Books reviewed by Carol Van Strum
The Freedom Manifesto: How to free yourself from anxiety, fear, mortgages, money, guilt, debt, government, boredom, supermarkets, bills, melancholy, pain, depression, work, and waste, by Tom Hodgkinson, 2006-2007. Harper Perennial paperback, $13.95.
“Machines separate us from our very selves. Tools, however, are quite a different thing. The spade, the chisel, the sickle, the pocket-knife, these are instruments of liberation.
USE A SCYTHE.”
I confess to finding any author who urges me to use a scythe instantly endearing. There are so few of us left who know the glorious, sweat-drenched, full-body joy of scything, and even fewer who find words for it.
Tom Hodgkinson finds the words, with bells on. The author of How to Be Idle and founder of The Idler, Hodgkinson looks to the past for tips on how people lived before cell phones, credit cards, television, mortgages, taxes, leaf blowers and demeaning work ruled our lives. Aristotle, Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Stuart Mill, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, E.F. Schumacher and other notables parade through his delightfully light-hearted do-it-yourself manual for personal freedom. These models, he says, represent a “long history of promoting the idea of cooperation, through which true freedom is possible, rather than competition.”
Hodgkinson continues a strong and much abused tradition “of rejecting money, property and business as the primary objects of life.” There’s nothing new about this tradition. The ideals of thrift, frugality, and simplicity are as old as Aristotle, espoused today by Sam Harris and other modern thinkers. What’s refreshing about Hodgkinson is, first, that he is great fun to read, avoiding any semblance of pedantry, and second, that he offers practical advice, suggesting nothing that he hasn’t tried himself and offering his own blunders, successes, failures, and adventures to illustrate his points.
Tension between wealth and individual freedom — between greed and sharing — is inevitable in human societies, which have devised varied ways to keep the two in relative balance. What disrupted the tenuous balance on a global scale, Hodgkinson says, was the Industrial Revolution and with it, the rise of capitalism and its enabling cohort, a Puritan morality designed to keep the populace fearful, greedy, guilt-ridden, forever unsatisfied, forever in debt, forever owing their souls to the company store. The result is a global population and entire planetary ecosystem held in thrall to corporate interests, i.e., money, property, and business.