I seem to have a soft spot for eccentrically reactionary radicals.
For a while, I was eagerly reading up on the anarcho-primitivists, who thought civilization was a bad idea and that mankind had taken a wrong turn when we started messing around with things like cities, agriculture, and literacy.
And you may remember when I reviewed Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists, which had a soft spot for the American isolationist, regionalist, anti-cosmopolitan tendencies of the early 20th century.
Hodgkinson is an English punk rock radical who finds his model for
human society in a romantically-evoked version of medieval Europe that has
since been destroyed by the Protestant reformation’s war against the
assimilated paganism of the Catholic church, by capitalism’s assault on
guilds and crafts, and by the victory of Puritanism over joy and nature.
His book is a series of exhortations intended to inspire the reader to stop
being the conforming, clock-watching, urban, employed, worried, lonely, rude,
guilty, accumulating consumer, and instead to go back to the land, slack off,
indulge simple pleasures, stop worrying about the future, stop feeling guilty,
take up the ukulele, and start cashing in on the pleasures of being a
roustabout bon vivant.
It’s full of quotes on this theme from the likes of William Blake, Guy Debord,
E.F. Schumacher, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Aquinas, Pyotr Kropotkin, William
Godwin, Leo Tolstoy, Robert Burton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and
Penny Rimbaud. You know, Penny Rimbaud of
Crass. (To give the kids of
today some context, Hodgkinson notes that Tolstoy “was the
late-nineteenth-century equivalent of Crass” — Crass being the
late-twentieth-century equivalent of, I dunno, Chumbawumba or something.)
Obligatory tax resistance pullquote follows:
It is perfectly possible to create an uncomplicated, job-free life. Artists
Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher started Crass, the anarchist punk band of the
eighties. Forty years ago they rented a tumbledown house just outside London
and renovated it and filled the garden with flowers, fruit, vegetables, sheds
and arbours for quiet repose. Thanks to an open-house policy, which has
ensured a steady flow of helpful residents and guests, they have been able
to develop the house and grounds to a high standard with very little money.
People power replaced cash. They keep things simple, they don’t need jobs,
and that gives them acres and acres of free mind-space to follow their own
paths through life, to think, read, write, talk, drink, make art. Their
income is virtually nothing, but they do exactly what they want and this, it
seems to me, is a tremendous achievement. It proves that money and freedom
are by no means synonymous. Gee said to me, “I don’t think I’ve ever paid
tax. How much do you need to earn? £5,000 a year? I don’t earn anything like
that.” And a more bill-free and liberated household I have never seen.
The book didn’t do much for me, but I’m already a believer in what I think is
the most evident and important message of the book: take responsibility for
your life; make an honest and necessarily radical reassessment of your
priorities that will certainly involve unlearning the ones you have absorbed
from a childhood overdose of public school, media, and commercial propaganda;
and start living creatively according to what you uncover in this way. Or, as
Hodgkinson puts it:
Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers
more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not
involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper
revolution. Once each of us recognizes our own freedom and our own
responsibility, then the chains that bind us will fall away.
And that excerpt comes from his chapter on cultivating good manners and
avoiding rudeness — perhaps not what you’d expect to find in an anti-puritan
punk rocker’s book about thumbing your nose at workaday living.
If you can deal with the fact that it’s Brit-centric (a mental
search-and-replace that swaps “john” for “loo” and “WalMart” for “Tesco’s” will
probably do the trick) and that it includes a heaping helping of bollocks, and
if you’re unable to work up the gumption to get you out of your cubicle and
back to living, this might be the kick-in-the-pants you need.
The Quaker policy on militia fines got a thorough going-over in the course of
the general denunciation:
We see the treason against God of one of the principles of Friends — that on
which they refuse incorrigibly, either to bear arms in any case, or to pay
the fines very properly levied against delinquents or exempts. They plead
conscience! What right have they, I ask, to keep such a conscience? Is it
conscience “resisting the ordinance of God?” And what respect deserves it
from man? I answer, just as much as it gets from God. It is nothing better
than a piece of will-worship, according to the inspiration of a
man’s deluded feelings, ignorant or cowardly or perverse or indolent or
perhaps compounded of all these, leading him religiously to have his own way
at all events. Hear the word of God:
“For, for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.”
It was the military government of the Cæsars to which was the
direct reference of the apostle at the time. But Friends say, we cannot pay
militia fines; nor do any thing to uphold the military power. Ah! truly: — and why do you ever become adjuncts and allies and officers of such
a civic dynasty? or vote for the ministers of such a power? What
are you doing at the polls, but upholding that very power? What
moral right have you there? to vote or be voted for? And
yet all of you (generally) exercise the right of suffrage.…
“What right have they, I ask, to keep such a
conscience?”
Here, a footnote, in which Cox acknowledges that “Some are so conscientious or
consistent that they never vote; viewing it as unlawful for them and for all
men.”
…And you virtually appeal to the sword, whenever you sue a man, and
invoke the armed interference of the law to coerce him to his duty!
Have I no right here to suggest that casuistry is sometimes marvelously
convinced, not by evidence but by influence; not by the Bible, but the — purse! If the government charged a pecuniary bonus or
capitation tax for the privilege of voting, I presume there would be heard
some new conscientious groaning against the military power — even by Friends!
But it gives them influence in a cheap way; and hence they forget the
dreadful horror they sometimes feel in doing any thing to uphold a
military government. Without such a government, there is not a right, nor a
possession, nor an endearment, they could call their own, one single day or
night! And yet — others must do the fighting or pay for the war: they only
enjoy the privileges; which blood and treasure other than their own, procured
for them and still preserves. In the defense of the commonwealth, they refuse
all responsibility: and just so — by proxy — do they support and diffuse
christianity in the world! translate the scriptures, defend them, and so
forth! The Father of his Country, in answer to an address of the society,
congratulating him in their way on his accession to the presidency
of the Union, gives a marked and just reproof of their unequal principles,
“receiving benefits and rendering none,” to the power of the State. His words
are very kind, dignified, and worthy of himself; commending their principles
in reference to order and peace,
“except their declining to share with others the burdens of the common defense”
He also very exemplarily assures them that “it is his wish and desire that
the laws may always be as extensively accommodated to the conscientious
scruples of all men, as a due regard to the protection and essential
interests of the nation may justify and permit.” Thus nobly wrote
Washington in . He had witnessed
during the revolution some of their twistical proceedings; and taken several
of their luminaries into his own custody, lest their “scruples” might incline
rather too far toward royalty and England. In the last war
() some became sudden converts to Quakerism;
growing quite conscientious in the time of danger against such profane
exposures of life — and either joined the Society, or pleaded a kindred
exemption from military responsibilities. In the revolution, a number of
courageous and patriotic men of the society, took the field; who were called,
on their return, “Free Quakers,” being disowned by Friends. What a pity that
their own good sense on some other subjects, can not be brought on this to
act with equal light and love of evidence! “Render therefore to Cæsar, the
things which are Cæsar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s.”
Matthew 22:21,
1 Peter 2:13–17.
It’s too bad Cox didn’t take the scriptural arguments Quakers put forward for
pacifism seriously enough to address. And it’s also too bad he only considered
as an afterthought (as I think his footnote shows) that some Quakers
did try to extend their convictions to their logical conclusions and
renounce voting and reliance on the armed enforcement powers of government
courts and constabulary.
Still, this is a good example of a typical knee-jerk opposition to the Quaker
peace testimony and its tax-resistance ramifications, and some of its rhetoric
has a good ring to it.