Follow Ben '09

Friday 22nd May.

2:20pm. I am late for my meeting with Edgar Cahn. I am relying on him being nice enough to forgive me. Time is, after all, quite precious to Edgar. In a number of ways. He is credited with inventing the concept of Timebanking and the alternative currency, Timedollars, during the 1980s - both of which are tools for the revaluing of time, and the revaluing of people. He has spent a good portion of his life thinking about how time and money work, how people put a price on their time, about what an hour is worth and what can be achieved with it. When I finally get there, I quickly see that his home is a testament to the central role these innovations have played in his life. The front door is wide open. The ground floor is divided into an office on the right and a large sitting/conference room on the left. The walls are lined with books and hung with artefacts and paintings. A clockwork wooden sculpture clicks in perpetual motion in the background. Edgar explains that the three people at the desks in the office are the staff that keep the Timebanks organisation running. Edgar's wife, Christine, appears from upstairs. She is also an employee of the organisation. Upstairs are more offices - piled high with papers and books, computers humming quietly. 'In 1980 I suffered a massive heart attack that blew away sixty per cent of my heart,' says Edgar in measured tones, 'thirty years later my heart is eighty per cent healed. This is life-giving work.' At 74 Edgar is not a young man. But he speaks with palpable energy about the agendas that have formed his life's work since that near-death experience. I first saw him speak last summer at the Fink Club, an evening event in London hosted by the New Economics Foundation. I remember his address clearly because the ideas it contained were new and radical to me. What stood out more than anything was what he said about value: 'Capitalism is a value system based upon scarcity. We value things only that are rare. And in so doing we de-value what is common: parenting, friendships, the ability to care and empathise, the work of creating and sustaining the social infrastructure we all depend upon and without which nothing else would be possible.' This infrastructure is what Cahn calls the Core Economy - the system of interpersonal transactions that underlies and brings into being the mechanisms of the Fiscal Economy, the money economy we measure and analyze and panic over and to the support of which our governments have come to lend so much of their thought and energy in recent years. It is the Core Economy in which children are raised, in which friends and loved ones care for each other, in which nurturing and learning take place: who's transactions simultaneously make possible those of the Fiscal Economy and give them their meaning. Were it not for our relations with one another, the earning of money and the production of goods would be motiveless. 'I like to say that if the Money Economy is the software on a computer,' says Edgar, 'then the Core Economy is the operating system.' He explains that we have for too long taken the Core Economy for granted, believing that it will function without our direct support, that it will continue regardless of our attentions. 'We are now realising that the Core Economy does require our attention, that in the long term it will fall apart if we continue to devalue the talents and efforts that make it possible.'

The Fiscal Economy presently runs on a value system that is contradictory to that necessary for a healthy Core Economy. We tend to value qualities that are scarce amongst the population, things that few of us possess: tenacity, reason, artistry, abstraction, creativity, leadership; and for good reason. But in our obsession with these scarce things, we risk losing sight of those qualities we do have in abundance, those things we truly rely on for our well being.

'There are domains of endeavour that are best executed outside the market economy,' explains Edgar. 'If you contracted out brushing your teeth you wouldn't be able to afford it - you'd have to pay some specialist with insurance and guild membership and years of expensive training.' There are also domains that simply can't be accommodated in terms of money changing hands: you can't pay someone to care about you. You can pay someone to perform the actions associated with care, but you cannot make them experience the underlying emotions that inform the quality of those actions, that might provoke them to take interest in your well being beyond the letter of their contract.

People who have acquired disabilities are often victims of the scarcity economy. Many loose those things for which they have previously been valued, the skills they have sold on the competitive market, and find themselves then without value. In the scarcity economy, the fact that they may retain many central human capacities makes no difference because those central capacities are viewed as being abundant and therefore of little value. This is why mothers and fathers are not formally rewarded for their roles. And why nurses are paid less than doctors. The problem begins when these roles are actively undermined by policy decisions. People take intrinsic reward from doing the jobs of the Core Economy, or jobs that involve the same kinds of activities, but this reward is not invulnerable in the face of attack. If these roles are made too difficult or unpleasant, people will do them less effectively and, eventually, stop doing them.

According to Edgar the solution is to plug in a new value system that is supplementary to that promoted by capitalism. 'Money is a fantastic system for dealing with a lot of things, things we need and want. But it's not the only way of doing things and we have to have systems for recognising and rewarding the work taking place outside paid employment. We need alternative systems of exchange.' This is where Timebanking comes in. The theory is that by bringing people together to exchange time and effort without money changing hands, people outside the competitive job market can be reengaged and revalued. Edgar breaks down five principles:

1. Acknowledge that everybody has capacity

2. Define the value of currently undervalued labour (record and reward)

3. Ensure reciprocity in individual acts (pay it forward)

4. Invest in community and promote interdependence

5. Hellraising (lobbying, raising awareness)

These principles aren't limited to the Timebanking network. I have heard about food distribution networks and housing projects that operate on similar grounds. Even TV Chef Jamie Oliver's recent Pass It On project has elements in common. (Absurdly) I have yet to visit a working Timebank but one project I am excited to see is the Youth Court going on here in DC. In this system, young offenders are tried and sentenced by their peers (usually to community service), and can then enroll as members of the Court, taking up roles they are proud of. I fix a date to see the Court in action next month.

