Our Daily Bread and Gasoline
ROCK ISLAND, IL If clan lore be trustworthy, I was only about four when I memorized, in Jacobean English, the twenty-third psalm, the stately language of which confused me not a little: if the Lord is my shepherd, why don’t I want Him? Who is Shirley Goodness—and why is she following me?
But then I grew up and got credentialed to the hilt and figured out what “want” means, whereupon Shirley Goodness lost interest.
The Coverdale psalter (1535), as those who use the BCP know, renders the opening of Dominus regit me thus: “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore, can I lack nothing.” The semantic difference between this and the somewhat more familiar rendering in the Authorized Version (1611) is negligible but instructive.
In Coverdale the older meaning of “want,” of which we are now only dimly aware, is never in question, not even to a pious four-year-old: “want” not as “desire” but as “lack.”
Now a frat boy trying to stab his pork chop with a spoon might say, “Dude, I want a fork,” and this cultured lad may indeed desire a fork, but he also lacks a fork and therefore wants one in the older sense. But by now that is an exceptional use of “want.” When a sorority girl is out shopping (but I repeat myself) and says, “I want those shoes,” she does not mean she lacks them, though it’s true she does. She desires them—and intends to have them by sundown.
Between these two meanings of “want”—lack and desire—there is a historical parable. Indeed, the modern project, so adept at turning desires into needs, has in large part been the story of draining want of its earlier meaning and filling it with the later one. An interesting feature of that story is that the OED records no use of “want” as “desire” until the first decade of the 18th century—a fact that ought to puzzle political and economic historians, unless of course they can’t be convinced that the evolution of consciousness is fossilized in language (which it is).*
It would be uncharitable of me, and also wrong, to say that no benefits accrue to us now that want wants its older meaning. Some benefits obviously do. Anyone who enjoys a drink and a book when the kids are finally in bed knows this. But Progress wants no cheerleaders, so there’s no reason for me to dwell on the benefits, especially given the possibility that I might be weighed in the Front Porch balance and found wanting.
If indeed we are “acting out the plot of a murderous paradox: an ‘economy’ that leads to extravagance” (as the sage of Kentucky says), then we are doing so because we are confused in a very deep way about what it means to want. To want something ought to mean to lack something essential; were that so, we could hold with Thoreau that that something amounts to little more than food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. But we don’t lack; we desire. For us, to want something means, more often than not, to desire something that is not essential. It means to crave a superfluity. And it is not by lacking but by desiring that we have consented to an economy that leads to wastefulness and profligacy. It is not by lacking but by desiring that we have accepted pollution and exhaustion as acceptable trade-offs for doing business as usual—for carrying out, that is, modernity’s imperative to achieve commodious living and ease man’s estate.
And we’re easing into the commode, all right.
But there are consequences that extend beyond the merely noticeable. Now that want means desire we aren’t in much of a position to say “give us this day our daily bread.” “Daily bread” doesn’t mean “daily bread”—not in the New Canaan, where there shall be showers of blessings. As that wicked wit and superb guitarist Mark Knopfler has said:
The Lord is my shepherd
He leadeth me in pastures of green
He gave us our daily bread
And gasoline.
And ethanol and HDTV and electric can-openers and golf carts and stair-climbers—those curious contraptions on which you step up and up and up but ascend to no heights.
We have larger houses and carcasses now and not much shame to show for them. When was the last time anyone pointed out what an embarrassment it is to inhabit a land that supports thriving industries for exercise and weight-loss—especially in an age of hunger and poor nutrition? To have debt counselors, addiction clinics, sex therapists, garbage dumps, and curbside recycling?**
The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing—except the ability to curb my desires and govern my appetites.
Emerson said of Thoreau, “He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself.” I detect in Emerson’s use of “want” both “lack” and “desire”—or rather “lack” sucking “desire” back into itself—and Thoreau is ennobled by the usage.
____________________
* A consideration of the semantic change that “luxury” undergoes from Chaucer’s time to our own is also instructive.
** recycle, v. What a man suffering from Affluenza does to vacuum his conscience but maintain his standard of living.
Well said, young man.
“We have larger houses and carcasses now and not much shame to show for them. When was the last time anyone pointed out what an embarrassment it is to inhabit a land that supports thriving industries for exercise and weight-loss—especially in an age of hunger and poor nutrition? To have debt counselors, addiction clinics, sex therapists, garbage dumps, and curbside recycling?”
You just became the last one to point it out to me. Thanks for the reality check.
Good article.
Great article.
We certainly live in a time that has lost the ability to distinguish needs from desires and enough from excess. You have beautifully summed up this situation.
Nice one….”Want” subsumed by “Desire” ehhh? No wonder everything from Asphalt Shingles to Salad shooters and cars has some sexpot attached to its advertisement , leading one to believe that if you buy this product, ye shall romp with Pan and look like Adonis….or Venus.
