In an issue of MANAS that I ran across in , I noticed that the pacifist tax resister Ammon Hennacy trod a similarly-annotated though much more frugal path:
Ammon Hennacy, militant pacifist, one-time Tolstoyan, and now, as he says, a “Catholic” anarchist, is a man who likes to make things simple.
He is also a vegetarian, which contributes to simplicity of diet.
Here is his budget for (with his comments):
Total
$10.00
Whole wheat flour, 25 lbs. (could grow own wheat)
$1.25
Vegetable shortening, 3 lbs.
.68
Cornmeal, 5 lbs. (could grow own corn)
.46
Oleomargerine, 2 lbs.
.38
Rice, 4 lbs. (price is too high)
.58
Raisins, 2 lbs.
.23
Syrup, 5 lbs.
.47
Yeast, salt, sugar, etc.
.50
Total
$4.55
Electric light bill
1.00
Bundle of CO and CW’s
2.40
Postage stamps, haircuts, etc.
2.05
At , Hennacy was making about seventy-five cents an hour as a farm laborer in Arizona.
His theory, then, and ever since, was that if he worked by the day, no withholding tax would be taken from his pay by his employer.
In this way Hennacy frustrates the government’s plan to use some of his earnings for the preparation for war, for the design and manufacture of H-bombs and similar devices.
Hennacy is bound and determined that none of his labor will contribute to the military program of the United States, and he is probably the most successful man in the country in carrying out this resolve.
He calls himself a “one-man revolution,” and if someone asks him if he thinks he can change the world, he admits to some uncertainty, but replies that he is making sure that the world won’t change him!
…Incidentally, while working as a day laborer in Arizona, he put his daughters through college, living on ten dollars a month, himself.…
The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:—
In all
$28.12½
Boards
$8.03½
mostly shanty boards
Refuse shingles for roof and sides
4.00
Laths
1.25
Two second-hand windows with glass
2.43
One thousand old brick
4.00
Two casks of lime
2.40
That was high
Hair
0.31
More than I needed
Mantle-tree iron
0.15
Nails
3.90
Hinges and screws
0.14
Latch
0.10
Chalk
0.01
Transportation
1.40
I carried a good part on my back
These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter’s right.
I have also a small woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.
I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually.
If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.
I became curious about this need to fill in a ledger that Hennacy & Thoreau & I had.
Although this is the third year that I have published an accounting of my budget, I still have to overcome an inhibition that discourages me from doing so.
In part, I think this inhibition comes from a taboo about discussing detailed money matters with others — it would be easier for many people to blog about the follies of their sex lives than about the line items in their budgets.
In part also, I worry that it is a particularly boring form of exhibitionism (people would probably rather read about your sex life than your checkbook, too).
But there is also a sort of lingering feeling that matters of money and economics are themselves shameful.
In the same way that everyone has bowel movements but it isn’t polite to bring it up in conversation, everyone has a budget but nobody is supposed to really talk about it.
If you pay too much attention to money it must be because you’re poor, or stingy, or greedy, or obsessed with money in a vulgar way, or something shameful like that.
This is too bad, because the part of our lives that we hide in this way is a big part of the lives we live.
Somehow in the course of history, while we were acquiring tools like money and credit and capital and commerce to supplement and amplify our ways of living, we were also shoving a lot of how we live behind a veil.
The irony is that these same tools give us a convenient notation for quantifying and reconciling much of our incomes and outgoes, the heartbeats of our economic health — it’s as if someone has handed us binoculars and we responded by putting on a blindfold.
This taboo has some big disadvantages — it means that we don’t compare notes and learn from each other’s experiences, and also it means that we often do not look at our own economic behavior very closely, even by ourselves from behind the veil.
We wander around, spending money with our eyes closed, stumbling into debt, wondering why things don’t quite work out according to plan but ignoring that we’re blinding ourselves.
And because we hide our true economic health from each other, we evaluate each other very superficially — we judge someone’s well-being by sizing up their bling because we know no better and aren’t supposed to ask.
We envy people whose sparkling debts are crushing them and pity people who would rightly fight tooth and nail not to trade places with them.
It’s hard not to entertain conspiracy theories when confronting this.
After all, it’s easier to make a profit off of customers who can’t tell whether or not they’re being ripped off, and it’s easier for a government to tax people who won’t bother to translate that lost money into lost time and energy because they don’t know any better.