There remains one hard question: What happens when a person loses not only the skills valued by the scarcity market, but also those abilities that define them as a member of the Core Economy? What happens if a brain injury (or other circumstance) leaves a person unable to care, to reciprocate socially, to participate in friendships? How do we advocate for their value then? 'I would argue that most of your people can listen to someone, that most of them can work in a garden or watch someone's pet. But even those that can't do these things still have a critical function in teaching the most fundamental values of tolerance.' He describes projects in which young offenders are required to care for children with learning disabilities. 'I've seen even the most troubled of youngsters change their attitudes quite suddenly when confronted by people with greater problems than their own.'

This all fits well with my earlier thoughts on the value of problems - the symbiosis between difficulty and innovation. It also brings to mind something Harvey Jacobs said about his clinical work. He said this: 'I work with people who want to create opportunity from challenge.'

Edgar describes himself as a 'pathological optimist'. He says that human history has taken us through various phases - of nomadism and agriculture, to our current industrial times. He believes we reaching the end of this phase and that we are about to move into a new 'ecological era' - where we redefine and reorganize our resources. He is convinced that there is enough food and energy and water to go around, and that, with a new value system, the Western World can rebalance itself with its neighbours and arrive at a sustainable mode of existence. The ideology is vital to this shift, he explains, because values are central to behaviour.

Edgar gives me a print-out to take with me, a page of excerpts from a book called Mothers and Others by Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy:

Psychologists know that there is a heritable component to emotional capacity and that this affects the development of compassion among individuals. By fourteen months of age, identical twins (who share all genes) are more alike in how they react to an experimenter who pretends to painfully pinch her finger on a clipboard than are fraternal twins (who share only half their genes). But empathy also has a learned component, which has more to do with analytical skills. During the first years of life, within the context of early relationships with mothers and other committed caretakers, each individual learns to look at the world from someone else's perspective.

And this is why I get so worried. Just because humans have evolved to be smart enough to chronicle our species' histories, to speculate about its origins, and to figure out that we have about 30,000 genes in our genome is no reason to assume that evolution has come to a standstill. As gene frequencies change, natural selection acts on the outcome, the expression of those genes. No one doubts, for instance, that fish benefit from being able to see. Yet species reared in total darkness--as are the small, cave-dwelling characin of Mexico--fail to develop their visual capacity. Through evolutionary time, traits that are unexpressed are eventually lost. If populations of these fish are isolated in caves long enough, youngsters descended from those original populations will no longer be able to develop eyesight at all, even if reared in sunlight.

If human compassion develops only under particular rearing conditions, and if an increasing proportion of the species survives to breeding age without developing compassion, it won't make any difference how useful this trait was among our ancestors. It will become like sight in cave-dwelling fish.

No doubt our descendants thousands of years from now (should our species survive) will still be bipedal, symbol-generating apes. Most likely they will be adept at using sophisticated technologies. But will they still be human in the way we, shaped by a long heritage of cooperative breeding, currently define ourselves?

Hrdy's ideas seem to add a greater urgency to Edgar's ideological discourse: a kind of use-it-or-lose-it biological imperative. If we don't nurture our ability to nurture, it may yet disappear, sink into dormancy, become no more than silt at the bottom of the gene pool, join the ranks of inert sequences down the twisting stairs of the human genome.

I have thought this: our future necessarily holds revolution (however sudden or gradual) in terms of energy and resource. Without unlocking new technologies for sustainable energy, food, water, we stand little chance of survival in the longer term. I have thought: social innovation is a side show, something that will happen along side or as consequence of these grander scientific narratives. But Edgar has provoked a different idea: that social and ideological evolution may be the decider in humanity's direction. People seem to me to be capable of almost anything. Crude determinations about human nature ('genetic' selfishness, religious altruism or somewhere in between) seem always to fall short. It seems to me that we are almost infinitely adaptable. And that what guides our adaptation is what we believe. The limits of our existence are those of what we can imagine and accept. There are constraints on our behaviour. Time is of the essence. Things may not work out as we expect.

DC Metro is Accessible

It says so on the posters. And it's true. DC's subway system is newer than those of many major cities. There is no need to Mind the Gap. There are lifts in every station. The platforms are nice and wide. In addition, the Metro is actually a pretty nice place to spend time. It's cool (but not cold), the lighting is restful, the sounds and voices that alert you to doors closing and stations arriving are reassuring (rather than ear-splitting), overcrowding seems to be the exception rather than the rule and the architecture has a pleasant retro-Jetsons modernist vibe, a sort of concrete honey-comb styling that puts me in mind of a great big friendly bee hive.