Reading the Hopeful, Part 2: Enough

A typical Boreen, or green lane, at Cleanderry, County Cork

One of the reasons that I haven't finished the re-write/re-edit of More News From Nowhere is that the utopian impulse seems to be a fairly common one. No sooner do I think I've read everything I need to read in order to wrap up the project, someone writes something so relevant and/or useful that I have to read that in order to continue. 

The most recent preoccupation comes from a review I read in The Idler back in late 2019, which was followed by my purchasing the book and getting about halfway through it before I underwent yet another cardiac surgery (this time a stent in one of my old bypasses) and, soon after that, the world closed down with Covid 19. I recently went back to the book, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, by Mark Boyle and found it well marked up with notes and comments and have been drinking it in ever since. Just the thing to help me answer the naysayers who have (and will in future, no doubt) insist that nobody could live like my utopians live in my book. [The link to Boyle himself goes to the Wikipedia article on him, which can give you a good idea of what he's about.]*

Boyle mostly does live without technology. He gained a bit of notoriety with his first account of un-modern life, The Moneyless Man: A year of freeconomic living (at the above link), but this one goes further and does a spiffing job of making readers question their dependence on mod-cons. His account of living on his little Irish freehold challenges the presuppositions of even old Luddites like me. I find much to admire in his steadfast carrying forth of his principles. Were I fifty years younger and not dependent on the latest medical technologies for my continued existence, I'd be more than willing to give it a try. 

What we can all learn from his account is that educating our own desires is foundational to saving the world. That education begins with wondering about how much of what we have or desire is actually necessary, and how much of it has been programmed into us by our having been brought up in a capitalist economy that sees money (and what it buys) as a measure not only of economic status, but also of moral worth.

Reno Gazette Journal, 4 December 1930
via Ancestry

Reading Boyle, I am constantly reminded that I am barely two generations away from my grandmother's early life near Nevada mining towns, in a hand-built cabin with no running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, or refrigeration. They farmed the desert, and my great grandfather carried mail and passengers from town to town in a stagecoach. The only reason they crossed the border into eastern California was because the children needed to be educated, and there were no local schools. So the family packed up and rode the Slim Princess, a narrow-gauge rail service, to the Owens Valley, where my father and his siblings (and, somewhat later, I) were born. Big Pine wasn't exactly a bustling burg in the 1920s, but it did have electricity, and, within a decade, automobiles. In 1930, my father's little sister Adele was killed by one of these soon-to-be ubiquitous machines on her way home from school, when she she was only seven.

When I was about five years old, my father was transferred to a US air base near Tokyo. Because of my mother's desire to get to know the Japanese people, we rented a tiny little three-room house in a tiny little town. It had a rudimentary kitchen with a hand pump, and an outdoor benjo (squat toilet; or, better translation:  shitter), and a Japanese dancing school next door. In exchange for English lessons from my mother, the instructor agreed to teach me a traditional form of dance (Fuji Musume), and that's where I acquired the "baby Japanese" language facility that was later to enable me to communicate with veterans of the Japanese occupation when we were stationed in Taiwan some years later. But the rusticity of our living conditions provided an early lesson in how to live with limited technology. Our cottage was heated with a pot-belly wood-burner in the living room (which was where my parents slept), and that may have been where we got our hot water for cooking as well. I don't remember, though, and everyone involved is now long gone, so that question will go unanswered. But I do recall going together as a family to the public baths every evening, except when the snow was so deep outside our front door that we couldn't get out. 

We had to leave for base housing a year later when I started school--and the parallel with my grandmother's experience does resonates here--but that brief experience imprinted itself on my child's brain as adventure rather than hardship. I thus have a much better idea of what living without modern comforts is like than most middle class children of my own generation. Even our time in Taiwan (1958-1962) found us living in old Japanese houses with, if we were lucky, ceiling fans to cool us through subtropical summers, and hibachi heaters in the winter. Oh, and no television! For five years at the beginning of TV's golden age!

So, for me, Boyle's book provides a thoughtful, generous, and compelling look at what rejecting the overwhelming effects of increasing technological "innovation" could look like. And when approached as a conscious choice, rather than a matter of privation and injustice, the beneficial effects of living on enough (rather than too little or way too much) can offer us alternatives to the economic excesses and environmental degradation modern human lifeways are inflicting upon the world.

