From ... in Literature — Dec 20, 2024

Convivial Economics

“It’s not a usual thing to do, you know, to invite total strangers into your home,” the woman says as she steps across the threshold.

Four o’clock in the afternoon, already quite dark outside, but we’ve lit a couple of marschaller, the large outdoor candles that Swedes put out to welcome guests, on the steps up to the old shoe shop.

“Well,” I say, “I guess it helps that anyone who’s been around these parts for long has probably been in here and bought shoes!”

This is something that Samuel Ewell pointed out to me, a while back: it asks more of people to invite them into your private domestic space, when compared with a space which is, in some way, part of the common experience of the local community. I suppose that’s why this house felt right, when we first set eyes on it, four years ago this autumn – because, for all that we talk about this as “a school that starts from the conversations we bring together around our kitchen table”, it’s the liminal zone of the former shoe shop which eases the making of these open invitations.

Reading Rosie Whinray’s recent Postcard from Brixton, I was taken back to my Spacemakers days, when we were running events in the empty shops in the arcades there, then starting up the community-owned and run street market festival they call the West Norwood Feast. One thing I learned in those years is that there’s a magical threshold, whenever you make an open invitation to a gathering: at first, as people start to show up, you see them looking around a little awkwardly, wondering if they made a mistake, and you wonder the same thing too; maybe this is going to be a flop, an embarrassment, a proof of our foolishness. Then, all at once, while you’re looking the other way, something shifts. It’s not a gradual fade, it’s a flip from one state to another, because suddenly everyone has forgotten to wonder whether they should have done something else with their Saturday night or their Sunday afternoon, and the gathering comes alive.

These things don’t map straightforwardly across scales from a south London high street to a shoe shop in small-town Sweden, but I felt an echo of that experience on Saturday. By Anna’s count, there were over fifty visitors who crossed the threshold in the course of the afternoon, easily the busiest gathering we’ve held, and a good mix of friends, acquaintances and strangers. Partly, it was an easy invitation to say yes to – “Advent fika with an English accent”, mince pies and a bit of carol singing – and partly it’s a reflection of a year in which we’ve had the energy to look outwards and get engaged in the existing life of this community, joining the committee that runs the folkpark on the edge of town, showing up most Sundays at the church across the road. We just know a lot more people around here than we did a year ago. That feels good.

I’m standing at the shop counter, restocking the plate of tea bread, when a couple of guests who are heading off come over to ask how they should pay.

“No need,” I say, “we’re giving it all away.”

“Well,” the man says with a smile, “that really is the Christmas spirit!”

Afterwards, Anna and I talk about an idea for next year, a simple monthly event during the term-time months: a soup dinner where we’d sometimes have a guest to speak, or sing, or a film screening afterwards.

“Of course,” she says, “we’d have to charge something. Or what do you think?”

There’s a strong pull in me to follow the inspiration of the way that Adam Wilson and friends are working at Sand River Community Farm, leaning all the way out into the logic of gift. But as Anna points out, if we don’t make it possible for people to contribute, then they will find it hard to keep coming, and we don’t have an equivalent just now to the “farm frolics” at Sand River, the opportunities to make a contribution in kind.

As we’re talking, I remember a little story from the David Schwartz essay in The Challenges of Ivan Illich, an essay which has been on my mind this autumn. Here’s the story, which Schwartz quotes from Rabbi Zelig Pliskin’s Love Your Neighbor: You and Your Fellow Man in Light of the Torah:

Rabbi Yitzchok of Vorki once praised the hospitality of a certain innkeeper who always treated his guests with much respect. “But he takes money from those who stay at his inn,” someone argued. “Of course he takes money,” replied Rav Yitzchok, “but he does so to enable himself to continue his commendable conduct. The warmth of his welcome and the thoughtful care he gives are proof that he feels love for his guests. If he wouldn’t take money, he would not be able to continue his hospitality.”

I reckon there’s a clue in that story, a lens through which it might be possible to discern two quite different ways of being, when it comes to money; two different tunes we can be dancing to. One of these is well described in the logic of the economists, the other falls out of view when we take their claims at face value. For there’s a great difference between “we do this in order to make money” and “we take money in order to be able to do this”. Maybe you can think of pockets of hospitality in your own experience, even today, which are running to that second, hidden logic.

A journalist once got baffled at my inability to summarise the “goal” of our work at a school called HOME. I wanted to help him, but it’s just not how I think about any of this. If I knew what we were “trying to achieve” – if I had the kind of certainty such language seems to imply – then I fear this would blind me to the unexpected lessons that present themselves along the way, the unforeseen lines of enquiry that arrive like a stranger across the threshold. I’ve no desire to make strong claims about what is achieved by serving mince pies to neighbours and strangers, but I will say that, from these humble, stumbling experiments in convivial economics, I am learning things that I would not have caught sight of, had I tried to do all my thinking through books and screens and the kind of conversations that come with footnotes.¹

¹As fond as I am of footnotes, conversations and books, and recognising that screens have their uses, too.

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