Thoreau had time for both, fishing and heaven: he earned enough for a year’s subsistence with six weeks’ labor, leaving the rest “free and clear for study.” Was that possible only in 1845? A hundred and sixty years later, Richard Czaplinski gets by on $5,000, living “low on the hog.” Still, you’d hardly call either of these guys loafers. And remember Peter Fraenkel, determined to Take Back Your Time and mine—but not his own?
Even the labor unions, to whom we owe such modern labor-saving conveniences as the weekend, have never accepted a week of Sundays as a seemly goal. Nineteenth-century socialists demanded “the right to work” (ironically, the term has been appropriated by pro-business legislation that guarantees the right to work “free” of unions). Today the Left continues to struggle for “full employment.” The Right is bigger on the obligation to work, even when there are no paying jobs, whether that means doing laundry in trade for the workhouse gruel in the nineteenth century or picking up trash in the park to earn a welfare check in the twenty-first. The Protestant ethic reigns: in America, you get to heaven by digging more worms.
If you make your way past the pro-work ideology, however, you can uncover another school of what might be called anti-labor labor theory. In 1883, for instance, Marx’s son-in-law, the French labor activist Paul Lafargue, published a pamphlet called “The Right to Be Lazy.” Lafargue quoted the Greeks and Jesus on the virtues of idleness and declared that Jehovah himself toiled six days, then lay on the couch watching football for the rest of time. He indicted the capitalist as a slave driver, but was equally distressed by what he saw as the worker’s masochistic lust for labor, even when technology might have eased his lot. “The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men,” he wrote. “Its productiveness enslaves them.” And this was before e-mail.
Lafargue called for a three-hour workday. In the 1970s an anarchist group called Zero Work did a little figuring, accounted for technology, and concluded that we’d each have to put in four hours weekly to keep the world spinning. Both subtracted profits from the equation—there would be no surplus labor value, just labor value—but along with profit everybody would have to eschew the surplus fruits of the marketplace, especially those that drink up fuel and other resources, such as centrally air-conditioned 10,000-square-foot McMansions and 150-horsepower snowmobiles.
None of us can eschew on our own. I know. I have tried. I drive a small car, heat with wood (in the country), fix the toaster rather than throw it out, eat vegetables instead of animals. All this is important to do, and if lots of people did it, Mother Earth would sigh with relief. But the main effects of personal reductions in consumption are personal. Not shopping may dump you into the happy stream of human intercourse or leave you lonely; deepen your education or make you stupid; deliver you to enlightened bliss or depress you so much you are compelled to start consuming…Zoloft. My own experience has been somewhere in between: I’ve contemplated Nirvana and longed for Zoloft.
One promised Simple Living reward I have gleaned, though, is a heightened consciousness, and not just of the pennies in and pennies out of my change purse. With each purchase elected or forgone, I am reminded of its potential effects on the world’s resources and people, however minuscule those effects might be. Consciousness tugs at the sleeve of personal responsibility. It shouts in my ear:Do something.
Do something, but what? I could withdraw farther from the marketplace, live like Richard Czaplinski. But even if I wholeheartedly wanted to, I could never withdraw altogether. No matter how far off the grid a person wanders, she still resides in a culture. Human cultures are held together with speech and touch, ritual, religion, and law. These immaterial relations are made of material things. Thing plus relationship equals exchange. Exchange comes in many forms—gift, barter, theft, and, mostly, in the form of flat plastic or colored paper in return for shaped plastic and paper- or plastic-wrapped beef, sugar, sweaters, or software. When I joined Voluntary Simplicity, I worried that I might encounter an authentic self who was a shopper. A committed shopper I may not be, but I am a consumer because I cannot not be one.
Does this mean I should give up and retreat to the malls—or at least to the wood-paneled shops to buy sandals made of recycled tires and organic blue corn chips?
