Fox: It’s pretty sad. Again, how sustainable is it for us as a species? Worldwide, we’re spending over $39,000 a second on weapons, and the U.S. is spending over half of that, about $20,000 a second. This should be announced; people should have parties where they brainstorm what else we could do with $20,000 a second. We should enlist mothers and grandmothers to express their outrage, because these are decisions made mostly by men, with no regard for the bigger picture. We’re spending $39,000 a second on war. There is no future in that kind of planning. We need to create alternative budgets for an alternative economy that takes the life of the planet seriously and makes life healthy and beautiful for our great, great grandchildren instead of carrying on these endless wars. We have to tame the reptilian brain, essentially. The Iraq war was a pure act of reptilian brain-thinking on the part of Dick Cheney and the Bush administration. To go to war in Iraq, when it had nothing to do with 9/11, for starters, is pretty reprehensible, but it’s an example of what the reptilian brain will do when it has no checks and balances. This is what meditation provides: it quiets the reptilian brain so that the mammalian brain, which isn’t as old but is about kinship and compassion, friendship and family, can assert itself. So we have to make these shifts, and meditation is one tool for accomplishing it.
The MOON: How has the Industrial Revolution—and going back even farther, to Newtonian physics and the metaphor of the universe as a machine—changed our notion of work, our psyches, and the planet? What is a better metaphor?
Fox: There are essentially two kinds of work: inner and outer. The inner work refers to the world within ourselves, our souls, which is truly the work that we are here to do. The outer work is how we keep the body—and perhaps our families—alive while we do the inner work. Ideally, the outer work also expresses the inner work for the benefit of the outer world. A poet expresses her inner work through the poetry she creates as a gift to the world, for example.
The Industrial Revolution was initially an outer revolution, but it has had profound consequences for our inner work as well. I would say that it has shrunken our souls. Engines and machines are inanimate objects; they don’t require relationship the way living beings do. When human beings are asked to play a part in a machine, they’re asked to perform like an inanimate object. When you’re stuck in a mine, for example, or a factory, or any job where the worker’s soul is not given a big canvas on which to express itself, it is very debilitating to the human psyche, to the soul, the imagination, to one’s sense of hope and beauty. Installing the same part day after day after day on an assembly line, or working in a mine, in a dark, cramped tunnel, where your body becomes beat down and your lungs filled with dust, these are jobs that are debilitating to the body, which means they are also bad for the soul. If the body is not healthy, the soul will be dragged down with it. Our bodies and souls are in this together. It’s hard to be joyful in work in which you are oppressed and your body is growing old very rapidly, and you come home beat-up every day. Your children and spouse will feel that negativity, and the joylessness will spread to the whole community.
This also applies to Wall Street workers who are at the other end of the financial spectrum, but their work isn’t healthy either, because it’s based on greed, or avarice, and no spiritual tradition says that avarice is good for the soul. Just because you make millions in a day doesn’t mean you’re happy, nor healthy. There are a lot of millionaires who are powerful people, but not at all healthy or happy in their lives. It’s not a question of which end of the financial spectrum you’re at. Predatory capitalism makes people unhappy—even those who are “successful” at it—because it’s soulless; it’s destructive; it’s ruining the Earth and it’s ruining our society.
Many years ago one of the Ford sons was asked in an interview when he would have enough money, and he said when he had more. He was already a multimillionaire, but he was confessing that he didn’t have enough. He could never be content. So it’s obvious that the answer isn’t more wealth or consumerism. The answer is figuring out what is important to you in life and focusing on that. Even the middle class and the poor can be sucked into the greed of the consumer culture we’ve developed. They, too, have become hooked on the myth that you need to constantly buy more things to be happy. Yet even if you achieve the object of your desire, your satisfaction is short-lived because a few months later they’ll come out with another, “better” model. You’ll never have the best car, the best watch, the best refrigerator, or whatever, because there will always be a newer one.
Back to your question, the industrial era fed our sense of outer directedness. As a result, if a factory closes, or moves off shore, and domestic workers are laid off, people are devastated instead of looking within ourselves and asking, “What are the work needs of my community now?” Because there is a tremendous amount of work that needs doing—and the heart of it lies in paying attention to the work the industrial model practically ignores: our inner work. As British economist E.F. Schumacher wrote in the epilogue to his book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, “Everywhere people ask, ‘What can I actually do?’ We can each of us work to put our own inner house in order.”
