A middle road
S.A.M. said:
I suppose that depends on how you define greed.
One of my high school teachers, a mathematician, entered his profession because when he was in college, he was desperate for money to stay in school. A scholarship was available through the metallurgy program, so he applied and ended up a science student. I knew that story for years, but a friend who knew the guy better told me he was a closet poet.
My father was a trained and licensed biology and PE teacher. He did this so that he could be a football coach. Over the years, then, he has worked as a salesman, a designer, a manufacturer, and a small-business owner. Oh, he also sold shoes in there somewhere, too. And jockstraps. And in the end, he left my mother, made some money on the stock market, bought a boat, lost a bunch of money on the stock market, and is currently hanging out in Mexico with his new wife. His regret about the failed marriage? That he put her through it at all. Thirty-one years of pantomime, and both of them knew it the whole time. My father, the capitalist who wanted to be greedy but felt insulted if anyone used the word, finally checked out of that strange room and rejoined humanity.
I am part of an American generation that still wrestles with the effects of a certain phenomenon. In comedy writing, there is a Jewish stereotype by which young men aspire to be accountants or dentists because their mothers want them to. Like all stereotypes, there exists in the culture a real seed of the idea. I cannot say how prevalent the situation is among American Jews, but I do know that it's not limited to the Jewish community. I know plenty of people who went to college and got the degree they were told to, and who hate their field, hate their job, and would be happier stringing flowers onto a necklace.
So why don't they do it? you might ask. Same reason a gay man marries a woman and has kids. They just don't figure it out in time, or if they do, they feel there's nothing to be done about it.
This is, obviously, an American example. Oh, shit, a dentist or an accountant. Try picking which of your kids has to go hungry tonight. I get it. But that's the thing. In my utopia, people would do what they wanted to do. One of my friends should have studied music his whole life, but he could only afford to go to college if he studied something "useful". So he majored in communications and dropped out a term shy of graduation. Eventually, with the help of friends, he made it over to England to spend some time at LIPA. Now his father is dying—slowly—and after years of toiling in the software industry, my friend is unemployed and has moved back home to change daddy's diapers and watch the old man fade to nothing. He didn't finish at LIPA, though, and that's a tragedy. He ran out of money. His classmates? Some of them are unbelievable bastards, but they're making a quarter-million a year in production.
The question, then: Is my friend greedy? Sure, he
could be making a quarter-million a year twiddling dials for the next Britney album—and he can make a better album with a MacIntosh and no investment capital than most major labels could put out for a million-dollar budget—but at the same time, a lot of that money would go to his father's care, or to a sister who did time for trying to save her girlfriend from a smack dealer who moonlit as a pimp.
It's not just what people want, but why they want it and what they're doing for it.
I have a community of writers around me that is slowly lifting my spirits. My mother expressed a regret not too long ago that she wished we'd started down this course sooner. (As a kid, the only parental advice I got on writing was, "Do something else.") That's twice, now, she's used writers to save my ass, and while I occupy this strange, magic world where I am at once writer, editor, student, and teacher, I now find a possible career opening up for me (professional manuscript editor) in a direction I never considered before. Both my mother and I have paused to wonder what could have been.
And now that I'm in my thirties and have a kid ...
now my family switches from the "make money" argument to, "I just want you to be happy".
So imagine that those who love words get to study and work with words. Those who love numbers, or music, or art ... those who are fascinated by the sciences—biology, medicine, physics, and so on. Think of it this way: If people did what they want, how many more astronomers, botanists, and mathematicians would we have? What would they be doing, and what would be their impact? How much better would stories and songs be if the musicians writing them did so for other reasons than money? (How many of
your all-time favorite songs have been Billboard #1 hits? And, yes, considering some of the manuscripts I've seen recently, and the advice I've heard agents and publishers giving young writers ....) If it wasn't about money, how many personal injury lawyers would there be? (There's a great but obscure
Doonesbury joke there.)
This is what industrial society can bring. Even in a society as decadent as ours, it is possible to aspire to better things without being greedy. Hell, consider the slow progress about workplace sexual harassment. This country is littered with women who would have given a lot for the opportunity to tell their boss to keep his fucking hands to himself without worrying whether they could feed their kids the next month. It's not all greed.
Now, to run down the list:
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Math teacher: Diving into an unknown major in order to stay in school is not greedy; by contrast, the movie
Soul Man, in which a white guy pretends to be black in order to get a scholarship ... now
that is greed. But the math teacher was doing what has long been tacitly part of the American dream. Work hard, live well, but don't dream too big. The majority of American workers simply took a job because they needed it. Wanting a life where they can survive (e.g. pay bills) without being miserable every day at work isn't greed by my standard. But it's tragically unsatisfying.