The housing thing is remarkable and we will soon come to realize what a monumental bit of idiocy the last twenty years of homebuilding have been. Replacing shingles alone will be a monumental endeavor. Many of them are not built anywhere near as well as the last era of housing ballon during the Victorian era. When I was young and stupid rather than slightly old and very dim, I bought a near vertical piece of rocky land in the Weekender Wilds of northwest Connecticut. Thinking a good investment for a weekend cottage market would be bona fide cottage, I imported a 2100 square foot Finnish timber home as the Finn Mark made them a great buy at the time, the style fit the land and I had a client who was starting to import them. The Finns came with it and told me it was “much bigger” than their own Finnish homes but then they were in awe of our gallon jugs of Bourbon and came to me one morning in solemn query and asked “How far to get to Custer’s Battlefield Monument”. Looking at the 1970 Pontiac Station Wagon they had customized with welded sheet metal to pass inspection for the duration of their stay…a car we all called “the Silber Bullet”..I replied “More time than you have gentlemen”.
Well, the house was great. I raised three kids, a brace of cats and several dogs in it and the pine clad nature of it was a fine introduction to my future sinecure in a pine box. The roof has several more years left in it, the wood required washing and staining only twice in 20 years and it’s been a fine place. Economical and Green way before LEEDs was invented. Thinking of putting it on the market for a while, I was given the august honor of a meeting with a local big shot realtor who, upon inspecting the very tight and warmly arcadian home pronounced “I Don’t Get This House”. It appears that the local weekender wants a 6-8,000 s.f. Palazzo and my paltry pine box was going to be beyond their reasoning capacity. He was right. I pulled it and remain in it and am starting to hear the era of giganticism is over. There are a lot worse places to live but without the kids, I’m thinking 1200 s.f. would be more than I really need.
Desire has become a death wish or at the very least, a consignment to real estate slavery.
Some people do get it. A few days ago CBS was interviewing people who had survived the tornado in Mena, Ark. They talked to a young man named Luis Muniz who seemed calm and collected amid the devastation.
Muniz said: “Our house slid 15 feet off its foundation. Wasn’t for the fact that the house is 100 years old, we’d be dead.”
I’m sure he didn’t learn that from television or school … most likely he’s done some construction work and figured it out with his own eyes and hands.
This is strange. For all the appeals to the “evolution of consciousness” by way of etymology, alongside “historical parables”, there’s a lot that is amiss in the intent and presentation of this article, historically speaking. One senses a mixed-bag of Puritanical/Calvinistic anger, New England romanticism, pre-industrial nostalgia and other ignes fatui hovering over the ideas presented here. Moreover, the appeals to Thoreau and Emerson, while they were interesting figures no doubt, does little to help understand many of our contemporary problems.
Let’s start with the Puritans, because there’s a strong Puritanical strain here that (correct me if I’m wrong) belies many of the claims against our benighted consumer-ridden social relations and “wants.” Anyone who is wont to consider history more seriously, however, will make due note of the fact that ascent of Puritan culture was ideologically connected to the rising mercantile and capitalist classes — sycophantically in bed with the royalty and aristocracies when they supported the merchant class and beheading them when they didn’t (the rise of Cromwell after the execution of Charles I in the English Civil War). In many ways, the embryonic capitalist social relations emerged in England as a Protestant ascendancy: a dynamic mercantile, manufacturing and artisan class was poised against the entrenched and economically overtaxed efforts of the Catholic monarchy. Cromwell’s dictatorship tried to maintain aggressive mercantile policies at sea and on land in order to compete with the Dutch, leading to protracted conflicts with them over navigational and trade rivalries.
While I agree with you that there’s a lot that problematic in our social relations, including our rampant consumerism that’s co-extensive with little moral and ecological sanity, I think the contempt for the affluenza-ridden consumers is deeply misguided, historically insensitive and ill-fitting.
Historically, the vast majority of people entered into capitalist social relations kicking and screaming. From the early stages of capitalist “primitive accumulation”, the conquest of the New World, the slave trade, etc., there was a constant attempt at plundering labor to bring in precious metals, cultivate crops such as sugarcane, &c., in order to generate surplus wealth for the ruling classes (the mixture of the emergent capitalist classes and the monarchies) of the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and the Dutch. Most people in Africa attempted to escape the clutches of these European slave traders by attempting to take refuge in land: controlling the modes of production, whether for self sufficiency or otherwise, was a way out. But as the proto-capitalists found a way to combat this, they made sure to buy up land and took the very means of production away from those who could sustain themselves. Many took to vagabondage even in Africa, but this was often thwarted too. Similarly, in the New World, with the Native American nations. The difference between the Native Americans and the Africans in slave trade was that the Native Americans refused to be taken up into the European capitalist expansions. They chose to fight, on pain of death and extermination, in order to combat the European way of life. And we know the painful history of that: genocide in the Americas.