The answer is yes only if I accept the exclusive role the corporation and, increasingly, the government have cast me in: consumer. If I am a consumer first and last, all I can do to better the world is consume more responsibly—“buy green,” invest in socially responsible businesses, and buy less.
The other choice I have is to reject consumer as my sole role and reclaim my other public identity: citizen. During our year without shopping, Paul and I had extra time, energy, and money to act as citizens. We also felt more personally the need to do so. Self-exiled from the shops and eateries, we had no place to hang out but the olde publick square. There we found much that was rich and surprising, but we also discovered that what our nation owns in common is in critically bad shape. Libraries, schools, and bridges are falling down; in 2004, the voting machines broke again, all over the place.
When the very gears of democratic participation grind to a halt and nobody seems willing or able to fix them, it’s a sign that tax-cut fever is more than a matter of fiscal conservatism. Our nation’s busted budget, and its broken infrastructure, are symptoms of a broken commitment to thepublic good— the things and processes whose universal benefit exceeds the private interests of individuals and whose value, even if they cost a lot of money, exceeds that of the commodities that can be sold at a profit.
With the public sector in the shop for repairs, anyone seeking pleasure, sustenance, community, and meaning (not to mention health care or education) has nowhere to turn but to private consumption. The public good becomes little more than a dream, and people like Paul and me, galloping over the landscape in search of the un-commercial fulfillments, are Quixotes tilting at Wal-Marts.
Citizenship means changing the whole picture. It means demanding policies (through proper or improper channels, your choice) and working for an economy and a culture that reject environmental destruction, the exploitation of working people, the privatization of the commons, and the commodification of every desire and satisfaction.
New systems don’t have to be invented. Environmentalists and allied economists have been thinking them up for decades, even centuries. One of the most prominent of these people is Herman E. Daly, a University of Maryland public affairs professor, former World Bank senior economist, and coiner of the term “steady-state economy.” Such an economy encourages, through tax and regulatory policies, a relatively slow flow of well-made, durable, energy-efficient goods, rather than the breathless production of low-quality, fast-obsolescing, and energy-hungry ones—for example, more bicycles, fewer Hummers. This doesn’t mean economic stasis. Daly distinguishes “development” (making things, and life, better) from “growth” (making more things). A development economy, he says, can thrive inside the finite space of the earth’s environment. A growth economy, by definition, will inevitably outgrow its home.
Economic policy advances certain priorities. Besides a clean, sustainable environment, the goal of economies in democracies is to give the greatest number of people the greatest degree of happiness. That was Jeremy Bentham’s idea when he thought up utilitarianism, a philosophy to which most economists still adhere. But because the fruits of America’s economic growth are so badly distributed, increasing wealth has not delivered happiness to an increasing number of people.
Socialists and labor unions address this maldistribution by demanding higher wages and lower taxes for lower-income workers. Juliet Schor agrees that the underpaid need and deserve to be paid and to keep more. But, she has recently argued, simply increasing wages won’t reduce the happiness deficit in the U.S. As long as the wealth gap endures, the relentless need to keep up with the Gateses will mean that wages never meet perceived
need. Given all our need/desires, more leisure is unlikely to turn the happiness tide either. As I noticed on the mountain trail in Bozeman, leisure is a form of work, requiring tools. Teach a man to fish and he will buy a pair of $400 Simms waders. Then, he’ll have to go back to work and stay overtime to pay the bill, and he won’t have time to wear them.
It’s not just envy or the desire for an unending supply of new things that is bringing us down. The marketplace itself, the things we make and the things we (and our government) choose to spend money on, have a big effect on whether life is good or not. To gauge how an economy is doing on the human-happiness scale, Redefining Progress (the same outfit that came up with Ecological Footprinting) has developed an alternative to the gross domestic product, called the Genuine Progress Indicator. Instead of adding up all the dollars spent in the economy, as the GDP does, the GPI looks at what the dollars are spent on, by whom, and how much they enhance or worsen people’s lives; it also assigns values to nonmonetary benefits and costs. So, for instance, the GPI enters in the asset column the value of unremunerated time spent on housework, child care, and volunteering. Deficits include “defensive expenditures” such as hospital bills for car accidents, prison costs, and the “depreciation” of old-growth forests. As you can imagine, America’s GPI does not look as rosy as its ever-expanding GDP.
