The stonemason and the gunman

First, two stories, one funny, one grim.

A couple of decades ago I spent some time at Aberdeen University in the north of Scotland. I struck up a friendship with an old stonemason who worked in the city of Aberdeen, one Henry McKay. Henry came from a line of at least two centuries of stonemasons, and at 68 was building stone walls in a local park. One day I found him in the park, tools set aside, arms folded, looking up at the towers of St. Machar's Cathedral, a 15th century structure then undergoing renovation. The average Scots face is dour at rest, but Henry's was more grim than usual. I asked him what was wrong. He pointed to the scaffolding surrounding the towers. “It's a bad job, it's a bad job,” he said, bitter emotion in his voice. “They're using dry fitted stone. Two or three hundred years and they'll have to do it all over again!”

I heard a radio interview with a reporter who had covered the civil war in Yugoslavia. The interviewer asked him if he had ever been in a place and realized that he really shouldn't have gone there. He said yes and told about driving into a small village immediately after a massacre. There were bodies and pools of blood still on the streets and nervous young Serbian militiamen standing around, their gun barrels still warm. He knew he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but decided that his only course was to brazen it out. He walked up to the nearest militiaman, stuck his microphone in the young man's face, and asked, “What happened here?” The young man began, quite seriously, with the phrase, “In the year 1642....”

There is a concept in finance called the discount rate. Officially it is the interest rate that the Federal Reserve charges banks. Effectively it determines the relationship between money in your fist right now and money promised to you at some time in the future. If you are looking at some investment for your money and you want to know whether it is worthwhile, you have to ask, “Compared to what?” If the discount rate is high, then you can get a good return at the bank, so the other investment should give you a better deal. If the discount rate is low, then you should be willing to wait longer for a payback on that alternative investment. A discount rate of 100% means that money in the future has no value. A discount rate of 0% means that $100 in a hundred, or even a thousand years is worth $100 today. The discount window at the Federal Reserve has been hovering around 4.5 to 5 percent.

There is also a behavioral version of the discount rate. It has to do with our tendency to value the present over the future. Drug addicts, children, and people with terminal illnesses have high behavioral discount rates. Parents, farmers, and urban planners tend to have lower behavioral discount rates. Nate Hagens, in an excellent article on The Oil Drum, discusses human discount rates and global warming, so I will not go into it here. What I am interested in is what one might call the inverse discount rate – how someone values the past.

I told those two stories as a way to contrast two of the possible effects of a low inverse discount rate. In the case of Henry McKay, valuing the past meant valuing quality of craft and taking care of a centuries-old legacy for future generations. In the case of the militiaman, it meant holding a centuries-old grudge and regarding medieval conquests as defining present territorial rights.

That seems to be the defining factor in the relationship between the discount rate and the inverse discount rate. One long view is that what comes from the past does not belong to us, but is our responsibility, to be preserved, improved, and handed over. The other long view is that what comes from the past is our property, to be hoarded and jealously guarded. It also views the conflicts of past generations as rigidly binding the actions of those alive today. The former encourages a low discount rate and a long view into the future, the latter a paradoxically short view.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, declared that, “...I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living...” The word usufruct means that the living have the right to literally (in Latin) “use the fruit” of the land without degrading it or destroying it and thereby denying it to future generations. It is an old concept in common law, contrasting with ownership in fee simple, meaning, “It's mine. Period.”

This is one of the great dichotomies in thought in our time – ownership in usufruct versus ownership in fee simple. Where the stonemason sees a common legacy to be preserved and passed on, the militiaman sees a gift to his people alone and a duty of vengeance. Sadly, most people in the world tend more towards the militiaman than the stonemason. This is partly due to the perilous circumstances of most of the earth's people. In part it comes from traditions left over from a less populated, pre-industrial world, where human influence was limited and the boundaries of ethics were tribal. That is the double edged sword of valuing the past.

In more prosperous countries I propose that it stems from the propaganda emanating from corporate sources. A corporation is a powerful economic entity, a sprinter in a world of marathoners, winning the short race by its unsustainable use of resources. Just as we humans modify our environment to suit our needs, so too the corporation, a legal creature, modifies its statutory environment to enhance its immediate survival. In a world where incorporation confers inestimable competitive advantages we are caught in a structural trap. The rules of our corporate industrial societies discourage acting as if we owned the earth only in usufruct. (See my earlier essay on corporate leadership)

There is no single clear answer here, but a trend. Part of the trend is increasing our awareness of the structures now present in our society that guide our patterns of thought, and thus our actions. We tend to think of the social and economic foundations of our present condition as inevitable. In fact, they were choices, and rarely enlightened ones. Part of the trend is being careful about the structures, both social and economic, that we create, in order that our thoughts are influenced towards the long view. A vital part is to work for the benefit of those in the world who are most in peril, whether from war or disease or poverty. Yes, it is good in itself, but it also allows them to think past their next meal and assist in the preservation of the whole.

Henry McKay was an old man with a failing heart when I knew him, 25 years ago. He must have died since then, leaving many monuments of his own making. I checked a satellite map online and found that the twin towers of St. Machar's are still standing...for the moment.

Comments

[robby]

Good Job,
Your best post yet. I think you need to follow it with a discussion about new structures. Exhortations to 'become more aware' or how we 'must change our consciousness' are about as powerful as, well, flatulence in a wind storm. You echo the Churchill statement 'first we shape the structures, then they shape us."
Our Constitution shaped our society to a large extent and indirectly shaped our economy. But that was two centuries ago and modern economic life bears even less resembelance to that old, rural economy than modern politics has to the time of our founders.
What fundamental features of the economic system (structure) could we change that would in head us more toward usufruct than fee simple?

[Rebecca]

Oh come on ! Live better ! Shop at Walmart !

Ignorance is rampant !

Most people in our country have no idea what's in the constitution...........
Could we start with education ? A good education goes hand in hand with curing almost all social maladies, from birth control to obesity, drug etc. What would the U.S. be like if we had spent Tens of Billions on educating people rather than killing them ? Would that be investing in our future ? And oh yes, maybe we could use our own damn money to pay for it ! Ha !

[gwen]

This may be well-trod territory for you, but I'd direct you to The Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based organisation dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking. No, really long. Even longer than that.

http://longnow.org/

I visited the former Yugoslavia a few years ago. The most common historical citation in any political conversation I engaged in was 1389.