There are powerful people who benefit from this money taboo.
But whether the wool was pulled over our eyes or whether we put the blinders on ourselves, we can’t expect someone else to come along and restore our sight.
We have to, and we ought to, do that ourselves.
Thoreau’s Walden, (Wikipedia summarizes,) “is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings” — a sort of memoir or collection of observations on man and nature, a celebration of the placid and the wild with a dose of wry skepticism about civilization.
Sound about right?
Philip Cafaro thinks we’ve been miscategorizing (and underestimating) Walden by treating it as though it were merely some sort of romantic pastoral meditation, when in fact Thoreau intended it as a challenging book of practical, experimental philosophy.
The confusion comes because Thoreau was trying to extend a classical form of ethical philosophy that had gone out of fashion — to the extent that it had almost become unrecognizable.
It was only after the virtue ethics revival of recent decades that Thoreau’s work could be appreciated for what it is.
“Because Walden is a work in virtue ethics,” Cafaro writes, “it is hard for some readers — and most contemporary philosophers — to see it as a work of ethics at all.”
Thoreau meant his book to show him trying to work out his ethical philosophy in practice, and so it discusses ethical questions in terms of concrete and specific means and ends and alternatives, and of real-life examples of choices he and his neighbors made.
“Ironically, however,” Cafaro writes, “this comprehensiveness and specificity make it harder for most academic philosophers to recognize Walden as a genuine work in ethical philosophy, since contemporary ethical philosophy usually remains at a high level of generality and theoretical abstractness.”
Thoreau’s Walden retreat was not primarily from a “back to nature” impulse, but from a need to give himself enough space and breathing room to work out for himself how to live life best, without the hobbles of habit and cultural conformity.
“I went into the woods,” Thoreau says, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” he continues.
Which is to say, Cafaro believes, Thoreau wanted a flourishing life, or, as Aristotle would put it, a life of eudaimonia.
Thoreau had little patience for the small ethics of thou-shalt-nots and duties to our neighbors; he wanted to explore the big ethics that included such things but only as side effects of the project of flourishing and becoming a better person and sucking the marrow out of life.
Ethics is not limited to a category of life, thought Thoreau, but: “Our whole life is startlingly moral.
There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.”
Cafaro believes Thoreau was not only reawakening the ancient virtue ethics tradition, but was also trying to modernize and extend it.
Among his contributions here was an attempt to make virtue ethics more democratic.
Virtue ethics by its nature is impatient with the sort of “everyone’s a winner” denial of individual merit and championing of mediocrity that democracy sometimes encourages; but while ancient virtue ethics tends to be directed toward the aristocracy and to concern itself with the virtues of the ruling class, Thoreau’s virtue ethics is more down-to-earth and available to everyone.
Another addition Thoreau makes to the virtue ethics tradition is to incorporate an environmental consciousness into it: to make our relationship with the natural environment, and the health of that environment, a core component of human flourishing, and to promote respect for the flourishing of nature on its own terms (some of the virtues Thoreau praises are exemplified in his book by the behavior of animals, for example the “admirable virtue” of fish trying in vain to spawn up human-dammed streams).
Cafaro goes so far as to call Walden “a fully developed and inspiring environmental virtue ethics” — an extension of the virtue ethics tradition that makes it especially important today.
Thoreau also insists that the virtues must be developed by the individual and for the individual.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all package or a single destiny or highest calling for everyone.
We each need to build the virtues appropriate for ourselves, and this is something we have to do through real-world experimentation and practice (in several places in Walden he writes of what he is doing as an “experiment”).
This, too, contrasts with the mix of theorizing and empirical observation in the Aristotelian tradition.
Thoreau also tries to reclaim the virtues from their ongoing appropriation by capitalism.
He was living at a time when terms like…
“profit”
(“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” — the Bible)
“career”
(“Rest is not quitting / The busy career, / Rest is the fitting / Of self to one’s sphere.” — John Sullivan Dwight)
“industry”
(“…people that trust wholly to other’s charity, and without industry of their own, will be always poor.” — William Temple)
“enterprise”
(“The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers.” — William Lloyd Garrison)
“economy”
(“Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson)
…which had included, but not been exclusive to, connotations about money, finance, corporate behavior, accounting, and the like, began to be almost completely taken over by those uses.
