To Have or To Be?

Much has been written and much has been said during “camp fire grumblings” about the greed of the age. It is not that all humans are greedy, but the human species is undeniably an insatiable weapon of mass consumption. If this is true then greed is the attribute that most fittingly describes the current human condition, particularly if you understand greed as an unrelenting drive to have/own/possess/consume more.

My reason for mentioning this somewhat depressing thought is because I have recently been reading the book “To Have or To Be?” by Eric Fromm. In the book Fromm describes two “modes of life” or two modes of relating to the world. Fromm explains that, in his estimation, it is possible to either be concerned with having or with being. The distinction between the having and the being modes of living is a matter of how we relate to all the goods of our lives.

Those who are in the having mode of living want to consume that which they deem to be good, they want to own it as some sort of possession. From such a mode of life, rampant consumerism and greed make perfect sense. We all want to get hold of the good simply because we want our lives to be good. In fact, we want to get hold of as much of the good as possible. If getting hold of the good takes the form of possessing a bunch things that we deem to be good, then we will necessarily pursue possessions with greedy obsession. The things can be both tangible and intangible. They can take the form of physical possessions like cars, houses and trophy wives but can also take the form of experiences and memories like that of the tourist more concerned about accumulating trips to far away lands than they are about savouring and experiencing the trips for themselves. The trips and the memories are sought so as to furnish an album or an archive of “places I have been”. Even the more ethereal things like love and knowledge are sought to be owned as if they are the kind of thing that can be put in our back pockets and make our lives better by being there.

Fromm believes that the global catastrophe that is currently facing the world is the consequence of the overwhelming tendency of modern man to occupy the mode of having. The issue here is not that this mode of living makes us want the wrong things, the issue is that we are incorrectly orientated towards the things that we naturally take to be good. There is no limit to the need for more because a possession is always of a finite and limited value. Things we have actually enrich our lives very little. Things we use however can make a meaningful difference to our lives.

We see this clearly when we talk about the alternative, i.e. the mode of being. To live from the mode of being is to be concerned less with possession than it is to be concerned with lived experience. It is about activity rather than passivity. To possess a good is a passive relation to that good, it is there to sit there. It is because of this passivity that the good has almost no value for us. It is valuable once we interact with, i.e. become active with it. For one who is living from the mode of being, what matters is what one does rather than what one has, the goodness is found in being active in certain ways. Once we interact with something its value to us becomes indefinitely large proportionate to the value of the activity it facilitates.  The difference is the difference between owning a car and driving it. One hundred cars in the garage are not worth the single car driven everyday. If we keep the value of our own being active as the most essential good in our lives then it seems we may come to desire less, desiring instead only what we need to be active in the ways that fulfill us the most.