Many European Union countries have achieved a healthier GPI, balancing social benefits with free markets, leisure with productivity. Those economies are growing a bit more slowly than ours—about 2 percent compared with our 3 percent. Europeans are on average 30 percent “poorer” than Americans—they don’t have as much disposable income, so they can’t shop as much or buy stuff that’s as expensive as what we buy. But their relatively lower wages also reflect the fact that fewer people work or they work fewer hours, often by choice. Europeans can choose not to work as much because they don’t have to pay for a great deal of what we pay for. The welfare state provides a web of health, housing, education, unemployment, and retirement benefits. In Denmark, the state pays for your funeral. Europeans are not eager to privatize these benefits, and most are willing to pay high taxes for them. Compared with their American counterparts, their material standard of living is lower, but their life satisfaction is higher.
The EU economies have their troubles: high unemployment especially for the unskilled, an aging population—same as us. Although productivity there has grown faster than in the U.S. (in spite of a decrease in average hours worked), that rate is now only holding steady. Recently, some analysts have been warning that pressure from global capitalism will force European workers to give up such long-cherished gains as the thirty-five-hour week and the five-week vacation. But that’s not inevitable. No economy is a force of nature; all are the products of human decision-making. “It’s a perfectly rational policy to accept lower output for higher welfare,” Nicholas Barr, a professor of public economics at the London School of Economics, told theNew York Times about such decisions in Europe.
In the end, it’s a matter of how you, or you collectively as a nation, define prosperity and poverty, abundance and scarcity—a question of what “you,” the nation, the culture, desire. This year, Paul’s and my household is a little like Denmark. Neither of us earned a lot, but we both feel prosperous.
I’ve tacked a headline from theOnion to my bulletin board to inspire reordering of my personal and—in my public good–promoting citizenly activities—our national priorities. It reads: “180 Trillion Leisure Hours Lost to Work in 2004.”
DECEMBER 28
Every time I go online, the AOL screen reports a higher death toll from the Asian tsunami—18,000…20,000…24,000…57,000…114,000…120,000. Millions have lost everything and have nothing with which to replace it. No insurance policies, no bank accounts, no houses or fishing nets, water, or families.
After three days, Bush emerges from his vacation in Crawford, Texas, and pledges $15 million in aid. The U.N.’s relief effort coordinator accuses the rich countries of being “stingy.” After a few more days the administration ups the U.S. contribution to $35 million, still five million short of what the Bush inauguration will cost. A few days later, the White House pledges $350 million, a smaller share of the GNP than any other developed country’s.
I write a check for $50 to Doctors Without Borders. At a bit over one-tenth of 1 percent of my income, I’m not doing much better than the Bush administration. I have given away almost $500 this year to political and charitable causes—a measly 1.2 percent, but still five times what I usually part with in donations. Hyperconscious that money can only be in one place at a time, this year I put my money where my mouth is. Not buying things has made this easy.
But I could increase my contribution tenfold and it would still feel puny. In fact, the waves that drowned South Asia are making this whole project seem puny. Like the waves, the forces that are devastating the victims’ lives—poverty, globalization—seem unstoppable, acts of a vengeful god disinheriting the meek, then kicking them in the teeth for good measure. With so much need in the world, how can I be thinking about desire?
Other people may be feeling the same. Clothing, food, and millions of dollars are pouring eastward from the wealthy countries. Like September 11, this disaster has temporarily dampened material desire. At the same time, along with compassion and grief, I wonder if it has opened a space for another desire—a desire for something bigger.
