We just got back from a quick trip to Monterey, one of the most beautiful places on earth and one of the most pricey. Before heading to church this morning, we took a drive around Pacific Grove, along the shore, alternately ogling the ocean and the houses which face it. There are some stunning architectural wonders along the shoreline, interspersed with a few dilapidated dwellings which are still probably worth over a million smackers. Out of curiosity, we picked up a real estate flyer for one small “cottage” with a for sale sign out front: 1.8 million for 780 sf. Wowza.
As we drove home this evening after worshipping with our friends at Reformed Heritage Church in San Jose, we didn’t have as much eye candy to keep our interest as we left the Bay Area and headed north and east on Highway 80. No ocean, no interesting architecture. Just mile after mile of asphalt interspersed with strip malls and ticky tacky housing developments (trying to emulate a quaint European village look and failing miserably). We didn’t even get to see the new hole in the highway where the oil tanker overturned, caught fire, and melted an entire overpass on the Bay Bridge, as it was across the bay from where we were today, though the driver’s journey began in Benicia, which we passed through on our way home. My children cheered as we drove up our driveway, after being away for a day and a half.
The scenery was what George Grant, quoting Thomas Chalmers (who may have heard it from someone else) calls “the geography of Nowhere.”
Speaking of which, sadly, our friend Rick Saenz decided not to publish an agrarian journal he had hoped to produce, but happily for me, I can now publish on my site the book review I wrote for him about Eric Brende’s book, Better Off. I hope the other writers will do likewise so I can read what they wrote. Here ’tis:
The landscape of most American communities continues to transform into bland uniformity, with a proliferation of strip malls and box stores around which hives of ticky-tacky suburban neighborhoods abound. The neighborhoods are strangely quiet during most weekdays, as their inhabitants are busy elsewhere, braving daily freeway commutes to their jobs, where they toil to pay the mortgages on the homes they seldom see. Even when they do have leisure time to spend at home, many leave again to congregate with strangers in shopping malls, movie theaters, and restaurants, as well as pursuing other forms of entertaining distraction. Many see this as progress and proclaim it is very good.
Yet there have always been those who have questioned whether or not the prevailing form of “civilization” is as good as prevailing opinion proclaims. These folks are usually written off by those who blithely accept the status quo, with pejoratives used to marginalize their qualms: “kooks,” “culturally irrelevant,” and “disestablishmentarian” are a few of the names bandied about. Yet the counter-cultural fringe doesn’t go away, and their questions are resonating with more and more people who are noticing the landscape and don’t like what they see.
The questions vary, but most boil down to this: when we accept the status quo are we accepting the destruction of what Russell Kirk called “the Permanent Things?”
Asking and doing are two different things, however. Eric Brende is a man who asks a lot of questions, but he and his wife Mary also decided to do something to find answers. Brende details their quest in the book Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (HarperCollins, 2004).
I imagine that Eric Brende was one of those toddlers who drove his mother crazy asking, “Why?” about everything. He admits that by his adolescent years he had “cultural indigestion,” though he had immersed himself in television, science fiction, and music as a boy, and later even held a job at McDonald’s trying to earn money for a car. But with what would become typical of his cost-benefit style of analysis, he decided that a bicycle would make more sense. He developed a habit of questioning the benefits of technology, making a distinction between tools and automatic machines. He says,
Everyone tended to treat them alike, as neutral agents of human intention. But machines clearly were not neutral or inert objects. They were complex fuel-consuming entities with certain definite proclivities and needs. Besides often depriving their users of skills and physical exercise, they created new and artificial demands–for fuel, space, money, and time. These in turn crowded out other important human pursuits, like involvement in family and community, or even the process of thinking itself. The very act of accepting the machine was becoming automatic.
As a graduate student at that bastion of progress, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brende even had the temerity to write a paper defending the Luddites.
Those whose idea of getting back to nature is using their own espresso maker with organic coffee beans rather than patronizing Starbucks probably think that the Amish people represent the extreme end of technological repudiation. That would be false. Eric and Mary Brende actually discovered an Anabaptist community in rural Missouri that thinks the Amish are liberals who have run off the rails. This group lives without electricity and survives mostly by subsistence farming. In 1996, the Brendes finagled an invite to live with them for 18 months to test what had up till then just been Eric’s theory: that scaling back technology would give more leisure time, not less.
In order to protect their identity and location, Brende calls the people he and his new wife lived with the “Minimites.” They rented a cottage and some land from a Minimite family, the Millers, who became not only next-door neighbors, but friends who exemplified the proverb, “A friend in need is a friend in deed.” The Brendes quickly found that if you don’t depend on technology, then you had better learn to depend on others, as well as be willing to lend a hand yourself, when necessary.
Despite being cautiously enthralled with the idea of going off the grid and raising his own food, the Roman Catholic, Yale University graduate Brende had some tentative stereotypes about the bearded men and the women in their modest frocks and pleated caps. The Minimites also reserved opinion concerning the outsiders before relaxing their reserve. But after spending time with one another, mostly in work-related activities such as canning, hoeing, threshing, and barn raising, the walls lowered and the relationships warmed.
There was this phrase they kept repeating: “Many hands make work light.” The statement was true, though hard to explain. Gradually, as you applied yourself to your task, the threads of friendship and conversation would grow and connect you to laborers around you. Then everything suddenly became inverted. You’d forget you were working and get caught up in the camaraderie, the sense of lightened effort. This surely must rank among the greatest of labor-saving secrets. Work folded into fun and disappeared. Friendship, conversation, exercise, fresh air, all melded together into a single act of mutual self-forgetting.
