What We Lose When Everything Gets Sold

From church attendance and homemade goods to poetry readings and local activism, many things only flourish when beyond the reach of market forces that reduce everything to its monetary value.

The Spaces That Shape Us

I experience it seated in the stern pews of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church on Sundays, surrounded by the warm devoted faces of people of varied skin colors trying their best to be of one heart and body during weekly Mass, but also in the benches of Grace Episcopal, a historic stone church with a vaulted ceiling buttressed by dark, resplendent wood—its gothic design drawing the eyes heavenward.

I experience it when gathering herbs from our vegetable garden to add to the sourdough bread we make for our household, grown from a starter gifted by a generous friend, loaves later bequeathed to family and neighbors.

I experience it when picking a few select gala apples from trees that only started to bear fruit a couple of years after planting them on our humble hillside that we refer to as “the orchard,” certainly an overstatement for a handful of trees that have produced little so far.

I experience it when seated in a friend’s living room, taking turns reading or reciting our favorite poetry to a small gathering of literary companions, with the warm glow of lamps on end tables telling us it’s okay to be quiet, a little more still, less bothered by the chaos and distractions that bombard us via smartphones. We must be intentional and vigilant about breaking away from our favorite habit-forming digital devices.

I experience it at Oak Hill Community Park and Forest, where nearby residents volunteer their time to plant hundreds of trees, including chestnuts—a large species with a once-hallmark cultural position, almost completely lost to blight more than a century ago. These are planted in hopes of making our eastern woodland landscape that much closer to its native mix of hardwoods, understory bushes, and knee-high flora.

I experience it when grassroots organizers and concerned citizens from around Burke County gather at the Historic Courthouse Square on a Saturday morning, taking turns giving stirring speeches about the immigrant and undocumented members of our community who are terrorized by hateful rhetoric and inhumane policies that tear households apart. These people are here to live, work, and contribute—just like their neighbors, whose families have resided in these foothills for a few generations longer.

I experience it at Freedom Park’s basketball courts and the Catawba River Soccer Complex, where strangers become acquaintances, and even friends, after a few pick-up games.

Our Politics Could Use 'Another Turn of the Crank'

When Everything (and Everyone) Becomes a Product

So, what threads all these moments together? Well, many things.

But mostly I think about how uncommercialized they all are, unsullied by the often brutal, faceless forces of commerce that reduce everything to dollars.

Heady academics might call this threat commodification, the process of converting something with inherent social, cultural, or personal value—like land, traditions, homespun goods, or community relationships—into products that can be bought and sold in the marketplace.

For the commodifying mind, our mountains and forests are a collection of resources to be mined or cut and turned into profit; they are not a beaver habitat, a glen where hikers commune with Nature, or a life-giving source of water for millions of human and non-human animals that live downstream of the Catawba River’s headwaters.

Or, they might call this antagonism over-commercialization, the excessive focus on profit-making and marketability in areas where economic motives overshadow all other values—such as affection, conviviality, social bonds, care, mutual aid, stewardship, place, belonging, humility/limits, cooperation, harmony, and unity (Appalachian values championed by Kentuckian writer Wendell Berry).

The Economistic Mind

To the economistic mind, we shouldn’t think twice about taking a higher-paying job far away from family or communal responsibilities, or choosing a supposedly more “lucrative” major in college over one centered around sustainability or caring for the most vulnerable in our communities.

You’ve gotta do what’s best for you, we’re told, a pernicious aphorism to ease the guilt we naturally feel for not fully taking into account the needs of our family and community members.

It’s a way out of duty and our obligations to the common good.

We could also call this menace the infiltration of capitalism, the ways in which capitalist systems expand to influence all areas of life, including education, healthcare, personal relationships, long-standing cultural traditions, and leisure.

For “market triumphalists,” as the philosopher Michael Sandel calls them in his 2012 book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, nearly everything is viewed through this economic lens. Nearly every aspect of society has been captured by “the market.”

Everything, and everyone, can be priced.

Friendships are networking opportunities for career advancement. Sponsoring a local charity is a smart way to market your brand. Attending church regularly raises your standing among neighbors, increasing the likelihood they’ll support your business. Go to college because it will boost your earning capacity.

A Dose of Philosophical Pragmatism for Appalachia

What We Stand to Lose

Alternatively, in these spaces shielded from commercialism and market triumphalism, there aren’t TV announcers hawking low-nutritional energy drinks and drowning out the sounds of basketballs bouncing on asphalt. These are just people enjoying each other’s company and keeping their bodies healthy.

SuperPACs and moneyed political machines didn’t fund that gathering on the Burke County Courthouse lawn. It was common people, like you and me, with shared interests and little, if any, to gain financially, who were motivated primarily by love, solidarity, and a commitment to our community.

All those trees planted near Canoe Creek aren’t investments that will line the pockets of private equity firms or generate more money down the road through garnered interest for the people who dug their modest holes; they were gifts, time and effort given freely to benefit our community, including fellow humans as well as the flora and non-human animals who share this patch of green earth with us. They created greater harmony and a clearer sense of stewardship.

That salon of poetry aficionados wasn’t an audition for a hefty book deal, an act of status-seeking, or an attempt to turn artistic expression into something crude and, well, commercial; it was a place to foster affection, belonging, and care, inspired by the alchemy of the spoken word.

Those apples are not just a way to feed my family, but also a personal practice tied to the belief that nurturing and watching over living things is good for the soul. Local food is almost always healthier and reinforces a sense of place in ways that produce grown at a mass scale (by agri-business and shipped from far away) undermines.

The sourdough bread is loosely wrapped in cloth or generic aluminum foil, with no brand shouting in your face for attention or cash. And this act of giving keeps alive the tradition of social cooperation and conviviality. We thrive when we look for ways to make other people better off.

We live better when we can exist together in non-commercialized ways.

Those church pews and benches are unadorned by scintillating advertisements for this or that. No sermons are interrupted “by a word from our sponsors.” Their walls aren’t encumbered by flyers telling congregants how they can make money fast.

In fact, the messages in their sermons are often calls to give to the poor, reminders that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” This captures the spirit of mutual aid and humility befitting our Appalachian communities.

As the marketplace attempts to claw its way deeper into our politics, relationships, multi-generational traditions, hobbies, houses of worship, schools, civic centers, and daily lives, I wonder: Who will push back against these confounding forces? And when all the things that already carry such deep social, cultural, or personal value have been reduced to dollars, market transactions, and self-interest, will there be many people left to remember what we gave up?

Who will even care?