David Brooks, as is typical, almost gets the point: “Poverty has been the norm through most of human history,” he wrote in The New York Times a few days ago. “

The question is not ‘Why is there poverty?’ but ‘Why is there wealth?’”

First, he’s missed something. Human history, even as defined by Europeans as what is recorded, existed all over the world. Poverty has not been the “norm through most of human history.” It’s been the norm in so-called western civilization during historical times. Poverty, in the absolute sense of lacking sufficient food, happens during hard times of natural disaster and famine, when some people suffer while others do not. But “poverty” as a relative experience where one person is poor and another rich? That is not a universal. Such poverty exists where individuals hoard resources.

Another question, then, is why do we not share?

Through most of human history and prehistory, in families throughout time, and in nearly every human cultural tradition, people shared whatever they had. Sharing was the norm. You gave what you had, you parceled out wealth during hard times. You didn’t allow your neighbors’ children to starve while your own larder remained full. You shared because you could, and because you understood this as the right thing to do. Sharing was valued and celebrated.

The real question we should be wrestling with might be: how did we become a society that decided it was acceptable not to share?

In many traditional cultures in my part of the word, potlatches were held. During a traditional potlatch, a wealthy person or family gives everything it has away. Stored food, art and religious items, even canoes. They might also destroy wealth symbolically, for example by breaking a copper. They impoverish themselves. The cultural anthropologist, Franz Boaz famously disapproved of this activity as braggadocio.* Which, yes, it is. The giver shows that they have been successful in acquiring food and artifact, and that they are confident of their skill to rebuild that wealth from scratch. So, yes, they are showing off as we would say when I was a child.

A historian told my class, years ago, that a potlatch was akin to a “coming-out party,” a definition that utterly fails to respect what such ceremonies accomplish.

A potlatch involves giving away or destroying wealth or valuable items in order to demonstrate a leader’s wealth and power. Potlatches are also focused on the reaffirmation of family, clan, and international connections, and the human connection with the supernatural world. Potlatch also serves as a strict resource management regime, where coastal peoples discuss, negotiate, and affirm rights to and uses of specific territories and resources. Potlatches often involve music, dancing, singing, storytelling, making speeches, and often joking and games. The honouring of the supernatural and the recitation of oral histories are a central part of many potlatches.—Wikipedia

Potlatches serve to redistribute wealth and to gain status by doing this, a reward for virtue.

Contrast the culture that gains status by giving it away with Europeans of the same period, who gained status by gilding their ceilings.

[I’ll allow that I don’t admire everything about traditional PNW indigenous cultures—the Haida butchered communities and most of these peoples kept slaves, though the terms of slavery in most of the world were not so abominable as what was practiced in the antebellum South. It was still a “bald, grotesque, unwarrantable usurpation” of human rights.]

Sharing as a value is also part of modern, historical European culture. Hoarding might also be considered one of the seven deadly sins in Christianity, “pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.” We know it’s right to give. The need to share our wealth is at the heart of a favorite seasonal story, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. We teach our children to share. It’s no merely a nice thing, sharing is something we do to survive.

It’s worth considering how far lost this essential human value of sharing equitably has drifted from our daily lives. How is it that we have become a culture that admires those individuals who hoard what they have, who stash wealth so far beyond need, beyond what I might call common sense? How did we become a culture of the wealthy thriving at the expense of so many?

It was Jesus who said the wealthy man must give everything away in order to find virtue.

“Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

The young man said to Him, “All these things I have kept from my youth. What do I still lack?”

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.—Matthew 19:19-21, KJV

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*Franz Boaz pretty much created the modern science of anthropology. “Among his many significant students were A. L. Kroeber, Alexander Goldenweiser, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gilberto Freyre.” Kroeber was Ursula K. Le Guin’s father and the reason for the initial K in the middle of her name. “Among Boas’s main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit.”

I would argue this persistent view of cultures as continually improving via European culture, which Boaz refuted, remains a problem for us today.