freedom’s two sides
It’s Passover, the Jewish celebration of freedom and the telling of the story of Exodus, told literally and interpretively in ways new and old. For me, and many other people of the Jewish tradition, Passover is a vital link between our cultural and religious inheritance and our work for justice; it illuminates a legacy of struggle, and helps us understand our place in a human geography of people called to make the world a better place, or more specifically, to pursue the realization of freedom for everyone, everywhere.
So, that’ a long way of saying that I’ve been thinking about freedom and justice extra hard lately, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the topic, as it relates to fair trade.
Fundamentally, fair trade is about changing the character of economic relationships so that producer and consumer come together in a whole partnership, one that sustains, nourishes, and shares. For farmers, this often means a transformation of the conditions of their lives—from poverty, and struggle of not having enough, to freedom, and the ability to choose with agency. It’s the difference between choosing which child not to send to kindergarten, and choosing which child to send to high school or even college. The uniting of farmers with consumers in a relationship that is direct, just, and sustaining changes the world. It creates a condition of freedom, or at least, circumstances of life that are more-free, with the possibility of the ever-opening pursuit of more freedom.
This is the heart of fair trade’s freedom, but it is only one side of a partnership, and its pursuit is incomplete (and I might say impossible) without an exploration of freedom’s other side.
Far away from the farmers who grow our coffee, we walk through the automatic doors of our neighborhood supermarket and are confronted with a countless number of choices. Products offer us health, energy, deliciousness, maybe even the fullness of satisfaction. We feel our power, and choose our favorite loaf of bread from the selection. Our favorite peanut butter. Our favorite fruit jam or jelly. So many choices. Then it’s on to bananas or oranges, maybe both, and apples, pears, lettuce and spinach. Then the coffee section. Strong or sweet, ground or whole bean, flavored or not. We wheel our carts to checkout, each of pushing a metal cart containing the results of our choices—or is it a cage containing the work of our freedom, a definition of self expressed through our agency to choose within the choices given to us?
What interests me is the question how are we to understand our freedom as consumers. To move from choosing within the narrow choices given to us, and the meaning of those choices, literally manufactured by a corporate culture, towards an economy where we choose in a broadly free way, where meaning is personal, and the process of choosing is liberated from external pressure, definition, and constraint.
This seems to me to be a study of the unfreedom of our condition as consumers in a world beyond our control, our blind (or distorted) participation in relationships formed predominantly by another’s choices, our day-to-day feeding of a social organism directed and guided to serve the interests of some over the many. If freedom is the ability to choose, to connect, and to know in truth, then we are greatly deceived by the illusion of freedom we so surrounded within.
Fair trade proposes a very different kind of freedom, the freedom to choose not only for self (think back to health, deliciousness, satisfaction) but also to choose for other. The possibility of choosing to consume in a way that takes and gives, the possibility, as I’ve written elsewhere, to re-imagine our role as consumers to be more like co-producers in a world where farmers feed, and are fed. Where we who take do our taking in a way that sustains the ability of those who give to give.
These are the two sides of fair trade’s work for freedom. I hope that you who know the story of Peace Kawomera, who’ve met the farmers, read their interviews, and thought of them when you bought and drank their coffee—you who’ve made this project whole and who it possible for our company and their cooperative to continue our work—I hope that your participation has given you a new sense of freedom, your freedom, and another’s, together awakening a new, more whole, more free world.
Yours in Peace (and for Freedom),
Ben
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Thanks for your thoughtful reflection on how our unlimited “choices” in commerce are actually both constraining and diminishing to both consumer and producer. It is certainly counterintuitive in our culture to think of limiting our choices as an exercise in freedom but indeed, it can lead to reclaiming some of our sense of agency. Although we sometimes count the days until Passover is done so we can go back to our “regular” diet, we’d all be well served to take the sense of mindfulness around the act of eating into the rest of the spiritual year. And especially to remember that making choices in our daily lives without “kavanah” or intention can contribute to the enslavement of others. It would be an interesting haggadah that asked us to experience that type of slavery as if it were our own.