In my late teens and twenties, I was an advocate and practitioner of what could be termed Voluntary Simplicity (VS) - with "simplicity" interpreted in a relative but not total sense.
The idealistic and extreme advocates of VS were proposing a return to an essentially medieval feudal agrarian system; but medieval minus the Lord of the Manor and the Catholic church. In other words; pretty much the kind of society of many small farmers and craftsmen that was envisaged by William Morris in News From Nowhere.
However, my less radical idea was to (more or less) stop overall economic growth, except for benefits due to improvements in (simple) technology* and methods - on the basis that by 1975 we had "enough" stuff; and indeed we should reduce our material needs in order to allow more discretionary time ad space for individual freedom.
Thus; consumerism would not altogether be abolished, but would be "bounded".
This also applied at the level of individual persons; whereby paid work was understood in terms of a "deal" whereby so much in the way of resources was traded for so much time and effort in labour; and the individual could - and I would have said should - reduce his wants in order to allow more time for discretionary activities.
This is, of course, the attitude advocated by HD Thoreau in the Economy chapter of Walden.
The activities to be pursued during the time and with the energies liberated by restricting material-wants were high-minded: things such as contemplating the natural world, reading and writing, doing arts and crafts, communal social participation in music and dancing - and the like.
In short; a somewhat "Merrie England" sort of existence!
When I eventually became a paid worker, this was exactly what I did in my own life. I had qualified as a doctor, and therefore could command a much higher-than-average pay-per-hour; but I chose not to maximize income by doing the full allocation of medical hours; but instead to trade-off about half the potential salary in order to get about double the free time.
Such an attitude was actually fairly mainstream, or at least not unusual and fairly influential, in leftish (as I was) Britain of the 1970s - and (I later discovered) had a fairly well-known international advocate in the French economist Andre Gorz.
It went with a tendency to eschew fashion, and the accumpulation of possessions; and expenditure on things like lavish cars and holidays.
But through the middle 1980s, there was instead an almost society-wide return of aggressive consumerism; with a desire and expectation for participation in frequent rounds of fashion, technological novelties, and complexification of life - all of which was linked to higher social status.
This has continued up to the present; and has transformed what is now called the "Green" movement from one based on "back to the land" deliberately simple agrarianism; to the current state-/multinational-/ multibillionnaire-/ bureaucratic-managerial-dominated compulsory-subsidized waves of techno-fashion.
These technologies are by intent anti-nature, anti-farming; and in-practice focused entirely on pseudo-scientific and officially-mandated concepts such as CO2 climate, or the levels of other chemicals - the individual person is regarded as unable to make such evaluations; and is supposed to accept and obey these diktats without questioning.
In terms of individual aspirations; the social ideal is very far from Morrisite, Thoreauvian, Voluntary Simplicity; but instead success is to work long hours for an ever-increasing salary to sustain ever-increasing and publicly-advertised consumption.
"Leisure" is focused on the purchase and display of ever-changing fashions; and expensive pastimes such as owning high status cars and boats; participating in expensive sports; and travel to exotic locations.
Even gardening has become ever more fashion-driven, expensive, and technological!
And farming is aggressively demonized rather than idealized.
The whole area of food-production and consumption has been shaped by top-down media, NGO and government campaigns emanating from mega-corporations and using PSYOPS.
So that farm animals are painted as an evil and destructive indulgence; meat-eating is wicked and to be abolished (for the masses) in favour of factory-made protein matter; and veganism is prescribed as spiritually virtuous - and has been orientated towards eating ever-more artificial and imported substances.
A very far cry from the hopes and dreams of the neo-medievalists of the 1970s!
Such have been, over the past half-century, the dominant trend of choices and decisions made by Western Society and by most of the individual persons in these societies.
While there was much that was unfounded and incoherent about the ideals of Voluntary Simplicity - and the whole notion lacked a basis in the strong motivations that only an active and spiritual religion can provide; what has replaced the seventies idealisations of nature and society has been a good deal worse!
*My ideas of simple technology were influenced by EF Schumacher's "Intermediate Technology" as described in his book Small is Beautiful.
Note: Some readers will notice that in my descriptions of neo-medievalism I did not mention Distributism, or the names of Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton. This is because I was not significantly aware of this 1920-30s movement during the 1970s, mostly because my perspective was coming out from atheism and the Left. However, I had read of Distributism in EF Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed, which I read on publication in 1977. Nonetheless; I had apparently more-or-less filtered-out this information, as being of little interest to me at the time - although I became very keen on it later when I had developed a more positive attitude to Christianity.
4 comments:
Interesting! It was trendy amongst my younger sister’s college friends (at a famously very leftwing school) to promote a form of voluntary simplicity, which I and other older Millennials did not seem to share as much. But their VS ideal was different as you note. They admired a man who essentially decided to be “fancy homeless,” who reduced his possessions to about 100 things that fit in a backpacking backpack and who then traveled to exotic locations nearly full-time. They were always frustrated by the lack of part-time high paying work and had (to me) weird demands about how they wanted to work (one girl claimed she wouldn’t work anywhere where she couldn’t use her personal laptop to do the work). They weren’t necessarily very politically leftist and were not Greens or vegans, though they were big on sexual freedom.
My ideal was absolutely as you say to work as much as humanly possible, though both because I very much like working and for future material benefits. I had a boss who kept a picture of a private island on his desk for motivation, which at the time I found very shallow and weird (he’s retired now and does not own any islands). To this day I don’t really understand people who don’t like to work, even though I now work minimal hours to maximize time for the unpaid work of child-rearing, homeschooling, etc.
The travel thing stands out to me a lot. I traveled a lot as a child but upon leaving the nest couldn’t fathom why people do *so much* of it given the cost. Even entry-level, relatively low-paid professions were spending 10-20% of their gross income on trips that prior generations would have considered the “once in a lifetime” vacation and instead it was an annual thing. My husband always considered it a conspiracy the way that sort of spending is encouraged.
@Mia - You just have to visit a backpacking shop to see how consumerist, expensive, technological that kind of thing has become.
wrt work; for most of my adult life I wanted to spend a good chunk of the day doing *my* work, which included reading and *thinking* about it (and other things). Doing what my employer regarded as work was mostly bureaucracy and meetings, and Not a source of satisfaction.
The overlap was teaching - which for a couple of decades satisfied my employer and myself - but what my employer regarded as teaching was constantly diverging from my convictions, until by the end it was clear that the two concepts had become essentially unrelated. The same happened to "research".
A very interesting post! I always associate the 1970s "escape" mentality with Reggie Perrin, even more than the Good Life (probably because I never really watched the latter).
There's a bit of a complication towards this in my own mind in that I fear that a less complex society would actually afford less food for contemplation, reading, writing, etc. I wonder what the Patriarchs are supposed to have occupied their time with in Genesis. Indeed it sometimes seems to me that society can hardly get complex enough to satisfy my desire for "the drunkenness of things being various."
Even when it comes to Christianity I'm grateful to be the twenty-first century rather than the first-- to have all those layers of tradition to fasten onto.
It's more the vulgarity and crassness of consumerist society that bothers me, rather than the complexity. And the conspicuous consumption you mention.
I should probably read Walden. But I imagine that much of Thoreau's thought was spent on nature, and I'm not that interested in nature.
Your youthful yearning for a simple life was very beautiful, es muy hermosa, and I long for something like it.
If I had enough money I would drop out completely, make a break from the Black Iron Prison, but alas, despite my longing, I seem fated to participate in this sick society.
Later this year I'm going to live in the desert wilderness for a bit, get attuned to the rythyms of creation.
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