The question that undergirds my writing life these days seems to be a popular one among sociologists, economists, and philosophers alike: Just how much is enough? What do we actually need in order to live a satisfying and fulfilling life? William Morris called answering these questions "the education of desire" and saw that education as instrumental to bringing about a just and fulfilling society.

In my efforts to offer a plausible path to the good life in More News From Nowhere, I began to realize that what my utopians were really after was twofold: an escape from the economic and environmental crises facing twenty-first century humanity, and an alternative way to exist in a reimagined world where human goals were not defined in terms of wealth and power. And two recent books, with very similar titles, approach these questions from different but compatible viewpoints.

In 2022, Avram Alpert published The Good-Enough Life, a counterpoint to the prevalence of quests for greatness that have dominated human ambitions throughout history. Although most of us have been brought up to seek excellence and greatness, Alpert notes that striving for lofty goals develops hierarchies that inevitably lead to unceasing competition to be best at something. His reasons are complex and his evidence interdisciplinary, and he draws from both eastern and western philosophical and economic traditions. Fairness, equal opportunity, and the survival of the natural world are vital to enabling us all to flourish. Making America "great" again is hardly a worthy goal if it means that the planet and its denizens are the "losers" at the hands of the "winners." As I read this book, daily news broadcasts provided ample examples of the inevitable consequences of continually ignoring what is decent and fair and sufficient for everyone so that those with much more than they need can compete to build extravagant, wasteful, grandiose evidence of human wonderfulness. Especially since the artifacts these endeavors produce are only wonderful for a tiny fraction of humanity.

In 2024, Daniel Miller published The Good Enough Life, which combines political economy with an ethnographic study of the inhabitants of a small Irish town. This project provides a real-life grounding for the exploration of what economic sufficiency and "good enough" might mean in an everyday setting. Ethnographies often employ an almost narrative structure, and this one offers a cohesive framework for illustrating what "good enough life" means to those living it. This book is also carefully grounded in the philosophical notions of the good life that have developed since the Greeks. My favorite part of the book, however, is Miller's focus on geezers like me, living in an environment remarkably similar to that of my grandmother's life in my home town in California. Miller lived in "Cuan" (not its real name) for sixteen months, and interviewed 170 people to determine their views on life and technology and necessity in the modern world. 

My main reason for seeking out books like these was to be able to counter accusations about my naivety and what might seem simplistic solutions for complex problems. But criticism of a low-tech, philosophically informed way of living because it seems (to modern folk) impossible seems rather shallow from an historical perspective. My generation's very proximity to the much simpler lives of our grandparents and their parents, to people around the world who manage with many fewer modern conveniences, and to those who have no choice in any of this should make it fairly simple for us to at least imagine much less complicated and less technologically compromised ways to survive on this planet. Perhaps simply considering alternatives, and being able to better manage our choices might eventually lead to significant change.

William Morris ended News From Nowhere, having lived for only a short while in the world he had imagined, with this wish: " . . . if others can see it as I have seen it then it may be called a vision rather than a dream." Considering a good-enough life, rather than some gazillionaire's notion of worth and greatness, seems much more likely to produce ideas and models that could ameliorate the damage already done to this fragile planet and its inhabitants. 

I have one more post planned to conclude my offering of usable resources for changing minds (if not the world). Some quite hopeful and capable people have been writing and talking about how to heal the planet, and have come up with some actual strategies for accomplishing change. Life is getting in the way again around here, but I hope to be able to get it together within the next month or so.

Meanwhile, stay cool if you can, and do a rain dance or two if you think that might help.

Source and image notes

*I do not have a partnership agreement with my online shop of choice (Bookshop.org), but urge you to order from them if you don't shop on-ground. The "convenience" of Amazon costs more to my conscience than any benefits, and using Bookshop diverts a bit of my cash to an independent bookshop of my choice--and you can do the same if you're not currently all that fond of multi-billionaires. My links to books, however lead either to the original publisher, or to useful critical responses.

The brief note about my Aunt Adele's death came from Newspapers.com, bits of which I have access to through Ancestry.com.

While reading Mark Boyle, I learned a bit of Irish, thanks to his use of traditional words for some of the objects in his little community. One such term is boithrín pronounced (roughly) "bor-EEN." It describes a narrow path with grass growing in the middle, between wheel tracks--often from carts. Such routes were also common in both Taiwan and in the Owens Valley when I was growing up. The photo I've included, "Unpaved boreen on the Beara Peninsula, County Cork," is a good example. It was taken by Nigel Cox as part of the Geograph Project in Great Britain and Ireland, via Wikimedia Commons.