As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, Americans will be treated to the familiar juxtaposed messaging and presentation of familiar tropes that likely indicate a profoundly schizophrenic tendency in US culture. On the one hand, school children will learn of the simple fare shared by the Pilgrims and Native Americans and will be reminded to be grateful for the extraordinary natural abundance of the land, while at the same time admiring the sober, disciplined lives of both the natives and the European settlers. The familiar images of humble log cabins and artful tepees will cast the early 17th-century in the hazy glow of nostalgia for a simpler time.
At the same time, of course, the holiday will also mark the full gearing up of the Christmas shopping season, with its elaborate advertising campaigns, reduced price sales, and powerful pressure to buy, buy, buy — even as nightly news programs offer a tacit condemnation of consumer madness by featuring coverage of frenzied mobs heaving at the doors of electronics and department stores. All of this will serve to remind us that the typical American is, first and foremost, a consumer, a purchaser whose accumulation of ever more products is the foundation of the contemporary economy.
With that in mind, the timing is right for Emrys Westacott’s The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Is Less Is More – More or Less. Moreover, the tone is right, as well. As indicated by the wryly hedging subtitle, Westacott has no interest in generating yet another lacerative polemic against consumer culture. Rather, he traces the persistent praise of “frugality” — the eschewal of extravagance, luxury, unnecessary goods — throughout history right into the present by all manner of sages, philosophers, and writers. After all, medieval Christians, ancient pagan thinkers, and 19th-century Transcendentalists alike assumed frugality to be a virtue; indeed, one of the essential features of a well-lived and responsible life.
Westacott makes no such assumption. Throughout the study he deftly rehearses a given encomium to the inherent ethical value of frugality and then raises thoughtful counter-arguments intended to complicate the picture:
Most people have no desperate burning desire to be rich or powerful or famous and are quite capable of being content with what they consider enough. But to live with nothing but the bare essentials invites pity or contempt. Few enjoy being pitied or looked down upon, and few can be subjected to it continually without this adversely affecting their sense of self-worth.
Such a fundamentally kind and commiserate recognition of the human need for acknowledgment and a sense of social worth would be completely incomprehensible to such paragons of frugality as Diogenes or Thoreau, whose (professed) disregard for the esteem of others bordered, perhaps, on sociopathology.
At the same time, Westacott avoids the blindness to historical reality that so often tarnishes blanket condemnations of consumer culture. When this or that writer (say, Bill McKibben) denounces the wastefulness of contemporary American life, he or she does so from a context of such unprecedented material wealth and comfort that it would be literally unimaginable to the vast majority of people who have ever lived, including ancient Stoic and Epicurean philosophers: refrigeration, running water, indoor toilets, electricity at the flick of a switch, myriad devices that provide an extraordinary range of instant entertainment options, vehicles that transport people with amazing speed and comfort, and on and on. Granted, there may be some advocates of frugality who live without these prerogatives of the modern first world, but many seem perfectly content to avail themselves of all of them.
In other words, one might suggest that contemporary “frugalists” are only playing at a virtue that previous generations practiced, willingly or not, to an unenviable degree. How many of us would be content with bland gruel and hard bread that is the common fare of millions of people across the planet, past and present? Moreover, contentment with frugality, and its kissing cousin, simplicity, is hardly the best prescription for realizing the extraordinary range and superabundance of human genius, the continual drive to invent new forms of expression and understanding:
Much of what we think of as the notable achievements of civilization from the Taj Mahal to the Cadillac, from the Hubble Space Telescope to the Olympic Games, from the art and architecture of Renaissance to James Bond movies, is the result of individual and collective extravagance. Yet this is the stuff of culture, and we think the world is a lot more interesting and enjoyable because of it.
Again, in this passage one senses a keen sensitivity to life’s complexities that suggests that while frugality is a significant feature of the conversation about what it means to be fully human, it hardly has the final word. Still, for all of his careful and nuanced analysis, Westacott generally endorses at least a modern version of frugality as one means to achieve contentment in the face of the prevailing ethos of ongoing acquisition as the sure path to a good life. Which makes it a surprise — and, for some readers, at least, likely a disappointment — that in its final two chapters and conclusion, The Wisdom of Frugality swerves from balanced and nuanced philosophical inquiry to at times leaden ideological prescription for statist progressivism to help frugality secure a place in the culture specifically in the form of taxing the wealthy and using the funds for programs that would help to further a national agenda of frugalism. For example:
The extreme wealth, measured these days in hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, that is enjoyed by individuals in the upper social tiers indicates that there is plenty of money within the system [to replace a consumption based economy].
First, this claim is rendered nonsensical on its face, given the earlier point that, “at the end of 2014, the national debt of the United States — the total amount the government owes — was roughly $18 trillion and rising.” Increased taxes, no matter how severe, are unlikely to cover the wealth gap. More importantly, the enormous wealth enjoyed by a small percentage of people — while it certainly offends egalitarian sensibilities — is itself a symptom of a consumer society, since the value of many investments is directly related to ever-increasing demand for goods and services (stock in, say, Wal-Mart). Reapportioning the pie will not change how the pie is made, so to speak.
In the end, the modern consumer is faced with an essential conundrum for which a solution is not easily discovered: he or she is the beneficiary of an economic and social system that has raised the standard of living and material wealth for even the average person to unprecedented standards; and yet, along with its many benefits, this system has bequeathed to all but the most resilient a covetous madness. The path to sanity is most likely to lie not in redistributionist programs of dubious merit, but in the course that Westacott models for the better part of The Wisdom of Frugality: a thoughtful willingness to resist the siren calls of the shopping malls and online bazaars for the sake of our mental health, and that of the world in which live.