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My father: Nobody becomes a teacher for greed. The failed businesses, the 2,300 square-foot lakefront house, the time he called our family—which possessed two houses in different states, four boats, five cars, three personal computers, two televisions, and a VCR (ca. 1992-3)—
poor. The lectures about capitalism, the denigration of compassion. These are all greedy. But at the same time, he really did believe for a long time that this was the proper way to maintain a family. He wasn't trying to be greedy; he was just trying to be good and proper. And, yes, he dreamed of working up the ladder and coaching pro, or maybe running a college program; among his co-workers at the time are a couple Super Bowl rings, three top-division programs, a WFL title, an XFL endeavor, and a personal disaster at one of the most storied football programs in the country. The last active that I know of among is college-coaching friends runs a program in Conference USA. I don't blame my father for loving football. I understand
why he misses it. But all dreams die, and when this one went to dust, he became a capitalist.
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My generation: Generation X is plenty greedy. We were raised by capitalists, and our values are coming to fruition in the present economic crisis. While we all recoil in horror and disgust at what has happened, it is hard to escape the notion that nothing about this crisis is really all that strange. Everything we did leading into it, no matter how corrupt our abstract judgment might find it, was generally accepted. Only us fringe lefties screaming so unreasonably and cluelessly that the system could come apart with frightening implications didn't like it. Well, that's not true. I know a conservative Christian who doesn't like it, but takes part anyway. Although, to be fair, he invents Bible passages sometimes to justify himself. And it shows. His daughter is, depending on who you ask, either slightly unstable or a raving lunatic. And she's greedy as hell. You know the kind. Remember when people could really easily steal long distance time from phone companies? Most people I know who did that said something about sticking it to the man. And say what we want about stealing from conglomerates, but she didn't have any such concerns. You could do it, therefore it wasn't stealing. (And, no, don't challenge me on the implications of that; I'll likely agree with you.) But our generational greed isn't complete. Many of us have checked out of society temporarily or permanently because we just can't cope with the stress of being a contemptible bastard all the time. And some would call
that greedy, but I don't see how sitting around in squalor, stinking for a lack of shower, using up other people's drugs, and hating yourself makes for greed.
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American Jews: Like I said, it's a comedy stereotype. But the broader phenomenon is fairly common. I'm sorry, but who the hell wakes up one day in youth and says, "I know ... I want to be a shop steward at a recycled-rubber manufacturing plant when I grow up!" People make decisions that they regret. Sometimes this is conditioning; sometimes it is arbitrary; sometimes it is a wholly independent choice. Taking a certain job because it's there, or studying a certain field because circumstances dictate you should, are common routes to dissatisfaction. Correcting that dissatisfaction is not greed.
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Musician: We all have our greedy side. This isn't one of his. I think there's a fair question involved:
What's with the $10,000 'cello and the years of paid instruction if you don't want me to play the thing? He keeps three instruments close to him these days. His first professional bass guitar, bought for him by a friend who had a good week dealing drugs, a Parker Night Fly six-string electric guitar that he bought with his severance after the second time he was bought out and downsized by the French, and a cheap electric guitar that his biological father (not the dying one) bought five years ago for eighty bucks at a garage sale. It has no sustain, won't stay in tune, and will never see the stage lights. It is his favorite musical instrument, ever. The 'cello was rented. The cheap guitar is the only musical instrument any of his parents ever bought for him, and it just means that much to know that at least one of them believes in the music.
Now, looking back to "wars by civilised peoples striving for a better world", it really does come down to a measure of greed.
In the United States we agonize over accounting or dentistry, wages or health care, chicken or steak. And I don't call this greed. Rather, it is an attempt to answer the questions that life—by circumstance—puts before you.
And if I don't call those aspects of American life greed ....
No, running around sixpacking your neighbors isn't a good idea, but neither were the Irish wrong to want a chance at being equal to their British neighbors. A hundred sixty years (at least) later, a drama that started with the landlords exporting food until a nation starved has yet to close. (Even in 1849, American newspapers in heavily-Irish cities like Boston and Chicago criticized the Irish as "ingrates" for rejecting everything the noble Crown did for them.) In India, people were sick of the patronizing tone and deprivation of colonialism, and being forced to violate their religion (e.g. Khyber Rebellion). All through the third world, people just want something to eat, or some clean water, and wonder why their children are dying from simple diseases. The disaster otherwise known as the Russian Revolution? Sending an untrained, deliberately ill-equipped peasant army to fight the war while you stay home, get drunk, and bang your relatives is a quick road to revolution.
These struggles don't represent greed. Certainly, elements of greed can be found in them, but the general concept of civilized people striving for a better world does not, in and of itself constitute greed anymore than a wet dog looking to get out of the rain is being excessively selfish.
There
is a middle road. It just isn't always clearly marked. Nor is it smooth, straight, or well-lit once you're on it.