Living MORE with LESS!

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That was the title of a book I bought (probably second-hand) a couple of decades ago, when I was more excited about the whole business of reducing my footprint, and setting an example for my children and my students.

Let me interrupt what I’m saying to briefly place on record just how much I hate both MS Office 2013, and Windows 8.  Thanks for indulging me!  Ok, back to our program.

D. J. Longacre, in her youth.  She died at age 39.

The book, by one Doris Janzen Longacre, was by a Mennonite, for fellow-Mennonites, where the author justified the entire concept of frugality from her Bible.  Now, I was never a Mennonite; I was brought up in a Methodist household, and in our church frugality was not a guiding principle, but simple living (which is not exactly the same) certainly was.  Our lifestyles were tied to that of the early Methodist Church in England, which was born out of rebellion against the excesses of Anglicanism, as it was practiced then which, I suppose, reflected the Baroque sensibilities of the British upper classes of the eighteenth century.  Dancing, alcohol, gambling, smoking, were all either forbidden or strongly discouraged; simplicity was all.
Mennonites, it seems to me —without getting too deeply into the denomination and its philosophy— takes simplicity a lot further.  A quick read of a couple of pages of the book (which, if I were a Christian of any flavor, would be a wonderful read), revealed that it was rather steeped in not only theology, but the sociology of the Mennonite community, which seems to be, at first glance, concerned to the point of being preoccupied, with its distinctness from its surrounding society.  When I was growing up, the Methodist community was a little similar, and there was a lot of emphasizing that we were not to get drawn into the lifestyles we saw around us.  After all, everything around us was sinful, and all our neighbors desperately needed to be guided away from Sin into the Way of the Lord.

Doris J. manages to communicate pretty much the same thing, albeit in far more diplomatic language.  The Mennonite philosophy is steeped even more than Methodism was, in simplicity in every aspect of life.  If I were still interested in matters of religion —and, quite honestly, I was more interested in social matters from a religious perspective— I would have been fascinated by what the Mennonites had to offer.  Heaven knows that Methodism today has no simplicity to offer; it seems to me that to be a Methodist in America today is to be practically nothing.  The only thing that can be said to their credit about the United Methodist Church in the USA is that it has championed the cause of education, and done it wholeheartedly.  Unfortunately, Methodist educational establishments tend to be primarily for the education of future Methodist ministers, and though they may not actually come right out and say this, the rest of the establishment seems only to serve to give the future Methodist pastors experience in living among, well, non-pastors.

My point is that, if people can’t adopt a simple lifestyle for its own sake, maybe they will do it for religious reasons.  Unfortunately, the minute a Mennonite loses his or her religion, there is a small possibility that they might turn into Donald Trump.  This is a risk one takes in using Religion as a basis for any sort of right thinking and right living.  Fortunately for me (and for Society), when I lost my religion (some time before Michael Stipe), I kept my social and moral attitudes, probably because it seemed to me that religious people only paid lip-service to the spirit of the teaching, and honestly, barely observed the letter of the law, either.

There are a number of different things we could choose to adopt as principles for living.  As an educated man, I think I am obliged to use language carefully, so let’s see what these words are, and what I think they mean.  I’m going to list them here first, right out of my skull, and then check out their meanings just to see if I’m right.  Those of you who like to get just the facts, (like the fellow on Dragnet,) might be frustrated at this fanciful approach to precision of expression, but since I write this blog from a combination of motives, which include your edification and my entertainment, you might bear with me.

No it isn't.  Dolts.

Frugality.  Hmmm.  I think this word means to extract the greatest possible use of the resources available, which by implication means that you might need fewer total resources, but of course that doesn’t really follow.  Think of the story of Esther, which my grandmother was fond of telling.  (If you don’t know the story, it is well worth finding out about.  Esther was one cool babe.)

Simplicity.  Again, I think this means to shun complication.  It is taken to mean also to avoid elaboration, ornamentation, ostentation, embellishment and similar things, by extension.  But the original meaning is worth hanging onto, since there are other words one can use to mean those other things.

Austerity.  This one is tough.  I think the word austerity means to be both simple and to shun showy ornamentation or ostentatious conduct in a social context, as an example, or as a social means to a social end, such as forgoing transportation and walking during an energy crisis, or fasting during a drought, not because one cannot afford transportation, but to show solidarity for those who cannot afford transportation.

Self-denial.  This one is like austerity, but is intended to be a private thing: forgoing various things, or certain specific things for personal reasons.  The objective is not usually to achieve some objective to do with the world outside the individual, but rather to achieve something in the individual himself, or herself.  Of course, a poor mother might starve herself to feed her starving child, but that would not be called mere self-denial.