Thoreau pointedly and often ironically uses terms like these to try, in Cafaro’s words, “to remoralize America’s economic discourse [and] to moralize his own economic life and the lives of his readers.”
Thoreau, of course, was also a political thinker, and his contributions to political philosophy are also, I think, misunderstood and undervalued.
Cafaro also discusses these, but I think his insight is weaker here.
Rather than wrestling with the thoroughly radical and severe challenge of Thoreau’s actual political views, Cafaro seems to prefer to wish Thoreau had more ordinarily progressive ones, and then to criticize him for his failure to adequately justify these imagined points of view.
Thoreau complained that “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers… To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”
Thoreau’s work I think has made philosophers of many of his readers; and Cafaro’s may well help to make philosophers of some professors of philosophy.
In the next section of the Politics, Aristotle inquires into how we get our material needs met, and of these methods, which are the “natural” ones.
Nature seems geared to provide for its creatures.
When mammals bear young, the mothers also begin to produce milk for example.
Each sort of animal has a sort of food that is appropriate for it, and nature produces just that food and provides the animal with the means to obtain it.
Humans too are likely to have certain natural needs and natural ways of providing for them.
Aristotle’s repeated inquiry in to what is “natural” had me puzzled.
He seems to believe that what is natural for man is what is right for man, and that one way we can learn what is natural for man is to see what he has in common with other animals or what is practiced universally by people.
But at other times he seems to say that what is best or most noble for man is what is exceptional in him, what he shares with no animal, such as reason, which Aristotle apparently believes is indeed only really practiced by certain Greeks.
In Aristotle’s Physics he goes into more detail about what makes something “natural.”
To oversimplify, something is natural if its becoming and being and changing are self-contained.
So a tree that develops from an acorn is natural in all its phases.
But when a tree is chopped down and carved into a bed, that bed is not itself natural but is artificial because it had its form and function imposed on it from outside.
Aristotle also defines “nature” in the Metaphysics.
But unfortunately I felt nearly as confused about Aristotle’s purpose in the Politics after having read the explanations in these works as I did before.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gave me a helping hand.
Aristotle apparently here is working within his framework of causes as given in the Physics.
Things that people purposefully create have a material cause (the substances of which they are made), a formal cause (the form into which it will be made), an efficient cause (the person or people or mechanism that molds the material into its form), and a final cause (the purpose or telos for which it is made).
Aristotle is apparently trying to carefully discern what the raw material of human nature is out of which the well-educated legislator can purposefully craft a well-functioning state in order to thereby better serve human flourishing.
He wants to make sure we understand the material cause first before we move on from there, and that material cause is human nature.
Here, in the Politics, Aristotle is going to provide a dividing line between natural and unnatural behavior in people.
Among the natural ways that Aristotle identifies in which humans provide for themselves are pastoral nomadism, fishing and hunting, stationary agriculture, and piracy or raiding.
For a human being to seek to sustain herself or her family in one of these ways is just a natural part of what it means to be a human, just as gobbling grass and chewing the cud is part of what it is to be a cow.
But when a human sustains herself in certain other ways — such as by the accumulation of coinage through trade, speculation, or usury, she is behaving unnaturally.
How does Aristotle come to this conclusion?
First, he tries to trace the genealogy of commerce.
Items of property have use-value (what it is that they’re good for in the first place — what Aristotle calls their “proper use”), and exchange-value (what you could get for them by trading them to someone else who needs them).
Aristotle believes that early barter — the occasional, exceptional use of property for its exchange-value — was a natural extension of natural forms of human acquisition of material goods.
But at some point, people began using coinage to facilitate exchange and to make exchange more flexible, and at that point we started to leave the realm of the natural.
(See Aristotle’s theory of how and why people invented money from The Nicomachean Ethics.)
This is because trade stopped becoming a way of directly satisfying human needs, and started to become a way of accumulating coinage-denominated wealth (this activity of money-accumulation he calls χρηματιστική), even when this wealth (or “wealth” in the cases of currency that was subject to devaluation or that was itself a form of speculation) had stopped being useful for meeting the needs of the household.
Another problem with money-making is this: Providing for the needs of the household has a natural upper-bound.
Once the needs of the household are met, you are done, and you can move on to more important things.
But money-making has no upper bound.