Brende tells of his surprise as the men who seemed so alike in their dour exteriors eventually distinguished themselves through their different personality quirks. Some had been part of similar communities all their lives, but many had, like the Brendes, come from the modern world and radically changed their lifestyles, often for the sake of their children. There was Edward, the ex-Vietnam veteran who liked to tell jokes then apologized for it; he and his wife would sometimes spar in front of others. There was Cornelius, the reclusive elderly schoolteacher who felt the Minimites were too materialistic and who lived like a hermit on the fringes of this fringe group. There was Harvey, Mr. Miller’s oldest son, who could be both crude and jolly as he enjoyed his gargantuan meals, but who knew how to handle an axe and preferred it over a chain saw because “when I stop, it stops too.”
In the cost-benefit scheme of things, Brende was constantly evaluating the success of his experiment. When they first arrived in the reclusive community, the Brendes were enchanted with many aspects of their new life, including the neat little home with its tidy yard and garden, the flush of success when the first vegetables began to grow, the physical benefits of hard work and the consonant ability to truly enjoy one’s leisure. But weeds inevitably grow, and “weeds in particular must be hoed on time, whether you have the will to hoe or not.” Lack of refrigeration and planning made the lack of variety in meals become onerous, for a time. It quickly became a burden to carry all their water from a spring, and attempts to construct a ram to bring water to the house only resulted in running from some cows, but no running water. And working in extreme heat and extreme cold could be downright uncomfortable.
Less is usually more is the conclusion Brende draws. After passing out from heatstroke at a threshing party, at first he wondered if his entire premise about technology had been a fantasy. “[The threshing] appeared to be a form of naked physical toil that only a glutton for punishment would willingly engage in. Was there a need for more machinery here?” But after he realized that the other workers had survived the first threshing of the season unscathed, he remembered that he had just returned from a trip with his wife in an air-conditioned car where they had been in air-conditioned buildings. His body was not yet acclimatized to the heat, thanks to technology.
Brende also notes that reducing their dependence on technology had the benefit of heightening their sensory perceptions as well as their enjoyment of everyday activities. When their garden finally began producing and Mary finally began consulting cookbooks and learning the craft of cooking—“The domestic dungeon burst its bonds, and Mary the artiste stepped forth‗they discovered the joy of tasting real, fresh food. Long evenings were spent reading, as well as just listening to the ebb and flow of the sounds outside, or watching fireflies cavort about the ceiling. Kerosene lamps provided illumination at night without eliminating the natural light from the stars (though Minimites kept flashlights for emergencies). Life was lived according to the natural cycles of daylight and nighttime, and while work was physically demanding, it was limited by these natural boundaries. The down-side was occasional moodiness induced by long winter days without much light, but the inevitable return of spring was that much sweeter.
Many have heard of the Gilbreth family in the story Cheaper by the Dozen. The famous family with 12 children was portrayed first in a book, then some 1950s movies (then in a couple of recent and forgettable remakes of the original movies). In the real-life clan, the parents were both “efficiency experts,” applying their time-saving methods to their large brood, often with amusing results, such as when the children regaled their new principal with an explanation of how their father taught them to bathe. Efficiency in the early twentieth-century was big business, and Eric Brende notes the contributions of Frederick Taylor who was known as the father of “scientific management.”
Wielding a stopwatch, he would measure the time it took a worker to perform a given task, such as shoveling dirt. Then he would analyze the task, breaking it down into segments, eliminating any unnecessary motions and replacing them with more efficient ones. The task was now standardized. Using Taylor’s findings, a manager could instruct an employee how to shovel dirt in one perfect, unvarying pattern, as if he were a robot, and reprimand him if he deviated to the slightest degree. Taylorism thence became one of the most slavish forms of technological servility, parodied by Charlie Chaplin in the movie Modern Times.
Yet what seems like a good idea may have unintended consequences, Brende believes. More stuff requires more maintenance, and more time working to keep up with the Joneses who have more stuff than you. Comparing the height of threshing season (lasting two to four weeks), when the full day’s workload resulted in just over nine hours of actual labor, to the year-round burden of a typical partner in a New York law firm who works 60-80 billable hours, Brende decided that his yoke was easy and his burden light, especially when he considered the long breaks in the off season.
While criticizing modern notions of efficiency, however, Brende noticed that one kind of division of labor made a lot of sense, though to say so offends modern notions of egalitarianism: dividing the work of men and women. From the start, the Brendes fell into the pattern of Eric doing the heavy outside chores and Mary taking care of the house, with some overlap when it came to gardening, canning, and occasionally cooking, though Mary had been employed in Boston before their radical move from the city. The book tells about the home birth of the Brende’s baby Hans; the midwife reluctantly accepted the hundred dollars they offered her. They took a weekend trip to have the baby baptized and to visit friends, and Eric decided to attend a college lecture about the social relations of the Amish. It turned out to be a feminist diatribe against their “patriarchal” system, critical of the delineation of men’s and women’s tasks. Brende, after living with “Amish” people for so long, couldn’t sit still for that. While he didn’t defend patriarchy, he did point out that “…never was there a society in which female, or womanly, values so dominated? Nurturing the land and the crops, deferring to the wishes of others, not having to get one’s own way? And because they live on farms, women make an important economic contribution to the home, well recognized by the community.”
The occasional foray back into the industrial world didn’t keep the Brendes from being tempted to remain in the Minimite community. But they eventually decided that they had learned what they set out to discover: how much or how little technology was really necessary for “human comfort and leisure,” and they wanted to see how that could be worked out in the outside world. They found that life without technology is not the romantic utopia that some would like to imagine—it’s hard work. They also found that such a life is impossible without community, and not many have the same ideals. Like a true idealist, though, Brende says, “What we saw in it can be transported; principles are lightweight and easily carried about.” The Brendes carried them to an older neighborhood in Saint Louis where they now live with their children.