In Europe, we need only look at the development of England moving from mercantile, agricultural and manufacturing capitalism towards industrial capitalism. England created the seeds for a new world order by ravaging feudal social relations. The capitalist classes made sure to round up people from rural areas (whether they landless or landed peasants) and threw them into the urban factories, whether it was in the textile factories or in the coal mines. Many attempted to escape this, often on pain of death or severe punitive repercussions. Instead, the strategy employed to counter this was the ownership of land, once again. By taking away the immediate means of production from those that engaged in subsistence economies, they took away the sole control they had over their lives and put them into conditions of indentured or wage slavery, while enacting significant rents in income or in kind for those on the lands. All this was followed by lots of social upheavals, including the Luddite movement to engage in sabotage, the Chartist movements, etc. England was on the verge of a massive revolution in the 19th century that had to be put down by force. Cf. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class for more on this. Eventually, however, capitalist social relations were enacted by law and by force, until they became nearly universal in England. The attempts against capitalist social relations, then, were ways to reduce the working day. All this was thwarted too by bringing in machinery, and forcing the workers to work harder — one of the ironies of machine labor.
As capitalist social relations started to engulf the world, via colonialism, or otherwise, there was ample revolt against such social relations. In a word, capitalism has hardly been a one-sided affair of lazy people and greedy elites. It has often been met with active resistance that threw capitalism into various crises of sorts, among other things. The 20th century was met with equal such rebellions against the forces of capital: the turn of the century, the early teens, the 30’s, the 40’s, the 60’s, 70’s, etc. People haven’t just watched capitalism suddenly appear on the scene as a deus ex machina. The social relations had to be foisted upon them in sundry, dynamic and disastrous ways. The 70’s resulted in one of the major capitalist crises, from the food and oil crises, to the collapse of the neo-colonial wars, where the majority of the people in the world were actively demanding more reforms, if not outright resistance to capitalist social relations. The strategy of the capitalist classes since then has been to wage a repressive war against the majority of the working and non-working classes in the core and periphery states by trade policies, creating new financial instruments, regulating social theft of all sorts, etc. What we’re seeing now is a collapse of those mechanisms by and large.
Furthermore, many of the capitalist social relations we ascribe right now to late capitalism, including the problems of consumerism is a product of the very social relations engendered by the capitalist classes. But this isn’t because the majority of people are too stupid, lazy, or affluent in their behaviors. This is the only way to survive in an onerous world for most. The predication of consumerism of our current social relations in the core states has been largely driven by certain production models as well. After all, capitalism is an economic system of accumulation for accumulation’s sake and not one based on needs.
Many of the so-called critics of American consumerism fail to take note of the real creators of our crises: the capitalist classes, by and large. They have arranged the social relations around certain productive mechanisms that engender all sorts of heightened contradictions: overproduction met with underconsumption, rising standards of consumption in the core states with massive debt and work-related stress, the collapse of family life, alcoholism, drug abuse, ecological catastrophe, etc. etc. The litany could go on. But one has to keep in mind the crushing of the working classes since the 70’s has enabled such glaring contradictions to repeatedly appear in sharper relief. Malthusians like Kunstler have little an eye for all this: instead they preach a contempt for the majority of people (consumers) while framing the problems rather myopically. People like Kunstler are contemptuous of such symptoms of capitalist social relations without understanding the deeper structural problems; instead, they even argue in bellicose terms for blitzkrieg of Gaza while somehow failing to see how capitalist social relations fundamentally undermine the lives of most people in the world.
Kunstler may not have all the answers Mr. Goodfellow but he has provided a couple of fine field guides to dysfunction that are spot on and he is an able and humorous commentator on a host of dehumanizing aspects of the current sideshow. Most public-thinkers…for lack of a better term are making their living by cheering on the shirts and skins while he is at least his own man. If he is potentially off-base in some areas, So What. Is the goal to find a comprehensive and singular Explanation? If so, good luck with that rock and in particular, good luck with maintaining any pacific cheer under the weight of that rock.
Kunstler may not have all the answers Mr. Goodfellow but he has provided a couple of fine field guides to dysfunction that are spot on
If a scattered set of harangues and diatribes with little coherence counts as spot on for an elitist yuppie audience salivating at any mention of “peak oil”, “ecology” and “fat, lazy Americans” — with little regard for many of the nuances of these issues, historically or otherwise — then sure. Spot on.
[H]e is an able and humorous commentator on a host of dehumanizing aspects of the current sideshow
And if being a racist, sexist, war-salivating Malthusian counts as being humorous. Yeah, sure. The Irish knew the worth of Malthusian nonsense first hand.
Is the goal to find a comprehensive and singular Explanation? If so, good luck with that rock and in particular, good luck with maintaining any pacific cheer under the weight of that rock.
No. Not necessarily. But, then again, a coherent and properly progressive “metanarrative” is not something many seem to hazard these days. Even paleoconservatives seem so afraid of coherence with the rise of fashionable postmodern attacks on “metanarratives.” It’s not surprising to see conservatives champion similar notions.
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