Instruments of Liberation

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.

Rather than moan about how terrible this all is, Hodgkinson offers advice on how to escape the “mind-forged manacles” of that system. You can’t save the world, he says, but you can save yourself. It’s simple and at the same time challenges everything you’ve been brought up to believe in: the work ethic, the consumer culture, the shame of poverty, tantalizing cures for death, an elusive technological utopia so endlessly paid for but never achieved. With humor and insight, Hodgkinson shows how to escape those manacles: “Bake bread, play the ukulele, quit moaning, make music, stop consuming, start producing, smash usury, embrace beauty, embrace poverty, hail the chisel, ignore the state….”

All of his tips may not work for all of us, but that’s no excuse for not trying the ones we can manage. What’s most refreshing about Hodgkinson is that he never holds our failures against us, and is never judgmental. Just give things a try, he urges: ride a bike instead of driving, have fun, grow food instead of buying commercial muck, live within your means, buy only what you really need — you’d be astonished by how little that is — and as you need less, work less. Life will be more fun, less stressful, and above all will be your own.

The Idle Parent: Why Laid-back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kids, by Tom Hodgkinson, 2009-2010. Tarcher-Penguin paperback, $15.95.

My mother used to describe her motley brood as a clutch of Darwin’s finches, each finding or creating its own niche. The only advice she ever gave me about child-rearing was, “Enjoy them.” She would have loved Tom Hodgkinson’s approach, which is essentially the same.

Hodgkinson’s general philosophy of raising kids is to leave them alone — not literally, but give them the freedom to grow at their own pace, fight their own battles, pursue their own passions, make their own mistakes, follow their own stars. This is what he means by “idle” parenting: it demands parental restraint, which can be more difficult than micromanaging, but amazingly, the little buggers turn out to be people you really enjoy being and doing things with!

“Paradoxically,” he writes, “the idle parent is a responsible parent because at the heart of idle parenting is respect for the child, trust in another human being. It is the irresponsible parent who hands the child over to various authorities for education and care, whether these be child-care providers, schools, after-school clubs, sports teams, the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon or whatever. Or tries to impose their own vision on the children and does not simply let them be.”

Obviously, this isn’t your typical child-rearing manual. Hodgkinson finds support for his ideals in the works of John Locke, Rousseau, and A.S. Neil (founder of the Summerhill School in England), but again and again he warns about the tendency of idealism to morph into tyranny. “You can’t impose freedom by authority,” he says; “the idealist can become a bully.” Frequently, illustrated by his own lapses, he reminds us: “Let’s not get fanatical.”

There is no right way to raise kids, Hodgkinson points out, encouraging readers to find their own way, adapt to their own situations, and turn a deaf ear and blind eye to the experts. Above all, make life fun. Applying the principles of The Freedom Manifesto, he suggests ways to enjoy family life without going into debt, buying plastic toys, or depending on television and other electronics for entertainment and recreation. His chapter headings alone are a primer for subversive parenting:

Bring Back Child Labor

Stop the Whining

Seek Not Perfection, or Why Bad Parents Are Good Parents

The Importance of Nature

The More, the Merrier

Down with School

The Myth of Toys

Ban TV, Embrace Freedom

Let Us Sleep

The Power of Music and Dancing

… and more!

Parenting, he reminds us, is not always easy, but great adventures never are. His book, Hodgkinson says, “is a record of my own failures, disasters and mistakes….” It is also a hilarious lesson in turning disasters and mistakes into comedy and adventure. What tales his children will have to tell in later life — and what greater gift than to give them such wonderful memories!

“I am a disaster-prone and chaotic layabout, and so should warn you not to listen to my advice,” he cautions. “With that caveat in mind, let us go forth, throw away the rule books, forget what other people think, and enjoy family life and all its joys and woes.”

These are books to keep handy, even read aloud to each other, reminders to lighten up and enjoy life without the manacles of debt and guilt inherited from Puritan killjoys.