by 14 times and prices fell by 40%.

A free market economy arranges - spontaneously, unless the rulers forbid or inhibit that - for the products of all specialists to be available to all; it is the very engine of abundance. Professor Kimmerer is therefore a hopelessly ignorant romantic - yet she teaches in the State University of New York. So does government thrust into the heads of each rising generation economic nonsense which cripples its ability to increase prosperity.

When we've ended its miserable existence, that process will reverse.