Ok, let’s see.

What do we have for Frugality?

1. Practicing or marked by economy, as in the expenditure of money or the use of material resources. See Synonyms at sparing.
2. Costing little; inexpensive: a frugal lunch.

Well.  I am disappointed.  The word economy gets close, but the idea of making resources stretch is missing.

What do we have for Simplicity?

1. The property, condition, or quality of being simple or uncombined.
2. Absence of luxury or showiness; plainness.
3. Absence of affectation or pretense.
4. (Not relevant: simple-minded)
5.

a. Clarity of expression.
b. Austerity in embellishment.

 I suppose this captures (and goes beyond) what I was trying to say.  Good.

What do we have for austerity?  Oh, this will be good.

1. Severity or sternness in disposition or appearance; somberness and gravity: the austere figure of a Puritan minister.
2. Strictness or severity in discipline; ascetic: a desert nomad's austere life. See Synonyms at severe.
3. Having no adornment or ornamentation; bare: an austere style.
4. (Economics) reduced availability of luxuries and consumer goods, esp when brought about by government policy.

It is the last meaning that is closest to what I was thinking.  The other meanings of the word have nothing to do with the family of meanings I was trying to present here.

Finally: Self-denial.  The online dictionary gives

Sacrifice of one's own desires or interests. See Synonyms at abstinence.

Enough of that.  This post is running away from me.

I want to come up with a plan for non-religious folks like myself to live more with less: Live More With Less for Non Believers, or LMWLNB.  Holy mackerel, that certainly is a mouthful of alphabet soup.

Let’s pretend that we’re going to write a book with this title.  What would we put in it?

A.  Why ordinary people should do with less.  If you were not driven by the ideology of your particular religion or denomination to be austere, simple or frugal, why would you do it?

It seems to me that there are several reasons.
(1) There is not enough stuff in the world for everyone, unless some of us do with less.
(2) It is always a good time to set a good example to the kids, and few examples are more telling than the example of someone who is willing to consume less.
(3) These days, everything you procure for consumption comes with a whole lot of packaging, and even if you’re going to consume every little bit of whatever the actual product is, the packaging will go to the landfill.  Our objective must ultimately be: nothing in the landfill.
(4) Consuming certain kinds of things —particularly foods— have their own liabilities.

B.  Exactly what are we going to do with less of?

(1) Food.
(2) Energy.
(3) Things that go in the landfill, like paper, and packaging.
(4) Real Estate.  This is a biggie.  People are in the habit of eating up land, mostly for unnecessary things: large yards, businesses, roads, parking lots.  And now: well-pads for fracking.  Ostentatious buildings.  Soccer fields.  Enormous fancy supermarkets.  Houses.  When I was young, I thought it would be nice to get an enormous piece of land, and build an enormous house, in which all my family and friends could come and stay for holidays.  Well, I do have a big house, but nobody comes.  It seems that we must make a bigger effort to get people to visit; but if people want to visit, they would come whether we had a big house or not.
(5) Cars.  When you have a big car, you not only need a lot of gasoline, but you end up also needing a lot of clothes to wear while your driving around in it.  Isn’t that curious?  It’s the same with a house.  You’d think that you can get in your house and hang out without any clothes at all.  But apparently the privacy laws in certain parts of the country require you to be modestly clothed even in your own freaking house, which is disappointing.
(6) Packaging.  Thank goodness some things come with little or no packaging, like a truck, for instance.  (Can you imagine how large a carton would have to be to put a truck in?  On the plus side, the kids could probably build a playhouse with it pretty easily, but forget about flattening it for recycling!  Whoa.

C.  Does this mean, we take all the fun out of life?  This was the thrust of the original book that started me off.  No.  You may have to take my word for this, but trying to do something with limited means is a lot of fun.  This is true in so many situations that one is tempted to make a general principle out of it, but we have to be careful.  But in mathematics, or computer programming, or culinary arts, or graphic art (plain ol’ old-time art), or music, creating something with limited means is actually more fun than using an infinite set of resources.  Architecture is another example.  Theater.  It is an interesting challenge to write a play to be performed by, say, five people.  Some of them may have to play multiple roles, but that simply adds to the fun!

D.  Unusual examples of doing more with less.  The original book was centered around cooking; it was initially a cookbook.  But I envisage a book that one could give a young couple, who were getting married in austere times, such as the present.  The idea of frugality is principally to choose resources that serve multiple purposes.  Be it clothing, or planning your home, or planning your time, making one resource do twice the work is healthy.

