Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: giving and taking

[Diane R. Margolis (diane]

If the tone of my response to Molly?s email was out of line, I am truly very
sorry.  I did not intend to hurt anyone?s feelings. I hope you will forgive
me.  Questions of entitlements and/or gratitude are ones about which I feel
very deeply and these feelings apparently got the better of me. Like Molly,
I was expressing my feelings?or trying to.

My hope was to clarify why I feel that education is an entitlement for which
it would be inappropriate to express gratitude.  I want to try again.  Molly
says in her later emails that she wanted to discuss feelings of entitlement
and that the example she used of education was perhaps ill chosen.  But the
whole point is in the examples at least the point I was trying to make is
that Molly?s examples were like apples and oranges.  We ARE entitled to some
things, like education, and not to others, like gifts.

If a community decides that its children should be educated, then all kids
are ENTITLED to an education.  As far as education is concerned, these are
the community?s children, not the parents?.  Industrialized nations educate
their children in order to be industrialized, or modern.  It has nothing to
do with giving gifts to parents who, as somebody on the list pointed out,
have no choice in the matter. Education is compulsory.   Parents do not
benefit from public education any more than non-parents do, which is why
parents act as though kids are entitled to an education.

Similarly, in cohousing, some communities pay for child care ? not all the
time, but just during meetings.  We do this, not as a gift to the parents,
but because we want the parents? participation in the meeting.  If anything,
we should not take the parent?s participation as something the group is
entitled to and we should say thanks to the parents who give up precious
time with their kids in order to share in the work of the community.

In both cases, we are pooling ? we think of the kids as America?s kids, or
coho kids, they are OURS, not their parents? in this sense, and the money to
pay for the education comes from taxes, a pool of resources that citizens
draw from according to their needs.   A sense of entitlement is very
appropriate when we are pooling.

A sense of entitlement is not appropriate when we are exchanging gifts.
Molly, gave another example that is as different from public education as
the moon is from the sun.  I?m referring here to the person who sends out
pages from catalogues to let people who intend to give her gifts know what
she wants.  From what Molly said, it does seem that this person is in a gift
relationship with Molly, and, according to the way gift exchanges are
supposed to work, she is behaving very badly indeed.  No one is ever
entitled to a gift.  Gifts are the outward manifestation of various kinds of
relationship.  Grace?s example of the friend who loaned or gave her money is
a perfect example of a gift relationship working well.  They are friends,
they?ve known each other for quite some time, the friend did not wait for
Grace to ask directly, she made the offer.  Grace, of course, said ?thank
you,? but she did not make too much of it, that would have embarrassed her
friend.  Some day, Grace may give or loan her friend money; she has probably
already given much of equal or greater value.  The whole nature of a gift is
that it puts pressure on the receiver to reciprocate in some fashion.  Often
reciprocation is linear rather than circular.  Driver A lets driver B in
line and, a little later, driver B lets driver C in.  That?s what civility
is all about.

Maimonides, a Hebrew scholar in the 12th century, wrote an oft-quoted rubric
of charity from the highest to the lowest.  It works pretty well for gifts
of all sorts.

                        ________

  There are eight levels of charity each greater than the next. The greatest
level, above which there is no other, is to strengthen the name of another?
by giving him a present or loan, or making a partnership with him, or
finding him a job in order to strengthen his hand until he need no longer
beg from people
2.  Below this is the one who gives charity to the poor, but does not know
to whom he gives, nor does the recipient know his benefactor?
 3. Below this is one who knows to whom he gives, but the recipient does not
know his benefactor?.
4.  Below this is one who does not know to whom he gives, but the poor
person does know his benefactor.
5. Below this is one who gives to the poor person before being asked.
 6. Below this is one who gives to the poor person after being asked.
 7. Below this is one who gives to the poor person gladly and with a smile.
 8. Below this is one who gives to the poor person unwillingly.

                        _______

I guess the first level is public education and the second is pooling in
general.

Rob talks about the giving in community.  The more there is of giving the
deeper and better the relationships.  My guess is that that is less because
of expressions of gratitude, and more because receivers feel a need to pass
the gift along.  In some ways, a gift is like a hot potato.

I?ve gone on too long.  But still I want to try to clarify one more point.
Andrea took as an attack on Molly my reference to the Taliban.  I was not by
the longest shot comparing Molly to the Taliban.  I WAS trying to describe
the enormous variation among gift exchange systems. The Taliban would like
to wipe out modern markets, and the pooling of the modern state and revert
instead to one of the most repressive  hierarchical gift exchange systems
known to man.

Each system does some things well and some badly.  If you try to do
everything according to any one of these systems, your society is sure to
fall apart.  Our discussion is about which goods and services are best
exchanged in markets as commodities, which are best exchanged as gifts, and
which are best pooled.  IMO education works best when it is pooled.

Again, I am sorry my last message seemed like an attack.  I hope this one
does not.  But, if I have once more transgressed, please let me know and I
will try to express my feelings and thoughts in less offensive ways.
Diane.



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