When you have made some money, you can always make even more money, and when you make even more money, there’s still more money to be made.
So if your focus is on making money you may never get around to the more important things at all.
Aristotle has an interesting analysis of how people come to find themselves on this money-accumulation treadmill:
The reason why some people get this notion into their heads may be that they are eager for life but not for the good life; so, desire for life being unlimited, they desire also an unlimited amount of what enables it to go on.
Others again, while aiming at the good life, seek what is conducive to the pleasure of the body.
So, as this too appears to depend on the possession of property, their whole activity centres on business, and the second mode of acquiring goods [χρηματιστική] owes its existence to this.
For where enjoyment consists in excess, men look for that skill which produces the excess that is enjoyed.
And if they cannot procure it through money-making [χρηματιστική], they try to get it by some other means, using all their faculties for this purpose, which is contrary to nature: courage, for example, is to produce confidence, not goods; nor yet is it the job of military leadership and medicine to produce goods, but victory and health.
But these people turn all skills into skills of acquiring goods, as though that were the end and everything had to serve that end.
All this would have fit comfortably alongside some of Thoreau’s musings in the opening chapter of Walden, where he says:
[M]en labor under a mistake.
The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.
By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.
It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.…
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.
Another reason why professional commerce is looked down upon, says Aristotle, when compared to more primary ways of making ends meet, is that unlike the natural modes of providing for the household, which take from nature (or, in the case of piracy/raiding, from the unfortunate victims you prey on), in commerce your gains come from profiting off your neighbors (Aristotle evidently sees the marketplace as a zero-sum game in which sellers gain only at the expense of buyers).
Usury is the ultimate and most unnatural degradation in this direction, and is the one that treats currency the least like a medium of exchange and most like an end to itself.
In brief, the ways people make money (natural and unnatural) are through agriculture, fishing and things of that sort; commerce, usury, and employment; timber, mining, and things of that sort; and speculation or monopoly acquisition.
(He amusingly illustrates the latter variety with a story of the philosopher Thales, who, when someone accused philosophers of being impractical and their wisdom of no worldly use — “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
— used his philosophically-attuned foresight to corner the market on olive press leases before a bumper harvest and then made out like a bandit, merely to refute the accusation.)
Aristotle acknowledges that while wealth accumulation is an unnatural and unwise goal for a person or a household, knowledge of how to promote wealth in society is useful for a polis and therefore also for a statesman or student of political science.
And then to conclude the first chapter, Aristotle changes direction.
He first says the statesman∶citizenry relationship can be compared to the husband∶wife relationship, while the king∶subjects relationship is more like the father∶child relationship.
(One difference is that citizens, he says, typically trade off in terms of who is in office and who is out of office, while husbands and wives don’t trade roles in this way.)
What are the virtues of those who are in the subordinate roles — slaves, women, and children?
Do such as these have any virtues all, properly called?
Do they have the same ones as free men?
Aristotle thinks that such people have their own sort of virtues, though not the same set as those of free men, and that even to the extent that they have virtues with the same names as those of free men, they mean somewhat different things.
For example, some virtues that are suitable for masters would be superfluous in slaves who only need a smaller set of virtues sufficient to make them useful and keep them out of mischief.
The reverse can also be true, that a virtue in the subordinate class would not be appropriate for the superior: silence is considered a virtue in women, for example, but not in men.
Here, Aristotle makes an interesting aside about employees, when he muses over whether they should have slavish virtues or free-men’s virtues:
[T]he slave shares his master’s life, whereas the craftsman lives away from his employer and participates in virtue in the same measure as he participates in slavery; for the skilled mechanic is in a restricted sense in a condition of slavery.
This again reminds me that we have to be careful that we pay close attention when Aristotle speaks of slavery what it is that he intends to encompass by the word.
And it reminds me again of Thoreau, who had these similarly blasphemous thoughts in Walden:
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South.
It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
Talk of a divinity in man!
Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him?
His highest duty to fodder and water his horses!
What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests?
Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir?
How godlike, how immortal, is he?
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds.
Aristotle ends by noting that it will be important for a good state that its designers have a good understanding of the proper relationships between members of a family and the virtues appropriate to its various members, and to promote the health of these relationships and virtues, for the good of the state and those in it.
Next he will consider some of the options that have been proposed for doing just that.