Putting our own inner houses in order will prove the key to reinventing work for the human species. For the sake of the future, we must dismantle the war economy and redirect our energy toward sound and life-sustaining enterprises. If the government were to truly support this effort, losing one’s job would not seem like the end of the world, for there is so much new work that needs doing. For example, we need not lament the loss of the United States’ competitive edge in car manufacturing to Japan and elsewhere. We could instead ask, “What work might we do and be trained in that is more useful at this time for our people?” After all, the world hardly needs more automobiles. The loss of dominance in certain industries might be a blessing in disguise, freeing us for the more pressing and important work of our times.
The MOON: I remember someone telling a story about how his father was a rag-picker, but this humble occupation brought him no shame because he didn’t define himself in terms of it. It was just what he did to provide for his family. He counted his other roles in the community—husband, father, cantor in the temple, etc.—as who he was. How did it happen that our jobs got to be so tied up with our self-esteem—that being unemployed is like being the worst kind of outcast because the economy—the society—has no place for you?
Fox: I do think there’s a great danger, particularly for men, of our jobs and our egos becoming enmeshed so that if we don’t have a job, we feel as if we don’t have a self; we’re nothing. That’s a displacement of proper authority. That’s why we need a sense of our own spirituality, which asks who are we really? Why are we really here? The father in the story knew who he was; he didn’t need his employer, or his job, to confirm it for him. He found his deeper self-expression in his spiritual life and his family life. If we settle for letting our employer determine our sense of self, our worth, our very souls, we’re setting ourselves up for unhappiness. We’re selling ourselves too cheap. I love this example. You can be a rag-picker, a garbage man, a juggler, an ordinary worker doing an ordinary job, but still find deeper meaning to your life—and even to your work. That’s why I talk about asking whether your work brings joy to others. If it doesn’t, it’s dangerous.
The most important work we might turn our attention to, I believe, is work on the human being itself—on the inner work of being human. Scientist Peter Russell wrote, several decades ago, that we need a project to explore human consciousness comparable to the Manhattan Project of seventy years ago. Why is this work so pressing? Because we are the problem. Human beings are the ones destroying our own habitat and the habitats of countless other creatures by our blindness, greed, and violence. We need a massive investment of talent and discipline in our inner lives. When we do this, we will find some solutions for the overwhelming issues of violence and self-destruction; of internalized oppression and external acts of oppression; of racism and sexism; homophobia and fear that seems to overwhelm our species and play out in intergenerational cycles of abuse—physical, sexual, emotional, and religious.
When enough of us have tended to our inner work, then the process of converting jobs to work and inventing new work can begin to be fruitful. We convert jobs to work by understanding the service aspect of even the humblest occupation, such as washing windows, sweeping floors, or even changing diapers. This understanding comes with spiritual practice. As Wendell Berry points out, all work contains drudgery; the issue is whether it holds meaning or not. Those who love a child don’t resent changing her diaper. Those who believe in an enterprise don’t mind taking out its garbage or sweeping its floors.
We invent new work in response to the needs of our times—such as helping people transition to a less consumeristic, more sustainable way of living; re-educating people in traditional simple living skills; developing new technologies to convert waste into usable materials; retooling our economy to run on renewable energy sources; repairing and healing our polluted oceans, rivers, and lakes; reforesting our denuded hillsides; paying our artists and musicians and caregivers, and so on.
One of the important images I’ve seen in years occurred in the last few months and was posted to the Internet. It was taken by a satellite that left the solar system and looked back, taking a picture of the Earth, its home. The Earth is visible as just a speck among many lighted specks, but an arrow identifies it. I think that photo needs to become as iconic an image as the photograph of the Earth from the moon taken by astronauts 45 years ago. When you realize that from space the Earth looks like a speck, indistinguishable from countless other specks, it hits you just how unique and special our speck is. There may be millions of other specks out there, but not one that we knowof possesses the conditions suitable for human habitation. A relative few may possess the potential for life, perhaps, but so far as we know there’s nothing quite like Earth—with its beauty and diversity of life—anywhere else in the universe. The perspective you can get from an iconic image like that has the potential to slow our reptilian brains down a bit and enable us to feel the awe and gratitude our situation really requires…and then, of course, to treat our precious speck—and the other beings we share it with—with the kind of reverence they deserve.
The industrial era work metaphor is running out of steam, even in the so-called First World. The basics of human living, including work, healthcare, politics, and education are increasingly beyond the grasp of most people. A new era is upon us, whether we’re ready for it, or not. The wounded Earth, the billion unemployed, the billions of despairing young people who see few prospects for either work or jobs, and the needs of other species who are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, are calling upon us to create a new economics and a new way of defining work.
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