This project is a collaboration between members of Free Columbia’s M.C. Richards Program (a creative alternative higher education program) , The Hudson Valley Current (A complementary currency initiative) and hundreds of other participants not unlike yourself!
It is a social-art project intended to activate awareness of social dimensions of our economy, experiences of beauty, conversation about economic culture and to provide small grants to local community organizations. We are excited to see where this goes and especially how the people involved help to inspire new ideas about economics. The willing participation of the people involved is the creative water that allows the blossoming of meaning within this project. Likewise, human intentions and relationships, your actions of goodwill, could become the waters that truly nourish economic life and community prosperity.
We created 100 cards, with instructions and a ledger, documenting the givings and receiving of the gracious participants, on one side. On the other side, students of the MC Richards program have thoughtfully designed and crafted paintings to express the spirit of this project. When placed together they create one large piece of artwork that will be exhibited during the Spring of 2021.
Upon completion of this project, at least 5,000 Hudson Valley Currents (equivalent of 5000 USD) will be distributed to community organizations. During the exhibition we will also host a series of events exploring promising developments in economics. Read the instructions printed on the cards below:
We want to emphasize that foundational to this project is the belief that economics, at its best, is a moral affair, involving mutual care and interest amongst empathic individuals. This belief is in contrast to conventional economic theory, as taught in many places of learning, that posits human beings are essentially rational: In this context, meaning self interested and calculating. To people who are loyal to this perspective an economic project centered around human warmth and ethical intentions may seem unintuitive, even absurd! However, recent research challenges the idea that we fit within this coldly rational and rigid mold, and opens vistas to moral and social economic perspectives: economics that make room for you, your emotions, and your ideals. It is a good time to become an economist, and to learn about economics, as new space for thinking is opening up, making way for new growth, at a time when this new growth is sorely needed.
Recent centuries have seen local, regional and national economies turn into one global economy, and human faces are lost within its tremendous context. In the past, it did not require a great leap to understand the clothing one bought from a local seamstress enabled them to produce more clothes for more people, and to care for their family.
Today, due to trends inherent in globalization, our commercial economy does not reveal our interdependence with other people and the planet. We often only see advertising, logos, sales signs and price tags in the market, which turn our attention away from the real world processes and consequences connected to our products. There are rare exceptions in fair-trade products, benefit corporations, cooperatives, credit unions, ethical banks, impact investors and the divestment movement, organic products and the community supported financing culture of the CSA movement.
When we do not sense concrete relationships to other people and the planet through money, money itself is untethered, floating up into what seems like an independent value. When the value of money and capital are seen as separate from the world and inherent to themselves, we can no longer see through them into the social, cultural and ecological realities that provide real values for good lives.
INTRODUCTORY STATEMENTS TO THE FILM
At the MC Richards program we’ve been working with Goethean methods of inquiry towards a new integrative education rarely found in mainstream pedagogy. This approach requires a personal participation that seeks to find the elemental connection between private human contexts and freely available natural worlds we are wrapped up in. When we looked towards economics and economic history, we began to perceive a vast need for immediate change; something to oppose to the present economic language of individual gain; to reach for a novel system invested with human prosperity; a new form of value rooted in the good instances of earthly events not simply the temporary isolated rises of fortune.
We decided to communicate this with a lyric essay turned lyric film “Against Human Nature”, originally written by Norman Douglas in 2020. The film essay is an oblique glance at humanity’s artificial separation from nature and the language games we have spun for ourselves. The film traverses a cross section in today’s transitory web of significance and asks us to pledge ourselves to a higher more constant motive. Edited to be a meditation on various themes, the film endows a mood for change inspired by contemplation. The film sits between an ode to nature’s glory and a petition for a radical change in human activity.