The Cost Of Living

January 27, 1984
Port Charlotte

January 6, 1985
Lakeland

The beginning of a new year always tempts a speaker to make some appraisal of the future, and I yield to that temptation today. The theme is the cost of living – for us and for those who come after us. The cost of living involves more than balancing our checkbooks, even though such creative arithmetic may be occupying the minds of some of us. I came across a couplet:

“Now that you’ve jingled your bells,
Are you ready to juggle your bills?”

Or, as the 19th century humorist Artemus Ward advised,

“Be happy and live within your means,
Even if you have to borrow money to do it.”

For several generations, the Rockefeller family have not worried about the dollar cost of living. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was once asked for the secret of success. He reflected and then replied, “Get up early, work late, and strike oil.”

The most popular labor-saving device is still money. But the cost of living is going to be an increasing worry and burden.

In a feature article the other day, it was calculated that bringing up a baby born in 1985 will cost the parents $143,000 to age 18. Four years of college will cost the parents another $180,000. The father of a 2-month-old girl commented, “I don’t care if I have to take out a second mortgage, Lauren’s going to get an education.” Two thoughts struck me. First, what kind of wealth would this young father, now 24 and a railroad clerk, have to accumulate in the next eighteen years to be able to get a second mortgage of $180,000 in the year 2003? At first glance, such an achievement is utterly beyond my comprehension.

Second, I thought back how my immigrant grandfather, a skilled pattern-maker, raised a family on $16.00 a week. But that was about 100 years ago. He would probably be as confounded today that his weekly wage would not buy one leg of lamb as I am astonished by the projections of child-rearing and college expenses for the next generation. Then, too, I remember the early thirties when my salary was $35.00 a week, but that put us in the middle class – not affluent, but the rent was paid, food was on the table, and we had an automobile.

Therefore I am not rash enough to say the economic outlook is impossible. What may seem impossible now may very well be feasible in 2003. Church historian Martin Marty noted, “History does not teach us lots of little lessons. Insofar as it teaches any lessons, it teaches only one big one: that nothing ever works out quite the way its managers intended or expected.”

Such speculations about the future may be fascinating (or frightening) but of greater interest is the cost of living today. But we can’t isolate the cost of living as just economics. No matter how one slices it, the cost of living centrally involves ethics and values. How shall I behave? What is the rank order of my values?

The whole world is close and immediate when the pictures flash across the tube and woeful newspaper headlines stare at us:

What is the cost of living in Ethiopia? Malnutrition and death by starvation. The headlines of crisis turn us on and there is response – a million tons (?) of food will be sent. The desperate situation has been increasing through years of drought, but only recently has world consciousness been touched.

The nation of Israel is now, and has been, in the process of moving Ethiopian Jews to the Jewish homeland. But for Ethiopian Christians and Moslems there is no new homeland. The numbers are too vast, the motivation is not sharp, and the logistics probably impossible. We do not even want starving Haitians on our shores. The economics of salvation from hunger are not in place and may never be until all the peoples of the world are valued as brothers and sisters. More than 50 countries around the world have an annual gross domestic product less than $800.00 per capita. There will be more Ethiopias until those nations recognize that starvation is not just a matter of drought and millions of tons of food from afar, but also deal with unrestrained population growth. It might be called imperialism, but acceptance of family planning clinics as a condition for famine relief might be a beginning.

When the deadly methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, on the night on December 3, 1984, about 2,500 people died, and possibly as many as 200,000 were affected.

When the fire occurred in the Emery mine in Utah, 25 men died and are sealed in the tomb of a coal mine.

One can predict similar disasters because they are part of the cost of living. Mine disasters are as old as mining. The cost of living has always had a human price tag.

But we all want to eat every day; we want to be warm in winter; cool in summer. So there must be food, fibre, energy. The pesticides and fertilizer produced by the chemical industry are necessary for these ... comforts. We draw heavily on the resources of planet earth. Total depletion of the sources of our survival may not be immediate, but down the road, there [lies a] point of exhaustion. A high cost for our living.

In Florida you will frequently see the bumper sticker, “We are spending our children’s inheritance.” In terms of a retired couple living well, that’s OK and whimsical, but on a world scale, we ARE spending our children’s inheritance.

This has been sounding like prophecies of doom. Yet if there can be increasing ethical values in the economic structure we call the cost of living, the world may muddle through. There will be great cost. However, who can predict what technical marvels will be ways out of the continuing crisis – if we don’t destroy ourselves in nuclear war. But ways of behaving and the values which undergird social behavior must be interlaced with scientific achievement, or forget it! The most penetrating question is still, “Who is my neighbor?”

