Which Future Do We Want? One Created by Care or Efficiency?

A future full of opportunity and hope, a future where our children will flourish, a future inspiring the sacrifice required for its attainment, a future where human and biological diversities thrive, a future of health and prosperity and peace…isn’t that what we want?  It seems within reach. Income and opportunity have steadily increased.  Health and longevity are rising. Social connectivity and global awareness are exploding. Violence and war are waning.  Solutions to poverty and hunger are finally within reach.  Even the population bomb seems to be defusing at 10 billion (hopefully).

We are so close, yet so far.  Does arrogant individualism limit our collective goal?  Are we unwilling to continue the shared sacrifice this future requires? The progressive democratic dream of we-the-people fueled by a capitalist engine has stalled just as we near the final big push.  Our past successes were due in no small measure to us being able to marshal the political will to responsibly allocate our collective wealth to the building of moral, intellectual and physical infrastructures upon which we created a society of tolerance, opportunity, and progress.  But now we are mired in political paralysis, income inequity, fiscal irresponsibility, infrastructure neglect, religious intolerance and willful disregard of rationality and science.  We’ve lost the very qualities that brought us within reach of our goal.  The care and compassion that once motivated our sacrifices for a shared future are now trumped at every turn by worship of efficiency, faith in the market’s invisible hand, arrogance of individualism, blatant disrespect for institutions of shared governance, and a failure to steward the natural capital that makes everything else possible.

Our future will be created though countless decisions made by people and organizations pursuing their self-interests, each of us innovating and sacrificing, each of us constantly responding to the infinite dynamic, each of us evaluating what it takes to get from here to there. The magic bullet is not different leadership, new government policies, innovative technologies, or improved markets—although these will be necessary—but instead an examination of our self-interests.  Decisions motivated by a self-interest to care for others as we would like others to care for us will produce different outcomes and a different future than decisions motivated by the self interest of minimizing costs and maximizing profits.

Where do self-interests come from? We learn them from family, media, school, theologians, and life lessons. Anthropology documents that cultures differ from one another in how self-interests are defined and historians show how the self-interests of Americans have changed over time.  In this series of blogs I tag “landcare,” I contrast two assemblages[1] of self-interest—care and efficiency—in how they inform our decisions about stewardship of our land and infrastructure.  I strive to demonstrate that a self-interest motivated by care creates the future we want, while a self-interest motivated entirely by efficiency leads to a very different, less desirable future.