We have a dog, so we have to walk her.  There is absolutely nothing she likes more than a walk.  (Unfortunately she was never trained as a pup, and she tends to drag us along, rather than walking to heel like a good little doggie.)  But we combine the walk with any number of other activities: exercise, mailing our bill payments, going to breakfast on Saturday, running to the corner store for a carton of milk.

Those who home-school their kids know that their youngsters need to get together with other children on a regular basis, as part of their social development training.  But combining that with exercise, or play, or artistic activity, or music, is a natural thing to do.  And, as a bonus, it is invariably entertaining.

If you were born into a family of limited means, such as I was, you would realize what a blessing it is; it seems to me that to be born to wealth is misery.

A poor child learns to shop for clothes with great imagination.  A poor adult can draw upon those experiences to make the more complicated decisions about what clothes to invest in for all the activities you may need to take part in.

I was recently informed that most women never wear a party dress more than once!  I had heard this often, but I put it down to an urban legend.  But now that I am more aware of what is going on, it seems true: women may as well buy disposable party dresses.  It makes more sense if the dress were to be edible, especially since the morning after the party, you’re normally not in a mood to fix breakfast.  We really need a dress than can be shredded, microwaved, and eaten for breakfast!  Inventors, where are you?  Note: do not jump to the conclusion that my own family follows this pattern.  My wife has been known to wear the same dress for several parties.  But it usually undergoes subtle transformations that extend its useful life.

At a higher level, city planners have to learn to create multi-use spaces.  They have to encourage more creative uses for the facilities they do have.  For instance, our town has a band-shell that seems to get used maybe five times a year.  Why not more often?  Why not a rock concert put up by local kids?  Why not theater?  A magic show?

E.  Creative recycling of materials makes enormous sense for children.  We should encourage kids to make greeting cards out of old calendars, Halloween costumes out of things lying about the house, recycling old clothes to make new ones---that was a good one when I was growing up.  I learned to sew on my grandmother’s ancient Singer machine.  Many of my friends are surprised to learn that I can sew.  (I helped my daughter make her Senior Prom dress.)  But leave alone guys, girls are growing up unable and unwilling to sew.  This is sad, not only because buying all your clothing at the store is a huge expenditure that takes money away from all that extra cholesterol you could be buying instead, but because sewing is actually a lot of fun!  As is cooking.  As is gardening, I’m told, but I just have a brown thumb, and I tend to forget that plants need water.

There are tons of toys that are entertaining, inexpensive, and which can be used for other purposes once they have been used.  Making Christmas tree ornaments, for instance, is quite entertaining.  At the moment, our collection of ornaments is small, but we’re determined to add one ornament a year, and no more.  We must think seriously about actually making the ornament ourselves.  (I’m talking about our own little family.)

[I just Googled "frugality", and got an eyeful.  There are dozens of websites that encourage and coach people who want to get into frugality and minimalism in a maximal way.  Those of my readers who have a stronger constitution and want to jump into the deep end of the frugality and minimalism pool might think of doing that, but it can be very off-putting to be told that a little frugality doesn’t really cut the mustard.  But, fairly soon, we’re going to have to do that.]

Something to think about, eh?  Wishing you all a happy end of the Summer, and a good Fall season!

Arch

[Added later, 2013/8/27:]

I started this blog post with the intention of elaborating far more on these points, but I somehow got sidetracked.

Personally, I believe that frugality is going to be a much greater part of the lives of concerned citizens in the future than it is now.  As I have been at pains to explain above, this most definitely does not mean a lower standard of living, in the most enlightened sense of that phrase.  (I also do not mean citizens who are concerned about their bank accounts exclusively, but rather citizens who are concerned about the future of their world.  This would leave out a large number of those who we normally label conservatives, though ironically, while the rest of us are more preoccupied with the conservation of the parts of our environment that cannot be artificially restored, conservatives are blissfully unconcerned with anything that would get in the way of business.  This naive trust in the efficacy of business, and Capitalism generally, marks most so-called conservatives.)

Perhaps those last few remarks should not have been parenthetical.  The greatest threats to the well-being of the vast majority of citizens of the planet come from business, and I’m going to expand on this idea.

Business, as it is understood now by most conservatives, has been used as a means of dividing the real problems of society.  The so-called business model (about which I know nothing good, really), is to cut up everything into separate packets, each of which tries to make as much profit as possible.  But the cost is measured in terms of cost to the business concerned, which means that it will be revenue to some other business.  So, in its very nature, the business model is one where everything is relative, and the cost is most certainly relative.

