How Big is Too Big?

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2008: the world is watching as a building rises to surpass the height of all previous human-made objects. Its architects and builder will not reveal the final altitude of their creation. Size matters. They won’t accept second place in the tall building Olympics. How big will it be?

Most of us know the end of that story–the Burj Dubai became the world’s tallest building at 818 meters (2684 feet). We live in a society obsessed with growth, wealth, obsessive eating, size, mass, volume, area. It’s all about big. Huge even. Everything has to be bigger, better, faster, louder, more powerful, more luxurious. The Biggest Loser vies with Survivor for ratings on television. It’s ironic that the biggest losers will be humans when the global energy crisis leaves little to sustain life. The Survivors will be the cockroaches.

A profound new book by Quaker economists has posed the question of why seven billion people continue to behave as if the earth’s resources were infinite. Each month economists publish figures for GDP percentage increases, stock index gains, inflation, national wealth. The message is that growth in economic activity, increases in monetary wealth, and expansion of all kinds of technology will outpace the degradation of the earth’s systems and save the planet from ruin before 2100. Most ecologists are not sanguine about these prospects.

Instead, Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver argue that humankind should seek a “right relationship” between sustainable economic activity and the earth’s delicate biosphere. All current evidence from climatologists, biologists, ecologists and other earth scientists is that the current pace of economic growth is not only too great, but that significant retrenchment will be required if humans are to save themselves and their environment from catastrophic ruin in the next century. What does this mean for a society that wants to build “bigger and better” with every new technological leap?

Among the prescient messages in this book is that one of our society’s most destructive obsessions is the quest for bigger economies and more stuff. While many of us profess a desire to live with less, we fail to understand that less does not mean a small step backward in personal wealth and consumption. Less means a complete transformation of our expectations for personal fulfillment, affluence, material wealth and physical well-being.

When it comes to how we live, and the spaces we inhabit, our vocabulary and standards for adequate accommodation are about to change in ways we never thought possible. Americans in particular will be forced to live with less. Our houses will be subdivided, our rooms diminished in size, our possessions curtailed. And we will become wealthier as members of the commonwealth of life on our planet, if not at the bank or stock brokerage.

Work 2.0–smell the sawdust

“Knowledge workers,” according to the conventional wisdom, are America’s ticket to prosperity and happiness in the 21st century. Armed with graduate degrees in obscure scientific, technological and financial subjects, these new workers will sit at computers endlessly reinventing the world as we know it, adding “value” to products and services, and generating billions in new wealth.

Why then, are so many younger people jumping off the bandwagon and starting small handicraft businesses? Why has “homemade” music entered the lexicon of popular culture? Why do many sustainability gurus advocate low tech, handmade solutions?

To those of us who deal with craftsmanship and handwork as a matter of course, the answer is simple–people need to feel connected to the things they produce. This principle guided the leaders of the Arts & Crafts movement over a century ago. It has come to mean more to today’s disaffected workers as the bubble economy fades each week amidst concerns about job security. This week’s New York Times Magazine legitimized this trend with an article by Matthew B. Crawford, a young man with a Ph.D. who works as a motorcycle mechanic and loves his job.

“The trades suffer from low prestige,” he writes, “and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience.” Crawford’s positive experience is a revelation only because our society has so skewed the relationship between work and what John Dewey called “the materials of life.” As children proceed in school, their learning takes them further and further from the hands-on joys of things like gardening, woodworking, household arts, and mechanical repairs. By the time our children reach college, they have been brainwashed into believing that working with their hands is a low class option. Even when they see plumbers, stone carvers and woodworkers earning higher wages than they do, they persist in reaching for “knowledge work.”

This situation contributes to a sickness in our society. People in all walks of life are suffering from anxiety, low self esteem, despair over their future, and a general malaise in the workplace. Especially among the so-called working class and recent immigrants, the misplaced desire for betterment through “higher” education robs children of their natural intelligence when they are discouraged from working with their hands.

There is only one college in the United States devoted solely to the building trades–The American College of Building Arts in Charleston, S.C. Europe has myriad schools of this kind, and children there find alternative courses that lead to jobs in the culinary arts, handicrafts and other endeavors that do not require advanced degrees. It is time that American educators recognized the need for such avenues to self-fulfillment. Perhaps with the demise of Wall Street, we will wake up and smell the sawdust.

When will money stop shouting?

As America faces the consequences of eight years of frenzied consumption, unbridled greed and a culture of “pay to play” in all walks of life, perhaps we will learn some lessons about the significance of money. It has appeared to many in the Bushwacked age that people with a lot of gelt were smarter than those who decided not to make mammon their god. As an architect, I’ve seen this in many of my clients–success on Wall Street translated into an arrogance about nearly everything. Listening to the advice of a qualified architect was not on their agenda. Kings of bond trading and queens of derivatives went around acting like their knowledge and wisdom were boundless. Mr. Madoff has proven conclusively that a lot of them were fools.

The sheer stridency of our culture has worn down many of us who believe that wisdom comes only through experience, and that knowledge has to be cultivated in an atmosphere of humility and respect for others. Expertise, artistry, craftsmanship, leadership and other salubrious qualities cannot be purchased at auction. Moreover, he who shouts the loudest and carries the biggest sheaf of credit cards should not  be granted credibility in areas of public discourse in which he otherwise possesses no credentials.

It is time for Americans to look at civic virtue through the lense of past ages and learn from the history of greed and corruption. During the Roaring Twenties, the French Ancien Regime, the Regency, the reign of Czar Nicholas Romanov and other ages of excess those with money shouted and people listened. The results of their gullibility and short sighted reverence for the plutocracy are written in the tragic history of failed regimes and ecomomic crashes.

It will be refreshing to go forward under new leadership that does not reward aggression in any form, but especially the kind of win at all costs view of success that has characterized the last eight years. When money does more than talk, but rather drowns out civil discourse as it has in recent history, the consequences are devastating–to morals, education, politics, the environment–indeed, nearly everything a democratic society depends upon. Perhaps at the next town meeting we will be able to listen intently to a modest farmer, philosophy professor, fiddle player, or shoemaker with respect, unconcerned about her net worth or rank in the Fortune 500.