Voluntary Simplicity

Towards Voluntary Simplicity Ideal Resistance to the Mechanisms of Modern Materialism Jørgen Toralv Homme Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy in Culture, Environment and Sustainability Centre for Development and the Environment University of Oslo Blindern, Norway June 2014 ii Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................. 4 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 1 1. FORERUNNERS: ROMANTICS AND TRANSCENDENTALISTS ................................. 15 1.1 WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE ............................................................................................ 17 1.2 EMERSON AND THOREAU ....................................................................................................... 26 1.3 VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY AND ROMANTIC TRANSCENDENCE ................................................ 37 2. VICTORIAN PESSIMISM, AESTHETIC SOCIALISM AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF BEAUTY ................................................................................ 41 2.1 JOHN RUSKIN’S “VIOLENT, ILLIBERAL” AESTHETICISM ........................................................ 44 2.2 WILLIAM MORRIS – “A LONGING FOR BEAUTY” ................................................................... 50 2.3 EDWARD CARPENTER, PROPHET OF THE NEW LIFE ............................................................... 57 3. GANDHI’S WAY – SELF-SUFFICIENCY AND RURAL RESISTANCE IN THE FACE OF A “DYING SOCIAL ORDER” ....................................................................................... 67 3.1 GANDHI’S INDIAN UTOPIA ..................................................................................................... 70 3.2 TWO AMERICAN CONTEMPORARIES: ..................................................................................... 76 I. Richard B. Gregg ............................................................................................................. 76 II. Ralph Borsodi .................................................................................................................. 81 3.3 AN AGE OF ECOLOGICAL INNOCENCE? .................................................................................. 86 4. THE SELF-DIRECTED EVOLUTION OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BIRTH OF A MODERN MOVEMENT .......................................................................................... 89 4.1 THE SIXTIES ........................................................................................................................... 89 4.2 THE GREENING OF AMERICA – A WAKING UP TO EVERYTHING ............................................ 92 4.3 RADICAL SELF-RELIANCE IN THE NEW AGE – “MAKING IT YOUR OWN WAY” ....................... 95 4.4 THE SIMPLICITY OF DUANE ELGIN - PERSONAL CHOICE AND THE TOTALITY OF EXISTENCE ..................................................................................................................................... 100 5. VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM .......................................... 108 5.1 RESPONDING TO CONSUMER CULTURE ................................................................................ 111 5.2 “PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS, SOCIETAL CONSEQUENCES” ........................................... 114 5.3 ELGIN REVISED FOR PRESENT REALISATIONS ..................................................................... 118 6. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 121 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 127 iii Acknowledgements I extend my heart-felt thanks to my supervisor, Kristian Bjørkdahl, who made the completion of this thesis possible. iv Introduction The narrow focus of the industrial view of reality has acted as a reducing valve that diminishes our capacity to experience directly and consciously the essence of life. – Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (1981). In 1829, the Scottish historian and literary critic Thomas Carlyle published a frustrated and pessimistic analysis of what he saw as a defining feature of the present-day situation: It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one (…) For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep (…) We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils (1889:233). For Carlyle, who is described by one historian as “an explosive paradox” of radical and conservative sensibilities (Kaplan 2014), this tendency towards “abbreviating processes” was deeply troubling, having ramifications far beyond material culture. The “wonderful accessions” that had been made “to the physical power of mankind” had likewise led to wealth being gathered “more and more into masses (...) strangely altering the old relations” (1889:233-34). The institution of education had lost all its subtlety and human flexibility, and had become “a secure, universal, straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism” (ibid:234). Even the religious establishments had been transformed into something which was now merely an “earthly contrivance,” where every endeavour to do the Lord’s work was hindered 1 by the “constructed machinery” of things such as “public meetings (...) committees, prospectuses” (ibid:234) Although little suggests he had much aptitude for it himself, Carlyle saw the performance of everyday, manual labour and craftsmanship as inherently ennobling. The plainness, human scale and connection to nature and to God he found in the notion of these “old modes of exertion” were vital to the independence of thought, moral fortitude, sanity and health of the human species. To Carlyle, the outrageous ascendency of “mechanical” thinking signified a complete collapse of individual human agency and the corresponding birth of a new kind of institutional existence, which could only be immoral: No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise single-handed and without mechanical aids (...) Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, – for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle (ibid:234-6). Sentiments resembling these have been mirrored, modified and reinvented more times and in more ways than can be easily accounted for. What we might call material progress has always had its detractors, ranging from religious leaders and mystics fearing the erosion of spiritual life, pacifists positing the heightened risk of violence, pessimists predicting impending cataclysms, conservatives lamenting a more cohesive past, environmentalists decrying ecological devastation, socialists insisting on communal control and utopians with a knack for subtracting perceived detriments to society with the stroke of a pen. My thesis will be an attempt to locate and explicate, within this cacophony of voices, some of the defining features and evolving characteristics of a specific but elusive strand of ideas and practices in this self-perpetuating tradition of resistance, which in recent times has been conceptualised by the adoption of the term “voluntary simplicity.” 2 This concept, commended by futurist Duane Elgin in the 1970s for its promise of individual and planetary “revitalization” (1981), and more recently by Samuel Alexander as “the poetic alternative to consumer culture” (2009), is tangled up in the complicated web of countercultural beliefs and sentiments hinted at above. The plurality of possible approaches to – and wide and often cross-factional appeal of – the ideal and practice of voluntary simplicity makes it both an interesting subject and a quite unwieldy one. The following pages are the result of a foraging exercise through texts and thoughts produced by advocates of this ethos, none of whom are convinced that our material progress amounts to much more than “exploitation,” “ugliness,” “clutter,” “stress,” “coercion,” “distraction,” and “vanity,” and all of whom are concerned with bringing about a better world for people to live in. Jeffrey Spear notes that “like historical writing, programs for the transformation of society are implicitly stories – plots in the literary, if not the political sense” (1984:5). This has proved to be true of the subject of this thesis, and a large part of my aspiration has been to locate and problematize some of the important “underlying narratives” or myths that are present in discourses advocating self-directed, “enlightened material restraint” (Shi 1985) as a transformative

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