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Simplicity Is Complex
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10331 |
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Book World
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12 / 1986 |
4,541 Words |
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Donald W. Livingston
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THE SIMPLE LIFE
Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture
David E. Shi
Oxford University Press, 1985
332 pp., $8.95
"So great is the hurry in the spirit of this world that in aiming to do business quick and to gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan." These are not the utterances of a despairing commuter on a metropolitan expressway at 5:30 P.M. They are the words of the American Quaker John Woolman observing English life in 1772. From our own point of view, the manner of life and business in late eighteenth century England appear frustratingly slow. Yet Woolman's complaint was not unique. Similar remarks were made by Thomas Jefferson and most of the Founding Fathers about the dehumanizing effects of the expanse of commerce and manufacturing that they saw taking place at the dawn of the industrial age in England. Indeed they feared that the new British mania for producing wealth would spread to innocent agrarian America, bringing with it the cancerous growth of industrial cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, and London as well as the attendant greed, poverty, and pollution. It is an irony of history that the sort of fear expressed by many Third World countries today that they will be "Americanized" was first expressed by the Founders themselves in the fear of being, for want of a better word, Britainized.
Nor is the complaint that men are being corrupted by the pursuit of wealth and the toil and care of business peculiar to observers of the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. There are many biblical passages that blame many of the evils that would later be blamed on capitalism to the love of gold. And there are many passages that support the view that poverty is, in some way, intrinsically good, enabling liberal theologians such as Harvey Cox to speak of "the holiness of the poor." Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers are almost unanimous in praise of a life of contemplation removed as far as possible from the hurried life of business. Indeed, the ideal of the simple life as the good life is found, in some form or other, in every culture that has achieved a literary self-consciousness.
But just because it is a virtually universal ideal, simplicity has meant different things in different times and places. David Shi's book is about the ideal and practice of the simple life in American culture, ranging over a vast and fascinating landscape, beginning with the Puritans and ending with a discussion of Jimmy Carter's and Ronald Reagan's contrasting views of the good life. The book is more about actual attempts to practice the simple life and how these have changed over time than it is a philosophical analysis of the worth of the ideal itself. The subtitle is "Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture." But, as we shall see, some of the "high" thinking is merely "high flying" and tends more to alienate from the good life than to lead to it.
Puritan Simplicity
Shi's story begins with the Puritans who firmly planted in the American mind a moral tension between doing good and accumulating goods, a tension that itself goes back to a split in Christian ethics at the end of the medieval period. St. Thomas and other Scholastic theologians had subordinated commerce to ethical and religious
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