But apart from the tough decisions of place and human care, we deal consciously or unconsciously in our personal lives with the cost of living – not just our personal wealth or poverty, but is life worth living? A sad and baffling phenomenon of our time is the increase of teen-age suicides. All sorts of causes are alleged: tension, loss of hope, drugs, loneliness, rejection of an unfair world of conflict and selfishness. But the answers are not clear, and the remedies not effective enough. What suffering in some young people is so profound that the cost of life is not worth it?

Think of Job’s lament. Job, a good man, experienced the death of his sons and daughters, the loss of all his worldly goods, was inflicted with painful sores – all because (in the old story) God and Satan were placing bets on Job’s endurance.

“Wherefore is light given
to him that is in misery,
And life unto the bitter in
soul?
Which longs for death, but
it cometh not....
Why is light given to a
man whose way is hid,
And whom God hath
hedged in? ...
I am not at ease,
neither am I quiet
Neither have I rest, but
trouble cometh.”

As I mentioned, Job is an ancient folktale circulating for centuries before it was written down. It deals with undeserved suffering. There are many theological interpretations. Many conventional believers find in this ancient folk drama a test of Job’s faith in God. Can a person still trust in God when disaster comes? Many say, “God’s will be done, accept it, and maintain your faith.”

But the inquirer who seeks humane values and simple justice asks, “Why? Why would a good God do such evil in order to test whether his popularity can be sustained when undeserved blows are struck [on] his own creation?” That is adding a big price tag to the cost of living for the sake of God’s self-satisfaction.

Consider another ancient folk-tale, the Odyssey of Homer. At Olympus, Zeus, the father of gods and men and women, is in conversation and speaks of the deaths, murders, the agony of the Trojan War, saying,

“My word, how mortals take the
Gods to task!
All their afflictions come from
us, we hear.
And what of their own feelings?
Greed and folly
double the suffering in the lot
of man.” (p. 12)

Folly and greed have always added cruel price increases to the cost of living.

Then, too, the cost of living requires risk. We make decisions and must, without full awareness of consequences. A French philosopher, Amiel, wrote, “The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.” Ralph [Helverson put it this way], “A ship is safe in a harbor, but that is not what a ship is for.”

The old book of Proverbs asks –
Can a man take fire
in his bosom
and his clothes not be
burned?

I’m sure you know that the old Chinese symbol for crisis is a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity. That is true to human experience in any important decision we make. That risk is central to the cost of living.

Life is what we have, what we are. There was no comparison shopping for a different mode of existence. Here we are. Life brings us birth, caring love, growth and decline, grief, friendship, good and evil, tragedy and hope. We experience personal change in what we hold dear, how we relate to our fellow humans, and how we value ourselves.

Augustine once wrote, “Love, and then do as you please.” Jean-Paul Sartre commented, “Love and do as you please, but know that whatever you do will have consequences for which you and you alone are responsible.” That adds to the cost of living, does it not? I am responsible for the consequences of love. King Midas discovered that, to his great sorrow.

So the cost of living is risk – the possibility that when we take fire to our bosom, our clothes will be burned.

Last, but not least, awareness that we shall die is part of the cost of living. Because of human self-consciousness, awareness of our individual selves, we experience life and know that it is limited. For some too brief, for some too long, but in any case, limited. That reality is fearsome for some who try to shut out, escape from the reality – [who] don’t want to speak about it [or] think about it. But the awareness of death is there like an underground geological fault that affects the upper earth. When one we love dies, we grieve, we remember, and are reminded that we too are mortals and march in the innumerable procession that moves from life to death.

We cannot choose not to die. That is not risk, that is certainty. But within our power, to some extent, at least, is how we live, treasuring the moments, valuing the years, welcoming the good experiences, sustaining the love of life, even when the troubled times come, as these come to us all. There’s risk and pain in such openness and sensitivity, but such are costs of living well worth the price.

In conclusion, think of Socrates. Erasmus called him St. Socrates because Erasmus believed the old Greek philosopher deserved a place in the Christian roster of saints. Even the dogmatic Christian Luther was puzzled because he thought Socrates ought to be in heaven [CJW note: Dante, limbo]. Anyway, this brief prayer of Socrates tells much about the correct price for the cost of living:

“Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the inward and outer man be at one. May I reckon wisdom to be wealth, and may I have so much gold as a temperate man and only he can bear and carry... This prayer, I think, is enough for me.”