The Gold Standard
In Times Like These, New Mythologies are Born
Drawn during this time of COVID, the title reflects my desire for new stories yet to be discovered.
It has been seven weeks we’ve been locked down here in quarantine. We are fortunate in that our main purpose these days is to manage Kelly Street Garden, which also affords me the freedom to concentrate on my various creative endeavors. It is also a time that has given longer moments to just ponder the purpose of existence.
There have been many discussions online about what life might look like when we come out on the other side of this. It is fair to say that I am neither a historian, an economist nor a scientist. But I do occasionally posture like I am. One of the predictions I read recently suggested that if our money fails, which it could, we would have to return to a gold standard.
So basically my understanding is that a gold standard puts forth the idea that a monetary system must be based on something of value, namely gold. But what if we do not really value gold anymore. Given our current condition, is gold really worth anything to us anymore? You cannot eat it. Some would argue that it can be traded. But in review, gold is not the main thing of value that was originally extracted and used as the catalyst for wealth.
I highly recommend reading 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann. It is an eye opening exposition on how Columbus, the subsequent explorers (conquistadors) and the colonialists that followed influenced every aspect of how we exist globally today. It covers how the discovery of new crops, mineral deposits and oil changed the very nature of our planet and thrust us into a new age—the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene (ann-THROP-ə-seen) is a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.
One is the extraction of silver in which hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were sacrificed. How crops like tomatoes, potatoes, cotton, rubber and sugar changed cultural diets across the board (for instance, tomatoes in Italy. Potatoes in Ireland.)
Tobacco became a path to super wealth with farming methods that were intensively unnatural to that environment. Within 25 years of the North American farming of tobacco at the Jamestown settlement, addiction to it and high demand for it had reached as far as China. The farming and deforestation was so aggressive, that the overseers neglected to grow food for their indentured servants. More than half of all indentured slaves, mostly Scottish, died within a year of arriving in the New World. This is what led to the beginning of North American slave trade.
In none of these described scenarios is gold the standard of wealth. In each case some natural resource was appropriated and aggregated for the sake of wealth and wealth alone. Human labor was sacrificed in the name of progress. There was no social benefit to any of these endeavors. The indigenous people, who had very established cities and societies in these areas, didn’t understand the reasoning behind any of the activities of these invaders. The rationale made no sense in a world where one is grateful for what nature provides. Of course, they were eventually displaced and annihilated through an unintended germ warfare, deliberate genocide and land theft,
My point for all of this is to question in this time of COVID, what actually has value. We are getting up each day not knowing what the actual day is nor caring. There is a general sense of release for many who have now turned to baking, cooking, crafts, gardening, art and music and even poetry. The world in a sense has stopped. What seemed important 8 weeks ago, no longer has much value. All of that activity that kept this giant extraction machine in motion. A machine that would not stop even in the face of imminent extinction. Like a heroin addict who cannot stop using, even after all their material goods have been sold off, they have robbed their own mothers and survived several overdoses. There is no other way to describe the American experiment than to call it a “death culture.”
“Do you see this fine thing? Do you admire the humanity of it? Because the human beings, my son, they believe everything is alive. Not only man and animals, but also water, earth, stone, and also the things from them like that hair. The man from whom this hair came, he's bald on the other side, because I now own his scalp! That is the way things are. But the white man, they believe everything is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people! If things keep trying to live, white man will rub them out. That is the difference.” —Old Lodge Skins, from Little Big Man
I have been making drawings ever since I could hold a pencil. My work has an obsessive quality and I am not even sure half the time if what I am doing is any good. Does it have any value? Especially in a world that will be facing a slew of needs that maybe as a nation we have never been faced with. Millions have lost their jobs and it has taken a crisis to convince a majority that we need to stop not just for our sake, but for the planet. This could just be a warning. Worse may be coming—more cataclysmic. The house of cards is about to tumble. They can stall all they want. A world with several times the amount of debt then all the money that exists on the planet. A place where 70% of all mammals are cows and 60% of all birds are chickens. It cannot be sustained. We have known this. Is this a time to reflect on the madness?
What has value for me aside from food and shelter is this need to reflect from a place of quiet. There is a wish to engage in activities that feed my soul. Exercises that invite quiet and deep breath. There is a wish to see my life not as any teaching wants to tell me how to understand it, but through a direct inquiry into my own inner and outer world. There is a need to embody a more sincere relationship to existence. This for me is the new gold standard. We see in the world that those who were not valued are suddenly cast into the light as essential. Humans being valued. This is the new gold standard. People. We need to value each other and our selves because there is no system in place that will care for us. That is what has been revealed even though many of us knew this well before this crisis.
There is not a clue in my mind as to what the world will look like past all this. But if we want a world that is humane, we will need to struggle to make sure the things people have discovered in this time away from their habitual schedules becomes implemented as policy in the future. A new standard of exchange.
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am 'I'? And if not now, when?” —Hillel the Elder, b.110 BCE