So how do they make their profits?  How can the sum of all businesses make a profit?  Someone has to be the loser.  Either businesses make money out of nothing, or there is a hidden source of revenue somewhere.  Marxists have contended that the wealth is created by the labor of workers, whereas Capitalists (i.e., the Business World) maintains that wealth is actually created by the ingenuity of businesses, who create value out of practically worthless raw materials.  But very early in the twentieth century, it became clear that whoever controlled the raw materials would control the wealth, and the political power.  Later in the same century, it began to emerge that it was rather whoever controlled the labor would control the wealth.  By the end of the century, a new factor emerged: who was controlling the information and the technology?  Finally, who was controlling the energy? sd

It is certainly confusing, but confusion is the delight of economists and business.  The less people know about where wealth is coming from (and where it is, at any given moment), the happier business is, except for very young businessmen who are desperate to make a show of affluence.  We can conclude, somewhat hesitantly, that Business uses energy or labor, and natural resources, to influence the flow of purchasing power in various ways.  There is no such thing as wealth, really; it has been replaced by purchasing power.  The Arab States and the US use oil to gain purchasing power (yes, the US has a lot of oil), and the US purchases wars to gain more oil, with which to get more purchasing power.

Conservatives and the Business World view frugality with great alarm.  Why?  Because it is bad for business.  If people stop buying, business will slow down, which slows the flow of purchasing power to business.  Modern Western society has come to depend on escalating consumer demand to be its engine.  In other words, just to maintain the running of Western society, (and now Chinese and Indian society as well), the using up of the environment, the destruction of the wildernesses of all five continents must actually accelerate.

Since I, for one, am vehemently opposed to this, it follows that I am opposed to business, and so I heartily embrace anyone who embraces frugality.

Stop building new homes.  Repair old homes, and make them work for you.  Anyone who clears new ground for a new home deserves our strong condemnation.

Buy only new vehicles when your old ones cannot be repaired.  (Luckily, we are told, automobiles are supposedly the commodities that are recycled most efficiently.  I’m not sure whether to believe this, since I have seen junkyards containing literally a hundred acres of junked cars.)

Wear old clothes.  Shop for clothes at stores such as Goodwill, and American Rescue Workers, and Salvation Army.  Clothes that survive one wearer are practically guaranteed to be of superior construction.  Many women’s clothes bought off the rack today are fit for wearing only once, my wife assures me.  She recently attended a wedding wearing a dress she brought at Goodwill, and I was exceedingly proud of her.

Pick up litter, and dispose of anything in a responsible way.  Picking up after wild teenagers is frustrating, but litter attracts more litter, and litter can ultimately destroy a neighborhood.

Recycle your books promptly.  I myself own several hundred volumes that I will never read, and I am intermittently depressed that the longer I keep them, the less use they’re going to be to anybody.  I’m too lazy, and my wife is too busy to think of an imaginative way to get them out where someone can read them.  (I had better do it before we are faced with a generation that doesn’t have the vocabulary to read the books.)

If you have records, listen to them now before you lose your hearing!!!  What a tragedy that would be.

Support local businesses.  Many local businesses are an entirely different sort of animal than national chains.  If you think about it, a local bookstore is simply a warehouse that has decided to select books that its patrons might find interesting.  They buy the books cheap, and sell them at a profit, but if you did not see the book on a shelf at the store, you would probably not buy it.  If we all did all our shopping online, though, the bookstore would cease to exist, and would be the end of the employment of several people.  Similarly, a grocery store, or even a supermarket, does provide a service.  Many of them recycle food that isn’t selling quickly enough, by preparing it partly, so that you can take it home and complete its preparation into a meal.  These half-prepared (or even completely cooked) meals are usually found at the extensive Deli sections of the supermarket, which are effectively now cafeterias.  When I say businesses, I mean industries, brokerages, energy companies, chain stores, all sorts of businesses that are never satisfied to maintain a steady level of business, but insist of expanding.  We will always need stores.  But we probably do not need WalMart, which seems bent on putting up a new outlet every five minutes.  Business expansion is destroying our world.  Remember, you read it here.  Business expansion, and the politicians who facilitate it, are the enemy. It is just like a cell in your body.  For normal body function, cells multiply, and in that way, replace cells that die.  But some cells stop everything except multiply like crazy.  Similarly, initially businesses concentrated on manufacturing products that people needed, and getting it out to the customer.  Today, businesses go far beyond.  They manufacture products that are already being manufactured by others, which results in more of a product than can be used by anyone.  They put other businesses out of business.  They try to convince people who may not need the product to become customers.  They trick customers into buying their products by changing their descriptions.  They promise one thing, and deliver another.  They pay low wages.  They influence government and subvert the legislation process to frustrate the will of the people.  They transport revenues offshore to avoid having to pay taxes.  But most of all, they use up energy irresponsibly, and pollute the environment.  They consume the planet to make a profit.

Arch.