The wisdom of less is more
- By Wan Lixin
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, October 21, 2016
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The coverpage of the book The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More — More Or Less. |
Since time immemorial, frugality has been a governing tenet in Chinese ideology. Recently, however, the enshrinement of growth as the holy grail in many places — and the mandate to consume as a panacea for sustained growth — has led to a paradigm shift.
Well-off Chinese travelers are trotting the globe snapping up almost anything they can lay their hands on: branded bags, cosmetics, toilet seats, rice cookers, even medicine. Frugality as a living principle can no longer be mentioned with confidence in polite society, while extravagance and luxury are openly extolled and admired. The obscenely wealthy are gossiped about and venerated as the new gods or mentors. Occasional exposés of how corrupt officials are wallowing in luxury constantly stretch our imaginations, with the most recent being Zhou Benshun, former Party secretary of Hebei Province, who reportedly lived in an 800 square meter, 16-room mansion.
In a social milieu like this, how can we expect our children to think positively of Yan Hui, a Confucian disciple who was eminently cheerful with just a bowlful of rice and ladleful of water, living in a mean alleyway? Or the Western sage Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 BC), who destroyed the single wooden bowl he owned on seeing a peasant boy drink from the hollow of his hands, exclaiming: "Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!"
In his latest book, "The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More — More Or Less," author Emrys Westacott discusses how Western moralists and religious leaders, from Diogenes and Socrates to Thoreau, have viewed frugality as a virtue and regarded it as necessary condition for living a life of wisdom, integrity, and moral purity. Even the US, a nation that prides itself on its material abundance, is home to well-known figures who, not so long ago, advocated thriftiness and simple life as the key to the good life.
The idea of fiscal prudence contained in such worn adages as "Waste not, want not" and "A penny saved is a penny earned" were associated with Benjamin Franklin. The archetypical self-made man, Franklin arrived in Philadelphia a penniless fugitive at 17, but by the time he died at 84, was celebrated as one of the greatest men of his time for his achievements as an entrepreneur, writer, politician, diplomat, scientist, inventor, and philanthropist.
Franklin and his wife exemplified the virtue of frugality, warning against the dangers of debt, since "he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing." Debt, he says, "exposes a man to confinement, and a species of slavery to his creditors."
One point on which most frugal sages agree is that it is not difficult to achieve simplicity in our lives. After all, the necessities of life are few and easily obtainable, including the food and drink necessary for survival, and protection from the elements in the form of basic clothing and shelter.
Many of our modern woes lie in our steadily lengthening list of 'necessities': electricity, running water, flush toilets, air-conditioning, cars, smartphones, Wi-Fi, and so on and so forth.
There was a time when it always made economic sense to repair an item rather than replace it, so people would darn socks, patch sheets, and take their defective radio or watch for repair. Repairmen can be still occasionally espied in some old neighborhoods in Shanghai, but having something repaired is no longer consistent with notions of decency.
Consuming faster
It is easy to conclude that modern development is essentially predicated on our capacity to produce, and then consume, faster and faster. When half a dozen socks cost what a minimum-wage worker can earn in less than an hour, and when the cost of repairing a machine may easily be more than the price of a new one, there is no longer an economic basis for having things repaired. Consumerist society ushers in disposables, as disposable items are often more economical in terms of both money and time.
The concept of acquiring and spending as needed to achieve the good life is grounded in modern beliefs around freedom: the belief, in particular, that material abundance promises freedom and independence. Yet those who subscribe to this tenet are all too often unaware of how abundance only deepens the bondage, and how we become critically dependent on the good opinion of our friends, relatives, and colleagues.
Go to sages such as Thoreau, who in his experiment in Walden, tried to recreate conditions of a castaway (like Robinson Crusoe) just a few miles from his home. As Thoreau had been dependent on his relatives and friends, his seclusion could not but be a temporary experiment.
Technology used to be extolled as the greatest emancipator. As a matter of fact, whether as a new means of production or communication, it has been a powerful tool for deepening our affinity to material things, not so much by proactively inventing new necessities as by conjuring up an oversized Vanity Fair. Just think how many travels have been motivated by the desire to brighten one's WeChat moments.
That's why a general shift towards simple life would presuppose a reduction of our dependence on technology.
As the author observes, "Those who advocate self-sufficiency in this sense seek to counter the alienating effects of modernity, which, by increasing the division of labor and mechanizing so many tasks, has distanced us from nature and from the elementary activities that underpin our lives."
The technology and division of labor, by taking over work formerly done on the strength of communal cooperation, frays communal ties. As Klaus Schwab observed on this page on Tuesday, "New technologies are emerging so rapidly that we are now having trouble coping with their impact on society. By affecting everything from the nature of work to what it means to be human, technological changes could overwhelm us if we do not collaborate to understand and manage them."
We have grown so accustomed to seeing technological advances as progressive in its own right that it is unnatural for us to conceptualize it in the context of pervading social decay and environmental degradation. As Schwab warned in the afore-mentioned article, "Investments in new technologies are justifiable only if they contribute to a safer, more integrated world."
As Mahatma Gandhi observed, the Earth provides enough to meet everyone's needs, not everyone's greed.
If our societies are run according to the greed principle, it is easy to see why simplicity has always been a hard sell. As the author observes, "We rely on a complex infrastructure for energy, transport, communication, and education. And we are hopelessly lost without our cars, phones, computers, stoves, and refrigerators."
There is the need to renew our faith in nature, the source of true wisdom. In Chinese philosophy, social and human events are just manifestations of cosmic order.
The rationalizations for living simply are legion, but none is so empowering as the healing power of nature. To be close to nature is necessary if one is, as Thoreau observes, "to live deep... and suck out all the marrow of life." This responsiveness to nature is essential to our happiness. Again in Thoreau's words: "There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear."
Westacott's philosophically informed polemic argues that if we rise above our material individualism, we will be better off, both as a society and as an individual.
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