The Simple Life

...When compared to European social thought, with its persistent focus on issues of class and state politics, American social commentary has always seemed suspiciously heterogeneous, if not downright flaky...

...That sense of the subtle relationships between different strands of closely held beliefs, and of the ways in which those beliefs often fostered the very developments they sought to avoid, makes the histories of the older school of American Studies and its neo-Marxist successors such exciting reading...

...Commonweal: 444...

...The scope of The Simple Life is enormous, ranging from John Winthrop's first admonitions against mercantile extravagance and Samuel Adams's dreams of a chaste republicanism to the counter-cultural communards of the sixties and Carter's indictment of Americans' con-sumerist "malaise...

...Unfortunately, he ascribes all these conflicts to a general "gap between professed ideals and actual behavior" in Americans' pursuit of simplicity...

...While Shi may be faulted for his tendency to stick to familiar territory (Emerson, Thoreau, and Gilded Age genteel writers receive yet more attention for their defense of republican simplicity, while Henry George, Dorothy Day, the Frankfurt School, and Zionist and black nationalist advocates of a return to the land are virtually omitted), and for all his reliance on previous scholars' work in the same field, his book is the most comprehensive survey to date of "high thinking and plain living" in American history...

...Earlier historians of American myths, such as Marvin Meyers and Richard Hofstadter, made similar arguments about the convergence of agrarian nostalgia and entrepreneurial ambition in the radical rhetoric of the Jacksonian period...

...Far from seeking to escape the complexities of social life for an imaginary communion with nature, thinkers such as Thoreau and Mumford have forced us to confront the contradictions in the world that we have created to escape primitivism...

...The very thinkers whose task it was to assimilate and reinterpret the conditions of modern life had produced only a hash of conflicting nostrums and crackpot reforms...

...Such dismissals neglect "the beauty of elevating human aspiration beyond the material and mundane'' that Shi rightly sees as the greatest legacy of that tradition...

...Shi is quick to point out other contradictions in simple life ideas: between the "optimistic boosterism" of Jefferson's political economy and its hope of restraining full-scale capitalist development, between the "inward simplicity" that Thoreau observed in the lives of "low and primitive men" in the woods and the consciously chosen simplicity of the intellectual, and between the romantic individualist and bureaucratic currents of back-to-nature and decentralist thought in the Progressive and New Deal periods...

...Lears's anti-modernists showed a similar ambiguity...

...In the case of republicanism, artisans and mer9 August 1985: 443 chants appealed to a shared notion of "moral community" that simultaneously provoked critiques of commercial inequality and muffled their intensity...

...Casey Blake WRITING in 1918, Van Wyck Brooks despaired of ever finding a ' 'collective spiritual life" in the "aberrant individualism" of America's "preeminent cranks...

...When all is said and done, theorists of simplicity have been far more concerned with the relations among human beings than with those between humans and nature...

...As such, it deserves attention not only from historians but from anyone who has ever shared its subjects' skepticism about the benefits of a culture of material abundance and conspicuous consumption...

...Simplicity, piety, virtue, and decency crop up again and again as the keywords of American jeremiads, alongside proposals for modest dress, dietary reform, single taxes, and the repopulation of the countryside...

...Yet a focus on myth — or a neo-Marxist emphasis on "cultural hegemony'' — offers a far more sophisticated explanation of the relationship between popular ideology and social life than Shi's tiresome refrain of the "gap" or "chasm" separating the two...

...Brooks's "army of American cranks" is the subject of David Shi's The Simple Life, a broadly synthetic study of American critics of luxury and modern decadence from the Puritans to Jimmy Carter...

...When they speak to the democratic promise of human community, advocates of the simple life are anything but cranks...

...While their European counterparts were telling readers to take to the streets, American critics were urging theirs to return to their plows...

...Like Herbert Hoover, whom he resembled in so many other ways, Carter saw no contradiction between his paeans to frugality and consumer capitalism...

...Where previous students of American culture would join the cult of...

...Every member of the vast army of American cranks has been the graveyard of some 'happy thought,' " Brooks complained, "which has turned sour in his brain because the only world he has known has had no use for it...

...Who needed liberty, equality, and fraternity when graham crackers, exercise, and acres of available farmland beckoned instead...

...For the most part, their protest of the ascetic "iron cage" of industrial capitalism set the stage for a new "therapeutic culture" of consumption...

...Critics of mass-produced images of selfhood and manipulated desires have again and again urged Americans to take responsibility for their own lives in conscious association with their fellow citizens...

...simplicity to the agrarian ethos, Adamic individualism, and the image of the New World as a second Eden as central myths that have shaped American identity, Shi rejects such an approach as "essentially static and one-dimensional," since it treats ideas only in the ' 'rarified'' context of the imagination...

...Thoreau's challenge "to make the getting of our living poetic," like Mum-ford's call "to live a whole human life," is anything but nostalgic...

...Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech, Shi notes, was the most recent example of this current of simple-life ideology, since it "implied that the national malaise was solely the result of individual selfishness and secularism," rather than of a consumer culture with deep roots in America's corporate economy...

...Where Shi does succeed is in reminding us that there is nothing simple-minded about the simple-life tradition itself...

...At its most successful, as in Shi's chapter on Jeffersonian economic thought, The Simple Life indicates how a firm belief in simplicity had the unintended consequence of producing its opposite, in this case the commercial revolution of the early nineteenth century...

...Despite its enormous wealth of documentation, The Simple Life never achieves a comparable level of interpretive sophistication...

...As Foner and Wilentz have shown of late eighteenth-century republicanism, and as Lears has demonstrated in his study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-modernism, dominant ideologies have developed so as to both spawn and contain competing radical challenges to the status quo...

...Throughout, Shi explores the many tensions within the simple-life tradition's "core assumption that the making of money and the accumulation of things should not be allowed to smother the purity of the soul.'' Most importantly, Shi describes a conflict between those thinkers, such as the eighteenth-century Quaker ascetic John Woolman and the modern social critics Lewis Mumford and Scott Nearing, whose critique of luxury evolved into a consistent indictment of the costs paid by ordinary people for the luxury of the privileged, and those who interpreted simplicity as a "conservative moral idiom" to reinforce habits of deference and humility among the lower classes...

...Subsequent writers and historians have echoed Brooks's lament...

...And contemporary historians such as Eric Foner, Sean Wilentz, and Jackson Lears have followed up on their predecessors' methodological insights, even while challenging their conclusions...

...For the latter, the threat to virtuous living came not from the rapacity of the market place, but from the masses' hedonism and rowdiness, which threatened the sober sensibilities of a republican elite...

...Such a goal may well seem illusory, given the current cynicism about any alternatives to "looking out for number one," but no one should misconstrue as simplistic its advice to forgo commercial artifice for the burdens of self-government...

...Hard-boiled" critics of all ages have parodied its advocates as fuzzy nos-talgics in search of a pastoral era that existed only in their own minds...

...By doing so, he gives the impression that there was far less diversity in simple-life thought than his account suggests and that the persistent failure of that movement was due only to a hypocritical divorce of rhetoric and action...