Since Saturday, I’ve been thinking about Sarah. A generous, empathetic girl born at the dawn of the Reagan era, she has never lived in any but the most cynical, self-protective, and politically pinched of times. Might she figure out how to put her generosity and empathy to effective use? She can’t quite imagine finding a halfway-interesting job with a decent wage. My thoughts also turn to Christmas Eve at Plymouth Church and the tears that I could explain only as an envy of faith. And I realize: I don’t want faith. As far as I’m concerned, there is far too much blind faith out there; the worst, from Islamic jihadists to Christian anti-abortion assassins, are full of passionate conviction.
But I do want something that religions offer in abundance: the permission to desire wildly, to want the biggest stuff—communion, transcendence, joy, and a freedom that has nothing to do with a choice of checking accounts or E-Z access to anything.
We don’t need religion for any of this. Even the modest secular social democracies of the EU have made room for caring about something besides money and things. That they have the room is the result of the hard-nosed, pragmatic efforts of the labor movement. But if pragmatists can create such realities as the weekend, only the loafing likes of Paul Lafargue can dream up, in the first place, the big idea that everyone deserves the time and space, the freedom, as Ellen Willis put it, to wander off the map.
No, we don’t need religious faith. But if we are going to desire the big stuff and get it, one kind of blind faith is necessary: the faith that it is possible.
PaceRobert Frank and Juliet Schor, America’s aspirations are not rising. They’re a lead bob plummeting to zero. We’ve endured three decades of a political culture of scarcity, which posits no public good beyond private interest. Free markets have displaced free speech; sexual freedom is the right to get breast implants or make a designer baby; security is not a home and health care but a bomb detector scanning your shoes at the airport. For us citizens-turned-consumers, satisfaction is a pair of lime-green shoes, fantasy is a Jaguar XJ8L, and a vision of the future is $1.25 million in the 401(k). We are Bonshe the Silent, the I. M. Peretz character who is so demeaned by his laborer’s life that when he gets to Heaven and is offered anything he desires, all he can think of is a hot roll and fresh butter every morning.
Today’s Bonshe wants a pecan-raisin multigrain roll from Tribeca Bread slathered with sweet organic butter from Vermont Butter & Cheese Company, and he wants it not just every morning but at midnight, in London, delivered. I’m not denigrating these things. The pleasures of the consumer culture are indeed many and
luscious.
And yet, compared with what we might imagine, the desires of the American consumer are paltry.
DECEMBER 31
I call Jonathan to make plans for tonight. He’s coming over for New Year’s Eve dinner, spaghetti and champagne, the second and last bottle left from last year.
“So tonight’s your last night,” he says. “What are you going to buy tomorrow?” That’s the other question—besides how much money we’ve saved—that interests our friends. I tell Jonathan I have a list of a half-dozen movies I’d like to rent. Paul misses Q-tips. We both sorely need socks.
“Are you excited?” he asks. He’s echoing other people’s comments: “I bet you can’t wait!” they say. What a relief!”
Paul and I always laugh in response. Excited, eager, and relieved do not describe how either of us feels. Today, I am calm. Paul is wistful. For him, it’s been one of the best of our thirteen years together. We have had a joint project. As Paul and I withdrew from private consumptions this year, we found ourselves more than ever out “in public.” But we also became more intimate with the back roads of the places we live and with each other, doing what Paul calls “embracing the ordinary.”
This evening, in the hours before Jonathan arrives, we embrace the extraordinary ordinary of New York and for about the twenty-fifth time this year, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and visit Bruce and Sara.
Bruce and Sara are not friends—not exactly. They are pieces in a public art exhibition in the environs of City Hall. Created by the British artist Julian Opie, the two are amber-colored light emissions, each from an eight-foot-high LED screen erected on one of the pedestals that flank the staircase of the Tweed Courthouse, behind City Hall. The exhibition is paid for with a combination of private and public money. So, in a manner of speaking, was the courthouse, an elegant, enduring public work financed in the late nineteenth century through one of New York’s most spectacular government embezzlements.
Not Buying It Page 24
