A Cure for Instability

The deadline for mailing gifts to arrive in time for Christmas is quickly approaching. If you’re lucky, you may receive a very personal gift during this holiday season. Even if you’re not so fortunate as to get a hand-knitted scarf from a friend who took up yarn-wrangling during the pandemic, you’ll probably receive something. You’ll probably give too.

Most of us know intuitively that something has been lost in our post-industrial, technologically advanced world. In the midst of unprecedented wealth, power, and knowledge, there is a tangible disconnectedness. Add to it political tension, a coronavirus pandemic, and the resulting economic disruption, and we live in a world of profound instability.

In the midst of this, I was lucky enough to give a gift to someone who understands gifts the way ancient people do. Nearly every time we speak by phone, she reminds me of the gift I gave her and how meaningful it is to her. And she recently gave me the “meta-gift” of understanding gifts the way she does, a book that taught me that there is a cure for this instability in which we live, for which the holiday season presents a golden opportunity: the giving and receiving of gifts. 

In The Gift,º Marcel Mauss presents a stunning survey of gift-related practices in ancient societies from every corner of the globe. His observations and conclusions provide us with a few precious principles that all of us can apply to create stability in an unstable world:

• A gift is a living thing: It carries with it the spirit of the person who gave it. To give it is to give part of yourself, and to receive it is to receive a part of someone else’s essence. When we give and receive gifts in a truly personal way, we revivify our experience of life.
• Giving is a good cultural norm: “In ancient societies, people were anxious to give. There was no occasion of importance when one was not obliged to invite friends and share the produce of the chase or forest; to redistribute everything at a potlatch; or to recognize services from chiefs, vassals, or relatives by means of gifts. Failing these obligations—at least for the nobles—etiquette was violated and rank was lost.” The social pressure to give gifts is not a bad thing.
• It’s in our best self-interest to give: There is an old Hindu teaching that the secret of fortune and happiness is to give, not to keep, not to seek but to distribute it that it may return in this world and in the other. According to this teaching, self-renunciation and getting only to give is the real source of profit and the law of nature. It is in the nature of food, in particular, to be shared; to fail to give others a part is to “kill its essence”, to destroy it for oneself and for others: “He who eats without [this] knowledge kills his food, and his food kills him.”
• Giving and receiving gifts creates a sense of reciprocity and connectedness: The person who receives a gift does not merely recognize that he has received it, but realizes that he himself is in a sense “bought” until it is paid for.

Mauss concludes with a few suggestions for modern societies: “The rich should come once more, freely or by obligation, to consider themselves as the treasurers of their fellow citizens…Meanwhile, the individual must work and be made to rely more upon himself than upon others.” Ending with the famous image of King Arthur’s round table, Mauss asserts: “The mere pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and peace of the whole, to the rhythm of its work and pleasures, and hence in the end to the individual.”

These ideas have implications on many levels, from the individual to the national. In a time of instability, giving and receiving gifts may be the most deeply human way to cure it and the disconnectedness that fuels it. 

º https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Gift/